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June 25, 2003

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:

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).

Posted by distler at June 25, 2003 10:10 AM

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Re: Random WWDC Thoughts

I am amused, too: leaving out proven-to-be-useful features from Nextstep that had been in place 10 years ago, then re-introducing them with great Ooom-tata and celebrating the great innovation…

I am just waiting til they get Terminal Services back into place; and the final thing I am missing is a decent TeX previewer with hyperlinks capability, and with that I’d be fully happy (it seems that in Panther the pdf window object will support URL’s, so there is a good hope that this will trickle through to TeXShop et al).

CU at KITP, I guess !

Posted by: WL on June 27, 2003 3:16 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

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