Apple Core.
Bulletin: Apple ships Safari SDK
It's hard to describe the famous reality distortion field that Steve Jobs sets up with his biannual keynotes. The elements are classic--one part software, one part hardware, one part power user, one part invented here. Jobs has a quick wit, good presentation tools, and a hand-picked audience of the faithful.
What could go wrong? Not much. For a brief shining moment--in this case 2 hours plus--we are hurtled back into Camelot., where computers make work seem elegant and time a dimension to be bent and shaped. Each time Jobs does this trick, I sit back and enjoy the ride, knowing full well the spell will shimmer and then dissipate.
But the field is changing--less distortion, more reality. The long-foreshadowed partnership with IBM is now real, with the "world's fastest desktop machine" promised to get 50% faster within a year. The iChat video-conferencing we've been trying to get work with NetMeeting for 5 years is shipping at prices Grandma can afford and business will certainly use in the boardroom.
Panther--the next rev of OS/X--adds incremental improvements that sound less impressive on paper than they add up to on screen. An improved Finder--now that would be easy. Expose--you mean you can actually find that screen with a quick gesture without rearranging every other one? Threaded mail? Autosyncing files to the .Mac cloud and back?
But Jobs is reaching the same tipping point he's rendered with Pixar. Toy Story is still in my 2.5 year old's rotation--averaging pickage once every ten or so "pick me up Daddy--let me see..." trips to the video library. The key here is longevity, not opening week. It's the blend of technology, design, humor, and music that creates the virtuous circle.
"One more thing..." says Jobs as he announces the core of today's hardware, the next-gen G5. The power is in the rhythm, building on the methodical march of the software platform. Yes, Microsoft can clone the innovations as they occur, but with the loss of excitement, the promise of empowerment, the joy of beating time at its inexorable game.
It's impressive to watch the G5 best the dual-processor Xeon at Photoshop rendering, 3D, and synthesized sequencing. But it's more devastating than that--it's funny and gut-wrenching as we see our life slipping away in Windows while the G5 waits for more ideas. The new XCode tools shave hours off compile times with predictive and on-the-fly repair and recompiles, and Distributed Build bootstraps Rendezvous to spread the work across multiple systems.
The Safari SDK is music to the ears of both developers and users, particularly Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame and authors of those RSS channels that deliver full-text and graphics feeds. Now if we could get spell-checking services in the Safari container, I'd be just that much closer to the place Jim Allchin won't go. Already I'm enjoying Safari's tabbed windows to spotcheck this story as it unfolds on the CRN site. Bye bye IE.
Jon Markoff of the Times asked the core question: will all this increase their market share? Yes, I told him, it will add to the more than 50% share of laptops at most tech conferences. Yes, I guessed, to the corporate communications nodes that will spring up around executive video-conferencing, interactive sales presentations, and remote office collaboration suites.
But Jobs hinted at another avenue of adoption when he showed the iChat AV video-conferencing extensions and clip-on iSight camera. First he gave one to each of the developers in the room, betting that they would be the perfect evangelists to spread the word. Then he suggested that, like iTunes, this would first be available to Apple users only, but would spread to the rest of the market when they "adopted the open standards" of the technology.
Until recently, I would have laughed that one off, given Microsoft's effective firewall with Dell et al. But with Sun's success in planting its JVM on HP and Dell machines, an avenue for development is now seeded on the PC across Redmond's DMZ. When I chided Sun's EVP of Software, Jonathan Schwartz, on not fully leveraging the synergies between Apple and Sun, he agreed with me. "I've got some work to do there," he said.
After the keynote, Apple's corresponding software guru Avie Tevanian asked me what I thought. I told him much of the above, pausing only to reinforce my delight that the Safari SDK was shipping earlier than expected. I predicted that Apple success at extending its core set of services would provide an opening for the company in the emerging RSS architecture that others, particularly Microsoft, could not exploit.
Like Schwartz, I expected some pushback. Like Schwartz, I didn't get it. Instead, I got a request for the Allchin Tax URI. I'll just bounce over to the Emerging Opps tab.... Here it is, Avie.
[Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps]
The new Safari breaks our WebOutliner product. After carefully tracking their progress and keeping up with their whacky new browser - we were f*cked by Apple - once again. God bless um.
Just to be clear - there's no way in HELL we'd ever support a Mac only API. We'll copy it, clone it, help others copy them, steal from one to help another and in general play the innovation game and make what they have available to everyone else - but it's all about cross-platform - baby. It has been since 1988 - when we showed the first cross-platform multimedia player.
And as long as Apple doesn't license their OS and keeps it to themselves - they'll always be - just Apple. They do have a play in the digial lifestyle arena - and I might even buy one of those - someday - but it'd BETTER be based upon 'open standards'. Not Quicktime.
I just wanna know how long they're gonna 'give away' their video chat bandwidth before their buddies at Akamai start asking to get paid (since they have to pay for the bandwidth - too!)
It's great to see 
![[FoaF Explorer]](http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/images/foaf-explorer.32.png)
