Obligatory WWDC post

Well, the Worldwide Developers' conference was today, and after getting home, I finally remembered to look at today's announcements. I've got to admit, I was a little bit nonplussed, based on Apple's web site, it's just a confirmation of the rumors that have been flying around for a few weeks.

The biggest thing is the impending arrival of the iPhone 2.0 firmware. I'm pretty excited about that one myself, because I'm really looking forward to some of the third party apps that appear. The 3G iPhone was there, but I wasn't really feeling it, except that the thing has a flush headphone jack, which made me seriously consider for a moment either selling my existing iPhone or just outright buying the 3g one. Of course, I can get one of the cool little iPhone mic/headphone-adapters for like $20, so that's a better option. In case you don't already know, the details  on the 3G iPhone are as follows: $199 for an 8-gig iPhone, in black. $399 for a 16-gig iPhone in black, or a pretty nice looking new white finish, which would match someone's white iPod collection, a white MacBook/iBook, or a white iMac like mine.

The other "important" news is Snow Leopard, which aside from one or two new things that might be considered as features, is almost purely a structural and stability/polishing upgrade. It's expected to be released in "about a year" and I'm expected to probably pay more for it than everyone else at the university. Such is life.

The update about which I'm really the most excited though, is the replacement for .Mac, which has been dubbed Mobile Me. It's touted as "Exchange for the person who doesn't have a corporate server," and the big, all-important thing about Mobile Me is Push, Push, Push. It's got push e-mail, push calendaring, and push contacts, completely (well, cross-platform enough anyway) cross-platform, supporting Microsoft Outlook 2003 & 2007, Apple's own Mail/Address Book/iCal combo, plus the iPhone, of course.

Add to all of that, a standard storage space of 20GB for mail, galleries and iDisk, plus a few other niceties, and you've got a a great, well-rounded set of online services to provide to people who buy iPhones and Macs in the Apple Store. Plus, it works great in modern web browsers, to the extent that the iDisk function lets you sort files just like in finder on a real Mac. (Plus, you can mount iDisk in finder, and map it as a network drive on Windows.)

The biggest drawback to MobileMe is that Apple is still charging for it, but I suppose they've got to make lots of extra bucks somehow. It's still $99/year for an individual subscription, and there are +20GB and +40GB storage options available, for "just" $49 and $99 respectively. Someone owning a MacBook Air might spring for the +40, to have 60 gigs of available space, to back up the entire contents of their little 64GB SSD.

On that note, I do wonder what happened to the Backup app with MobileMe -- will people currently using Backup be unable to continue backing up to their iDisks. I also wonder whether or not Backup will still be available to people who sign up as new members for MobileMe. I'll have to check that out at some point in time.

The iTunes/Safari Fiasco

Let me start this post by saying that my ThinkPad already has Safari installed anyway, so I really don't care if Apple pushes a Quicktime/iTunes/Safari update to my machine. In fact, I intend to go try out the new version of WinSafari pretty soon, because I really like it, save the fact that scrolling doesn't work with the TrackPoint.

So when I started hearing about how Apple is now "pushing" Safari on people who don't know not to uncheck the box, it gave me kind of a chuckle. A lot of people are saying it's wrong that Apple is distributing Safari like this, and that it borders on the practices of those distributing malware. Of course, I'll refrain from saying anything about the Windows Live applications that always want you to install more, more more, or the difficulty of installing any kind of Google product without getting Adobe Reader, RealPlayer and one or two other things with them.

The thing is that the apps affected by this updater on Windows are all actually part of the operating system on a Mac. Which is one of the reasons I suppose the updater is probably behaving that way. On the Mac, it's the default behavior to get you updates for apps that usually ship on the system or with the retail versions, even if you don't currently have them installed. I've seen iTunes come in on Software Update for a Mac that I chose not to install iTunes on. It's just one of the things Apple does.

In all reality, between typical Windows desktop clutter, and the fact that most people don't even know what's already on their computer, I doubt most normal people will notice this. All the people observant enough to know that there's a check box they can undo have already undone said check box.

It would be evil, however, if Apple were actually hijacking machines by setting Safari up as the default browser on people's machines, or changing Firefox/IE home pages to pages explaining about Safari.