How to Follow Along With Apple's Big Announcements at WWDC

At San Francisco's Worldwide Developers Conference Apple is expected to announce iCloud, preview iOS 5 and introduce Mac OS X Lion

Apple and its suits (or turtlenecks?) make a big point out of keeping far away from any of the years' big tech trade shows or conferences, saving everything they've been working on for special press conferences and the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That means we have a lot to watch for at 2011's WWDC, which kicks off today in San Francisco with a 10 a.m. (1 p.m. ET) keynote address from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Jobs, who is technically still on medical leave, is expected to announce Apple's new iCloud service, a new product that, we think, will allow subscribers to buy music from and store music on the cloud and then stream it to all compatible Mac and iOS devices. (Apple just finished construction on a $1 billion data center in North Carolina to hold the files.) At some point during the conference, we're also expecting Apple to announce the details of the iOS 5 update coming soon to portable devices and preview the Mac OS X Lion software, which is intended to make using an Apple laptop more like using an iPad.

There's a lot to watch for and, if you'd like to hear about Apple's new products and developments from Jobs and the rest of his team, you can stream the event live at Engadget, where Tim Stevens, the site's new editor-in-chief, will help you decipher all of the techno jargon. A straight video feed -- without commentary -- is available at UStream.

If you're at the office and don't want the boss to see a video feed of an event taking place in sunny San Francisco on your computer screen, you can follow along on the liveblogs. Gizmodo has a post already set up. So, too, do the teams at Wired, MacRumors, Technologizer, CNET and ArsTechnica.

But the event is still several hours away. To keep you occupied until then, the Guardian's Charles Arthur has a rundown of all the rumors. On the paper's technology blog, Arthur covers what we're likely to see at the event -- those things we've already mentioned here -- and what's less likely, like an Apple TV update or a split-pane view of multiple apps running on the iPad.

Image: Reuters.