WWDC Keynote 2009 Wrap-Up #1
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 1:01 AM With the internet finally connected to the new flat I am able to bring you my comments on the WWDC 2009 Keynote. As you can probably guess from the title of this post there are going to be quite a lot so I thought that I would kick off with some general observations of the event, opinions in the cloud and the aftermath. They are in noparticularorder, just how they come to me while I am writing this.
Developer Videos/Demos
This seems to be becoming a regular sticking point with many people, most finding that they slow the whole thing down and are boring. I suspect that this is in a large part due to the fact that so many people follow the event through live blogging, a medium which does not lend itself well to describing such things. Most live bloggers seem to just give up during these sections.
If you watch the footage of the event itself, as I always do, you may well find them interesting and enthusing. We're all Apple fans after all and most of the time we seem to love hearing each other praise what's going on. Strange.
Of corse, for those of a more morbid disposition, there is always the chance that something will go wrong as it did in 2 of the demos.
The one demo that did seem to catch people's attention was that of TomTom. Turn by turn route apps is something that iPhone fans have been waiting a very long time for. They didn'tdisappoint. Not being a car owner this isn't something that interests me too much, but I will be fascinated to find out whether people prefer using the app in portrait or landscape mode.
Snow Leopard's Reveal
Okay, so not much was revealed in the show that we didn't already know. It was great to see some indication of the benefits of Grand Central in the Mail demo, but beyond that not much stuck out. It was in the updated Snow Leopard pages at Apple.com that things really got more interesting.
Firstly, after the changes to the laptop range, more on that another time, Apple made a subtle change to the way their horizontal navigation falls on the Mac page at Apple.com.
Previously the default position had been more to the right, framing the laptops between the almost identical LED Cinema Display and the iMac, the Mini and Mac Pro still on the right. Now all they have done is slip it to the right which drops the one item that wasn't a Mac and introduces Mac OS X, now linking to the Snow Leopard pages. A very small change but a very clever one.
We were told some time ago that Snow Leopard was a release to build on, that it wouldn't include any new user features but instead provide new foundations. In line with this the $29 upgrade price must have pleased developers (ensuring that as many people as possible will upgrade) and Apple supporters alike. But dig a little deeper to here and you'll find lots and lots of small changes that will be big benefits to users.
To pull out some highlights that weren't mentioned before the event;
- More reliable disk eject
- Assign applications to spaces
- Navigate folders in stacks
- Faster shutdown and
wake-up (up to 75%!) - Automatic updates for
printer drivers - AirPort menu signal strength
- Safari resistant to crashes
- Intelligent text selection i Preview PDF
- Screen saver shuffle
- Automatic time zone setting
- Configurable time window
for screen locking - Smaller footprint (reclaim 6GB)
- Static analysis in Xcode
There are more, you should go and check them out.
Not all in Snow Leopard is perfect
Maybe I'm just being picky and possibly in practice these things will make little to no difference, but there are some things that have come to my attention which are not as good in Snow Leopard as I had hoped. Not doubt there are good reasons for these, probably out of Apple's hands in some cases. Here they are for you to decide.
1) Not all OS X apps are 64bit
DVD Player, Front Row, Grapher, iTunes and X11 are not 64bit. I can understand X11 being an issue, older tech that doesn't really belong to Apple. Grapher probably wouldn't see much benefit and wasn't worth the money to do. I expect that DVD Player is tied to some tight 32bit CSS encryption code that they didn't really need to change, although it does probably point out further that we are not going to see the Player app upgraded to Blu-Ray anytime soon ... or possibly the opposite and that there will be a wonderful new 64bit DVD Player that also supports Blu-Ray?
Front Row and iTunes are puzzling though. They are not great resource hogs, until your library is very, very large. Even then the last few versions have gotten rid of most of the issues. But they seem so core to Apple's future that theirabsenceis definitely noted.
2) Not all graphics cards are supported by OpenCL
This one cuts me deep. My late 2007aluminumiMac contains a Radeon HD 2600 PRO which is not supported. In fact only NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130 and ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 487 are supported.
3) You need an NVIDIA 9400M for hardware H.264 acceleration
So many of us are out of that one.
4) Exchange support requires Exchange Server 2007
It will be a while coming for some companies.
These are all small niggles and I'm sure I'm just being bitter about the lack of support for my personal hardware.
Overall
I enjoyed the event. I think Apple presented what they needed to, the whole thing being evolutionary rather that revolutionary. They managed to quietly send the PowerPC and to an extent the iPhone 2G off into the night, never to be heard from again. Great though they were, their time has past. Welcome to a new world of speed and power. The foundations have been laid and WWDC was the right place to do it, right in front of the builders.
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