Midnight Cheese

CrossOver Mac Beta is working exceptionally well on my MacBook Pro. Apps install with ease, and run fast. The power of WINE with the easy install and functionality of OS X. Here’s a screenshot fresh after the install.

I received an email from Adobe advertising some of their new stock photos. The stock photo they included as an example is of horrible quality. Blurry, looking very compressed, and lacking detail. (I’ve also discussed the same issue with images on their website.) If their blurry sample photo is supposed to be any type of example of their product, then who would want that? The plug for Bose is of much higher quality. Look at the sharpness in that image compared to the girl. Adobe has got to get some quality control happening. All their stuff looked so good before the acquisition of Macromedia.

This is a crop from the original email. Click for the full email screen capture in PNG format.

If you look at the Adobe stock photo site you’ll see the same image from the email which actually looks quite a bit better. I’d be willing to bet that whoever composed this email grabbed that photo from the website and blew it up, stretching it into nastiness. Come on guys… you can do better than this.

Looks like my Dad is getting a good word. Very cool.

Just before Dave began I caught the end of the 10:00 news on channel 5 and witnessed the weatherman say something to the tune of, “Rain is in the area, but there won’t be any severe storms tonight!” So 20 minutes into Letterman channel 5 interrupts announcing severe thunderstorm warnings for Nashville and proceeds to track the storms.

If we can’t predict 20 minutes into the future, how will weather prediction ever be as precise as it is in Back to the Future Part II?

There’s been a lot of press about the keynote not being too hot, but from a developer point of view the rest of the week was great. (Well, judging from the first three days that I was able to attend, anyway.) Technically I’m not allowed to go into detail about the sessions, but I will say that Apple is doing a lot on the back-end to make development on their platform very easy.

The conference was an interesting event, especially having attended by myself. Everyone kind of kept to their own little groups, so breaking into conversation was a bit difficult. Other people that were attending solo tended to immerse themselves in their laptops inbetween sessions and even during the receptions.

Nevertheless it was interesting to peer into the Apple developer world for just a bit. The WebKit team was exceptionally “awesome” and “hot,” as they tended to throw those words out quite a bit.

Candor didn’t get a mention at the Design Awards. Obviously being the WWDC the judges were probably more interested in how the Widget worked in addition to what it actually did. So iClip was definitely deserving of that. Unfortunately Candor doesn’t use any fancy Core technologies to get the job done.

So overall WWDC06 was a good experience, although oddly it was a bit isolating at times. It would be interesting to compare with something like MacWorld as I imagine you would probably get a much wider spectrum of Apple addicts at that event.

These are photos from Sunday afternoon with a couple from the WWDC on Monday.

Edit: Added a few shots from Tuesday to the set.

Well, in less than 24 hours I’ll be in San Francisco for the much anticipated WWDC 2006. Candor Gallery has been entered in the Apple Design Awards, so I figure this will probably be the best excuse I’ll have to go to one of these conferences.

I’m looking forward to some great things being announced at the Keynote… No doubt we’ll see the Mac Pro introduced, along with a tasty preview of Leopard. For Leopard, maybe a tabbed Finder and a redesigned UI that begins to lose the bubbly gloss look? After all, their hardware no longer sports the multi colors and the bulbous shapes either.

Perhaps we’ll see Apple negate the work of CodeWeavers and the Alky Project allowing users to run Windows apps straight-up in Leopard.

Will there be one more thing? Maybe a sneak peak at the new wi-fi enabled iPods due out for X-mas? I’d like to see the iPods sport an RSS reader that lets you update your feeds at any wi-fi hotspot.

But aside from the keynote there will be some great sessions and of course the Apple Design Awards Ceremony. I can’t stay for the whole week so I’m going to miss some good stuff like the widget sessions on Wednesday and the Campus Bash on Thursday, but I’m sure 3 days will be plenty of Apple overload.

San Francisco by itself will have plenty to offer. Hopefully I can hit up the Presidio and check out the new Letterman Digital Arts Center. If I have time Wednesday I’m going to try and drive down the coast a couple hours and see what there is to see.

There’s been interest expressed to blog the Keynote live, but I don’t know how feasible that will be. Besides, I want to see what’s going on on-stage rather than staring at my notebook screen the whole time. But we’ll see. There will certainly be plenty of other sources for live Keynote updates.

Anyway, at the least I’ll certainly be posting some photos as the trip progresses, so check back for that!