Was 2006 a good year for Apple? Yeah, I’d say so. If only for the incredible speed and smoothness of the transition to Intel, not forgetting all the new iPods, Core 2 Duo processors, and hints of what’s to come (in the form of the iTV and Leopard sneak peaks).

How have we covered things here at the Mac DevCenter blog? In an informative and entertaining way, we hope. Here’s an overview of the news from the first half of the year; I’ll post the second half tomorrow.

January

The Leopard wishlisting started early, with Matthew Russell hoping for cleaner uninstall mechanisms way back on January 4th: “One thing I’d love to see in Leopard, the next major rendition of OS X, is an option for developers to embed information into their applications that would facilitate a complete uninstall by the OS — yet keep all of this completely transparent to the user.”

Fraser Speirs mused on possible futures for PowerBooks. That was before MacWorld 2006, and the MacBook Pro announcement. Most people didn’t like the new name.

Adobe announced Lightroom; Microsoft abandoned Windows Media Player for Mac; there was a bit of moaning about changes in iTunes; Apple released iPhoto 6; and BareBones released Yojimbo.

February

A quieter month, which kicked off with a new 1GB iPod nano.

Fraser made some good points about function keys; Todd suggested that Apple buy Nintendo; Francois watched Safari and Firefox fight it out; Camino made it to 1.0; the iTunes store reached one billion sales; Adobe released Photoshop Elements 4;

And right at the end of the month, new Mac minis and the introduction of iPod Hi-Fi.

March

Reaction to the February announcements was a little dulled, mainly because the hype machine had whipped people up into more of a frenzy. Speculation began about new directions for the Mac mini.

People also started sharing their experiences of the new MacBook Pro machines. Stories emerged about strange noises.

We put iWeb to the test; Google bought SketchUp; OS X turned five years old; and Apple was taken to court by Apple.

Those who spent a lot of effort hacking a means to run Windows on their Mac had not, yet, seen their efforts made obsolete. That would come the following month.

April

Apple celebrated its 30th anniversary by releasing Boot Camp, an officially sanctioned means of running Windows on a Mac. Oliver wasted no time in trying it out, and Kevin found the best use for it: games! (Later on, he produced some other notes for running games and other stuff.)

Apple released Aperture 1.1; Matthew questioned webapps and the trust we place in them; and Derrick looked for better ways to shift files.

May

Joshua encouraged us to use Core Data; Apple won; Francois broke up with Mail; NetNewsWire was purchased by NewsGator.

Jochen expanded iWork while Joshua dumped Emacs.

Finally, Apple did what we all expected and replaced the iBook with the MacBook. Everyone promptly drooled at the black model, and simultaneously snorted with derision at the extra money it cost. Then they ordered one.
Either that, or they simply couldn’t decide which one to buy.

There was a brief mention by Todd of the new Parallels Desktop release , the first under the new name. He needed something to play with on his new MacBook.

June

Erica mused on permissions; lots of folks fell in love with TextMate (you can’t blame the bloggers for loving the blogging bundle); Derrick found the joy of living with Universal Binaries; work progressed on Kiwi, a new Cocoa email client; Jeremiah claimed “Apple is moving the wrong direction”; Alan listed 15 apps he can’t do without.

There wasn’t much from Apple this month, except a new U2 iPod.

Part 2 of this round-up of the year’s news and opinions follows tomorrow.