I don’t know why I do it… but I do. Every August I find myself shunning the impoverished text-only ‘live’ updates web sites from someone in the WWDC hall sitting on their wireless laptop, in favour of hearing all that is latest, greatest and sure to continue the future of the Apple race for years to come, right from the proverbial himself’s mouth. Yes, I am one of those seeming millions who make Apple announcement dodging a sport (to rival only football fans’ avoidance of discovering the full-time score before being able to get home to watch the recorded match), and head straight to Apple’s Quicktime Event web site in the hope Apple will post a stream to their recorded keynote so I can bask in some RDF glory.
For the last few WWDCs I’ve done this: the elation when the link is finally posted; the sprightlyness by which my Quicktime icon bounces in the dock; the frustrated semi-catatonic Quicktime-streaming-settings-preference-fidding that goes on while I try to coax and tease enough bandwidth from Apple’s servers to give me the merest hint of more than a frame a second of video.
Three hours. From the time the link was posted. This was how long I spent at it this year (a new record on previous years, FYI) before I finally gave up and went on over to apple.com. Mr. Jobs can’t possible irradiate me with his tried and tested RDF if all he’s doing on my screen is turning into some early-eighties badly-drawn 8-bit computer game sprite and blocking and jaggy-ing his way through all of 5 frames a second of video.
Enough of my pain though. You’re here for a run down of the goodies, eh? Of course you are. Let’s get to it then.
To start, I’m not going to rehash and report on the lack of materialisation resulting in all the frantic inventing of products that the various rumour sites make their annual habit around WWDC time to do. Lots of stuff that people wished into rumour being didn’t happen.
What did happen, however, was some mainly pretty solid pro hardware announcements (don’t forget kids, this is a developer’s conference) and our long awaited Leopard preview.
So, first up, the Mac Pro and XServe. The high-end pro desktop from Apple now sports dual dual-core processors (that’s quad core for the slower among you), a redesigned enclosure (now they have gotten rid of the case-melting G5s and the cooling paraphenalia that had to go with them - you would have thought that we would have had to double-take back when Apple originally announced the G5s and they kept banging on about how they’ve made wonderful engineering hocus pocus cooling tunnels to keep these babies cool, that something was up), and loads of reclaimed space to fit four hard drives, kicking graphics cards and lots of other cool stuff. Plus, when stacked up against an equivalent Dell machine, the price ain’t anything to be sniffed at neither. All in all, a very solid upgrade that once again puts Apple’s high-end desktops right up there with the ever-changing world of the big boys.
Oh, and the XServe was updated too.
But enough of that. You’ve come here for the real sweet cat-candy ain’t ya? Who’d blame you? From the looks of it, this candy is sweeter than ever.
The next major release of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system - codenamed ‘Leopard’ - is going to be coming your way Spring of 2007. Hell yeah, that’s a long time to wait. I hear you. But wait until you hear what you’re waiting for.
First off, Apple has committed to bringing all these little ancillary applications that come on some Macs but not others into Leopard itself. These are things like your Mac Mini’s favourite Front Row and everyone’s favourite fire-up-once-and-forget Photo Booth. Apparently, these are going to be given major overhauls too to make them smell more ‘next gen-ny’. Nice.
Apple is also going to be building in some cool ways for software developers to easily make use of animation in OS X. The bottom line here is that Apple has done this kind of thing in the past with audio and video and end users don’t really get to see the benefits directly - they usually come in the form of making applications more easy to maintain (and therefore, they break less when the OS is updated). It will be interesting to see whether anyone actually uses any of the new animation functions when they develop their Leopard software (I can’t imagine there are many potential applications for it really).
There are also updates to Mail (some rather nice looking new templates to help you create aesthetically pleasing emails with photos and integrated notes and to dos - all of this smells a little too much like Outlook Excuse on Windows if you ask me), iCal, Spotlight and Dashboard. Actually, there is one new feature to Dashboard that is worth mentioning more of: Web Clip. Do you surf to obscure web sites where you are probably the only visitor, yet the author constantly tries to bolster their ego by publishing new content? And do you wish there was a widget that could show you that web site’s latest postings quickly and in a Dashboardy way? Well, now you can. Web Clip allows you to go to a web page, click a button, and then simply drag a box around the area of the web site you want to create a widget from. Instant Dashboard widget of your obscure site that updates live. OK, OK… why not just go to the site in a web browser, eh? Well, only having one or two of these things is no better than a tabbed browser. The real benefit comes when you start to have ten or twenty places you want to keep an eye on quickly and frequently. Ebay auctions, for example. Quick, simple and very effective. Nice.
There are lots of these little tweaks Apple has made to their OS like this - nice things to have. But nothing revolutionary so far. This is where the real heavy hitters come out to play with the enigmatically titled features Spaces and Time Machine.
