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Google is sponsoring a brilliant series of talks in their New York city office. I unfortunately missed Guido Van Rossum (you can catch it on google video) last month. This evening I had the opportunity to listen to Andy Hertzfeld reminisce about the good old days at Apple computer and the building of Apple, the Macintosh, the people involved, and creating an entire industry. Andy was absolutely hilarious and is a huge Woz fan.

When I was young Woz, Andy, Jef, Bill, Jobs, Burrell, etc…were childhood heroes. I absolutely adored the Mac and the team that created that insanely great computer. Andy has posted many of his stories over at http://www.folklore.org. Listening to Andy speak gives you a great view on what the silicon valley of the late 70’s was like and why it became such an incredible incubator of innovation and wealth creation. Not to mention a tremendously fun place to work! Andy’s talk should be up at google video in the next few days.

Even the packaging looks amazing, see it all after the jump…

Read all about that wizard of technology, Steven Jobs, over at Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology

John Siracusa lays out an impressive case for the direction Apple should take. He is dead on, Microsoft is having some difficulties with Longhorn and Apple looks like the darling in everyone’s eyes right now. But Apple has been here before with Copland and stumbled badly, losing the thought leadership position they built in the 80’s in the 90’s. OSX is truly a gem of an OS with some underlying issues, as pointed out by the comments on John’s posting. The essential problem for Apple right now is their future development directions. Microsoft, for all its current problems, has .NET and C#, truly next-generation development platforms/technologies. Right now on the Apple side of the fence you have C++ and Objective-C. Objective-C is a good language, but it shows its age when compared to more recent entries in the development front. What should Apple do? The answer lies in the current crop of dynamic languages, both Python & Ruby (my current favorite) would serve well in this capacity. Apple had a great dynamic language, Dylan, it was pushing way back in the early 80’s but it never went anywhere. Python and Ruby have large robust opensource support with large code libraries for just about anything that a developer could need. A strong move to either (or both) language(s) would be a game changer that would level the playing field. The next few years should be interesting as Apple lets the world in on its plans.

Technorati Tags : apple, macosx, technology, programming

The Apple rumors are true, read about ithere
The world just changed. There are going to be far ranging ramifications, hopefully there will rise a re-invigorated desktop application market.
The battle between Microsoft and Apple is going to heat up anew. Apple, flush with cash from the ipod, will probably go after Office next. Interesting given Microsoft’s announcement that the Office file formats are moving to XML.

And what does this all mean for Longhorn, the successor to the Windows 2000/XP architecture. The world just got very very interesitng indeed….