My thoughts on Apple’s WWDC announcements

The news from the WWDC has received a lot of press, so I won’t go into what I think of each of the details of what Leopard will bring to the table, nor what having Safari on Windows means for the long term. Lifehacker gives a really good summary of Leopard’s features, and I encourage you to check out their write-up at some point.

Instead I want to draw attention to my one disappointment with Leopard: I really wanted to see some improvements to iSync. Specifically, I would very much like it if Apple would design iSync so that

• It doesn’t require third-party software to sync with Pocket PCs,
• It syncs perfectly, without duplication or loss of data.

A lot of people visit this site looking for information on how to sync iCal and Outlook and a Pocket PC and/or Palm. I provide some guidance on it on my Keeping a Pocket PC, Outlook, iCal, and Palm in Sync page and my Revisiting That Syncing Feeling page, but I would still like to see a solution that just works simply without having to require us to jump through hoops. Of course as Thomas as pointed out before, there is the option of using a remote host to accomplish all of this, but that is an added monthly expense I would personally like to do without.

The other point that I want to add about the WWDC is the announcement that Safari is now available to run on Windows. There has been a lot of negative talk about this on several sites, with a lot of people being critical of Safari. I will say this for Safari: of all the browsers I tested my site on, Safari was the only one that let me see that there was a problem somewhere with the CSS coding. That is, its strict enforcement of CSS let me see that something was wrong. (I tracked it down to a missing bracket at the end of a declaration statement.) The other browsers ignored the error, which I suppose is good in some respects, but I personally appreciate Safari helping me track down a problem that could have grown in significance over time (as I made further tweaks).

The final point I will make about Safari: I always love to see competition in the market place. So, good for Apple for introducing a bit more competition to the scene.

Update: I mentioned my hopes about iSync herein, and not ActiveSync, because (1) we are talking about Apple, and (2) I have come to expect Apple to solve the problems Microsoft either can’t or won’t. Maybe that is a bit harsh of me to say, and ActiveSync has improved a good bit over the years, but I would like to see it and iSync sync pretty much anything you put to them. A big hope I know, but it is a mobile world.