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.

Speaking of Seizures

The new London 2012 Olympics promotional video is guaranteed¹ to send epileptics into seizure.

¹ Not an actual guarantee.

Mapping The Comical World

Originally aired in 2004, The Simpson’s episode “The Ziff Who Came To Dinner” contains as its couch gag a riff on Charles Eames’ seminal “Powers Of Ten.” You can see a low-quality version on YouTube.

As a result, one can clearly see the layout of the Springfield that the Simpsons live in, and the relative locations of a few of the more obvious buildings:

Of course, it could be argued that a gag in the opening sequence isn’t really canon. The Simpsons has also always been self-contradictory, so any map is virtually guaranteed to be wrong.

See also: the semi-official Map Of Springfield and the live-action Simpsons intro.

Ell Oh Ell

I’ve been sort of steadfastly ignoring the whole lolcats meme — it’s not in my nature to be on the hip end of things — but it’s getting to be mainstream and overdone, so it’s starting to be fair game.

Case in point, lolcode — a toy scripting language with lolcats-inspired grammar:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI, WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

May God have mercy on our souls.

Indeed, But In A Similar Fashion

A NY Times article by John Markoff on the iPhone:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/technology/12apple.html

The article itself is interesting because it contains a quote from Jobs about third-party applications on the iPhone:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them. That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

So it might be the case that third-party software has to go through Apple QA to make sure that the experience is seamless. That’s ok with me, even if the Cingular issue is still a deal-breaker.

What sticks out the most about this article, though, is the writing. There are three sentences that begin with ‘Indeed,’ three that begin with ‘But’ and three uses of the phrase ‘in a similar fashion.’ The writing feels disjointed in other places, too.

Maybe this is the status quo for the NY Times and I just haven’t been paying that much attention.

Microsoft's Sticky Fingers

Microsoft badly copies an icon from Apple; John Gruber catches it.

Gruber concludes:

GIF? In 2006?

Microsoft still has to support its huge installed base of IE 6.x and below, none of which properly support PNG.

Burning CDs. No, really.

Disco is a soon-to-be-released application that burns CDs. When it’s writing to the disc, smoke comes out of the top of its window.

Cute.

Two DreamApps that need to see the light of day.

There is a contest going on right now called MyDreamApp, in the spirit of American Idol. The concept is that 24 people come up with cool ideas for applications, and every week they get voted on and a few get eliminated. When the contest is over, the three ‘best’ applications will remain, and they will be developed by a team of four and then actually be published as shareware (with royalties being paid to the contest winners).

The original entries range from the ridiculously complicated (such as Minerva, which would really require heavy AI in order to successfully pull off) to the cute (PuppetConstructor), to the YALOA (iStyleIt, iGotPets).

It’s down to just nine applications now, and I want some of them to be developed. Because I want to use them. I want to use them right now.

I encourage you to go read through the ideas. These two in particular stand out for me, and I’m hoping they’ll win:

Hijack is a desktop interface for internet forums. I don’t keep up with as many forums as I used to, partially because it’s annoying to have to visit every site and remember all of my logins. Putting them all in one place, with one unified interface, is genius. I want to start using this two years ago.

Whistler is one of those ‘why didn’t I think of that’ sorts of applications. I can’t count the number of times I’ve made up a neat tune in my head and lost it while trying to translate it to notes on a piano. An application that will automagically do it for me is worth $25 easy.

My prediction is that Cookbook, Hijack, and Atmosphere are going to take the prizes. I’m really hoping that someone pulls Whistler out of their hat, though.

ChaChing!

ChaChing! is a slick money-management application for OSX. I noticed a spelling error on one of the screenshots, pointed it out, and it was fixed minutes later. Now that’s customer service!

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Buster Was Erik

Erik Benson has changed his name to Buster McLeod. Buster Butterfield McLeod, to be exact.

I haven’t spoken to him in like four years, but his number is still in my cell phone, and now it’s under McLeod.