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Apple Round Up - The 2007 WWDC

The elite of the Apple geeks are at their week-long conference. We'll highlight the stuff that matters to you.

We're not expecting any big news to come out of the "Deploying Large-scale Storage Solutions using Xsan and Xserve RAID" session today, so will take this lull to review what's happened so far and if anything actually important has happened.

Safari for Windows
- Background: Safari is the web browser that comes with a Mac. It's like the IE for Mac machines. Any browser that's packaged with an operating system has some noticeable advantages, namely it starts up way faster and probably crashes less. Windows users know that IE starts way faster than Firefox. But Firefox and its extensions is way better, so it's not a sacrifice.
- Good News: Choice is good. The more browsers that are out there means users can find one that has the right functionality for them. More importantly, as we live our digital life online more and more, you can see the need to run more than one browser at a time (right now I'm running 3 on my iBook: writing this in Firefox and logged in to 2 different Google Readers with Safari and Flock).
- Bad News: It doesn't seem to work, as the Zolved team found out. But that's what a beta release is all about: put it out there, find out what's broke, fix it, then release a working version. The other bad news is that the other Apple program that was made for Windows (that would be iTunes), had a lot of problems and most people who care agree it ain't all that great for managing your music.
- Real News: Apple had to release a Windows version of Safari so software developers could write programs for the iPhone. Say what? What does a web browser have to do with a overly-hyped cellphone? I'm not a programmer so I can't really explain it well, but think of it this way. If a software guy wants to create (and make money) off of a program for the iPhone, he would've had to get a Mac. Now he just has to write something that runs in Safari, on his Windows machine, and it will run on an iPhone.
Leopard - Mac OS X (10.5)
- Background: The new version of the Apple operating systems. New features, updated functionalities.
- Good News: For the Mac faithful, this is exciting stuff. For the other 95% of computer users, meh. Check out Lifehacker's list of the new OS X goodies.
- Bad News: It's not ready yet. To quote the Apple press release "Apple today unveiled a near final version of Mac OS X Leopard" (emphasis ours). Why showcase something that's not finished and unavailable until October? Because it's a develper's conference and they get into stuff like that (plus they get to take home a free copy of 10.5.
- Real News: That Apple and Steve didn't have anything earth-shattering because they don't want to distract from the release of the iPhone on June 29th.