Apple WWDC 2007 Keynote

[Jessterw]

Nothing awe-inspiring (again), but a few points of interest:

• EA and ID releasing games for Mac (C&C3 in July)
• Revamped UI for OS X (somewhat Vista-like elements) and new Finder features (Stacks, CoverFlow, QuickLook)
• Safari for Windows, with public beta starting today @ apple.com/safari
• 3rd-party iPhone development using AJAX (very much like Dashboard widgets), with access to system services

Keynote should be up in QT form later today (as usual).

[Jammrock]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spaces.html

LOL, it's X-windows! Or the poor-man's multi-monitor application.

But wait, it's for OS X, so it's ... Spaces.

If they were going to integrate X-windows into OS X they should have gotten that awesome cube interface from Linux. Can't remember the name off the top of my head.

[Jessterw]

Yeah, though they already use the cube for account switching. *shrug* It's been a known feature for a looong time now.

[az]

I think I could do multiple Desktops with my old Millennium in Win95. Have never used it, but it's nice it's there, and of course it gets a new name.

[Jessterw]

There's a few virtual desktop apps out there for OS X, so it's truly not anything new for the platform. But it's something 'new' from Apple and now it's built into OS X.

I have absolutely no use for it though. Never have, even when I was using a single monitor.

[az]

I'd rather they allow real maximizing

Luckily, Opera does, Mail does, iPhoto does, VLC does...

BTW, neat game I found (for mac and win): Plasma Pong.

[Jessterw]

Yeah, it all depends on the application. Some will maximize to the maximum size allowed on the screen, while others do the whole 'smart' maximization deal (eg. Safari). I don't use most apps maximized anyhow, so it's not a big deal to me, but I've always understood the gripe.

Plasma Pong is great, though I've gone for an hour with no points being scored several times. Kept it installed for awhile now simply because, well, it's cool.

[Jammrock]

Hahahaha... Safari for Windows!

BTW, minute-by-minute of Jobs keynote here:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/11/steve-jobs-live-from-wwdc-2007/

Jammrock

[TransformX]

If they were going to integrate X-windows into OS X they should have gotten that awesome cube interface from Linux. Can't remember the name off the top of my head.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_(window_manager)

[TransformX]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spaces.html

Looking for something on the Mac OS X site?

The page you tried was not found. You may have used an outdated link or may have typed the address (URL) incorrectly. You might find what you’re looking for in one of these areas:

[az]

Safari for windows is just there to have a "development platform" for the iPhone, because the third-party apps on that are going to be AJAX widgets.

[Jessterw]

@TransformX: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/...es/spaces.html

@az: That's undoubtedly true. However, Apple has also been making a push in other areas to promote their products' ability to work on Macs and PCs. I think having the need for an iPhone development platform on Windows just made the decision easier.

[az]

Yeah, it's just that safari does nothing better than other browsers, except for standards compatibility, where it wins over IE (but so does everybody else). I can't really see a market for it on windows (other than for developers), and I can't really see how else apple is going to be benefiting from it.

[schmosef]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/11.html

Apple Safari for Windows: The world's slowest web browser

This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Monday, June 11, 2007

Apple is advertising Safari for Windows as “the world’s fastest and easiest-to-use web browser.” Fast, maybe, in page rendering speed, but ridiculously slow to launch... on my brand new, 2.33 GHz Core-2 Duo laptop, it takes an insane amount of time to launch: 57 seconds, during which you don't even get an hourglass, so you don't even know it's launching.

By comparison, Firefox takes about 3 seconds and Internet Explorer takes about 2.

Apple is and always has been severely dishonest in all their advertising when it comes to performance. This is the company that spent years telling us that the PowerPC was faster than Intel, only, suddenly, to change their claims midsentence without an explanation when reality caught up with them, in a scene almost exactly like the scene in 1984: “Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.”

This is the company that's about to release the iPhone on a slow, last-generation data network but is running TV ads that have edited out all downloads and waiting time that network entails.

These products may be cool, but I don't understand why Apple should be allowed to lie so blatently in their advertising about performance and get away with it. I'm sorry, but a web browser that takes a minute to launch is not going to win any converts on Windows.

PS I know; the Apple press release about how "fast" Safari is refers to "page rendering speed." Frankly, that is almost completely irrelevant given that the bottleneck in displaying pages is mostly download speed and network throughput. Another case where the big print giveth and the fine print taketh away, it adds up to one thing: a lie.

PPS Yes, I know it's a beta. Eventually, the Safari programmers will figure out the preloading tricks that IE and Firefox use to get quick startup time (at the cost of slow Windows startup; Raymond Chen explains it here). In the meantime, when Apple's marketing team goes around making untrue claims about performance, they make the company look like liars, not innovators.

PPPS Safari even managed to bring the inferior font rendering of the OS X platform to Windows, no easy trick.

PPPPS Safari for Windows means we don't have to buy as many Macs for compatibility testing.

PPPPPS 20 minutes later: The more I run Safari on Vista, the faster it launches. Am I hallucinating? Is there a cosmic force that means just when I complain about Safari taking 57 seconds to launch, as soon as that complaint is made public, it launches much more quickly? Am I going insane? Or is someone playing a clever prank on me? It's this kind of epistemological, reality-shifting shit that makes me not want to blog any more. We are at war with Eastasia. We were always at war with Eastasia. 2+2=5, and I love Steve Jobs.

[Jessterw]

Safari isn't exactly a speed demon on initial load under OS X either. But of course that wasn't the claim and as such Joel is just ranting.

You know, I'd almost think Joel and Gurm were the same person with their constant claims of Apple "severe dishonesty" in advertising.