Some combination of screwy net access and a LiquidWeb mail server upgrade resulted in my Inbox duplicating all of the enclosed messages. Since I’m nowhere near inbox zero the glitch resulted in a few thousand messages to wade through. I figured I wasn’t the first to deal with this, and quickly found two scripts which id’d duplicate messages: Tim Auton’s Select Duplicates and Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts. I ended up going with Time Auton’s script because of his description and a quick review of his code. The script finished quickly enough (running from Script Editor) and left me with all the duplicated messages selected and ready to review and delete.

The LiquidWeb mail upgrade caused another problem, my IMAP folders were now grouped inside my Inbox. The solution was to add the IMAP prefix “INBOX” to the account settings, as shown here:

And yes, I do really have that many active email accounts. Pity me.

The CalDav project Calendar Server is looking to be very, very good.

It’s an open source server supporting full read-write calendars, availability blocking, delegations, notifications, directory integration and more. I’m going to be setting up a few of these once we start migrating to Leopard.

In the WWDC keynote, right around 1:18:30, Scott Forstall’s nervous typo started a slide which ended up knocking about $5 billion dollars off of Apple’s market cap.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the typo, though I felt it in my gut the instant that happened. The stock’s drop from the mid-124s down to nearly 120 almost exactly matches the duration of the iPhone web apps section of the keynote. Rumors and expectations can be expensive.

My initial reaction to the Keynote was fairly positive. While it was a little short on new stuff and heavy on spinning questionably functional features, there were some really funny moments, some suspense and we all had a good time.

Everyone at WWDC is under NDA, so I’m not going to cover anything which hasn’t already been covered, featured on Apple’s site or mentioned in the press. Considering how much attention Apple’s getting these days, there’s quite a lot to talk about.

My thoughts started to sour when I had a chance to use 10.5 and really try out the new features. The whole of Leopard often just feels thrown together in a hap dash sort of way. Bits and pieces of one app are in other apps Todos and RSS in Mail? Coverflow everywhere? Shiny Dock backgrounds? This is called bloat when Microsoft does it.

Rather than try and finish one monster post like my predictions post, I’m going to eke out shorter, more topical posts as I have time. Those posts will all be linked from here.

Posts:

• The $5 billion typo
• Interface

The rumor mill is exceptionally quiet this year, I’m probably more excited because of that. Quoth Fake Steve Jobs:

Arrive early, wear comfortable clothes, and prepare to have your mind blown. Because this one is going to be the most awesome WWDC we’ve ever had. Seriously.

Here are a few rumor roundups: TUAW, MacRumors.

I’m not expecting any new hardware. It’s too close to the iPhone release and there haven’t been any major recent hardware developments. The only potential outlier is some sort of ultra-portable based in part on Intel’s mobile Metro notebook or that new Dell ultra-portable. Even if that is coming, I don’t think it will be announced here. This show is about what can be made with software. Even the t-shirt says so.

Sun’s slip about ZFS in Leopard is probably true. ZFS is just too good for Apple not to use it. Time Machine with a ZFS backend becomes efficient and practical.

I think it might be technically possible to convert an active drive from HFS+ to ZFS, in-place, without any additional hardware. The foundations are in place, Boot Camp has proven that HFS partitions can be dynamically resized. ZFS seems to be astonishingly robust and inherently malleable The process might take a few hours, but I think the shocking thing is that, if you have a few gigabytes of free space on your HFS drive, it will be possible to convert a drive from HFS to ZFS without reinitializing the whole thing. But I have no direct experience with ZFS, so I could be completely wrong here.

Core animation will prove to be central to the entire Leopard experience. Everything will have transitions, animations and eye-candy–however small and fast. Apple knew what it was doing with the Dashboard animations, and they’re going to run with it, not just in the iPhone, but throughout the MacOS. Apple isn’t competing with Aero here, the really amazing UI-candy to beat is mostly coming from Beryl/Compiz

An Apple virtualization product/feature doesn’t seem likely. Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion are providing a load of value in this area and it doesn’t make sense to shake up an already healthy competitive marketplace. Apple only benefits from those two companies trying to outdo one-another, providing an integrated virtualization product doesn’t seem to make sense from a business standpoint.

I really hope there’s some integration between some of the Google apps and the iApps. Especially read/write from iCal to Google Calendar, but I’d just settle for allowing multiple people to work on the same calendar with iCal via .Mac.

We might see a radical re-casting of the iLife and iWork components. The various applications have proven different levels of usefulness and some seem far more important than others. Personally I don’t even have GarageBand, iWeb or Pages on my machine anymore, I needed the space and they are all pretty big. iTunes is it’s own universe, there’s absolutely no reason it should be a part of iLife, besides it’s too tied to development of iPods and Windows. iPhoto is the gorilla of iLife, it should probably be rolled into Leopard and let iLife be a suite of creative apps, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and Garageband. iWork is more coherent, but keynote is the component that I see getting the most use. Maybe Apple will finally introduce the long-rumored Charts, but this doesn’t seem like the place. Un-rolling iPhoto would cut into iLife’s sales, but it would fit in with the “whole package” idea that Steve mentioned last time.

