With a press release issued today, Apple has confirmed that CEO Steve Jobs will kick off the the WWDC with his keynote on June 7. Press release after the break.

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For the love of Jobs, what’s with carrier rumors this year? We’ve heard enough about Verizon through the grapevine, but Sprint? Certainly this would allow the iPhone 4G to live up to its name, but these are just whispers in a forest of wishful thinking. Though in reality, if Apple really did extend their reach to both Sprint and Verizon, would Apple finally prove to the world that their iPhone is a bigger contender than their Android competitors? I’m not sure how an even battlefield (in this case the lack of carrier exclusivity) would play out, but let’s not jump the gun here; WWDC is only days away, and Jobs will certainly have a few aces up his sleeve.

[via MacRumors]

Found on TUAW, this is an excellent example of what’s possible to do with an iPhone and a large amount of creativity. Recent MIT grad Chris Varenhorst found an old soda machine on Craiglist, bought it and hooked it up to an iPhone app over the air. It basically gives free stuff to anyone who clicks on a button in the application. I’ll let you think about the possibilities for this in the future, if someone will pick up this concept.

The whole system has, obviously, some bugs - but it definitely works. The machine is currently on sale on eBay, and the funds will go to charity. You can also head over the original post to take a look at some pictures and technical overview, or just check out the awesome video after the break.

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Cool as a cucumber, Steve Jobs isn’t worried about Google’s latest ventures between Android and Google TV. In fact, MacRumors reports that Steve Jobs promises, “You won’t be disappointed,” at this year’s WWDC. When questioned whether Google had leap-frogged Apple, Jobs replied, “Not a chance.” This year’s WWDC is bound to be huge, and keep in mind that Jobs promised that this would be one of Apple’s best years to date. With a new iPhone, iPods, and maybe new MacBooks yet to be unveiled, Apple will surely have some interesting responses to Google’s latest attacks. And working demos.

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has developed and Objective-C plugin for iPhone OS, and he’s sharing the source code on Github here. As he explains, it’s possible to create plugins for iPhone OS’ Safari, and the code structure is very similar to the one for desktop Safari. You just have to change NSView with UIView, he confirms.

Steve goes even further and suggests that Apple should release a public Safari Plugin SDK and “let developers decide”, and sure this would be an interesting perspective. As long as a plugin is developed with Apple’s technologies and is submitted to the App Store for approval, a whole new category of “applications” might be available for purchase and be able to change the way we use Mobile Safari.

Think about some sort of Flash built in this way. Or 1Password, or Evernote’s web clipper. Got the idea? Great, now take a look at the video after the break, where Steve shows Lights Off (an iPhone app he created) running inside Safari on the iPad simulator. Impressive.

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We’ve seen many images of the iPhone 4G / HD, components and black and white panels. What we’re seeing today seems to be an actual white unit, sitting next to a black one.

AppAdvice has found these images on Apple.pro, the same website that some days ago posted pictures of the white panel. As you can see, the device is the same we’ve now gotten used to see - front facing camera and all.

Check out the photos after the break.

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Thanks to everyone who entered the Notably giveaway. We also want to thank Derek Lyons for the licenses he offered to MacStories readers.

Here are the winners:

Chris

Oskar

Rob Weber

You’ll receive the promo licenses in your inbox in a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week. You can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet or Cody as @codyfink.

Back in April we reported that AutoCAD was probably coming soon to the Mac, considering all the OS X references that were spotted in the SDK. Today we’ve received the first screenshots of an actual beta, running at 64-bit on Mac OS X.

The app is names “Sledgehammer Beta 1”, doesn’t seem very polished yet (it’s coming from Windows) but at least there’s already support for Magic Mouse gestures. Check out the screenshots after the break.

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iPhone repair site uBreakiFix has posted some images of parts of the alleged next iPhone, which - again - show us the black and white front panels. Quite interesting, you can see that there’s a physical feature right above the earpiece, and the website claims that it’s the proximity sensor. We find it quite hard to believe, considering that Apple has always hidden sensor under the glass to make them invisible to the users.

Check out the images after the break.

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