Since I haven’t received my Leopard DVD from Amazon yet, I still have some time to blog.

However, having played with the Developer Preview I got at WWDC a couple of months ago i must say that I am surprised that except for a couple of honorable exceptions, all the OS reviews I have seen so far focus on the end-user features that are available right out of the box. That is just plain wrong. Reviewers should also have spent some time discussing what new features are available for developers and how applications could take advantage of these new or expanded APIs to create better applications for the Mac over the next few months.

It is too bad that the mainstream press didn’t take more time to review the developer CD because if it lis like the one handed to developers last June, it contains a lot of hints on how Mac applications will outshine their PC counterparts over the next two years. My two favorite APIs nobody has talked about yet are:

• Pub-Sub
• Core Text

Ever wondered why there aren’t that many applications that work with RSS feeds? The reason is that there are many different versions of RSS (not even counting Atom) that a developer needs to support if he/she wants to avoid any incompatibilities. RSS Readers must also be able to work with malformed XML files, which are unfortunately very frequent on the Internet. Writing such a flexible parser is boring and time consuming. Apple understood that and decided to include an API to make it easy for any programmer to either generate or parse all kind of RSS feeds. This is great news because now we will probably see many new innovative uses of RSS in Mac applications. I am planning for example to publish puzzles created with my upcoming application as an RSS feed including custom XML files. The client will use RSS to download the latest puzzles included as attachments just like podcasts today include MP3 files.

Core Text is also new in Leopard. Core Text replaces most of all previous text handling APIs. Now it is easier than ever to write applications that can easily handle gorgeous text in multiple columns wrapping around complex objects. Expect to see many specialized text editors to improve dramatically as developers start using this new technology.

Many seem to believe that Leopard is just another small evolutionary step over Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger because they haven’t seen any applications yet that take advantage of all the changes that were made under the hood. I suggest to everyone to take a look at the developer sample projects included on the developer tools DVD to understand what Leopard really is about.

It is usual for employers to google for possible candidates in order to find out more about their personal interests and their past. That is why many are trying to alert the younger generations to be careful about what they post on the net. Reckless comments, visceral reactions can come back to byte you years later because once you have written something it may be impossible to take it back.

On the other hand, just like having no credit history makes it difficult to apply for a loan, it may become harder for those with no net presence to apply for a job. I see it in my job. I prefer to hire people who have a web-site and who participate in open-source projects. That means that if I do not get any search results when googling for someone, I consider that a negative. This may be related to the fact that I work in a high-tech industry, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this trend had already become mainstream in other industries, since online reputation is becoming harder and harder to separate from real world reputation.

This phenomenon could have unintended consequences for several social groups. The first one is women. Since it is common in many countries that women adopt their husband last name and considering that marrying multiple times in a lifetime is becoming more prevalent, large chunks of their online history could easily be lost to those who do not know all the different names a woman may have used. This could have unintended beneficial consequences for those interested in burying old stories but it could also lead to a situation where women could be perceived as having a less “interesting” professional past. There are many solutions to this problem, but my personal favorite is to have women keep their maiden name all their life.

Another group we need to be concerned with is the one living on the wrong side of the digital divide. If less web presence leads to less opportunities, we must make sure that everyone has proper access to the internet and that schools teach the importance of online reputation. This could, by the way, also help improve good judgement in adolescents who tend to say or write things without measuring the consequences.

None of my previous comments should indicate that I am against anonymity on the web. I am not, on the contrary. Without anonymity there is no freedom, but you cannot spend your life writing only anonymous comments. Sometimes you will have to show what you stand for, what you believe in or what you know. That is what will be used to build your image and your reputation. This cannot be achieved anonymously.

The IBM PC was introduced on August 12, 1981. At the time I was 15 but I was already an avid Apple II user who enjoyed programming in assembly language. I must say that I didn’t pay much attention to the announcement. After all, it was just another boring monochrome computer. However, it soon became clear that the PC was a commercial success and a clear threat to Apple. The truth is that, like most teenagers, I couldn’t care less about the business market. As long as Apple could maintain their lead in the education and home markets, I would be happy.

In 1983, however a new threat emerged, the IBM PCjr. This product was squarely aimed at the market that Apple had dominated for years, at least in the U.S. That is when I started to hate IBM. I felt that they were forcing me to switch to a platform that wasn’t as exciting against my will. Of course, years later the same anger made me revolt against Microsoft and I progressively started to forget about IBM. That is a good thing by the way because I have just celebrated my tenth anniversary at IBM. Of course it helped a lot that I have always worked at IBM’s Software Group, a division that is operating system agnostic and allows customers to choose their preferred computing environment.

