Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Since everybody and their mothers are weighing in on Apple's announcements on their weblogs, I thought I would add my 2 quatloo's worth. Warning: Tech talk ahead.

Panther Compatibility: First off, Panther is nice in that it doesn't seem to break as much existing program code as Jaguar did. Testing Watson, it's almost Panther-ready; just a few changes will be needed on my end to compensate for changes in Aqua widgets. And of course there are a few Panther bugs which I'll need to report to Apple. But overall, Watson should more or less "just work" on Panther.

Some "low-hanging fruit", for a release coming soon: At last, the toolbar will be able to indicate the currently selected tool, if you are running Panther!

XCode: Looks very nice, what a lot of people have been looking for. It will take a bit of getting used to the new UI; trying it out today, it took a while just to find my source files! But this is nitpicking...

Cocoa updates: I don't want to get too specific, fearing NDA breakage, but the biggest update is that Apple has finally folded the concepts in "EODisplayGroups" -- some great technology that was part of NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework -- into Cocoa. Basically, it puts a lot of the basic "controller" functionality into Interface Builder connections, replacing a lot of "glue code" to load and store user interface elements on the screen. Several of us have been begging Apple do make this happen, and it's finally a reality. From a developer's perspective, I have been saying that this technology is as much a time saver to traditional Cocoa development as Cocoa is a timesaver compared to non-Cocoa development. It takes a bit of getting used to some of the concepts to make this work, but Cocoa developers will find this to be a real productivity enhancer.

iChat AV / iSight: Very cool. It just works. It will be very handy for people working remotely. (I have found only a few people I know to have the software and camera up and running, but everybody so far has had very little problem getting it working.) Plus, it's fun! (But wait until the novelty wears off!) I haven't heard mention of an API for the iSight yet, but maybe one isn't needed -- after all, EvoCam just works with it without any configuration. My only wish: a way to easily send screenshots or images back and forth over iChat, so that you could essentially have somebody "looking over your shoulder" if you so desired.

Design Awards: Congratulations on this year's winners of the Apple Design Awards. It is of course no surprise that the most innovative programs come from the smallest companies -- Like Watson, Salling Clicker is DemoWare, and pretty much the work and vision of one person. Let's hope that these winners don't get "sherlock'd"! :-)