Now that WWDC is over, I’m going to share with you guys what happened there and my thoughts about it. I’m doing this in two posts because this can get really big for just one.
For the ones not knowing what this is all about and quoting Apple’s WWDC FAQ: "The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the most important annual event for anyone innovating with Apple technologies. Thousands of developers from around the world come to California each year to receive in-depth information and instruction from Apple’s technical architects and engineers."
There were great expectations about how it would be this year. After all the rumors being raised before the event, the news are finally here.
The keynote started with the updates on laptops hardware. Now, all the aluminum enclosure Mac notebooks come with a built in battery like the 17" Macbook Pro, unveiled early this year. The screens also got upgraded with more recent panels having a better color gamut, all models have now a SD card slot, except the 17" which still has the Express Card slot and 13" Aluminum Macbooks are now branded as Macbook Pro, now featuring a Firewire 800 port. The Macbook Air also got upgraded and it’s now more affordable even with the SSD hard disk option.
The only product remaining with the "Macbook" name is the white plastic one and here is where things become odd. It feels, at least to me, that there’s a middle man missing here. In my opinion, the early line was more balanced as far as different models and target users were concerned. It’s true, however, that the aluminum Macbook was very feature and appearance like to the Pro series but that was precisely the strongest point last year when they were released: pro features in a consumer notebook. It is also true that people was wishing for a smaller size Pro notebook since the 12" Powerbook but the 13" aluminum Macbook was all that already, only lacking the Firewire port. Being the "most popular Mac" the 13" Macbook soon will be forgotten and all attention will be towards the Macbook Pro line. Is Apple hiding something else up its sleeve for the Macbook line? I don’t know but, looking at the available hardware, there’s not much that can be done to fit in between the plastic model and the aluminum pro series. I’ll write a post about Apple’s family of notebooks as soon as possible. For now, let’s continue with the keynote.
The second topic on the keynote was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
In this field, almost every changes are under the hood. The OS is now full 64 bit and many of its apps were rewritten or greatly improved. There aren’t many UI changes despite the rumors about the so called "marble", a new UI design trend for Mac OS X. An example of things looking the same is the Finder: it has been entirely rewritten in Cocoa, as I said the UI remains the same but it has some refinements and improvements which are very welcome and good. The dock now has exposé built in which allows us to see only the open windows of a certain app that we may choose among all the apps we are running on a moment in time. The OS installation itself will be 45% faster and it will require 6GB less disk space than Leopard. Other improvements are the smarter text selection when viewing pdf in Preview and character input using the trackpad for asian character systems. Other new features are navigation in stacks and live preview in Finder.
A usual companion of Mac OS X is the web browser Safari that was released for Tiger, Leopard, Windows Xp and Vista that day. It will be included in Snow Leopard with better performance on the new OS because of its 64 bit architecture. Once again, I’ll write about this on one of my future posts.
There’s also a new version of Quicktime name Quicktime X and its rebuilt using recent libraries and video technologies. Here the UI changes are visible as well as new features like video trimming and video sharing.
All the other improvements are very good but are of technical matter and I’m not going to discuss them here even being a developer myself and understanding what it’s all about. Doing that would be making this post a very large thing and it would be too much painful to reach the end. There’s one, however, that its important to focus: Exchange support across Mail, Address Book and iCal. This really makes OS X a good OS for use within a business environment.
To finish this section about Snow Leopard I’ll talk about pricing and availability. Believe it or not, the upgrade for Leopard users will cost only $29! Yes, this is a great new! The family pack will cost $49. I still don’t know the price in euros but even if they do a direct conversion and make it €29, it will be alright. I really would like to see Microsoft doing something like this with Windows 7 but they aren’t going to do it for sure even after the flop with Vista. Snow Leopard will be available in September (there’s no exact day) and it will be targeted only for Intel Macs. Leopard was the last iteration of an Apple OS running on PPC architecture. With this I can say that I’m looking forward to get it as soon as possible though my expectations were higher as far as UI changes are concerned.
Well this is the end of part one of my WWDC’09 coverage. I’ll see you next post!
Source of images: Apple
