WWDC was a bit of a let down, iphone alleys’ coverage by ustream however was fantastic. I was expecting more information and more products, not a grueling 45mins of demo’s of apps we cant use for a month, not quite the usual Apple finesse we have come to appreciate.
One important thing to note was Steve Job’s committed to pricing the new 8gb iPhone at no more that $199US in all 70 countries the iPhone 3g will be sold in by the end of the year. I hope this is the signal of a much bigger push by Apple to price equivalently in all countries. That said they create products people will gladly pay for in some cases even twice such as myself who will be upgrading come July 11th once again.
Surprisingly the announcement of OS X 10.6 dubbed Snow Leopard was pushed from the forefront of the announcement, giving credence to the fact it will not be a stability release just a fit and polish release to keep ahead of the competition. Also .mac will be no longer and be replaced by mobile me, which has to be an improvement of the aging .mac name and technology.
It was a bit of a let down in the fact that Steve had very little stage time, some reported as usually steve looked ill.
Shock Horror - There was no one more thing.
Ok So heres my predications:
- iPhone 2,
- iPhone App Store
- New Firmware for existing iPhones
- New Version of OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard - Nice and shiny none feature release
- New Cinema Displays
- Updated Macbook Pro’s
- Twitter will die - Twitter Blog
- Lets not forget the one more thing that no one guesses, my money is on a Yellow Submarine iPhone and all the Beetles back catalogue on iTunes
It was less then 30 minutes after the official word that iTunes was selling films in the UK store, before I was watching Batman Begins. But is the convenience coming at too high a cost?
In the UK we have become used getting ripped off around every corner, it stinks but we are British so we put up with it. My problem is that some of the films now available particularly Al Gores documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” £10.99 At this point the noveltywore off, I can have this shipped to me from amazon £6.22 in less than two days.
I aren’t apposed to paying £6.99 for a film, but £10.99 for a film that you can buy in the shops for less than £7 I think its pushing it. Us Brits whilst being hard done by after getting the long of the stick for so many years we have all become cynics, and easily see where profiteering is taking place. We saw it with the iPhone, which didn’t do anywhere near as well as planned (see here) We also see it with practically every computer or gadget, when you get nearly 2$US to £1GBP and the prices of things are the same in dollars as pounds you know there is something wrong.
Unless iTunes get more content up in the store and stop stupid pricing, they may just take off. Who am I kidding it will take off whatever apple do, its what their good at. I would like to think that Apple at least get some semblance of order in pricing and price match with the High Street.
Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about - available wherever you happen to be. www.mesh.com
Microsoft being its usual self has joined the web 2.0 party, and looks as if the Yahoo! bid was a hint at a much larger plan.
So what exactly is the significance of Mesh and the whole Microsoft online play? Its validated a couple of ideas cloud computing is definitely going to have a massive impact the way in which we interact with both mobile devices and laptops/desktops, and also Microsoft has seen a little sense and is bending to the will of user.
Office Online?
An obvious application that Microsoft will put into mesh is Office, quite frankly the current online offering is underwhelming and Google Docs beats it, but in mesh with a cross-platform version of office that follows you I would be willing to pay for that.
Did I here you say Cross-Platform?
Along with the announcement of Mesh some other intersting things came out of the tour, support for Macs! Is this a much bigger plan to get out of the Operating System business or transition to providing a thinned out operating system that can access mesh (They may even use an Open Source kernel)
I think Microsoft has got themselves some new friends and I will be sure to check out Mesh in more detail very soon. Its going to interesting if they do it right…
O2 obviously isn’t making enough money or selling enough iPhone’s to make it worth there while and they have completed re-structured there tariff plans, basically more for less. I don’t make enough calls to make it any cheaper for me anyway :-(More Details here
So I have a nice new unhacked iPhone. My first impressions are all somewhat good, so I though’t I would run done some of the things the press have been knocking the ye olde iPhone down with.
EDGE
Whoa! The iPhone is only 2.5G phone, run! Well in all honesty the EDGE coverage is poor although I can get it most places where I go, it ain’t to slow and even out of EDGE areas webpages load pretty damn fast. Its not youtube fast but it gets the job done.
Camera
2 Megapixels is that all? Well this is something that has bothered me, but not for the reason you may be thinking of. I have yet to use a camera on any phone, if I want to take a picture I have a dedicated camera for it. Though ‘cameraphones’ are getting much better there are still no match to a good quality dedicated camera
Price
This point I actually agree with and I think like our American cousins, we will get shafted for at least £100 come January, but do you know what I don’t really care. It would be nice if there was a Pay-As-You-Go option but then I can’t see anyway for o2 to make money.
The rest of the package is spot on, iPod and Phone work perfectly (not that I call many people) I am looking forward to the SDK, but may hack apptap on there before too long.
Having had some issues with iTunes over the last week, nothing downloading from the store to be specific. I just got an email from a nice person at iTunes Store support, saying the problem was fixed and I got 5 Free credits to boot. My lucks in, maybe I should do a lottery this week.
The move to VMware fusion just hasn’t happened, since the new Parallels update dropped earlier this wee, I have been impressed with the increased speed and the integration with exposé a feature which windows desperately needs and not just an alt+TAB varient like that of Vista.
In other news, CommonApp.org should get a medal for being impossible to understand if your an international applicant (like I am) there’s a lot they could learn from the new UCAS website, also good help documents would make it easier for people such as my self who haven’t got a clue.
I just installed VMware fusion on my Macbook; Parallels they crept up behind you. Don’t get me wrong I love parallels and its incarnations, but VMware has a smaller feature set and its fast.
I have been running Fedora 7 through VMware, with it emulating to cores thats right you can virtulise stuff on multiple cores. It screams. I had a little trouble getting the resolutions right (this is because Fedora isn’t a supported OS) but a bit of googling (who knew this was now a verb) and I got it going.
I now have a fully operational Death Star, for use with my many future Ruby on Rails Projects. I am really looking forward to seeing what Parallels comes up with in there next version, all it really needs is more performance and I will have a dilemma which to use?
Its almost a day since the WWDC bomb dropped, and everybody has stood back to see what a lack of real good announcements. What I mean is what we all really wanted to hear (even if impossible)
- UK Shipping Date for iPhone and Network
- Proper SDK for iPhone, or just we are working on one. Not just make a website
- Leopard Shipping by the end of this week
- A killer feature of Leopard, not just the evolutionary stuff. Something we can all taunt the windows users with
- More use of Steveisms “boom” “Glass of ice water in hell” etc
What we have got though is a solid Safari update that works 10times better than the old version, another tool to get people to switch (Safari on Windows ofcourse) Clear detail on leopard, and just how much more polished than Tiger it is. As for my experience with safari, I have had Safari 3 open all day, Google Reader hasn’t frozen up. All my plugins work even Inquisitor (http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/)
Search within pages works just like Firefox with abit more fancy pants animation and highlighting. Now the only thing that Safari for Windows needs is a GPO template for Windows Server, then the holy grail has been cracked. This is the only thing stopping me from deploying Safari or Firefox on the networks I admin.
Whilst the Announcements may not have been a giant leap. They certainly were a jump in the right direction.
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Twitter has come under attack for being a great service that has a poor record of up time Link1 - TechCrunch, Link 2 - TechCrunch. Well news on the street is Twitter survived the several thousand posts it recieved during WWDC, including my own meager posts. But at what cost.
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