WWDC ’07 Keynote Thoughts

June 11, 2007

Leopard: I have a feeling this will be a very significant OSX release. I’m looking forward to it in October.

Games: I admin, I’ve secretly been wanting to play C&C 3. Not that it’s much of an issue with Bootcamp and the new 3D acceleration in Parallels and VMware, but it’s still nice to see a native Mac app.

Safari 3 on Windows: I’ve heard a lot of complaints about it so far, mainly due to the non-Windows style UI. I tend to agree, and I can’t see Safari replacing Firefox on my Windows PCs anytime soon. I don’t think it really matters if it gains any marketshare on Windows though; what’s really important is that web developers can finally test sites in Safari, even if they don’t own a Mac.

The Safari 3 OSX beta, on the other hand, is great. Lots of neat new UI features, and the new WebKit is much faster, even on my aging PowerBook.

iPhone Web Apps: A little disappointing to Cocoa developers, but I guess at least it’s something. Web apps will be able to tie into the phone’s dialing and email features, so it should give potential developers basic capabilities.

I’ve heard some speculation that this is really a stopgap measure until Apple has the time to develop a set of stable iPhone APIs, create a working development environment and emulator, and take care of any hardware and software bugs in the rev A model. I tend to agree; you can’t assume anything about Apple’s long term plans for a device that’s not even in stores yet.

Marc Charbonneau is a mobile software engineer in Portland, OR. Want to reply to this article? Get in touch on Twitter @mbcharbonneau.