Apple’s WWDC 2009 Keynote

Today was Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, and like always, Apple gave developers and Apple fanatics alike some new treats. If you haven’t caught the keynote yet, Apple has posted a video on their website. There has been an abundance of conference coverage today, so I’m going assume you caught up.

My Thoughts

The clear theme of this year’s keynote, in my opinion, was refinements. Apple didn’t unveil any brand new products, or even upgrade any of their products radically. They simply improved on what they do best. That’s fine by me, as I’d rather have something work the way its intended than keep pushing forward on features, never reaching a point of stability.

That being said, I’m still excited for the new releases. Outside of the new iPhone 3G S and the upgraded MacBooks, WWDC contained lots of good news for me. Listed below are the announcements that mattered to me and why I’m excited.

Safari 4 Final

• Safari is my browser of choice, due to this its speed and operating system integration.
• The final version is a lot faster than the beta, and seems to have solved the lockup issue I experienced frequently in the beta.
• A final version is always better than a beta.

iPhone OS 3.0

More information about iPhone OS 3.0 can be found on Apple’s website.

• Release date is only a week and a half away, June 17th.
• Supports copy, cut, and paste – something that should have been included in 1.0.
• Enables Bluetooth on my existing second generation iPod touch.
• Apple claims the whole operating system is faster.
• Better syncing with MobileMe, which I actually use for my calendar, contacts, and bookmark syncing.
• Using my iPod touch at Penn State will be easier due to the new automatic wifi login feature. Opening the settings app constantly to connect to PSU’s VPN gets old after a while.

Snow Leopard

More information about Snow Leopard can be found on Apple’s website.

• Only $29 instead of the normal $129.
• Smaller operating system footprint. I only have a 128GB hard drive in my Mac mini, so the extra 6GB of space Snow Leopard provides will be welcome.
• Completely rewritten applications for 64 bit. Some of Leopard’s applications feel dated and slow, so a complete modern rewrite was needed.
• Completely rewritten Finder. Yes, this was technically covered in the last bullet point, but the Finder is currently really slow and truly needs this rewrite.
• Completely rewritten Quicktime (now Quicktime X). Again, yes, I covered this already, but Quicktime really needs this rewrite as well. Quicktime currently chokes with HD video, which I’ve been watching a lot lately, so the new version will hopefully run better.
• Faster Time Machine backups. Time machine takes forever to run a backup in Leopard (sometimes five minutes for just a few megabytes worth of data) and absolutely rapes the backup hard drive during the run, so I’m really looking forward to an improved Time Machine experience.
• A more reliable disk eject. This one sounds stupid, but I rely on external hard drives, and they occasionally don’t eject properly. Apple has claimed to fix this in Snow Leopard.
• Preview with scanning capabilities. If Apple can get OCR image scanning to PDF working in Snow Leopard, I may finally have my paper archiving system.

That about covers my list. What are you looking forward to from Apple? Do you even care about Apple’s WWDC?