Some of the Leopard stuff was cool, but much of it was old news, and the iPhone bit was down-right insulting. Not really a WWDC that will stand out as one of the greats. In fact, things even went backwards on one front, ZFS does not appear to be in Leopard at all, not even as an option, despite having been in some of the earlier betas! However, at least one of my predictions came true, Leopard has a new look. Just not sure that’s all good news, that transparent menu bar looks terrible!

[tags]Apple, Steve Jobs, WWDC, Leopard, iPhone[/tags]

Leopard

Overall Leopard looks good. It looks far better than Vista. Hell, I’d consider Tiger to be far better than Vista, but Leopard takes it further. I’m not going to give Apple credit for things like iCal finally catching up with Outlook in terms of calendar sharing. That’s just not worthy of praise, that was long over-due! However, the new Finder looks good. The better integration of networked machines into the finder looks very powerful and Time Machine looks amazing.

I’d predicted that Leopard would get a face lift, and when iTunes 7 came out I’d speculated that it may be a glimpse of Leopard and I was right. Take the iTunes look and apply it across the board and you have the Leopard look. They have also made the Dock look shinier but I fear in doing so they didn’t pay enough attention to those of us who prefer it at the side and I also think they messed up the menu bar. I really hope there’s an option somewhere to make it solid rather than transparent!

For fear of seeming overly negative I really like the concept of Stacks (expandable folders in the dock). The Downloads stack in particular will be very handy. I also liked the way Steve used a stack as an application launcher. This is much quicker than having to go to the finder and then go to the Applications folder. The stacks also look very well. I have a feeling this will be one of those really simple things that makes life a lot easier. Similarly I think Spaces will do the same. It’s nothing new to Linux users but it seems to have been done with a bit more style on the Mac. Since I multi-task like mad this will really help me keep things organized.

A good OS should provide some good foundations for other Apps and indeed for other parts of the OS. Two things jump out at me here, the first is Core Animation which is what makes all the cool UI stuff work and the second is the rather trivial seeming feature Apple are calling Quick Look. The idea sounds trivial, it lets you view a file without opening a big App. What makes it cool is how it has been leveraged in Leopard. First you have the obvious use, it lets you preview things in the Finder. Useful, but we kinda have that already. When you add it in to Cover Flow though it starts getting more interesting. It becomes even more interesting when looking for things in the improved Spotlight but when you see it used in Time Machine it’s power and importance really hit you.

To be honest Leopard looks great, and I will definitely be buying it. The problem is that Steve hyped things up too much last year. He showed us some really cool stuff then (including Time Machine, Spaces, and Core Animation) but promised that there was much more to come in the future but that it was all too top secret to tell us then in case “the guys in Redmond” “started their photo copiers”. Nothing new we saw today came even close to Time Machine. Time machine is amazing so we of course all expected the super secret stuff to be even better than that. It wasn’t, hence I for one feel let down. By over-hyping things last year Steve set us all up for a big disappointment today. And there were more disappointments to come later in the keynote 🙁

Safari Meets the Big Bad World

Safari on Windows. It’s a good idea and I hope it goes well. Not really much more to say on that really. This was a total surprise to me but in hind-sight it makes perfect sense. IE 7 totally sucks so Safari has a chance, particularly if it starts coming in an all-in-one package with QuickTime and iTunes on Windows. I expect we’ll see more and more Apple products on Windows and I expect that to increase the number Windows users switching to Mac.

iPhone 3rd Party Apps – Total Disaster

Well, like I mentioned before, Leopard was a bit of a let down because the new features were not as spectacular as they’d been hyped up to be, however, that let down was nothing compared to Steve’s iPhone pronouncement. I think the stunned silence of the crowd says it all really. The developers were not impressed. They didn’t drink up the Apple Coolade on this one at all. Telling devs that the way they will get to write apps for the iPhone is to make web pages was a huge let down. But to dress it up as a big treat was down-right insulting. John Gruber said it best:

If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it. Don’t tell us how lucky we are and that it’s going to taste delicious.

Conclusions

Looking back on my pre-WWDC post I really didn’t get much right or get much of what I wanted. No big .Mac news really. Sure, we heard about some new features but that’s just building even more on top of a broken foundation. None of the fundamental problems with .Mac were addressed. We did get a new look for Leopard but I’m not sure it’s really all that special. It’s not as ground-breaking as Aqua was when it was launched. Not by a long shot. Nothing really new to announce on the Win32 support end of things, no iLife 07, no iWork 07, and no iPhone SDK. Also no word on movies and TV shows for iTunes here in Europe. Basically, all I got right was that Leopard would have a new look and I got none of my wishes. All in all I think Disappointing is the best way to sum up this WWDC keynote.