Happy WWDC day!

Well, it's been a while since I've updated the blog, but today there are a few good reasons too. It's that time of year again... WWDC.

So what are the main things in the 'developers' Stevenote. After reiterating most of what was said last year, not a huge amount to be honest.

EA coming to the Mac.

This is an interesting one. The biggest games from EA (in terms of popularity not gaming-geek factor) have generally come to the Mac via third party publishing deals. Aspyr alone have steadily brought over the Sim's, Battlefield, Medal of Honor (sic) franchises as well as some of the Harry Potter games and classics like Alice. Today's announcement brings some positives for Mac gamers in that it looks as if EA will be going for simultaneous releases of more titles. But the negatives are that Mac dedicated publishers who know the platform will likely lose out on deals and end-users will quite possibly see shoe-horned ports utilising middleware such Transgaming's Cider.

In fact, this is what the company has announced today. Now, all credit to the company for their technology, but frankly, it leaves developers too much opportunity to be lazy. There are certain things that Mac users expect. Certain ways an application should behave when loading, when jumping in and out of fullscreen or even choosing which display to play on, when interacting with the rest of the system. Data files, save files, etc should be in certain places. While the core game, once you are in it, is pretty much the same on any platform and upto the game designer, it's packaging and interaction with it's parent OS is a big deal. Especially for Mac users expecting certain behaviour usually adopted by Mac developers. Sadly from what I've seen of Cider ports so far, they don't do this. You only get the polish from knowledgeable Mac developers.

Update:
A couple of other points brought up relate to customer and EA's expectations. Beyond the 'look and feel' people who buy these games will expect a certain level of platform specific support and timely patches. Aspyr and others have always been very good at this, are EA geared up to deliver? From EA's perspective, are they really prepared for low sales? How will a company that it used to selling hundreds of thousands if not millions of units cope with selling thousands or tens of thousands? In the past this is what caused them and others to pull out of direct support of the market. And these cheap 'ports' are focussed purely at Intel based Mac's missing out the large installed base of PPC machines. It does look as if EA is taking a sensible balance here though. Aspyr are still working with and bringing across big sellers like the Sims, while Cider is being used for games which may not have otherwise made it.
End Update

Having Carmack on stage showing of, albeit briefly, the new engine that id have had in development for some time was nice, and not something he's been averse to doing in the past. The teaser of more announcements at E3 for multple platforms including the Mac was as close to anything news-worthy that was said though.

Safari 3
New Safari Beta available for OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

I've tried this out under both OS X 10.4 and Windows XP under Parallels and apart from some differences in title-bars, both generally behave the same are work very nicely.

The combination of having an updated Webkit (AppleWebKit/522.10.1 compared to the previous AppleWebKit/419) as well as a core updated Safari application (unlike Webkit Nightlies) yields a lot of improvements. On top of the clearly defined features such as the awesome inline find/searching a whole slew of improvements to the underlying WebKit frameworks have been properly exposed. Compatibility and performance is better, for example the Safari Beta works great with Google Apps and launches a lot faster on my laptop.

Interestingly it seems as if the Windows version has a slightly later Webkit version included, as Safari for XP/Vista reports AppleWebKit/522.11.3.

Some may ask why Apple have done this. In my mind it's a great move. It proves the portability of their frameworks (the KHTML based Webkit framework now runs on Series 60 phones, Intel and PPC Macs, Intel PC's and soon the iPhone) and helps evangelise the Safari platform itself. The more people on more devices that use Safari and Webkit, the better for Apple and it's core devices. Web developers will be forced to take Safari seriously and not consider it a 'minor' inconvenience when creating web applications. After all we all know that Web 2.0 is where it's at (apparently). Not only that but if your average PC user is using iTunes to manage their music and Safari for all their surfing (which these days can mean everything from traditional browsing, through social networking to creation of complex spreadsheets) then maybe they'll take the final leap and buy a Mac next time around. Most of us spend a large proportion of our time in our web browsers and more and more 'serious' applications are being used and accessed through a browser.

Other
There are long awaited and significant changes to the Finder and the desktop organisation paradigm. Much as I like iTunes I'm not so keen on it being the main interface to all my files but the 'Stacks' (previously known in patents as 'piles') approach to organising files and folders looks promising.

Then there's the partial opening up of the iPhone to external developers. It's not much and not a full SDK but having the ability to make Web 2.0/AJAX applications for the device will allow room for customisation. There must - in my mind - be some hooks into lower level API's to allow for access to address book data and so on, even if it's only in a read only basis. I guess only time will tell how this pans out. It's certainly not what some developers were hoping for and may be described as jumped up widgets, but it's better than nothing.

There was talk of Leopard of fully supporting 64-bit. finally 32-bit and 64-bit applications living side by side with complete support from all Cocoa libraries. There wasn't any firm word on whether this would be for Intel and PPC but I can only assume and hope both architectures are covered here. After all, the transition to 64-bit started with the G5 and a few core low level libraries, before stumbling with the move to 32-bit Intel CPU's and has only now taken the bold steps forward now that platform has allowed across the board 64-bit.

So a few things to think about but nothing earth shattering. Leopard is on it's way and will be welcomed by Mac users the world over, but that would likely happen whatever. Interestingly the biggest pushes from Apple seem to be along the lines of making the company strong on the desktop but also in 'the Cloud'. While Google want to be the company running all the web-based applications that we all use every day, Apple want to be providing the devices and tools we use to access those services. Be they the iPhone in our pockets, the MacBook on our laps or the AppleTV in our front room. Not a dream that different from Microsoft, but a very different approach.