Monday, June 23, 2003


WWDC 2003


The new Apple announcements. (341 words)

  • Safari 1.0 — It seems a touch faster, and even more importantly they seem to have squashed a couple of nasty memory leaks in the last beta that made long, multi-window, multi-tab browsing sessions less than pleasant. The International Herald Tribune site works now. They reset the default font settings to more closely match Internet Explorer for Windows. I guess that’s a low friction approach, but I have to say that 16 point Times looks utterly ridiculous on my 15-inch screen, like a large-print book or something. I immediately set things back to Lucida Grande, but if I set the font size to less than 16 point then type specified as xx-small becomes irrevocably munged (e.g. the default stylesheet my Shoutbox uses.) I suppose that’s a side effect of moving to 96dpi (once again, to match WinIE.)
  • iChat A/V — I’m not a really heavy IM user, and my family are all on AOL, so I rarely have much reason to go beyond iChat for my IM needs. A brief 60-second chat with Sven showed that the audio quality, even for a transatlantic connection, was quite good (not quite Vonage quality, but decent, especially for the price.) I have a webcam, but it’s an utter piece of crap (especially in low light) and it’s USB, so no video conferencing yet.
  • Panther features — As far as most of the Panther features go, Sven did a pretty good job of summing up the good and the scary. I just don’t know enough about the new Finder to say anything meaningful, but the fast BeOS-style searching looks really good and the Fast User Switching will definitely get a workout here at home. The new PDF features are going to be great, especially getting Postscript rendering “for free” throughout the system. The encrypted home directory sounds like something that could be really, really cool, especially if its completely transparent to the user.
  • G5 — Unlike a lot of folks (grin), I really need a new computer. Time to start hoarding my bottles and pennies.

edit: One great thing about today’s announcements: at least we won’t have to hear about how Apple will/should switch to Intel or AMD for at least, say, a week or so. ;)


:: Dave Walker 20:41 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags:

:: Comments (3)

Comments:

kent wrote:

Title: not convinced

Date:

Response:
'worlds fastest personal computer' is pure hokum. I doubt that in any real world test it would be noticeably faster than a comparably priced PC.
I think OSX is pretty sweet -- as I said elsewhere, it's everything Linux wants to be except free. Portable OSX would be great; as it is, the Mac you buy to run it is basically a big copy protection dongle.
To be fair -- again -- if you compare apples to apples -- so to speak -- I priced out as similar a Dell Dual Processor machine, and it came out very close in price to a similar G5
Quarter Life Crisis wrote:

Title: Safari 1

Date:

Response:
As Safari has been declared version 1.0 and thus ready for prime time now, it's time to take a...
d.w. wrote:

Title:

Date:

Response:
Kent -- The "world's fastest" hooey -- hey, it's marketing, and you know what that means. In real world terms, it means the "macs are so slow blah blah" argument goes out the wind. I do "general purpose" computing, which means that a machine that does the usual things (rendering web pages, compiling source, running Java apps) faster is a good thing to have, but I'm certainly not one of those psychos sitting in front of a copy of Photoshop with my stopwatch. As far as supporting generic x86 boxes, I've yet to hear a single, credible business model for it that makes sense for Apple. They would instantly magnify their support costs by a factor of (2,3,4?) and put themselves directly in Microsoft's crosshairs, and for what? So that folks who, if we're being honest, don't like spending money on software (your average Linux geek) can run it on some box of boards? It'll never happen, especially now that Apple's got competitive hardware again.



Software, n.: Formal evening attire for female computer analysts.

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