So the WWDC (World Wide Developer’s Conference, an annual Apple event) keynote was given yesterday by Steve Jobs. Frankly, it was kinda boring. No hardware updates for anything, no new features for the iPhone (save for the addition of custom apps, more on that later), but a lot of updates on Leopard, Apple’s next revision of OS X.
There were 10 Leopard features either announced or elaborated on at WWDC:
- A new Desktop – with the addition of Stacks, pseudo-folders on the Dock, a new semi-transparent menu bar, and a reflective, 3D dock
- A new Finder – with a new Sidebar and the ability to browse your other macs over the internet, plus coverflow! 😀
- Quicklook – a pseudo-app built into Finder which lets you quickly view documents without loading any other apps, great idea since I hate Preview…
- Complete 64-bit support – a bit more technical than the others, OS X is now completely equipped to run on 64-bit processors. Just like most applications these days are “Universal,” meaning they run on Intel or PowerPC, the same will be true with 64-bit and 32-bit apps. Everything will work on either a 32-bit (like a G3, G4, or Intel Core Duo), or 64 bit (like a G5, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Xeon) processor just fine.
- Core Animation – again, kinda techy, but in essence this means that any app can have really shiny animation effects without lag, without much effort from the guy making the app. There’s a really impressive demo of this in the Keynote, with that apple tv intro movie, but interactive. Thousands of videos, all playing at once and moving around really fluidly, with no lag.
- Boot Camp – Boot Camp is faster, and now it’s built-in, which means no more disc burning to get the drivers. Yay!
- Spaces – a virtual desktop manager, lets you organize windows into different sectors to keep everything neat and clean. This is one of my most anticipated features.
- Dashboard – of course, the Safari web widget, over 3000 widgets written, yadda yadda…
- iChat – cool stuff here. Better audio quality for voice chat (this is mostly improvements for the video aspect of iChat), the addition of backdrops, some cool Photobooth-esque effects, and Theater, which lets you stream video files, documents, etc. over iChat.
- Time Machine – old hat, automatically backup stuff, instantly restore it, slick interface, uses Quicklook, all that good stuff. Another of my most anticipated features.
So yeah, that’s Leopard. Some time in October release date, I’ll be buying it. 🙂 For more info and deets, check out Apple’s page on the matter. Speaking of Apple’s website, there was a complete and total redesign of the site to finally bring it out of the Panther-era tabs it had at the top. It’s very slick now…but it’s hard to find the movie trailers page, and the newest trailers section has disappeared…Too bad…
Anyway there were two other announcements. One was Safari for Windows, which from what I’ve heard, sucks. It’s got too much smoothing or something, and apparently there are already 8 serious security flaws in it. Of course, it is in beta (the beta is available for Mac as well, it is crazy-fast…), so some amount of issues are to be expected, but really, 8 holes? That’s pretty rough.
The last announcement was the inclusion of AJAX and Web 2.0 support on the iPhone, meaning that developers can write their own webapps for the iPhone and basically have custom programs like that. However, this isn’t realizing the iPhone’s full potential as a portable Unix machine (it has all of the pieces required to make OS X: Unix, cocoa, darwin, core image, all that good stuff). This means that only Apple will be able to make real apps for the iPhone, which I don’t really have a problem with, but there could be so much more. Oh well, maybe they’ll change their mind.