Tuesday, June 24, 2003

WWDC 2003 Keynote

Matt Gemmell has my favorite writeup of Panther and its new metallic Finder. I can’t wait to see how Apple will change the human interface guidelines to suit this whim. Personally, I think it’s time to change the default system fonts and smoothing since (according to John Geleynse) they were specifically designed for striped backgrounds, and stripes are now passé.

But metal is just the skin, and what really matters about the new Finder is what’s underneath. Is it fast? Is it buggy? Has Apple actually thought about this design, or is it just another one to throw at the wall to see if it’ll stick? Time will tell, and I’ll be using Path Finder at least until Panther ships.

More coverage from around the Web:

2lmc
ArsTechnica on WWDC, PPC 970 Part I, Part II
Dan Benjamin
Lee Bennett
James Duncan Davidson
Steven Frank
Jason Fried
John Gruber
Slava Karpenko
Michael McCracken
Sven-S. Porst on Panther and iChat AV
Glenn Vanderburg

And some links from Apple:

GCC 3.3 release notes describing syntactic extensions to Objective-C to give it Java-like exception handling and critical regions. I’d like to hear about their sugar content.
PowerPC G5 Performance Primer
Tuning for G5: A Practical Guide

Unfortunately, unless they’re saving the news for the Cocoa Update session, Apple apparently isn’t bringing back EOF. However, they do appear to realize that Project Builder is lacking and are doing something about it. Hopefully they’ll be open about it so that BBEdit and other editors can get context-sensitive symbol completion and lookup. Or, better yet, they’ll open source the developer tools so that the community can help build what it needs. High on my list would be a way to build and embed frameworks without resorting to obscure incantations. They should be at least as easy to use as jars!

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