There were a lot of announcements during Steve Job’s keynot ate WWDC07 yesterday. There were two that stood out for me.

Firstly, Apple’s Safari browser is now available for Windows. You can download a beta here. I’ve installed it and have been using it to browse around some of my favourite sites. It definitely renders quicker than Firefox or IE, it has a very snappy feel to it. It is a beta however, although I haven’t had any problems, Andrew, who sits opposite me says its crashed for him when he tried to change the default homepage to www.google.com.

Secondly, John Carmack from id Software, the man responsible for creating the gaming engines that completely defined the First Person shooter genre, appeared on stage to announce id Tech 5 to the world. It’s the next generation of id Software’s revolutionary gaming engine, John describes it briefly:

“So the last couple of years at id we’ve been working in secrecy on next-gen tech and a game for it … this is the first time we’re showing anything we’ve done on it publicly. What we’ve got here is the entire world with unique textures, 20GB of textures covering this track. They can go in and look at the world and, say, change the color of the mountaintop, or carve their name into the rock. They can change as much as they want on surfaces with no impact on the game.”

I dont think the images truly do it justice, but its an immense technical achievement especially when you consider that most people are still raving about the id Tech 4, the engine that powers games like Doom 3 and Quake 4, and the about to be released Enemy Territory: QuakeWars. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about this new technology and the new “secret” title they have been building based on it.

The screen shots above are from Engadget who have been providing minute-by-minute coverage of the keynotes at WWDC07, which you can follow here.