You know that this year’s WWDC was designed first and foremost to be an iPhone event. That’s why you didn’t hear much about Snow Leopard, Mac OS 10.6, which has features that are of more interest to developers than the rest of us. In fact, most of the information about Snow Leopard was provided under Apple’s typically rigorous nondisclosure agreement, and only a brief press release and some online highlights were actually revealed in public.

For the same reason, it makes a lot of sense that the rumors of a major refashioning of the MacBook didn’t come to pass. This wasn’t the venue for introducing a brand new consumer notebook computer. Besides, the newest Intel chipsets aren’t even available yet, so if there is going to be a big change, in case structure and otherwise, it won’t happen for another month or two, in time for the back-to-school season.

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Well, it looks like Microsoft is going to be getting some cash from Apple and RIM has a lot to fear in their lucrative business market. During a session with tech journalists on Thursday morning, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the long awaited iPhone SDK. Available as a free download, it is basically an updated version of Apple’s Xcode development environment that lets you program for the iPhone. This will mean games, an AIM instant messaging client and other cool stuff beginning in June, when version 2.0 of the iPhone software is rolled out to users. Most significant, however, is the fact that has licensed Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync, and will embed it right into the Mail application on an iPhone. That and other new features, such as Cisco IPsec VPN, will enable business users to readily embrace iPhones and, Apple hopes, send their Blackberries out to pasture. Although the iPhone SDK is free, if you want to actually sell your stuff to iPhone users courtesy of the new Apps Store, you have to enroll in one of Apple’s iPhone Developer Program packages, beginning at $99 per year. And, oh yes, let Apple keep 30% of the take on each sale (although free stuff costs nothing to distribute).

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In recent months, I’ve settled on Firefox as my default browser. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Safari, but Firefox seems to provide fewer complications in acccssing some sites. It has, however, some issues with printing certain sites, which forces me to revert if there’s no “Print” link to access the specially-formatted variation.

There has, however, been an alternate to Firefox, one that used the same (or at least a similar) Gecko rendering engine. However, it has largely been consigned to second-tier status as far as upgrades are concerned. The browser, Camino, uses Apple’s own Cocoa development environment, and thus has a more “Mac-like” veneer than Firefox, which is designed to look and operate basically the same across platforms.

For this reason, I’ve put Camino on the back-burner, even though it launches faster than Firefox, hoping that the folks at Mozilla would eventually get with the program and give it the major upgrade it deserves.

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Whenever I get a word processing document, I don’t have to look at the file extension or icon to know it’s probably in Word, or translated into that ubiquitous format in another application. A spreadsheet? Excel, of course, although things might be a little hazier with a presentation, since Apple’s Keynote does so many good things so well.

So it’s fair to say that the various components of Microsoft Office are as critical and common on the Mac as on Windows. In fact, many suggest that few would take a Mac seriously as a business computer without Office being regularly developed for the platform.

Certainly, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has been working seriously on the software for years. Sure, it’s been a while since a major release appeared, but there’s that little matter of making a Universal version, which meant bring millions of lines of code into a new development environment. Sprawling software requires sprawling efforts to move the lumbering beast forward.

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