Headed to the WWDC keynote line shortly. Even this year, when there appears to be no large hardware announcement lined up, nobody is taking chances. Macrumors reported 30 people in line 11pm last night.
The WWDC hall makes it obvious what the focus is this year: Lion plus iOS plus iCloud. With emphasis on the plus, I suspect. Much speculation abounds about all of these, but from the conference schedule so far, there seems to be a push to unify interfaces between iOS and Lion above and beyond what we’ve been told so far. Things that used to be presented on separate tracks, like UI design, etc. now are joint iOS/Lion sessions.
The Mac App Store already seems to be pulling developers from iPhone into iOS proper now, so it looks like they are dissolving the walls between the platforms. One dead giveaway is that they appear to be changing the UI layout system to something that will be much more resolution-independent.
There are some 32 sessions scheduled that are TBA, which means they are about stuff that will be announced in the keynote. Some of those sessions are scheduled to be given more than once due to room capacity and scheduling conflicts.
Stuff I’m hoping for:
- a killer update to Apple’s HTML5 authoring tools — iAd Composer and Dashcode have a lot already, let’s get them unified into something that will really kill Flash.
- a framework for syncing apps between mobile devices, desktop, etc. using the cloud.
- Apps on Apple TV.
- Better notifications on iOS 5, along with some sort of home-screen capability
Anyway, off to brave the cold.
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