post-WWDC season

This blog has been quiet for some time: I have been attending WWDC, Apple's developer conference in San Francisco. It's been my fifth WWDC in a row, probably one of the best and definitely the most crowded of all.

The funny thing is that over the past 5 years, a similar phenomenon occurs after every WWDC keynote: end users are mostly underwhelmed by the announcements. Thereby, many people forget that WWDC is a developer conference, aimed at informing developers of new technologies and APIs. It's then up to developers to take advantage of these APIs and create some stunning apps that weren't possible before (or would have taken twice as much time). From that perspective WWDC has been a home run: Apple announced an endless array of new technologies that enable developers to integrate their apps even more with the OS and with each other, and to make their applications faster, easier to use and even more elegant. Sorry, I can't give more details here, as all sessions are under NDA, but I can tell you that we have some great new ideas for Undercover, based on this new technology. Moreover, Apple has given their developer tools a complete makeover, especially Interface Builder, making Cocoa application development more enjoyable than it already was. Even with the announcements made thus far, Leopard will be a stunning release, combining great new features for end users (Time Machine, Spaces, ...) with inspiring possibilities for developers (e.g. Core Animation). These developer focused features will ultimately benefit end users as well.

There is more, however, as Apple has not unveiled everything at WWDC. They are still sitting on some top-secret features they can't show us right now. My guess is that some of these featues could be linked to a future hardware announcement (probably as early as tomorrow?). Other of these top-secret features could be interface-related or Finder related (just my wild guesses, this is no rumor site and I have no reliable sources ;-))

Enough speculation, time to go back to work and making Undercover shine on Leopard.