Not much wow at Apple WWDC

Steve Jobs’ keynote at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference is sometimes huge with news, sometimes less so. This year’s news was weaker than most. Jobs didn’t unveil new hardware or new developer tools. He didn’t announce new software, but did distribute betas of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” to paid attendees (not to press/analysts).

The announcement that won the biggest applause from WWDC’s 5000+ developers was that two major game companies – Electronic Arts and ID Software – will be increasing their support of the Mac platform. In EA’s case, a number of best-selling games will be released on for Mac OS X, and in the future, there will be some simultaneous releases for Windows, Mac and game platforms. ID’s game engine, which normally targets the Xbox and Playstation, will soon be available for the Mac.

There was less frequent cheering during Jobs’ demonstration of 10 features out of 300+ planned for Leopard, scheduled to ship in October. The biggest crowd pleasers were a new graphical desktop, an improved Finder and Core Animation.

The audience also liked that there will be more robust 64-bit support in Leopard – and that the new OS will come in a single SKU, priced at US$129, instead of the bewildering number of versions of Windows Vista, and reacted favorably to the surprise announcement of Safari for Windows (a public beta of Safari 3 for Windows and Mac OS X 10.4 is now available for download). The new backup application, Time Machine, also was popular.

The biggest yawner was a tool to let consumers make their own dashboard gadgets by making clippings from Web pages. Snooze.

The biggest disappointment was Jobs’ “one final thing” presentation of Apple’s official way for third-party developers to create apps for the iPhone: write and host Web apps for Safari using AJAX. That was not what this audience had hoped for.

Three elements in the keynote are worthy of additional discussion: 64-bit computing, Safari for Windows, and the iPhone development news.

64-bit computing. Apple has flirted with 64-bit software since the release of the PowerMac G5, but went back to 32-bit with the first Macs running the 32-bit Intel Core processor. Today, however, most shipping Macs today are using the 32/64-bit Intel Core 2 processor. Since Mac OS X 10.4 (and earlier) is 32-bit when running on Intel, the news that Leopard will include both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels is welcome.

What about 32-bit/64-bit interoperability? It’s common for 64-bit operating systems using the x64 platform (like the Intel Core 2 family and the AMD Opteron family) to be able to run 32-bit software. 64-bit Linux and Unix can generally run 32-bit binaries directly; Windows uses a software abstraction layer called WoW64 (which means Windows 32 on Windows 64). Mac OS X, remember, is based on Unix.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the inverse is usually not possible: You can’t generally run 64-bit binaries on a 32-bit version of the operating system, even if the chip is nominally a 32/64-bit chip. The hardware architecture generally can’t handle it, and software emulation would be extremely computationally complex (and would have terrible performance). But that’s what Jobs seemed to imply: that you could run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on both 32-bit and 64-bit Macs running Leopard.

Jobs wasn’t explicit, in stating that a 32-bit hardware platform (like my first-generation 32-bit iMac Core Duo) would run 64-bit apps under Leopard — but again, he implied it. This is a big question mark, and I have queries into Apple about it.

Safari on Windows. Jobs talked about the market share of Safari at 5% of all browsers, vs. 15% for Firefox and about 76% for Internet Explorer. To boost market share, he announced Safari for Windows, and the company released the public beta for Windows and Mac OS X 10.4.

The only benefit that Jobs presented for running Safari on Windows was speed: HTML rendering with Safari for Windows was about 2x faster than IE 7, and 1.6x faster than Firefox 2, he said. That’s not a reason to change browsers! Security, features and interoperability are ‘way more important than rendering speed.

Sadly, Jobs didn’t mention security, features or interoperability. Specifically, he didn’t discuss the reason why so many Mac users abandoned Safari 2 and embraced Firefox 1.5 (and later, of course, Firefox 2): There are too many Web sites, especially those optimized for Windows or using extensive Web 2.0 functionality, that simply don’t work right with Safari 2, but which work great on the Mac with Firefox.

I would have liked to have heard Jobs pledge to fix those issues instead of implying that only reason to choose a browser is its rendering speed.

iPhone development. Developers have been frustrated by the on-again, off-again rumoring about third-party apps on the iPhone. Looks like “off-again” won, and that’s a shame. Third-party apps are what define a platform and ensure its success. Jobs’ recommendation that developers should just build AJAX applications, and let customers access them via the iPhone’s embedded Safari browser, is a solution that will satisfy nearly nobody.

Sure, Apple has created hooks that would let AJAX apps use built-in iPhone services, like making phone calls or sending e-mail – but that’s not what developers want. They want an SDK. If that’s what Jobs really thinks customers or developers want to run third party apps over using AJAX in a browser, why bother encouraging the development of native Universal Binary software for Mac OS X desktops and notebooks? Running AJAX apps in Safari does not compute.

Not heard at the WWDC. Completely not addressed by Jobs: Application development for Leopard. Nothing about APIs, SDKs or an update of the Xcode development suite. Disappointing. Also not mentioned at the keynote was last week’s leak, by Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz, that Leopard would use Sun’s ZFS file system.

I went home from the Apple WWDC empty handed, both literally and figuratively. Beyond the preview of Leopard, and beta of Safari for Windows, there wasn’t much to get excited about – and neither of those really spoke to developers.