The iPhone did not fit under any of these headings, arguably it could go under iPod + iTunes but it was too important for that. Tabs had been added over the years but it was getting a little confused and crowded, as shown when Apple did for a short while between iPhone announcement and release did just add a new tab. My guess turned out to be true and Apple changed their site structure and look to;

The new design reflected the changes that had happened to OS X over the years, was more tidy and grouped their products much more sensibly (except Apple TV which to me just doesn't feel right under the iPod + iTunes heading, much as the iPhone would not).

So where will the Tablet fit? As with the iPhone I don't feel that it fits naturally under any of these segments and will be important enough to Apple to require its own section. Might we see iPod +iTunes disappear as a top level heading? Possible but unlikely. We could see Downloads go and Tablet (whatever the name) added.

Or we will see a total design overhaul. This is my bet. I would expect to see the design either again reflect the changes made to OS X on the desktop or it could pull its influences more from the iPhone/Tablet if that's the current big push for Apple.

As with the iPhone, post announcement of the tablet we may well just see something shoe horned into the current design, but I think we should expect a whole new design to appear on release day. Something I find almost as exciting a prospect as the Tablet itself.

The last 2 versions of Final Cut Studio have not seen updates to DVD Studio Pro. Only theme additions for iDVD for a while. To the dismay of many Blu-Ray has remained a "bag of hurt", as Steve Jobs famously described it, and seen only token support added. In Snow Leopard Quicktime X is something of a step back with many interactive features removed and Flash, it seems, will never get a look in on the iPhone.

It would seem then that Apple is giving up on modern interactive content, or is it. There are signs that it is instead simply heading in another direction.

• HTML 5
• iTunes LP and Extras 

HTML 5

While it has been keeping Flash off of the iPhone Apple has also been pushing the capabilities of HTML 5 in its Safari browser. The Apple created addition of the Canvas tag and support for SVG allows for interactive vector graphics in an open standard format.

Another integral part of HTML 5 is support for inline audio and video content, which along with Apple's close relationship with Google now opens the door to a Flashless YouTube.

iTunes LP and Extras

With the launch of iTunes 9 Apple brought to the world downloadable special edition content for both music and movies. After a little investigation people soon found that these are created using open standard HTML, CSS and Javascript. Apple have said that they will soon publish the details of how to produce this content.

Tool Support

The one thing that Apple is yet to do is provide any particular tool support for this content. While it was unlikely that they would release something general and broad ranging to support interactive HTML 5 content it seems that there is a much better chance that they will offer a tools to develop iTunes LP and Extras.

If that were the case then where in the their line up of software would that tool sit? It could be reasoned that it is a developer tool and could live in XCode, but that would be more likely for a general HTML 5 tool. The people that would really want a tool for developing iTunes LP and Extras are the content producers themselves, the people that use Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio. The two suites already share Soundtrack Pro, why not software to finalise delivery?

The differences between delivery of music and movies are very few and far between these days. The music industry are relying more and more on DVD/Blu-Ray releases to make up revenues and the movie industry is relying more and more on downloadable content.

So to appeal to all widest potential audience what would such a tool have to do?

• CD
• DVD
• DVD-Audio
• Blu-Ray
• iTunes LP
• iTunes Extras

Both CD and DVD production are already catered for through Logic Studio's Waveburner and Final Cut Studio's DVD Studio Pro.

So if Apple were to produce a tool to support iTunes LP and Extras it makes a lot of sense to add in support to output DVD and CD using their existing software. Also if they ever to add support for Blu-Ray (which they must do or drop DVD Studio Pro completely) then it really belongs in the same place to.

Such a tool would off the unique capabilities of taking content directly from creation through to interactive output on all the formats that count. Having to produce something so complex and that supports the only recently released iTunes LP and Extras could explain why DVD Studio Pro has not been touched in such a long time.

This is of course all my personal pipe dream, but it's a very nice dream.

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.

If these devices are going to be around for a while then they are an aberration in the Apple platform family, in other words that are almost the only device platform that doesn't run OS X. All of Apple's Laptop, Desktop and Server machine run it, the Apple TV runs OS X. The only device that performs more than minimal processing that doesn't is the Time Capsule.

The original iPod platform is based around the PortalPlayer platform and it has served Apple well, but now they have an embed-able version of OS X. As well as that they have all the libraries required to run music, video, photos etc on it.

