MacWorld notes

Well, that was mighty fun. Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field is alive and well, and I'm excited for Apple; it was a nice batch of stuff.

Ted Landau did a nice comprehensive reaction piece, so I'll only add a couple of comments:

Safari is a nice idea and a compact browser download at only 2.9MB, but I hope it grows some; Chimera and Mozilla's tabbed browsing (and bookmarked sets-of-tabs) are quite nice, and I'd love to see Apple do a variant. Safari's bookmark handling, particularly the ability to make several pull-down menus of your own on the Favorites toolbar, is excellent. Jobs didn't mention Opera in his comparisons; I wonder if it's because Opera long ago put Google in the toolbar (which Apple is claiming as an innovation). Anyway, thumbs up to Safari.

Keynote looks excellent, but my reason for being excited about it isn't that it's cool software with very professional themes and clip art (though that's nice). It's that 1) they bothered to build in PowerPoint compatibility (import and export) and 2) the file format will be open, documented and XML-based, meaning that anyone else can work with (or produce) the files with impunity. That's a very different model for a company Apple's size to try, and I like it. (Incidentally, adding two and two, this means you could open any PowerPoint file and convert it to an open-format XML file, unlocking the content from the proprietary format. I find that... fascinating.)

I remain happy with my Titanium PowerBook from February 2001; I've felt for a long time that today's PowerBooks really don't offer me much that's different besides a speed bump. But the new PowerBooks finally break that assumption. Backlit keyboard is nice, audio line-in is back (woo!), and the screen size is about as big as is practical to lug around. I'm not going to buy one any time soon (probably not even this year), but it's nice to have something better out there to ooh and ah at. :) (Hey, with that extra room in there, could they do two processors someday? Ah, probably not; battery issues.) I'm also curious to see a 12-inch PowerBook in person; I expect it will be impressive.     1 comment(s)  

MacFixIt.com doesn't waste any time.... I clicked the link to read the Ted Landau piece only to find that it is now in their archives, an area only accessible to MacFixIt Pro subscribers (at a cost of $24.95). No thanks....

I have to say I was a bit underwhelmed watching the keynote. Watching Steve Jobs get so excited while he sits at a Mac and copies music, edits photos, makes DVDs, and so on, is getting old.

      ...posted by Scott on January 12, 2003 7:43 PM

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