Steve Jobs addresses lack of Mac design awards at WWDC | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs addresses lack of Mac design awards at WWDC

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16 pointsanderzole8 comments

Yeah sounds credible to me. Last year had Snow Leopard which was primarily a dev-oriented release - this year it's the iPhones/iPod/iPad.

I would speculate next year's will be all about the consumer and Mac OS X 10.7, could be wrong though.

I doubt very seriously that next year will be the "Mac centric" year as Jobs states; but I'd guess it will at least still be there, and may well be more of a focus...or at least 50% of the focus.

Seems to me that, of the two branches, iPhone OS is just the one that's currently evolving more rapidly. WWDC attendees would be naturally most curious/hungry for deep information about it. Desktop OS X won't even have a major revision for some time yet...so why take a rote focus on "well, more of the same Mac OS X" when pretty major changes are afoot in another, admittedly closely related segment?

It would seem odd to me, though, for them to not have any Mac awards this year and then bring them back next year. Why do that? Unless they have something really big planned for Mac OS between now and then. (Though even if they do, how many great apps to take advantage of it will be out within one year?)

Or to apply his statement that this year primarily focuses on iPhone OS and maybe next year will be mostly about the Mac: maybe next year there won't be any iPhone OS awards and they'll all be for Mac. Ummm, sorta doubt it. :)

(Though even if they do, how many great apps to take advantage of it will be out within one year?)

This is probably grasping at straws, but maybe 10.7 will finally be focused on Apple building something for the end user with all the nice APIs they've added in on 10.5 and 10.6. Stable foundation, now to build something on top of it. In this case, devs would already have a lot of the APIs.

You're right. That end user facing thing will be touch. After iPad, I want an iMac with multitouch.

But why? It seems to be well known that touch interfaces are uncomfortable for prolonged interaction: your hand overlaps the display, gets tired, etc.

Maybe it's beneficial to have touch as additional input method, but it's not obvious to me.

MacBooks have multitouch already, it's just on a touchpad instead of the screen. Unless Apple goes completely bananas over touchscreen keyboards and releases a Nintendo DS style MacBook, all they'll probably do is embiggen the touchpad.

I think it's just because 10.6 wasn't a very UI-oriented release. There were lots of changes under the hood, but since the design awards are usually awarded to software implementing cool new OS features. Software that implement Grand Central Dispatch or OpenCL in an awesome way don't correlate with the design of the app, so it's hard to give them out meaningfully.

I don't see the problem in giving out awards for the platform they're focusing on any particular year -- I just hope they don't pull all the best engineers from the Mac OS to the iPhone and let it slide for too long.

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