Steve Jobs Absent From Developer Keynote

In lieu of the traditional Steve Jobs keynote address at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple has announced that a team of executives will deliver the address, which will kick off WWDC 2009 at 10 a.m. on 8 June, at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

The group will be led by Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

Attendees can expect in-depth sessions on the iPhone 3.0 OS and the latest fine-tunings of the new Mac operating system, Snow Leopard.

“Last June, we gave developers an early look at the powerful new technologies that form the underpinnings of Mac OS X Snow Leopard,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, in a statement on the event. “At WWDC, we will be giving our developers a final Developer Preview release so they can see the incredible progress we’ve made on Snow Leopard and work with us as we move toward its final release.”

Also in store for attendees of the sold-out show is one-on-one attention with more than 1,000 Apple engineers conducting hands-on labs, and more than 100 technical sessions run by Apple engineers prepared to discuss developing, deploying and integrating iPhone OS 3.0 and Mac OS X technologies.

Many are expecting Apple to also use the opportunity of the WWDC to introduce a hearty new iPhone, as well as possibly a “junior” iPhone with a slimmed-down feature set and a significantly reduced price point.

A list of sessions and labs for WWDC 2009 — including “In-House App Development for iPhone” and “Designing USB Audio Class Devices for Mac OS X” — is available here.