WWDC 2007

Well, yeah, I’m not the first to blog about it but there are a few things I just want to jot down about it.

As some people know (and those who don’t will know now) Apple host a yearly WorldWide Developer Conference which kicks off with a Keynote presentation (it’s like PowerPoint but then done right) by “his Jobness” on some upcoming things from Apple.
Expectation were high this year (as usual) and the rumor machines were running at full RPM, only, the outcome, I found quite disappointing.

First strange things, we didn’t get an update on Apple marketshare, stores, sales or iTMS, what’s up with that? A nice gesture was made towards Intel with giving them a little something to thank them for their work and collaboration.
Then it was off to gaming. This was quite interesting, EA is going to port some of their current titles to Mac, C&C3, Battlefield 2142, NFS Carbon and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and all the new titles will be Mac compatible and launched simultaneously (this is achieved with TransGaming’s Cider engine as far as I’m aware), from July on. This is real good news for the Mac since gaming with a Mac now becomes a serious possibility. Not only EA but iD was there too, demoing some interesting stuff and announcing that they’ll be making a Mac-related announcements somewhere in August which probably means iD is going to do the same thing EA announced.

Then it was of to Leopard, something we were all waiting for. “His Steveness” announced Leopard includes more than 300 new features and demoed only 10, most of them we already knew about, like Time Machine, WebClip, iChat, Spaces, BootCamp and Core Animation, they really didn’t have much new to tell us. The renewed Dock, Desktop and Finder were interesting and it was about time!

The thing that really did intrigue me was 64bit support, in every application, running side by side with 32bit, one OS version, the works, that really was a very welcome announcement. QuickLook is a nice touch too and those things wouldn’t be possible without Core Animation, people still don’t grasp the power and capabilities of it.

The little Microsoft bash was fun, Phill Schiller taking over Steve Balmer’s head and the thing that Leopard comes in one release which costs 129$ compared to Vista with 5 release going up to almost 550$.

Then came the iPhone and how they are allowing people to write apps for it, using web2.0 and Ajax and can also use the phone’s internal functions through it. This is quite an interesting solution. Some people didn’t like it but to be honest, it’s one heck of a lot better than not being able to write custom apps at all. The part I don’t get though is the fact that they think those Safari apps will not compromise security or stability. A bad website with evil Ajax can screw up your device, compromise security and stability just like a normal app can.

And then it was buh-bye, Keynote’s over.

And I was like, WTF mate?!
The features demoed in Leopard weren’t that impressive, we got no hardware announcements (which is quite strange, they always announce something at WWDC), developers were shushed by the fact that they believe they can write apps for the iPhone and that was basically it, and that took almost 1h30.
I don’t get it, to be honest I expected a lot more from it. The things they showed were interesting but I can’t help but feel disappointed.

So Apple, next time you expect people to pay 3500$ for a WWDC pass and don’t have anything really impressive to show, just don’t