Apple tastes a little different today
Apple have kicked off their Worldwide Developers Conference with the usual flurry of announcements to surround it:
New Apple website
It has been a long time since I remember seeing any aesthetic changes to the Apple website, and it looks stunning now. Their old site was looking a bit dated. Check it out at www.apple.com. I particularly like this page, fantastic design, it really feels alive and has a sense of place.
Leopard product tour
As they are releasing Leopard to developers at their conference I guess they had to bring this out to prevent people talking about it and getting it wrong. Essentially this is what Vista is to XP, so it will be interesting to see how it fairs. Some fantastic features like Spaces - giving the ability to dedicate screen layout to particular tasks and switch between those tasks easily. I’m a big multi-tasker, so this looks ideal. The other big feature is Time Machine - keeping backups of everything and accessing it by what day/time version you want. It is the backup everyone has always wanted.
I’m always fascinated about the ability Apple has to develop features such as the cover slide in iTunes, but make it practical enough to be modular - in the new Finder you can use cover slide for looking through files. Good design principles really: specific enough to be useful, ambiguous enough to be used across different problem domains.
iPhone to support third party web 2.0 products
This is a big one. I don’t think the iPhone could be truly successful without compatibility and support for third party web products. There was a lot of criticism early on about the iPhone being a “closed shop”. In fact I remember reading a quote from a Microsoft spokesman saying how it could never be a truly useful device because it doesn’t have Microsoft Office. Come on.
Providing web developers with access to iPhone functions (call, message, show location in Google Maps etc) opens up huge possibilities. This means that all the current web 2.0 apps we love will finally be accessible in our pocket.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Sebastian
Well, the site appears to have changed yet again to line up with the launch of the iPhone in the US. In a way its good that we’re going to have to wait a year because it means we’re going to get the product in a mature stage of it’s life cycle. I’m still a little apprehensive about buying a piece of first generation Apple hardware, although it certainly looks like this generation of iPhone is going to last a bit longer than the early iPods. Only time will tell how the product will fare, and by the time it reaches our shores I’m sure we’ll have a good idea of whether its worth forking out the cash. I wonder what Nokia will come up with in the mean time?
Jul 6th, 2007
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