- Well, it’s the first day of WWDC, and as usual, Steve’s keynote will lead things off. I’ve got a few minutes (even after being one of the last people to enter the hall) of waiting before it starts, so I’ll try and catch you up with my doings.
- Yesterday was a travel day, starting in Detroit, catching a 12:30pm flight (which was delayed at least a half-hour) with a bunch of other people who were going from MacHack to WWDC. We weren’t grouped together on the plane, but there was at least one ad-hoc airport network that was set up on the plane, complete with a chat. Lisa, Chris and I took the BART from SFO into the city, and it was surprisingly smooth. $4.70 gets you from the airport to downtown, which is quite a deal when you consider that the alternatives are a $40 cab-ride or a $15-$20 shuttle bus.
- I checked into the Powell, then wandered over to Moscone West to register (and get the bag of conference materials that Apple distributes. After dinner wiht a couple other guys, it was back to the hotel for sleep.
- Steve’s on, and here goes the keynote. 3800 in attendance. 300k registered apple developers. No turtleneck, not even a mock. Just a crew-neck black t-shirt. 1M iPods, 8 weeks on the iMusic store, and 5M songs sold. Safari goes 1.0 today, and will be available on the web today. Also WebCore (Safari) SDK.
- Panther (10.3) previews today. It will ship sometime this year. Grey look (like the T-Shirt for the conference) on the logo. Finder 10.3 has a new setup. Left column that looks like the start menu in windows. Labels are finally back (no surprise there), but they only seem to apply to the name of the doc.. There’s also a special button that replaces contextual menus, since people couldn’t find them. It’s also brushed-metal look. There’s a faster search (but what cost in indexing?)
- iDisk is now enhanced to auto-sync when you’ve got networks. Local folder that mirrors and auto-syncs in the background.
- Exposé: Layer manager on steroids? Way to deal with lot of apps open and be able to find the window you’re actually looking for. Lets you assign any key on keyboard (or screen-corner) that shrinks all the windows so they’ll tile on your screen and you can then select one to bring it to the front. Pretty cool. Also lets you drag’n’drop from desktop into an application. Pretty darned cool.
- FileVault encrypts/decrypts everything in home directory. What about external disks?
- Mail improved. Faster, HTML, etc., mostly the kind of things you thought you shoujld have. Spiffy address-handling. There’s a ner threaded browsing mode, too, which happens right in the subject-view. No word on how well the threading actually works, but I suspect it’s pretty-good.
- Fax-printing built into the OS
- Pixlet - new Codec - film-grade compression, Pixar request. Wavelet technology. No inter-frame compression, so you can edit at any point in the stream. Not only full high-def, but also HD/2 (half-high-def), which you can decompress live on a 1GHz G4 (or better).
- preview’s been improved, faster render/search. Also can now do live PS->PDF conversion, which is cool.
- FontBook - suitcase for MacOS X? Installation easier, at least, as are previews. Searching on substrings of names. Built-in to panther. Steph’ll like that, but no word on removal.
- iChat - adds audio and video-conferencing. "Video-conferencing for the rest of us." Also iSight camera - 30fps VGA video@24bps. AF, AE, f/2.8, firewire camera. Small enough to clip to screen on powerbook. Set up to be mounted on top of screen. $149. Available today. All developers at the conference get one free.
- New developer tools (Xcode). Speed improvements. GCC 3.3-based. Only twice as long to build as CodeWarrior. Also supports distributed builds, and Steve’s marketing numbers suggest it scales relatively well. Also, zero-link - that is, you only link the objects that are needed to launch. Predictive compile. It starts compiling before you hit "Save", which means that compile times are cut further, and you can fix, recompile, relaunch more quickly, because they’re using mach-o and dyld to change the object code in-place, and continue running without re-compile relaunch cycle.
- Okay, here’s the one-more-thing. Chip = 970. Steve is carefully not mantioning Moto, but just IBM. G5 chip - 64-bit processor. Runs existing code just fine (natch). 2GHz CPU. 1GHZ front-side bus. Full SMP. System has custom ASIC designed by Apple. Fabbed by IBM. It controls I/O. 8Gb of bandwidth, and you can put in two of them, to get 16Gb of bandwidth. Memory limits to 6.4Gb. New graphics bus, to double bandwidth there. Slops. 133MHz PCI-X (one, two @100). Serial ATA drives, independent interfaces. USB 2 on there, analog i/o, too. Product: dual processor, 8GB RAM (so you don’t have to page!) 4x Superdrive, Radeon 9600 pro in high-end-model. New case. all-aluminum. Oh my christ, look at the heat sinks. Four thermal zones. New cooling system, 9 fans, independently controlled. 35dBA at normal room-temp. "twice as quiet" as G4. 3 models - $2k, $2.4k, $3k - 2x2.0GHz, .5GRAM - pretty decent system at the $3k point. Will ship in August. 3GHz processors within 12 months.
- I know that’s not horribly organized or coherent, but I’m not firing on all cylinders at the moment. Not very linky, either, but maybe there’s something people will find useful in there.