Next Tuesday’s event will come just over a year after the company released the original SDK at the iPhone 2.0 software event. Apple has mentioned that this will be an “advance preview of what were building,” so nothing is really expected to be ready to go. The invitation did not make mention of who would be leading the event, but with CEO Steve Jobs still on leave, it may be safe to assume Phil Schiller or iPhone software chief Scott Forstall will be taking the reigns.

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The company has posted the available positions on numerous job boards such as 37 Signals’ and Smashing Magazine’s. Here are some specifics for both positions:

Sr. Web UI Engineer at Apple Inc.

Type: Full-time Job
Location: Cupertino, CA
Apple is seeking a Senior Web Front-End Engineer to help create and define the interactivity of Apple’s Online Store. This senior front end engineer will be responsible for architectural oversight of front-end technologies as well as collaborating on ideas with other Senior Engineers in other disciplines.

Responsibilities:
- Lead development efforts on large scale projects, ensuring robust & lasting solutions are implemented.
- Maintain JavaScript libraries: Adding and pruning them as necessary and providing documentation to be leveraged by other engineers.
- Mentor team members: Educate on software development best practices and new technologies.
- Innovate: Design things that people will blog and Twitter about.

Minimum of 7 years of professional software development experience with front end web development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, AJAX)

- Comfortable with source version control software (CVS, SVN, Git)
- Well-versed in fundamental visual and interactive design discipline
- Strive to use web standards to build solutions using semantic markup and CSS.
- Understanding of all major browsers and the special coding required for all various quirks.
- Competent JavaScript programmer who doesn’t need to rely on libraries to accomplish innovative interactions.
- Aware of the interplay between JavaScript and HTML & CSS, and can dynamically create, modify, and style elements on a page with ease.
- Able to communicate front-end issues with back-end developers.

Video Editor Product Designer, Pro Apps

Apple’s Pro Apps Design Group is seeking a passionate video editor who understands the complexity of software product design. This person must possess a relentless attention to detail, a gifted eye for aesthetics and the ability to quickly grasp and distill highly complex matters.

The candidate will work closely with all designers, producers, engineers, and other editors to design the future of Pro Apps; high-visibility applications that are used daily by creative professionals working in post-production (examples include Final Cut Pro, Motion and Soundtrack Pro).

The designer will be responsible for researching, designing and prototyping new user experiences and features, creating design mockups, producing visual assets and writing behavioral documentation (required for proper design implementation).

The candidate must be a natural collaborator who prefers being creative in a team environment, a passionate customer advocate and be capable of crafting and designing simple solutions to complex design problems.

Qualifications:
-Minimum 5 years of experience as a video editor, with sound design/production, motion graphics, photography, and videography skills.
-Experienced creating or designing innovative and visually stunning user experiences for software, games, DVDs, video, or the web.
-Degree in film production, interaction design, human factors and/or visual design (or equivalent).
-An outstanding body of work demonstrated as a reel (film, TV, web examples) or design portfolio demonstrating the successful delivery of innovative video, motion graphics, and/or design.
-Understanding of Apple’s human interface design language and the ability to translate it into future designs of Apple’s professional applications.
-Exceptional understanding of fundamental design disciplines (typography, composition, information architecture, color and animation) and principals (affordance, clustering, consistency, usability, etc.).
-The ideal candidate is not afraid of a blank white board or blank screen.

Software Skills:
-Expert-level knowledge of editing, motion graphics, and finishing suites like FCP, Avid, Smoke, Luster, etc.
-Highly versed in graphic design tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Omnigraffle, etc.
-Complete mastery of the Mac OS X platform.
-Advanced knowledge of interaction prototyping tools such as Flash, Director and/or AfterEffects is a big plus.

Interestingly, in relation to the pro apps video editing position, we recently covered an interesting Apple patent (Apple Patent Shows Interest in Film Production, Script-Integrated Storyboards) that may possibly relates to this position.

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If you missed the opening animation that Safari 4 played when you first opened the new beta, most of it was done with HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards. Apple has always been on the forefront when it comes to pushing for open web standards. Mobile Me and iWork.com both use a heavy dose of Ajax, coupled with frameworks like Sproutcore and high level data-interchange formats such as JSON. As Adobe spends its time fruitlessly developing and trying to further the necessity of Flash, Apple seems to shun the idea altogether. Out of all the platforms and all the web browsers available today, Flash arguably performs the worst in Safari on Mac OS X. With Safari 4, Apple has once again made it clear that open standards are where their intentions lie, and the necessity of Flash remains solely in the ubiquity of its video format, which Apple seems poised to take over as well with its own H.264 format.

Safari 4 brings in a host of new features and visual enhancements. The Top Sites feature was ripped straight from Google Chrome in which a user can see his most visited sites “at-a-glance” – and the same goes for the new “tabs on top” feature in which users can tear off tabs into new pages, or click the “+” sign to open up a new tab, which conveniently displays your “top sites.”

