Utrecht, The Netherlands
Geneva, Switzerland
Madrid, Spain
Bayonne, France
Bordeaux, France
Montreal, Canada
Mexico City, Mexico
Attending WWDC gave me enough positive energy to start working harder on my current Cocoa project (Professional Crossword Designer), which allows to create all kind of different word puzzles. I have published current pictures of the application that show its current state. You can see them here.
I have just updated to my .Mac account some pictures that I took during WWDC two weeks ago. Enjoy! You can see them here.
Tonight Apple invited all the WWDC attendees to their headquarters in Cupertino. We had dinner in the central garden while listening to electronic music played by a quite decent DJ. During the event, many Apple engineers were available to answer any questions we may still have. The truth is that the answers I got from Apple engineers during the labs as well as during this party totally justified my trip to San Francisco. I may have to start saving for next year’s event. I hope to see you there!
As I wrote in a previous post, every time Apple updates its OS, it includes two kind of changes. A new OS (with new low level functionality which is mainly interesting for developers) and new utilities for the general Macintosh users. Inevitably it seems that for each new OS release there is some controversy around these new utilities.
Why does Apple add these utilities? Well, that is easy, to convince end-users to move to the new version of the OS. Without these utilities, upgrade cycles would be much longer and that is bad both for Apple and third-party developers alike who need to support their apps on multiple OS versions which is costly and slows the adoption of new technologies available only on the most recent releases of the OS.
Should third-party developers be afraid of Apple (or Microsoft for that matter)? Sure. Everyone must be concerned by competition from the big guys. But that shouldn’t be such a big concern either. It is just a matter of carefully choosing what you are going to develop.
Suppose that now that Apple has unveiled Core Animation you decide to use it to create a 2D animation product. Well, that doesn’t seem like a good idea. Since most f the value is provided by the API, it is easy for any company to create something similar to your application. On the other hand if you plan to create a different kind of application that uses Core Animation o more easily display the information to the user, you should feel safe. Basically what I recommend is not to stay in the middle of a freeway for a truck to hit you.
Very long ago, the first releases of GS/OS did not support “dead keys”. Therefore, if you had an American keyboard it was very difficult to write letters in French since you had no access to accentuated vowels (you had to switch the keyboard layout to AZERTY). Since I could not wait for Apple to solve this problem, I wrote a NDA (New Desk Accessory) that did the trick. In this case I did not sell the product, instead published it on a couple of BBS and gave it away for free. Unsurprisingly, Apple later updated the OS and fixed the issue. My NDA was useless. Was I mad? No. Was I surprised? No.
It is not my intention to defend Apple on every issue, but we must remain calm. Many of us would love Apple to include some type of limited (or full-fledge) image editing software with the OS. Why? Because Apple normally produces great software. Sure, there are third-party options, but I would like to get one from Apple. Would this be bad for Adobe or others? Probably. However, as a consumer I do not care. I want the best software for my Mac. If Apple releases a product that is not good enough for my needs, such as iWeb, well I will not use it and buy from someone else. It is called competition.
So, the messages for developers are clear. If you want to compete for a large market, you need to invest a lot in differentiating yourself and create a high quality product. This is not the case for niche markets.
It turns out that there is a new exciting API in Leopard that we can talk about without infringing the NDA. It is called the Core Text API and as its name implies is used to display text. From what I saw at todays session, adding support for multiple columns in any text editor or placing text in irregular shapes is now fairly trivial. Unlike Core Animation, most applications should benefit from Core Text and it shows that Apple is not forgetting traditional developers who focus on “normal” tasks. Of course Apple should be one of the prime beneficiaries of this new API since it opens a large array of new possibilities for both Pages and Keynote 08.
It is amazing to see how Apple is advancing on all fronts. Leopard is really going to be Vista 2.0.
Yesterday I attended a session on Core Animation. You would not believe what you can do with this new API. The demos were just amazing and wooed the audience. Most importantly for the developers, the API seems really simple to use, which means that soon after Leopard is released you should start to see many applications using it. This may become a problem.
