Apple WWDC07 keynote thoughts

Journal entry
June 12, 2007

Going through my aggregated feeds today was a pain. Everyone were writing about the WWDC07 keynote stuff and I hadn’t seen it yet. So I had to stop reading and start looking .

And since I blog too little these days, I figured I might as well write down some notes and loosely joined thoughts while watching, so here goes:

Games

With Blizzard and now EA backing the Mac platform and doing simultaneous releases (did EA say this or only John Carmack?), we’re pretty well served in the games area. Other companies are bound to follow.
I wonder what the market share of Blizzard and EA combined is like, it has to be big chunk.

Leopard

Stacks look awesome
- The Download stack in particular is great, talk about seeing a need and fulfilling it.
New finder - about bloody time
- Cover Flow? Meh.
  - Cool, sure - “super useful”, doubtful
  - Although with Quick Look it might be good.
Back to my Mac - sounds really interesting, might be reason enough to buy .mac
- Actually makes a good deal of business sense: They want people to have multiple macs, one in every room preferably. People aren’t going to do that unless it’s damn easy having more than one.
Time Machine
- Definitely cool, shoddy UI
- Wonder if they’ll come out with a Mac Home Server thingy. Jives well with the Back to My Mac as well.

Safari for Windows

Why?
The slide showed Safari obliterating Firefox’ market share, leaving only IE and Safari. Gee, that’s a bad plan if I ever saw one.
Their track record with Windows software isn’t terribly good
- iTunes is slow as a dog on a sunny day on my XP machines
- The UIs are different, and Apple aren’t really trying to make a Windows app.

iPhone

Web apps for iPhone
- Cool, I like it, but then again, I am a web developer
- What is this stuff written in?
  - Is it server based?
  - What the heck format do we serve up to get the iPhone look’n’feel and integration with iPhone services?
    - Some XML format? XUL? XAML? iML ;)?
    - Microformats? :)
- Oho, this is why they’re putting Safari on Windows. They want to allow as many developers as possible to create and deploy Web apps for the iPhone and Safari for Windows allows the Windows developers to write their stuff on their platform.

Oh, and a funny sidenote: Steve Jobs (or someone else on the demo machine) apparently played WoW the day before the keynote ;)

Comments and Trackbacks

Jeppe S June 15, 2007

There might be a second reason, that Safari for Windows is a better idea: search-market share.

From: < http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote/ >

It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. (Ever notice the “client=safari” string in the URL query?) My somewhat-informed understanding is that Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.

Nicolas Noben July 16, 2007

I have a different theory regarding the 'Why Safari on Windows'.

I believe that it was a preemptive requirement to get web developers on PC to develop for iphone.

See, the same way they had to make itunes for PC in order to get people buying the ipods, they thought this time they will go proactive and make Safari on PC, that way they get support for iphone apps from the PC developers.

thoughts?

Jakob S July 17, 2007

Nicolas, that's my initial theory as well, and I still think that's a part of the reasoning. However I am also pretty sure it's not the only reason, and the money Gruber mentions probably plays a big part.

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