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I think you are drawing way too many conclusions from the rounded square (i.e., the app icon) motif used every year for WWDC since the iPhone.

Of course it's more than possible that I'm jumping to wishful conclusions! But in previous years they either showed app icons, or any difference in icon size could be attributed to distance (i.e. the implication being the icons were all the same size, but different distances away).

Anyway, we'll know soon enough.

That's the fun of Apple "Kremlinology", finding meaning in the smallest, stupidest details of their invitations. It's like when my friends and I would hang out in diners and try to prove the Discordian Law of Fives by finding relationships to the number 5 in the most mundane things.

Packet of sugar? "Sugar" has 5 letters.

Coca-Cola? Their slogan is "The Pause that Refreshes". Six syllables. Six is 2*3. 2+3 is 5.

It's like, so deep, man.

What about pressure-sensitive touch? There was a patent filed recently using IR light to detect how hard someone is touching a screen:

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

If so, I predict a demo with an iPad and a Piano app (playing soft and hard notes).

accelerometer already does this surprisingly well on ipad garageband

whoa, I had no idea. that's cool.

It IS cool. My housemate was the engineer behind it. He's cool. Also, a genius.

> Incidentally, has anyone noticed that Apple's push towards simple geometric UI design in iOS7 has simultaneously reduced application sizes (less need for giant bitmaps), improved performance and battery life, and paved the way for more flexible screen resolutions.

I have never seen numbers that indicate better battery life or performance on iOS 7, in fact the opposite has been measured on the iPhone 4:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/ios-7-1-on-the-iphone-4...

Plus UIKit is still monkey-patched around fixed-height UITableViews everywhere. I have increased the font size in iOS 7.1 and see truncated text all around the OS (with no tooltips to save me), probably because implementing line breaks in lists is pretty painful.

I don't really disagree, maybe Apple wants to release a larger-sized iPhone with an all-new resolution. But I don't think that iOS 7 has made resolution-independent app development any easier. (Xcode 5 has made AutoLayout a lot more bearable, though.)

> This similarly means that third party TV apps will probably appear (and thus we'll get CBS, Showtime, etc. on the Apple TV itself).

On this point, it seems like we're already there. Apple seems pretty willing to let anyone with original video content have access to the Apple TV APIs and will distribute their app. Look at all the stuff they've added lately, that has pretty small audiences.

The actual main obstacle is contracts that prevent the content providers from making their content available on set-top boxes at all, because it would compete directly with their existing distribution channels (broadcast affiliates.)

Sony and Microsoft beat Amazon to the punch. Whatever that means.

I remember Apple being beaten to the punch on MP3 players.

Being first sometimes just tells the other guys what doesn't work.

"Obviously Amazon has beaten Apple to the punch"

As for public skd, sure. But we've already been able to use AirPlay on games for a while. For years. It's obvious (for now) Apple's notion of a controller is the iOS device itself, vs. Amazon using a typical console controller.

I've been waiting for years (like a lot of people I suppose) for Apple to spring the ATV sdk on the public. Every year, every WWDC, disappointment. This year I'm not holding my breath.

> Apple's notion of a controller is the iOS device itself

Apple introduced standards for console style iOS game controllers last year. A handful of compliant controllers have been available for a while.

Airplay on games is total shit. The amount of time it takes for the screen to get encoded, sent to the atv, then displayed on the tv, is really unnerving.

Its like playing Counterstrike back in the 56k and >100ms ping days. Aka, not a twitch game. Might work for things like plants versus zombies or candy crush though. But things like infinity blade are not playable. I tried, and failed horribly and just ended up using the screen anyway.

Would be cool if they opened up the airplay sdk and atv as well though. I do like my appletv in general but playing games from my ipad or iphone is... at best frustrating.