While I can see many legitimate uses if the API to create screen savers and multimedia applications such as Front Row, I am scared that developers will start using 2D animations everywhere. After all, Apple may be obsessed with multimedia but most of the work we all do daily still revolves around, word processing, e-mail and web-browsing. I really think that Apple needs to update quickly the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) if they want to avoid losing the GUI consistency that we all Mac users love.
Take for example Time Machine. It is an application that runs on its own animated background, with no menu bar. Even though I understand why you wouldn’t want to interact with other applications while restoring files, this could become a dangerous precedent.
So, while Core Animation is amazing all developers should remember Spider-Man, With great power comes great responsibility.
Today’s sessions are over. I spent most of the day learning about technologies that are not really new, such as Core Data but that should help me with my current projects. As I was learning more about the value of current and future Cocoa APIs I couldn’t help thinking if Apple was moving in the right direction.
It seems to me that most analysts think that with the venue of the Internet, OSes are doomed. Sun was probably the first company to suggest that, pushing for light clients, really another name for an appliance that can only run a browser. After seeing initial interest in the concept many started doubting that this vision would ever become a reality because HTML limitations were hindering efforts to move complex client-server applications to the new model. However, new technologies such as CSS are helping the new Web 2.0 applications become more competitive and take on new challenges, which means that once again, talks of the demise of the PC are being heard loud and clear.
It seems to me that Microsoft has accepted that ultimately Windows will become a commodity on the desktop and is working exclusively on providing a solution to the current problems faced by its customers without even trying to set a vision for the role of desktop computers in the future. Apple seems to be moving on a different path. They want PCs to be able to perform tasks so complicated for the browser and so appealing to the users that both will have to coexist for many years to come.
The question is not who is right or who is wrong, the question is will Apple with its small market share be able to influence the whole industry to adopt this new vision. Apple does not seem to be interested in working with other technology heavy weights to promote this vision. That is logical since most of these companies work closely with Microsoft, its main rival. But in order to survive they will need to quickly convince a larger number of consumers that the PC offers value beyond the browser. That is why iLife and iWork are strategic, but they will need many more applications like those. Visually rich apps will be key. That is why technologies such as Core Animation are so important to Apple.
I cannot talk about the contents of these sessions as they are confidential. I can only say that the contents were very informative and everyone seemed pleased. My strongest fear was that most improvements to Leopard were only skin deep but fortunately it doesn’t seem to be so.
What is clear to me though is that the improvements have not been across the board in a uniform way. Some APIs are advancing really quickly while others remain almost stagnant. It seems that Apple has a very clear idea of what they need for their own applications and that these new APIs are driven by these needs. External developers are invited to use those APIs but do not really drive the requirements. Apple may be right, they may know better, but I would love to have a better feedback process at my disposal that would return some say to the Macintosh programer community.
Well, I finally know what it feels to attend a Steves Jobs keynote. I think that we all enjoyed seeing him throw poisoned attacks at Microsoft. However, Apple seems a little defensive by not disclosing the full feature set of Leopard. Such caution seems understandable. It is probably better to keep some secrets until Vista is released so that Microsoft cannot copy those features until their next Windows release, sometime in 2011. As a teaser, the demonstration worked well. I feel however that Apple will have to add more to OS X to make the upgrading process really interesting. As some developers told me, Core Animation seems interesting but most of us haven’t even started doing interesting things with Quartz composer…
What really impressed a lot of developers, though were the hardware announcements. You hace to see the new Mac Pro line. They are simply amazing. Swapping or adding a disk or adding memory is so easy that you simply cannot imagine why not everyone has computers like this one. It will be hard to beat Apple on serviceability.
Time to go, I have to attend a session on development tools..
After waiting in line for over an hour, i finally made it into Mocone West. One hour later we were allowed to the second floor. Now everyone is sitting on the ground, playing with their macs, browsing the internet and discussing rumors while waiting for the keynote.