WWDC 2004

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so i’m a day behind, cut me some slack… :)

apple previewed some cool stuff today @ WWDC 2004. i’m most excited about spotlight and dashboard. if i’ve had one need lately it’s better search, especially as my photo and music collection grows. (no, i don’t use iphoto, thank you very much) and even though dashboard looks a whole hell of a lot like konfabulator, it’s still a welcome addition to the osX family.

the safari RSS reader is cool, too. makes sense that the browser should understand RSS and present that as an option when reading an RSS-enabled site. very cool. the new displays are cool, but i’m not shelling out any more cash for desktop stuff – a powerbook, desktop g4, and 17” cinema are fine by me…

UPDATE: there’s a ton of debate out there re: dashboard vs. konfabulator… (including jeff’s comments below, heh) but while it certainly looks like apple ganked the idea, there’s a lot that changed engineering-wise behind the scenes. for one, dashboard is built on the base mac os x technologies of web kit and cocoa, where konfabulator uses custom XML and javascript. debate and opinionate all you want, but i think we all can agree that companies shouldn’t “buy out” other companies (or their software for that matter) simply for an idea. if you see something useful that other people are finding useful, and you develop a better way (and better, more open technologies) to do something similar, good for you. that’s competition, and that’s the real world.

but i digress, here are a few links that try to clear things up:

- daring fireball's view
- dave hyatt's thoughts (safari lead developer)
- extracted dashboard widgets from erik veland
- todd dominey on "proprietary hoo-ha"