Apple WWDC day 1

Steve Jobs showed some cool new features in Tiger, the next version of Mac OS X, which will ship "first half 2005". Looks like there's going to be some very useful system-wide searching stuff, Apple style. It's called Spotlight. I know that Microsoft has been farting around with search in Longhorn for years, but it looks like Apple will ship first.

The new displays are very pretty, but I'm in love with laptop computers, which I can take anywhere in the house (or out), so I'm not likely to buy one.

RSS in Safari is a great idea. I'm glad I suggested it to them last year ;-) .

Dashboard is interesting. It looks like a complete ripoff of Konfabulator, right down to the word "widgets". Shame, Apple. At least buy the guy's technology.

Four-person video chat in iChat looks very cool, as does Automator, opening up sync and .Mac, and Core Image.

The Microsoft-baiting banners (e.g. "Introducing Longhorn", "Redmond, start your photocopiers") are silly. Microsoft isn't shipping these features, but neither is Apple, until next year. So I guess it's "Our vaporware is less vaporous than your vaporware".

Best fun, as always: seeing old friends.

Comments

[markd2]

I presume Automator is based on applescript. Is that a correct assumption?

[Juan de Dios Santander Vela]

Why buy Konfabulator technology when you're not going to use it? Dashboard widgets are HTML+CSS2+JavaScript, not a custom XML description of a layout plus JavaScript for a custom engine.

And I agree very much with the comments by John Grubber in Daring Fireball at http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator

[remove .at and .dot from my address]

[Beth]

Hey Scott: I used to work with you at Apple years ago. Beth Christofferson is my name :) How are you?