PushingJelly

Well the cold light of day is shining and the digestion of Keynote morcels is churning away in our guts so lets look at the announcements.
As ever with these matters its not what was said but what was not said.
I have to agree with some of the pundits, Steve did look a little off – was it just me or has he lost more weight. Hmm, hope for Apple’s sake (and therfore mine) that he’s OK. Mercenary I know, but you have to look after the breadline don’t you? And if it means we look after Mr Jobs to boot then thats just fine.

Hardware releases- Pro Intel, Xserver Intel, fast as hell, cheaper than Dell, better than Dell. Dell worried and reduced their prices of comparitive products.
Nuff said.

Now waiting for Paris for the consumer stuff. Not long to wait.

Leopard client:
Doctor What? – Time machine is Apple’s solution to file deletion and overwrite woes that effect us poor computer users. Using a fancy interface developed in the new Core Animation engine, Time Machine allows one to backtrack movements of files over time and instantly (on Steve’s Mac anyway) restore the file to its rightful place back in your folder structure. I can only guess it uses some extension to the journalling system found in HFS+ for some time. The UI is wacky with a wormhole and a (seemingly) infinite number of monkeys, sorry Folders. You can then either manually flip through time until you find the file you are looking for and can go on your way, or you can let the machine best guess the time your precious file was available and had the correct info.

Mail – HTML templates – nice, more HTML spam. Notes – good idea, I do this already by sending myself a mail, no more will I have to. Horrid font though, marker script – yuk! and lastly a system wide To-Do service. Nice idea, just need third party buy in.

Spaces – a nicely implemented version of UNIX virtual desktops (yawn)

iCal – See iCal server below – more new stuff to come allegedly.

Accessibility – Being able bodied (ish) I don’t really think much about this part of the OS, however considering I am mostly blind in my right eye (I’d give my right eye for a new right eye), I really should pay attention a little more. I guess I am in denial still.
The new voice, Alex, is really good. No more Steven Hawkins impressions.

Core Animation – Wolf in sheep’s clothing this one, I think. We won’t know much about it really until the dev seeding comes up with some examples however the album covers demo at the keynote which simulated the recent iTMS advert in realtime was very cool (the ad was done the hard way on Film and probably ILM). Very much a wait and see but I expect some experimental spatial UIs to be forthcoming as a result.

Leopard Server:
Not a lot said in the keynote about server 10.5, more on the web-site.
Turn it on – Set-up is easier, blah, new perfmon, blagh, auto client set-up, bit – what? OK it binds new machines to OD automatically apparently and configures some of the applications for users auto-magically – iChat, mail, iCal etc. Hmm, I wonder if that process has an open API?

Wiki – Wiki wild wild vest, Yep they have included a Wiki software, however Apple being Apple have made it all jazzy and resource hungry by the look of it, the result is more like a poor man’s SharePoint. The killer will be the templates they provide for it. The example picture looks more like an iWeb page than a professional groupware site, get with the Pro theme Apple – One to watch I guess.
Interestingly, on the macosforge.org site, there is mention of an “Apple Teams” product and in the blurb on the main site about Wiki, it refers to the Wiki as a product for “teams to create and distribute information”. I wonder if they are talking about the same product and if so, why would the Wiki need access to the CalDEV server?

Spotting a Leopard (server) – At last we will have the ability to search a server’s spotlight metadata. All we need now is an indexing agent for third party servers such as Helios Ethershare or ExtremeZ-IP. Some enterprise customers (us included) still are not willing to entrust all their data to the Xserve despite their uptimes being better than the Solaris/Ethershare combo. I guess they just don’t cost enough to matter.
Oh yeh, Boolean searches! So there. (hold on, were they not an undocumented “feature” in an early version and then taken away rudly when a patch was released? My memory must be failing me)

Podcast Producer – now there’s a thing. I have been doing a lot of work with our papers recently preparing for the online push, especially for audio and video. Details are sketchy but there seems to be some form of workflow using FTP and XGrid (ah a use for XGrid) to take summisions and RIP them into shape for online broadcast/download. Again there’s OD integtation for permissions – nice.

There’s also some really interesting stuff for the Enterprise:

iCal server – At last, an Apple group calendaring solution! It uses a new open protocol CalDAV – an addition to the WebDAV standard used widely and of note by Apple’s own iDisk service to host calendars and one assumes, provide free busy etc.
From the diagram on the webpage and information from the new OSS site, iCal server will support cross platform clients like Mozilla Sunbird and MS Outlook to boot. Apple have joined a consortium called CalConnect which promote open calendaring standards so no propriotory protocols. Lets hope its not a lowest common denominator as many of these “standards” are which are then patched with extra functionality by developers.
Another interesting tidbit for the enterprise crew is that the server will be scaleable with support for clustering and Apple’s XSan as a robust storage back end. This is one of the first Apple applications outside video targetted at XSan and the fisrt I can remember to tout the system as a high availabilty system.
Lastly it is also promising that iCal server is integrated with Apple’s OpenDirectory LDAP service and third party products such as Active Directory, at last a recognition by Apple that directory services are for more than user authentication.

iChat server – the updated version of this service looks like it uses a more feature complete version of the Jabber server including IM federation to link to outside services such as GoogleTalk. Other dainties include automatic buddy lists, single signon using Kerb (at last), Central chat logs and better security for multiple user chat and server to server comms.

Mail server – Clustering seems the order of the day, obviously high on the wish list for the average IT department and mail server doesn’t dissapoint with Active/Active clustering when using XSan, Vacation notification and improved performance.

Web Service – Apache is now pre configured with MySQL and PHP, plus a load of very important other OSS software updates which I can’t be arsed to list because there are too many TLAs and FLAs. Its all good, trust me.

File Services – Secure NFSv3 using Kerb and AutoFS – no mention of AFP or SAMBA yet. Wait and see..

XGrid – Although not of interest to normal humans who don’t speak CoBOL or have 1100 cluster nodes in their server room, it is interesting to see that there are still developments happening to XGrid, mostly on the management of process distribution (yawn). Come on Apple, what about XGrid for the rest of us, I want an open API that Adobe can make a plug-in so that PhotoShop runs like water and iMovie renders in realtime because I have 4 Macs at home and they just add to the grid.

Darwin is dead, long live macosforge.org!
Apple is opening the new kernel (xnu), Collaboration services (read iChat server – more in a mo), Bonjour, Launchd and WebKit.
Curiously it has released all these under the Apache 2/0 licence as opposed to BSD or GNU. Odd, I wonder what it was about the others that made them go with Apache? Not ready to lose control perhaps.

So thats almost it.

One more thing – Hey, Steve didn’t say it this time so I thought I’d oblige.

B.

P.S – I’m not interested if there are gramatical or spelling errors in the post. Nor do I care if you like my writing style. If you don’t, then leave now because I am not changing at this stage in my life.