The Reality Distortion Field just crashed

I guess, that when you constantly ride on a wave of success, and have to meet very high expectations, you will most certainly disappoint at some point in time. That’s a good chance to get in touch with reality again. Seen this way, Apples WWDC07-Keynote was a huge underperformance, and I hope Apple listens to the critics. Because there are many.

First of all, the 10 new Leopard features. Don’t get me wrong here, Leopard is awesome and I agree that it is the biggest step forward in any OSX update. The stuff under the hood, like some new frameworks and the new developer tools are amazing. But if you claim to have “super cool top secret features” that you hold back almost a year, you better deliver. But out of the 10 features presented, only two were new: The new Desktop and the new Finder. It was about time that these two areas get their updates, that was the minimum one could expect. But is there more, than could have been expected? I doubt so. CoreAnimation and Quicklook have been announced last year, and as great as they are (and they truly are) they are not new. Next time please keep the expectations low, maybe you then keep the disappointment low, too. Leopard will be awesome when it’s released, one can write great Apps for it, but this Keynote was WWDC06 reloaded but without the “Wow”.

The next thing is Safari 3. I like it. I used it in the Leopard seed I got last year, and thought it would be great to have it now, on the Tiger system that I use for most of my work. Now I have this, and so far it works great. But there are some things:

• Safari is not the worlds most innovative browser. Look at how many people crash Safari 3 right now, because they have incompatible extensions installed via obscure input managers. Look at how elegantly Firefox solves the problem of extending the browser. To be truly innovative, you need to do something like this. Right now, Safari is not as innovative as it could be, and you have your existing userbase complain very loudly that this thing crashes, because they made up for that lack of innovation.
• Safari on Windows seems to be very, very unstable. Apple alienates its future userbase with such an unstable release. Yes it’s beta. But it shouldn’t be “public Beta” at this point, Apple needs to find some way of testing software between the two choices “closed alpha for a handful of people in cupertino” and “public beta for everyone”, because if done wrong, the latter may crash your reputation. The word “beta” means nothing these days. If you release it to the public, it better works. Safari on Windows doesn’t work at all.

• On another note, I’ve got a question: How did Apple port Safari? Webkit, the rendering engine – ok, that’s clear. But how did they port the rest of the app, the windows, tabs and menus? It’s either a completely different codebase or they have finally ported the Objective-C runtime and some of the CoreFoundation and Appkit Frameworks to windows. Because, unlike iTunes, Safari is a Cocoa Application.

  But Apple saved the worst for last. I have to agree that claiming Websites are like native apps, no matter how ajaxy and web2.0 they might be, is an insult to app developers. When I first heard this, I thought: “Well they will expose some functionality via Javascript and give us Google-Gears- or Apollo-like functionality that bridges the gap between what you can do with a web app and what you can do with a standalone app. Like having your data and application logic offline. Or do what they do in Dashboard Widgets: They let us make custom Plugins that have access to the system.” Well, they don’t. We can’t even go to the icon dashboard with our apps, they are just websites, you access them via the bookmarks, and they run in the normal Safari.

  Apple misses a big opportunity here. With multi-touch and CoreAnimation a whole new class of applications is possible. These things are the beginning of a huge revolution in interface design, and we’ve literally only touched the surface. We as developers want to be part of this, we want to contribute and make things that even Apple could not have imagined. That’s why everyone asked for an SDK so loudly, and I think – and hope – that those voices will even get louder.

  What Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall have to get, is that their target group is a lot bigger than “Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg”. Apple has a lot of professional customers out there that want to do more than just email their photos. And if they provide their developers with the right tools to make amazing apps instead of feeding them bulls**t like they did at the keynote, the developers will build things that will please these professional customers as well as Steve and Walt and push the iPhone even more forward.

  Apple themselves are not using the web technology they claim to be “sweet” anywhere on their iPhone applications, their Apps are all native. They know why. So please, Apple, hire some security engineer, add some sandbox layers, or in any other way, get your phone secure. So that you can be brave enough to let third-party developers start making real apps for it. It will be worth it. If you don’t, the developers will find a way to hack your system, and do it anyways. But as you see right now, just by looking at the disappointed Safari 3 users that hacked their old Safari to make it a little more “innovative”: That is not the best way to go.

  Computer