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June 28, 2004
[WWDC] Post Keynote
So, the more reliable portions of the rumor mill were right on the money. Save for the new displays (and the video card required to drive the 30" monster) no new hardware. The design matched "artist's concept" rumor sketches, and Apple is indeed going back to DVI for the interface. The Tiger screenshots that surfaced on the net were, apparently, legit.
Tiger (MacOS X 10.4) itself won't be shipping until "H1 2005" - meaning the first half of 2005, which could be as late as June of 2005. There's a fair amount of nice stuff in what Steve showed us (most all of which can be seen on Apple's site). Spotlight is Google for the desktop - it's really going to change the way people (don't) organize their files. Downside? By allowing people to easily find their stuff, they'll just dump it into one or two folders - and unless Tiger comes with some serious filesystem changes/optimizations, those humongous folders will be a huge performance sink everytime you try to open one.
Swag is good, though not as cool as last year. WWDC t-shirt, Developer release of Tiger, Tiger t-shirt, poster for the new displays, WWDC backpack (nice, but not as solid as previous offerings). The underreported surprise is the bundling of a copy of Apple Remote Desktop 2 into the Tiger package. Not sure if it's a 10-user or unlimited license, but the 10=user is worth about what last year's iSight was.
Network is, as usual, wonky. Still, providing reliable wi-fi for a few thousand laptop-toting geeks is tricky at best, especially when you insist on using your own hardware (which supports a max of 50 users/AP) - which is why I'm back at the hotel room, entering this on my pirate Wi-Fi.
Back to the conference...
Posted by jim at June 28, 2004 01:15 PM