It took weeks for WWDC 2009, days for WWDC 2010, but only 10 hours of WWDC 2011 to sell out. Needless to say that’s the fastest sell out time ever. That’s rock concert fast.

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference was only just announced today, and is to take place from June 6th till June 10th at Moscone West.

What are we going to see at this years WWDC? Any Developers lucky enough to get a ticket?

Careful observation of one of Apple’s presentation slides taken during last week’s iPhone SDK event reveals a possible firmware 2.0 feature; SPOTLIGHT!In one slide depicting the Contacts list, a small search icon appears at the very top of the screen. Could this be Spotlight for iPhone? We’ll see. It so, I know of many iPhone users who will dance through lawn sprinklers with glee, myself included.

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Months ago Apple made a promise to developers, committing to one day release an SDK and open the iPhone for platform development. Today it made good on its promise, and reaffirmed that old adage “good things come to those who wait”.

Steve Jobs, along with corporate cohorts Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall, presented a public unveiling of the company’s product roadmap for iPhone at its Cupertino headquarters. What Jobs paraded to his audience was so spectacular it puts Apple at least a decade ahead of any competing mobile platform. For starters, the company is making a major play for the enterprise with a slew of corporate messaging tools and technologies that will put iPhone on par (and beyond) with other business-savvy devices like the Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices.

iPhone will offer full support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, and with it comes the same Push email, contacts, and calendar that Windows Mobile users have come to enjoy. About the only thing that Windows Mobile users enjoy, come to think of it. In addition to smarter messaging acumen, support of advanced wireless security protocols and remote data implosion will be integrated into OSX, making iPhone one of the most secure mobile devices in the industry. If someone steal’s your company issued iPhone, one quick line of code gives it a long distance lobotomy. Gone forever. There are other impressively boring features for the cubicle world, but I won’t delve into that since it is of little interest to you folks, unless you work in IT.

The show stopper for today’s event was the final unveiling of the iPhone SDK. Apple must be given the highest praise for going above and beyond expectations in both opening its platform, and exposing iPhones underlying plumbing to developers. There had been much concern that Apple would hide a great deal of OSX’s inner workings, and keep many doors locked to developers; not so. Nope, Apple has gone full monty and provided code monkeys the world over with powerful tools to build applications that take full advantage of iPhone’s core technologies.

Scott Forstall demoed the SDK and exhibited the iPhone’s core architecture, which until now have remained somewhat shrouded in mystery. One fascinating facet to OSX is a technology Apple calls Core Touch, an environment native to iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a sophisticated interactive overlay that integrates with other organs within the OS like Core Image and OpenGL, allowing for innovative and weird application concepts. Scott demonstrated a breathtaking space shooter game developed in-house for demonstration. Using the built-in accelerometer and touch screen, the iPhone’s orientation is used to control pitch and yaw, in place of traditional button controls. The graphics were stunning, and comparable to a console. The iPhone is about to become a revolutionary gaming platform. Apple just gave Nintendo and Sony the business.

The possibilities are endless for rich applications. I expect lots of innovation from developers on a scale unprecedented in mobile platforms. And speaking of innovation, the best was yet to come. Forstall introduced a number of well known developers and publishers on stage, partnering with Apple, to bring first string applications to iPhone. First on deck was Electronic Arts with a dome of Spore, yes that Spore. Again, the graphics were simply stunning and touch screen capabilities enable even more imaginative possibilities in game design.

Salesforce.com gave a first look of its upcoming iPhone native app to empower sales agents. Great stuff, if you enjoy watching damp smudges solidify on your iPhone’s screen. Next!

AOL showed off its new AIM client for iPhone. This one had me puzzled because I half expected Apple to be first out of the gate with a native instant messaging client, in the form of iChat. Still, AIM for iPhone looks fantastic and offers everything you’d expect in a chat client. Be prepared to receive lots of messages from your friends once this app goes live… “OMG I’M TXTING FRM MY IPHONE! LOL!” Can’t wait for that.

