Yes, you guessed it. The most visible highlight of this year’s WWDC keynote is a brand spanking new web site for Apple.com. That’s it folks. Nothing to see here. Move along now. Or is it?
More seriously, I bet the average Mac user is going to be baffled, still waiting for those über-features that were so hush-hush that Stevey couldn’t tell us last year, but had to wait until now to announce. You know which ones I’m talking about: those that never existed in the first place. I mean, really, is this it? If the new Finder and the new skin and the glorified back up application (aka TimeMachine) is all they’ve got then I’m seriously thinking they made a huge mistake announcing a $129 price tag for this cat. $59 would be more like it. Why? Because Leopard is such an indifferent product to the end-user it just doesn’t make sense. What gives?
Well, Leopard is what Leopard was always meant to be: a developer’s release. It’s touted to sport the most significant and numerous improvements under the hood than any other version of OS X since 10.2. The kernel has been extensively optimised, Core Animation is slated to ‘change the way applications look’ multiplying the ‘bling factor’ several times, XCode and the other Dev. Tools are revamped (new major XCode release, DTrace etc), resolution independence and many others.
The rest of the features Steve Jobs announced are cool, but very minor. They closely resemble features that never made it in previous releases, but were now sufficiently polished to be included in Leopard, i.e leftovers: The brand new Finder we were promised, but never got 4.5 years ago — I hope this one is significantly improved — see multithreading. ‘Stacks’, originally rumoured back in spring/summer 2002 to come along with Jaguar, they were even part of the Jaguar betas for a while as ‘Piles’, but were pulled from the final version for reasons unknown (to me at least). The virtual desktops, UNIX converts (among others) have been craving for, ever since 10.0 hit the stores in March 2001. An assortment of minor, largely uninteresting improvements to iChat and the abuse err. milking of Apple’s Coverflow acquisition. One noteworthy ‘improvement’ is the homogenisation of the User Interface; at last Apple can — at least try to — be consistent with its own HIG, although I reckon the chaos with custom widgets will continue for many years to come, if not forever.
What will undoubtedly cause many to raise an eyebrow (or two) is Apple’s release of Safari for Windows. It is baffling why Apple did not release iChat for Windows, but did so with Safari. iChat on Windows would certainly make it a much more useful application than what it is now. Port iChat to Windows and add MSN support.
There are few reasons for which Apple might want to release Safari on Windows. It doesn’t seem like a trojan horse, in the sense that Safari alone, despite it being by far the fastest and technically superior browser out there, cannot convince someone to drop Windows and get a Mac. Then, there’s no immediate monetary gain to Apple from doing so. There must be some other reason, and some may argue that Apple did it to promote Safari as a viable alternative, pushing for its adoption and thus increasing its browser market share so that more of the Web works great with the Mac and the iPhone. I don’t buy that: Safari and Firefox are both highly conformant to standards and pages written for one work great on the other, with very very few exceptions. Apple has nothing to worry about when it comes to compatibility on the Web: Safari does it like the best of them. Actually, Safari is — and has been for years — the best of them. 🙂
I cannot but think that Apple made a mistake with Leopard. By taking so long to release it and having people believe (well, those that actually believe Steve, anyway) that there were numerous ‘top-secret features’ to be announced it raised expectations. And in the end, it doesn’t matter how much polish you put onto it, if there’s no substance, well, there’s no substance. And while the part of the Mac users that drool every time they see anything coming out of Cupertino will probably do so again, to many budget conscious end-users Leopard will probably seem lacking the substance it should’ve had given the time it took to develop it. It seems nice, it’s certainly an improvement, but it’s probably not worth it. Then again, the improved performance, the brand new over-the-top (but hopefully useful) Finder and the prospect of amazing new apps using Core Animation alone might be enough to convince some that are not getting a new Mac to shell out for it. For those of us that have followed OS X from day one, it certainly seems like Leopard equals a lot of under the hood work, Core Animation and a bunch of leftover features from previous releases. Needless to say, if you’re a developer Leopard is a must. If not you can probably live without it for the time being, but this will most certainly change once third-party applications start depending on its new APIs. And something tells me that won’t take too long.
[Update: John Gruber at Daring Fireball has some interesting things to say about the keynote. One thing that never crossed my mind and that he absolutely nails, is search revenue as a reason for porting Safari to Windows.]
