WWDC 2008 prediction results
Posted by marshall Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:43:00 GMT
I'm back from WWDC, and it was a great week. The sessions were interesting, I had lots of good discussions with friends, and as usual, a bit of sightseeing was worked in as well. The conference itself was far better than last year's blend of dropped Leopard features and the "sweet" "Web 2.0" "app" "solution" for the iPhone. This year, we got solid information on the real iPhone SDK, Snow Leopard, and even some improvements for web apps.
For once the early buzz was fairly accurate, so my predictions for what was likely to appear turned out to be reasonably accurate as well. The things I thought would happen did, and the things I didn't expect (but nonetheless hoped for) were nowhere to be seen. And while there were a few small surprises, there weren't any really big shockers.
That being said, here are the results, broken down in the same way the predictions were...
Virtually certain
These are things that were widely expected to happen, and it would have been extremely surprising and/or disappointing if they didn't.
3G iPhone -- Yes
This was no surprise whatsoever. Steve Jobs had said it was coming, various carriers had said they'd have it, and there was really no doubt that it would show up at WWDC. As predicted, it features version 2.0 of the iPhone OS, it has an updated appearance, and the headphone jack is no longer recessed. Unfortunately, the camera doesn't appear to be improved in the slightest.
Rebranding of ".Mac" as "Mobile Me" (me.com) -- Yes
Not only was the rebranding correctly predicted, but they are even advertising it as "Exchange for the rest of us", featuring push e-mail, contacts, and calendars. This will be wonderful not only for iPhone users, but also for those of us who are currently synchronizing contacts and calendars between work and home computers using the unreliable polling system in .Mac. The pricing still sucks, but at least it's cheaper than running one's own Exchange server.
While MobileMe doesn't really offer a universal sync solution for third-party developers like I'd hoped, Apple did introduce a related feature for the iPhone that MobileMe almost certainly uses: a universal update notification system. Any application can register with Apple's servers and push notifications out to iPhone clients. The publisher is still responsible for hosting its own servers, and it doesn't solve the push-to-desktop scenario, but it does fill a gaping hole in iPhone application development, namely: how does one notify an iPhone user of new content (e.g. instant messages) if no background processes are allowed? With the notification service, a single process is used to receive notifications, and the user can then choose to open the app, which would then pull down the rest of the content. It's simple, it doesn't use lots of memory or slow down the device with lots of background processes, and it doesn't waste battery life.
Likely
These weren't necessarily sure things, but I was expecting them nonetheless.
GPS in iPhone -- Yes
GPS is indeed present, Google Maps uses it, the Camera app uses it for geotagging, and it's available for use by third parties as well. It even works in conjunction with the existing location technologies in the first-generation iPhone to get the data faster. Nice.
Preview of 10.6 -- Yes
Mac OS X v10.6 "Snow Leopard" was mentioned in the keynote, but it wasn't discussed in detail until the Mac OS X State of the Union. As expected, it's primarily an under-the-hood update intended to polish up existing operating system technologies and introduce some low-level performance enablers (e.g. Grand Central, OpenCL) for future development. There is one notable and welcome user-level feature, though: full support for Microsoft Exchange in Mail, iCal, and Address Book.
The build provided to conference attendees requires an Intel processor, though it was not made clear whether the final release will. I'm guessing that Snow Leopard will indeed be Intel-only, and that Apple just isn't ready to state that on the record yet. Perhaps they're waiting to see how much of a backlash there is from the rumors. One aspect that Apple is advertising is that it "dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X", and removing all PowerPC code would certainly be one way to do that.
Somewhat likely
There was conflicting evidence on these. I said I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see them, but it's true that I'm just a little disappointed nonetheless.
Video chat in iPhone -- No
Sadly, Engadget was right: no front-facing video camera, and in fact there's still no video recording support at all. Hopefully some enterprising third-party developer will fill this gap in functionality...maybe an official YouTube app?
Rebranding of "Mac OS X" -- No
The posters turned out to be just a one-off thing for WWDC. The iPhone operating system continues to be referred to as "iPhone OS", and the Mac operating system continues to be referred to as "Mac OS X". Apple's even extending the meaningless "X" branding to QuickTime, where it's even less appropriate.
Potential surprises
As I mentioned above, there really weren't any major shockers. The "one more thing" was the 3G iPhone itself, which surprised no one.
Cocoa for Windows -- No
AppleInsider posted a ridiculous article today suggesting that SproutCore is somehow the "natural heir to the Yellow Box or Cocoa for Windows" and "people can't stop talking about it." Now, SproutCore looks like a fine JavaScript framework, but it's still just a JavaScript framework: it does not solve the problem of native desktop apps that need to run cross-platform any more than Safari solved the problem of native apps on the iPhone.
I'm still curious to see if iTunes continues to be implemented the same way on Windows once it moves to Cocoa on Mac OS X.
OS X for non-Apple systems -- No
It was highly unlikely, and it didn't happen. Again.
iPod Touch 8GB for all attendees -- No
Nope. Apart from the expected beta of Snow Leopard, this year was pretty light on free stuff. The traditional laptop bags were decent (though I prefer my smaller bag for my MacBook Air), but in previous years Apple has been known to provide valuable software and/or hardware. Oh well.
