Steff.me

Everyone will be posting their thoughts on the WWDC keynote, so I thought I’d join in. Been as all the basics are covered by news sites, random blogs and the keynote itself, I thought I’d take a minute to just draw attention to a few things some people may have missed and some things I found interesting.

Safari 3 has just been released as a beta for both Windows and Macintosh and it appears to use what I would call ‘normal’ widgets just like WebKit does. Well isn’t that funny! Just as Mozilla announce that the new version of Firefox will move to use standardized Aqua widgets and adopt the buttons that Safari used to use, the new version of Safari has dropped it.

My favourite features of this update have to be the “Find” feature, which is now integrated into the browser and the ability to drag tabs about. Another feature which has taken me by surprise is the ability to resize elements inside the browser such as text areas. While typing this blog post I noticed the resizing image in the bottom right of the post and started resizing the area in which I was typing; very cool.

Taking a glance at the features videos over at Apple.com, if you look at the one entitled Desktop you might just notice that Exposé now has an application icon.

(second one down, on the left)

Does this mean that new features will be added to Exposé which require this feature to be granted app status like Dashboard?

Also, visually, alot of apps seemed to get an update. Namely Front Row has been changed to look like the Apple TV and DVD player seems to have got a ‘Pro’ app look and feel.

Just a few thoughts on this WWDC. While I wanted something new to be released so that I would have something to purchase, I’m glad that this one shifted focus back to the Mac platform and the developers. The rest of my thoughts were pretty much summed up by Chris Marshall. I would have liked it, though, if they had kept the iPhone out of the picture but I guess they had to squash all hope for an SDK for the thing.