Well 10.4 got previewed this morning and provoked mixed reviews. 3-way video conferencing in iChat AV will be pretty useful for keeping in touch with family etc., there’s some cool graphics stuff and the Spotlight search thing has potential. If the user can specify their own metadata it could be really cool. Automator just seems to be a GUI for building Applescripts.

Dashboard seems to have been a rip-off of Konfabulator, though Tom deems me an idiot for saying so. Desk Accessories were allegedly Apple’s prior art, which is rubbish. They were little applications implemented as device drivers that relied on main applications to figure out that a mouse click should go to a DA and then pass it to them. If the app didn’t support DAs then tough. That’s hardly a comparison to Konfabulator, which is a scripting engine, which uses XML to define the UI and JavaScript to provide functionality, in a manner which makes it easy for people to write their own widgets. Apparently it’s also a big deal that these widgets are out of the way and accessible by hot-key a la Expose. When I’m using a big application all my small apps are already hidden behind it and easily accessible by Cmd-Tab. Certainly just as quick to access. Just missing the eye candy.

The Konfabulator debate doesn’t centre around whether ot not it was a unique idea. It’s true that it has been around before in various guises. However, it didn’t exist on OS X before Konfabulator came along. Apple made a big song and dance at the launch of OS X about developer relations and encouraging more developers onto the Mac platform. They should be offering support and encouragement to sharware developers who come up with good, slick products, not just waiting to see what it reasonably popular and then incorporating it into the OS. Apple should spend their R&D money on bringing $5000 media tools to the common man, a la Final Cut Express and GarageBand, not shitting on the little guy.

RSS in Safari doesn’t seem to be much of a big deal. Anyone who is aware of blogs knows that RSS has been around for years and is not new as Jobs claims. If I go to a site I don’t want to see its RSS feed. I want to subscribe to RSS feeds of sites I like and have an aggregator alert me when one of those sites publishes something. NetNewsWire already does all that and does it well. I can see a precis of the article and if I’m interested, then a key press opens it in Safari. Maybe when it comes out in almost a years time there’ll be something more significant.

So, we have searchable metadata from BeOS, widgets from Konfabulator and RSS from NetNewsWire. Not exactly innovation and a bit hypocritical when you have “Redmond, start your photocopiers” posters all over the conference hall.