While yesterday's preview of Leopard didn't show too much (I'm talking about the "top secret" features that Steve left out this time around), it did show enough to, well, make quite a few shareware and freeware applications somewhat obsolete. We all know that Apple doesn't have a problem scalping the Mac shareware market for good ideas (think Watson), and ultimately I don't have a huge problem with it as long as Apple's solutions are better. But whether it's justifiable or not what they do, they have done it, and are continuing to do it with OS X Leopard. Here's a list of existing 3rd party applications that are going to find themselves losing a lot of sales or a lot of downloads in the upcoming months with 10.5's upcoming release. Or, alternatively and rather optimistically, you can take it as a list of applications to hold you over and in many cases provide satisfying near-Leopard functionality until you can get your hands on the upgrade. Continue reading...

I thought I caught a glimpse of one of our widgets at Widget Machine in the keynote yesterday, but as it turns out, there were two of them! Both VoiceNotes and Statosphere showed up in the brief display of the Dashboard. It's always cool seeing our products get some Apple loving! (And hopefully even more tonight, crossing my fingers about the Apple Design Awards.) Also a note, kudos to our friends at Monkey Business Labs get their Package Tracker widget shown there as well. Thanks to Engadget for the photo.

Christmas came early this year when my dad let me borrow his WWDC badge for the keynote (he wasn't too interested in camping out), so I thought I'd extend the favor to you guys and let you at least see what it's like. For the record, my first stevenote, and, well, it was an experience. So, to begin, John Casasanta (iClip), Austin Sarner (AppZapper), Blake Burris (CocoaRadio) and I enter Moscone center at around 8 am. Doesn't look too bad, looks like we beat the crowd?!

We go up the escalators to the second floor... crowd's pretty sparse. We leave Blake at the media desk. (He has some trouble with the guy there and ends up waiting 45 minutes for his press badge, but beats us out at the end with a seat six rows from the stage.) Continue reading...