Steve Jobs makes at least two major presentations each year, one in January and one in June. I’ve written about the January 2007 announcements before. The June ones (made on Monday) seem to have been more an effort in spin than an announcement of new technology.
He made much of the fact that games are being ported to OS X. Now it seems as if what he meant was that some Windows games will be released running under some kind of emulation. Not exactly the same thing, really, or nearly as significant. It is, for one thing, hardly new.
Then he made much of the fact that developers would be able to write “Web 2.0″ applications for the iPhone. It wasn’t, he said, full access to the phone (which is what developers wanted), but it would enable programmers to write software that integrated well with phone functions. It was a way of allowing development that Apple had thought long and hard about.
But re-watching the video and really reading the fine print, it looks as this too was an effort in spin. A web-browser had already been announced, so the ability to use web applications was hardly new. Jobs avoided promising that ‘web applications’ could be downloaded onto the phone, meaning that third-party applications will only run when an internet connection is available. It is noticeable that within the demo, the application show was accessed via Safari, not via its own icon. And ‘access to the phone features’, such as sending email or making a call, does not seem to mean ‘tell the phone to send data’ but rather ‘launch Apple’s own email program when you click on an email address’.
We’re not even talking, then, about ‘widgets’ in the OS X sense - mini web pages that appear to the user to be individual applications; we’re talking about viewing web pages on a web browser. If they’ve thought long and hard, then, they haven’t come up with anything new.
Jobs had some of the most important members of Apple’s developer community in one room, and then tried to impress them with not one but two rather misleading announcements. I am not an expert, but that doesn’t seem like a very smart move to me.