WWDC Keynote Thoughts

Between all the great sessions here at WWDC yesterday and Buzz’s excellent blogger party last night, I’ve had just about 0 time to blog about anything that has been announced here. The typical news sites have been posting all the details on Mac OS X Leopard that Steve talked about yesterday, but I thought I would add a couple of my own comments on Leopard.

First, though I’m under NDA for a lot of the content here, I’ll just say that Leopard adds a lot of nice features for developers. I would not be surprised to see a lot of applications next year requiring Leopard. I’m sure some Tiger/Panther users will feel a bit left out, but the development time can be collapsed greatly, and these apps will be a lot more polished.

64 bit is a big buzzword around here. It is a big deal…even with 64 bit POSIX available at the UNIX layer in Tiger. That was nice, but it meant that only command-line applications that used straight POSIX libraries would have the ability to run 64 bit. As was mentioned in the keynote, Apple has extended 64 bit support all the way up to the Cocoa and Carbon layers…completing the transition to 64 bit for Mac users. I think this will allow some very high-end scientific applications to provide absolutely beautiful visualization displays without having to write a bunch of extra code to handle 64 bit data processing in a different process on the back-end. I haven’t tried building Seasonality for 64 bit yet, but I suspect that it will provide a slight speed improvement on 64 bit machines because the satellite image is highly accelerated in hardware using the Accelerate framework. 64 bit processors may be able to generate a new satellite image up to twice as fast. I’ll update my blog with performance results on this sometime in the future.

Mail.app changes seem to be aplenty. I haven’t loaded the Leopard preview on my MacBook Pro yet to see just how much has been improved, but already I’m impressed. The templates look to be a good idea, but I can’t see myself using them too often. I’m sure there will be a subset of Mac users that will get a kick out of that though. The notes feature strikes me as a big chunk of bloatware tacked on to Mail. If you need to take notes, there should be another place to do it outside of your inbox. Sure, people spend a lot of time in Mail, and I’m sure a lot of people take notes while reading/responding to email, but that doesn’t mean that notes should be an integrated feature. It seems that a much better solution to write a new system-wide notes application that would let you bring up an interface with a hotkey, type something in, and dismiss it.

Apple still hasn’t updated the Finder. I really hope this is one of the “top secret” features they aren’t releasing until the end. The Finder is something Mac users spend a lot of time using, and the amount of legacy code still in there is pretty staggering. At the very least, the Finder needs to use more threading, but really they should start from scratch and try to implement something that is more efficient. They should also revisit usability. When using the Finder with a modern system with several hundred thousand files, it takes awhile to navigate to where you want to be (Note: this applies to all the current file-system-exploring applications I’ve used on any platform). Spotlight improves this situation somewhat, but it is still a pretty big problem and will only get worse as hard drive capacities skyrocket as they have been in recent years.

Despite these drawbacks, Leopard as a whole is a big improvement. Time Machine and Spaces are greatly welcomed, Core Animation will be a huge win for the usability of Leopard applications and the iChat improvements seem pretty solid.