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WWDC 2014
Once again, I won’t be able to attend WWDC. I am very excited though that on Monday we will be able to see what Apple has in store for us for the next few years, because I believe that this event will be more about announcing the foundation of things to come than actual products we will be able to buy in June.
From a developer perspective, Xcode 6, iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 should include enough new functionality to keep us busy for the next few months. Support for larger iPhones will probably translate into a lot of work to prepare old apps for the official launch of the new devices. Something similar is to be expected for Mac developers who will have to deal with a flatter overall design including updated controls. I certainly hope that the changes are more than skin deep, because while appearance is important and having a uniform look and feel across Apple devices can make the user’s life much easier, when I use my Mac, it is all about what I can do with it, great looks come second.
What I would like to see announced at WWDC are improvements around iCloud, namely lower pricing and APIs for Windows, Linux and Android. Writing a cross-platform app that syncs data among devices is not very difficult, there are many scalable document based data stores than can handle this task (Cloudant comes to mind). The problem is persuading customers to pay for the service. Apple on the other hand can do that much more effectively because they already have a large customer base that use the free service or pay for iCloud once a year and get a lot of value by using the service with not one but multiple apps. The value proposition is much better. Sure, there are competing services, like Dropbox, but I like the Apple option better because I can easily assume that all Apple customers have an account.
On the hardware front, I do not have many expectations. Apple has been unable to keep hardware leaks from happening in China in the past and right now we haven’t seen enough credible information to believe a product launch is imminent. If there are any announcements it will be like last year’s MacPro, a simple preview with a launch date, to generate pent-up demand.
I have no doubt that WWDC 2014 will all be about announcing the infrastructure for things to come, namely new services that will be available only to customers with modern hardware (fingerprint reader and the M7 processor as well as future devices) which will generate a need to upgrade old devices and leave the competition in the dust for a while. Apple has had several years to build the infrastructure and plan for this moment. On Monday we will finally understand what Apple has been working on. We may not understand the full reach of these announcements until Apple launches their new devices in the fall, but it will be an exciting event. I will be spending a lot of time on the treadmill next week, watching the WWDC session videos on my Apple TV.