El Jobso’s WWDC Keynote: Old News.

Steve JobsWell, just having sat through my early afternoon catching up on the WWDC keynote address via live blogs, I must say that it was fairly boring and not much was newsworthy.

To preface there were a few exciting items for OSX Leopard. I rather liked the new finder and iChat. Though finder’s new found capabilities, or at least the shiny ones, are just going back through time and reusing an old idea; coverflow.

Steveo brought up a back-up program, called time machine at one point. He found it amazing but its basically a built in one touch backup software. Sure haven’t seen any of those before. But the metaphor of the time machine was well and alive throughout the rest of his performance. It seems that audience reactions were meager, and the whole thing certainly left me not blown away. Much of what he debuted for the new OSX is just rehashing old ideas, a few new little morsels that were relatively uninspired, and a few cracks on windows, especially vista (a platform which in all fairness really just reinvented the wheel for itself unlike the new OSX). Which, I should point out, that Mr. Jobs sided back up to in hopes of raising Apple’s minuscule stakes in the browser market by introducing Safari for pc’s. Hooray. (Can you feel my enthusiasm? I can’t).

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iPhone ads reveal little or maybe much.

Let me start this by saying I’ve been following the development of the Apple iPhone for quite some time. And finding news on new developments has become a bit of an obsession for me. I’m readily awaiting it’s upcoming release on June 29th. So in the meantime I’ve been indulging myself with the new series of four iPhone ads. During my time watching these ad’s I noticed a few funny things. Perhaps slips of the ad agency who created them, or maybe little bits of thread Steve Jobs is dangling in front of us. Only time will tell. Anyway, the evidence is below. First up is a mysterious 12th button. In all the iPhone ads and demonstrations previous to these ads and even in the ads themselves there has only ever been 11 icons on the front screen to choose from. In a few frames during a close up shot of the hand model pressing the iPod button, it is visible that there are not three, but four buttons on the bottom row. Meaning? A new button has found its way into the space above and shifted all the other down or over one space. See the modified screen cap image below.

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