I am at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which is Apple’s major conference for software professionals and network administrators. It is always a fun time, as it gives us a chance to learn about Apple’s newest technology straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Much of what we learn is “privileged” information and can’t be talked about in public, but the keynote presentation, which covered some new features in MacOS 1.5 (Leopard) has been made public. You can learn a lot more about Leopard at Apple’s web site.
While Leopard is certainly a nice operating system and a definite improvement over Tiger, there’s not too much that is truly exciting from a user perspective, the way, say Spotlight was in Tiger. From a developer perspective, there is a lot of cool new features under the hood that will make for some really great applications in the year ahead, but as an end-user, Leopard doesn’t offer very much that is new beyond some “eye candy” and some evolutionary improvements in the Finder and built-in applications (such as Safari), including a more 3-d look in the Finder and some new ways of browsing files and networks.
While watching a Steve Jobs keynote is always a highlight, this year wasn’t nearly as exciting as years past, probably because there was nothing hardware-related. When you think about it, the last truly “new” Mac Apple introduced was the Mac Mini, almost three years ago. Since then, all new Macs (with the slight exception of the Macbook) have been the same old form factors with faster and different internal hardware (moving to Intel was a big deal — but of more interest to geeks then normal users). Consistancy and solid improvement over time are worthy accomplishments, but “exciting” they are not. The iPhone was pretty exciting, but there was no news about the iPhone at WWDC beyond Apple’s encouragement for developers to write web applications for the phone. Many developers have been very disappointed with this because a “web app” is just a glorified bookmark in the iPhone’s Safari browser — it is not a real application that would show up on the phone’s main screen.
Still, keep in mind that WWDC is not as much for the public as for software engineers, and like I said before, there are many under the hood improvements in the OS I can’t talk about, and these promise some brilliant new third-party applications in years ahead….so don’t replace your Mac with a Dell just quite yet :-)
Brief WWDC Update
Posted by mike on 6/13/07 • Categorized as Commentary
I am at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which is Apple’s major conference for software professionals and network administrators. It is always a fun time, as it gives us a chance to learn about Apple’s newest technology straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Much of what we learn is “privileged” information and can’t be talked about in public, but the keynote presentation, which covered some new features in MacOS 1.5 (Leopard) has been made public. You can learn a lot more about Leopard at Apple’s web site.
While Leopard is certainly a nice operating system and a definite improvement over Tiger, there’s not too much that is truly exciting from a user perspective, the way, say Spotlight was in Tiger. From a developer perspective, there is a lot of cool new features under the hood that will make for some really great applications in the year ahead, but as an end-user, Leopard doesn’t offer very much that is new beyond some “eye candy” and some evolutionary improvements in the Finder and built-in applications (such as Safari), including a more 3-d look in the Finder and some new ways of browsing files and networks.
While watching a Steve Jobs keynote is always a highlight, this year wasn’t nearly as exciting as years past, probably because there was nothing hardware-related. When you think about it, the last truly “new” Mac Apple introduced was the Mac Mini, almost three years ago. Since then, all new Macs (with the slight exception of the Macbook) have been the same old form factors with faster and different internal hardware (moving to Intel was a big deal — but of more interest to geeks then normal users). Consistancy and solid improvement over time are worthy accomplishments, but “exciting” they are not. The iPhone was pretty exciting, but there was no news about the iPhone at WWDC beyond Apple’s encouragement for developers to write web applications for the phone. Many developers have been very disappointed with this because a “web app” is just a glorified bookmark in the iPhone’s Safari browser — it is not a real application that would show up on the phone’s main screen.
Still, keep in mind that WWDC is not as much for the public as for software engineers, and like I said before, there are many under the hood improvements in the OS I can’t talk about, and these promise some brilliant new third-party applications in years ahead….so don’t replace your Mac with a Dell just quite yet :-)