Most Amazing Keynote Ever

Apple PR just confirmed that this year’s WWDC keynote will go down in history as the most amazing keynote ever, and your’s truly will be in attendance. Unfortunately I am not prepared for camping out to get in the main conference venue to make sure I can see that with my own eyes. Oh, how much I would love to be able to make it…

The four pillars of amazingness have been confirmed to be:

• The Amazing Steve Jobs himself
• Lion “Unveiling”
• iOS 5, Codename “Fleeting Image”
• iCloud, the amazing cloud service with the extra i

This effectively rises my excitement level to new heights. Apple had kept their iOS 5 plans really close to their chest to avoid Google stealing the coolest ideas and thunder.

iOS 5 will probably be such a fundamental new version that it does not make sense previewing it like they did last year. I fully expect that some of my work in NSAttributedString+HTML will become obsolete as of iOS5, I’m hoping for official and proper tools to give us rich text rendering and editing as Apple has been testing in private APIs present in the iWork iPad apps. If this indeed will be one of the new items, then my strategy for continued development on this project will shift to providing a transitional technology that smoothly uses the official APIs on devices that support them and my unofficial ones on all others. A good one year head start for those who implement it, because it usually takes between 6 and 9 months for broad adoption of a new iOS version.

Lion being finally released is also a big thing. I know of people who are using Lion as their main OS for quite a while and report that for the most part they are happy with it. Lion will finally unify one thing across all of Apple OSs: the direction you scroll in. 🙂

And finally this elusive iCloud raises my hopes for an integrated cloud strategy that goes way beyond a simple online music locker. Apple has a history of providing technologies and circumstances that enable small development shops to provide functionality that was previously reserved to the big guys, think of push notifications for example. What if iCloud gives every developer a method to synch data between multiple iOS and OSX devices via the Internet?

Recently more and more apps are starting to use Dropbox for exactly that. So I am rather certain that Apple will want to provide an online-sync platform for all developers as this would be the next revolution for the small guys. Now everybody can sync, not just the guys who have the resources to maintain servers for this purpose. Servers, that you cannot program in Objective-C and thus you need to pay somebody else for making it prohibitive for the small guys.

And maybe, just maybe, this will finally enable all these game apps we have on multiple devices to have a consistent shared progress store. I want to be able to play an adventure on my iPad while on the road and continue where I left off on my TV+MacMini.

Speaking of which: I predict also something that Apple PR was careful to avoid mention of in the press release. I am convinced that iOS 5 will also run on Apple TV and enable third-party apps on that.

Categories: Apple