Bitching and Whining over WWDC 2006

Posted on August 10, 2006
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This year’s Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is in full swing and that hasn’t stopped the media, pundits and bloggers from weighing in full-force on how lackluster the new toys and technologies shown off have been. Seriously, at least two articles I read led with how tired Steve Jobs looked (are you lot reporters and geeks or Mary Hart wanna-be’s? I can’t tell.) Sadly the most notable and prominent of these comes from Leander Kahney at Wired:

Looking very thin, almost gaunt, Jobs used the 90-minute presentation to introduce a new desktop Mac and preview the next version of Apple’s operating system, code-named Leopard.
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In the past, I’ve found myself clapping wildly at the most mundane product features, or the tiniest increase in market share, despite trying to maintain a steely, Zen-like editorial impartiality.
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The sneak preview of Leopard was underwhelming. For what seemed an interminable time, Jobs and Co. showed off one yawn after another. There’s no way I can get excited about virtual desktops or a new service that turns highlighted text into a “to do” item. Oooo.

Kahney, you had me laughing out loud at “editorial impartiality”.

Over at Engadget a commenter posts:

i wanted a new ipod video or iphone before christmas. disappointed

and another:

I was hopeful that I would hear about that super-duper top secret feature for iChat. You know the one I am talking about….. Yahoo integration… Jeezzz…. I do not need roller coasters. What I need are things normal people use in a normal day’s work.
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Very Very disappointing

Well, here’s the rub: WWDC just isn’t Macworld, that comes in January. It’s the called the WW Developer C for reason: developers, developers, developers (say it with me Mr. Ballmer).

Yep, you’re absolutely right. No splash-bang, ground-shaking, heart-stopping new consumer gadgets were announced and an upgrade to the OS sure isn’t 7am on a sunny Christmas Morning but from a developer’s perspective, of which so far 0% of the post and article author’s I’ve read who’ve expressed disappointment are, WWDC show-cased some pretty damned interesting technologies.

Technologies like Core Animation (holy shit, we ain’t seen nothin’ from this yet), Objective-C 2.0 (garbage collection, sweet), iCal API (finally, shared calendars), Ruby on Rails and Apache2 included by default, and something called “Latent Semantic Mapping” which sounds so cool as it is that I dont’ want to spoil it by googling it.

If you read that and thought “Wtf are you talking about?” or “What, no new iPod?” or even “Steve Jobs didn’t give me enough show for my dollar!! *whine* *whine* *whine*” [ref. Kahney, Leander - ed.] then move along, nothing to see here, just wait for Macworld in a mere five months.

See, us developers tend to get excited by the kind of thing that makes most people fall dead asleep. Faster servers? Cool! Faster compile times? Wicked! A new API? Gimme. We live in the dreadfully geeky and technical world that exists behind the flash-bang and golly-gee and back here it’s all nuts and bolts and girders and concrete. Not much to look at, really.

Unless you’re a, you know, developer.

Y’know, it’s also a bit tragic when AeroXperience, a Windows-dedicated site, get what the D in WWDC is all about and scoops the dedicated Mac sites with a comprehensive list of what’s to come in [EXCLUSIVE] Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” Developer Improvements.

Update: Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster notes the same phenomenon in Memes that need to die., and Wil is way more Mac-famous than me which is proof-by-association that I’m right.

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