Blog

The center of the app universe

Apple today announced the dates for the WWDC 2010 together with a few other surprising details. The first one is that the WWDC will start on June 7th, that is a bit soon to say the least. The second one is the fact that this WWDC will really focus on iPhone/iPad development only and that also means that there will be no Apple Design Awards handed out for Mac applications this year.

The tagline of this year’s WWDC is ‘The center of the app universe’, and that already discloses all you need to know. It’s obvious the WWDC will be iPad/iPhone for the vast majority. This is by itself not all that terrible, even understandable. One of the consequences though is that there will be no Apple Design Awards (ADA) given out this year.

Now this is the one that really upsets me. I already had doubts about whether I should go this year but at least I had hoped to submit Sketch for this year’s design awards. But that won’t be possible, since of course in the center of the app universe, old-fashioned mac applications don’t count.

Even though last year’s WWDC had a big focus on iPhone development they at least kept the ADAs. Does Apple think there are no good mac apps that could possibly earn an ADA? I find this hard to believe. There have been fewer mac applications released this year than the previous years but still I’m sure they could find some candidates.

Personally I had hoped that Sketch could be one of them, which gets me to another objection against this theory: In past years, many devs have released applications shortly before WWDC. The fixed date set a nice deadline; you can polish an application indefinitely, but at some point you have to stop, and the WWDC provided such a point. Apple doesn’t know what’s yet to come so this is just incredibly rude on their part. I confess myself disappointed.