It has been only been two weeks since WWDC, but somehow it seems longer. Despite that, it has been a challenge finding a few moments to cobble together a blog entry.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the interest in Briefcase for iPhone following WWDC. There is now a story at BusinessWeek that mentions Briefcase.

WWDC week is always one of my favorite weeks of the year. This year's event was a bit more crowded, but Apple did a fine job of managing the throngs of people. The iPhone was definitely in the spotlight this year with the new version of OS X being shuffled off to a later presentation after the keynote. Overall, I think Apple did their usual top-notch job of presenting a consistent and compelling story with respect to developing for the iPhone platform.

It will be very exciting to see the evolution of iPhone applications over the next year as developers get deeper into the platform. I think that one point that cannot be made strongly enough is that Apple has successfully taken their best-of-breed development tools for desktop applications and has migrated them to a handheld device in a very natural way. I think that is what changes the game.

Given that I am under NDA, I can only speak to what was in the keynote speech. From my perspective, I got a little bit nervous as Steve Jobs started laying out the plan for MobileMe. The goal of MobileMe seems to be to give the iPhone and the iPod Touch a central roll in a revamped .Mac experience. The part that worried me was that they might work the iDisk into the iPhone somehow. However, after a little thought, I could see why that would not make sense. There is still a very limited amount of storage on an iPhone. Even the largest capacity iPhone cannot hold MobileMe's default 20Gb of data storage. The 32Gb iPod Touch could squeeze it in, but that wouldn't leave much space for other media. And, there is no interface on the iPhone to view local files. So, the only interface to MobileMe's iDisk from the iPhone will likely be via Safari.

I believe that Briefcase solves a different problem than the iDisk. It provides an ad hoc way to quickly grab a few important files and view them later without requiring network access or cell coverage (eg on an airplane or subway). And you can deliver those files to another Mac on the other end.

Having said that, I think that there is an opportunity to take advantage of the iDisk from Briefcase. I believe that the iDisk is accessible via WEBDAV. It should be straightforward to give Briefcase access to your iDisk. I won't make any promises until I've signed up for MobileMe and have had a chance to play with it.