WWDC

Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2006-08-07 21:19:14

so, WWDC kicked off today. steve job's keynote address was kind of disappointing.. i was hoping for some sort major bombshell. instead, he just went through a list of ten features coming in leopard next spring. that, and the transition of the powermac to intel. most of the leopard stuff is kind of boring and expected - more features in mail and ichat, virtual desktops, easier widget creation for the dashboard, etc.

the one ray of hope remaining is that jobs said that they're still keeping some of the features under wraps. this, of course, allows me to speculate.. :)

so, parallels has already created pretty nicely-integrated virtualization software for the intel macs that let you run windows. however, this is still not as user-friendly for the average-joe user as it could be. the ideal case would be just being able to run a .exe file straight from OS X without having to explicitly go through a virtual machine. in order to do this, the virtualization software would have to be integrated into the OS, and running in the background (or at least started/stopped transparently on demand). this would be similar to how OS X can run OS 9.1 apps using the "Classic" emulation layer.

the other thing would be to integrate windowing environments. running a windows application should be no different than running a mac application. there's probably half a dozen different ways to do this, ranging from hacking the virtualization to use the underlying mac draw routines, all the way to simply pre-loading the windows virtual install with a mac skin and just drawing the window area instead of the entire windows desktop. it gets messier when dealing with things like the system tray or other windows things that have no mac equivalent. however, i'm pretty sure the engineers at apple can figure out a reasonable way of doing this.

if this is something apple's working on, then... i need to call it something. let's call it "hasta" (inspired from this picture). so, if this is something apple's working on, they will want it to be compatible with vista/glass applications. this means that any changes to the vista APIs will have an effect on hasta, and any vista delay means a hasta delay. combining that with the general difficulty of the task and how long apple has had to work on it, i would guess that apple may or may not have hasta ready in time for leopard's release, which is why jobs didn't say anything about it.

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