I devoted this morning to watching and listening to Steve Jobs keynote speech at the WWDC2007. I use the word devote on purpose. I have been a devoted Mac user since 1995. Other ‘old timer’ Mac users might remember the Power Macintosh’s flat biscuit shaped hard drive that had two floppy slots and a minute monitor and no RAM to speak of. I used one of those as my first Mac.
Now I’m about to migrate from Shaka, borrowed from my daughter, 17? PowerBook G4 with 1GB RAM - eat your hearts out, to Snoopy the MacBook Pro. Yes, true blue blooded Mac users tend to give their machines names and treat them as part of the family. How did I get to call him Snoopy? I was phoned for the name while walking down the pet food aisle at the supermarket. The name seemed appropriate at the time! The mind boggles what name I would have come up with if called while checking for organic chicken thighs or cheddar cheese.
Going back to the Keynote. Did anybody see the video of Steve Ballmer going off pop somewhat hysterically at the Microsoft Developer’s meet? He was lucky he didn’t have a heart attack. It lead to a fabulous remixed version on YouTube, if you missed it search for "Steve Ballmer developer". What a pleasure to have a calm and non-hyped presentation. For most of the time, I was marveling at the progress made and what will be shipped in the next operating system.
What is particularly awesome is that the new features, and only a few out of hundreds more were shown, is that one can hear that the consumer’s feed-back has been listened to. My particular favourite is the download stack. I download zillions of articles, pics, brochures you name it and my desktop is constantly cluttered. And I hate a cluttered desk. The stack, stacks your downloads into a folder on the dock. Drool. And click on it to see what’s in it. Wow, it fans out. Ok you had to be there…
But there are many new features that start making the operating system look more like a real world of files, videos etc rather than the static, DOS based other systems around. What about being able to check the content of a file without having to open the application that it was made in. Huuh? My next favourite. I can’t always remember what I have called something or even which app I created it in. With the new Quick Look I don’t have to open all applications to check for the file I am looking for. And if I don’t recognise the file immediately I can cycle through it, still without having to open the relevant application. Those are just two that I particularly like and which fit into my style of working and enjoying a computer. There’s lost more. View the speech on Apple's website or read about it on Macworld.
Then Safari, Apple’s browser software, was announced for Windows. I believe it’s still very buggy. Microsoft sells buggy software, Windows users should be fairly used to it. Ok. No catty comments. Safari for Windows is still being tested. So I suppose eventually, the Mac operating system will be available for PC users. I would imagine there will be a rash of PCs now getting ‘nice’ names, and being introduced to the family. Now all they need, are some funky designs and I could almost understand anybody wanting to own a PC. Beige anyone?
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