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Apple Watch: WWDC Analysis
Wednesday, 2007 June 13 - 12:04 am
Thoughts on Apple's announcements.

Since other web sites have all the details about the facts of WWDC, I won't go through them all. But I do want to hit on some points, and what they imply for the future.

Gaming. Two gaming announcements were made. First, Electronic Arts is bringing games to the Mac... sort of. They're using TransGaming's "Cider" product, which creates Windows-compatible "wrappers" for Direct3D, DirectSound, etc. around Apple's native programming interfaces. This allows Windows games to be quickly ported to Mac. But there are two major downsides: one, only Intel Macs will be able to run games built on this technology, and two, there's some performance penalties associated with this conversion. It's certainly not as bad as running in emulation, but hard-core gamers will certainly highlight this as an issue.

I think that we should highlight this as the beginning of the end for PowerPC Macs. Apple seems pretty unapologetic about leaving PowerPC owners out of this advancement, and I think that signals a new trend.

There was one other interesting announcement... legendary game developer John Carmack debuted id's new id Tech 5 game engine on the Mac. id is saying that many of their developers are Mac converts, and that may spell equal status for the Mac for future id games. However, I wouldn't be surprised if those games were also Intel-only.

Finder. As I've long predicted, Apple introduced an iTunes-like Finder interface. However, it's missing a crucial element: metadata. For this kind of interface to be truly useful to me, I need to be able to tag files with keywords, so that I can organize them the way I want. Hopefully that will be a future enhancement, or a third-party addition.

But then again, with Apple's new Quick Look functionality and the Cover Flow interface, users will get accustomed to finding files by flipping through them, instead of searching for keywords. It'll be a paradigm shift, but one that novice users will find very intuitive. Expect Windows users to clamor for a Quick Look equivalent... like Exposé, it's one of those "wow" technologies that Apple seems to get right.

ZFS? First we get Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz saying Leopard will have ZFS. Then Apple says they won't have it. Then Apple backtracks and says they'll have limited, command-line based, read-only access to ZFS.

Two things here: One, I think it's entirely possible that ZFS announcements were yanked out of the WWDC at the last minute, as punishment for leaking information prior to Steve Jobs' address. But two, it's very likely that ZFS will eventually be a fully supported file system, and maybe the default; putting read-only support in now provides a migration path.

Safari. The surprise "one more thing" announcement was that the Safari web browser is being released for Windows. Some people are puzzling over this one... I mean, why put out another browser? Apple's speed claims notwithstanding, there's not very much demand for a new Windows browser out there.

But it makes sense if you consider the other Safari-related announcement: Apple's official strategy for developing iPhone applications is to make Web 2.0 (AJAX) applications that run in Safari. Note that there are (currently) no other ways to develop applications for the iPhone, and there are no browsers other than Safari on the iPhone. So now, web developers will be greatly motivated to make their stuff Safari-friendly... and suddenly, Apple has defined the defacto standard for the mobile Internet. Remember that there aren't many mobile devices out there that give users a "real" Internet experience. Now Apple is poised to do it, and they're looking to write the rules of the game by making everybody use Safari.

Goodbye, Internet Explorer and your ActiveX extensions. The iPhone and Safari have just become Apple's weapons against Microsoft's attempts to control the Internet, just as iPod and iTunes became Apple's weapon against Windows Media.

This just might be huge.
Permalink  1 Comment   Bookmark and Share
Posted by Ken in: techwatch

Comments

Comment #1 from JohnC (Guest)
2007 Jun 14 - 3:56 pm : #
I use Pathfinder as Finder replacement. I wonder if I will use it when Leopard comes out?

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