Nielsthooft.com

Notes About Apple’s WWDC Keynote Speech

* It’s always hard to manage expectations with an event like this. Nintendo’s press conferences and Steve Jobs’s keynotes–and especially the many rumours surrounding them–always succeed in raising my hopes too much.
* Today, I was right when I said there probably wouldn’t be any aluminum iMacs. After all, it was a given that it would be all about the new version of OS X, Leopard. However, the rumours about .Mac and Google integrating were literally everywhere. I’m afraid that’s where I went wrong.
* So I guess I’m a little disappointed. (Read the full transcript “at Engadget”:http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/11/steve-jobs-live-from-wwdc-2007/.) Even though the “sparse few truly new bits”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ that Jobs announced are the parts I really care about: the design and functionality of the desktop, the Finder and the overall UI. I love the reflection on the dock and the document previews on icons. I also dig the consistent look. However, what’s up with the transparent menu bar? Did they want to make it look more like Windows Vista?
* This one is a little weird: Apple announced “a Windows version of Safari”:http://www.apple.com/safari/, its native web browser. Of which a beta is available today. However, Safari is still far from perfect and it doesn’t really have any features that Firefox doesn’t match. A test run by a Windows friend of mine (yes, I have a few), shows a lot of bugs in simple stuff like rendering links. It might be his machine, but still, that doesn’t bode well. I also hope they won’t shove Safari for Windows down iPod users’ throats all too rudely…
* The same Safari beta is also available for OS X (sans the new UI), which, it must be said, seems to be much-improved: it’s snappier, custom buttons are finally rendered correctly, text fields are resizable (very useful!) and the in-site search looks sweet and usable.
* What also makes me happy is that Apple used the opportunity to redesign “its website”:http://www.apple.com. It is now wider, and the bar at the top has been simplified and made to look more like Leopard. I love the new style.