Steve Jobs took a gutsy and highly unanticipated stance regarding the newest version of Mac OSX, stating that it was the "best release to date."  Jobs’ statement came during an unveiling of a "near final" version of Leopard at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Phew!!  No more backtracking and devolution for these guys.  It’s all systems go and full steam ahead!

Read the press release here.

Electronic Arts (EA) and Apple have big plans for the future. An announcement was made at the Worldwide Developers Conference, bringing to the light that EA will focus on bringing big-named games to Macintosh computers. This is an effort on both groups to establish that, yes, Macs can be taken seriously as a video game outlet.

The list of future games includes Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Need for Speed: Carbon and Battlefield 2142. Later on, sports games will be added, including Madden NFL ‘08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour ‘08.

As a dedicated Mac user, I am very excited about this news. Here’s hoping for a good run at the end of the year!

Just in case you missed Walt Mossberg’s sitdown with Steve Jobs earlier today, but in the open Q&A his Jobsness was asked point blank about the openness of the iPhone, and whether users can expect their $600 cellphone to be able to add on third party apps. His reply?

"This is an important tradeoff between security and openness. We want both. … we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone. … I’ve used 3rd party apps… the more you add, the more your phone crashes. No one’s perfect, and we’d sure like our phone not to crash once a day. If you can just be a little more patient with us I think everyone can get what they want."

You heard it folks, Apple’s working on allowing third party devs into the hallowed ground of the iPhone. One big issue (kind of) down, now we’ve just got to work on getting that thing a real keyboard and some 3G.

That’s right, Google’s YouTube is coming to Steve’s little AppleTV "hobby" as he described it during his gig at D. The little treat Steve left out at the show is a new build-to-order 160GB disk; 4x the original capacity offered by Apple at launch. Of course both of these hacks were already available for you DIYers. Still, it’s always good to get it via official channels, eh? The new AppleTV with beefier hard disk will be available tomorrow for $399 while the free YouTube update will be available in mid-June.