kyleandkelly.com

Alrighty, Steve Jobs has wrapped up his keynote speech at Apple’s Wordwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC). As a Mac aficionado, it’s my duty to offer my unsolicited opinion on anything Apple I’m going to jump right in without much intro, so if you haven’t heard all of the new announcments, I’d recommend visiting Apple’s Hot News page. Here goes.

• I’m reserving judgement on the new enclousure for the G5 until I see it in person. It does appear Apple’s taken a bit more function over form approach this time. The simplicity of the design appeals to me.
• Does it seem like the new enclosure is a step back in expandability? Apple just started getting things right with two optical bays, and now we’re back to one.
• There’s no mention of 64-bit optimization in Panther. I really wish/hope it was/is optimized for the G5.
• It appears non-Quartz Extreme machines (like my 500Mhz iBook) are being left in the dust. Expose is dependent on Quartz Extreme, and I becha that nice cube effect while switching users is dependant on Quartz Extreme. I already know that video conferencing in iChat isn’t supported on my machine.
• The distributed build feature in XCode is a really intriguing idea. I’ll be curious to see if people begin thinking about doing something like this with Ant and Jini.
• I’ll be curious to see how the new Finder holds up when the Jobs Reality Distortion Field is gone and the usability gurus (Nielsen, Tog, Raskin) start tearing it apart (as no doubt they will, given their penchant for a completely different paradigm in human-computer interfaces).
• File Vault looks like a sweet feature, but the Achilles’ Heal seems to be that it requires you to log out to “lock in” the encryption. It would be useful if the encryption kicked in if your screensaver was password-protected. Since the screensaver kicks in automatically, and logging out is manual, I’d be prone to forget to log out. I am very impressed with just how easy they made it.
• Fast Search in the Finder was extremely impressive in the demo - how’d they do that? Is Finder constructing a database/index of all the files somewhere?

Finally, this picture, taken from CNN, is funny - it was taken during a demo of iChat’s video conferencing capabilities. Steve Jobs took a video call live from Al Gore. Not exactly the most flattering picture of Gore.

written by Kyle