The smart cover is actually quite ingenious, doubling as a stand for the device.

Mobilized:

Steve Jobs took the stage to kick off Apple’s event on Wednesday, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts.

An excellent post on waffle entertaining the idea that Apple is working on a new language to complement Objective-C. Charles Ying from satine.org thinks that a language close to JavaScript would be a good fit, due in part to extensive use of the language in iOS, iAd & iTunes.

It’s a strong theory – and one that I would like to se a reality, given the popularity of C-style syntax and garbage-collected environments. I not a big fan of low-level languages, but crying out for one that is more abstracted than Objective-C is met with a kind of resistance I’ve never really quite understood – a resistance that an Ars Technica article discussing the future of Apple’s languages and APIs explains perfectly:

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.

With hardware acceleration support for select models, i.e. the ones with graphics hardware supported by the Video Decode Acceleration Framework introduced in OS X 10.6.3.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open.

He also highlights five other reasons why Flash isn’t available for iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Scheduled for April 8.