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My home away from home
WWDC 2013
This year, for a third year in a row, I unfortunately won’t be able to attend WWDC. I certainly hope to be back next year though, as I really miss the excitement and the creative energy that you can feel during the week long event. When you are used to attend large customer events organized by corporations like Oracle, IBM or MS, a smaller event like WWDC, filled with passionate developers from all over the world, is a breeze of fresh air.
As a developer, I have a limited set of requests for Apple. First on the list is fixing iCloud. I have no doubts they fill finally get their act together and solve the issue. Second, I would love them to release a new charting API, both for OS X and iOS. Having a standard API everyone could use would certainly be great news for developers. Drawing charts is not difficult, but starting from scratch every time an app requires a nice looking chart is really a pain. Finally, I would like to have an improved JavaScript-Objective-C bridge that would make it simpler to script Cocoa apps, without having to use a WebView. The state of the union keynote tomorrow afternoon should give us a good idea of what Apple is planning for the future and it is in many ways much more interesting than what will be discussed during the morning address. I am really looking forward returning from work and listen to it while working out on the treadmill.
As a user, I have much higher expectations, though and I can imagine that this will be the case for most of the people who will listen to the keynote tomorrow. There will most likely be some hardware announcements, but given the fact that there have been no serious leaks from Apple’s supply chain, I wouldn’t set my expectations too high.That means no new iPhones, iPads or even iWatch tomorrow. There may be some upgrades to the laptop models, with faster wireless networking and new CPUs, but nothing really ground breaking. The lack of news seem to indicate that the announcements will come primarily from work performed at Apple’s HC in Cupertino, under a shadow of secrecy. That means new system software (we already know about iOS 7 and OS X 10.9) and new services (iRadio, which has now be rumored for months). While I do believe that much time will be devoted to iOS 7 (and a little less to OS X), I think most of the surprises will come from the services side. Apple has spent billions over the last few years on their data centers and we still don’t know exactly what they plan to do with them. While they serve billions of apps, movies, songs, notifications and iMessages every day, in addition to syncing devices and provide remote backups, there is a perception in the industry that the cloud services capacity they have been building is well above what they are delivering right now. As a result, I expect Apple to emerge tomorrow as a new Cloud powerhouse. What does that mean? Well, I am not sure, but I am convinced that they will announce an expanded and improved set of services as well as outline a vision for the future that will be both compelling and credible. Allow users to edit iWork documents in their browsers and offer improved collaboration options? Maybe. Share video on-line? Most probably. Improve syncing? Absolutely. A completely new service? I think we should count on it.
Tomorrow will be an important day for Apple. These announcements should allow them to further differentiate from the competition, making hardware even less important than it is today, while putting emphasis on the ecosystem. Users may be slightly disappointed in the short term, as many of the announcements will not be available immediately, but will benefit immensely as soon as the new OSes are released, in the Fall.