Post WWDC 2007 Commentary

Today's WWDC keynote basically consisted of:

• EA Games making games for Macs again.
  
• id Games is also working on a project for the Mac called Tech 5.
  
• Huge Leopard Demo of New Features.
  
  
  
  • New Desktop, Stacks, new Sidebar, Search Other Macs, CoverFlow in Finder,
    
    
  • Leopard fully 64-bit
    
  • Core Animation
    
  • BootCamp
    
  • Widgets for Dashboard
    
  • New iChat
    
  • Time Machine
    
  • One Version: $129.
    
  
  
• Safari for Windows
  
• iPhone update - in a nutshell: June 29th, Server-side apps through iPhone's Safari browser.
  

As I mentioned before, the games announcement is not all that surprising. Partially this is because the Mac platform holds a large number of a specific niche of gamers -- the casual gamers. While the releases for EA are targeting hardcore gamers (okay, Harry Potter isn't really a hardcore game) , the 22 million Macs that are mostly gameless (save for WoW) present an enticing business opportunity.

I'm really looking forward to the new features in Leopard, especially the new Finder. The Apple Website has been reskinned with the new look for the UI. October seems so ridiculously far away.

Although I still keep a Windows machine around, it is highly unlikely that I would use Safari for Windows to do most of my surfing -- I've gotten too used to Firefox.

The non-news of an iPhone development kit is disappointing -- developers can basically write generic server-side web applications that are Safari compatible.

Overall, the keynote for WWDC was a bit underwhelming -- with Safari being the "surprise announcement", going head to head against both IE and Firefox is going to be challenging. (My webstats show 33% Firefox, 29% MSIE, 18% Mozilla, and just 1.3% Safari. It will be quite an uphill battle.