Last but not least, medical reference giant Epocrates demoed its mobile prescription database app, which unfortunately didn’t include a prescription for drowsiness to overcome the effects of boredom form their presentation. What a snoozer. Still, it’s yet another great app coming down the pike, so that something to get excited about I guess.

After the dog and pony show concluded, Steve returned on stage to outline Apple’s model for application distribution, and drop the other shoe on our toes.

The bad news: As expected, iTunes will be the orifice for iPhone apps, exclusively. Apple will provide a special tool for enterprise customers, enabling custom corporate apps to be directly loaded onto iPhone, orphaned from iTunes. For the masses (meaning you moi), however, it’s going to be iTunes or nothing. Like it or lump it.

The good news: That’s actually not a big deal. In fact it may be a good deal better. Apple will include an app on the iPhone called App Store built in the same vein as its mobile iTunes WiFi store. You tap the icon and presented with an interface similar to the music store that shows featured apps as well as listed categories. You pick what you want… tap on a button called buy or free (if you’re lucky), the app downloads wirelessly to your phone, and voila! Better still, the App Store notifies you when applications you’ve purchased or downloaded have been updated. Very slick.

Best of all, Apple isn’t screwing developers in the way so many other mobile software stores have with nefarious contracts that favor the distributor or the developer. The terms laid out by Apple are fairly competitive, giving a 70/30 split in revenues, with the former going straight to developers. The remaining 30% lines Apple’s pockets to cover its overhead as well as net some profit. It’s not a perfect arrangement, but I call it fair.

Now for the badder bad news. The truly terrible “go sit in a chair and cry in your hanky. Mother will bring you a nice hot bowl of soup” kind of terrible. Apple will be releasing a major firmware update, now elevated to version 2.0, that delivers everything I’ve just covered, including Exchange messaging support and third party applications… but it won’t be arriving until late June. Yeah, I know. J-U-FREAKING-N-E. The agony. The torment. The inhumanity of it all.

But hey, it wasn’t so long ago that very same month drew us together, as we waited for the arrival of iPhone. Consider this an anniversary present from Apple. Many happy returns.

Angry verbs and adjectives are flying from iRate iPhone users brewing over the revelation that a site claiming to have a leaked SDK and working in partnership with Apple, was in fact a hoax intended to generate traffic and a some laughs. It’s getting lots of the former, but very little of the latter. The person behind the hoax site, Tiny Code, perpetrated this caper by posting what he alleged to be “leaked” information, then later pulled down the information, at the request (so he claimed) of Apple’s attorneys, and even redirected the site domain to point to Apple’s server.

In a forum post on MacRumors he confesses to his crime and then blames the blogosphere for picking up the story in the first place…

Overall I just apologize. I do not expect forgiveness and I definitely understand the posts following this to be nothing more than bashing. Just know than when I posted that information I had no intention for attention or otherwise, it was simply an excuse to stop publishing to the repo; seemed like a good one at the time.

Yeah, and I thought about faking my own death to get out of paying taxes. Seemed like a good idea the time. Well I forgive you, Kelly. But you’re still a tool.

For everyone else, look on the bright side; the SDK is coming despite this juvenile hoax, so keep the candles burning. It will get here when it gets here.

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As expected, Jobsy took center stage at San Francisco’s Mascone Center, pouring glasses of Kool-Aid to a thirsty yet doe eyed audience. MacWorld, for those of you unfamiliar, is Apple’s annual conference and keynote that is part State of the Union address, part infomercial, and part Renaissance Festival (minus the period costumes and jousting) all rolled into one. Jobs gave his usual PT Barnum performance with product announcements and demos to wow the crowd. This is MacWorld after all, so iPhone took a backseat to a major new product added the portable line, MacBook Air. More on that later.

What came from today’s big event was the vacuous sound of what didn’t. For starters, no SDK was announced, nor any update given on its inevitable release. What we got instead was a firmware update that offers a few really nice features, but barely chips the surface on what is by now a mountain of feature requests from users. No copy/paste. No Exchange support (not that Exchange IMAP fiddly bits we get now). No Flash support for Safari. I keep hearing that song from OneRepublic playing in my head… “Stop and stare. I think I’m moving but I go nowhere.”

