I’ve just been watching the WWDC06 keynote speech again today after following it on a text only basis via Engadget and I began to rethink my position on Apple. Those who know me will know I have a less than positive opinion towards Apple for various reasons that I blurt out every now and then. I’d like to clear up that my mainly negative views are concentrated towards Apple hardware. My view is that Apple is the Nike of computers – they put their logo on it and double the price.

Putting that to the side, Apple software, I have to say, is rather nice. Their latest technological offerings like Time Machine, iChat improvements and the new Dashboard tools are something any other OS won’t have natively. People have been saying that this keynote speech was rather dissappointing but I feel that they don’t actually realise what was announced. Jobs’ past speeches have mostly announced new hardware such as the iPod and iPod Nano but this speech announced loads of new software and software enchancements as well as the MacPro and XServe – more virtual than physical products.

I do have one bone to pick with Steve Jobs though, and that’s the way they introduced Spaces and Stationary in Mail. They’ve been done before. These ideas are not new, they’re just more aesthetically pleasing. The idea and implementation of Spaces has been in most major linux desktop environments (such as GNOME and KDE) for a long time. When I use linux I’ve never actually used this idea at all, but then I never used linux as my main OS for productivity. Also, the idea of Stationary – again in Mail it’s just more aesthetically pleasing – has been done before. In Microsoft Outlook Express, stationary was implemented. So, who’s using their photocopiers now?