WWDC Keynote Confirmed
An Apple press release confirms a WWDC keynote on Monday, June 6.
A few thoughts: Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote, significant since he’s still technically on medical leave. But it also implies some new stuff here needing explanation, the Jobsian sales-pitch — the infamous “reality distortion field.” So whatever it is — be it some new Lion feature or “iCloud” — I am now expecting the envelope to be pushed forward.
Second: iCloud is confirmed, and I’m still sticking with a music offering and MobileMe revamp. But I’ll nitpick a bit on the word “upcoming” meaning a launch may not be as imminent as next week. And the further thought is “WWDC” which is directed towards developers.
So the pure speculation is that perhaps iCloud goes further, a cloud storage set up with hooks for developers. Think something like Amazon’s S3 but for iOS apps. So someone could make their own DropBox-style app.
I definitely think that a big part of iCloud will be the hooks given to developers. Not so much for creating dropbox-type apps, but for dropbox-like functionality within your app. If Apple wants us to replace dropbox with iCloud, for instance, there needs to be a way for third-party apps to easily move files to and from the storage area (iDisk, or whatever it’s renamed.) There are hooks for iDisk, but everyone hates the current iDisk.
Who knows, maybe Apple will find a clever way to give third-party apps access to that automatically in iOS 5?
This should answer everyone’s criticisms of the iPad’s lack of an easy way to move files around, in other words. But it will only work if ALL apps can easily build in iCloud support. Thus, WWDC. Have to get the developers’ buy-in.
Same goes for any music locker feature. Third party apps would need a way to tap into that streaming music, in addition to the hooks provided to the local storage of music on the device.
I think this is going to be huge. iCloud is going to be the marketing term to make it sound like a single thing, but this is really a whole range of different APIs that will help tie iOS and Mac OS together even further. Which is why Apple has bundled this in with Lion and iOS 5. Can’t talk about any one of these three things without talking about the others, is my guess. And can’t explain it all in under two hours if hardware is getting in the way.
My big question is: Are we going to be seeing the end of iTunes synching for iOS devices? At least in the way we do it now. Perhaps you’ll still need iTunes for getting your big media files and for backup purposes, but for everything else, iCloud should totally replace that ridiculous iTunes file sharing.
Hmmm, third party access to personal music stored in iCloud, now that’s an interesting and huge idea.
Am really interested now, to see how iCloud ties into iOS 5 and Lion. “Next generation” software implies something we haven’t seen before.
And iTunes syncing — I don’t mind it at all for music, but that may just be out of habit since we’ve been doing it for so long. But I would be all over wireless sync or having any iOS device or Mac be able to access my iTunes Library wirelessly, everywhere, so I could easily see getting on board with that as carrot.