Filed under: Pure, Wild Speculation.

John Gruber, writes today in Daring Fireball, an article about Adobe CS4 and the fact that while it will be 64bit on Windows it will only be 32Bit on the Mac. He writes (as usual) a simply wonderful analysis on the topic (well worth the full read), pointing out that lack of Carbon support in Leopard is making it difficult for Adobe (as well as some other cross platform vendors) to develop applications for both Windows and the Mac using the same code base.

John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

… the degree to which Apple pulled the rug out from under Adobe’s feet at WWDC 2007 last June. When Leopard was first announced at WWDC 2006 nine months prior, it included full 64-bit support for both Carbon and Cocoa.64-bit.

Carbon wasn’t promised to be coming “sometime”, like with, say, resolution independence. It was promised for 10.5.0. And it existed developer seeds of Leopard up through WWDC 2007 had in-progress 64-bit Carbon libraries, and Adobe engineers were developing against them. Several sources¹ have confirmed to me that Adobe found out that Apple was dropping support for 64-bit Carbon at the same time everyone else outside Apple did: on the first day of WWDC 2007.

If Apple had shipped Leopard with the 64-bit Carbon support promised at WWDC 2006, Photoshop CS4 would run in 64-bit mode on the Mac.

I’m not rushing right out to get my tinfoil hat, but this coupled with the new Aperture plug-in framework, really starts to make me wonder. The only question which remains is how might Apple augment its current suite of products to more fully take on Adobe (remember, in the software space, Apple grows as much by acquisition, as by innovation).
My bet, they acquire Corel, but I’d love to hear your ideas.

The general consensus is that Steve Jobs’ most recent keynote speech did not measure up to his typical standard. I’m not anywhere near so down on it (maybe because I didn’t go and only watched the online feed during stolen moments at work). This Joy of Tech trip sums up the sentiment pretty well. But you’ll have to click through to see the source of Steve’s sudden suck. Clever, gentlemen. Clever.

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: humor, puppy, steve jobs

Delicious Library 2, which has a snazzy new UI based on Core Animation, wins an Apple’s 2007 Design Award for Best Leopard Application. Still no screenshots of it though.

For discussion of Core Animation and how it might change interfaces, see here: Kiss Boring Interfaces Goodbye With Apple’s New Animated OS.

The other winners are:

Best Mac OS X User Experience: Coda. Panic.

Best Mac OS X Developer Tool: CSSEdit 2.5. MacRabbit.

Best Mac OS X Game: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade 2.0. Blizzard Entertainment .

Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution: Papers 1.0. Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis.

Best Mac OS X Dashboard Widget: BART Widget 1.0. Bret Victor.

Best Mac OS X Student Product: Picturesque 1.0. Zac Cohen.

Miss the WWDC keynote? Other than a couple of the specific features of Leopard, don’t bother. But you should watch the video above — it’s John “PC and also noted pseudo-intellectual” Hodgman posing as Steve Jobs and announcing the demise of the Mac platform. It was the opening act for real Steve. Hilarious.

Technorati Tags: get a mac, john hodgman

With all the excitement and, to be frank, disappointment that came with yesterday’s WWDC Stevenote, I haven’t seen anyone pick out the obvious with Apple’s innovative new GUI element Stacks, which allows users to cluster files that would otherwise clutter the desktop into a discreet pile of files that blow out into a scannable list with a simple click. It takes the super-janky right-click a folder in the dock movement we’re all used to now and replaces it with a sleek Dock launcher we can all get behind.
It’s really cool. It’s also a very old concept, one that Apple has had patented for 15 years. And this doesn’t look to be a great implementation of it. Way back in 1992, Apple called the Stacks content “Piles,” first demonstrating the new interface at the CHI conference. Gitta Solomon of Apple’s Advanced Technology Human Computer Interaction Group created the fascinating interview, which The Register mooted was finally destined for Mac OS X way back in 2003. Only four years too early — and 11 years too late. Click through to learn more about Piles.

Technorati Tags: piles, stacks

MacRumors founder Arnold Kim makes a very interesting point regarding the rumored new MacBook Pros and iMacs that Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster unleashed on an unwitting public yesterday. Like many others, I was fairly impressed that Munster took the trouble to determine the average life cycle of both iMac and MacBook Pro generations.

Well, as it turns out, Munster might not have calculated the numbers himself:

These numbers correlate exactly to the [MacRumors] Buyer’s Guide averages. Some have asked couldn’t he have come up with these numbers on his own? It’s possible, but exceedingly unlikely as he would have had to choose the same releases (2002 PowerBook, 2003 iMac) to start counting in order to achieve the exact same averages.

Kim also implies that Munster’s assumption that Apple will release new Macs at WWDC might be directly drawn from an earlier ThinkSecret report, which makes the reliability of tech analysts’ reports about Macs questionable. Which they absolutely are.

Apple is the rare computer company that won’t play nice and let analysts see their stuff earlier than the general public. There’s no question that most reports or based on assumptions and reading rumor sites. I do question a commenter’s conclusion that any of this is new. From what I can tell, the Mac rumor sites have been ahead of the analysts since the day Steve came back.

Technorati Tags: analysts, rumor

Apple loves to make big announcements on Tuesday mornings. Today, they reminded us that not all big announcements are created equal. Apple PR informed the world that — brace for it — none other than Apple CEO Steve Jobs will kick off the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, June 11.

Don’t all of you wet your pants with excitement at once.

Apple did confirm that Jobs would show off a feature-complete version of Mac OS X Leopard, including whatever mystery functions got left out of the 2006 showcase, and the company will will distribute a beta to all in attendance. And that’s something to get worked up over.

Steve Jobs to Kick Off WWDC 2007

Technorati Tags: leopard, wwdc, Steve Jobs