I’ve heard/read many people project the death of the Mac Mini.
After spending half a week here at WWDC, I’d like to inform you that I don’t believe this to be the case.
Mac Minis have proven to be quite the useful little box here at WWDC. They are set up as cheapo terminals for users, practice stations, whatever you can think of. However, the most prominent use of them (and one that will definitely keep them alive) is using them with Leopard and Podcast Producer.
I am in the process of adding a few more photos of WWDC 2007. In particular, these pictures are of waiting in line for the keynote. I have videos of that too… but… gee, who wants to see a bunch of geeks waiting in line?
I also have video of portions of the keynote (like the John Carmack portion), but I’m not bothering to post it since a good slice of the keynote has been posted and does it much more justice than what I can offer.
So today was the keynote and I have to admit – it was a little underwhelming.
Most of the chatter I heard around the show today seemed to share that sentiment. The excitement was pretty good surrounding the newer features – specifically the new Finder, Cover Flow integration, Time Machine and Core Animation. It’s cool stuff. I personally never found the Finder offending enough to need replacing.
The keynote was definitely entertaining – which is good since I waited three hours for a chance to see Steve Jobs in the flesh. Since this is my first real Apple event, I got a true taste of what these things are like starting around 7am. The line stretched around Moscone Center West quite early. We were corralled into the center little by little as a teasing mechanism. As time went on, we found ourselves wound up on the 2nd floor and spiraling throughout the entire complex. Finally, when the doors were opened to the Presidio, where the keynote was to be delivered, the flock began moving. One of the escalators stopped working on one side of the lines. One guy had the bright idea that he was going to jump lines. He did so and what resulted was a crowd following suit until the security folks halted the movement. At least one person quite loudly declared, “This is bullshit man! Our escalator stopped working and we can’t get upstairs!” He was quite upset.
So we journeyed down the hill from our hotel to Moscone Center West to get a gander of WWDC 2007 and register for the show. Many folks had the same idea – they were streaming in from everywhere with excited looks on their faces. Many of them registered and immediately unpacked their laptops – perhaps to blog about the experience.
The show’s swag featured a fairly elegant WWDC ’07 laptop bag and t-shirt. The laptop bag posed a bit of a problem for us since we had a toddler and stroller with us, but the wife managed to find a way to get it attached to the stroller to make it easier to carry.
Despite a cancelled flight, we’re heading out this morning to San Francisco. The new flight itinerary sucks terribly, but what can you do? The other choices just weren’t very good at all and cancelling means giving up a lot of dough. At the mercy of the airlines again.
We’ll be landing in SFO at around 5:39pm today Pacific… then tomorrow will be a day of play and WWDC registration… then Monday… WWDC! I can hardly wait.
Sun’s CEO said that Mac OS X will be getting the open-source high-performance ZFS filesystem. Exciting!
Paul Thurrott has said numerous times in his blog and on the Windows Weekly podcast that he feels that Linux does not innovate.
This is a pretty broad statement and I find myself in violent disagreement.
Whenever I install a Linux distribution to play with… which is usually how it always ends up, since I run into issues… I find myself installing and using software that I wish would be running on Windows or the Mac. I often find myself saying… “Self… why doesn’t the (such and such) platform have an app like this?”
Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus – A technology blog
On this post, Paul Thurrott points out the install base of Windows Vista is 40 million strong… so sayeth Bill Gates. Despite all of the negative press, Vista has a strong presence in the industry and is already installed on more machines than non-Microsoft products.
I echo Paul… “I get it.” However, what no one is able to measure unfortunately, is how many people are uninstalling Vista to roll back to XP or another operating system. Reporting that sales of Vista is 40 million strong does not mean that there are 40 million PCs using it. Every day, I read posts about people trying to weather Vista and failing.
Microsoft today released beta 1 of a docx converter for Mac Office 2004. This converter allows a ONE-WAY conversion of docx files to Mac .doc format so you can open them. You cannot save them as docx from the Mac, nor send it back. That’s to “protect your data” by the way.
Who cares? If Microsoft’s MacBU wanted to impress folks, they would wake up to the half-assiness known as Entourage and spend a lot of time and resources into making it a sweet and beautiful application that sings happily with PC brethren in a mixed, collaborative environment.
So while BunBun took his nap and the wife took to exercising, I tuned in to TWiT.TV Live and watched Leo Laporte’s last hour or so of the KFI radio show that is done on weekends. Leo has hooked up a webcam and broadcasts a stream via Stickam to all interested parties. During the breaks or while on the air, he interacts with the chatroom #techguy on irc.dslextreme.com. It was pretty interesting. After the show, he gave an impromptu press conference with the chatroom, which was inundating him with questions about how TWiT is going, how he gets his show into other markets, his equipment and jazzy setups, etc. It was very interesting and I’ll be sure to tune in for more when I can.
