Interesting Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC yesterday. I'm listening to it now through QuickTime. I wish they'd broadcast it live but better late than never. As usual though, it takes about a day for Steve Jobs' reality dissipation field to dissipate. For Java developers, the situation is not as rosy as it may have first sounded (or as Jobs claimed). Here's what seems to have been deduced so far:
On a non-Java note, I'm not sure yet but it seems likely that the new X86 PowerMacs will not be able to run Classic apps. That's a problem for me. I still have quite a few classic applications I need to run on a regular basis and several more I need to run occasionally. Some of them go back 15 years or more. I don't expect this to change.
Potential platinum lining I haven't heard anyone else speculate on yet: Someone, somewhere (VMWare?) is going to figure out how to make one box run Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux at the same time without the overhead of emulating processors.
Apple has released version 2.1 of Xcode, "Apple's tool suite and integrated development environment (IDE) for creating Mac OS X Universal Binaries that run natively on PowerPC and Intel-based Macintosh computers. The IDE provides a powerful user interface to many industry-standard and open-source tools, including GCC, javac, jikes, and GDB. Xcode is designed to fully support the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks and Java. It contains templates for creating applications, frameworks, libraries, plug-ins, Java applications and applets, and command-line tools. Developers can use Xcode to construct a user interface, test code performance, and perform many other common development tasks." It's a free download for ADC members. Xcode and its updates are free beer. With Mac OS X Apple wisely stopped charging for developer tools. You'll still need an ADC membership (including the free membership) to get a copy.