Cover Flow is a new addition to Safari which lets users navigate their site history through a visual slideshow of images. As Apple puts it, “Cover Flow offers a highly visual way of reviewing your site history and bookmarked sites, presenting full-page previews of the websites that look exactly as they did when you last visited them.” Even though this feature is nice and provides some slick eye candy, it’s not very useful, and barely performs on Windows machines with the new Safari 4 running, at least not fast enough to be enjoyable. It seems that even though the addition of Cover Flow was most likely cakewalk for Safari’s developers, the resources could have been spent on more important additions to the browser. Like the diversification of plugins available that can extend Safari’s usefulness.

Safari is built upon Apple’s WebKit browser engine, and at this point it’s safe to say that Apple’s javascript engine (newly renamed to Nitro instead of SquirrelFish) is the fastest around. As Apple claims in the Press Release, Safari is the “first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable highly polished web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG web standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.” And in terms of speed, Safari blows away Firefox on OS X. The sheer snappiness and accelerated load times remain the sole reason we religiously use both Firefox and Safari together.

Overall, Safari 4 is a good step forward on the visual side of things, and the newly crowned “Nitro” javascript engine is incredibly speedy. But the lack of extendible plugins and cross-platform stability make it a bit too shaky for most to use as a primary browser, even if were not in beta. Additionally, the developer plugin Firebug remains a daily necessity for us, so it looks like while Safari got a little bit faster, sadly we still have to use both.

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Alongside the new version of Safari, Apple has visually detailed some of the bigger more substantial upgrades or enhancemenets to the browser on a “What’s new is Safari 4” web-page.

Top Sites

Cover Flow

“Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.”

Tabs

Developer Tools

Innovative new features in Safari 4 include:
• Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;
• Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;
• Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes®;
• Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;
• Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;
• Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;
• Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text;
• built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and
• a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.

As MacRumors helpfully points out, if you download the new Safari 4 beta, and after some use want to revert back to Safari 3, simply follow any of these links to grab the older version. (Leopard, Tiger, Windows)

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A brief mention of Snow Leopard at WWDC 2008 by Steve Jobs gave the public a mere glimpse into what can be expected, yet developers had been privy to more detailed information. World of Apple has gathered a gallery of screenshots showing the latest Snow Leopard build (10a261), that has been sanctioned as a primarily “under the hood” upgrade, improving performance and reducing the operating systems overall footprint. Below are a few of the screenshots that have been released.

About this Mac showing build 10A261.

System Preferences pane showing a few minor user interface changes.

An upgraded Keboard Shortcuts pane resembling the Finder allows for greater ease of use.

With Stacks you can now navigate the folder structure.

“Application footprints in Snow Leopard are significantly reduced. Almost all of the applications have been rebuilt in Cocoa and 64 bit.”

A new “Put Back” feature allows you to easily restore deleted items.

World of Apple notes that based on the current progress of the latest build they do not expect Snow Leopard to ship during the first quarter of 2009.

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MyAppleGuide originally found the file (though we first saw it over at MacRumors), which we opened up in Interface Builder to snap the screenshot below.

While none of these new features have been discovered in developer builds of Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard operating system, readers have previously discovered that Snow Leopard may be bringing four-finger gestures to older Macbooks through software updates. The notion that Snow Leopard might ship with the ability to customize your own gestures is not far fetched.

To find the file navigate as shown: /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Trackpad.prefPane/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/FourFingerSwipeGesture.nib

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A video tutorial explaining how to use the new service can be seen here. “The process is a simple matter of going to iDisk on me.com, selecting the file you want to share, and clicking the Share File button.”

We’re pleased to announce that you can now use your MobileMe iDisk to share files with others simply and easily. Instead of attaching a large document to an email and hoping it’s not too big to be received, you can place the file in your iDisk and use the new Share File command in the iDisk web app. It lets you send your friends, family, or colleagues a link they can click to download the file directly. You can password protect the link if you choose to and even set how long it will be available.

Analyst Shaw Wu Speculates Over AT&T Tiered Rate Plans

Shaw Wu, who’s “notes to clients” sound more like a study of different opinions from websites on the internet, has apparently released another speculative suggestion pertaining to the future of AT&T’s iPhone rate plans.

Primarily he claims that Apple has held off on the release of a new iPhone because AT&T cannot solidify new rate plans. As we mentioned back in November alongside some of the first iPhone tethering information, AT&T has definitely been considering some changes to its rate plans. However, Wu’s analysis that these considerations are holding up the debut of a new iPhone is preposterous.

“Our sources indicate what’s holding up new iPhones are not technology issues but rather fine-tuning of its go-to-market strategy,” Wu explains. “Due to fear of lower profits, [AT&T] is more open to developing tiered data plans that fit more in line with today’s environment.” — “Apple, along with AT&T and its carrier partners, is in the midst of figuring out how to position a second and potentially even a third iPhone model that would be complimentary and minimize cannibalization with the current 3G iPhone.”

