Jobber

Steve Jobs' keynote address at WWDC 2007 left a lot to be desired. After the iPhone's huge splash at Macworld in January I had high hopes for another demonstration of Jobs' renowned showmanship. Instead we got the following four announcements:

1. EA and id will be concurrently releasing new titles for PC and Mac. Enh, I'm not much of a gamer.



2. Some neat-looking, but not groundbreaking features of Leopard, the next version of OS X. A lot of these had already been previewed and none of them were knock-your-socks-off exciting. And while the switching animation is neat, various UNIX distros have had multiple desktops since the mid 90s.



3. Safari on Windows. I don't use Windows or Safari, so this one was a dud. I am considering giving Safari 3 another shot to be more useful to me than Firefox, but I doubt it will win.



4. 3rd party development on the iPhone via AJAX web apps. Boo. This one actually really sucked: the message to keen outside developers? Make a goofy Web 2.0 site and pretend that's a real app. Pretty weak, Apple.

In addition to the mediocre content of the address, you could tell that Jobs was off his game. In contrast to his rollicking iPhone announcement, where he had the audience eating out of his hand, he was adrift here. He kept awkwardly pausing for applause breaks where the audience half-heartedly obliged. He's demo some fairly lame feature and finish with an embarrassed, "Yeah, we think this will be really useful." I guess my expectations were too high — you can't hit a home run every time.