Hardware

• Mac Pro with Quad Processors, or at least 2x dual-cores Right!
• New case for Mac Pro, the G5 enclosure needed to be huge mostly for heat management, Intel’s chips won’t need enormous radiators like the G5s did. I’m feeling high-gloss black, maybe. Wrong.
• Intel XServes Right!
• The return of 64bit CPUs. Right!
• Price drop on Cinema Displays, possibly with some new features, most likely a camera. If resolution independence is included in Leopard, higher-resolution may be offered, but I don’t see how they could sell high-resolution displays without supporting scaled UI features in the OS. Perhaps an add-on to 10.4? If there’s a significant surface redesign to the Mac Pro, displays might be redone to match. Maybe dropping “cinema” from the name too. Right! and sort of Wrong. too.
• Possible updates to MacBook Pros. These might include the rumored switch to Core2 Duo chips (obvious, but when? I don’t think Jobs really wants to stand up in front of several thousand developers, ask them how many are now using Intel Macs, then tell them those machines are obsolete. Especially when most of those developers just spent a laptop on admission to WWDC.) Other changes might include a MacBook like drive replacement rejiggering, which I’d welcome, even though gutting a MacBook Pro isn’t nearly as bad as the 15” G4. Right!, basically.
• A new sub-notebook to replace the much-loved 12” PowerBook. It will be significantly pared down, causing much consternation from those wanting a 12” replacement and much joy from those wanting a sub-notebook. (This one is a longshot, but not totally implausible.) Wrong.
• Mac Pros with dual GPUs or paired video cards. Also a shift to NVidia, mostly to appease Intel after AMD bought ATI. (I’m convinced the ATI/AMD purchase will lead to only two hardware choices for PCs; Intel-Nvidia and AMD-ATI. Intel might as well just buy NVidia since ATI’s stuff will likely be optimized for AMD hardware.) Close. NVidia is in, but no paired GPU cards and ATI is still a build-to-order option.

Software

• Subversion becomes part of the base OS X install. If not the base install at least installed with XCode and the Developer tools. (I will be among those cheering this one) Right! it’s in there!
• Resolution Independent displays in OS X (I will immediately start running at 80%, just for the smaller menu bar) Wrong. not yet.
• iChat improvements, demo’ed with Phil Schiller. Right! Right!
• Quartz 2D Extreme will have been cleaned up, renamed and turned on by default. Close.
• Some sort of gaming initiative, to encourage and make game-development easier on Macs Wrong.  although you can learn how to install betfred for your mobile or tablet.  
• Color coding for mailboxes in Mail.app. Wrong. Notes and todos aren’t what I was hoping for.
• Significantly better video handling user experience in iTunes. Wrong.
• Some sort of network-collaborative document framework. Wrong.
• Garbage collection in Objective C. This was sort of leaked a while back. Right!

Nots

• No new iPod, wrong audience and not enough press. Right!
• Virtualization, I thought Apple might do it, but now I’m doubtful. Partly because of Parallels, partly because it kind of undermines the MacOS. (Brent thinks Apple might buy them) Wrong.
• QuickTime Pro license included with .Mac subscription. This will never happen, but it should. An alternative would be a free QT pro license with each iPod or after so many songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Wrong. no surprise.
• iTunes Music Store renamed to iTunes Store. Probably not at WWDC, but it will happen. Wrong.
• No iPhone. Not because of any technological hurdles, rather due to the bone-headedness of American wireless carriers. So yeah, this is totally fake. Right!

Misc.

• Either Adobe will demo CS3 on Intel during the Keynote or Quark will be invited onstage to show off XPress. Wrong. Wrong.
• Before the zillion derivitive cards were posted, I would have expected Jobs to pre-empt John Siracusa’s WWDC Keynote Bingo card if events had lined up. Imagine a slide that just said “Bingo” before something good, at which point the crowd, knowing what’s coming, would have gone completely nuts. But now that there are a bunch of variants, the fun is sort of gone. The most reliable “wins” in the original card would be diagonal up from “New kernel in Leopard”, and across from “‘New’ Finder in Leopard”, which just aren’t all that exciting. Wrong., Wrong., Wrong. One guy in front of me did have a card printed out, but no one yelled anything.
• TextMate will win some sort of Apple Design Award. Allan more than deserves it. Right! Go Allan!
• David Watanabe will not win an Apple Design Award. No matter how much he deserves one and how beautiful NewsFire is, David wrote Acquisition and Hell will freeze before he’s invited on stage by Apple. Still, I hope I’m wrong. Right!, unfortunately.

