Apple WWDC 2007 Predictions

Since there are a lot of predictions flying around for what we might see at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, I thought I might try a stab at it, and encourage you to leave some of your own comments on what you hope to see from Monday's announcements.

Here are my hopes of things to come in Leopard:

Newton-like Assist: If you’ve never had the pleasure of using an Apple Newton, you probably don’t know what you’re missing. One of the neatest features of the Newton, besides handwriting recognition, was an service called Assist. Assist, when asked, could examine the meaning of text and do things with it. So, if you received an email that had a lunch appointment in it, simply tap Assist, and the Newton would add the event to your calendar, with the appropriate person’s info (taken from their email address which it would associate from your Address Book), and add them to the invite list. Assist could also grab info from an email’s signature, and automatically populate an Address Book card with the info (for some time, I used to just send emails to my Newton, just so I didn’t have to type out all the info into Mac OS X’s Address Book). Google Calendar is only starting to provide these kinds of features, but it still has a long way to go before it catches up to the Newton’s technology, which is some 10 years old. It would be great if Apple remembered it had this technology and ported it to Mac OS X Leopard.
Keynote Upgrades: Two features I’d like to see in Keynote is the ability to narrate and record a presentation to video. Keynote allows you to drop in audio you’ve recorded, but not actually record a presentation’s narrative as you give it. Also needed in Keynote is the ability to have motion paths, where objects can be made to move to different places at-will on the screen, instead of simply popping in and out on call. Both of these features would dramatically help those of us who like to create online video presentations, without the need of more expensive animation packages like Motion or Flash.
Pages Upgrades: Track changes might be the only feature preventing me from using Pages exclusively in a work environment. Sure, comments are useful, but they just don’t cut it when multiple people are working on a document. Since we’ve heard that ZFS is going to be a big feature in Leopard, maybe Pages will somehow take advantage of ZFS’s versioning to provide a truer implementation of tracking of changes—just as Time Machine can take you back to previous versions of a file. I’m not sure if this would be compatible with Microsoft Word Docs, but it need to be for greater adoption.
iChat VoIP: Since iPhone is running a version of Leopard, it’s not crazy to think that Apple has advanced its knowledge in connecting to the world of PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). Granted, the iPhone isn’t necessarily using VoIP, but Apple’s relationship with AT&T may be more fruitful than we might think, or this might be an additional service added to .Mac that would make it worthwhile. Providing VoIP through iChat would also help podcast authors who want to conduct and phone interviews without the need of additional third-party software like Skype or Gizmo Project, as iChat conversations can be recorded through iChat in GarageBand. iChat also needs some user interface improvements to get steal this diehard Adium user away.
More extensible Address Book: The wealth of information that users can store in their Address Book is really staggering. And even though many Mac OS X applications can pull from that data, it’s rarely used in advanced ways. For instance, each contact can be associated with one or many other contacts (even though currently, there’s no look-up query for those fields to make it easier to populate). By tying those associations into social network-like services (maybe through .Mac?) like LinkedIn, Address Book users could find whole new ways to leverage the contacts they’ve made—and built right into the OS. Family trees could be easily generated as well. Adding this kind of basic intelligence to AB would help other apps like Mail. Imagine being able to sort incoming emails by people associated with a specific person or family. Crawling your previous emails to find relationships between contacts that you didn’t previously realize?
Eliminate Silly Secure AFP Restrictions: Did you realize that when you login and transfer files between Macs that the Apple File Sharing protocol wasn’t secure? Sure the connection is password protected, but to achieve a secure encrypted connection (like through an SSH tunnel), only a connection to a Mac running OS X Server can actually be made securely? It’s a business model limitation that Apple implemented, but in my opinion, should die with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Sorry, I just think this is stupid.
iSync Phone Plugin Creator: So many phones out there support SyncML in some way or another, but many manufacturers don’t bother to build support for iSync. Enabling more users to “crowd source” the problem would go a long way to more Mac adoption. There’s rumor that we may actually see this kind of app, let’s just hope it’s true! It would be nice if this app also provided ways to sync not only contacts and events, but music, photos, and video too.