Wu believes that regardless of Apple COO Tim Cook’s statements that Apple is not making a cheaper iPhone, they indeed are working on such a device. Interestingly, images claiming to be a new unreleased iPhone began floating around the web yesterday. The images depict a similar sized device, only the exterior finish is a black matte, not shiny glossy black.

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Shortly after Apple’s recent iPhone/iPod display table overhaul, the company will ready the third major interior design change to its brick-and-mortar locations. ifoAppleStore notes that these changes have included wood floors and the transition to a stainless interior in September of 2006. According to the upcoming plans, Apple will put hardware on the back-burner of their marketing strategy to focus the spotlight on software and the various digital features of Apple’s product lines. This correlates well with how Apple’s recent marketing of iPhones and iPod touches seems to have a heavier focus on the 20,000 applications that are now at the users fingertips, over promoting the actual devices themselves.

Upon entering the restructured floor space, customers are said to be greeted with a front section of the store dedicated to promoting “Why You’ll Love a Mac.” The correlating signage and literature will note the advantages of Macs over PCs. It is also said that the next section of the retail space will concentrate on the iLife suite of applications and how the software can assist in the user’s everyday digital lifestyle. Additionally a third section of the interior makeover will focus on the iLife suite of applications. The layout restructuring is said to begin taking effect as early as next week, yet could be several weeks for staff training and display changes.

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The information and build numbers come from Macitynet.it, which have reported that the builds are only available to a select group of developer testers at the moment.

As MacRumors and ArsTechnica both point out, Macity’s sources (who provided the information), explain that there are not many changes in this build of Snow Leopard. The interface is largely untouched, even though many believe Apple is planning some major changes and refinements to it in the future. There are a few fixes to the finder, and everything overall seems more stable.

In previous builds that were leaked to a few torrent sites online, readers found that Snow Leopard may offer 4 finger gestures to older Macbooks and Macbook Pros which currently don’t support the full multi-touch gesture swipes.

Apple’s Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies Jordan Hubbard spoke at a conference a few months back, and one of the slides from his presentation pointed to a first quarter 2009 Snow Leopard release. While Snow Leopard may be coming a little bit later than initially expected, we do expect Apple to release some new multi-core and GPU accelerated hardware alongside or around the Snow Leopard release.

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The patent application explains how it would serve as a tool for film and video editors and producers. Storyboards are a way that people involved in a film’s production can communicate and visually represent their thoughts to one another. While Apple have a presence in professional grade film editing with software like Final Cut Pro, this patent applications shows interest in the other side of the process, actually shooting the film.

One illustration shows the proposed interface for script and actors.

Specifically, this piece of software would allow for those working on a film to visually place and arrange elements like the cameras and actors, while efficiently integrating in with the actual script. As InformationWeek explains, “…rather than being a purely visual aid for those behind the lens, the storyboards Apple has in mind could serve both crew and actors.” As the patent explains, the storyboards could be distributed to all members of the crew and production alike. In essence, the software would serve as another effective way of visually communicating thoughts across a team of people.

Another shot of the interface shows script integration with a specific actor info card.

Apple describes the background on the patent as follows: Producing motion pictures can be an exciting project. Motion picture productions can range from major studio epics to documentaries produced by small independent film makers. The major studio epic can encompass a large cast and crew with large inventories of equipment, while the smaller film may include a smaller cast and crew with limited inventories. Even smaller productions may involve multiple locations and include multiple scenes with different shots within a scene.

Another description is as follows, “In one general sense, a storyboard presentation for a motion picture production is generated by launching a scene design tool that includes a camera placement tool and an actor placement tool. Using the actor placement tool, a first actor icon is added on a scene layout for a motion picture production, the first actor icon representing a first actor that will appear in a scene in the motion picture production. Using the camera placement tool, the first camera icon is added on a scene layout for the motion picture production, the first camera icon representing a first camera that will film the scene. The user is enabled to control a location and orientation of the first actor icon using the actor placement tool. The user also is enabled to control a location and orientation of the first camera icon relative to the first actor icon using the camera placement tool.”

Whether the patent application turns into an actual product has yet to be seen. But, it does make sense for Apple to have intentions on creating a symbiotic relationship between two pieces of software used for the same overall goal. With this proposed application and a nice marriage to Final Cut Pro, nearly everyone involved on a particular film, whether it be major motion pictures or a small independent filmmaker, would be able to seamlessly work together in an Apple ecosystem using specified hardware that’s in tune with the software being used. While it may seem like a locked down environment to some, the ease of use and stability this may provide would be nearly unmatched in the movie business. You can download the patent application’s full 36 page PDF here.

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