Apple WWDC 2005 Keynote Reaction

Paul Thurrott has written up his take on the keynote with his, as usual, unique view: Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus. Here is my take on the keynote. In general, I came away positive. Spotlight vs. WinFS. Suggesting that the bits Apple shipped yesterday where in some way a response to the PDC or any build of Longhorn is just insane. The kind of functionality Apple demonstrated yesterday with searching does not get built in the 8 months since PDC 2003, the first public talk about WinFS. Those bits hardly worked. My take so far, Apple's stuff works in their preview build, WinFS still doesn't fully work in any public preview build. Mac OS X. Man this is so easy to get correct, it's right on the slide in the keynote. Jobs said there are now 12 million Mac OS X users, 50% of the installed base. Here is some simple math, 2 x 12 is 24. SafariThis is completely subjective, but after running RSS Bandit on .NET for the last month, I have been thinking of building my own browser that unifies Bookmarks and RSS feeds right into a browser shell. Safari is also my favorite browser, I can't wait to get my hands on 2.0 with RSS. And the built in Spotlight search looks great. Core Image and Core Video. The demo in the keynote with a quick homegrown app called Funhouse on this functionality was hella good. As a developer, being able to apply quality motion effects and filters with it baked into the platform is very enticing. I have watched a bunch of stuff on Longhorn Aero and Avalon, I don't remember seeing mention of funtionality like this. Just because MS is going to draw the UI and do compositing with the GPU on your applications behalf is not the same as giving you filters and effects to use in your apps and doing all the hard work for you using the GPU, which is what Apple is doing. Dashboard I totally want this functionality. It's nice that the guys at Konfabulator have a similar implementation, but I am not paying $25 to get this, sorry. I wonder if there is some bad blood between Apple and the Konfabulator guy? That's no excuse, Apple should just dump some money on this guy from a PR standpoint. Automator. Can't wait to get my hands on this to see just how much I can automate with Visual Scripting. This is just about as close as anything I have seen to answering one of the big issues of CLI guys with GUIs, no way to make the output of one app the input of another without code or some intermediary like files. iChat. I love iChat. This functionality is amazing, 10 people audio conference and 3 + me video conferencing, and it even looks like we are all looking at each other. The really big deal is the H.264 codec. iChat with the iSight was already really good quality, this looks seriously better. My only complaint with iChat is the AOL only integration. I hope that's changing, the iChat icon lost the AOL buddy. It just speculation at this point, but I hope. Tiger. I can't wait to get my hands on this release. My only true disappoinment was no Xcode 2.0 demo yesterday.