WWDC 2006

"This week, I see a ton of articles saying WWDC 2006 is a disappointment, and even speculating that maybe Steve Jobs is sick.

I simply don’t have words for this. Leopard is still three quarters away. There’s a LOT of work to do, yet. At the keynote, everybody got a sneak-peak at some of the features Apple is working on. If they were finished, they would, you know, ship it.

WWDC is a developer conference. Aimed at developers. Who develop software. Those of us who are developers are freaking amazed at all the great stuff that’s in Leopard. Guess what, we can’t talk about it. So, you’re going to see a lot of opinions from people who aren’t here and have only an uninformed opinion.

On the other hand, if it was just the announced products that disappointed you, well, I’m not sure what you expected. Apple is a computer company, and they unveiled a machine that runs blazingly fast and is $1,000 less than a similarly equipped Dell. This doesn’t make people happy? Seriously? What’s it take? I mean, you can equip this baby with a quad-SLI video card, install Boot Camp, and play Doom at 80 billion fps for way cheaper than you could on Sunday. Doom! Doom!

Yes, Steve didn’t announce any new consumer products. Here at the developer conference. Wow. What a shocker. I really expected Slash and/or Edge to come out and sing us a song and announce a new iPod bundle, or at least give me a close shave. (Seriously, "Edge?")" — Wil Shipley

Update – I was rereading a few pages from the latest edition of Macworld magazine (one that every Macophile should be subscribed to), and I noticed a few things that I thought interesting.

Pg. 18 under the heading "10 Wishes for Leopard" there were some things at WWDC that the editors of Macworld were pretty close to outright predicting.

#4. Built-In Launcher – Scott Forstall (Apple’s VP of User Experience) mentioned that Spotlight would be better at launching applications than were used to in Tiger. I found this direct quote from Macworld to be interesting, and perhaps it is the way Apple has decided to tackle this: "Apple should create a new launcher shortcut key, and have it access a restricted version of the Spotlight index that looks only for file names.". You could read that as ‘Apple should create a way for Spotlight to only search for applications’. Perhaps they have.

#6. Restore More – To quote Macworld editor only being referred to as CB (which could be Christopher Breen): "…I would like to see Apple implement a system restore feature in OS X. This would "rewind" your computer to points where it was happy and stable." Well CB, I’m sure you’ll be happy in the Spring of 2007 and if Time Machine is as nice as it seems, so will I.

#10. Expand iChat – This update to Leopard may seem like a no brainer, but I think we were all surprised to see Apple reveal iChat theatre and the ability to control someone else’s computer via iChat. These were features that not many people (or anyone for that matter) saw coming. Macworld editor JS (perhaps this is Jason Snell) added something else I thought would have been nice to see in Leopard: "…to be able to save audio- and video-chat files". I too desire this ability. Text message logging is a feature I adore and use everyday. To have that for audio and video conversations would be equally as useful for me.

All-in-all Macworld magazine did a pretty good job with their wishes. Did any of your wishes come true?

[tags]wwdc, apple, macintosh, world wide developers conference, time machine, ichat, macworld magazine[/tags]

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