Monday, June 28, 2004

WWDC 2004

Innovation never sleeps. The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is the most important week of the year for developers, IT professionals, and digital media authors. Apple CEO Steve Jobs will kick off this year’s conference with a keynote that includes a preview of “Tiger,” the next release of Mac OS X — Apple’s critically acclaimed operating system. Come to WWDC 2004 to preview this new release and discover how Mac OS X will fuel the next generation of developer innovation.

Arghh. My major disappointment with leaving San Francisco is now I have to make plans to attend either Mac World Expo or the Wordwide Developers Conference (WWDC). I originally had plans to go to WWDC 2004, a colleague had free tickets, and I very much wanted access to the preview of Mac OS X Tiger. But I needed to move before the end of the month so the free ticket went to some other lucky bloke. (Sigh).

So now I’m reduced to watching the MacRumors site update ever three minutes with news about WWDC and Steve Job’s keynote. Why Apple didn’t offer a live stream I’m not certain. I guess it’s better than nothing.

So far the rumors regarding new flat panel displays are true. There’s a completely new 23” Apple Cinema Display, done in single piece aluminium. Apple also introduced a 30” display (that’s massive, larger than my TV). The display has 4.1 million pixels. Let me repeat that 4.1 million pixels. Wow!  Pictures will be available later today, so I’ll come back and link.

Update: 1:58PM Cinema Display Pictures

12:45PM
What’s this? I hear that Tiger won’t ship until early 2005 (that most likely means MacWorld Expo 2005).  That sucks!  I’ve been thinking I need a new OS, especially with my current wireless problems. I really don’t want to have to rebuild my OS. What can I say, doctor heal thyself.  I’m lazy, and have no desire to troubleshoot my own machine. Typically my machine cooperate with me, in fact they collude with me in this endeavor. But noo, now they’re rebelling. Probably against some horrid slight that I inadvertently caused, but I didn’t mean it. I swear.

Anyway, maybe Apple will beat its predictions. I could hold-off till say September or so without getting a new OS or repairing my current. But anything longer than that and I’m going to have to just break down, and get to combing through my massive amount of preferences.

1:05PM
Okay. MacRumors.com coverage of the WWDC was starting to irritate me. The site updates every three minutes, you’d think that be enough time for them to type a full paragraph, but noo… So anyway, it’s now down to the dualing WWDC coverage. I have MacRumors.com loaded in one tab, and MacCentral in another. I got to say MacCentral is dicing MacRumors in terms of depth. But the three minute auto-update is also compelling for MacRumors.

New version of Safari in Tiger. This Safari (2.0?) will support RSS feeds--site syndication--and a RSS search. I’m assuming something akin to Feedster.com.  Not that that’s not cool and all, but I’d be more impressed if they added a search to the bookmarks function. Once you have over a couple hundred bookmarks, even filing them in folders isn’t enough to make finding them quick. A search function would go a long way here. Update Note: Just relinked to the new Tiger Safari page. Bookmark searching is included, so now I’m much more excited about this feature

1:30PM
Cool, new functionality for iChat AV. Video-conferencing with multiple people. Up to 10 people if your just using audio conferencing, up to 3 people if your doing video-conferencing. Very exciting. Update: New iChat will take advantage of H.264/AVC (Advance Video Codec with High Density capabilities). Meaning, it will have even better image quality than it does now. Wow!  I need more friends with iSight. I so rarely get to use it despite my nifty iSight camera.

Of course there’s some news for the , “I’m not so sure” category as well. The new dashboard for widgets, sounds like it will either work with Konfabulator widgets or squash them. Here’s hoping it works with them. Konfabulator rocks, and I’d hate to see it go the way of Watson. Which is not to say that it would die, just become less relevant to users. I love my Konfabulator widgets. Personal favorites include Weather, Desktop Flipper, miniCalendar, and then RSS News which I’ve customized to bring me news from the New York Times, MacDailyNews, and Slashdot every half an hour.

1:50PM
Well, I believe it’s all over. I’m going to go back and see if I can find direct images and links to things for people. I’m definitely interested in Tiger. Would also love to find some sugar mommy to buy the 30” Cinema HD Flat Display, and a top of the line G5 system to run it with it (smiles). Volunteers.  I’d be grateful.

2:15PM
Ughh!  How’d I’d leave out Spotlight and Automator. My brain, its addling. So Spotlight is the new search engine that takes advantage of the new search technologies added to Mac OS X Tiger. It finds documents, email messages, addresses, web links, etc. Anything stored on your computer. It’s also extensible so vendors can build plugins to integrate their applications. The new metadata search engine seems very, very cool. It will also allow for “smart” folders, mailboxes, and address groups to be created. This means just like in iTunes where you can build “Smart Playlist"--playlist that are maintained by the system to meet criteria you specify, you’ll be able to do the same with folders, mail, and other Apple applications.  Finally!!!

Update: 2:35PM Spotlight Image

Automator seems like its an easy to use front end for basic AppleScript steps, so that more users can take advantage of automating repetitive jobs. This can only be good?? I hope. Lord knows, AppleScript trips me up enough that I don’t use it nearly as much as I’d like. But I do love automating things. You should she the growing list of things scheduled in iCal to run weekly, monthly, etc., using the not so well documented, “Open File” feature under alarms. This step can be used to open and run scripts at specific times. 

For example, I have a FileMaker report that a client needs run monthly. It’s a pretty long report to run, but the steps are scripted in Filemaker so its pretty much just waiting for it to complete. With iCal and a FileMaker droplet, I schedule the report to start running at 4am, added a few extra steps (print, create PDF, attach PDF, and email report to client), and once a month, a priorly 2hr task is just handled. Yeah for automation. So I’m excited to see Automator.

Footnotes

Other Details

Categories: Technology •
Viewed: 601
Comments: 0
Permalink: http://www.wide-eyed.org/main/article/apple_wwdc_2004/

Comments

Sorry, no comments right now; but you could be the first.