techno.blog("Dion")

Leopard is coming. Will there be any cool secret features? I have said before that I am not that excited about the OS itself…. but finally we will get to see all of the new apps that people have been holding back because they rely on Leopard.

For example, this list isn’t exactly exciting:

• Google Maps integration with Address Book.
• Tricked out AppleScript.
• Automator UI recording / playback.
• Japanese dictionary support.
• New, easily-printable font books.
• Front Row now looks more like “Back Row” (the Apple TV interface) — too bad it’s still not more like Media Center.
• New AirPort menus that show WiFi encryption.
• Disk encryption now supports 256 bit AES.
• Built-in grammar checker. Lord knows we need it ’round these parts.
• Tabbed terminal.

I finally got around to Tapping some Apps on the iPhone. I am amazed at how good these guys are, and how they reverse engineered things so well. Imagine what they could do if Apple HELPED them, or hired them!

The apps themselves are fine… nothing “must have”. Being able to run ls and some ruby phone is cool to do, but what do I need?

I did enjoy the ants tool though. We had a bunch of ants at our house this week in Palo Alto (the bad side of fruit trees). I used this as a way to trick the family. I got the ants running on the phone and told them that they got on the phone, and then IN the phone. Everyone totally believed that there were ants in there!!!!

Seeing Joe’s Facebook app at an Apple keynote was very cool.

I talked about ipodtouch.ajaxian.com over on that other blog, and how we will be seeing a lot of Mobile Safari browsers hitting us come Christmas.

What about the other news?

• iPod nano: Eh. I am not in the market for that kind of device
• iPod classic: ditto
• iPod Touch: Nicely done. It was obvious to go ahead and do this, and they are executing
• Starbucks: Seems so niche that I hardly care at all. Now, if it starts to work at Peet’s ;)
• iPhone: The price drop is great. Bitter? actually not really. This is what you get for being an early adopter. Steve is being generous in my opinion. Don’t tell me that when you bought v1 right away you didn’t think it would a) go down in price and b) v2 would be a lot better. I quickly came up with a plan:

  v2.onrelease = function() {
  v1.send_to_wife();
  v2.buy();
  };
  

All in all, nothing amazing to see here, but nice incremental execution. I still want 3G. I still want over the wire syncing for everything. And, I still rich app dev platform option. That will be v2.

Nicholas Jitkoff normally hides in the shadows a little, as alcor. They finally persuaded him to come out and speak about Quicksilver.

Quicksilver is the FIRST application that I will install on a new Mac, and it was great to here about it from the horses mouth:

Quicksilver hides almost unbounded power beneath the interface of a keyboard-driven … all

As time has gone on, I have gotten less and less excited about Leopard the operating system. A 3D dock and more transparency doesn’t do that much for me. Having “Spaces” instead of Virtue will be nice to have.

As a developer, having Objective C 2.0, and new APIs such as Core Animation is going to be good.

This is where my excitement peaks. It’s all about the apps. Most of my favourite apps haven’t seen a release for a bloody year! All of the developers are working on wicked cool Leapard stuff, and they can’t get it out of the door until Leopard ships. I have recently seen a few sneak peaks, and WOW, we are in for some great updates, and new applications all coming out on Leopard day.

So, a bit of a “eh” for the OS, but an “Oh yeah” for the new apps!

I have proclaimed several times that I miss my Gmail for Mobile experience on the iPhone.

Ed Burnette then points out that Apple sneaks Java support onto the iPhone.

They didn’t really sneak it on though, it is just on the ARM chip (although not available):

Despite public comments by Steve Jobs that

The iPhone has the fancy new Safari browser (which Nokia has had for awhile, but still) and the un-fancy painful EDGE network is going to kill it.

The internet piece will seem so painful as you will get used to using it via WiFi (which is great) and then when you use it on EDGE you will be crying. Minutes to download a page???? really?

At least on a Blackberry with a minimal system (although it drives me nuts that the browser is painful wrt CSS.. display:none. please!) the latency and download speed is painful, but the data is so small that it comes down in short order.

I am really torn on the iPhone. I do want one. It looks like they are changing their tune on an SDK (sounds like Flash) so we will see cool third party applications.

My main issue is when to bite the bullet.

Ben bought the Apple TV right away. Now the poor guy is looking at a 40GB beast, when he would definitely have spent a few more bugs to get a 160GB upgrade. Apple should really do something to help him in fact. It isn’t like this is 2 years later… it is a matter or months!

Will the same thing happen with the iPhone? If I pretend to be cool and get one on day one, will someone laugh at me in 3 months as a version with 4 times the hd space, and other new features kick in? The pressure to release this thing is so huge that you KNOW that a bunch of corners had to be cut. The date was firm, so they had to do anything to make that date…. and when it is over they can finish up what they really wanted in v1.

So, it may be wise for me to wait on this puppy. Too much $ and the 2 yr contract piece kicks in too.

As we use web applications more and more on core tasks (email, calendar, office) I have found that I sometimes get frustrated when some annoying piece of Flash on a random web page brings down my entire browser process (including the web applications that I care about).

Some browsers allow you to run multiple instances in their own world. For others you could hack around that by having multiple copies of the browser. I have gone through phases of compartmentalizing my work on various browsers.

• Development work on a Firefox instance because I want to use Firebug
• Fluffy browsing on WebKit nightly (to try to be a tester too)
• Apps in Safari

My main problem with this is that I normally also want Firefox for certain apps because I make heavy use of Greasemonkey. I couldn’t do Gmail without at this point (let alone the other sites).

I am used to having my calendar on window 2 of VirtueDesktop (iCal). I am not experimenting with Google Calendar, and I want to do the same. Instead of just having an instance running Google Calendar over there, I decided to try to built a wrapper around a browser component.

I am trying this in both Mac OS X Cocoa, and Adobe Apollo.

Today we will discuss the OS X version.

In theory the hard work is definitely already done for us. The WebKit component is nicely done for us, and the documentation is thorough.

I decided to try to follow the “Multiple Windows” example:

You can implement multiple windows in a Web Kit application easily by beginning with a Cocoa document-based architecture as follows:

1. Using Xcode, create a document-based Cocoa application. Your new project file will already contain the needed classes and interface files to support multiple windows (namely MyDocument.h, MyDocument.m, and MyDocument.nib).

2. Add the Web Kit frameworks to your project.

3. Open MyDocument.nib using Interface Builder and drag a WebView from the Cocoa

I was ready to get frustrated. I wanted it all.

If an event is sent to my Gmail account I want to be able to just click ‘add it’ and see conflicts.

I want to have iCal up to date for offline / nice rich app use.

I want to be able to create events in iCal OR Google Calendar and for everyone to be happy.

I was ready to sigh and just have iCal as a read-only offline view, or to not use Google Calendar, when I stumbled on Spanning Sync which does the hard work to get true two-way syncing. It is still in beta (which is worrying with a tool that can nuke your data) but it is working nicely, and backups are happening frequently.