Did anyone else catch the Warchalking story on Marketplace today?
I'm a bit puzzled that the approached it as a "hacking" story. They don't get it, either, I guess.
*sigh*
Wow. Check out Western Digital's Drivezilla. They've announced 200GB hard disks. Something tells me that I'll have my own terabyte by the end of 2003.
I had to leave the conference after the first half of the day so that I can get some stuff done at work and some work on the book.
David Pogue's keynote was excellent. He knows the Mac, Apple history, and is very funny. I highly recommend seeing him speak if you get the chance.
Tim O'Reilly's keynote was disappointing for me. If you've been paying attention to what Tim's been saying in the last year, you didn't miss anything. A lot of it has come up in his weblog and in his other presentations. He also ended up going over the alloted time and had to really cut himself short. I never really seen that happen to him before.
I attended a presentation called Automating Mac OS X by Matt Neuburg of TidBITS. It was interesting at a high level. I never realized how AppleScript and Apple Events work and what they're really capable of. He showed a bit of Real Basic and Cocoa as well as some Perl, Python, and Ruby--all on OS X, of course. It's interesting to see how many applications are "externally scriptable" on OS X and how easy it is.
He even had a demo that involved using Manila to build an on-line photo gallery. Neat stuff.
That's it for now. Sorry I can't cover more of today.
I'll be headed back tomorrow to listen to Jordan Hubbard's morning keynote about OS X and Unix. I'll also cover James Gosling's afternoon keynote on OS X and Java. An Apple exec was very happy to tell me (several months ago) that Gosling now uses OS X on his desktop and that Java is great.
I haven't completely decide which other sessions I'm going to hit, but I'm hoping to nail at least two of them. We'll see.
David Pogue is talking about Mac in the past, present, and future.
Mac market is growing. It's a small part of a very large and growing pie. So Apple isn't dead and won't die. But they'll never be the big player.
The history comes first. The two Steves. They had color first. And it was the first beige machine! Heh. Steve Jobs visits PARC and gets some ideas from them. Saw the mouse, menus, and more. Decided they belonged on his computer. (Heh, Xerox invented the brain-dead business plan. They never did anything with the ideas.) The Lisa was born.
Then comes Scully, fresh from selling sugar water. It was the reality distortion field at work. Jobs went to work on the Mac project. And MacWorld magazine was born not long after. It was all GUI all the way.
Cool. System 1 screenshots. 128k and floppy. Heh.
Scully sends Jobs away and strips his responsibility. Goes off to start Next. Scully does layoffs and Windows 1.0 comes out to compete with Apple. The first color Mac comes out, as does the Newton. It flops big time.
4,000 newton modems make for great dominos.
Then came Spindler and Amelio. More Macs came out. They were all pretty boring.
Apple bought Next and got Steve back. Then came the new Macs. Flavors, cubes, and more. Lots of OS revs. Then came OS X.
And it was good.
Talks lots about all the new features in OS X.
What about the future? What'd be nice?
Icon labels, location manager, file encyrption, ram disk, Windows "send to" menu, virtual desktop (yes! I'd love that), and so on. Networking assistant would be good too. Voice and Video conferencing.
What Windows could learn from the Mac. Taste. AppleScript. Freedom from "activation". Driver invisibility. Text-to-speach. Centralized control panel. Drag-n-drop install. And uninstall. Coherent app names. One menu for software apps. The list goes on and on.
What about OS XV and beyond?
Here are some ideas. Document aging. Icons that reflect their contents. Big docs get "taller stack" icons. Screen memorizer. Broadband software. eBay for documents (clip art, music, info, etc).
RAM growth. Disk growth. Much more powerful CPUs, of course. 55 inch monitors! :-)
Seriously, CRTs are dead. Very dead. Bluetooth is a sure thing. It's going to make a big difference. Speech recognition is not the answer. Keyboards are here to stay. Battery problems won't go away for a long time.
RAM drives are coming. The USB kind. Very cool.
DVDs. CDs will go. Microsoft is here to stay too.
Windows wizards could just keep getting worse and worse.
Apple will continute to set design trends, like the iPod and the new iMac.
Tim O'Reilly is giving his keynote right now. Talking a lot about watching
Alpha Geeks, wireless netowrk, bots, and so on. Here are some notable items
that Tim mentions.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet" -- William
Gibson.
Hackers push the envelope, and entreprenurs make things eaiser for
ordinary users.
The evolution from CGI to PHP/mod_perl and on to GUI site builders.
Eventually, consolidation happens around technologies as mature. We
need to balance control and innovation. Microsoft is probably too closed
and controlling. It's an ecosystem. Don't pollute it.
Paradigm shifts and distruptive technologies.
What's to like about OS X:
Piracy is progressive taxation.
Thanks to an anonymous helper, I've mirrored all 5 ISO images for Red Hat 8.0.
Ohio - http://family.zawodny.com/~jzawodn/iso/rh80/ (DS-3 connection via Sprint)
California - http://litterbox.zawodny.com/~jzawodn/iso/rh80/ (multiple gigabit connections)
Now be nice. :-)