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Apple's annual World Wide Developer's Conference began this morning. Apple's #2, Phil Schiller, is giving the keynote speech right now. He's already announced new MacBooks although nothing too big to report: slightly faster, better battery, cheaper prices. I'm actually glad they didn't change too much because the MacBook Pro is easily the most satisfying consumer electronics product I have ever owned. It's really close to perfect.
The new OS X (10.6 Snow Leopard) is due soon, so that's going to dominate the conference because that's what software developers care most about. In terms of the keynote probably the only things of interest about Snow Leopard to casual users is what looks like pretty full Exchange support , and a $29 price tag (new versions are usually $129.)
New iPhone. $199 for 16GB. $299 for 32GB. The old iPhone will remain and drop to $99.
New iPhone includes 3MP autofocus camera w/ video recording. Compass. Much better battery life. Along with a bunch of software improvements that everyone will get with the impending release of iPhone OS 3.0.
A few days after me, UNIX turns 40 years old.
jQuery Tools looks really nice.
Palm released it's new phone, the Pre, yesterday. A bunch of the usual suspects received review units ahead of time, and their reviews pretty much all agree. It's a very nice phone.
This is an interesting story because Palm was basically dead. They went from complete control of the electronic pocket organizer market space to nothing very quickly. They literally almost went out of business. Then in a last ditch effort to save the company Palm hired Jon Rubinstein and gave him complete control to build a new team and design a product that would save their lives. Rubinstein had been through this before when he worked at Apple and had a hand in creating both the original gumdrop iMac, which saved Apple from a similar extinction, and the original iPod, which launched them into the profitability stratosphere.
And it looks like it worked. To be way too short about summing up the reviews and initial impressions I'll say: it's basically as good as the iPhone but with a hardware qwerty keyboard, without visual voicemail and without an enormous and often very inexpensive app store, and runs on Sprint instead of AT&T.
Whether that sounds a little better than the iPhone or a little worse depends on the viewer, and probably mostly turns on the keyboard issue.
Still, for how well Palm seems to have done with the Pre, will it matter? The iPhone has a massive head start. And WWDC (Apple's yearly conference for independent software developers) starts on Monday where it is widely anticipated that Apple will release the new iPhone. Nice timing. Being basically as good as the iPhone may not last for too long.
I may take a look at the Pre, but I think I'll be buying the new iPhone.
I've posted about Stack Overflow before. It's a community question and answer site with wiki-like editing capabilities for programmers and programming questions. It's a great resource.
The people behind it have just launched a sister site called ServerFault which is the same thing, but for system administrators. Assuming it's not completely dominated by Windows admins this will be very helpful to me as well (Stack Overflow has lots of Microsoft based discussion, but it isn't overwhelmed by it, and it's easy to pick through and find the areas you are interested in.)
That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.If true this will be super great and I will definitely use it.
As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design.
We’ll be launching this summer with a great collection of beautiful and hardworking typefaces. We’ll offer a free version of the service to get you started, and a low-cost way to grow from there. A truly scalable professional version will follow soon after.
Ape project - open source Ajax Push Engine streaming comet server. Uses javascript on the client side. Looks interesting.
The much hyped WolframAlpha search engine computational knowledge engine launched last night. This is from the makers of the truly mind blowing Mathmatica software, and is in some ways an extension of those ideas.
I haven't had time to play around with it much, but for sure it's worth a look. The UI is very nice, no doubt about it. But some of the hyperbolic claims of it's makers I'm guessing will turn out to not be true. Still, this looks like it might be a very useful tool.
Had a few minutes of down time just now. Still investigating. Something made MySQL eat up all CPU time. Didn't have to reboot though. I eventually got in via SSH and just restarted Apache which seemed to do it.
I've become a big fan of Stack Overflow where users ask programming questions in a host of different categories and other users answer. Good answers are voted up, and the whole thing is group editable a la wikipedia. Loaded with good info and everything is presented with a nice clean design. Incredibly useful. It's my number one trouble shooting resource now.