WWDC Followup

7 August 2006

Well, I have to say that was more interesting then I thought it might be – more for what wasn’t shown then was, however.

With Steve saying that they were keeping some major features under wraps – ostensibly to keep Microsoft from copying them, but with their current problems with Vista I imagine it’s really because they’re not finished – I’m even more sure we’re going to get a complete visual refresh with 10.5, and probably a whole new Finder as well (as that seemed to have no improvements either).

So, lets see how I did then?:

I was pretty much dead on with the Mac Pros, and very nice they are too. The all quad line-up is a nice surprise, and the almost Dell style online configuration is interesting too – makes a lot of sense for the Pro models, but I wonder how that’s going to work at retail?

Cinema Displays: nope, I was wrong here – although they do get a price drop. Maybe the Paris Expo in September (although that’s probably going to be all about MacBooks Pros + iMacs).

10.5: only 1.5/7 here; pretty close with the new Mail and iCal improvements, which look really great (To-Dos in Mail! RSS in Mail! Proper iCal sharing!), and I’ll give myself 0.5 for Time Machine (“At least one thing that no-one has predicted that is unbelievably cool.”).

Time Machine looks seriously cool – that UI is just amazing, and the functionality just as good – Apple really hit it out of the ball park here. Hopefully it doesn’t use up too much disk space, the potential for completely changing day to day use is staggering; it reminds me of when they showed us Exposé for the first time…

Ok, so they didn’t call it virtual desktops (*Spaces* is a much better name anyway…), but they certainly are virtual desktops, much to my chagrin. Judging by the movies up apple.com though, they have of course managed to use their Apple magic and make them look really neat and useable. I remain to be convinced, though.

It’s a bit of a shame we didn’t get VOIP in iChat, but the new features do look very cool – especially the screen sharing functions. Looks very useful for collaboration on things when you’re not in the same place – it’ll be interesting to see how well it works (better then vnc or Remote Desktop?).

The other new features all look great as well; the new voice is really good – text to speech is actually useable now!; The Spotlight UI improvements sounds really good; Xcode seems to have had a huge amount of improvements (although it’s a bit hard to tell from the site) – nice to see Interface Builder finally getting a proper update, and Xray looks phenomenally good (if I was still a developer it would have probably been the highlight).

So, where was Resolution Independence? And the new Finder? As I mentioned earlier, the absences of these two I think are a sure fire indication that these are where the most interesting developments in 10.5 will lie, and they probably aren’t ready yet.

If you weren’t sure we were getting a whole new look in 10.5, you should be now.

Even if I was a bit off about 10.5 – mostly due it still be under-wraps if you ask me! – I was dead on about what we wouldn’t see – no iPods, no iTunes, no iPhone and no MacBook Pro re-design. I was actually quite surprised by the Xserve update; not that it was going to happen – that was obvious – just that it got keynote time.

So, there we have it.

Spring 2007 can’t come soon enough.

From: Articles

7 August 2006