Thursday July 01, 2004
Apple WWDC round up
With all of the excitement of JavaOne, I haven't had time to comment on the Apple WWDC announcements. I don't have too much to say that hasn't been said already though.
- The new displays are great. I even think that $3,300 is a perfectly reasonably price point for a 30" LCD monitor. That kind of monitor is a long term investment. The downside of the monitor is the dual-DVI requirement which requires the bleeding edge graphics card. I can't buy a monitor that won't work with my laptop. I'll probably order one of the 20" Apple monitors when I save up the cash for a new PowerBook.
- Dashboard was handled pretty poorly. For those who don't know the whole ugly saga, Apple annouced a new OS feature called Dashboard which is a pretty blatant rip-off of a shareware app called Konfabulator. Apple's version is different enough (and improved enough) that there probably aren't any legal issues. But the way that Apple handled it is going to have a bad effect on their developer community. This effectively will be a death blow to one of their most innovative ISVs, which will discourage others from innovating. Apple should have offered to acquire Konfabulator's technology. Or at least made some sort of gesture. I hope Apple does the right thing here in order to get back some developer goodwill. Developers are the heart of any platform.
- Otherwise, OS X 10.4 looks innovative but not worth the $129 upgrade price. Maybe I'll wait until Tiger ships before I upgrade my laptop. That way I'll get Tiger for "free". (It's hard to think of a >$2000 laptop as "free".)
- Multi-platform (including Java) Rendevous. Cool. Hopefully developers will do interesting things with this. It would be cool to see SubEthaEdit interoperate with Windows and Linux equivalents. It would also be nice to autodiscover printers and other network devices on non-Apple networks.
Update/clarification: By the way, I do think that Apple's Dashboard will be a great application and will probably have some significant improvements over Konfabulator. This article talks a lot about the technical issues involved. It's not what they did that bugs me. It's how they did it at a time when Apple needs to be cultivating developers.
(2004-07-01 13:22:37.0)
Permalink
Posted by Flip on July 01, 2004 at 02:27 PM PDT #