Musings

Random WWDC Thoughts

Watched Steve’s WWDC Keynote and, after the RDF wore off a bit, here are my thoughts:

1. The G5 is a great relief. Thanks to IBM, Apple finally has a next-generation 64bit CPU to replace the aging G4 (without a hint of irony, I am writing this post on a G3-based iBook). And they’ve built a kick-ass system around it. What surprised me was the absence of a rack-mount version. They badly need this for the XServe II.
2. NextStep redux. After all these years, the “FAX” button in the Print dialog box finally makes its triumphant reappearance. More amusing still, was the malarky surrounding the new Finder (“User-centric,” not “Computer-centric!”). I should reserve judgement until I can see 10.3 in action, but from the screen shots, it’s clear that the left-most column of the new Finder is a born-again version of the Shelf. Now, the Jaguar implementation of the same idea (as a toolbar) is next-to-useless, so this must surely be an improvement. But, since I was never much-enamored of Workspace.app (the NeXT name for the Finder), I am somewhat underwhelmed.
3. iChat AV and the new iSight camera look really cool. I don’t do IM, but ad-hoc video-conferencing, now that’s a bandwidth killer I could get into.
4. Otherwise, Pather (MacOSX 10.3) looks to be chock full of good features:
   • Fast User Switching (I know XP has it first, but this is a slick implementation and the rest of the OS doesn’t suck.)
   • On-the-fly directory encryption
   • IPSec, FreeBSD 5.0, X11,…

They just keep churning out new features while the “rest” of the world waits patiently for Longhorn (which prompts one of the more amusing clips in the Keynote).