But all is not for naught. Firmware 1.1.3 gives us a few decent featureware additions sure to pacify even the most puerile cynic, like myself. To begin with, control of icon placement in the dock is finally wrestled from Apple’s totalitarian grasp. The phone app, Mail, Safari, iPod, can all be relocated to the homescreen, repopulating the dock with any app you choose, though I strongly advise leaving the phone app where it is, unless you enjoy making calls from the homescreen. In fact, all homescreen icons can now be rearranged around as you please simply with one finger by tapping and holding on any icon, at which point all the icons begin to dance and gyrate like Brittany Spears staggering to her car after a night of bingeing.

And when you run out of screen real estate for all those icons, the homescreen paginates, represented by a series of small white dots depicting the number of viewable “pages” that scroll from left to right. If that sounds suspiciously similar to the multi-page implementation found on SummerBoard, you’re correct. A little too similar. So much so in fact that I can’t shake the feeling Apple is using the very community of iPhone hackers it shuns as free outsourced R&D. When what appeared yesterday as a hack from community sources now appears today from Apple, your mind begins to ponder where the real magic of software design is happening; Cupertino or somewhere in the cloud. All I can say is, if Apple is going to ahem “barrow” innovations from hackers it damn well better open the door good and wide for developers in the coming (presumably) SDK, offering unfettered API support. That’s all I will say on that subject. Now back to the firmware review.

Meanwhile, Apple puts the fun back in function with Safari in the form of a handy new feature allowing users to pin webpage shortcuts, called Web clips, to the homescreen. This is where the new homescreen paginate feature comes into play. After launching Safari, post-update, you’ll notice a new “+” sign at the bottom of your screen display. Tapping this brings up a dialog panel offering a choice of bookmark options. Tap on the middle selection; “send to home screen” and whoosh! Well actually there is no whoosh, per se. Another prompt screen appears allowing you to name your soon-to-be icon, at which point you get dumped back to the homescreen to admire your lovely new icon. If you want to delete a user-generated icon, just tap and hold, wait for the gyrations to begin, and now a delete emblem appears in the upper left corner of the icon in the same way that Dashboard widgets are handheld in OSX. It’s that simple.

By now you’re asking yourself… damn, why doesn’t Kent post screenshots of all this so we can see what it looks like? Ah, well that’s where we go back to that whole “dude! where the hell is my SDK you lying bastards?!” thing. With this latest firmware update, as with all others before, iPhone gets sent back to prison, behind barred doors and razor wire fences to keep out unwanted developers hackers. And with that goes the breadth of applications and useful utilities developed by creative and telented people. One tool in particular I use for taking screen captures for posting. So goes that. Now it’s back to blurry photos of my left hand holding iPhone for image capture. If you sense that I’m growing tired of this game, you’re right. Apple, it seems, devotes more effort taking features away from me than it does providing them, and that just kills my inner child. Ok, so I lied about dropping the whole Apple vs. Developers thing. This time I will, I swear.

Beyond the dancing icons ala Brittany, and Safari bookmarking, there are two other notable additions sure to leave you leaning forward in your chair and reciting biblical proverbs. From the book of Jobs, Verse 21: And Steve said…“Let there be group SMS messaging.” And behold, from the towers of Cupertino poured forth multi-party SMS and it was good. Well it’s not a burning bush, but having the ability to send one SMS to several friends or group members is a much needed feature. The tendons in my thumb splintering to shreds from having to peck out the same message for different recipients. Thankfully that ends now.

Those above features, while tasty, are mere potatoes compared to the real meat of the update. The signature feature to this firmware update has to the revamped Google Maps application which now integrates some rudimentary location aware functionality that enables iPhone to perform some form of GPS mimicry. By using crude cell tower triangulation, the new and improved mapping app is now able to locate your current location on a map, in proximity to the nearest tower. It works well and might even help you find the nearest town or borough, but I wouldn’t trust this app to help medical personnel locate me should I fall into a deep crevasse while hiking through Middle-of-Nowhere Montana. When I tested this feature out twice today it did find my location, but was off about… oh… one square mile. That’s one hell of a margin of error.

