Bobbis.net

WWDC will start next Monday. After going two years in a row, and after graduating, I am not going. Even if I were to pay for it myself, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to take a week off work just three months after starting my job. That, and I have a deadline coming up very soon. Perhaps next year I will go. Perhaps with Colin.

This year I have heard a lot of changes have been made to some of the events at WWDC. I believe these changes to be dramatic and actually may end up degrading the value of the conference.

First off, there is no student Sunday. Traditionally there has been a day the Sunday before the conference dedicated to students, where people from Apple and other companies as well as noted developer community members would give talks and presentations directed towards students, then a career fair with some of the most noted mac development firms. Student day was a great opportunity to meet new people to hang out with for the rest of the week. I still keep in contact with Mark from last year, and every once in a while I will talk with Peter who I met back in 2005. This year, there will be a student session Monday evening followed by the career fair and a bunch of students are organizing a meet of their own on Sunday since many of them already bought their flights and hotels planning to have a student sunday.

The other big change this year is that there will be no Apple Campus Bash. The bash will be in downtown San Francisco. I would have to say, the last two years I have been to WWDC, the Apple Campus Bash at the apple headquarters in Cupertino have been the highlight of the week. Live music, having fun, free food, free beer, visiting the Apple Company Store (lots of great Apple Swag). This year the "Bash" will be in downtown San Francisco somewhere. I hope Apple has a good reason for doing this or compensates the attendees in a different way (free iPhones before release?). We'll see what happens.

Now, my predictions:

Aluminum iMac

10% - Aluminum has generally been reserved for the Pro class machines like the Macbook Pro, Cinema Displays and Mac Pro. There may be a new iMac, but it doesn't seem like something that would be announced at WWDC.

New iPods

70% - The iPods are reaching a long time since the last update. With the new technology in the iPhone, I can see the next generation of iPods introducing cover flow and touch screen. However, it will not be a communication device like the iPhone.

ZFS File System Default

30% - Knowing what I know from some of the presentations last year that are still under non-disclosure, I wouldn't think Apple would be moving the default filesystem. However, I believe ZFS has the features used in the betas of Leopard preview a year ago. I can see ZFS becoming an option, but I doubt it will be the default option.

New Finder

75% - The "Top Secret" feature. Finder has been one of the things Apple has needed to fix. I can see use of Core Animation and other integrated features to evolve the finder. I hope to see it well multithreaded so that Finder doesn't stop responding when a network drive unexpectedly goes away.

iLife 07 Announced

50% - This was missed at MacWorld in favor of covering the iPhone and Apple TV. My guess is there will be some features in iLife that are Leopard specific like Core Animation, integration with Time Machine or some other top secret feature. Being that Leopard will not ship until October, I doubt they will announce iLife until they want to ship it.

New xServe

85% - It has actually been a while since the xServe has been updated. Now is a good time to show an update. Perhaps there will be an update to the xServe RAID since it is getting less competitive as it used to be.

We'll see what happens Monday.