A week after WWDC and I'm still rather underwhelmed. I at least wanted to be a little whelmed.
There were three parts to WWDC this year: stuff that was recapped, stuff that wasn't unexpected, and stuff that was new. They weren't there in equal proportions, either.
What was irritating for me was such an emphasis on the recapped portions of the keynote. We knew about the SDK, we had been shown a walkthrough of Interface Builder, we knew people were building cool apps (Super Monkey Ball again?). These weren't rumors; they were shown at the last Apple event. Admittedly, it is the developer's conference, so a tech-centric focus was inevitable, but you can get so much more out of a smaller session than you can with paired programming in the Moscone Center.
Admittedly, part of the thrill of an Apple event is the surprise. There's nothing quite like a "oh, and there's one more thing" in the tech industry. The rumors sites had most of the details pegged: 3G iPhone (obviously), MobileMe (most of it), Snow Leopard (in and of itself a yawn right now). It takes a little bit of the fire out of the event, of course, but that's part of the game.
The problem was that when everything's said and done, there really wasn't much being offered here. iPhone now has GPS and 3G — likely enough for me to upgrade my own — and MobileMe has some cool aspects (web apps look gorgeous), but when you get down to it it's just a tweaked iPhone and a tweaked .Mac. On top of that, you can't get anything right now. iPhone's not for another month, likely the same for MobileMe, and AppStore's somewhere in there, too. Given their SDK launch event a few months back it sounded like WWDC would be the target release for AppStore. I am looking forward to both AppStore and MobileMe, but the wait kills the buzz a bit.
Hopefully this all means that the next event Apple does will be killer. Apple's hardware is where the real sparkle comes from, and it was mostly absent for WWDC. Throw some new radical design changes on the ancient (and tried-but-true) PowerBook and iBook designs and things will start feeling fresh again in a hurry.
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