Beyond that astonishing feature introduction, the mapping app still works and looks largely the same. Apple did clean up the UI quite a bit, and concealed function buttons that were previously at the forefront behind a page layer that displays interesting page curl effect when activated. Again, nothing overwhelming here, just nice touches to fit and finish. A disturbing revelation came during today’s keynote when Steve Jobs announced that users of iPod Touch, iPhone’s cellular-castrated cousin, have to pay Apple a tax of $20 to download the firmware update. That doesn’t bode well for iPhone users as this is no doubt a harbinger of things to come. We can now look forward to the prospect of one day paying for software updates as well. Sucketh!

And that ladies and gentlemen pretty much wraps up this otherwise underwhelming update. In the long history of firmware updates, this one won’t receive any special honors. No statues will be erected in its honor. But 1.1.3 still stands head and shoulders above 1.1.2, which I best described as the DDS release for “Doesn’t Do Shit”. And that’s the kindest compliment I can pay today’s firmware update, believe me. Yet this release offers so little and I find myself, as always, wanting so much more. Like someone who has crawled through a hot arid desert, with Apple offering me only a thimble of water to assuage my parching thirst. Just one more layer of the onion peeled back, so many more to go.

Keep updating your software Apple, you’re getting closer.

C|Net’s French website is reporting that an upcoming Firmware update, to be released by Apple as early as Saturday, will include two added features that enable the iPhone to act as a USB Flash Drive when docked with a PC or Mac, and includes Voice recorder capability. Which means you’ll be able to throw out all those thumb drives littering you desk, as well as that ridiculously obsolete handheld voice recorder.

Aside: I’d like to know how C|Net France came by this seemingly “insider” information. The whole things seems very dubious, but we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

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Leopard sales are off to a honking strart. According to Apple the company sold a prodigious 2 million copies of the new OS in the first weekend since its official launch at 6:00pm on Friday. Several thousand Mac fanboys (and girls) stood in long lines, similar to those witnessed during iPhone’s launch, eagerly waiting to grope Apple’s new kitty-clad OS. How many copies were sold to Microsoft’s Research lab? Oh, we’ll have to wait for the next version of Windows to see what features Microsoft’s bovine borrows from Apple’s feline.

Astonishingly l was not among the rabble. I’m saving my spare change for the purchase of a MacBook Pro, which will come with Leopard pre-installed. As General Patton once said… “I never pay for the same real estate twice.”

Read the press release after the break.

Apple Sells Two Million Copies of Mac OS X Leopard in First Weekend

CUPERTINO, California—October 30, 2007—Apple® today announced that it sold (or delivered in the case of maintenance agreements) over two million copies of Mac OS® X Leopard since its release on Friday, far outpacing the first-weekend sales of Mac OS X Tiger, which was previously the most successful OS release in Apple’s history. Sales included copies sold at Apple’s retail stores, Apple Authorized Resellers, the online Apple Store®, under maintenance agreements and bundled with new Mac® computers. Leopard is the sixth major release of Mac OS X and is packed with more than 300 new features.

“Early indications are that Leopard will be a huge hit with customers,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Leopard’s innovative features are getting great reviews and making more people than ever think about switching to the Mac.”

Leopard introduces Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac; a redesigned Finder that lets users quickly browse and share files between multiple Macs*; Quick Look, a new way to instantly see files without opening an application; Spaces, an intuitive new feature used to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; a brand new desktop with Stacks, a new way to easily access files from the Dock; and major enhancements to Mail and iChat®.

Pricing & Availability Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard is available through the Apple Store (www.apple.com), at Apple’s retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129 (US) for a single user license. The Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack is a single-household, five-user license for a suggested retail price of $199 (US). Volume and maintenance pricing is available from Apple. Leopard requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and is designed to run on any Macintosh® computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (867 MHz or faster) processor. Full system requirements can be found at www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs.