Kev

On Monday morning, Steve Jobs gave his keynote at the World Wide Developer’s Conference, most commonly known as WWDC. There is a common saying, at Apple at least, where we call this keynote the Stevenote. There are a few reasons why this event has been tagged as such. First off, what is always included in the Stevenote is flashy stuff. The fluff of software is what Steve Jobs loves to show off. In the hallways of the Apple Campus, you hear engineers talk about how they spent one hour adding some flashy animation to an interface or changed the look of a button just so that Steve would like it, and want to show it at his keynote. The second characteristic of the Stevenote is that he always shows off something secret that no one else, except the engineers who worked on it, know about. And finally, the Stevenote is usually really good, and has you leaving the room excited and ready to go innovate.I regret to say that this year’s WWDC keynote may have hinted on the first two, but certainly fell short of the third one. The keynote was indeed flashy, as Steve demoed the latest features of the Mac OS called Leopard. The announcement of Safari on Windows was certainly surprising. But after the hour and half, I was bored, and ready for it to be done. Here are the things I liked and didn’t like about Steve Jobs keynote.

• The new desktop?: One extremely misleading feature of Leopard is the “new” desktop. OK, maybe in terms of code a lot of new things are happening, but it was hardly worth the number one feature. There is a new silver dock, which I like, a deeper drop shadow on the active window, which I like, a unified UI, which I like, but the new menu bar? I loathe the new menu bar. It supposed to adapt to your background picture, but it ends up just totally being unreadable. In earlier versions of Leopard, they had a great menu bar, and two or three days we sent off Leopard to be duplicated for the developers, they changed it. And everyone hated it, and they ignored us. Now everyone at Apple and everyone at WWDC hates it.
• Spaces: I actually love Spaces. There are a lot of people who don’t, but I do. It is an extremely useful way of getting rid of windows that you don’t want to see at the current time. It’s like having as many monitors as you want, only you don’t have to strain your neck to look at them. It’s just a keystroke, and your there. Great! There are currently two other ways to hide windows: minimize them or hide the entire application. Personally, I think minimizing windows is one of the dumbest ideas ever. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I hate Windows so much is because they hinge on that. I don’t want my window to go somewhere where I have to bring my mouse down and retrieve it. No. I want a keystroke to get it back. Hiding the entire application is a good start, because it can be done with a keystroke and retrieved with a keystroke, and it does not clutter up my Dock or anything. Of course, if I need these windows open so I can do a copy and then paste or drag and drop, the screen gets cluttered. Spaces opens up a lot of space, and its sweet.
• CoverFlow in the Finder: I was watching the keynote in one of the employee rooms, and when Steve Jobs said that CoverFlow in the Finder was useful, our whole room burst in laughter. That’s because we had been trying to use it for the past month (for me) or months (for everyone else), and we could not find any use for it. Again, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t like the finder. I am perfectly content with cd, ls, cp, and mv.
• Dashboard: When Steve Jobs needs five minutes to show off a movie widget, you know that he has absolutely nothing better to say. Dashboard is a memory sucking camel, and extremely over-hyped. Yeah, WebClip is cool. But I still do not think that he had to spend so much time on a Javascript widget that most developers could have written quite easily
• Safari on Windows: This is a great strategy. Combined with the release of the iPhone, I think that lots of people, mainly iPhone developers, will use Safari in order to test their sites. I don’t mind Apple products on the Windows platform, especially when they run faster than their competitors.
• A “sweet” way to make iPhone applications: Here at Apple, we have created a sweet way to create applications on the iPhone, they are called websites. Come on! Are we stupid? I do not think that dwelling on this sweet way of making applications was necessary or beneficial. I think anyone who has written a line of HTML would be offended by that. I know a lot of people who were.

So I have been pretty harsh on Apple, but I think we should. Apple is the leader of innovation, and they have extremely high standards around the globe. I think that the display that Steve Jobs put on was not on par with where it should be. I am looking forward to how Steve is going to dig himself out of this one.