As I enjoy a pint at the Chieftain before the afternoon sessions, I’m thinking I may not be able to wrangle a return trip next year. This is just what it says on the tin – a developer conference. Without an IT track, I’m sort of at a loss. Nevertheless I have learned a lot, and without breaking NDA, let me just say that nobody is sleeping on the malware issue.
iOS 5 has nothing new in voice control, based on what I saw at the keynote. I fully expected the Nuance tieup and the Siri acquisition to be more important than they seem to be at present. Nevertheless, consider how long it took the PA Semi acquisition to pay out, or the mapping acquisitions…this could be a long game. Other than voice, though, I got everything else I wanted from iOS and Mac OS X alike: full volume encryption, geolocated reminders, notifications that don’t suck out loud, and iPhones and iPads that will never need to see a USB cable for anything but charging ever again. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. The emphasis on how many devices support it seems to bear out my contention that there may not be a new iPhone this year. The white one and the Verizon models were it.
The iPad is also problematic for text entry, but we knew that. Of course, the angle on the bar is tricky, and the space bar isn’t getting hit very often (when it’s not turning the into Tyne or Te, that is). I really wish iOS did at least as good a job of spam management as Mail on the desktop, obviously, but in most respects it’s worked out well. Not for work obviously, with no ARD and no ability to use Remedy (but that, in fairness, is down to the shitbag HTML code that Remedy’s web piece generates). But more than ever I think iCloud means that a MacBook Air would be viable with all the media content left at home on the house storage Mac.
As an aside…there’s no getting around it. He looks bad. Really bad. I think Apple will be fine without him, but I don’t think he’s capable of resigning. I hope he hangs on, though. He’s earned a long quiet retirement. To help create the personal computer as we know it, and then come back thirty-plus years later to be the one who helps destroy it? That’s a career. In any league.