WWDC

Well, as you can probably guess, alot of people have written me asking what I think about the stuff that Mr. Jobs presented this morning at the WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) in San Francisco, CA.

In case you are sleeping in a cave, he announced a few things: A new desktop, new Finder, Safari on Windows, Dashboard, Time Machine, Spaces, blah blah, and some other stuff.. Let me talk about a few of these

New Desktop: Thank God. Unified them, transparent menu bar, reflective Dock. Stacks? Um, okay. I’ll use it, it’ll be nice, but didn’t someone else have that?

New Finder: THANK GOD. The present Finder sucks, so I am glad they did this. However, it occurred to me that some of the stuff like searches that are for ‘Today’ and ‘Yesterday’ can already be done with Smart Folders in Tiger. Seriously, give it a shot. I’ll wait.. Well, maybe I won’t. The things I did like alot were the features to be able to instantly search via Spotlight and ‘browse’ via Finder the other computers on my lan (which you can do now, it’s just alot better in Leopard), and the ‘Back to my Mac’ feature. The ability to connect to your home PC no matter where you are. NICE. I will be using THAT one alot. Cover Flow? mmm.. okay. We’ll see.

Quicklook: Nice. The ability to look at files w/out having to open their app. Nice.

iChat: Nothing new here except the picture superimposing. Kinda nice. I already use iChat alot, so these features will be nice. I use iChat to communicate w/ my wife and baby while I am on the road. Makes up for me being gone (a little bit).

Safari on Windows: More on this later, but this is kinda cool.

Dashboard: Steve, we saw this last year. Boring.

Time Machine: Nice feature, except, again... we saw this last year. Boring.

Spaces: Multiple Desktops? Um, how long have Linux/other *nix’s had this? A long time? yes. How did Mac make it better? They made it prettier. That’s all. Boring.

All the other stuff: Boring. I’ll talk about what I think about Safari on Windows in a sec.


Things that WEREN’T Covered, and probably should have:

Mail -- Yes, we saw a bunch of this last year, Stationary (whoop de do, Outlook has had stationary for years, and it’s irritating, Apple just made it easier to use and prettier) However, Mail supports Notes and ToDo’s now (this we knew last year) it also integrates RSS feeds (nice), and it auto-recognizes Addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses in the text of an email and allows you to auto-create an Address Book entry for that person (nice). It also recognizes dates and auto-creates (with the help of a drop down) events in iCal. Nice. Watch the video linked to see. Leopard++

iCal -- Another one of my daily apps, iCal got better. Inline editing (instead of in the side PAIN -- pane), unified interface, nice. Like it. Leopard++

Parental Controls -- Nice. Alot better. I don’t know how this lines up against Vista, but this will be a welcome addition. Leopard++

Boot Camp -- Ehh.. Kind of expected native Windows apps running parallel w/ OSX ones. Not having to reboot to use Windows Apps. I tried to predict this, apparently the Leopard developers don’t read my blog.

Photo Booth -- Ehh. I don’t use it. I don’t care.

DVD Player -- Good. The other one was ‘just okay’

Overall -- okay. I’ll buy it for 129.00.

Now, why do I think Jobs introduced Safari for Windows. Lets look at the situation here. Let’s say Windows people are afraid to switch to a mac because they don’t know how to operated the interface. Okay. Safari and iTunes are the Mac apps on Windows. Both are different in their own special way, each having a nice interface.

The new Finder in Leopard is just like iTunes. Compare em, go ahead. Safari is exactly the same on both platforms.

IMHO -- I think Apple is making a play here for switchers. Don’t be afraid to switch to OSX, have you used iTunes before? Then you know OSX. Done. Everything in OSX will look like an app you are already familiar with.. okay? No more excuses. Oh, you have an app that doesn’t run on OSX? Boot camp, thanks.

I think this is targeted at the potential switcher audience. Good luck.

I’ll still buy Leopard, and I’ll still buy the iPhone. I like them both. But I am buying Leopard for the Back to my mac, intra-network computer access in Finder, Time Machine, Mail, and the new iChat. That’s it.

What did you guys think?