Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is upon us, and while the event lasts until the end of this week, Apple has mercifully spared us the anticipation by kicking WWDC 2011 off with a keynote about which a lot of people are pretty excited. Though the word on the street is that there almost certainly will not be an iPhone 5/iPhone 4GS reveal today, we do know that Apple will be talking about iOS5, Mac OS X Lion (this is, after all, a developers’ conference, and developers need to know about the operating systems they’re working with), and, most intriguingly for many, iCloud.
Everything is speculative at this point, but the great hope for iCloud, as elucidated by John Gruber, is that it won’t be the new MobileMe, but rather the new iTunes: That is, that with iCloud, the previous model of PC-as-central-media-hub for Apple users will shift to “should shift to the cloud. iTunes, the desktop app, currently syncs the following things with iOS devices: audio, movies and TV shows, iBooks e-books, App Store apps, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, notes, and any sort of files shared between iOS apps. All of these things would be better served syncing over-the-air via the so-called cloud.” Will it live up to that? Well, it’s silly at this point to write more speculative blog posts about it; just tune into the keynote at 1pm ET/10am PT to find out.
As for that: As of posting, Apple has not yet made a live video stream available for the event, and it’s very possible that it won’t at all. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t follow WWDC 2011 as it happens:
Leo Laporte’s TWiT Live is always a good option for tech event coverage. You can watch the video here:
We’ll keep an eye out should a live video feed of the event, real or bootleg, emerge.
Update, 1:14pm ET: This live video feed is serviceable.
Update, 1:22pm: Not anymore :(
Meanwhile, here are some worthwhile WWDC liveblogs to follow:
