Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference kicked off Monday at San Francisco's Moscone West convention center. The keynote address, by Steve Jobs, began at 10 a.m. Pacific time.
[ For the latest from the show, read Tom Yager's Enterprise Mac blog ]
The event began with a video featuring John Hodgman, the PC of the Mac and PC ads, dressed as Steve Jobs. "I've got some big news this year, I want the whole world to hear it -- I quit," Hodgman said. "And what's more, I'm shutting down all of Apple. I know this comes as a surprise, but I didn't have a choice -- Vista has sold tens of dozens of copies.... Then I got my iPod killer, the Zune. Look at this baby. Brown!"
"I'm sure you'll agree that it's time for Apple to wave the white flag," Hodgman said. Then Justin Long, the actor who plays the Mac in the ads, confronts Hodgman with the news that he's not Steve Jobs. "You're right,"Hodgman says. "I'm Phil Schiller."
After the video played, Jobs took the stage to applause.
Intel kudos
The focus of last year's WWDC was the transition to Intel microprocessors, noted Jobs.
"We did that transition successfully, and everyone did an awesome job," Jobs said, including engineers inside of Apple and the developers present at this year's WWDC. Jobs then invited Intel CEO Paul Otellini up on stage.
Complimenting Otellini and Intel on a job well done and to recognize their hard work in helping Apple with the Intel transition, Jobs apologized.
"Paul, we're not big on awards at Apple, so we don't have anything real standard, so I asked Jonny Ive to make something for you. It says, our sincere thanks," he added. Jobs then presented Otellini with a disc made of polished stainless steel.
Gaming news
Jobs then presented Bing Gordon, co-founder and chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, the billion-dollar game publisher.
"I have two daughters, they live on their MacBook. I have friends in business, they live on OS X. Our CTO at EA lives on Mac, and we're seeing EA technologists move to Mac in droves. And what do they want, in addition to a Cinema Display? They want to go to Apple stores and see EA games. And so that's what we're going to do," Gordon said.
Gordon said that EA is going to bring "four of our biggest titles" to the Mac starting next month: Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
What's more, EA will be bringing sports games to the Mac in August, beginning with simultaneous launches of Madden 08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08.
Jobs then introduced someone with whom he's shared the keynote stage before -- John Carmack, owner and CTO of id Software, the company behind such games as Quake and Doom.
Carmack presented to the audience a demonstration of a heavily textured 3D environment built using id Software's next-generation technology, running on Mac OS X. Carmack told the crowd he'd just gotten it running on the Mac in the past few days and encouraged attendees to look forward to other Mac-related announcements coming at QuakeCon, id Software's annual gamers convention.
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