Apple WWDC. meh.

So yesterday was the big day - the WWDC 07 with Steve’s long awaited keynote. It came and went - I found the whole thing kinda snoozy. Most of it was a rehash with maybe a little more detail from last year’s show - going over all the Leopard stuff again. I think one reason why people were pissed over the Vista delays and not the Leopard one was that Vista was promising some significant new functionality that Windows people really wanted/needed. Leopard on the other hand doesn’t seem to offer any must have feature - there’s a lot of eye candy (Coverflow, Desktop, etc..) but nothing really stupendous in it. Time Machine could be cool - nice to have a sweet backup system but we’ll have to wait and see how it works out.

The iChat stuff is pretty good - a lot of it is fluffy, applying effects or static/video backgrounds to your system (although I wonder how well that works if your background is cluttered and not a nice solid color wall…). The sort of thing that will be fun for about a minute and then whatever. However, the integration with slideshows and keynote software is the beginning of something for sure. Adding in the presentation aspect, I’m guessing, is the start of Apple trying to work iChat into a video conferencing competitor for WebEx and the like. This goes along with the automatic recording of audio and video chats. Very cool. Sadly, it’s still AIM only so I doubt GAIM or Adium users will switch to this bad boy for regular IMing.

The switch to be completely 64 bit is interesting, I wonder what effect that will have on performance - the core 2 duo’s are only 32bit chips but the Xeon’s in the desktops and xserves are 64bit so they might see a real boost there. That’s genuinely cool - wish my li’l imac was a Xeon. Still, I’m thinking about upgrading to the desktop pro (if it isn’t a jet engine like past apple desktops I’ve had…) and this is just another little weight on that side of the equation.

Sadly Steve dropped the bomb that they way the hoi polloi are going to get their apps on the iPhone is via AJAX/Web2.0 development. This is kind of sad, not completely unexpected, but still sad. I’m actually surprised that no mention of flash was made - as an application environment flash (and Apollo) seem like a much more reasonable technology. People have a lot of problems with it, but I think there’s a lot of ways around them - you could make tiles for the application launcher that are just bookmarks so that they’d seem like real applications. The problem is that, unless they have some magic way to bundle everything up you only get access to these applications when you’re online. I don’t know about you, but living in NYC there’s all sorts of times when I want to do something where I have no connectivity.

For me that’s the biggest problem. Sure it may not be an ideal development environment, but there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do in javascript these days. Some companies will get to develop real iPhone apps, I’m sure that there’ll be some interesting games coming out for it what with EA all hot to trot with iPod games and I’d imagine sometime in the future the platform will open up more. But for these non-apple blessed programs, I can’t see people getting hooked on apps that they can only use when they have good connectivity. Also, I think it’ll make any pricing model kind of difficult - there’s all sorts of services built up around making it easy for small time developers to sell access to their application because it revolves around a download. With this, it’ll be harder, although maybe it’ll make subscription type sales more prevalent.

Everything else was mildly interesting - I’m still excited to see how they did Spaces because I needs me some desktop organization (I still miss it from my linux days). Stacks, Mail, you know all nice but not great incremental improvements. Safari on windows? I really dislike Safari and don’t know many who actually use it over Firefox. I am guessing (based on nothing) that the great majority of Safari usage comes from it being the default browser on the OS, I doubt there’s many switchers. I suppose that the iPhone could also help with some safari uptake - since developers will want to do some javascript development for Safari which tended to be the on-the-fence browser for developer support, it could push it over to be on the have to support list instead of the probably should, but maybe later list.

That’s life, I don’t think anyone was impressed with the keynote, but everyone still is waiting for the iPhone in just a couple weeks. So there you have it.

Jun 12th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: apple · iphone