Tuesday, June 19, 2007

WWDC 07

Well, I'm back from the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. If you happened to watch the keynote, you probably saw the big public announcements about the new Leopard features (well, 30% of the features were new, the other 70% were covered at last year's WWDC), Safari for Windows and that developers can write apps for iPhone just by formatting their web pages better and supporting Safari.

If that was all there was to WWDC, then it would have been a real yawnfest. Fortunately, there was more. The improvements in developer tools are significant with new features that make it significantly easier to build very cool looking and highly performant applications for MacOS X and those "last year" features of Mac OS X Leopard have evolved over the year and gotten more integrated. Quick Look has made itself quite visible in a number of the new features and promises to make browsing for information much more efficient.

The attendees of WWDC each got a development copy of Leopard to start working on and while it looks nice, and the new APIs pretty much work as promised, it is clear there is a bunch of work to do but not so much that they would miss their anticipated October ship date.

I installed my copy on my new MacBook Pro 17" with the high res screen. It is gorgeous! I particularly love the higher resolution though having more memory helps a ton with performance (here's hoping that Leopard's video driver support improve's in the coming months...).

I'm playing around with a new photo viewer application I started writing at WWDC. It is true what they say about Cocoa - it makes the common things easy and the rare things possible. Ramping up on any framework takes time but the consistency in Cocoa does make it much simpler to know how to use it once you grok a few key principles. Now if they would only take another great idea from Microsoft and improve their documentation to have great sample code with each API definition and they'd make it twice as easy to get going in Cocoa...

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