The Mac we’ve all been waiting for, the one that completes the transition to Intel, was unveiled today at the WWDC 2006 Keynote by Steve Jobs himself. The Mac that was known as the PowerMac is now known as the Mac Pro, to go along with the MacBook Pro.

The Mac Pro is a must have for anyone who makes their living with Macs, because it is the fastest Mac to date. It features a “Dual Dual” setup, meaning two dual-core Xeon chips, for a total of four cores. It has dual 1.33 Ghz system bus and a 4 channel, 256-bit wide 667Mhz memory setup. This baby is fast.

Here’s a Mac Pro slightly disassembled. You can’t really see it clearly from here, but I understand that the system should be a bit quieter since there are only 4 fans instead of 9 in the previous PowerMac. I myself would have preferred a smaller case, but I guess the big case helps accommodate expansion.

Notice that there are four drive bays, all of which can be pulled out and filled in with a SATA drive. The entire thing is tool-free and cable free. This is a great design for the drives. I wonder if this will encourage people to do more software RAIDs.

Also notice that the memory comes out in trays. This looks like it will be easier to upgrade the memory which is quite handy. My only concern with the memory is the price for FB (Fully Buffered) ECC 667Mhz DDR memory. It seems to run from around $200-$300 right now for 1GB of memory. Also I think the memory has to be a matched pair.

I think everything is going to be smoking fast on the Mac Pro, from Xcode builds to audio and video editing. It starts at $2499 (or less if you are an ADC Select/Premier member) and is shipping now. I’ve been saving up for a new Mac and I think this is one that I’ll probably get.

I’d write more about WWDC Day One, but you really should go see the Keynote video first to see for yourself. There’ll be time enough to comment anyways since we can’t talk about the rest of the conference which is under NDA.

One more thing… My friend, Brian Cooke, is offering a 33% off WWDC Special on his handy app rooSwitch. I use it whenever I do testing, since it helps me test with a clean set of data and preferences, while keeping my normal set around. I asked him to make a banner, so here it is. If you’re a developer, go check it out!

Well WWDC is almost upon us! I arrived safely via JetBlue who was nice enough to move me before takeoff to a window seat in an exit row. As I looked out my window, I was surprised with branding on the engine. I guess that’s just in case I nod off, then wake up and wonder where I am?

WWDC Day 0 is made for meeting up with friends, getting some coding done, and of course, picking up your badge and other goodies.

I had lunch with Jeff of HyperJeff.net and Rainer Brockerhoff. Rainer had a good idea and has a t-shirt featuring XRay II and RBSplitView. Which reminds me, I need to make a t-shirt. But I’m taking it one step at a time… I finally got my business card done.

Dinner was with the regulars of #macsb, the Mac Small Business IRC channel. And for a late night dessert, I met up with Chris Aquino, a Mac developer from Atlanta who is in the position I was last year, namely very enthusiastic about his first WWDC. So it was nice to be able to impart some wisdom as to how to get the most of WWDC. I guess I should blog that soon.

Things are much more subdued this WWDC. There was not the HUGE leak last year of the impending Intel switch that Steve Jobs announced at his keynote. Instead, there are a lot of rumors swirling around what will appear in Leopard. But no one knows anything definite. To add further fuel to the fire, I posted some comments on Brent’s blog about the possibility/my desire to have some standard status bar controls that parallel NSToolbar.

But stay tuned… all will be revealed tomorrow morning at the SteveNote. I’ll blog my reactions and see try to see what my fellow developers think. Now to rest my weary legs. Its a workout climbing the hills of San Francisco.

Apple has started setting up for WWDC and the banner behind the registration booth has been set up. And artisan has posted a nice annotated picture of the WWDC banner on Flickr. Roll over the picture to see all the different icons or look at the list.

I think the only thing that might be revealing here is that this hints towards a 64-bit based Intel PowerMac replacement. But what really stokes the imagination is the banners that are covered up. :)

I’m not really good at making predictions, but since WWDC is just around the corner, why not… Plus Gus, Brent (twice actually) and Uli have some interesting ones. But instead of trying to look into industry trends, here’s just what I myself would like to see:

New UI widgets, like:

1. The entire bar that has the “+” button, the gear popup button and grabber that appears in Mail.app.
2. Safari-like tabs
3. A better splitter – though RBSplitView is already quite excellent

After all, I think users want a consistent experience across OS X and giving us all the widgets that people are familiar with in the iApps will be way better than each developer implementing them. That’s because every implementation will usually have some slight differences.

Xcode and Interface Builder improvements (so we can develop apps better and faster):

1. An easy way to diff two nibs
2. Make a toolbar in IB
3. Refactoring! Refactoring! Refactoring!
4. Smart correction of bugs (like in Eclipse).

And of course… Intel replacements for the G5 PowerMacs and upgraded Cinema Displays to match!