Random predictions:

• Developers will complain about the food.
• AAPL will go into the $130s, possibly as high as $135 if there’s good iPhone news.
• Developers will complain about not getting bussed to Cupertino for the annual bash
• More alcohol than just beer and wine will be served at the SF party although some people actually prefer just wine since they know what to look for, still many people will get unpleasantly drunk and Friday morning’s sessions will be poorly attended and full of moaning.

Pie-in-the-sky hope: Apple will have iPhones on hand and offer Developers the chance to buy one and start using it this week, before anyone else gets them. Yeah, this is completely nuts and not going to happen. While it would turn several thousand developers into Apple indentured servants, completely cowed vassals ready to do Apple’s bidding. It would also piss off all the international attendees who wouldn’t be able use it yet.

Not a WWDC prediction per se, but I am certain that there will be several dozen articles and blog posts about errors typing with the iPhone. Someone (probably some apple-hater on c-net) will attempt to enter Jabberwocky, just like Robert McNally on his Newton in 1993, and try to hype the hell out of whatever comes out. I share some of Steven Frank’s concerns about the touch screen, that thing had better work.

When attempting to capture footing into FCP from the Canon HV10 camcorder, I got the following message:

It turns out that something in either FCP or the HV10 is very finicky about the camcorder’s power source. Here are a few solutions:

1. Close the Log & Capture window, plug the camcorder into wall power, re-open Log & Capture.
2. Open iMovieHD. Just opening iMovieHD seems to be enough to kickstart the FireWire connection. iMovieHD was able to read and capture from the camcorder even when FCP couldn’t.

I haven’t had the issue pop up at all when running on wall power. It may be related to a low charge camcorder battery.

Occasionally, when correcting the state of the camcorder, FCP’s Log & Capture window gets stuck and won’t close. I haven’t found any way to close it other than restarting FCP.

So I was 6 for 25, ouch. That’ll teach me for throwing too many things out there. How’d other MacHeads do?

• Dan Benjamin: 4 of 18, also totally wrong about the iPhone.
• Mike Davidson: 3 of 10, mostly right about the iPhone.
• Steven Frank: 1 for 2, he’s going to be very, very happy in June. (yep)
• John Gruber: 5 of 13, he got the iPhone mostly right.
• Daniel Jalkut: Let’s say 50%, he was kind of vague and didn’t mention OS X.

In all of our defense, the fact that there was absolutely no mention of 10.5 severely affected our scores. A bunch of these predictions will probably come to pass whenever Apple gets around to demoing Leopard.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, congratulations to Bruce for landing himself in the 9th row.

iPhone

Best wrong quote about the iPhone comes from Steven Frank again:

“Apple’s about “the whole widget” and I can’t imagine them making you suffer some idiot at a Cingular store who can’t figure out which data plan you need, but it’s probably this one ’cause he heard that MACs have a problem with this other one because MACs don’t use TCP/IP networks or DNS and you have to use the AppleTalk Chooser or something I dunno Gary the Apple Guy should be back after lunch but check out this awesome RAZR.

While I’m suitably blown away by the iPhone, there is quite a bit of lingering disappointment that this great phone will still be hamstrung by Cingular’s crappy contracts and customer service. Somewhat pathetically, Cingular may be rebranded as AT&T (once again) by the time the iPhone goes on sale.

My cell phone, of which I am not fond, is currently through Verizon. We’ve got a somewhat convoluted multi-phone business/family plan, so it’s probably going to be a pain in the butt to move to Cingular. Yay.

There’s plenty of griping in the IRC channels about being Cingular only. I agree that it definitely feels like a letdown. If it were Cingular with a complete re-thinking of the contract and customer service model, I’d be more excited. Cingular itself was the only real choice since  the other large US wireless carriers are all CDMA networks. But no matter how great the phone is, contracts and the same-old cell phone service crap will bring down the whole experience. Perhaps it was a bad omen that Jobs clickers broke after Cingular took the stage.
On the positive side, it seemed as though the iPhone will be able to run third-party apps. If it really is running MacOS X, then Mac developers should be able to port their apps to run on the phone without too much fuss. This is outstanding news and could finally lead to the level of personalization and customization I’ve dreamed about having in a phone.

AppleTV

Very surprising that the AppleTV will be shipping without common Standard Definition connectors. Essentially it’s a HD playback device with no clear source of HD content aside from movie trailers. The AppleTV TV Compatibility description underlines this:

Enhanced-definition or high-definition widescreen TVs capable of 1080i 60/50Hz, 720p 60/50Hz, 576p 50Hz (PAL format), or 480p 60Hz

Those are all HDTV or recent SDTV requirements. HD has to come to iTunes soon.

The Name Change

I’m curious whether or not Apple’s name change to Apple Inc. has anything to do with the most recent Apple Corps lawsuit and the Beatles music library. Jobs used “Lovely Rita Meter Maid” for one of the demos, either he was taunting Apple Corps’ or something is up with iTunes and the Beatles.

AAPL

Wow. While Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, the value of Apple increased by more than 5 billion dollars. Five billion dollars, out of thin air, because of a great speech and a new product that won’t ship until June.