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(image courtesy of Lifehacker)

So the WWDC 2007 has come and gone, Steve Jobs got on stage and made a few announcements, although nothing spectacularly new, and walked off. And the bulk of the Macintosh and Apple-loving community is left wondering; “is that it?” “nothing else?”

No brushed-metal, redesigned, or performance boosted iMacs or MacPros, no new hardware, no new iPod to compete with the world of Shuffle wannabes that have started popping up, no super news, nothing groundbreaking. Why?

Some people are saying that Apple already has so much hype and energy built up around the iPhone and its pending release on June 29th that they don’t want to eclipse that for anything. Some people think that they’re so busy working hard on the iPhone that they don’t want to even think about anything else until it’s over. Some people knew ahead of time that Steve would take a lot of time discussing Leopard, and didn’t expect much else. All in all, I think the Apple and Mac community ruined their own keynote by expecting too much out of it.

We’ve seen a lot of ratcheting down the importance of the keynotes and the speeches in recent years, with Apple issuing more press releases when they so choose and updating when they feel like it instead of waiting for a speech. Sure, the super-big announcements, like OS updates and products like the iPhone get to wait until Jobs takes the stage, but given the rev-up of the MacBook Pro recently, Apple is showing us to not hold our breath at keynotes. I wanted more too, guys, and I’m a little deflated, but I’m certainly not surprised.

So what was discussed?

The iPhone and iPhone Development

There was news about the iPhone; Steve announced that there would be no official SDK available for the iPhone, which has raised the ire of a great many application developers. This is to be expected, many of the Apple-centric developer community are a very “me-centric” group, as in they’re ornery, easily irritable if Apple doesn’t bend their way, and they believe that without them the Macintosh platform would die off and credit themselves with keeping the Mac brand alive. To a degree they’re right – I mean, any OS is only as good as the apps that are available for it, but being outraged by the announcement that iPhone won’t have an official SDK is ridiculous. In reality, the announcement was that apps for the iPhone will be piped through Safari, and will be web 2.0-style apps, written and running within Safari, using tools like Ajax and Ruby on Rails.

This is the beauty of the announcement.

A lot of developers are rightfully unhappy that the iPhone will be closed via SDK. Fine. But a lot, and I repeat, A LOT of web developers, Ajax programmers, and so on are VERY pleased with the announcement that they can essentially write widgets that will run via Safari and get their apps on the iPhone that way. I predict that within weeks of the iPhone hitting shelves, we’ll see MySpace, Facebook, Google, and other social networking and search widgets and services, perhaps even location-aware services, available for the iPhone. We’ll see online ordering of food and groceries that you’ll be able to do with the iPhone. We’ll see web shopping on the iPhone. We’ll see flight tracking, package tracking, and more for the iPhone, all using existing web services.

The Firefoxes and the Skypes of the world will be cheesed, but there’s a whole world of web apps that already exists on the net, and the fact that Apple announced Safari for Windows yesterday just lends proof to the fact that Apple isn’t closing off the iPhone to developers, they just insist that those developers play in the sandbox they’ve created.

Now whether that’s a good thing or not, whether Apple is sacrificing creativity and functionality for control over the platform, that’s a whole different story, and is freely debatable. Just because the dev community is pissed off right now doesn’t mean Apple doesn’t have the infinite love of web developers right now.

Personally, I would have liked to see the SDK opened up completely, but at the same time, with so much at stake on the iPhone, I wouldn’t have expected Apple to do it at this early stage. Maybe later in the game once the iPhone has (or hasn’t) gotten a foothold in the market we might see an SDK, but not now. Beyond that, I don’t think it’s particularly strange for a platform manufacturer to tell a developer that they’ll use these tools to make an app that’ll work on their device in this fashion. Lots of manufacturers, from game console developers to web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Google, do it all the time.

Safari for Windows

What else did we see? Ah yes, we saw Safari for Windows. Speaking of application development. What’s the best way to make sure that your application will work seamlessly and attractively on the iPhone? Develop it and test using Safari on any platform you like. And that’s the beauty of Safari for windows – it’s like an SDK for the sandbox that Apple wants iPhone developers to play in.

A lot of people, very very smart people, have totally missed this point. Here’s someone else.

At the same time, someone else gets it entirely.

