I have not posted recently, mainly because I have been sorting out some issues with the move of web hosts. That has caused more trouble than I would like but I think everything will be sorted soon, when it is I will post some of the details and learnings.
However, today is one of the days that Apple fans – and I class myself amongst that group – look forward to: a major Apple announcement. This one will occur at WWDC, their annual developer conference, with Steve Jobs himself making the keynote address. This event has previously seen the announcement of the iPhone, OSX upgrades and so on. Apple never reveals in advance what is coming so usually there is a lot of speculation in the blogosphere as to what it will be. This time around there is a likely to be a bit less surprise as you must have heard of the iPhone leak a couple of months ago, if you want to refresh your memory look here.
That iPhone OS4 will be covered in detail at the conference is no surprise but it seems like there may be at least one other thing up the sleeve of Steve Job’s black turtle neck jumper. Engadget today has a report of a completely new peripheral coming from Apple: a trackpad. So what is new about a trackpad? Laptops have had them for ages. Well, maybe not so much really new; this is for finger gestures which the trackpads on recent Mac laptops, including my daughter’s new Macbook Pro, already have this. This trackpad, which appears to be styled exactly like the wireless keyboard that I am typing this on, will bring gesture control to any Mac. Having used Juliet’s laptop, the Magic Mouse which also supports gestures, as well as my iPhone I am really looking forward to adding this to my Mac Mini. Only 5 hours until WWDC starts ….
I confess to being a bit disappointed by the announcements yesterday. Most of iOS4 stuff was adding detail to the April announcement (fair enough) and the only hardware news was the iPhone4 (my prediction for it’s name). Obviously the latter was largely known about already because of the leak. Even the “one more thing” was the camera for video chat, nicely done but no surprise.
Folders in iOS4 will be a big help, as I prefer to organise my apps into logical groups, multi-tasking should be good, as long as the processor is up to it, and I think I will like iBooks. Beyond that … meh.
I was hoping for:
– iMac updates, I am waiting to order a 21″ to replace Mac Mini
– the magic trackpad, which I think will be very good
– handwriting support in iOS4, the thing I miss most about my old Palms