I've not yet had a chance to watch the thing yet, but I followed the live coverage on the net, so here are my initial thoughts.
I'm not very impressed to be honest. At the previous keynote when Leopard was announced, Steve Jobs told us about 5 new features and yes they do look and sound very cool, but he also said there where 5 other 'secret' features. In this keynote I only count 3 new, 'new features'. Those would be coverflow for documents, quick look, which is really part of the same thing I'd say and the new desktop.
Mmm, well okay, maybe there are some more killer features waiting for the actual launch. Some what do I think of what I've seen so far. Well coverflow and quick look will be handy for some types of documents, those that are graphically heavy and that are obviously different from each other, but I can see one text heavy document looking like any other text heavy document. Maybe I'm wrong and it will be possible to read the documents in coverflow with out opening them.
The new desktop looks...well, put it this way and the end of the last keynote Steve Jobs said 'Redmond start your photocopiers', well looking at the semi transparent menu bar I'd say it was Cupertino who started their photocopiers. It's just so Vista!
Okay maybe apple did have the idea first, but Microsoft got it to market first! And what is the point, dose it add anything to the current menus? I don't think so and I don't like the look of it to be honest. I know I do use lots of keyboard shortcuts, but the menu is the single most important control for most apps, why hide it? Ditto with the changes to the dock.
Now the stacks idea, that dose sound both cool and useful. For me, at the moment, stacks and time machine are the two features that might, just might persuade me to buy Leopard separately. Even then I might just wait till I update my hardware (which is looking like some time next year now).
Okay so what else do we have? Well safari 3, yes I have downloaded and installed it and I just got to say...a reboot needed to complete the install! What is this windows! Okay now I've got that off my chest, what's is like well, er, er. I'm sorry I just can't see any differences! At all.
So what of the big news Safari on windows! Mmmm, one question, why?
No one has ever made money selling a web browser, so why do it? Several theories have come off the net since then, the most compelling of which is that apple gets some revenue from the google searches done through the browsers search box. Another possible reason is that apple are planning more windows apps (iPhoto, iWeb maybe?) and this is a good way to build both developer experience on the platform and the apple name as a provider of good quality windows software. The beginnings of an iPhone development kit for windows? No I don't think so (but more on the iPhone later).
A very unlikely theory which came to light after the various problems in the Safari beta where discovered, is that Safari is a way of making windows look bad? No, some might say it need no help from apple there, but I would say, if you have to compete by making your competitors look bad, give up, your not good enough to win. And we know apple is good enough to win.
Okay on to the iPhone . You might guess I don't really care much about the iPhone. It's been way over hyped for a start. Secondly I don't care about features on a phone, if you can make and receive calls on it, where you want to and the battery life is good, who cares. Not me!
But also I think apple getting in to the phone market is a mistake. Okay yes the market is huge, but it's already filled with lots of very big, big tough playing producers. I think apple might get hurt here, which makes my worry about future computer development. Just because apple practically created and now dominate the MP3 player market (remember they weren't the first there, that honor goes to the Diamond Rio) dose not mean they can do the same in the mobile market.
Especially now they have said for sure that there won't be any 3rd party apps on it, apart from AJAX web widgets. So it's not going to be a smart phone. Yes people will hack it for sure, but quite frankly I don't care.
If it goes well for apple, great! More market share for apple can't be bad, but I just hope that it doesn't hurt apple to badly (I think it will hurt them quite a bit).
So there we go. Now I have to get back to my script!