Steve Jobs knows how to demo. If you’re a developer, heck if you’re a user, you’ll want to check out Steve Job’s keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. There are several sneak peaks at things to come in Apple land, such as a 30″ monitor. Also, the 23″ Apple monitors are being refitted to use a DVI connector and will be PC compatible. Cool. I know what’s on my Christmas list :-).
On the developer side, the CoreImage/CoreVideo technology got me rethinking about imaging apps. Apple’s got the timing right again. Offloading to the GPU is ready for prime time and providing an SDK that provides simple access to this capability makes a lot of sense. If I understand it correctly, the next version of the Apple OS will be able to perform just-in-time compilation of graphics commands so you can perform many imaging operations in real-time. The days of CPU-bound graphics processing are coming to an end.
Now I don’t know how tuned the system is to doing toy stuff. It’s hard to tell from a demo. For instance, can I find corresponding points in three images and extract 3D information in real-time? Can I stitch together and auto-correct four adjacent video streams into one cohesive image in real-time? Can I author a GPU routine to locate a moving head? Or is the GPU data not on par with CPU data? I don’t know. I’d like to find out.
Searching was also a big part of the demo. In a crude sense, Jobs showed Apple’s own version of WinFS. He was able to pull up data almost instantly, but he didn’t say much about indexing time and performance. I’m not quite sold yet on this type of searching techology becoming a Google-killer. I’ll have to get into this another time.
Check out the video. There’s lots more there. Many great technologies. And it’ll get you thinking about the competitive landscape in the computer industry. Jobs and Pixar have blown away Disney’s animation. Could Microsoft and Windows be next? What’s that? You say, Apple can go ahead and be first and Microsoft can watch and learn and do it better? Yeah, that’s worked well in the past. But in today’s age of patents–I don’t think so. If Apple can innovate ahead of the curve and patent whatever they do, Microsoft will not only be behind a year or two in the marketplace, they may be behind in the courts too. Patents give an edge to small and nimble organizations. In a patent race, Microsoft might figure that it can hire thousands of workers throughout the world to develop new technologies faster, but will this yield the quality of IP that can fight an demonstrably innovative foe? Provacative questions for sure. Food for thought.