Monday, June 11, 2007

WWDC Keynote, Meh

So the big Keynote happened at WWDC and the speculation what Apple will announce is over. I think there were only 2 new things announced and they came first. The Finder and desktop is getting an overhaul, ars has the early details in Apple to rework the interface in Leopard. Basically the menu bar is translucent, the dock is a little different, the sidebar is more like iTunes with builtin spotlight searches (which really usefully now work across machines on the local network and your own machines connected via .mac) and a coverflow view.

EA and ID also announced they'll be porting more games to mac which should help to eliminate one of Window's advantages.

The one-more-thing was Safari for Windows. Yeah, Safari for Windows. it's twice as fast as IE and 1.6x as fast as Firefox but that seems like a yawn. Jobs had a one-last-thing which was developing apps for the iPhone. Instead of providing a kit to install apps on the device the answer is to make a web app. Since the iPhone has full Safari a real web app will work fine (like amazone or salesforce.com) and with Safari on Windows you don't need a mac to do the development. It's kinda a cop out. I want the app to work when there isn't a connection (on a subway or plane) and I don't want to have to host it. I don't see an app like Planetarium running on a web server.

Update: Gizmodo has a summary with pics.

4 comments:

grahams said...

I know Firefox 3 is going to have persistent data storage and offline capabilities using that persistent data storage, so perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye...

Google Gears also provides offline storage, and we know that Apple is working with Google, so there may be another avenue to provide offline access to "web apps"

-sean

Howard said...

Certainly not needing a mac to test iPhone web apps is a good thing, but I agree there has to be some additional future use for this.

Anything that would chip away at IE's use and Active X controls that don't work on mac is better for mac, but this seems like an odd way to achieve that. Maybe the thought is if there are two viable browsers then IE is in the minority and has to conform to standards better?

Since Firefox is already doing offline storage, I'm not sure I see why Apple would go to the porting effort for that. And honestly when Firefox 3 ships with native mac controls I see Safari's use on mac slipping. And I'm not sure why apple would care.

I like John Grubers explanation too.

grahams said...

I'm sorry, I was talking about offline storage and applications on Safari on the iPhone, for application development... =)

Howard said...

Ahhh. It's certainly interesting to have a full browser on a phone. We'll have to see how well it works viewing the web at 1/2 VGA (I didn't love it on my Palm T3).

Apple keeps saying it's the real web. Now we know that's not flash or java. Persistent storage is interesting for the iPhone but I doubt it will be there at launch. Which leaves the question, how will software updates work?

The "real web" expectations is why the Ajax development for the iPhone was such a non-announcement. Having now watched the keynote video, there is some slick integration and I'm not sure how they make "iPhone services" available to apps without an sdk. There has to be an API, right? Or do they just do pattern matching on addresses and phone numbers, etc.