Next from Apple

What’s going to happen next Monday, at Apple’s WWDC 2008?

Ok, it’s as certain as it can be that a new iPhone will see the light of day. It will have everything the previous one was critizised for not having: video calls, video recording, 3G with fast HSDPA (maybe even the superfast HSPA+), GPS, better battery life, slimmer form factor (not that the first iPhone wasn’t slim, but everything in electronics just keeps getting smaller), Exchange support (promised by Apple as part of the new firmware 2.0), and support for third party apps & widgets sold at the new App Store. All this, and worldwide availability.

But what else? Rumors about a peek at OS X version 10.6 have been floating around. Maybe. The previous version was released less than 9 months ago, so I doubt this one, even if it’s a developer conference. But we’ll see. Apple is great with surprises, although they usually float parts of what’s coming beforehand, either as rumors or features in other products.

There is always the trickle effect. Apple will probably bring touch screen technology and gestures (and according to recent patent applications also other new means to interact with your computer, like 3D displays and infrared controllers) to the rest of their product line.

As I suggested before, they should make a networked kiddy computer with touch display. It would be awesome. Parents could control it remotely, and kids love to touch. They could watch movies that they are allowed to see, and that their parents distributed to their Kiddy Mac after downloading them from iTunes, and why not games. I think Apple would do a great job with building a fun and innovative UI that kids could easily use.

The iPod, MacBook+Pro, and server lines should see updates. And why not finally a display that can better double as a TV?

And as iTunes Movies and TV shows are rolled out outside the US, the need to come up with a good solution for subtitles in Quicktime is growing. And maybe a practical way to package several videos, like the extras you get on a DVD.

Still a lot needs to be done.

Big areas that need something new

Maybe we should look at things from the “need” perspective.

A home server would be great, or another way to access your data anytime, anywhere. Time Capsule (the automatic backup solution that works completely in the background, whenever it has access to your computer over the air with WLAN) is a good start, as is .Mac and “Back to my mac”. Ok, .Mac is not so great. It’s been waiting for (real) change for years now, and even Jobs has hinted at the need to do something about it. Data portability is the next big frontier, and I believe Apple is going to be quick with this one. Everybody is scrambling for good data portability solutions, and new “web 2.0″:ish sites are springing up like mushrooms after the rain. There are some really good ones out there, usually focusing on a part of the solution. No one, as far as I know, offers a complete data portability solution for all your data. I think Apple has incentive to try its hands at this. Lot’s of people will be out there soon with iPhones, and they would love to have easy access to all their data.

The problem with proprietary solutions in the data portability arena is that they will not live long. We need something more than portable data. We need data inter-portability, controlled access to our own as well as other people’s data, and for that we need standards, APIs to services, and all of them truly working together. Mashups should abound, and they are starting to do so. No one can do this on their own. I think. Part of the beauty of the interwebs is that we can share so much with each other. Because of the bad guys we need security, but there are ways to do that, or someone will come up with them.

There has been rumors that Apple is rebranding .Mac into me.com (partly to better reach the PC crowd that have been wowed by the iPods and iPhone).

I’m also curious to see what’s going to happen to Apples pro software. There was even someone who suggested they were cutting those departments, something Apple quickly denied, but I find it hard to believe. Software is what really sets Apple apart.

I would rather believe Apple would be adding to the pro software lines. They should do a good vector and 3D app. Illustrator sucks big time. It seems to me that Adobe either doesn’t get that, or that they don’t care. It’s a very clumsy app if you compare it to the greatness of Photoshop and InDesign. Apple has been dabbling with 3D in Motion already, and if you remember the trickle effect, they should pass the finds on to other apps soon enough. Keynote already got some nice animation and very nice photo gallery features with advanced Core Animation effects within and between slides.

Apple has done nice work making photo editing easy and effective in Aperture, and I think they will keep pushing the envelope. Aperture isn’t Photoshop, but it sure is getting nearer (and past in some aspects, like organizing photos and interface design) with every release. Who knows, they might even take a hit at InDesign. Adobe wouldn’t have many unique apps left after that.

Another area that needs good apps is Content Management Systems for the web. Apple’s iWeb is just playing around, but it seems to me that Apple is aiming for more in this area. They already made Safari available for Windows, and it seems to me that the iTunes store essentially is a website. It’s like iTunes has a specialized version of Safari built in. Apple also has WebObjects, an aging but sort of hard core CMS. If Apple would make an easier version of WebObjects, as well as keep making iWeb better (the code it produces kind of works, but it’s very bulky), they could do an “iMovie/Final Cut Pro” move for the CMS arena.

Ok. These are my thoughts right now. Let’s see what happens on Monday…