Today, almost 23 years after the introduction of the IBM PCjr, Apple is the most valuable computer maker in the world. What has changed? We now live in a world ruled by consumers, not corporate suits. Consumers want exciting new products, not boring, barely functional products. That is good. Some may complain that teenagers are driving the consumer electronics industry but I am ecstatic. I still remember why I was so excited by Apple as a teenager. The reasons I had then were not driven by style or peer pressure, they were driven by a passion for radical new products that made no compromises to achieve greatness. In general teenagers do not tolerate mediocrity as well as adults because they are not scared by change. That is why Apple is successful now with a new generation. They are fighting the establishment with superior products and this is a battle teenagers can perfectly relate to.

However, make no mistake, this is not just a marketing gimmick. Unlike Pepsi who wanted to artificially create a generational gap with their “Pepsi generation” campaign, Apple decided to focus on creating exciting new products that have since been adopted by a new generation. That is why it worked.

As I wrote in my previous post, I am extremely happy with my iPhone. The screen is simply gorgeous and in general the experience has been amazing so far. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case for everyone.

Over the week-end I was helping a friend to unlock his brand new iPhone when we ran into a big problem. The wifi connection was extremely unstable. I could sometimes connect to my network, but just seconds later the connection would be lost and the phone wouldn’t display any available networks. It seems that either there is a hardware malfunction or that the internal antenna is disconnected. Either way, my friend is in serious trouble. Without wireless network access the phone cannot be unlocked. Even if I return his phone to original factory settings he cannot return the phone because it was never activated with AT&T. That makes it hard to claim that the wifi connectivity is not working, since there is no way to test that functionality until the phone is activated.

My friend is therefore stuck with a US$400 8GB iPod. He would have been much better off spending his money on a 16GB iPod touch. Of course, if this doesn’t happen very often, it is still worthwhile to take the risk, because the iPhone offers much more functionality than the iPod touch. The problem is that I have learned since that two other acquaintances have faced similar problems. One iPhone was dead on arrival (that is not a major problem, it can easily be returned) the other had a faulty battery which only offers a couple of hours of operation (that is tough if you discover the problem after unlocking the phone).

The iPhone is currently used all over the world. The temptation to buy one in the U.S. and bring it home is extremely strong. However, you shouldn’t minimize the risks involved. There is anecdotal evidence that Apple is facing production challenges that are resulting in a relatively large number of defective units. I strongly suggest that if you are planning on buying an iPhone in the U.S. with the intention to use it overseas, unlock it while in America. At least, if something goes wrong you will still have some options.

I bought an iPhone while in Miami last week, just before boarding the Enchantment of the Seas. I hoped to get one of the last 1.02 firmware phones made by Apple but was unlucky (it seems that iPhones are still going extremely fast and that Apple stores restock very often). As a result, I was left with a useless US$399 brick, since I had no intention whatsoever to activate the device with AT&T.

Fortunately the iPhoneDev team was hard at work hacking the newer 1.1.1 firmware. By the time I reached the Bahamas, they had already found a way to activate the phone. The procedure isn’t very straightforward but now with iNdependence it has become fairly easy. That allowed me at least to start using the iPhone as a nice, expensive iPod. However, I didn’t have to wait for long to unlock the phone since developers released anySIM 1.1.1 yesterday and soon after getting home I was enjoying full phone functionality.

I must say that I am extremely pleased with the device. For the first time in years I no longer have three devices hanging off my belt. Gone is my trusty Palm as well as my (not as trusty) Sony-Ericsson cell phone. Now everything I need is finally delivered by a single device. I even look slimmer!

There is a downside, though. It turns out that all my IBM colleagues now want an iPhone and they all seem to expect me to unlock it. In fact my first incoming call was from a friend who had already heard that I had unlocked my phone. My first assignment will be tomorrow. I hope everything works well. I should probably print a disclaimer and hand it out to my friends. Nah!

You may have noticed that I didn’t update my blog last week. That is because I spent last week on a cruise on the Caribbean. This may sound like vacation but surprisingly it wasn’t. It turns out that IBM had organized a “geek cruise” for some of our customers and business parters and I was invited to give two speeches on SOA during the event.

I must say that I was thrilled to participate as I had never cruised before. I was also quite surprised to find out that I enjoyed the trip, well beyond my (low) expectations. Who knows, I may even consider a cruise for my next trip to Europe. If you are interested in finding out more about this trip, I have published some pictures of my .Mac account.

Today is a date I will remember. It is the day I have been waiting for since IBM announced that we would be selling our PC division to Lenovo. I just got a memo that describes a procedure to purchase a Mac as my primary computer. At this point it is not clear wether this initiative will be limited to the U.S. or be more global in scope, but it is certainly another crack in Microsoft’s armor since I understand that IBM is Microsoft’s largest Windows and Office customer. Way to go IBM!