It’s not about giving web surfers another option, it’s not about being faster than Firefox or IE, even though Steve said as such. Frankly, I don’t think Safari is going to catch much market share in the Windows world…unless it’s tied to something people want, like the iPhone. But right now, the reason Safari is available for Windows is to give people a development platform to test and build their Web 2.0 apps for the iPhone. Nothing more, nothing less.

Security researchers have already said that the Safari beta has security problems. That’s to be expected, and it’s important to note that Safari for Windows is a BETA, but I don’t think it’s meant for widespread adoption. Apple’s no Web 2.0 company, when they say beta, they mean beta. They don’t mean beta like GMail was beta for years but in wide use. I would have preferred that Apple didn’t open itself up to another avenue of the browser wars, I mean, I don’t use it on my Mac at all, but I think this was the best way to let developers who want in on the iPhone but not the MacOS an avenue for development.

Leopard Preview

The rest of the keynote was spent examining some of the new features in Leopard. A redesigned Finder, Stacks in the dock, rehashing Time Machine and Spaces, it all looks good. Some folks have said it’s a little heavy on the eye candy and light on the useful, and while I think the features will indeed prove useful, I don’t think there are any real killer apps or features that we haven’t seen already.

Spaces is killer, and Time Machine will completely revolutionize backups. Yes, yes, I hear Windows users saying now that Time Machine is just a souped up System Restore, but I’ll be more blunt: it’s not souped up at all, it’s – heaven forbid – what System Restore should have been. It’s System Restore if it were useful. And while Apple fans and Windows nuts fight about who had what feature first, I’ll head over to the Apple camp this time because it’s not about who got it first to me, it’s about who got it right.

Bundling BootCamp will be nice as well, so every Mac will come with the ability to do whatever you want, no installations or long instructions to follow, and QuickLook is what previews in the Finder should have been all along. I’m pleased to see that, to be perfectly honest.

Apple’s blitz to the gaming world is also a long time coming and well deserved. Partnering with EA is smart, and bringing more games to the Macintosh will really make the Mac an attractive platform for people trying to choose which direction they want to go with their computing. Hopefully people in the long run won’t have to say “Well, I would buy a Mac, but I like to play games, so I’ll get a PC.”

Nothing earth shattering on the Leopard front, I have to say, but what I did hear as mostly good, just not revolutionary. We’ll see if anything else comes up between now and October, when Mac OS 10.5 is due to be released.

The notion of wireless electricity is as old as Nicola Tesla’s brilliant (or mad) inventions and ideas. The trouble is that while transmitting energy wirelessly is easy (eg, microwaves, radio, etc) transmitting electrical power is difficult, and results in a lot of signal loss in the process. Physicists at MIT (go Physicists!), inspired by the annoying noises that a cell phone makes when it’s battery is dying and its not plugged in to charge, went to work on an idea that so far has only been seen in science fiction books and games: (think Protoss “pylons” in Starcraft) being able to create a “field” of electrical power that objects in range can draw energy from and operate with. They’ve dubbed the technology WiTricity (for “Wireless Electricity”) and have been able to design copper coils that successfully transmitted enough power wirelessly to light up a light bulb.

Don’t expect to charge your laptop from a wireless power station in the middle of your coffee shop anytime soon though, the technology drops about 50% of the broadcast energy between the transmitter and the destination, and only works in the lab within a 7-or-so foot radius. Even so, the scientists at MIT are ready to license their technology to companies who might continue to work on it along with them.

[ CNet News: MIT Crafts Wireless Electricity ]

Apple came out of the gate swinging last week with a refresh to the MacBook Pro lineup. I had expected them to hold off on this kind of announcement until Steve Jobs took the stage at the WWDC later this month, but it looks like they either didn’t want to wait or they had bigger news to announce at WWDC. Either way, the MacBook Pro line has gotten a significant refresh.

The new notebooks sport Intel’s speedy new “Santa Rosa” Intel Core 2 Duo processors, which have been making their way under hoods of other manufacturer’s laptops for a few weeks now. The new chips come in at 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz, giving the notebooks a speed bump as well as a processor upgrade. Right when the greater PC community was wondering when Apple would up the ante by adding the Santa Rosa chips to its laptops, Apple goes ahead and does it.