One more thing… I’ve got a partition named Leopard… :)

I just released WebnoteHappy 1.2! It’s even more del.icio.us. What do I mean by that? You now have the full roundtrip from your desktop to del.icio.us and back. The previous versions already uploaded your changes immediately to del.icio.us after you share publicly, save privately, or change any previously shared/saved webnotes. 1.2 adds the ability to periodically synchronize with any changes made via the web interface of del.icio.us. To enable this, go to the Preferences window and choose a time interval other than “Manual” in the “Import from del.icio.us:” dropdown menu. I modeled that loosely off of NetNewsWire’s Downloading preference.

Also for del.icio.us is being able to choose whether your new webnotes will be shared, saved privately, or kept locally. Previously in 1.1, it was just whatever you last chose. After further reflection, it seemed like you as the user needed more control over this, so here you go! This is available in the Preferences window under “Default sharing status for new webnotes:”. The default is “Keep local”.

But if you want to have a pure del.icio.us experience with the elegance of a desktop app, just fire up WebnoteHappy, set the Import from del.icio.us preference to “Every 30 minutes”, and the Default sharing status to “Share publicly via del.icio.us”. Even in this mode, you can always choose to keep any webnote local or make it private on del.icio.us.

There’s lots of other good stuff in the new version, like support for the add/edit hot key in Firefox (thanks mph!) and Shiira (the new browser on the block.) Lots of crowd favorites like being able to edit more fields of a webnote, specifically the URL. Handy for those really long URLs. I originally resisted this since I use URLs as unique identifiers for webnotes, but I worked through the changes need to make this happen. Also the main window will stay closed/hidden when you use the add/edit hot key. Finally, there’s two new hot keys, one for editing a webnote (Command-E) and renaming a webnote (Command-Return).

Enjoy! Now I’m off to do some skunkworks coding to prepare for WWDC. :)

IronCoder 0x10 will be soon upon us. It is a battle of wills between Mac programmers and it will run from July 21 to July 23. I’ll likely be sitting this one out yet again – working on WebnoteHappy 1.2 and all. But I’m sponsoring this competition by giving away WebnoteHappy licenses to contestants. There’s lots of other cool prizes too. Bring on the Cocoa!

Last Saturday was a very Mac-filled day. In the afternoon, I went to the Washington Apple Pi (or the Pi for short) annual picnic. The Pi is my local user group where I get together with other Mac enthusiasts in the DC area. It was pretty enjoyable. Good folks and good food.

We had a special guest: Bob LeVitus, aka Dr. Mac. He talked about The State of the Mac and all sorts of other things. A very cool guy who always has something interesting to say. He specializes in fixing your Mac. I talked to him about he worked and it seemed pretty advanced. He definitely knows his stuff. He gave away a few copies of Mac OS X Tiger for Dummies which he wrote. I also snagged some Dummies post-it notes.

I tried to do my part by giving away a license of WebnoteHappy. Graham Young, a fellow Pi member, was the winner. Congrats Graham!

Later in the evening, I attended the initial meeting of CocoaDevHouse Washington DC, but that’s a whole another blog post! (That I’ll write up soon…)

The MacReviewCast reviewed WebnoteHappy last month but I haven’t gotten around to blogging it until now. The sad truth about running a shareware business while you also have a full-time job and family: I have to choose between blogging and coding. And coding means improving the product, which makes people happy. So anyways forgive me for not blogging as much as I’d like to.

The podcast episode is MacReviewCast #60. The review of WebnoteHappy starts at 19:59 and runs until 23:07. Thanks to Trent Armstrong from the MannersCast for reviewing it and to Tim Verpoorten of SurfBits for setting it up! If you’re unsure about what WebnoteHappy does, I think Trent does a good job of describing it from a user’s point of view.

CocoaDevHouse Washington DC – this Saturday July 15th
Hours: 6pm-9pm (we could go a little later if we want…)
Where: Murky Coffee in Arlington
3211 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22201
703-312-7001

Bring your Mac/Power/iBook/Pro and let’s talk Cocoa! I’d be interested in talking about shareware development too.

RSVP at http://wiki.cocoadevhouse.org/CocoaDevHouseWashington and hang out this week at the #cocoadevhouse IRC channel on irc.freenode.net if you want to chat beforehand.

Wow… Gus [the current Iron Coder champion] made it to 3.0 with VoodooPad! That’s awesome. VoodooPad for those who have not tried it yet is a Desktop Wiki. Or for those that don’t know what wikis are, its a great app that lets you enter in all your thoughts and then organize them.

VoodooPad 3.0 also now has 3 levels of enjoyment: Lite (which is free but doesn’t have all the cool features), regular (the cool features), and Pro (the ‘leet features.) I highly recommend it. Very useful and looks like a lot of the features I wanted are now in VP 3 with an integrated search and tabbed interface leading the way.