Time is running out for Apple to organize a February keynote - but since they haven't announced a delay in the SDK, we're assuming invitations will go out on Monday for an event on Thursday or Friday next week. We can but hope! In the meantime - enjoy this fantasy transcript, a continuation from the previous post.
Of course, Apple has got a lot of experience with office productivity software. Our iWork package has been hugely popular on the Mac. So it’s simple, right? We just port iWork to the iPhone… Wrong! Because it turns out that word processing on a mobile device is an entirely different kind of application to word processing on a desktop. And you can’t make a business presentation on a mobile phone screen – even a beautiful high-density widescreen like the one we put in the iPhone.
So what do people want to do with documents, spreadsheets and presentations on their phone? Well the main thing is that they want to view their documents – and you already can do that on an iPhone because we’ve got this great feature built right into our Mail application that let’s you do just that. It’s built on the same rock-solid technology we use for QuickLook in Leopard. And for many users, that’s all they need. Which is great.
But then, what if I want to do more than read the document? Maybe I’ve got ten minutes to spare on my way to a meeting, and so I take the opportunity to read through a document. But I have changes that I want to share with my colleagues, and I want to track those changes. It’s amazing, but as far as we know, there is no mobile software out there right now that let’s you track changes on Word documents. Now we couldn’t believe that, so we spent a lot of time looking, but we really couldn’t find any.
The next thing I might want to do is to make some comments on that document. Again, there isn’t much mobile software out there that allows you to do this, and there’s certainly no mobile software out there that makes it easy. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. We started from scratch to build a whole new kind of application – a mobile word processor that makes it really easy to read through documents, to track changes and to make comments. And I’d like to show it to you now. [Demo]
…so that’s Pages. But what about presentations?
We looked at the mobile presentation software out there, and a lot of it seems to be focused on letting you edit presentations. But we don’t think that’s what people want to do. Working with graphics isn’t easy on a handheld device. We just don’t think that people want to design this stuff on their phones. So what do people want to do with presentations on their phones? Simple – they want to present them. And there’s no slicker way of making a presentation than with Keynote.
So, we launched our Keynote application back in 2003, and the reaction has been huge. You see Keynote does the same thing as other presentation packages out there [show’s icon of PowerPoint on screen]. The difference is that Keynote does it a whole lot better. It really takes advantage of the amazing graphics capabilities in Mac OS X to deliver incredibly slick and impactful presentations. Well, the great news is that the same graphics technologies that Mac OS X ships with are also built right into iPhone. So we can deliver almost all of the amazing visual impact of Keynote from something as small and compact as an iPhone. It’s truly amazing. Of course, you’re not limited to viewing your presentations on the iPhone’s built in screen. You can plug in our Apple Component AV cable, and hook it right up to your TV. And today, we’re introducing a new iPhone compatible VGA cable, so that you can hook up your iPhone to any VGA display – it means you can leave you Mac behind, and still take your Keynote presentations with you on the road. And the great thing is that your iPhone turns into this wonderful remote. You see, we’ve made our VGA cable really thin and flexible, so that it doesn’t get in the way when you’re presenting. On your iPhone screen you have a big back and next button… you have speaker notes… you can even check out the next or previous slides. I don’t know any other presentation remote that lets you do all that.
So Keynote on iPhone really is a great new way to take presentations with you on the road, and you can even use it with PowerPoint presentations – you’ll just have to do without Keynote’s amazing graphics.
Then, of course, there’s Numbers. Now, not everybody loves number crunching – I guess only an accountant can really love a spreadsheet. But of course there are numbers that we all like to keep track of [shows chart tracking iTunes sales on an iPhone screen, to laughs from the audience]. Anyone in business has numbers that they need to have at their fingertips, and iWork Touch does exactly that. It literally puts your numbers at your fingers. You see it turns out that our MultiTouch interface is really great for working with spreadsheets. Scrolling across big spreadsheets is a breeze – and if you double tap on a cell, you can adjust numeric values with this neat slider, without even having to use the keyboard. Plus of course, there are all these great 3D graphs and charts. So that’s Numbers on iPhone.
So we have these three great applications. What do they all have in common? Well they’re all redesigned from the ground up as mobile applications – providing you with the stuff you need to carry on doing your job when you’re on the road. They all take advantage of our amazing MultiTouch user interface. They all work with our hugely popular iWork suite for Mac, and of course, Microsoft Office as well, including Office 2007 & 2008 for Mac.
So as you can see – with our new iWork Touch suite – Pages, Keynote and Numbers, we’ve re-invented mobile business software. And after today, I don’t think anyone will want to settle for anything less. But there are a couple more thing that all these applications need. [Copy & Paste appears in words on screen to another round of applause]. In fact it’s not just for iWork – as we’re getting more 3rd party apps, we’re going to need copy and paste system-wide. But how?
Well we already have this great magnifying glass that helps you to position your insertion point. Well now we’ve made it so that if you hold down one finger as you move the magnifying glass, it let’s you highlight text. They you can simply tap the highlighted text to bring up a context menu that gives you some options – you can choose cut; copy; make note; send as e-mail or send as text. Then when you want to paste, you just use the magnifying glass again to position the insertion point, and then tap the insertion point to paste the text. It’s that simple. Let me show you [Demo].
So that’s how we’ve done copy and paste. And we know a lot of users have been wanting this for a while now. Well it’s so simple to use, we think you’re going to find it was worth the wait.
But there is one more thing that we’re going to need for all these amazing new apps. On the Mac, we call if the “Finder” [Finder icon appears on screen]. It’s what we use to browse documents. And in Leopard, we introduced CoverFlow, so you can browser through these gorgeous large thumbnails of your documents. We’ll we thought – wouldn’t it be great to have that on your iPhone too, so that you can browse through documents using CoverFlow, just like you browse through your music. It’s amazing. This is a real, desktop class file browser, right here on your iPhone. And it couldn’t be simpler to use. Here’s how it works. We’ve got this new icon in iTunes, called “Documents” – it appears under your iPhone icon. You can either drag your documents straight to it, or you can set up a folder on your Mac or Windows PC to sync right onto your iPhone. But that’s not the only way you can send and receive files. You can…
- Sync with a folder on your Mac or PC via iTunes
- Save attachments from e-mail on iPhone
- Send and Receive files via Bluetooth from any compatible device
- .Mac integration, so you can access you iDisk directly from your iPhone via WiFi
So as we promised at the end of last year, today we’re launching our SDK. Although we’re admittedly pushing it a little for “February” – fortunately this year is a leap year! [Laughs from audience]. But it’s actually a whole lot more than just an SDK that we’re introducing today:
- iPhone Games
- Buy Software from iTunes Store
- Finder for iPhone with CoverFlow
- Bluetooth File Exchange
- Copy and Paste
- New iPhone VGA Cable support
Well, that’s all we have for you today – we’ve been working really hard on this over the past twelve months. The entire team have been putting in a monumental effort to make this update something truly special, and I think you’ll agree, they’ve done a fantastic job. Thank you.
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