Views from the Ivory Tower - July 2007

WWDC Announcements

By Ted Bade

As we expected, Apple made a few interesting announcements at the WWDC last month. Mostly it was about Leopard, which won’t be released until October. I think a lot of people expected more from Apple this time. But I guess we will take what we can get. I have to admit that it was nice to see the keynote speech return to Apple’s computer roots. It was about Macs and Mac OS X. One might say that this is to be expected, since the event was a developer’s conference for the Macintosh. Still, I was happy to hear all the news about Mac OSX and what we can look forward to.

Some interesting news from WWDC07

First of all, game publisher Electronic Arts announced that they will be releasing titles for Mac OSX. They immediately are going to release 4 popular titles, C&C 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed carbon, Harry Potter and the order of Phoenix game. They also announced simultaneous (Win/Mac) releases of several sports related games.

While this is good news for Mac gamers, it has a caveat. EA is releasing the games using a system called Cider developed by a company called Transgaming - Cider games will only work on Intel Macs. It does its magic by replacing calls to Window’s OS APIs with ones that work under Mac OSX. This works because the game has already been optimized to work with Intel based CPUs. I had expected that a company would develop as system like this. It is a great thing for gaming companies that can now easily offer even their worse titles to the Mac OSX community. They don’t have to completely rewrite the game, but pay a fee for a simple conversion.

Back at the WWDC, game developers id also announced they planned to release titles for the Mac OSX community. There is no word if they will use something like Cider or write the game directly.

Steve Jobs demonstrated ten important aspects of Leopard. Will ship in October. You can watch the entire Keynote by visiting the Apple site. Some of the more interesting aspects of Leopard include:

1. A New Desktop - Dock turns into a reflective table. It actually appears to sit horizontally on the bottom of the screen. Desktop designed to have a digital image on the desktop rather then a solid color. So the Menu can become transparent.

2. Stacks - Steve is really annoyed by all your messy desktops with icons strewn everywhere. With Stacks you can grab a bunch of icons and tie them as one to the Dock. A good example of this is items downloaded from the Internet. They appear all over your desktop, With Leopard and Stacks, a “Downloads” icon will appear on your dock. If you click on this icon the various items you downloaded fan out from the Dock for easy access. In the demo we saw a curved row and well as a grid display of these items. The good thing about this is that there will be less clutter on the desktop but you won’t loose easy access to items you want to store there! Pretty cool feature.

2 A new (updated) Finder - There were a lot of things shown about the new Finder. It is supposed to be easier to access other Macs on your local network (although it is pretty easy now). They also added a Cover Flow (as in iTunes) view for the Finder, so you can use the album case metaphor to sort through files in a folder. It looks interesting but I am not too sure how practical it will be. I am a list view kind of guy and will probably stay that way. Perhaps I am “old school” but I think alphabetically and find things faster that way. Back to my Mac uses .mac account to keep track of changing IP addresses of the home Mac. So when you are on the road and need to access your home machine, you can find it via your .mac account. Obviously this requires one has a .mac account and that you leave your home machine on all the time. I am sure this will be useful for traveling business people.

3. Updated Dashboard, includes the ability to easily create your own widgets.

4. QuickLook is a feature that allows your to see the contents of a file without running the application that created it. Aspects of this are already in the current Finder, since you can see a thumbnail of an image or play a movie directly from the Finder. Wit this feature in Leopard the document is opened and can be viewed completely. This would be a useful feature for those people who need to find a particular item among several and have confusing naming conventions!

5. In iChat there are some new features. iChat theatre lets you share the media from another program with a friend via ichat. You can do slide shows, Keynote, or show anything that uses the new Quicklook feature. You can also add a backdrop, that is am image behind you when you video chat. The image can be still or a motion video. Finally, you can mess up your image using various PhotoBooth” effects, this will probably be a big hit with the kids. ☺

6. Spaces - this is a pretty cool effect that lets the user organize the projects they are working on in separate visual spaces on their Mac. The advantage of this is less screen clutter. A good example of how this can be used is say you are creating a web page. In one space you can have the web creation tools and in two other you can have your favorite browsers which will view your output. At the same time your can have another space with your email client checking for incoming mail. Since all these applications are in different visual spaces, they don’t get in each other’s way, which means you don’t have to hide and switch between applications or move open windows out of the way to see something. All you do is switch to the space that has the application and its window(s) open exactly the way you like them. I do this all the time at work (on a Unix box) and I really believe it makes my work a lot easier.

