5.45pm: The queues are up and filing in and the lights are going down. If you need reminding about what to expect from today's presentation, have a look at our guide to what to expect and not to expect.
Of course the developers in line have had plenty of time to buff their tweets (that's not a euphemism.. we hope). One of our favourites so far came from Emily Caffrey, who tweeted "If I'm correct, the One More Thing will be a live performance of a real Lion devouring the Lodsys team." She also pointed to a mysterious black banner - no doubt to be unfurled and unveiled once the keynote is over - and wondered if this is the mythical iPhone 4S. ("No", replied other devs.)Other favourite tweets included "Free the iPhone 5! They've suffered enough!" (but we can't find it on Twitter's New'n'Improved Finger-lickin' Good Search).
Your guesses please too for the music playlist for those awaiting the start... "Hey, You, Get Offa My Cloud" by the Rolling Stones? "[I've Looked At Clouds from] Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell? Something more recent (please)?
6.00pm: There's no live stream from this year's WWDC, so we'll be doing our best to aggregate from as many credible sources as we can - not least the thousands of devs in the Moscone Centre...
For now, James Brown is playing, and there's just a few minutes to go. Watch this tongue-in-cheek warm up if you're feeling itchy:6.04pm: And we're off! Steve Jobs has taken the stage, looking disturbingly gaunt, while the audience shouts "we love you".
Jobs' intro is short: "We've got some great stuff to talk about: OS X Lion, iOS 5, and some kind of interesting new cloud stuff," and then he hands over to Craig Federighi, senior vice president of the Mac division.6.14pm: Federighi starts with the stats: Apple has sold 64m Macs, and year on year the PC has shrunk 1% while Mac has grown 28% (this is Apple talking, remember) for the past five years. There are 250 new features in OS X Lion, he says, but he'll be listing ten.
Incidentally Gizmodo (barred from Apple events since the phone-nicking incident) somehow has a live stream running. I wonder if whoever that brave recorder is will be able to capture Apple's heavies heading...So those ten features:
• Multitouch gestures fully supported including multitouch tap to zoom, which means the death of the scrollbar. We won't miss that.
• Devs can make all their apps run in full-screen.
• Mission Control is an uber-expose, showing everything you're working on at once. (Devs are familiar with these features as they've had access to the beta for a couple of months...) Swipe from one app to another, and get to Mission Control with a three-fingered upwards swipe.
• Photo Booth has some face detection features.
(We'll come back to these! Meanwhile Gizmodo has been SHUT DOWN and put on Apple's naughty step.)
He's moved on the Mac App Store...
6.33pm: Simon Maddox, a dev who's there has just retweeted this. Take with a pinch of salt: Apple TV, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch - are all getting iOS5 beta, it would appear.
"LEAKED: URLs for iOS 5 betas, new Lion developer preview, iCloud beta, and more! (NOT A JOKE) http://t.co/Eus1v0G"6.35pm: Ok, so the Mac App Store. He bigs it up, etc etc, and says it is built into Lion with in-app purchases and push notifications plus a sandbox feature built in for extra security.
• Launchpad... make a pinch gesture on screen and all your apps will appear.• Resume... brings you back to where you left off, with everything from windows to tools just as if you put them down on your digital desktop...
• Auto Save... does what it says on the tin, though you can switch it off or revert back to a previous version.
• Versions... he demos many, many pages of versions...
6.42pm: Mail has been "completely overhauled" with two or three column view, and much improved search that includes search suggestions. Mail will distinguish between a person or subject, then allow rules on those searches. There's a conversation view that simplifies threads by cutting out things like forwarded messages, and there's also now search by date.
He mentions, but doesn't elaborate on, the Windows migration feature, built-in FaceTime, Filevault 2, a Lion Server add-on and 3,000 new APIs. (The devs coo at that...)Developer John Henry Barac, who's there, tweeted: "Much smarter search in mail in osx lion. Start to search and mail will quickly prompt you with fields that search might apply to." And then: OS X lion will not be available on optical disk... Only via the app store, and at $29.99!"
That's a first. It's a 4GB download that can be used on all your authorised Macs. Out in July.
Next up: Scott Forstall (senior vice president of iOS) on iOS5. This will be a good one...
6.51pm: Forstall says: "We've sold over 200m iOS devices." That gives Apple, by comScore's calculations, 44% of the mobile operating system market, conveniently crushing those gleeful stories about Android become the predominant mobile OS. iOS 44%, Android 28%, RIM 19% and all the rest 9%.
The stats, they cometh:• 25m iPads sold since launch 14 months ago.
• More than 15bn songs sold through iTunes.
• 130m book downloads sold through iTunes.
• 90,000 iPad-specific apps and 14bn apps downloaded from the App Store in total.
• $2.5bn paid out to developers (cue pictures of big cheque on screen, signed by Steve)
• 225m accounts signed up for one-click, credit card purchasing.
And as for iOS 5?
6.57pm: Forstall says there are 1,500 new APIs for iOS 5. First new feature? Notifications. Hurrah! An end, at last, to the intrusive push notifications - more than 100bn of those have been sent already. But that doesn't make them right, Scott.
Notification Centre aggregates notifications from all apps, and there's a nod to Android's very efficient notification bar because with iOS, you access notification by swiping down from the top bar. Depending which apps you're using, it will list missed calls, texts, emails, football scores, Facebook updates etc, all in one list.Next: Newsstand. This manages subscriptions to multiple publications, so they automatically queue up within Newstand.
Twitter gets special mention: ""We want to make it even easier for all our customers to use Twitter on all their iOS products,' says Forstall. There's single sign-on, within settings, which can be shared with any app that uses Twitter, so photo apps for example. iOS currently send 1bn tweets per week...
