Boring is Beautiful
Robb Beal posted this morning regarding his fondest wish for Panther: that it be boring! As Robb said:
Here’s hoping Panther is one of the most boring OS upgrades in personal computing history! Faster boring. More compatible boring. Less buggy boring.
I said in my earlier post that I was relatively unimpressed with Panther, as demoed during the keynote, for exactly that reason: compared to Jaguar, it has very few flashy new features. The real question, then, is whether or not the other half of Robb’s equation proves true. Is boring really beautiful?
After sitting through an afternoon of presentations by Apple employees regarding Panther, I would have to say yes. The thing about Panther, you see, is that it is short on the sorts of features that “demo” well, and long on under-the-hood improvements. It seemed like nearly every new feature discussed this afternoon was some sort of optimization or new API designed to make developers’ lives easier. And that’s a good thing!
I guess I’m not supposed to talk much about all of this due to Apple’s NDA (and besides, it’s fun to be vague and mysterious!), but I will say that there are some fundamental changes in store for Cocoa, and that they should make application development even easier than it already is! Combine that with a variety of new APIs, new widgets, and a snazzy new development environment, and I think you’ve got a very winning proposition for Mac developers!
Speaking of Xcode, I would just like to reiterate that I think it will go a long way toward eliminating the things I hate about Project Builder. I still need to install it and play around a bit, but what I saw this afternoon looks very promising. My compliments to Apple for finally devoting the resources to make their developer tools world class!