Guesses on Apple Announcements at WWDC
fury.com
fury.com
> iOS runtime within Mac OS to allow iPhone apps to run as Dashboard widgets and iPad apps as first-class desktop apps.
This one will never happen. Like Flash on touch devices iOS apps on a desktop or notebook makes little sense. No gyro, compass, gps, accelerometer.
Of course now that I said never Apple will announce a new line of super touch-enabled gyroscopic accelerometered displays. Shipping in September.
> Realtime, continuous syncing of iOS devices will mean never having to plug your iPhone or iPad in to your computer again, or even the need for a computer for syncing at all.
Better stay next to a wall charger.
Task level integration and continuous media play across devices would be really awesome. Fun list :)
Apple wants to essentially create a line of physical devices varying in performance (dumb devices to smart devices), size (shuffles to desktops), and where you use it (on the go vs the living room vs the office).
This may sounds pretty obvious until you take into account the fact that they want a) the experience to be seamless and familiar and b) software (to how much ever extent is possible) to be as hardware independent as possible. That's what's going to make it killer. Apple wants to use the Internet functionally and practically not just recreationally.
iCloud being the enabler of all this? That would be quite an announcement! I think iCloud is going to be FREE since these services are what will make even the basic Apple experience so premium and worth the price tag.
Apple a year or two back had a big presentation at one of their WWDC's about a new multi-core garbage collection for Snow Leopard.
With dual core in the new iPad 2 and I imagine coming on the next iPhone this represents a perfect time to newer apps porting over.
I wonder if iOS5 will be backward compatible to iPhone 4. Most games manage their own memory allocations/pools - this won't be that useful to games. But to the average hobbyist programmer this means the bar will be lowered and more noise will be introduced into the App Store. But Apple still has the best tools.
Android, by contrast, has garbage collection built-in and lots of mediocre apps. Hopefully with their new ADT 11 Interface Builder-like GUI tool, they will get better.
Apple doesn't want to you to make poor quality apps. Google could care less (it is so designer-unfriendly, I had to apologize multiple times to our designer for having to deal with skinning an Android app)
After hours of effort and frustration, he effectively failed. When it is all in XML files using obscure attributes like layout_width and Horror of All Horrors... selectors (for stuff like custom click colors/states), it is more programming than design. And Google, why is it so hard to define Colors and Themes (XML?!)
This is interesting. It sounds to me like something people think they want, but wouldn't really use that much without a big social shift - we're too attached to personal belongings (at least here in the US), and we're too mobile and independent to share.
Suppose people actually did want this, or thought they did - the result on sales sounds too unpredictable and risky to try, anyway. Would people start sharing computers more, meaning fewer sales? Or would they get more users temporarily by converting Windows users, but ultimately damage their ceiling through the new shareability?
This sounds like a dream that no one would implement.
I have nothing but a weird gut feeling to go on here, and I know it's a ridiculous idea, but because of it, I'm kind of dreading the key note.
Other features:
App Store, FaceTime, Thunderbolt (obvious).
Touch remote included - where do they save money vs ipod touch? no memory, lower res, monochrome? maybe eink?
Femtocell functionality -- Massive applause line when smiling AT&T CEO shown. See, it's not an end run around the carriers. At least not totally. Or not yet.
Cloud gaming ala OnLive, arcade business model- bye bye consoles
Easy to use QoS/throttling ala Ga Tech's recently demo'd Kermit.
app updating without syncing seems to be a go.