Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC today, widely regarded by Apple-fanatic critics and bloggers as lackluster, was not exactly disappointing to me because I saw it as more of a “maintenance-release” keynote than anything else.

June’s big Apple news, of course, is the iPhone and, since it’s already been publicized that the launch date is June 29th, all that was needed today was for Jobs to fill in the gaps. He told us it would be available at 6pm, and he sketched out Apple’s model for supporting third-party “apps.” Necessary information, but nothing earth-shattering.

Similarly the Safari 3.0 beta availability for Windows as well as MacOS seems to fall squarely on the side of “good” but not “great” news. Apple seems to be doing a lot with Safari as a browser, app, and platform (?), making it central to the iPhone, establishing its connection to Dashboard in Leopard with the web-clip, make-your-own-widget capability, and having it do a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in the new version of Mail and other apps.

The Windows XP and Vista release of Safari is something which was staring the tech community in the face, but no one I read prior to the keynote predicted it. Safari’s always straddled the fence between open source and proprietary, so it doesn’t seem like it would have taken a significant amount of effort to build a version of it that would run under Windows. (Absolutely not meant to trivialize any Apple programmers’ work, just a comment on the organizational resources and cost to port this app.) Right now it seems a little odd that Apple would enter the “browser wars” (v. 2.0), especially since Firefox will most likely be the victim if Safari on Windows gains any traction.

Is there a master plan behind Safari on Windows? I hope so. Will it convince some more switchers, again, hopefully. Right now I’m stuggling to understand the “why” behind this move, but if it’s a “maintenance pre-release” for some to-be-announced Apple software, hardware, or internet service, then perhaps it will end up being one of those things that 1-5 years from now changes the computer world like iTunes for Windows did when “hell froze over” and Apple released its “first” Windows app.

As a practical usability matter, I’m curious to see how well Safari 3.0 (Mac and Windows versions) are going to perform on the sites where Safari currently has difficulties. These are mostly websites built using poor, non-standards-compliant code, and/or Micro$oft backend stuff. Hopefully Apple has taken the opportunity with 3.0 to make the browser work even with those websites that expect IE’s buggy-ness. Otherwise the Windows user experience with the new browser will be frustrating at times, and this will only make Apple look bad (even though, of course, the problems really lie with bad website designers and/or Micro$oft).

This observation carries over to the speed question, which Jobs touted as one of the key Safari advantages in his speech. Safari was shown to be significantly faster than IE and Firefox. Its speed advantage over Firefox on Mac is well-known and is not a surprise. Part of this is due to the skill and expertise of Apple programmers, and some of it is due to the fact that Firefox maintains more compatibility with broken websites and components. Does Safari’s speed edge on Windows come from it being better written software or does it come from Safari only agreeing to work with well-written, standards-compliant websites?

The MacOS X Leopard final preview seemed like the biggest “maintenance release” aspect of the keynote. There were some “new” features that had not been publicly shown before, but there weren’t that many of them and they could not qualify as earth-shattering. Leopard still looks great, fast, worth the $129 for the “premium” version (Jobs joked that $129 was the price for the “basic” “home” “premium” and “ultimate” editions, of course, there is only one desktop Leopard version unlike Vista). There also looks to be a lot that will help developers write beautiful and useful apps. And it looks really fast.

The UI enhancements looked subtle, but good. “Brushed metal,” we were informed, is “gone” from the desktop / Finder. The opacity and transluscence of many more elements looks nice, and seems to emphasize the desire for technology and computers to be unobtrusive. So score there…

Of course, just as “brushed metal” fades away from the Mac desktop, it appears slightly tweeked and without explanation as the new unifying element of Apple’s website. When the site was taken down during the keynote, the expectation was that there would be some sort of new hardware product, something to buy. Instead, the website got its own “maintenance release” which saw its navigation bar updated from its 2001-2002 vintage “Aqua” look to something more similar to a 2004-2005 vintage “Brushed Metal” appearance. Of course, the website is more solid gray, the “brush” lines aren’t there.

The Apple website looks good, and the partial redesign was long overdue. So nothing really “wrong” there, but, as with so much else today, nothing really game-changing either.

Overall, I’ll admit to some disppointment, because I expected more “new” stuff, and instead it was generally a “maintenance release” keynote. But I won’t go so far as some, who are already selling derisive t-shirts: http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/4028 to commemorate the speech.

I am left wondering about the regular iApps - it’s been a few keynotes now without any mention of iLife, iWork and all their real and imagined subsidiary applications and features. They deserve a maintenance release too, and I hope that something cool is in the works for them and that we won’t have to wait 6 months or more to find out about it.