Spaces is essentially the same thing that any Linux user has had for years and is almost another way of solving the problem that Expose solves, but without actually using Expose. It works like this: imagine you have a really big sheet of paper, and your eyes can only look at one small part of that piece of paper at a time before you have to move them. With Spaces, your desktop now becomes a really big sheet of paper with your apps spread all over it, and you now only have to look at the apps that have anything to do with what you’re doing right now. So, say for example you have Safari and Mail open in one Space, you’re also working on a presentation in another Space, and you’re doing some sly photo editing when the boss isn’t looking on another Space. Simply press an Expose-like button (a button on your mouse, for example), and all the Spaces zoom out, allowing you to click on a different Space and view that one instead. What it is is actually a really quick neat way of keeping your apps separated and your screen uncluttered. For all those people who like things in their place.
However, as far as I’m concerned, the real killer feature shown at this year’s WWDC is Time Machine. We all don’t back up, right? Of course you don’t. Are you a fool? Only communists and women (if you’re a woman, please substitute that for ‘men’ ) back up. Its the respectable thing to do. What isn’t quite so respectable, however, is that sharp pain you feel behind your eyes when you realise that the piece of work you’ve been working on for the last three months and that is due in tomorrow has just disappeared from the folder it always lived in. Or you loaded it up because you wanted to use some of the graphics elsewhere, and you changed it all and hit ‘Save’ instead of ‘Save As’, and overwrote all the work you did before.
Time Machine saves your bacon, big guy. And in true Apple fashion. Sure. you’ve got to get yourself an external hard disk from somewhere, but these are dirt cheap nowadays. Simply plug it in and Time Machine does its business. So far, however, this isn’t too much different from any of the other oft-bought-never-used automated backup solutions out there for the Mac (I’m a proud owner and non-user of ChronoSync, for example). Most normal people (and don’t forget, the Mac is the computer for normal people - present company excluded obviously) get confused with backup software - either trying to set it up to back up the right things, or recovering the right things if the right things turn into the wrong things. It is doing this very job - seeing what files / photos / contacts / things on your computer have changed over time, and then really easily getting them back - that makes Time Machine so very very special, and it is why I shall be continuing by subscription to the Oh I Do Love To Gush So Much Over How Brilliant The User Interface Design People At Apple Really Are fanclub (of which I have been a member for some years) for another year at least.
Simply click your Time Machine icon and your desktop - in real time - morphs into a real timeline, showing your past files and stuff receding into the distance back to the very beginning of the universe. It actually looks exactly like this. If you don’t believe me, go check it out on Apple’s Leopard Sneak Preview pages. You can then go back in time by selecting any day in the past and see exactly how you stuff was on that day. You can even zip straight back to when stuff changed. Once you’ve found what you think you’re looking for in the past, you can click it to preview it and make sure it is the right thing, then simply click the ‘Restore’ to present button and your bacon is very much saved.
Its not so much the idea of an automated back up solution that makes Apple’s Time Machine so very special - because that’s been done countless times before. The really revolutionary thing here is Apple’s way of providing you with a really simple way of getting back the stuff you lost. This is what Apple excels at: making really useful but otherwise complicated stuff a piece of cake. By using the strengths of the graphics capabilities in OS X, Apple have proven that it isn’t just eye candy to wow the punters. They are able to construct images and scenes in the computer that look just like the things they’re supposed to represent. Which means that people get it instantly. Which means they’re able to use it instantly. And this is what owning and using an Apple Macintosh computer with OS X is all about.
So, all in all, this WWDC has proven just how solid Apple’s commitment is to the Mac and how furtive their stream of ideas still continues to be. That may seem odd, but with Microsoft copying almost every move Apple make with their upcoming release of Vista, Apple may be one of the few places where we’re going to be seeing any real innovation in the computer world for a while. Enigmatically, Mr. Jobs also mentioned the fact that he hasn’t uncovered all of Leopard’s spots just yet and is hiding some other major new features until the OS’s release in an attempt to try and stop the competition “starting their photocopiers too soon”.
As hard as it is to believe, that could mean that the best is yet to come from Apple…
You may like to catch up on some of the previous weeks’ articles by the same author:
Week 1 - Fanning the Fanboys
Week 2 - The Lament of the Mac Mini
Week 3 - Market Share? What’s That?
Week 4 - Integrations What You Need (aka. the assult on Windows)
Week 5 - Beating Windows At Its Own Game
Week 6 - MacBook Surprise
Craig Pugsley works as a technical consultant for a small independent software vendor in the UK, and writes commentary pieces for various publications and online sources in his spare time. He lives in Berkshire with his astounding nearly-wife Lucy and a surprisingly large mortgage. He gives thanks for every day he is able to work on a Mac, and yearns for a life when more people can freely experience the life-changing benefits of a good computer.
© Copyright Craig Pugsley 2006 - published by MacShrine with permission.
