I hate to join in the chorus of “Me toos” but I was seriously disappointed in today’s keynote from Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. Honestly it was one of the most non-event keynotes I’ve ever witnessed.
Let’s start from the top.
First, Steve goes over soem old ground with Leopard material with a few new bits in there on the new finder (Now with Coverflow!), stacks, quick look and some new iChat features. Ok, that was to be expected, every developer going to WWDC knew they were getting Leopard so no big surprises that Steve was going ot unveil some more of the OS.
Next came the announcement that Safari was going Windows. My first response was, hunh? My second was, “Well, I guess that is cool.” My third was “Crap, yet another browser to test all my Web stuff on.” Finally I thought, “This has to be part of some bigger plan that Apple has and isn’t ready to unveil yet.”
Then came “One More Thing”, iPhone third-party support through, uh, the Web. Alright, I admit that part of me likes this idea, being able to design a Web app that will interact with the phones features is cool, but this can’t be the solution, no way. Here’s why.
- Offline mode – hello, if I’m on a plane or somewhere with crappy reception there goes the app I was just using
- EDGE sucks – yeah, it’s better than GPRS but not by much. Apparently Cingular (nee AT&T) is beefing up their network to 2.5G but it’s still gonna suck. I’ve been on AT&T’s network – dropped calls, spotty reception, etc. So, every user is going to have to wait for your app to load through the browser before they can use it.
- Two – Three steps to get to an app – now this is pure fiction right now as we don’t know if there’s going to be a way to store an app shortcut anywhere on the iPhone. Launch Safari, type in the address, probably login to said service (most of these are going to have to be secure in some way, it is your data)
- Full power – you just don’t get the full power of the iPhone’s OS through the Web browser. Can anyone say games?
Overall I was very unimpressed with this year’s keynote. I was seriously hoping for a .Mac update (geez does it ever need it, talk about the red-headed step-child of Apple). Hardware updates I can wait for, but I was hoping for some real zingers this time out and it fell flat in my opinion. Now, I’m just going to sit back and wait for Leopard, hopefully fairly soon though I’m going to grab a new Mac Mini and start helping out on this project.