This is a mix of what I think we’ll see and what I’d really like to see, hopefully there will be some crossover. I meant to post this last week, but forgot to (life distractions aplenty). A few things were added after seeing the buzzkill banner this morning. I’ll update this post after the keynote to see how I did.

The official New York City Department of Education website is schools.nyc.gov.

Several websites and email addresses belonging to the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) still use an acronym presumably leftover from their days as the NYC Board of Ed (NYCBOE). It’s easy to see why this is a problem when shown side-by-side in lowercase:

nycboe.net (half-working url for Department of Education)
nycdoe.net (half-working eChalk site)

How much email has been lost because of that little letter-flip?

The old website for the NYC Department of Education, nycenet.edu redirects to schools.nyc.gov.

It’s New York City’s third day in a row where the temperatures haven’t gone below 95°F and we’re starting to see some trouble. Not a blackout, but evidence that the system is straining.

Con Ed has problems on the East Side

>Con Ed tells Eyewitness News that three feeders are out in both the Madison Square and Kips Bay networks. It believes at least one of the inoperable feeders in each network should be back around noon.

>Kips Bay has 12 feeders altogether. Madison Square has 24.

>There are no voltage reductions in place because of the problems, but Con Ed is asking for extra conservation between 5th Avenue and the East River from 14th Street to 40th Street on the East Side.

>Con Ed says it was manhole fires that damaged the feeders, and that the company is in constant communication with the New York City Office of Emergency Management.

Power problems in NYC

>Con Edison asked New York residents and businesses between 40th Street and 14th Street from Fifth Avenue to the East River to shut off any unused or unnecessary appliances. The area is largely residential.

That would be our neighborhood. The 14th St Y is dark and has signs in the doors reading “Closed to conserve power.” Stores on First Ave north of 14th St are running without AC and most have their lights off. Several traffic lights north of 16th St are on low-power mode (1st Ave flashing yellow, cross-streets flashing red).

I’ll post more if I find anything out.

**Update** I just walked from our apartment at 14th and First to the office on 20th just west of Fifth. Not much evidence of anything past Second Ave. All the stores on Fifth were open, Park Ave and even Irving Place seemed completely normal.

Apple Support Document 300225: Photo Sync creates iPod photo Cache:

When using iTunes to sync photos to iPod photo, iTunes creates a folder called iPod photo Cache in the top level of the folder you selected for your photos. Picking another folder to sync does not erase the previous iPod photo Cache.

Depending on how many photos are being synced, the hard drive could fill up.

Drag the folder named iPod photo Cache to the Trash or Recycle Bin.

Sure enough, poking around in there I found cache files from 2005. so I moved some of that clutter over from my old PowerBook to the new MacBook Pro.

Juggling free space is always an issue for me, deleting this folder recovered almost 3 GB.

I noticed this folder while showing Disk Inventory X to a friend.

Ben notes:

>Merrill Lynch issued a note to investors calling for ESPN to “throw in the towel” on its branded mobile phone service. Analysts Jessica Reif Cohen … now estimate that ESPN Mobile will lure a mere 30,000 subscribers over the course of this financial year, well below their original estimate of 240,000. Along with the losses generated by a second Disney-branded phone service, ML expects that the Mouse will lose $135 million on its experiment in FY06

You know, I could have saved ESPN $130 million dollars if they just asked me first. For the small consulting fee of $5 million, I could have written at length about how branded single-channel digital devices were a stupid, archaic model that was doomed to fail. Anyone with a proper internet-enabled phone could have all of ESPN’s features and a thousand times more.

However I don’t think ESPN is completely at fault here. They were likely sold a bill of goods by whichever wireless companies they partnered with. American wireless carriers have no idea what they’re doing. The phones and services are often crippled or charged per use, data access is difficult and expensive. Charging to get photos out of a phone is madness. In Japan you can use your phone like a credit card, here people think I’m some kind of tech-god for getting a weather report via SMS.

$5 million, negotiable. Call anytime.

Halfway through the discussion of dimension 5 I got that wonderful brain-ache where the mind’s expansion seems to have a physical corollary. Click auto-play and enjoy: Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

I didn’t think the Del.icio.us link pulling script was even still working… Guess it is.