7.05pm: And then there's Safari. (Obligatory bigup: Safari handles two thirds of all mobile web browsing, says Forstall. Android has 27% share.)
Safari now has a 'reader' feature that strips all unnecessary content and makes it easier to read a story. This will be great for news sites. Unless it strips off their ads, of course. Content is emailable and tweetable, and there's also a 'reading list' feature. So that's blown Instapaper off course, then.
• Reminders can be about anything, and can include lists, dates, locations... and they sync with iCal too. It looks like you can set up geographic triggers too: "I can set a location to remind me to call my wife when I leave the convention today. It'll set up a geofence," said Forstall.
On Steve: A typical astute observation from John Daring Fireball Gruber: "A word from He's here, but this is the first post-Steve keynote." It's true - a minute or so, and he was gone.
7.13pm: And the camera... iPhone 4 is soon to overtake the Nikon D90, based on the camera popularity recorded by Flickr uploads, it would appear, Flickr. Opening the camera function will bypass the password, but won't make existing pics accessible. Volume up button now takes pictures, too.
Photos can now be edited - crops, rotations, red-eye reduction and one-click enhance - right on the phone without needing an app.• Mail on iOS will include rich text formatting, indentation control and you can drag addresses into send fields. There's also a dictionary that works across iOS 5 and will work with all apps. The keyboard can be split in two (this is more for iPad!) to allow a bigger view of the email you're writing.
• By the way, that tweet earlier was legit: http://t.co/Eus1v0G. More in a moment...
• Game centre: There are more than 100,000 game and entertainment titles in the App Store and 50m Games Centre users, and it's a social service too that includes friend discovery.
7.25pm: Charles is very excited about this. iMessage, the native messaging system, can now be used across iOS devices with new read and delivery receipts and real-time typing notifications. And it works across wifi and 3G.
And praise the heavens: you can now sync your iTunes library over wifi. No more goddamn cables. TFFT.iOS 5, says Forstall, will ship in the Autumn.
7.30pm: And Steve Jobs is back. To talk about iCloud. Steve saves the best bit for himself, you see. Take that, Gruber.
"You'll basically sync it to your Mac and everything will work fine. And it did, for the better part of 10 years, but it's broken down in the last few years," he explains. (You're telling me - I don't bother syncing any more because I can't be bothered with iTunes' tantrums or the sodding cables. Which is fine until I lose my phone, of course.)Well, it bothers Steve too, so Apple is going to move "the centre of our digital lives into the cloud."
"iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your device. It automatically uploads it, stores it, and pushes it to all your devices."
He admits it - Mobile Me was "not our finest hour". Oh no. No no no. It really wasn't, was it? All those Mobile Me apps have been rewritten to work with iCloud, so contacts, calendars, Mail, books, apps - they are all updated automatically through the cloud.
Mobile dies today. iCloud will have no ads, and will be free. How is this possible?! Hail the end of the $99 annual MobileMe subscription! There won't be many people at MobileMe's funeral, that's for sure.
There's also Documents in the Cloud, so you can share documents you are working on between all devices. Keynote and Pages too.
7.40pm: Jobs says there are iCloud Storage APIs for devs to work with, and these will work across Macs and PCs as well as all iOS devices.
NEXT! Photo Stream. This is about what iCloud means for photos. All iOS devcies will automatically push photos to the cloud from the native Photos app, and then sent to other devices; The Pictures folder on a PC and Photos on a Mac, as well as Apple TV. So take a photo on your phone and it instantly appears on your desktop too.This is one to watch out for: this will only store that last 1,000 photos. If you want them permanently stored move them to an album. In iCloud, they only live for 30 days. Ruh-roh. That smells like trouble.
7.49pm: And here it is, finally, arriving fashionably late... iTunes in iCloud.
You buy music in the same way from iTunes, but can now download that same track to all your devices. If you were wondering how long it took Apple to twist some music industry arms to agree to multiple downloads of the same track, here's Jobs: "This is the first time we've seen this in the music industry - no charge for multiple downloads to different devices."Buy it on your iPhone, and it will automatically appear on your iPad, etc. Up to ten devices, in fact. "We're making it free," said Jobs "...and we're very excited about it. So that's iCloud. It stores your content and pushes it to all of your devices, and it's integrated with all your apps."
Time for a dig at Google Music: Jobs says competitors can't do that Apple thing of making so "it just works".
iCloud will be default on all iOS 5 devices with 5GB of mail storage. Developer beta launches today.
7.59pm: iCloud will ship (do virtual products still 'ship'?) with iOS 5 this autumn. And, for his final trick:
It's about ripped music. (Oh, Dan Sabbagh will have something to say about this.)Do you sync your library over wifi or cable, buy the songs again on iTunes (nil points) or... do you use iTunes Match. I don't know how they've pulled this off, but this is likely to be very bad news for Spotify.
iTunes Match: It's basically an amnesty for ripped music . In minutes, said Steve, you can have your entire music library in the cloud. (What, even if you're into Burzum? That might not be in the 18m-strong iTunes catalogue...)
iTunes Match is $24.99 per year; Jobs compares it to Amazon's Cloud Drive at $50 per year and Google's as yet unknown service because both reply on lengthy uploading, he said.
8.08pm: Steve thinks we need some proof that Apple is up to this. Cue picture of Apple's third data centre. (It's a warehouse in a desert. All looks very data centrey. And not unlike a set for Alien, as if designed by Apple.)
So that's it. Steve leaves the stage. No streaming music service, but a cloud based backup service that puts content on all your devices, and the one last thing was iTunes Match, which scans your music collection and then gives you the same collection in the cloud. Provided it's in Apple's music industry-approved catalogue. We have no idea on a UK date for this, though iCloud's US release date is the Autumn.Steve Jobs has left the building.