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in this video, I continue the WWDC 2008 Roundup as I discuss the SDK features. There were a lot of things in this part of the keynote that impressed me. During this portion of the keynote, Apple reviewed a lot of features which were debuted in March, and also demonstrated the Interface Builder. Apple then decided to showcase several developers to show off the power of the SDK which include: Sega, Ebay, Loopt, Typepad, Pangea Software, Modality, MIMVista, Cow Music, MLB.com, and Digital Legends. My favorite of all these demonstrations is from Cow Music, they have opened up a whole new realm of applications with their music app. They demonstrated a 12 Bar blues simulator which created great music in a short amount of time. Modality and MIMVista also demonstrated the iPhone's potential in the medical arena. Switching gears in the keynote, Apple talked about the topic of running applications in the "background". Typically, applications which rely on server notifications need to be running in the background in order to receive alerts. This type of behavior is seen in Instant messaging type applications. Traditionally, when applications run in the background on mobile platforms, they consume precious system resources and drain battery life. Apple looks to solve this issue by introducing a new architecture for notifications. This new system will allow developers to send three types of notifications through Apple's server: badges (number of new notifications), custom sounds, and custom textual alerts. There is a little controversy surrounding Apple's ownership of the messaging server. Personally, I think it's a good idea as long as the data sent and received is not sensitive. This will be available in September. All in all, the SDK improvements look and sound fascinating and I'm excited to see what apps get developed as a result.

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