On Thursday, Apple held a special education event in New York City and introduced a number of software products, including the newest version of iBooks, iBooks 2, bringing textbooks to the iPad from large publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton-Mifflin.

Now anyone can create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books, and more for iPad. All you need is an idea and a Mac. Start with one of the Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. Add your own text and images with drag-and-drop ease. Use Multi-Touch widgets to include interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations, 3D objects, and more. Preview your book on your iPad at any time. Then submit your finished work to the iBookstore with a few simple steps. And before you know it, you’re a published author.

Apple also released an iBooks Author application, which allows users to create their own textbooks for the iPad 2. Since then, Apple has posted the video of the event to its site, alongside all other past events.

The Cupertino company also posted the Podcast for the event in both HD and standard formats. Apple is continuously increasing support for iBooks and is attempting to move into the e-reading market to compete with other popular reading devices such as the Nook and Kindle.

Unlike previous WWDC keynote events where Apple would announce next gen iPhone this year the company is focussing on software. iOS 5, the next generation software update for iOS devices, will be previewed during Steve Jobs keynote later today.

It is widely believed that Apple will completely revamp the current obtrusive notification system with something which is more elegant and user friendly. The company may have hired Peter Hajas the developer of a popular jailbreak tweak which replaces Apple’s notification system with an unobtrusive way of showing and managing notifications below the status bar.

Now, TechCrunch has published a photo of what they believe could be the new notification system in iOS 5. The publication later updated their post saying that according to their sources its the “right idea”.

Notifications that come down from the top bar could be how Apple ends up doing things in iOS 5. After all, this would mimic already existing functionality — when tethering, a blue strip appears along the top; when on the phone, it’s a green strip. Might notifications (or at least Twitter notifications) produce a gray strip?

Twitter integration is expected to be major part of the keynote event. The new image upload service announced by the social networking site is believed to be tied to photos app on iOS devices natively. If rumors about Twitter being integrated at system level turn out to be true then we could be seeing much deeper integration and not just limited to uploading photos.

Robert Scoble recently shared that he has actual knowledge about iOS 5 and Twitter integration and expects it to be “huge”.

Next week will be a huge week for those of us who have lived on Twitter for last few years. Apple is building Twitter in deeply into iOS 5.

Going by what Apple thinks about processes running in the background it would be unlikely for the company to introduce widgets which require constant connection to stay updated. However, the rumor mill has been consistently speculating that widgets would indeed make its appearance in iOS 5.