The .Mac SDK session here at WWDC was interesting. First, it was forward-looking, not something we’ve seen much this year with the exception of Intel. Also, it wasn’t covered under NDA (hence this blog post).
The 2.0 kit will be Tiger-only when it ships next month, but it will provide some really powerful features such as publish-and-subscribe and secondary user accounts that live off a paid .Mac account. Lots of fun applications surely to come. Apple wants to enable deep collaboration across applications.
Meanwhile, it’s been a few days and many developers have already brought their apps up on Intel. The general consensus now seems to be that this will be a smooth and very fast transition. If there are new Intel-based PowerBooks ready in January, there will be a wide-variety of popular apps ready for it.
I use CodeWarrior for most projects, but I was still surprised to hear Apple say that almost half of Mac developers have also yet to switch to Xcode. That will be the biggest chore for most people.
Thanks for all the good times Metrowerks. CodeWarrior was a great development environment, and in its time PowerPlant was a great framework. The Mac OS X transition has always been a mix of steps forward and back, and Xcode will be no different.