A Nano Touch?

I'm not suggesting the iPod Touch Nano, nor an iPod Touch with a massive HD in side it. What I'm suggesting are devices that look exactly like the current ones (well, probably with a seasonal redesign). Users would not know any difference, so why do it? To remove the need to develop for a different platform. To allow Apple developers to work on iPods without know anything about a new firmware. To provide new opportunities to advance the other iPods.

Taking their form factors and the click wheel interface into account I wouldn't imagine them running mobile Safari or picking up your internet. But Apple has seen that people like being able to purchase music direct from their device. So adding Wi-Fi and Music Store purchases would be pretty easy.

I'm sure many developers would be interested in taking what they have learned from iPod Touch and iPhone development and trying the challenge of producing games for the click wheel based device. Games are the highest selling category in the App Store, why would Apple not want to take this out further to iPod Nano and Classic owners.

Production Savings

The other possible benefit of such a move could be savings produced from being able to order more of the same chip-sets and electronic parts. We've already seen that this is something Apple is good at leveraging. The last Nano refresh was probably one of the most cost effective one's ever, taking the screen from the previous Nano and turning it on its side, the same in/out 3.5mm socket from the iPod Touch which then allowed Apple to add voice notes etc.

So will Apple unify the core of their iPod devices? I don't know, but if I worked for Apple engineering that's what I would be suggesting.

Wednesday is worth paying some attention to, especially if you are a shareholder, as it could be the last major announcement of any kind from Apple until WWDC, at which people expect the new iPhone and Snow Leopard to be shown.

Multi-core everyday

Right now, just writing this article, I have Activity Monitor open and I can see that between 18 and 20 processes are active, that is they are consuming more than 0% of my CPU. Many of these are only consuming a very small part, but around half of them use more than 1%.

Last night my wife and I wanted to watch The Apprentice: Your Fired, the program that interviews the person just fired on The Apprentice. Unfortunately the recording on Sky+ clashed with something else and so didn't record. No problem, I just downloaded it using the BBC iPlayer and because my iMac is connected to the TV it was no problem to start watching it.

This was the first time I'd tried iPlayer from the iMac to the TV and I was disappointed that it had such a stutter that we really couldn't watch it. Of course I immediately check Activity Monitor and found both cores at 100%, but not from iPlayer, instead it was EyeTV. EyeTV (the software for the TV tuner that I have plugged into my iMac) was exporting a recording to iPhone format. I was actually suprised that iPlayer was doing as well as it was in the circumstances.

The high end view

It is true that there are classes of software that can, if the developer programmes it right, benefit more from access to multiple cores. This software is normally of a type that performs a large amount of work in the background, without user interaction. It will also be work that can be split up into small pieces that can be processed separately. Examples of this incllude;

• 3D rendering, where parts of an image or individual frames in an annimation can be processed separately
• Video/audio encoding, where separate sections of the timeline can be sent out to different processes
• Scientific calculations can also often be parcelled out to different porcesses, which is how most super-computers work

While all of this is interesting it's not exactly the everyday work that you and I do. So this is where the commentary that more than 2 cores are not needed for most people and that the Mac Pro/Xserve's 8 cores are a bit of a waste even at the high end.

The concurrent nightmare

Between the warnings of waiting for Snow Leopard and that more than 2 cores is a waste of time, it's no wonder that people think that our computers are a long way off of utilising multi-core processors. This is simply not true. Look at your machine right now, really look. Look in your menu bar and remember, just because the icons are small it doesn't mean that they are not doing a lot of work.

Try to imagine all that things that your Mac is doing right now, right at this moment. I don't know about yours but I can tell you all the things mine is doing;

• Safari has 4 tabs open; Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Calendar and SquareSpace admin. All of these are heavy AJAX pages which are either polling the server, or maintaining an open connection to listen to the server, for updates.
• EyeTV is sitting there checking its schedule ready for the next recording, which when it starts will mean EyeTV will be recording and encoding SD video, then when finished it will transcode it into iPhone format
• iTunes is checking for Podcasts updates and then downloading
• TED is checking for things to download them Azeursus will download them
• Skype and Adium are listening for status changes of my friends
• Time Machine is checking for file changes and putting them onto my Time Machine drive
• SuperDuper! is waiting for its scheduled start time and will then clone all changes from my main drive to my clone drive
• SpanningSync is checking for local or remote calendar or contact changes and syncing them if required

All of this is before you look to the other applications that I have open. I've become quite a user of Spaces recently and now have 4 setup with an assortment of applications open in them each of which, while mostly doing nothing, will trigger the odd event which will require some processing time.

