CocoaDust

I attended WWDC last week, it was good, and while I can’t talk about most things, I would like to talk about what Apple has made public.

So excuse me if this isn’t an original thought, but after what people are calling Steve Jobs’s worst keynote ever I did some thinking and had a lot of discussions with people about what that really means for Leopard in general.

The thing about Leopard is that is shows how mature the OS is now when the biggest thing they can trumpet is backup software (Time Machine), which looks to be a fantastic implementation in demo form, and there’s Spaces, the stacks in the Dock are pretty handy and the consolidated UI is really, truly welcome. And there’s more to it than just that, of course.

So Leopard actually sorts out a lot of things that have been annoying people, but what many people won’t be aware is just how much stuff it adds for developers - more than any release of Mac OS X that I can think of and I’ve seen them all. Also, they really seem to be taking the HIG bull by the horns and reining in the craziness. The Apple Design Awards showed that pretty well too.

I heard someone say (and can’t remember who - sorry) “Apple seems to be counting on developers to sell Leopard”. No bad thing!

That keynote sucked though. Oy.

By now (hours after the announcement) Leopard’s postponement until October is not news, but I’m just documenting my thoughts.

I’m a little disappointed, it means I have to rearrange my plans a little, do more work, etc but on the other hand it gives me breathing room and, crucially, we finally know where we stand, because that is the most difficult thing.

You see, it’s one thing if the OS is planned to come out before you expect to release - fine. It takes a while for everyone to get up to speed. But, when you’re (ahem) developing a product that could depend on or benefit from Leopard technology, you don’t want it sitting around the shelf for months. For anything more than a few weeks, that’s not an option for me.

Now we know where we stand I have a choice: to work on something else or target Tiger.

In this Ars post on Leopard’s ship date (I’m pretty sure it will be around WWDC, BTW), the paragraph that gets the most attention in the comments is this one:

One more tip we got regarding Leopard, is that InputManager plugins are no longer allowed. That’s right… no more little hacks from anybody besides Apple. No more Apple menu hacks. No more Safari plugins. (InputManager is not exactly the same as APE, by the way.) “Apple isn’t really broken up about it since InputManagers were often used for nefarious purposes anyway,” our sources said, but the loss of InputManager control will break a lot of shareware and commercial software that currently makes use of that control.

I have to say, this will be a huge help to me. The trouble with Input Managers is that they load into every application, and the problem with that is, they are almost always involved in the crash reports I receive for KIT. The telltale sign is when the crash is happening entirely in Apple code, sometimes drawing standard widgets, sometimes just as part of the run loop, with the Input Managers listed below.

The trouble is that KIT gets the blame. I’m not sure why KIT is so susceptible to these, as Feeder hardly seems to get affected, but I suspect it’s for a combination of reasons.

Firstly, the sort of people who use apps use KIT like the enhancements these Input Managers provide. Secondly, KIT uses a whole heap of Apple frameworks and is always swapping views in and out. Finally, KIT is very multithreaded, scanning for changes to files, indexing, searching, etc. Maybe some of the problems are due to the way KIT is designed, but I have no way of finding out.

I have no issue with people running Input Managers, as long as they accept that this means their set up is unsupported when crashes occur.

The simple fact is the application works perfectly on a regular system and I can’t fix problems in code that aren’t mine, so less hour spent sifting through crash reports that have nothing to do with me, the better.

That last post was a tangent from my original thought bubble of when we were likely to get a ship date for Leopard and the futility of planning for future versions of Mac OS X.

It matters to me because I need to know what’s coming and plan for it. I have a fair idea of what I am doing for the rest of the year; what makes things difficult is the way software sales nosedive during the summer months.

Timing is everything. I need to get major releases out during peak periods, no good releasing software if everyone is up a mountain or at the beach. If Leopard is going to be out in June, just before sales start to dip (I think Leopard can get away with such seasonal trends) then great, I can do my best to get updates out before then.

However, if it’s going to be around April or early May and I need to do Leopard-specific work (because we just don’t know) then my current plans would need some adjustment, because there are plenty of other things I could be doing too.

Of course, if Apple thought a lot of work would be required, they’d let us know about it sooner, but I work up to the wire. It is so easy for my time to be devoured by events in ways that simply allow me to maintain the status quo. This year I am really determined to go beyond that.

So, Apple has succinctly redefined itself with the Macworld keynote in name, while the transformation has been taking place over the last few years it now seems somehow more substantial. One could easily say this started with the iPod, but arguably the iMac was Jobs’s first real statement following his return to the company that pitched Apple in a different direction to its business-oriented competitors. That path led us here.

I think developers in particular could feel a little slighted by the Macworld keynote and iPhone. As it stands the phone is not extensible, available or even suitable for everyone’s phone contract arrangements, but it is utterly desirable, runs Mac OS X and more than worthy of Apple brand, so that’s good. The trouble is what wasn’t announced at the keynote leaves developers and consumers hanging. I come at this from the developer perspective and will concentrate on the software here.

What’s happening with Leopard? It seems pretty certain we will see it by the time of the launch of the iPhone, if not before, and that Leopard is partly the cause of the delay. iLife, iWork? Well, maybe they are waiting for the big cat too, which would suggest that they will truly embrace Leopard technology in a way no iLife suite has done with the current OS before, and then the possibilities boggle the mind.

The annual update cycle now seems broken, maybe permanently. Perhaps not a bad thing, it is quite a demanding and artificial timeframe for any developer. It hardly seems like Apple would launch these products without fanfare as the very appeal of the Mac on a consumer level begins with iLife; the iPod, .Mac, soon AppleTV and later the iPhone are all affected by it in some way, and the suite influences and impacts countless third party applications.

So what do we know now and where could that lead us?

We know, because Mr Jobs told us, that there is more to Leopard than we have been shown. Many people think this will bring an updated UI, and sure enough there are aspects to the iPhone that have an iTunes 7ish look about them, although we do not know that is final or that it will have anything to do with the desktop version of Leopard. Seems likely though, given the fact that the phone runs a version of OS X and Apple is keen on making a point of this.

We know that Apple really *should* show such UI updates to developers some time before the release goes out, because everyone (including Apple) is using a billion custom controls to compensate for a lack of such standard controls in shipping versions of the OS and that anything more than minor changes could prove rather ugly.

Trouble is, we don’t know that is coming, but assuming there is something to significantly revamp the Mac OS X experience in Leopard and that this something would appear in developer builds, then such an update would get leaked in a heartbeat, so it really needs to be shown to the public first or there goes any ooh-ahh announcement, without which Steve Jobs simply wouldn’t exist. Vanish in a puff of smoke, he would.

It’s also safe to assume we know updates to the iLife and iWork applications are coming in whatever shape and form. To go beyond the middle of the year with a pair of suites suffixed with ‘06 will just be too… last year. I think AppleTV is planned to work as things are, so its February availability doesn’t matter here.

All this seems to narrow the timescale for a preview of Leopard to around April at the latest and I would predict (hahaha!) sometime by the end of March, for no other reason than a gut instinct. On iLife, who can be so sure? Maybe we won’t get to see that until the summer. iWork seems neither here nor there unless spreadsheets get you moist. And, of course, there is everything we don’t know because it doesn’t exist yet. There could be a lot of that.

I think the iPhone is the first shot of what should turn out to be an exceptional year for the Mac and it seems all the more fitting that Apple is keeping us in suspense on all of this.

Note to long-term followers of my various blogs: Yes, I’ve already had to resort to song titles in order to name my posts. Things can only get better.