WWDC keynote notes

The new workstations and servers are awesome, and cheaper than Dell. Also on the hardware side, Apple now commands 12% of the "retail" laptop market. I assume that therefore ignores direct corporate sales, but it's still a huge increase.

Now onto software.

[Steve Jobs shows slide of 5 major OSX releases] ... so this is what we've been doing for the last five years ... what has our competitor been doing for the past five years ...

Cute.

Bertrand Serlet, Apple's SVP of Software Engineering, went on to compare OSX with Vista and pointing out where Vista appears to be a copy of OSX, with quotes like

... they even tried to copy the colour scheme ... but didn't quite get it right

There were also a huge number of serious OSX announcements, including full 64 bit framework support right up into the Cocoa and Carbon layers (previously 64 bit support was only available if you coded directly on the Unix layer).

Also, at last, a built in backup feature called Time Machine with the ability to do single file restores as well as a full restore of your hard drive (OS & Apps, not just your files) for any point in time, not just the most recent version. It can integrate directly with supported Apps at the data level, not just the file level. Oh and it has a UI that trekkies will die for!

A lesson for Microsoft (and everyone else) - Scott Forstall (VP Platform Experience) had a freeze during his demo. Ok, so it's beta software. But instead of being embarrasing, he simply flicked a switch, and the backup computer was instantly in use. Total embarrasment around 4 seconds.

Steve subbed in from Scott to introduce Spaces aka. virtual desktops. Very cool. Of course I have been using virtual desktops on MacOS since even before OSX, but it's awesome to have it built into the OS. A great feature I don't have right now is that when you switch to an app the OS will switch to the most appropriate desktop. Seeya later Exposé.

Major Mail.app upgrades, while overdue, are welcome (thanks Bruce ;). While some people will hate the slick stationary feature the average punter will love it. I will love the notes and todo features since I seem to use mail in the same way as Steve. Beating Outlook at it's own game, multiple todo items can come from one email message or in fact from any application, and will appear in Mail.app and iCal via a system wide "todo server".
Other highlights for me

• JavaScript Debugger
• Full Multi-user iCal
• Spotlight searching for network file stores
• Core Animation (sounds like an advanced Lingo but for Cocoa)
• really high quality text to speech (even better than the new Vista text to speech)
• WebClip (lets regular users make live auto-updating widgets from web page clippings)

Too bad I wasn't actually there to get the developer preview.