Apple Developments

Here’s a summary of my personal experiences with the latest from Apple:

The new Safari browser, while beautiful and elegant, isn’t ready for prime time yet. Steve Jobs halfway admitted this in his keynote address by demonstrating the “report a bug” feature. While it works well on most of the sites I visit regularly (and on most of the ones I maintain), it breaks down on weird voodoo sites that incant mystical bucketloads of CSS. I’m sure it will improve; for now, I’m sticking to Chimera which, for my money, is the best browser available on any platform.

The updated iCal is a fantastic improvement over the last version, primary in that seems to respond about twice as fast. It’s now very usable. Same thing for iSync’s latest version: it’s much faster, and far less clunky.

The new “synchronize my address book with my dotmac address book” feature, while not yet released, looks promising, and I’ll find it very helpful when out and about.

While I’m not a big presentation giver, the new $99 Keynote presentation system looks interesting, and I may invest in it for those presentations that I do give.

New releases of iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD are scheduled for the end of the month; if they work as promised today, I’m sure I’ll use them all. It might be finally time to invest in a digital video recorder; Oliver won’t be young forever.

By the way, the webcast of the keynote streamed in her flawlessly: not a missed frame in 2 hours.