This years WWDC'07 keynote is history. As always it was delivered by Steve Jobs. I have to say it was a mediocre event. The presentation was smooth enough, but Steve seems to be a bit uninspired. And with good reasons, as much of what was delivered was just a repetition of what we heard last year. No new hardware was presented, the shipping date for the "Leopard" is still october and the iPhone is not out yet.
The only new things really was that there will be a new desktop and a new finder (the file browser and management thing in OSX). Not a very big deal, mostly graphics tweaks that people like myself tend to avoid anyway. There was quite a few animated demos on stage, but notting to brag about to be honest. Sure, Leopard will be great and everything, don't get me wrong. But we know most of it already!
There was also announced that EA and id will have more games on OSX in the future, which I guess is great for people who avoid apple due to limited gaming support. And then Apple will start pushing browser to windows users, but I don't care much about that either as I use firefox anyway. It might be good for IE users, though. And it is supposed to be fast, too.
There has been some discussions on iPhone and development tools. This was but was not presented, too. What apple had to say on this is that iPhone will have a full safari engine inside, so people can do web2.0/ajax style applications that can be used on the iPhone. Which is a no-solution solution. It was not mentioned whether such applications can be downloaded and installed or have to be run from a webserver all the time. It was mentioned that such applications should get access to the phone and network services of the iPhone, but nothing specific was presented. I think this was another mediocre part of the presentation. Maybe good enough for some, but certainly not what most developers had in mind when they asked for development tools. It remains to be seen if Apple is right on this one.
What else is there to say? A large crowd was gathered as usual, more than 5000 persons we was told. And apple did the usual but very annoying marketing trick of lining people out before we could get in - had to stand in line for quite a long time. Now, I'm usually not the line-standing kind of guy, but I am still somewhat on the Norwegian timezone as I flew over only yesterday, and couldn't get much sleep after 5:30 in the morning anyway. So I get out of bed, had a shower, went to a breakfast place which was quite nice - Cafe Venue, I'll post the address later on if someone care. And then I went down to Moscone convention center. There I found a long, long, long queue of people waiting to get in. Which is only marketing of course. It was 7:30 in the morning, and a couple hundred people waited to get in as this was a rock concert or something. There where rumours around that someone was getting into the line 3 in the morning. That is simply a freakshow.
So, Apple, I have this suggestion for you for next year. If you don't have anything more to give us than we got this year. Please, just open the doors and let people walk in and get a seat, just as we usually do. No need to be so annoyingly special all the time.
Ok, that's it for now - I'm off to more presentations. While the keynote wasn't that good, I hope the other presentations will be. At least, the rest of the week will have more technical content delivered by engineers. I'm looking forward to that.
Take care!
No comments:
Post a Comment