WWDC 09 Predictions

It's now time for my regular pre-event predictions and this time it's the much awaited Apple Worldwide Developer Conference 2009, held at the Moscone center in San Francisco. I'm extremely excited as previously the only real announcements from this event were mac hardware and software, while this year we have Mac OS X iPhone (What Apple officially calls it), and Mac OS X Snow Leopard plus a whole bunch of other hardware to go with them. Let's get into it.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

From a consumers point of view this release doesn't appear to be too much but if you are a business person or developer, it's time to get excited. Previous releases, Leopard in particular, were a whole bunch of new features whereas Snow Leopard will be a bunch of new features for developers. New technology to handle multiple core intel processors called Grand Central, the ability to tap into the vast amounts of wasted power in graphics cards and a complete cleanup and streamline of the operating system. This gives developers like myself new tools, technologies and visual features in our own applications, and in true Apple fashion, with little effort.

A couple things I would like to see in particular from an interface designers point of view is the actual tool that was patented to create resolution independent buttons and elements. At the moment to do this in leopard involves subclassing components of buttons etc which is pretty messy. Plus improved toolbars, token fields and easier Core Data migration. It will be interesting to see though if Apple does come through with the new marble interface or something similar, personally if it's going to look anything like the glass in iTunes and iPhoto it will be horrible. They finally got consistent interfaces with Leopard, lets not do a Tiger have 4 please. It would be really sweet if Snow Leopard goes on sale right away.

iPhone V3/Video/Video 3G or whatever it's going to be called

Unfortunately with all the amazing work that's gone into Snow Leopard, any sort of announcement about the iPhone will take center stage. We have already seen the new spotlight and cut/copy/paste in Mac OS iPhone 3.0 so I would believe that it will be mainly about new hardware if the recent rumors have anything to do with it. My requests for a new iPhone would be:

• Better camera... please a better camera
• Improved scratch resistance
• Better bluetooth (Demoed in iPhone 3.0)
• Improved battery life
• Better screen!!!!!!
• More screen colours
• Cheaper
• Optus allowing to upgrade at no cost :)

Best of luck to everyone at WWDC this year, my best wishes to Steve Jobs and I hope to see you all next year when QuickPost will make it's conference debut!

Awesome iPhone Ad

A friend of mine gave me this link to a parody by Saturday Night Live of the iPhone commercials Apple did with real people on the street. It's awesome, funny and pretty creative so I share it here today. Though I do not condone meth or punching cops, it's still a funny watch, check it out below. 

iPhone OS 3.0...Wow

I woke up this morning to a whole bunch of new information regarding the iPhone OS upgrade from the Apple media event and wow. Over a thousand new API's for developers including the much delayed Push Notification System, in-app purchasing, live content streaming and access to hardware to name a few. For consumers they finally get cut, copy & paste and in true Apple fashion, it works brilliantly in almost every app! I'm not going to copy what has been said on the likes of TUAW and Engadget but as of now every request I wanted for the OS has been met. This includes MMS support in the form of a new messaging app, the ability to search your music not to mention everything else, increased Bluetooth support and landscape keyboards for Mail and SMS!!!!!. They also laid to rest a few common talking points including background apps and why the Push System was delayed though the App Store Approval process got the typical/standard/boring/not helpful response from the iPhone team.

1000 new API's, that is truly incredible for any platform. They applications demonstrated at the event were very cool, putting the in-app purchasing and notifications to good use. So when the update appears in iTunes for free ($10 iTouch) sometime in June, expect some amazing applications to go with it. Obviously there is long way to go and it will be interesting to see what gets added and what gets dropped.