El Jobso's WWDC Keynote: Old News.

Well, just having sat through my early afternoon catching up on the WWDC keynote address via live blogs, I must say that it was fairly boring and not much was newsworthy.
To preface there were a few exciting items for OSX Leopard. I rather liked the new finder and iChat. Though finder's new found capabilities, or at least the shiny ones, are just going back through time and reusing an old idea; coverflow.
Steveo brought up a back-up program, called time machine at one point. He found it amazing but its basically a built in one touch backup software. Sure haven't seen any of those before. But the metaphor of the time machine was well and alive throughout the rest of his performance. It seems that audience reactions were meager, and the whole thing certainly left me not blown away. Much of what he debuted for the new OSX is just rehashing old ideas, a few new little morsels that were relatively uninspired, and a few cracks on windows, especially vista (a platform which in all fairness really just reinvented the wheel for itself unlike the new OSX). Which, I should point out, that Mr. Jobs sided back up to in hopes of raising Apple's minuscule stakes in the browser market by introducing Safari for pc's. Hooray. (Can you feel my enthusiasm? I can't).
Anyway, like this post's category suggests, I was in it for iPhone news, and he gave out 2 nuggets. Nugget, a fitting word for sure. First up, iPhone will release on June 29th, but instead of a 12am midnight bash or the normal path of just letting individual store's door's swing open for the morning and letting the awaiting line in, they are going with a 6:30 PM launch. Ok, well this will be a great idea! Your average working Joe Shmo can finish his Friday afternoon work, then stroll over to the Apple store or AT&T wireless and pick his iPhone up in as leisurely a fashion as possible. Hum dee dum! But oh, wait, that's right, by that time there will be a line a mile long of people who have been waiting all day, people who took off, or who don't necessarily have, or need to be at a job. And how exactly does this work when the doors would presumably already be open at all these institutions? Wouldn't people just be able to meander in? As someone who firmly believe in lines, and firmly believes most morons will disregard lines, and who firmly believes there to be an extremely large population of morons floating around, I can't help but wonder how they will keep order. Especially when you figure most contracts and phone sales take often over 30 minutes per person to set up. And thats a giving number when all I can imagine first day is "circus". This throws off my original plans, but the lucky thing is I happen to be getting off at 1PM that day, so perhaps I'll be at a happy medium. Not waiting 9+ hours, and not arriving only to stand at the end of the line either. Only time will tell.
Secondly, they announced that iPhone development will be done at least for now, through Web2.0 and Ajax programming. I would have liked to have seen the ability to build some non-web-based apps, but I won't complain too much either. Either way, I think they could have done better, but again only time will tell. There may be some ajax genius's out there who have some amazing cards up their sleeves.
Either way I was fairly un-impressed with this keynote, and I felt like it borrowed too much from the last WWDC's results.
On a final note, having used a plethora of live blogs to learn this information just mere minutes after it was announced, I have to say one site stood above the rest. Engadget did not have the so-called live and rapidly refreshing page that some other sites like Gizmodo or Macrumors did, but it didn't bother me either. Their site was the fastest, the most reliable, and conveyed not only the most, but the best information well above the others.
Macrumors was fast but every update had no more than a sentence and the pictures on the side were nothing to write home about. Gizmodo plain didn't work, it was supposed to automatically refresh and it would occasionally but for the most part, I couldn't get info to load as the site must have been just too bogged down to deliver. Engadget on the other hand divulged quotes, opinions and great pictures very rapidly, that just plain gave the info across in a much better way. Way to go Engadget, and thanks for your hard work on delivering the news ASAP!