Chuqui 3.0: my first thoughts on today’s WWDC keynotes

Chuqui 3.0: my first thoughts on today’s WWDC keynotes:

As to the details; I found it to be a good, interesting keynote, one that lived up to what Apple promised, but (of course), not the hype and the rumors and all of that crap.

Well, WWDC is done. I wasn’t there (no surprise), but what I’m hearing is that most people are going home mostly happy.

Thinking about the keynote, and reading the feedback and complaints, I tend to fall a bit further into the middle than I did in my initial post.

As to leopard: well, hell: gimme. I want. I’m impressed. The keynote on Leopard wasn’t a jaw-to-the-floor keynote, but Leopard itself seems to be a great move forward. Part of the problem with the WWDC keynote is expectations — not just from the rumor and hype mills, but if you think back to when Steve first announced Leopard, he amde a fairly big deal about stuff that he wasn’t going to talk about until later. Well, it’s now later, and, well, those missing huge things are the finder improvements, especially stacks. Not exactly trivial improvements, but, well, Steve’s initial enthusiasm set an expectation that wasn’t met, at least for me. Makes me wonder if something didn’t make the cut or wasn’t ready, and so got held back. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Well, something OTHER than ZFS, which it’s pretty clear to me got whacked from the keynote by the leak. you could even see the spin going during the week, from “ZFS? Never heard of it. Not here. not now, not ever” to “well, yeah, it is in the release, and we are going to use it, but it’s no big deal”. So ZFS got punished for the leak, but really, only by being left out of the keynote. Ask ATI about how it felt — this isn’t the first time a leak caused something to be made a non-entity for a while…

ZFS, however, is only on temporary suspension, not shipped off to Siberia. It’s a neat technology, so I expect Apple will put it on parole and put it back to work.

Now, on the iPhone. I sympathize with those that want more; I also sympathize with Apple on taking this one with some patience. Let’s not forget that the iPhone hasn’t shipped, and is already more “open” to develoeprs than the iPod is to date.

there are some significant issues here. One is simple: has Apple had the time to build SDK’s and developer tools and docs? given they admit to having delayed Leopard to get the iPhone out the door, it seems to me they’ve been a bit busy. Add to that Apple’s tendency towards intra-group secrecy, and they likely didn’t have a team in place to build developer tools (for public consumption, at least) prior to announce — to minimize risk of leaks. It takes time and energy, and both ahve been very limited here. I’m actually surprised they got the Safari stuff ready for prime time this quickly.

Beyond that, the more you open up the device, they harder it gets to innovate the device down the road. Lots of folks are screaming they want for iPhone what they have for their Treo — but most people agree PalmOS is seriously long in the tooth and way behind in technology (and I, as a former Palm devotee, voted with my wallet in that election in January). You have to be careful making things too open or too hackable until the device is well understood and somewhat mature, or Apple runs the risk of making it impossible to take the device where it wants to go, unless it wants to screw over its developers (again). Kind of a no-win situation for Apple, and I think it’s made the conservative choice. it’s always easier to make something more open, very hard to make it less.

On the other side of that equation is Danger and their hiptops. Early on, T-mobile kept the device completely closed — and to some degree, lost much of the potential market to palm, in the name of protecting its walled gardens and network. Not a good choice, IMHO. Had lots of potential and could have been a big winner early on, and wasn’t.

What Apple has to find — in a completely unknown market and environment with an untried and unproven device — is a middle ground that allows Apple to innovate and developers to build for it, while not screwing over either side. So I’ll side with Apple here, tell you all to be patient, and see what happens.

To me, the whole idea of serious app-level development for the iPhone is NEXT YEAR’s WWDC, not this one. I’ll trust Apple on this one, at least for now.

Me, I can’t wait to get my hands on Leopard. ’nuff said.

You might also want to read:

1. some thoughts and stats on chuqui.com Over the last couple of days I’ve been tweaking the editorial content on the site, refining some of it and changing the focus in a...
2. my first thoughts on today’s WWDC keynotes Weird, trivial thought: when Steve gave his keynote at Macworld, it seemed — weird — to not be in the middle of the hype and...
3. Today is my last day at Apple Today is my last day as an Apple employee. I’ve been trying to track down and say “thanks” to as many of the folks I’ve...
4. fraserspeirs: WWDC, those “Top Secret” features and why your NDA observance matters to me fraserspeirs: WWDC, those “Top Secret” features and why your NDA observance matters to me: but it was still irritating to be told that there is...
5. survived WWDC Sorry for the relative quiet. The good news is, I survived the product launch of the Mac Pro that happened at WWDC. The bad news...