WWDC 2007

Woohoo, I made my return just in time for this year's WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference), where Uncle Steve-O usually wows us with cool Apple-ey goodness. Take note of the word usually.

The Steve-inator started the keynote address by giving a demo of Leopard, the next release of the Mac OS. While Leopard will come with some cool new technologies and features such as Quick Look, CoreAnimation and Time Machine, most of the new features demo'd seemed more fluff than substance. Apple just updated the interface a bit. Pretty much what changed between Windows 2000, XP, and now, Vista. Same system, just a bunch of new eye-candy, which I imagine, after a while, gets pretty old. Who knows, there might be some awesome-ly new things going on under the hood. If there is, it wasn't mentioned at WWDC yesterday. Not that any of this is going to stop me from buying Leopard when it's released to the general public. After all, Steve only showed us 10 of the supposedly 300 new features contained within Leopard. Although, I'm not sure if a new desktop really qualifies as a new feature (new Desktop -- feature number 1 of the 10 new features shown).

Also announced yesterday was that Apple is releasing their web browser, Safari, for the Windows platform. In fact, I am using Safari for Windows right now. It seems stable and feels like Safari on my Mac. It even appears to support the nice looking font-smoothing mojo thing that Macs do, so the fonts don't look like ass, which is the best way to describe how fonts look on a Windows PC. And now that Safari is available for Windows, there's yet another reason for me to stop checking to see what my site looks like or even works with Internet Explorer.

Of course, what most developers in attendance were waiting for was Apple's official stance towards developers for the iPhone. Apple originally stated that development was closed to third-parties, only Apple would make applications for the iPhone. And that statement kinda, mostly, err.., ...ummm, stayed the same. Apple announced a "sweet" proposition for developers. They would not be allowed to make applications, but rather web pages, for the iPhone. Their toolkit would be AJAX¹, which brings us all that ballyhoo'd Web 2.0 goodness we hear so much about. Sweet, indeed -- like a salty lemon. Somehow, I don't think that's what the developers wanted to hear.

John Gruber from DaringFireball.net seems to say it best here. Ooooooh, someone's been punk'd!

The keynote address had it's funny moments, too. It started with a video of the PC Guy (from the Get A Mac commercials) pretending to be Steve Jobs. And then, later on, Steve announced that Mac OS X Leopard would be available in the following versions -- Basic, Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate, each costing $129. He thinks that most people will go for the Ultimate version.

Second post since my bloutage, and already a boring Tech post.

I am outta heah!

</marcus>

¹ - referring to AJAX the Javascript coding technique, not cousin of Comet and TidyBowl