Also included are new LED-backlit, low-power, mercury-free displays. The new displays are brighter than their cold-cathode florescent light predecessors, obviously require less power to operate, and because they’re mercury free, they’re part of Steve Jobs’ new commitment to a greener Apple. The new displays have another benefit as well; along with being brighter, the new displays sport higher native resolutions than the previous generation, up to 1920×1200, which allows them to display video in true HD if you happen to get any onto your hard drive.

The new displays have a side benefit also; they can display the enhanced 3d graphics brought to the notebook by the new NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card included with each one. All of the new MacBook Pros have 802.11n and all of the other features of the previous generation built in. It’s a pretty substantial upgrade; one that would normally have been saved for a keynote speech, but I’m kind of glad it wasn’t. It gets the speculation going about what will be said, and gets those new MacBook Pros on the ground as quickly as possible. Now if I can find someone to buy my old Core Duo MacBook Pro, I might pick one up!

[ Apple :: MacBrook Pro ]

If you have something that you absolutely, positively must keep chained to one place, whether it’s your bike or your laptop, the 100-Decibel Alarm might be just the item for you. Perhaps you’re worried about your luggage when you travel, to make sure that thieves don’t steal it, or prying eyes don’t end up in your suitcase (just don’t hold me responsible when some TSA agent decides to “inspect” your particular luggage!).

The alarm is pretty simple, it’s your typical combination-based cable lock, and you can lock and unlock it using a combination of your choosing pretty simply. There’s a huge red sticker on the front announcing that it’s a 100-decibel alarm, which will hopefully be enough to scare off any would-be thieves or cable-cutters, but if the red sticker doesn’t warn them off, the ear-splitting alarm will when they cut the cable or try to break the lock open. As soon as the cable is cut or the lock is forcefully opened, the alarm goes off, and won’t stop. How you make it stop once the evildoer has fled and you’ve retained your property, I’m not sure. Either way, the 100-Decibel Alarm retails for $25 US from Skymall, and they’re available now.

[ Techie Diva :: Lock Alarm Guaranteed to Shock Ears ]

This is a clock I’d love to have on my office wall. A unique blend between geeky, steampunk, and outright cool, the Wall Gear Clock is essentially one large gear with the hours marked on it, and segments for every 15 minutes so you can tell how far past the hour it is. The clock itself is about 22-inches wide, and while it would be cool if the gears were part of the mechanism that powers the clock, there are independent motors that turn the gear and keep the time. Even so, it’s still really cool, and would light up any geek’s wall. Besides, if the blog title (or the title image) didn’t tell you, I have a thing for gears.

The Wall Gear Clock is sold out right now, but pre-orders are available for the next time it comes into stock, and the clock runs about $150.

[ OhGizmo! : Wall gear Clock Provides Mechanical Eye Candy ]

The AppleTV hacking community is still hard at work, doing everything from upgrading the hard drives in the AppleTV to updating the software, to changing the firmware so you can install a full version of Mac OS X on the AppleTV. It’s all pretty cool, and Apple hasn’t come out to squash the community that’s grown around modifying and making the most out of their new hit product.

Apple has, however, gone ahead and announced a couple of upgrades that will save AppleTV users some time and energy. AppleTVs with 160GB hard drives, in addition to the 40GB hard drives that came in the original AppleTVs, are now available in the Apple Store. But the hard drive upgrade was designed to give you more space and storage for all of your delicious audio and video, and more space for all of the add-ins and potential hacks that the community has developed for the AppleTV – that’s only part of the big news.

Steve Jobs announced that you’d soon see YouTube videos on the AppleTV. Services that do this, like TubeTV already exist, but the beauty of Job’s announcement wasn’t so much that you’d get flash on the AppleTV to support videos from YouTube webpages, but Apple and YouTube would partner to use H.264 video encoding, bringing high quality YouTube content to the AppleTV.

MacRumors believes that the massive transcoding of the YouTube video catalog will server two purposes; one, to prep the content for easy viewing on the iPhone, and second, to get YouTube to scan their entire video catalog to screen out the bad stuff. The iPhone and the iPod can both already play H.264 video, so it would be natural for YouTube to be available on those devices as the catalog becomes available.

[ MacRumors: YouTube for Apple TV uses H.264, not Flash ]