WWDC 2007 Keynote Recap
There are two events that every Apple fan and blogger look forward to during the year -- World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) and Macworld. The likely reason for the excitement is that these are the times when Apple opens up and shares details of what they have been working on for the past year.
During the WWDC keynote today Steve Jobs covered as much as humanly possible in about 1 hour 20 minutes (the scheduled time was 1 hour 30 minutes). If he would have attempted to covered any more it may have seemed rushed.
Every Apple related blog out there is covering the news today. At this point it is pretty hard to come up with unique story, but that won't keep us from sharing our ideas.
It was nice of Steve/Apple to present the award to Intel for their efforts during the processor transition. This will likely be the last keynote where it is highlighted.
The 10 major features that Steve covered were great.
- New Desktop: WOW. The stacks look great.
- Finder: It is going to take some time to get accustomed to using the new Finder. Many users identify running programs by their appearance. You look across your desktop and see an application with a grid (spreadsheet), web content (browser), pictures (iPhoto), Coverflow (iTunes) -- hold it... is that iTunes or Finder?
- Quick Look: This is a great idea. No one likes loading Preview to take quickly view data files.
- 64-bit: This is more of a feature for professional users because the average user does not need to address that much memory.
- Core Animation: This is probably the most visible feature in all of Leopard. Nearly every application Steve discussed used Core Animation in one way or another. The demo really showed off the power of this feature.
- Boot Camp: Compliment to Parallels and VMware. Steve went over this one quickly.
- Spaces: There are applications available that provide similar functionality today, but none appear as smooth as Spaces.
- Dashboard: Addition of a new wigit that allows you to search for movies, view trailers, and purchase tickets. WebClip now automatically selects regions of the screen -- pretty cool.
- iChat: Video conferencing made easier. Tabbed chats are great.
- Time Machine: Most users do not backup their machines. Time machine will solve this problem by automatically backing up the entire machine. The fact that this is a built-in feature is very impressive. There is no reason why everyone would not run this application.
Steve showed some charts that showed the performance differences between Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox running in Windows. As you would expect Safari came out on top in all the presented speed tests. We will be covering Safari on Windows in a future post.
Apple has proposed that developers create AJAX enabled web application as a way to satisfy the desire for custom development on the iPhone. While this is a solution, it isn't great. The performance and rich feel is not there (at least in the demo). It looks and responds like a web page. For example you click on something and the page re-loads like a web browser, rather than the native Core Animation effects. Many believe that Apple needs to figure out a way to make a rich set of API's available for iPhone development. We agree!
There are a few areas where Apple needs to analyze a little more closely (iPhone development/appearance of the Finder application), but for the most part we were very impressed with what was presented!
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