An Innovative Year For Apple
by
Randy Mears
As the dust settles, in the wake of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, we can reflect on the keynote presentation’s content. I focused in on one particular innovation in my previous post but thought I would try to include more of them in this post.
The presentation was 85 minutes long but it was filled with content relating the completion of Apple’s hardware transformation (from Power PC to Intel) and the continuing evolution and status of their next OS X operating system (Leopard). If you have the time and are interested in Apple, the video is worth watching. It was a great encapsulation of what must have been one of Apple's most productive and innovative years. It also gives us a better idea of where the rest of the PC industry will be going in the future.
There are many improvements in Leopard, like better email integration, recordable video conferencing, voice over Braille, and network searches but I will focus on a few of my favorites:
- 64 bit support - allowing native 64 bit applications (all the way through to the user interface) to run side-by-side on the desktop alongside native 32 bit applications.
- Time Machine – automatic on-the-fly backup of everything with a time based desktop integrated restore interface.
- Spaces – allows creation of separate spaces allowing each space to be customized for a particular task through an intuitive interface, integrated with the desktop. We’ve seen variants of this through third party developers on Windows but this is natively integrated.
- Web Clip, a feature of Dashboard that lets users create widgets linked directly to Web sites. A simple idea that will enable granular access to specific parts of existing Web pages.
In the keynote, Jobs further tantalized us by saying that there were other features of Leopard yet to be announced; so there’s more to come.
2006 wasn’t just another innovative year for Apple; it was the year of Apple’s transformation to Intel. Apple also clearly demonstrated a key benefit of the Intel migration (via Boot Camp); the ability to run Windows natively on Apple platforms.
With the introduction of both Vista (early 2007) and Leopard (spring 2007), it looks like the coming year is shaping up be a bellwether for the evolving personal computing experience. With entries from both Apple and Microsoft, we all win.
