WWDC 2004 Keynote

I'm almost done watching the broadcast of Jobs' keynote. The one thing that struck me, and I'm sure this isn't new, is that the people in the audience get really excited about the polish. Anyone can do technology, but only a few know how to really put that polish on the technology to make it digestible to normal folk. Apple excels at this and it seems as if it's the only thing the crowd is looking for. I'm sure most of them understand that without the polish Apple doesn't have a huge advantage over other technology providers.

A number of friends have made the jump, or will soon be making the jump, to Apple. The general response that I heard was, "it was cool, it just worked." Coming from a system where you have to configure XFree86 and your sound card with kernel modules, I doubt that is really a high bar though. Some even appreciated the polish that Apple put on the packaging. Others thought it was a waste. But the one thing that it did reinforce for both groups was that this wasn't some hunk of junk that you aren't going to care about. This is your new piece of Apple Gear™ and it's going to rock and that is why we had to make our own twist ties for the power cords because regular twist ties weren't worthy of being wrapped around your new gear.

Now to the Dashboard v. Konfabulator dustup. I don't care. I think the outrage is quite faux though. Hopefully Hyatt will have more to say in the coming days, after he gets some sleep. Plus, it really only got a minute or two in the entire keynote. Chill. (Update: John Gruber weighs in.)

Automator. I can only hope this will finally let me utilize AppleScript to make my life easier. I hope it's like browser tabs, something that once I use it I will never go back to life without it because it simply makes my life a lot easier. I think that's a pretty big wish though. But it does have a really cool icon, so bonus polish points up front on that.