I would say that if you’re in the business of writing Mac software, that every OS release and every WWDC brings with it two feelings.
There’s the reaction from the non-developer (non-rational) side of the brain which really wants to see what cool things are there. We really want to ooh and aah over improvements to Dashboard or new and cool user interface improvements or a new and cool implementation of Quartz 2D Extreme. Okay okay, we want to see ACTUALLY cool things too.
Then there’s the reaction from the developer (rational) side which wonders if Apple has just released the thing that will kill your business model. I mean, if you made a photo organiser back in 2000, how would you feel when Apple released iPhoto.
I don’t subscribe to the theory that Apple goes out and looks at the small devs out there and tries to put them out of business. The furor around iTunes makes Apple (and SteveJ) seem pretty human (in the good sense). I mean – if not for serenedipity, iTunes might have been based on Audion. Likewise with Karelia Software, when I saw Watson I immediately thought “Man….I can see Apple doing this” and boom. Dan Wood, the main man in Karelia (I need staff for fact-checking!) just released Sandvox which puts in one interface, the stuff that Apple released last January in iWeb and Garageband for podcasting and blogging. I prefer Sandvox but man it’s possible to make a joke about Dan Wood being the unlukciest man in the world…
Some apps seem ripe for this however. Some people have asked that Growl be integrated somewhow. I dunno. PaulJHolden, artiste and thespian (….but especially artiste!) introduced me to Growl and it seemed kinda Windowsy. It looks lovely but….I don’t need notifications when things happen. I use a Mac. I just want them to have happened. I can understand the need for little pop-up status notifications and with my need for some monitoring tools this week, I may even eat my words in a few days 🙂
It’s entirely possible that Apple will release some sort of sharing with iCal in Leopard. That Mac OS X Server 10.5 will have some sort of built-in SyncBridge-alike. Others have said that you can duplicate every aspect of .Mac with services like Picasa, GMail – with the exception of the iSync stuff. At the end of the day, we provide access to the iSync stuff.. So Apple might eat us.
My prediction is that they might bring in iCal sharing, but if they do it’ll be part of .Mac. It could be part of Mac OS X server but then I’d have to ask myself why they would do that. Most of the services in Mac OS X Server are built upon established existing open source code. They dumped their own mail server in preference to Postfix. They use Cyrus, Apache, Tomcat and other technology to provide a prettified BSD-alike. .Mac has over a million subscribers but I’ll bet that very few of them are using it JUST for iSync. I know I don’t.
It’s hard to know how to feel. What seems certain is that iCal is going to get some sort of upgrade, and that’s exactly what we DO want. The PowerPage has this exclusive:
iCal 3.0: - Brilliant new UI - 25 different organization techniques - 100's more options for each log - Integration with more formats
Nothing about sharing there but “integration with more formats” could mean anything!
I am looking forward to it. Leopard is likely more than six months away and we’ll have some work cut out to test SyncBridge with Leopard.