Keynote Blues

Steve Jobs held the second annual WWDC 2006 conference this Monday in San Francisco. If we’d been seeing most of this stuff for the first time, it would have been amazing, but instead it was mostly old hat. Spaces? Yeah, neat. Time machine? Been there. iChat improvements? Yawn.

Gruber did nail it when he said that brushed metal was being taken out back and shot. It’s no longer anywhere to be seen in Leopard: Safari ditched it, Finder ditched it. I think even Calculator may have given it up.

A few interesting things were revealed, both in the keynote and on Apple’s website. Quick Look, as an operating system feature, is an interesting extension of the ‘Preview’ section of the Get Info panel. The Dock’s stacks feature is neat and useful, spelling almost certain doom for Stunt’s Overflow. The Finder finally gets rewritten, possibly in Cocoa, and sports an iTunes-esque interface.

Behind the scenes, native support for multicore machines will make it easier for developers to harness the power of parallel processing, and other improvements to I/O, networking, and computing abound. There’s really a lot of meat here, it’s just hard to see — which brings me to:

The Desktop, which gets superfluous menu bar transparency and reflective dock effects, altered shadows on the windows, and a general visual refresh. Apple really seems to be relying on Core Image and Core Animation for most of their UI, and therefore depending on a decent graphics card to drive it. Already on Tiger, older laptops with less video power are beginning to choke on Core Image effects.

Apple is not yet saying what the minimum system requirements are, but I’m guessing G5 and higher. If they don’t go pure Intel with this release, they certainly will on the next iteration.

Jobs’ “One More Thing…” was Safari for Windows, which was predicted by the Mozilla folks back in January. This seemed kind of lame for a development conference aimed at Macintosh developers. What are we supposed to take away from this — that Apple thinks it’s worth our time to develop applications for Windows?

Gragh.

Wither iPhone?

The only other big piece of news is that the iPhone will support third-party development via Safari. In the keynote, Jobs says that “The Way” to develop applications for the iPhone are with Web 2.0 / Ajax, distributed via standard websites.

This went over like a lead balloon. You can see it for yourself on the keynote address, starting at 1:13:52. The audience is dead silent. There is no applause, no enthusiasm as soon as they realize what they’re being sold. Even Jobs and Scott Forstall seem like they know how bad this ‘solution’ is.

There are two problems here. One is that no matter how many times Jobs said that these web apps behaved ‘just like native apps,’ it’s clear from the keynote that they don’t. Native apps don’t have a location bar pinned to the top of their window. Native apps don’t require you to click ‘Safari’ to launch them. Native apps don’t show a grey-white checkerboard where Safari hasn’t been able to re-render yet.

The other problem is distribution. Jobs played up the ‘distribution and updates are easy’ angle, since the applications are really running on your webserver. But as an application developer, I don’t want to be responsible for running the application. I don’t want to have to maintain a server that responds to web service calls. All I want to do is send the application to the user, possibly take some of their money, and never hear from them again (unless there’s a problem).

Introducing the need to run a server-side application which renders HTML for the iPhone is a huge, huge problem. I’ve done web applications before, and I’ve had to worry about whether or not my site can be reached, whether there’s a problem with the server, whether there are too many people trying to connect at once. It’s not very much fun.

I don’t have a problem with constraining iPhone applications such that their interface is rendered in HTML and their logic is implemented in Javascript — this is, after all, exactly how Dashboard widgets are implemented. But why the need to connect to the internet? Why not just provide widgets that use WebKit?

With WebKit + Javascript + Google’s Gears, you’d be able to make a nice widget for the iPhone, completely local, with its own data store. Slap it into a bundle, give it a nice icon, and let it sit in the home screen along with all of the other first class applications.

If it needs to get information from the internet, fine, but don’t require that. And don’t insult our intelligence by calling these ‘native apps’ when they clearly aren’t.