Jun 28
WWDC announcements
2004 at 10.55 am posted by Veerle Pieters
There were 3500 registered developers at the WWSC, a 17% increase over last year. At last the new displays are here! I’ve been waiting for them almost 6 months and now I’m in the market for such a 30 inch beauty. There are 3 new displays: 20, 23 and 30 inch. The 20 inch has a resolution of 1680x1050 and a DVI Interface. The middle one (23 inch) has a resolution of 1920x1200 and also a DVI Interface. The big one has a mind-blowing resolution of 2560x1600! and has a DualLink DVI Interface and will cost 3299 Dollars. The 30 inch will need a special video card which costs 599 dollar.
The part most you have been waiting for, is talk about Tiger. Tiger will ship in 1st half of 2005 and will have over 150 new features. Some of them are just groundbreaking such as Spotlight, an advanced new search method. Email messages, contacts and calendars, together with files and folders, it all shows up in your Spotlight results. You can ask stuff like “find my keynote presentation by Veerle which I opened last week”.
Other features also include Unix 64-bit and better SMB support. Also to be added in Tiger is support for H.264/AVC, the next generation MPEG4. It will have 4 times the resolution at the same data rate as current codecs. This will be a great asset in iChat, which will have superior video conferencing quality.
Safari will also get an update with its new RSS feature. You can view a page with every headline and article summary right in the browser window in a very flexible way. Safari will even let you know if you landed on a website that has an RSS feed by displaying an RSS icon in the address bar.
iChat AV will now support video and audio chatting with multiple people at the same time. This feature looks stunning and will use the H.264/AVC codec to make all this possible in superior quality. In its three-dimensional view, your buddies seem more like they’re in the room with you, making it easier to follow the conversation. Their images are even reflected in front of them, just as if they were sitting around a conference-room table.
One other handy new toy is called Dashboard. This new feature looks much like the Konfabulator as it also a semi-transparent layer which holds widgets like a calculator, a stock ticker, address book, date book, world clock, display web cams ... View a movie about Dashboard.
More features can be viewed here.
Well, I don’t know about you, but this Tiger is not the puppy I had in mind a while ago, it seems more like full grown tiger to me ;-) Not all my wish list came through but all in all Tiger has some great surprises and I can’t wait.
BTW, some of the comments of this article stille belong to the “live coverage” I did earlier.
Update: Apple posted a Quickstream of the WWDC keynote here.
14served
1
Exciting!
2
RSS in Safari… I think that’s a waste of Dev-time. There is a beautiful FREE app on OS X for this that does much more than Safari, it’s called NetNewsWire Lite and it rocks. OS does not have to do everything, Steve!
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Awesome coverage!
It’s up-to-speed and more detailed than what I’m getting on IRC.
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@Frederik, yes I know.
I’m using NetNewsWire (full version) and it’s a great app ;-)
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What is this RSS integration like? Is it an aggregator like NNW or is it different? From what I’m reading it sounds like a way to search RSS feeds. Perhaps something like a built in version of Feedster?
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RSS in Safari—I think that’s great. Netnewswire isn’t very feature rich and development takes FOREVER. I haven’t seen a new feature in months. It’s interface isn’t very flexible either. If you have a lot of feeds it’s a nightmare to use.. Go Steve!
I’m stoked about the new displays ... 30” obviously for studios and cgi houses.. Good target to grow Apple products!
Tiger.. drool.
Waiting for more hardware announcements…
7
NetNewsWire 2.0 (free upgrade for past purchasers) is coming out sometime in July-August. There is also PulpFiction by Freshly Squeezed Software.
I don’t see RSS in Safari in a bad thing. The more people using RSS and seeing it’s potential the better.
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http://home.sport.rr.com/mrmudbug/Tiger/Safari RSS.pdf
Safari RSS integration screencap
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You have the most comprehensive coverage of the WWDC.
By far. Thanks for that!
Jan.
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as you’re the first person I’ve seen with intel on the WWDC, i posted a story to slashdot linking to your blog (just wanted to give you forewarning). Not sure if the story will be accepted, but hopefully it will get you some more exposure. :)
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What about this: Cupertino, start your photocopiers!! Apple should shut up, because they are also copycats!!!! Dashboard is a shameless copy of Konfabulator. Or: “How can I discourage developers to develope software for Apple?”
Man, that’s really shameless!!!
12
I find it very interesting that the displays are Mac/Win compatible (given the Win box has DVI). It just hasn’t been mentioned on most sites. Slipped through the cracks? Not that I know any Win people that will fork over that money.
Anyone else notice this or is it just a figment of my imagination?
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The earlier displays where also win-compatible.
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@kMikaZu, I know, it would have been more fair if Apple actually made a deal with them. I don’t know the full story of this. But I know that Apple had such kind of widgets long way back under system 7 called “Accessories” ... now I know there is a big difference here (technology changes fast) but you can compare it somehow. It’s not that they “owned” or invented it… but on the other hand out of courtesy they should have done the right thing here, I find this regretful too :-(
If I were in the shoes of Arlo or Perry I would try to take advantage of the head start and make their app much more advanced then what Apple is doing. Easily said of course :-S
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