August 7, 2007 at 10:16 pm
The big news today was, of course, the updates to the iMac, iLife, and iWork product lines. I have just a few random thoughts that I might as well dump.
First thought upon seeing the new iMac was, "iPhone." Looks like aluminum + glass + black plastic is the new aluminum + white plastic.
I want one of the new keyboards. I like the keyboard on my MacBook just fine, and it'll be interesting to have the same feel on both my desktop and portable. Hopefully it'll look cleaner longer.
In my not-so-humble opinion, the user-definable actions in Keynote '08 are reason enough to shell out $79.
Numbers is pretty cool. It's nice how easy it is to do reasonably advanced things. It doesn't do anything that Excel doesn't already do, with the exception of making it easy to make your spreadsheets look aesthetically pleasing (at least, as pleasing as a spreadsheet can look).
10,000 lines of Javascript code for their new Web Gallery? It does do quite a bit, but 10,000 seems a bit on the heavy side to me. Not to mention their code is fairly 'thick' (fewer lines of code that are longer in length, rather than more lines of code that are shorter in length). I get the feeling that the project was rushed. Many of the animations feel incomplete or inconsistent, and there are a few bugs. If, for example, you watch a slideshow and you haven't pre-loaded the images in the slideshow, then when transitioning to a new image the old image will briefly be visible during the fade-in.
Finally, again about the Web Gallery, why use Flash for Carousel? There isn't much of anything in there that hasn't already been done in Javascript elsewhere in the app.