I understand that I don't need 8 cores right now or even really 4. But I am seriously glad I have 2 and at times do wish I had more. It will only take a couple of developers of these applications to start pushing multi-core and I'm going to want as much power as I can get.

Finder will be the key experience changer

Even though I have all of those apps and processes running, my maching still mostly just sits there at 20% to 30% CPU usage, and that's perfect. It give me lots of head room for when I do something that quickly requires more processing power. Yet there are times when something as simple as right clicking a file and selecting "Open with" causes my whole system to freeze for a few seconds while my external drives spin up.

Firstly, why on Earth does OSX need to spin up my external drives to check for "Open with" applications. I've never launched an application off of either drive and it should know that, esecially the Time Machine drive. Secondly this is one example of the problems with Finder. While it is a key piece of software in OS X, iut is also one of the weaker ones. It still use the Carbon 32-bit API for its interface, rather than the modern, 64-bit compatible Cocoa, it's not as multi-threaded as it should be. In fact to my experience general file system access in OS X is not where it should be.

This is where the rubber meets the road though. These areas, GUI, file I/O, networking etc, are always where it is hardest to get performance gains. But in Snow Leopard we should feel a lot of them, straight off the bat. With a 64-bit, Cocoa based Finder able to utilise multiple cores OS X should instantly feel faster and smoother.

So now is the time

Don't listen to the nay-sayers, don't think that it will be years before you feel the power of as many cores as possible. When Quad-Core iMacs hit the Apple Store, I'm going to wish I could trade up and you should too. Power to the people, cores to the people.

Steve Job's product grid

Since Steve Job's return Apple main hardware products have always fit into a standard grid pattern.

Product Class	Intro	Consumer	Pro
Laptops	MacBook Air	MacBook	MacBook Pro
Desktops	Mac Mini	iMac	Mac Pro
Mobile	iPod Range	iPod Touch	iPhone
Wi-Fi	AirPort Express	AirPort Extreme	Time Capsule

Where would a netbook/tablet fit into this structure? True it could replace the MacBook Air, however while that product has its detractors it is still a very Apple like product and one I think they are going to stick with. The problems with the Air are not to do with the form factor but the level of tech inside (battery life, processor speed) and this will catch up.

The connectivity question

Another related question which surrounds Apple's laptop computers is when, if ever, they will build in mobile connectivity. A built in 3G modem is something that Apple's competitors have been pushing and something that Apple has shied away from. This along with the politics surrounding their relationship with AT&T seem to preclude them from including an unlocked 3G modem and while people will buy a locked mobile phone they may stop short of locking their laptops to a provider.

Instead it seems more likely for people to use tethering to connect their laptops, and the iPhone 3.0 release might provide the out that Apple need. Tethering is definitely in there, Apple has said that it is now up to the provider to agree support for it. Naturally what Apple would like is for you to tether your netbook/tablet to an iPhone. But a netbook/tablet is not a great form factor to provide a desktop replacement, which is how many people use their laptops. So are we expected to have all 3; iPhone, netbook/tablet and desktop?

The docking solution

How about a docking station that turns that spanking new netbook/tablet into a desktop? How about something like this, from an Apple patent.

Now what if the netbook/tablet contained a simple, battery saving, NVidia GeForce 9400M graphics chip, but the docking station added a powerful 9600M, the alternative already included within their higher range laptops. Then docking your netbook/tablet, would not only give you the correct form factor but also, through the power of Snow Leopard's OpenCL, give you a more powerful machine!

When docked it's connected to your network, undocked it's tethered to your iPhone. What this gives you is a new type of grid, a grid of where you use your machine and in a combination of 3 products fills each slot. The netbook/tablet plus the docking monitor provide the "On Desk" solution, the netbook/tablet plus iPhone provide the "Coffee Shop/Meeting/Train etc" solution and the iPhone along is the "Out Of Your Pocket" solution.

Of course this is all idle speculation on my behalf, but that's part of the fun that I want to have with this site. Hence the musing part of the site name :)