I ❤ WWDC

UPDATE:

• What is Apple Teams?

A few quick thoughts on Monday’s WWDC keynote. At my most optimistic, the announcements seem to be more about plain old competing than innovating.

• Will the new Mac Pro compete directly with Dell’s high end? Is Dell running out of places to look for a healthy profit margin?
• If you add a web interface and/or a Windows Spotlight client to the equation, will OS X Server compete directly with the Google Mini?
• Are iCal, iChat, Mail, Wiki, Blog and Podcast server enough reason to forgo a MS Exchange server?
• Is the Podcast Producer an important product? Are people really going to use Xgrid to speed up encoding times?
• The OS X Server monitoring Dashboard widget is fun for normal people, but will sysadmins use it?
• Has Mal wanted a Mac Pro all along, but never realized it? Is he going to put 8 sticks of 512Mb in or pay $500 more for 4 sticks of 1Gb? How quickly do Kingston update their systems list?
  

  PDQ, as it turns out, the Mac Pro is already there.

• Why doesn’t Microsoft give parents control over when and for how long a program is used? Is it because Vista will be the first truly multiuser OS and that for years the only “root” user has been the domain admin?
• How much better is dragging applications between desktops and rearranging the tab order in Spaces than in a random Virtual Desktop’s mini view.
• Could the new and improved voice for Universal Access trigger more widespread usage? Will people save their blogroll as a podcast? Will you switch from reading a long document to listening to it? Go play that sound clip now!
• Is Core Animation’s real strength going to be producing 3D interfaces? Will it be comparable to Windows Presentation Framework?
• Is Stationary in Mail a misnomer, and should they call them templates? Will it mean that people send info packed emails, or will it only mean your Mom will stop to add a background before she forwards that chain mail?
• Will Time Machine require a re-format before it can be used?
  

  Maybe not, implies MacFixit, saying “You can choose to use Time Machine to back up your drive before installing Leopard”. So people speculate that it will use ZFS’s snapshots, but this doesn’t quite fit with the fact that the backup information can be stored on a server or another partition. Also interesting is an application like Time Machine was proposed for ZFS in May.

• Will Leopard run on PowerPC? No word to the contrary, and DTrace has been ported to PowerPC.
• How much fun will we have with those crazy backgrounds for iChat?
• Is Xray the coolest thing ever? If I try to imagine using it for a remote Solaris box will my head explode?
  

  See the current state of a GUI for DTrace.

• Is this the greatest Mac in joke ever?
  

  <p class=“sosumi”>All features referenced in the Mac OS X Leopard Sneak Peek are subject to change.</p>

  Found while looking for an anchor tag for the Xray link.

Stay tuned Macfans, a few of these questions might be worth investigating.