7. Time machine - You probably heard about this. Automatically back up your drive to another drive on your hard drive or a network server. Its a good idea, but you need to have a large capacity drive available all the time. Of course you can then use it to recover lost files or to even go back to previous versions of a document. Time machine is a great idea, and Apple is being good to its customers by making it easy to back up their Macs. Let’s get a vote of hands here, except for your geeks and power Mac users, how many average Mac users do you think have either an installed internal or an external backup drive? I didn’t see many hands there ☺. Frankly, I think Time machine will make life easier for those people who already backup their Mac hard drives. Are iMacs going to come with two drives in the future? How about Apple laptops? It is an option with MacPros, but its an option. By this I mean, the user has to buy an extra drive. So Time machine is a good feature, but will the average user be able to take advantage of it?

8. The Finder is now completely 64 bit, which means it is faster and can make use of larger memory spaces. (I have to admit, my hopes soared when I say that US road sign icon on the dock of the demo computer. I was hoping we might hear that someone was releasing a map software package for Mac OSX. Oh well, just a 64 bit Finder L.)

9. Core animation. What this means is that animation features are build into the core of Mac OSX. This is a techie thing, but it means if someone wants to access animation features easily, they can. If a program makes use of the core animation features they should be smooth and slick.

10. BootCamp, the ability to use MS Windows (XP or Vista) will be built into Leopard.

These are some very interesting things. I think they all are terrific and can’t wait to try them out myself. However, I imagine that most of the glitz and glamour in these features will come with a real need for a fast processor. Apple has always done a good job of optimizing their OS to work well or at least okay on their older machines. With all this new glitz, I expect another round of older machines will be excluded from the fun. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining. As machines get faster and faster programmers work to find ways to use all that speed and so they add cute animations and features. Just don’t expect to do this on your old Mac!!!

After finishing the top ten list for Leopard Steve Jobs got the audience to catch their breath, I know I did, with a startling announcment. He announced that Leopard would be available in October. He then said they would sell the basic version for $129. Paused as the audience caught their breath, (thinking: “was Apple going to use MS’s multiple OS plan to make money????), then announced the business version for $129, as the audience laughed (realizing the joke and probably in relief!) Then went on to announce several other versions right to the Ultimate version all for $129!

Also announced was a new version of Safari, including a version that works on Windows. We will have to keep our eye on how well this works and how it is accepted by the Window’s community.

While all this is good news of things to come, it isn’t something that is actually here. This is the second time Apple has demonstrated features of Leopard. I think people want more then demonstrations. They want to be able to buy and use it. It appears the market felt that Apple wasn’t really doing enough as well, since Apple’s stock price went down during this event. It actually dropped several dollars per share. While it remained above $100/share, the drop shows that people expected Apple to announce a product, not a future one.

I am also concerned about the computing horsepower needed for all this glitzy stuff. I am sure Steve Job was demonstrating it using either the current most powerful or the soon to be released most powerful Mac. How will it fair on my old G5/1.8?

Hidden data in purchased iTunes files - people have discovered some personal information hidden in DRM free music purchased from the iTunes Music store. Apparently the purchaser's name and email address are hidden inside. So far I haven’t heard the official reason why this is done. Is it a means of tracking music that is being shared illegally or is it just an artifact of the song being sold to a particular user?

Some people are up in arms about this. I can’t see why it is an issue. If the song file is mine and will stay on my computer, then it is as safe as any other information on my computer. There is more information about me on every iTunes store receipt I get emailed to me. These emails include my name, emails address, postal address, and the last four numbers of my charge card. If someone were to hack into my personal machine, I think they would be able to find a lot more then my name and email address ☺.

Oh, I forgot, there is that sharing thing. Are people afraid or concerned because they believe this information can be used to track their illegal sharing of files? Well I guess that is the risk one has to take when sharing a file. If it wasn’t for those people who go completely overboard sharing music, we wouldn’t be in this situation of needing DRM in the first place. So if you are concerned and do indeed share your music, think about all the hassles you have caused every other person who listens to digital music.

Until next time, keep on enjoying your Mac!