Anyone got any spare app ideas? It’s just Apple kinda took out the market I was planning to enter. I’m now left with a half finished back up app and a jaw on the ground saying “Time Machine looks FREAKING AWESOME!!”. I thought that I’d feel some regret, some anger at Apple if they ever crushed an application of mine, but I think they’ve stunned me with how far ahead Time Machine is to any back up app on the Mac.

So… what about the rest of Leopard? iChat looks very nice, especially the screen sharing. The others are great novelties, though the collaboration looks amazing. Spaces looks like the slickest virtual desktop implementation I’ve seen in a long time and Core Animation also seems to blow away Core Image and Video in terms of coolness. The Mail part of the keynote was dull enough to have me wishing Roz Ho was on the stage for some reason, but besides that there were some pleasant confirmations in terms of Dashboard and Spotlight

There are also some significant points here too. We have Leopard’s shipping time, Spring 2007, which could be around the same time Vista comes out if it is delayed again. We also have what could be a tabbed IM system that doesn’t look like it’s a seriously flawed concept, though I could be wrong, I’d have to use it. But this seems to be Apple saying to Microsoft, we’ll take everything you might have beat us at with Vista and throw it away. The collaboration in iChat fixes the biggest hole between Vista and OS X, but also other things, such as Core Animation and Time Machine. They are showing that Apple is seeing where Vista looked better and making sure they top it. It is also quite interesting that these are all they are showing of Leopard for now.

Now onto the hardware. The Mac Pro is amazing. It is powerful, has great upgrade options thanks to it’s greater expandability and it is cheap. When you consider that the pervious 2.3GHz G5 PowerMac cost £1749 and that the new Mac Pro ships in it’s standard configuration for just £1699 and it features more RAM, better graphics and twice the processing cores it shows Apple is serious about price, these are extremely competitive systems. It also helps that the displays have dropped in price, however I didn’t get my hope for a set of budget iMac style displays

Which leads us on to, what is left. Well, we have the fabled iPhone and true video iPod, both of which were merely just hopes for WWDC, especially as the big mid year consumer event is next month. There is also no mention of updates to the Finder or Safari, but those could come at a later date. Many people were hoping for Core 2 based MacBook Pro’s, however given their last update was when the MacBook was release I doubted they’d receive another. The most likely candidate for a Core 2 chip is the iMac, which has had no speed bump since it first moved to Intel back in January.

This keynote will leave many disappointed as their longing for consumer goods made them forget that this the event where updates to pro machines happen, not a mid year MWSF. The closest to that is MacExpo Paris, which was where the iMac G5 was announced nearly 2 years ago. However I am extremely excited by what I have seen, it shows the future of the Mac, lower competitive prices, getting rid of the expensive stigma and blowing the minds of those looking at Vista. The only bad thing is knowing that my past few months of coding has gone to waste… oh well, back to the drawing board.