Are you disappointed at the lack of big surprises at this year's WWDC? Was the fact that Dragon Systems plans to release a Mac version of their continuous voice dictation software just not shocking enough for you? Were you hoping for thrills and chills that you felt you just didn't receive? Well, apparently most of the developers at the conference wouldn't agree with you. They're all walking around with stunned looks on their faces and their jaws dragging on the floor because this has been the most surprising WWDC in years-- precisely because there weren't any nasty surprises.

Think about it; for the past several years, it seems like every WWDC has brought a new Apple operating system strategy that's forced developers to rethink their whole commitment to this wild and wacky platform we call Macintosh. There was Copland, which would have some modern features but would break lots of existing software. Actual books were written, published, and sold about how to write software for Copland (we have one kicking around at the AtAT studios), which is especially ironic since Copland was eventually thrown out the window, with individual salvageable bits being rolled into other versions of the Mac OS. Then there was Rhapsody, the NeXT-based operating system that basically required Mac developers to rewrite all their software-- and originally they had to do it in Objective C, a programming language few Mac programmers knew or wanted to learn. Then last year Apple announced Mac OS X-- a new spin on Rhapsody with Carbon APIs, which made life a lot easier for developers who wanted to update their existing applications without having to rewrite them from scratch.

So the big surprise this year is that Mac OS X is still the operating system strategy of the day. Carbon still exists-- and in fact the APIs have apparently been finalized and released. It's a year later, and Apple has stayed the course; we imagine there must have been at least a few developers at the conference who keeled over stone dead when the realization hit them. It looks like there's really something approaching a state of stability in Apple's whole software strategy, and a bigger (or happier) surprise we can't imagine.