A week full of Apples
WWDC 2006 is over. It was a great week. They filled my head with information about new technologies, new ideas and concepts. I met a lot of great people there, attendees and Apple engineers. Unfortunately I was unable to get in contact with the engineer(s) that does the Apple Remote Control stuff. Nobody seems to know that person 
Is Leopard a Copycat?
I expected that at least one of my products will be obsolete after the keynote. Well - Let’s see.
Spotlight and Searchlight
Spotlight has been extended to search servers and other Mac OS X clients too. That gave me a whack. Of course that was foreseeable. My Searchlight extended Spotlight to the network already. The good thing about that is that Searchlight has a number of features that are still unique (we will see which of them are caught by Leopard GM).
- Cause of its Web Interface Searchlight is useable for Windows/Linux users too
- With Searchlight you are able to search for documents without the need to connect to all shares you want to search
- Searchlight works for the SMB protocol, too
- Searchlight is faster and I’ll do my best to make it even faster when it runs on Leopard
- Searchlight has this cool RSS notification feature. You will get informed when files are changing on the server.
- Searchlight is available NOW!
So there is still a place for Searchlight. Therefore expect some cool new features in Searchlight soon. I’ll also check out some ideas of bringing Leopard features to - let’s say - Searchlight 2. Let the race begin…
??? and Sofa Control
Nothing has been announced regarding FrontRow or the Remote Control. I expect cool new stuff on the FrontRow side. Perhaps some kind of Internet Browsing module.
Beside FrontRow I do not expect much new functionality for the Remote Control. So no features like controlling PowerPoint or other applications.
The bad thing about that is, that I has really hoped that they will introduce some AppKit based API for integrating the Remote Control in apps. Right now that does not seem to happen for Leopard. But we will see. They still have some time left and in case they find the engineer…. 
In the meantime I will release another update for the Apple Remote Control Wrapper Class which will add bug fixes and some new features.
A new version of Sofa Control is also in the work and it will have some incredible cool new stuff. But I don’t talk about upcoming features and/or release dates any more.
Next?
I think Leopard will be a great new version. There is much more under the hood than we heard at the keynote and the sessions. It seems like Apples engineers are pretty busy to finish the new version. In fact they sleep, eat and code - that’s all.
When we look back a year it’s incredibly how far they have gone. They successfully introduced a new architecture and with 64bit Intel another one at this WWDC. The Intel version of Mac OS X stabilizes with each OS update. That’s a tough job that takes time. That should kept in mind when people are complaining that Leopard takes so long.
Therefore - go on Apple engineers. I’ll fed you with bug reports to help you as far as i can with that tough job…