Thoughts on the keynote

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This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on January 7, 2003). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Just a couple quick thoughts I had regarding some of the news from Steve Jobs’ keynote speech today at MacWorld.

  1. Apple plays nice

    Apple is continuing to support the Open Source software movement. Not only have they been utilizing the Open Source community to help improve the code for OS X, but they’ve done the same with Safari, the newly announed browser. On top of that, after dramatically improving the code base that Safari uses, they are sending the improved code back into the community for public use. Very nice move.

  2. Apple plays nice, part 2

    I noticed a nice little feature in Safari during the few moments I was able to play with it before I left for work. In the main Safari menu, just underneath the ‘Preferences…’ option, is an option to disable popup windows. While the option has been around in most Mozilla-based browsers for a while (sometimes easily available, sometimes not), it’s nice to see Apple including the functionality right off the bat in their browser.

  3. Open format files

    The announcement that Keynote (the new presentation application) uses XML for it’s saved project files really got my interest. While I haven’t played enough with XML to be able to take advantage of this right off, I can think of some very interesting scenarios that could make this very useful.

    Say, for instance, a script that weekly (or monthly, or daily, or whatever) pulls the Apache logfiles from your OS X webserver, extracts whatever key data points you want to extract from them, and plugs the resulting data into the right spots inside the XML file of a predefined Keynote template. Bingo – an automatically generated weekly professional presentation of your website’s traffic, most visited pages, most frequently used search terms, etc., ready for presentation to your boss, board of directors, whatever. Or, since Keynote can export to PowerPoint, you could have the report ready to send off to those Windows-based heathen. Or just export the report to a PDF file or QuickTime movie for posting on a website. All automatically generated, without the need for any interaction beyond the initial setup.

    Pretty damn cool, I think.

In the meantime, I’ll just go drool over that 17\” Powerbook now…