If you're super keen, you can watch the entire WWDC keynote video here.

Every year software developers from around the world flock to San Fransico for the WWDC conference. Usually WWDC is a software only affair, although over the last few years they've also shown off new iPhones at this event. 

Apple showed off three new things:

iOS5 (the operating system that runs iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad)

Mac OS X Lion, bringing the Mac's OS to v10.7

iCloud

iCloud is something pretty huge, so I'll cover the others first.

Lion

Lion, or OS X 10.7, is the next major release of the Mac operating system. It will cost just over $30 AUD, and yet provide many ways to get more done with your Mac. There are some big improvements here, and a blending of some of the benefits iOS (iPhone/iPad) devices have.

There are over 250 new features over the current Snow Leopard version. Multitouch gestures let you pinch and swipe using your Mac just as you would on an iPhone. You can run apps in a special full screen mode, letting you concentrate on single tasks at a time yet flip between Applications easily. The Mac App Store lets you find Apps for the Mac easily, and they download into a launcher that works just like the home screen on an iPhone or iPad, making it easy to manage your software. Remove an app by clicking and holding, then when it jiggles just tap the X. When you restart the machine, all your App windows reappear exactly where they were; the system resumes what you were doing. Files are automatically saved, including differen versions you've worked on. AirDrop makes it really quick and easy to transfer files between nearby Macs, without bothering with setting up networking or external USB drives. 

iOS5 

The latest software for iPhone and iPad adds many brilliant features including revamped notificaitons, integrated twitter, autocomplete text substitution, instant camera access, new messaging features and more. 

We're quite excited about this. Anyone who uses their iPhone often will love how now you can pickup the phone, doubleclick the home button, and the camera app just appears. You can then click the volume up button to take a photo, instantly! Much faster than swiping to unlock, enetering you passcode, going to the first home screen, launching the camera app, etc. 

You can now tweet from anywhere. Suppose you've taken a nice photo. Tap the share icon, then Twitter. Easy. 

You can finally customise all the sounds. Set whatever you like for a text tone, new email, email sent, etc. Previously you could only customise the ringtone, which wasn't really enough.

Ever been playing a game, or typing out an email, only to have a notification alert box appear in the middle of what you're doing? Now this has been greatly imroved. When you return to your phone, the home screen has a neat list of all the motification's you missed; phone calls, new emails, etc. You can browse these and deal with them as you like. But if you're using the phone and a new message comes in, it appears at the top of the screen, then fades away. You can swipe down to deal with it if you like, or just let it go; it no longer interferes with what you're doing.

There is an integrated reminders app too, and these reminders appear as notifications. 

Of all the changes, the PC Free nature of iOS 5 is one of the most interesting. You no longer need iTunes to setup, sync, or backup your device. Which brings us to...

iCloud

iCloud is probably going to be looked back upon as one of the most significant things Apple has done. These quotes from Apple's CEO Steve Jobs best shows what iCloud is: “Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” and “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

So, more detail will come out later, but here are some key points:

It's free.

It's data that is always in sync accross all your devices. This means email, applications, calanders, contacts, books, documents you're working on, music, photos, everything!

So, start typing an email on your Mac, and you don't have time to finish it. It's in your drafts folder on the iPhone, so you finish it and send when you're out and about. Or send a quick email from your phone, and it's in the sent mail folder on your iPad and Mac or PC too.

Take a photo on your iPhone, and it's automatically on the Mac. Or work on your documents anywhere. Someone emails you a word file. You open it on the iPhone and make a few changes. Later you modifiy it further at home on your Mac. Then from the Sofa you finish it off and email it.

These services will be free, unlike the current paid only Mobile Me service. Apple has built a huge data centre (think of a giant hard disk the size of a huge building) to run the service, costing over 500 million. 

It will be interesting to see how this develops. All this software is due soon, we'll let you know when they're availible!