Apple takes Safari to Windows and iPhone

Jobs devoted the majority of his talk to Leopard, which was originally supposed to be available around the time of this week's WWDC but was delayed until October so that Apple could get the iPhone out on time. He showed off 10 features of Leopard that set to be additions to the operating system, including some that have been shown over the past year, such as Time Machine, Cover Flow and Boot Camp.

"We believe the Leopard features highlighted today will serve to further differentiate Macs and will help catalyze market share gains," Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, wrote in a research report distributed after Jobs' speech.

Leopard developers will now have the ability to create 64-bit applications specifically for Macs. They previously could create 64-bit applications for the Unix code base that's underneath Mac OS X, but Apple is now extending 64-bit support to the Cocoa development environment, allowing developers to create native 64-bit Mac OS applications, Jobs said.

Drivers for 32-bit applications will work with 64-bit applications, and vice versa, said Brian Croll, senior director of Mac OS X product marketing. Leopard can run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications, but Tiger users won't be able to run applications in 64 bits, he said.

Apple believes that its professional customers, graphics professionals and multimedia developers, will be able to take advantage of 64-bit applications immediately, Croll said. The biggest advantage of a 64-bit application is its ability to address large amounts of memory; 32-bit applications can only address 4GB of memory. There aren't a ton of people buying PCs with 4GB of memory or more at this point (only Apple's Mac Pro can accommodate more than 4GB), but that will probably change in the future as memory costs continue to decline and newer applications are created.

Apple focused on making the desktop easier to manage and organize with Leopard. One new feature that helps make that happen is called Stacks.

Stacks lets Mac OS X users see the files inside a folder in the dock, the row of application icons usually found at the bottom of the desktop screen, making it easier to find files without having to open a lot of application windows, Jobs said. It also works as an application launcher if the Applications folder is dragged into the dock, Jobs said.

Jobs also showed off a new version of Finder that uses the Cover Flow technology to enable Mac users to browse for files on their computers using an interface similar to the one used in iTunes for scrolling through songs or movies.

It also lets users search other computers--both Windows and Macs--connected to a local-area network, and it syncs up with Apple's .Mac service to let road warriors access the sales contract they left back on their home Mac before setting out on a trip.

Jobs also took some time at the beginning of his address to address a sore subject with many Mac fans: Game support. Electronic Arts' Bing Gordon, co-founder and CTO, announced that the company is bring four popular titles (Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) to the Mac in July.

But more significantly, he said EA would release Madden NFL 08 and Tiger Woods Golf 08 simultaneously on Macs and PCs. Mac fans have in the past complained about the delay in getting the most popular titles ported over from Windows.

Apple's stock price fell US$4.30, or 3.45 percent, to close at US$120.19 Monday, suggesting investors might have been hoping for something more from Jobs' on-stage presentation.

CNET News.com's Ina Fried contributed to this report.