Incase you missed it, here's my round up of Apple's Keynote at the World Wide Developer Conference yesterday, Monday 8th August.

First off; Apple have finished the transition to intel chips with the release of the Mac Pro, replacing the PowerMac G5.

No new design, on the outside, all looks generally the same as the PowerMac G5, with the addition of two USB ports, 1 FireWire 400 and a FireWire 800 port all on the front. Plus there are now two optical drive trays.

On the rear there are 3 USB ports, 1 FireWire 400 and 1 FireWire 800. Optical and analogue in/out and two Gigabit ethernet ports.

But it's inside where all the new stuff is happening. Gone is the G5 chip, replaced with two Dual core intel 64 bit Xeon "Woodcrest" processors (so many funny names). Which makes them Quad processor machines and said to be up to twice as fast as the PowerMac G5.

There are three processor speeds available: 2Ghz, 2.66Ghz and finally a 3Ghz model.

With the extra space given up by the huge G5, you can fill the machine up with 4 hard drives pushing the storage to 2 terabytes. You can also install up to 16 Gigabytes of memory!

Finishing off with 3 full length PCI express slots and a double-wide, 16-lane PCI express graphics slot.

You can configure the machine in many, many ways: An example configuration of the 2.66Ghz model, 1GB memory, NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT Video, 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive, 16x double-layer SuperDrive is £1,699.00 (1,445.96 excluding VAT)

Along with the Mac Pro, Apple also released the intel Xeon based Xserve, servers.

That was it for hardware, those hoping for all manner of iPhones, metal iPod Nanos etc may be disappointed, but the World Wide Developer Conference really isn't a consumer event, so it wasn't any great surprise. People shouldn't listen to rumour.

Next - Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard:

It will offer many new features, some Steve Jobs said they couldn't yet talk about, so we shall have to wait and wonder? Of course, it'll be 64 Bit.

Time Machine: (The best feature) A new backup/restore feature, but unlike any you've used. You have to see it in action to understand, but it seems to be just a matter of plugging in a large enough Hard Drive and Time Machine takes care of the rest. This should give us all no excuse not to do our backups with the ability to just step back days in a very user friendly manner and bring back data, finally.

Mail: Brings a new notes feature, I know I'm forever writing text documents with things to do and memory joggers, now you can save those all in Mail, which seems a great place to keep them. You can also select text and automatically set that as a To Do, this feature extends out of Mail. There will also be templates allowing you to send more media rich and just better looking emails out, which should save on going to iCards.

iChat: Adds Photo Booth effects to your video iChats, as well as photo or video backgrounds. These are more just for fun features. It also has some features you'd normally find in Apple Remote Desktop. Allowing two users to use a single desktop, which should make explaining things a lot easier. You also have the ability to show Photos and Keynote presentations.

One feature many will be happy to see who don't already install Chax, is a fully Tabbed interface, no more multiple windows all over the place.

Spaces: This is another you may want to just go look at. Spaces adds virtual desktops to your Mac, it's like having multiple monitors where you can keep certain activities together. Say you could have one Space where you're working on your email and browsing, another you're looking through iPhoto and editing in PhotoShop. This should reduce window clutter.

Dashboard: Finally Dashboard ads a Widget that might get me using Dashboard. I'm not a huge fan of Dashboard, but, Webclip is a widget which allows you to take a clip of any part of any website and have it right in Dashboard. For example you could make a webclip of a eBay auction you are watching so you can see when people are bidding and click and bid yourself. Webclip widgets are live. My only thought on this is, you could webclip anything you fancy, say a favourite cartoon which is great as you no longer have to visit or see any of the adverts placed on that site. Not so great for the website you're clipping though. Expect to see some sites finding a way to stop you clipping them.

They also add Dashcode, a way for you to create your very own Widgets for Dashboard.

Spotlight: Will be able to search other machines on your network, and adds an application launching feature which sounds a little like Quicksilver. I'm all for rolling things into Mac OS X, saves me having to install and pay for extra 3rd party software.

iCal: Now adds what I think is an industry standard CalDav, which should make sharing your calendars easier.

Accessibility: They have finally improved the voice in Mac OS X which hasn't changed from the Mac OS 9 days, you probably heard Fred on Radiohead's OK Computer album. The new voice is called Alex and really sounds a lot better, and for those who really need to hear things on their computer, it sounds good at higher speeds.

Core Animation: Which isn't really so much a feature for you and me, but more part of Mac OS 10.5 which should make for a richer experience when using your Mac. I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be used in iTunes in the future, if you've seen CoverFlow, you'll know what I mean.

One last thing, they'll also be bundling in Front Row and Photo Booth into Leopard, so those machines who haven't been able to have these features (without hacks) will be able to. Plus improved parental controls.

They'll also include Boot Camp, the software which allows you to run MS Windows, but there was no mention of an new Boot Camp features (e.g. Running windows using Spaces). Apple have been endorsing Parallels an alternative way of running Windows applications on your Mac without a need for a reboot.

That's it really, there was no One Last Thing and no mention of a new improved Finder. Sadly though, it won't be 'till next Spring 'till we get our hands on 10.5, so plenty of time for some other features to appear.

You can watch Steve Jobs and friends giving the Keynote address yourself here. It's fun just for the I'm a PC guy's introduction and Bertrand Serlet's comments on the remarkable way Window's Vista is starting to look rather like Mac OS X, we've never seen them do that before...