It's only impressive because people can finally use it, that's all

Instant Alpha is one of many fantastic features in iWork 08. It automatically removes the background from pictures that you want to drop into your presentation. View a Demo of Instant Alpha here. Of course computer scientists will be quick to point out that there is nothing technically impressive about this, separation of background and foreground isn't a particularly tricky imaging problem. I fully expect the gentlemen at digg to tell me that this can already be done using the Lasso tool in Gimp, or how you can install a GTK plugin to do it, or maybe how you can write your own Python based plugin that solves this problem. Yeah! Take that iWork, you can't write custom python plugins for that!

Lets not fuck around here. There is nothing impressive about Instant Alpha except for the little fact that I can now grab an image from the web and remove it's background without even thinking, let alone touching a graphics program. The tiny effect of this "un-impressive" feature is that people using Keynote will now find it much easier to create presentations that look really professional. Meanwhile the rest of us are still dicking around with a lasso trying to separate the background from the foreground so that our Excel generated barchart doesn't look so ugly. Who the hell decided purple was a good colour anyways?

Yeah, I realise that you can make nice Excel charts using Office 2k7, but it takes a little bit of work. Just like you can make really ugly presentations in Keynote, but it takes a little bit of work

No one really gives a shit what the algorithm is doing "under the hood". No one cares how many lines of code it took, or how many variables it's processing. Unfortunately many programmers don't get that, and have tendency to expose the inner workings of the code to the user, via the interface. It's like using the interface, rather than comments, to show what your code is doing. You might impress the other programmers out there, but they're a very small minority, and they don't use presentation software all that often.