Check this out: The Unofficial Apple Weblog features an AppleScript for opening major WWDC news sites!!!
Anyway, I've been meaning to get to this for-freakin-ever, but here we are. It's the morning of Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference. There was a time when this was nothing but code geeks and the like, getting their dev ducks in a row. It has since become a key venue for rolling out products and announcements. Some of these have been development-related (move to Intel), some not (iSight, new flat panels), but increasingly, a good time will be had by all.
(Hey, Macworld is a show named for a magazine. No way is Apple going to save all their good stuff for them.)
There are acres and acres of WWDC predictions out there -- look it up, you'll be amazed. You might also be amazed at how many of them are from blogs, but not me. Blogs are the number 1 source of news on the web, by a long long long shot. Seriously. Long shot. What surprised me, though, was how many, uhm, no-name blogs ranked higher at the google than name-brand blogs.
Still, here are some sources of note to check and score against as the week goes on.
Fake Steve Jobs, in classic fashion, begins with Steve at a meditation center getting a high colonic, and getting accused of smoking cannabis, which he denies. Unusual, since he's quite explicit recommending it elsewhere. (I'm not encouraging this sort of thing, but a truly hilarious entry.)
Anyway, he talks about his prep for WWDC, and concludes "this one is going to be the most awesome WWDC we've ever had. Seriously."
Jason O'Grady is another of my daily reads at zdnet. He's been making WWDC predictions for weeks. One of those, new MacBook Pros, has already come to pass. How's he do with the rest? We'll see in a few hours. He begins with a tantalizing come-on: Apple has publicly stated that Steve will demo a “feature complete” version of Mac OS 10.5/Leopard, so that’s a given. But if you remember back to the Stevenote at Macworld Expo in January Jobs mentioned that many of the features in Leopard were “top secret.” Presumably WWDC is where SJ will produce the proverbial rabbit from the hat.
He also reposts Apple Gazette's predictions:
1. Multi-Touch in Leopard
2. New GUI for OS X
3. New iLife w/iTunes HD
4. Blu-Ray Support
5. Leopard/iPhone integration
6. New Mac Minis and MacBook Pros,
and one more thing…
7. Ultra Portable iMac w/Multi touch screen
Some other notables:
MacNN has been a premiere site for Mac headlines for over a decade. They quote analyst Shaw Wu (please tell me he's a doctor) who mentions a recurring wish, a true Apple virtual machine for Windows. Interesting to me if only because it allows Apple to more explicitly go after Dell and the like for Windows computing market share. I'm not convinced, but hey, we'll know soon.
Apple Insider is another venerable news site, although unlike MacNN, there's some hardcore reporting here, consistently the best I see. They make several common observations, but here's one bit of hardcore reporting, this one razor-sharp:
A new track, named Content and Media, is tailored just to those developers who need to focus on getting their media to the Internet. Though offline production will be covered, most tracks will focus on blending Apple's latest software with the web -- ranging from web-only AJAX and WebObjects code to the mixed-media Dashboard in Mac OS X or even crafting websites made just for the iPhone.
Finally, you're going to want to get your WWDC Keynote Bingo card from Ars Technica.
If you're going to the keynote in person, print out the bingo card and play along live. The first person in the audience to win the game is expected to yell "BINGO!" loud enough so that the rest of us can hear it when we watch the keynote webcast video later. If we can't actually hear you, it's also acceptable if Steve Jobs hears you on stage and indicates this in some way...perhaps, by having you thrown out or "disappeared." Hey, no guts, no glory!
Fun for all.
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