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The real Leopard show-stopper? Developer goodies that weren't on stage

by David Chartier Aug 10th 2006 at 1:00PM

Reports are surfacing on the web that, while everything Apple showed on stage at WWDC 2006 was exciting and purty 'n all, the more exciting attractions are what wasn't shown on stage. AeroExperience, a Vista developer resource site (of all places), claims to have an exclusive list of many of the underlying changes, newly introduced APIs and other developer goodies that might simply not have been prime fodder for the news and PR spotlight session of the keynote.

It's a pretty lengthy list, so here are some of the highlights for you cliffnote readers out there:
  • Leopard will feature resolution-independent user interface and there are several functions to get the current scaling factor and apply it to pixel measurements (we've mentioned how cool this is before, and so has Mr. Gruber).
  • Address Book adds support for sharing accounts, allowing an application to restrict content according to user (.Mac already does this, so I'm wondering if they mean some kind of framework or protocol is in place to open this up to something like WebDAV or simple FTP).
  • Automator includes a new user interface and allows things such as action recording, workflow variables and embedding workflows in other applications.
  • Time Machine has an API that allows developers to exclude unimportant files from a backup set which improves backup performance and reduces space needed for a backup (I was curious about how Time Machine would handle 'useless junk' types of files myself).
  • Carbon, the set of APIs built upon Classic MacOS and used by most 3rd party high-profile Mac OS X applications, now allows Cocoa views to be embedded into the application. This could provide applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office access to advanced functions previously only available to Cocoa applications.
  • Text engine improvements include a systemwide grammar checking facility, smart quote support, automatic link detection and support for copying and pasting multiple selections.
  • Mail stationery is open to developers, allowing any web designer to create fantastic-looking Mail templates, with defined areas for custom user content (bring on the stationary plugin packs!).
  • A new framework is included for publishing and subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, including complete RSS parsing and generation. Local feeds can be shared over Bonjour zero-configuration sharing and discovery (I suspected something like this; sounds like Safari and Mail.app might share the same RSS database, as can other apps, so users don't have to waste time exporting/importing between RSS apps).
Check out the full list at AeroExperience for more of the potentially rocking Leopard features that Steve and company didn't show on stage.

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Reports are surfacing on the web that, while everything Apple showed on stage at WWDC 2006 was exciting and purty 'n all, the more exciting...
 

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Ken R

The res-independance thing sounds cool.
My theory for the change of the brushed-metal in iLife = easier to change simple gradients to vectors (the metal brushing is a bitmap, so it would degrade at higher resolutions)

August 11 2006 at 11:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
J. Adams

I've never understood why Apple didn't get behind group calendaring. When I worked at Apple, any attempt to ask "Why doesn't iCal do group calendaring, it would be so easy to implement!" was met with: "Um, we don't talk about that. Go use MeetingMaker."

August 11 2006 at 6:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Marcello

"Mail stationery is open to developers, allowing any web designer to create fantastic-looking Mail templates, with defined areas for custom user content (bring on the stationary plugin packs!)."

wow, yeah, now i'm excited!
finally i'll be able to get html-including-tons-of-worthless-images from normal people too, not only from bulk mailers...

meh...

M

August 11 2006 at 8:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
drivebybiped

I seriously think you're deluding yourself if you think the iCal server can compete with Exchange. At the same time I'd love to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple and think taking over the small business market is definatly something they could ready to do. Leaving Exchange and such only for the 'big-boy' companies. Hopefully it will allow truly cross-platform group access, then it would really useful. Of course plenty of companies have sprung up to fill in the place of exchange in small businesses. So they could be in for a bit of a fight.

August 11 2006 at 1:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jonathan

A pedant writes: stationAry = standing still, stationEry = letterheads, business cards, paper, envelopes etc.
Easy way to remember: 'e' for 'envelopes'

This public service announcement brought to you by someone with a lot of time on their hands... :-)

August 10 2006 at 8:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
henrrrik

My goodness, what a security breach... My guess is that a quite a few Microsoft employees were among the attendees at WWDC (MS Office anyone?), so they probably know these things already.

August 10 2006 at 6:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Seth

Adam is right. The fact that this is public information means that someone broke the Non-disclousure agreement that they agreed to when they registered for WWDC.

August 10 2006 at 5:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Julian Panetta

Yeah, I have no idea why people aren't mentioning Objective-C 2.0. I would think it would get a lot of coverage with its garbage collector (as you mentioned) and its focus on 64 bit compatibility (according to the xcode page).

August 10 2006 at 3:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gretyl

Don't know about anyone else, but "Sharing accounts" and a Bonjour-enabled RSS API have set my mind aflutter for a CoreAnimation-driven file-sharing Finder.

August 10 2006 at 3:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris

Also, Objective-C 2.0. I haven't heard much about it, but it has a --->garbage collector

August 10 2006 at 3:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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