WWDC 2004 Keynote: Who said that innovation never sleeps?

As we all know, today was Apple's World Wide Developers Conference which has been gaining more and more importance during the last two years as Apple has made significant announcements during this event. Here is a full report on the keynote followed by the feelings of some people that attended the event and my own feelings on today's announcements.

Like every year, Steve Jobs introduced the features of the next version of Apple's operating system. The first big announcement of this keynote was hardware though. Apple announced three new displays with aluminum case. A 20", a 23" a macosXrumors.site nd a 30" one, respectively priced $1299, $1999 and $3299. The particularity of these new displays is that their connector is no longer ADC, but the industry standard DVI.

After this announcement, Steve Jobs started talking about Mac OS X and highlighted some new developers that are coming to the Mac with new software, among them: Oracle, Peoplesoft, Borland, Microsoft and Sun. Some developers went on stage to talk about their developments on Mac OS X. Alias announced that Maya Unlimited would be available by late summer. Jobs also highlighted Myst and a satellite simulation application called Orbit.

Once finished with third party developers, Steve talked about Tiger. The main features and technologies were described or demoed : 64bit, Spotlight, Safari RSS, .Mac Sync, Core Image/Video, iChat AV, Automator... I won't explain them as Apple does it better than me.

According to sources that attended the conference, the most impressive improvements of Tiger were iChat AV's multi-way audio and video-conferencing (10 audio or 3 video at the same time) and Core Image/Video technology. The new iChat is indeed impressing but it remains too much closed to Mac users only. Notice that the new iChat icon doesn't have the AOL/AIM logo any longer, does it mean it will add support for other networks? It looks like it supports Jabber, as revealed in this page. The improvements of xCode Tools are also welcomed by developers but were not demoed during the conference.

It's important to notice, that in contrary to what a lot of you might have thought, an attendee told that it was indicated the database-driven search feature called Spotlight and the meta-data support do not imply the use of a new file system like it was reported on some rumor sites. It looks like an extension to the file system code-named "Metadoor" provides meta-data support to the existing file system.

Mac OS X Tiger Server also adds several new interesting features, like the iChat server, improved xGrid, the NT migration tools or the software update server. I suggest you to take a look on Apple's preview of Tiger Server because it reveals some features not announced in Tiger Client.

In conclusion, I'd like to add my personal feelings on today's announcements. Firstly, I'm happy that new displays were announced; Although they seem like very good products, I believe they are quite expensive for anyone but the high-end buyers. As for Tiger, I'm a bit disappointed because I thought it would be revolutionary and it is not, although the server version brings some great improvements. Let's hope Apple has kept some secrets that will only be revealed later. If we consider it's a two years project development, Except for Spotlight/meta-data and Core Image/Video which look stunning, I think there are no huge improvements on Tiger but mainly gadgets and little new features. When I see the Konfabulator feature... err.. the Dashboard feature I think that innovation sometimes sleeps and photocopiers start at Apple. Apple has also a lot of work to do on its development tools but I'd like to test them before saying anything further.

The Preview of Tiger comes in a DVD and will be given to developers later this evening. It is possible that I can test it soon and make a preview article. Don't hesitate to send reports and/or screenshots if you are able to test Tiger on your Mac.