Geek Speak: Random Mac Stuff You Need to Know
http://www.macfanatic.net/blog/
Copyright © 2006 Matt Brewer
WWDC 2006
by Matt Brewer
I know there has already been a lot of talk about WWDC on the net, ranging from rants from angry small developers, comments about how gaunt and sick Steve Jobs supposedly looks, and just tons of pictures from the event. However, if you somehow missed all of that, I'd like to tell you about my first experience at this awesome event this year.
SF is a Pretty Cool City
First off, I'm a college student attending the University of Tennessee. I was looking around for scholarships for next year and thought about one place that I hadn't even thought about checking into before, being Apple. So, I searched for some scholarships and came up with a Developer Connection "Scholarship". After reading some more, I was initially disappointed simply because I was looking for tuition money and not a free trip out to San Francisco. I went ahead and took the time to apply, never thinking that I would actually be accepted and get the trip. Boy was I wrong!
I did in fact get offered a free ticket to attend WWDC, so I made plans to fly out and stay in SF for the week. I've never been in the western USA before. I've never flown, and I've certainly never been in a city this large. It's been quite an experience! SF is a nice enough city to have the conference. It fits in nicely with the Apple Campus being just a few miles away (maybe more than that, it's a good little trip actually) and the weather is wonderful. The Moscone Center is amazing, a three level supreme Apple Retail Store being the best thing to compare it to in style and elegance.
Catered food was almost always available throughout the week, providing three meals a day. There was room for everyone to hang around and socialize. The overall atmosphere was pretty cool as I got to meet developers of the applications that I really enjoy and love. Developers like the guy behind TextMate (which won an Apple Design Award as well), the developer of Cast Life, people from Parallels, VM Ware, Microsoft, and several more were all there. I also had a quick chat with a guy about the new site redesign for Icon Factory.
Keynote Madness
The week was essentially just a huge geek-fest, meant in the best sense of course. Steve Jobs presented his keynote Monday morning to kick off the week, announcing and debuting some of Leopard's newest features, as well as showing off the new Mac Pro systems. One thing I noticed during the keynote was that first off, a lot of 3rd party apps that hard core users already use, like Virtue, Desktop Manager, and Quicksilver, those features were being integrated directly into the OS in an attempt to make Leopard better than Tiger. That mentality just puts the little guys out of a job though. I won't go into a whole long rant now, as Apple has a right to try to deliver features that their consumers will want and use. I just hate seeing the little guys (aka me) being trampled on in the process.
Another observation from the keynote was that Jobs didn't spend that much time going over technologies that developers were really going to love. There was a new version of XCode, Interface Builder and some other apps that were introduced during the week, but Jobs didn't go into any detail at all, besides a quick, "A new XCode..", and moving on. This gave the feeling that he wasn't really up there talking to the developers, but rather to Wall Street. And while I firmly believe that Leopard will pack several compelling features for switchers and upgraders alike, stocks still dropped after the keynote when Wall St. realized that there wasn't any new iTunes or iPod related announcements forthcoming.
Diving into the week
After the keynote, the week was pretty much the same. There were sessions on several different new technologies in Leopard throughout the week. Some of these were fairly informative and interesting, while others were just geared so low (presumably so that non-developers could pick up a small trick or two?) that it was hard to stay awake. The Apple Engineers that were scattered everywhere were simply amazing, being very enthusiastic to share what they've been developing over the last year and tripping over themselves to help us implement them into our applications to continue making the Mac platform the best user experience possible.
Leopard
This is what everyone will want to hear about, so now that you've scrolled down this far, let's go ahead and get to the good stuff.
*Note: I value my life and can/will not mention specific features and technologies that weren't previewed during the keynote.
Time Machine is presumably going to be the technology that Apple is going to push for this release (Spotlight being the one for Tiger). This seems like it will be a very cool feature for people who have problems accidentally deleting stuff. I got to try it out on my Macbook just a few days ago after making a full backup of my stock Leopard install, and was quite impressed with all the animations and flare. I had originally thought that it might be too much, but after using it for a few moments, it was readily apparent what the technologyÕs function was and even my mom, who hadnÕt even heard of it at all (the usual guinea pig for my experiments) was able to figure out what she was doing with relative ease. IÕm not sure if the implementation is quite ready for production launch, but Apple is off to a good start with this technology.
