![]() ![]() ![]() I rode the bus in this morning with two students from Australia who spent 24 hours on an airplane to get here: which promptly made me feel guilty for moaning about my measly 3 1/2 hour drive. There are attendees here from all over the globe. The WW in WWDC stands for World Wide, and those are not empty words. They turn heads everywhere and inspire comments such as "I want one." One generous person let me take a close look at his, and it is small, light, and beautiful. Out of the hundreds of laptops here, maybe a handful of users have one of the new iBooks. When I ask, most say they spend most of their day in X. Most striking to me - in my casual non-scientific survey that consisted of random peeks at other people’s screens – is that it seems nearly all of them were running Mac OS X. The entire building has a decent AirPort signal, making it possible to surf the Web while listening to a presentation. Although not a requirement, it is a heck of a lot of fun. With a casual glance around the building one might be tempted to assume that bringing a laptop is required. ![]() One of the first things to notice at WWDC is the proliferation of laptops. It is only a matter of time and effort before the Mac OS X transition is history, and we look back at 2001 much the same way we now look back on the 68K to PowerPC transition.Īside from the road to Mac OS X, several other items caught my attention today. Applications such as Mail, OmniWeb, GraphicConverter, REALbasic, and others prove that Mac OS X is a real operating system. Oh, but what impressive progress thus far. Just as the Finder in X needs optimizing and new features to equal the previous version, the tools needed to create OS X applications are also works in progress. No developer wants to create a Mac OS X version that has less features than the previous release, but that may very well happen given the relative youth of both Mac OS X and its developer tools. The time it has taken to get OS X in the shape its in today is a perfect example of how the best intentions take longer than expected, and often with substantial yet less than perfect results. That is a lot of evolution in and of itself. Most major applications, including developer tools such as CodeWarrior, have been revised between five and ten times since their first release. Imagine the quandary that poses for a moment. Although I question the wisdom of bludgeoning developers with threats about user loyalty in an effort to get applications converted in six months to run on an OS that took over 10 years to develop. Mac OS X is the future, and it needs to be evangelized aggressively. I am not being critical of Apple's overall strategy. ![]() Mac OS X has that as well - it's called Classic. It has a full set of developer tools, a large body of experienced developers, and an entire culture of user expectations. The reality is that Mac OS 9.1 has evolved over 17 years to become a polished, feature rich environment. Mac OS X everywhere is fine as a strategy, but engineering is that most wonderful of disciplines where, when fantasy and reality tangle, reality always wins. The message, both overt and implied, is that Classic is yesterday's news, and anyone looking back will be run over. When the word Classic is mentioned, the speaker usually adds a mild tone of derision. As far as the organizers are concerned, Classic is accorded the same respect as a crazy uncle the family sends upstairs whenever company comes over. In the event I was not clear enough previously, this is a conference about Mac OS X. As yesterday's excitement gently faded, attendees turned their attention from the high-profile keynote to the less glamorous and more important task of creating Mac OS X applications. Today the conference got down to business. ![]()
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