Tag: wwdc

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WWDC08 Keynote – iPhone App Demos

> “Loopt is a location-based social network for douchebags who wear two ill-fitting polo shirts at the same time.” – John Gruber

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

More than any other segment of the keynote, the demonstrations of the applications excited me the most.

* Sega, Super Monkey Ball – One of the sources I was following during the event said the graphics were “as good as the DS”. To me, it looks a lot better than many of the games on the DS. The price point is lower than most of the Super Monkey Ball games, but this one isn’t really grabbing me, probably because I’ve played SMB so many times over the years. (Also: if you’re giggling about the name, you probably still think “Wii” is hilarious.)
* eBay, Auctions – Auctions isn’t much more than a native front end into eBay’s API, but the experience is so well done, I can only hope that other companies can follow eBay’s lead in developing
* Loopt – I fully expect there to be lots of location-aware social networks forming around the iPhone, but I expect Loopt to get a big boost for being featured in the keynote. Hey Dodgeball? You’re on notice.
* Six Apart, Typepad – the TypePad client looks like a simple, clean blogging client. But I’m not a TypePad user; I use MovableType (and Tumblr). I asked Anil Dash if there was any reason the app won’t work with their other products, and I was greeted with a no comment.
* Associated Press, Mobile News Network – it’s truly a thing of beauty to watch the Associated Press innovate within the news space. The citizen journalism things are a thing of beauty. NowPublic? You’re on notice.
* Pangea – I have no great love for Brian Greenstone, although I admire his tenacity for sticking in the Mac software industry for so long. Enigmo looks promising, but Cro-Mag Rally was generally regarded as a poor cart game when it was originally released. Still, to hear that porting apps from OS X was largely painless is good news.
* Cow Music, Band – very interesting music making app, and I look forward to seeing where the iPhone drives music creation tools.
* MLB.com, At Bat – I’m not much for baseball, but kudos to MLB for so quickly integrating nearly real-time video into their box scores. This is a killer app for many of the guys in my office.
* Modality – when Scott said the medical community has been flocking to the iPhone, they aren’t kidding. Modality is not an obscure app – I’ve been told we use it in our curriculum at the medical college. The iPhone is going to be a great platform for building rich educational apps for all curriculums.
* MIMvista – again, seeing these apps make me smile because I know there’s lots of latent interest in the medical community for clinical applications.
* Digital Legends Entertainment, Kroll – the animation style reminds me a bit of *Dragon’s Lair*, although it looks to have slightly more gameplay. I guess we’ll see how it ends up in September.

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Debated

WWDC08 Keynote – Snow Leopard

> “Man, I should have kept my ‘Mac OS X 10.6 ignored’ square.” – John Siracusa

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

The 10.6 is seen in its natural climate.

For the sake of not wanting to vomit every time I type it, I’m going to refer to Snow Leopard merely as “10.6”.

A mere blip at the start of the Keynote (when Steve says “This morning I’m going to talk about the iPhone”, he *means it*), OS X 10.6 would be talked about only at the OS X State Of The Union. To the chagrin of those who care less about the iPhone, the OSXSOTU is always the first session covered by the NDA that surrounds WWDC.

Luckily, some relief came in the form of a since-deleted press release from Apple. Also, in the time it’s taken me to write this, the official Snow Leopard homepage appeared.

To dissect what we know:

* A technology code-named “Grand Central” will enable developers to more easily leverage multi-core processors. It’s hard to consider this a bad thing, although I haven’t seen a lot of multithreading issues in modern applications (from my very casual viewpoint).
* A technology called “Open Computing Language” (OpenCL) allows developers to tap into the GPU for general processing. It has been “proposed as an open standard”, which is interesting as I can find no information to this effect (and OpenCL was a name formerly used by a Linux cryptography package).
* The theoretical limit on system RAM will be 16TB. So when those 2TB RAM chips come along, OS X will be *so* ready.
* Quicktime X will come bounding along, seemingly destroying hopes for Quicktime 8 or 9 in the meantime. Hopefully “support for modern audio and video formats” indicates that Apple will embrace some of codecs that have been killing Quicktime for what feels like ages.
* Safari will get the recently announced SquirrelFish – but it’s not like you can’t run that and get performance upgrades right this second.
* Exchange support will finally be rolled into Mail, Address Book, and iCal, which is great if you’re in the sort of environment using Exchange. Everyone else may not care so much – but we’ll come back to this.
* “Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.” Consider this confirmation that 10.6 will not run on PowerPC. Nothing else is likely to shed that much weight from the OS. I don’t expect Rosetta to die any time soon, much like Classic (technically) will live until 2009.

Lastly, and most smugly satisfying for me, 10.6 is scheduled to ship “in about a year”, which sounds remarkably closer to my August 2009 prediction than TUAW’s “shipping by January 2009”.

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Debated Puzzled Over

An Environmentally Friendly Keynote

WWDC 2007’s Keynote just ended. What many people may not know was that the keynote was part of Apple’s goal to [become a greener company](http://www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple/).

An example? Here’s the list of the “10 new Leopard features” from last year’s keynote:

* 64 bit
* Time Machine
* “Complete Package” (Photo booth / Front Row / Boot Camp)
* Spaces
* Spotlight
* Core Animation
* Universal Access
* Mail.app
* Dashboard
* iChat

This year, there was another list of 10 new features.

* New Desktop
* New Finder
* Quick Look
* 64 bit
* Core Animation
* Boot Camp
* Spaces
* Dashboard
* iChat
* Time Machine

Depending on your view (“Boot Camp” was a part of the “Complete Package” feature; Quick Look is/was a part of Time Machine), you’ll see that 60-80% of this year’s Leopard demo was recycled.

Who would’ve thought Apple would go green so quickly?