Spaces has shaped up to be the perfect implementation of virtual desktops in an OS. This is a concept that I was first introduced to when I made the switch to Linux a few years ago. I didn't like the implementation in Gnome and KDE for the Linux distributions, so I never realized the true advantages of this concept until I made it to Mac and tried out Virtue a few months ago (See review here). However, there were several shortcomings as far as I was concerned and I wasn't able to add this to my normal workflow. Spaces fixes all of those problems and performs like a virtual desktop manager should. You can have up to 16 spaces and easily configure keyboard shortcuts for switching between them. There is an Expose-like mode that shows you all of your spaces at one time, and this is where Spaces shines. You can click on a space to go into that space, but the really cool thing (if you've used other desktop managers in the past) is that you can drag a window from one space into another. And I'm not done. From there, you can also have Exposˇ working in the individual Spaces, so that you can see all your windows in each space. Now you can "ooh" and "awe". Oh, and you can rearrange the spaces themselves. ThatÕs just cool.
Spotlight has seen some improvements sporting better search functionality for those that really need some crazy search criteria. The biggest thing that most people will notice is the fact that it performs searches much better and is so fast in fact, that it's meant to act as an application launcher. Just use Spotlight very quickly to find an application and hit Enter and it's launched. For those familiar with applications like LaunchBar and Quicksilver, Spotlight isn't going to provide all of that functionality. However, it does provide most users with all the features that they will need.
There are several new developer tools released, and for lack of memory of what is legal to talk about and what isn't, I won't go into any more detail than that. All I can say is that the updated versions have seen major revisions, some of them coming from the developer gods themselves, and the new ones will earn there place in our hearts very shortly.
iChat 4.0 has seen plenty of advancements since it's last revision and will sport many little features that will make using this IM client even better than it currently is in Tiger. There is support for little stuff like animated buddy icons and other cool features like graphics and movies as backgrounds while you're on a video chat, as well as something called iChat Theater where you can talk your way through a Keynote presentation, a QuickTime video and more. A very nice update to this application. The coolest thing about the new version is the updated interface that ditches brushed metal and adds nice ŅslicesÓ (a theme in Leopard it seems) for your buddies, so itÕs very easy to organize your long buddy list. Tabbed chatting is also very well done.
Mail 3.0 will be better than it's current version, adding features such as notes and introducing a system-wide API for leveraging the To-Do list that we first saw in iCal. However, that's about as cool as Mail gets. We're getting some templates for Mail that will allow anyone to send huge and annoying HTML email all the time and that's about where the joy ends. Not what I had hoped for a 3.0 version of Mail. However, Apple isn't done with Leopard yet, so hopefully they will surprise me.
Conclusion
There are other applications, system services, menu items and much more that are seeing updates and improvements in Leopard. Some of these are simply amazing, some are on par with a "Oh, that will be nice" and yet others are "What were they thinking?!?!". So, with all of that in mind, this is an early Developer Preview of Leopard that I have gotten to play around with on my Macbook these last few weeks, so there will be plenty of stuff that will change before the final release that consumers will get next Spring, as Apple tries to get this product out before Microsoft officially ships its Vista operating system.
WWDC was an incredible experience. I got to attend a wonderful event, surround myself with people just as enthusiastic about the Mac platform as I am, and learn all about upcoming features and technologies that will debut in Leopard so that I'm prepared to leverage them in my next killer app (not that I have a first one, mind you). If you ever get the change to attend, don't let the opportunity pass you by.
Contact Info
You can always send me an email at mbrewer@maccompanion.com or visit my website at http://www.macfanatic.net/blog/ for more information about me and my ramblings. I also produce a weekly audio podcast taking an in-depth review of cool and new Mac applications, along with tips and the occasional tutorial.
