WWDC is set to start Monday with a keynote from Phil Schiller at 10 a.m. PST. Here’s what I think we will see.
• A refined GUI - darker, more like iLife ’09.
• A good look at how Exchange integration for iCal, Mail and Address Book will crush Entourage.
• Apple will show a bunch of graphs showing how much faster it is than Leopard.
• A quick tour of 10.6 Server. Expect updates to imaging and push mail/calendars/contacts. Think ‘MobileMe for Companies.’
Jolicloud, a new Linux-based OS out for a select group of netbooks, generated some buzz after screenshots of the interface were leaked a few months ago.
The OS looks great, and ties in to web services easier and better than probably any other OS out there. TechCrunch took it for a test spin:
Even when you run Jolicloud for the first time, everything is quite visual, making it easy to navigate even when you’re not familiar with all the buttons and processes. Compare it to switching from Windows Mobile 6 on your smartphone to the iPhone OS: it’s incredibly easy to get used to, and it’s just a better general user experience, particularly if you use a lot of web applications.
These days, it’s just a matter of time before new gadgets get taken apart for their guts to be shown to the world. Here’s what the inside of the Palm Pre looks like. Pretty.
With the best release notes ever:
In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.
How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.
Electronista, discussing a leaked Best Buy memo:
An unusual aspect of the memo is Best Buy’s proposed marketing angle, which describes the OS as more than “just a ‘Vista that works,’” with benefits such as improved simplicity, performance and productivity. The memo may thus be a tacit admission that Vista was flawed; prior to the Service Pack 1 update, the software was frequently accused of problems like driver incompatibility and slow file transfers.
It’s great to hear that Jobs is doing well and is on track to return to full-time duty, but I don’t expect to see him at WWDC. Sure, it’d be a surprise, the audience (yours truly included) would go into conniptions, and the stock would jump five or ten points. But then what happens the next time there’s a keynote address where Jobs is not the scheduled speaker? Everyone will expect Jobs to show up as a “surprise.“ I’d love to proven wrong on this one, though.
Wired has put together a slideshow of Palm’s best - and worst - products.
Gizmodo seems to think that the company’s new WebOS is a diamond, the Pre’s hardware is the rough:
Think of it like this. The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.
From a piece over at TechRepublic titled “10 reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows,” from back in February:
Out of the mouths of Microsoft comes the proclamation that Windows 7 will run on any hardware that would run Vista and even slightly less powerful hardware. Slightly less powerful? What exactly does that mean? Well for one, Windows 7 will have no luck in the netbook market. And since XP is dying, the netbook market will be owned by Linux. Netbooks are not gaining enough power to run anything from Windows but the watered-down version of XP. Netbooks are not going anywhere, and consumers (both home and corporate) have their limits on how many hardware upgrades they will make to fulfill an operating systems’ needs. As of Fedora 10, the minimum system requirements look like something out of the mid ’90s.
The Apple Cafe was to be a high-tech cybercafe where you could order healthy food while videoconferencing with people at nearby tables, surfing the Web, and pulling up movies or TV shows on a small kiosk screen at your table.
Yes, Macs are plagued with as many (and sometimes more) vulnerabilities as other operating systems. These are the doors attackers use to exploit our systems, and Macs are far from invulnerable. But the truth is that in the real world, Macs suffer from far fewer compromises. This is the difference between security and safety. A highly secure home in a bad neighborhood is still more likely to be robbed than a less secure home in a safer area. Mac market share is probably an important reason here, as is the history of the platform, the focus of the bad guys, and a host of other factors
This week, my work-supplied MacBook Pro is having its logic board and optical drive replaced, so I’m using a 1Ghz Titanium PowerBook (pictured here) as my main machine for a while. I figured hauling my aluminum iMac around would be a bad idea.
With a 1Ghz G4 and 1GB of RAM, this TiBook (the last revision of the series) exceeds the minimum requirements for Leopard. While the 64MB of video RAM is pretty wimpy, it’s enough to get the job done. Regrettably, the TiBook shipped with a 4,200 RPM hard drive - which is miserably slow. To add insult to injury, the drive seems to be on its last legs. With its low-end specs and a slow drive, Leopard didn’t run well on the machine. I may try again once its new 5,400 RPM drive comes in later this week, but for now the TiBook is running 10.4.11.