Apple WWDC Reality Distortions

Whoa.

I did not have the opportunity to watch Steve Jobs envelope a hoard of Mac developers in his Reality Distortion Field™ at his keynote speech today at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, but I did get to experience it second-hand through an AIM chat room. Mac OS X v10.4 was presented with new features including CoreImage & CoreVideo, Automator, Spotlight, and enhanced iChat AV. Whoa.

My takes:

• Spotlight is going to work absolute wonders. I’m very good about keeping client files organized, but in my work-frenzy mode, I certainly can get over hasty about saving files in random location. This will certainly help in rounding them up. Ah, smart folders at last.
• iChat AV’s multiple participants should be very nice. Hopefully, SBC will increase my allocated bandwidth without a billing increase every month to take advantage. Also, it would be nice if other IM clients would jump onboard. iChat does use industry standards like H.264 and SIP. Currently, I’m limited to my family members who have iSights. Also, it would be nice if iChat’s protocols were more corporate firewall friendly.

• Automator should be nice for manipulating large batches of photos. I helped to create a memorial DVD for a family member that died last year using scanned photos. I wanted a nice effect similar to the screensaver slide shows zoom in out, cross dissolved, etc, but iMovie’s effect lacked any quality. I used Photo to Movie. Exposé helped a lot in jumping from one app to another, but we had over 100 photos that we had to apply the effect, export, import into iMovie and then get into iDVD. I see automator as completely running those sorts of tasks. Wonderful!

  Well, that’s all I have for now. I cannot wait for the “first half of 2005” to roll around so I can get my hands on Mac OS X Tiger v10.4!