I’m very envious of all the developers heading out to San Fransico for the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference starting tomorrow. I really wanted to attend, but I just couldn’t justify the cost in both dollars and in vacation time.
To make a feeble attempt to join in on the fun, here are my predictions for what Steve Jobs will announce starting tomorrow:
- Mac Pro – I do believe this is all but confirmed.
I’ve been holding out upgrading my main development machine to see what this monster will be. Then I’ll decide whether to go the desktop or notebook route.
- Leopard Preview – Again, this has already been announced and will hopefully bring all kinds of Apple goodness. Very exciting.
- CoreData Updates – This is my #1 wish: Support for external databases (MySql, Postgres, ODBC support, etc).
I love CoreData. It makes dealing with all the plumbing that goes into building applications much less tedious. If only I could save data to a remove data repository. If only I could have multiuser (shared) data with all the CoreData goodness.
- Quartz Extreme – Hardware acceleration.
This would give my Cocoa/Quartz based game engine a huge and instant performance boost. Plus this eliminates the need to use OpenGL to get accelerated 2D graphics and allow using the very nice NSImage and Quartz Cocoa api for animation and drawing.
- Xcode 3.0 – Cocoa and Objective-C are great.
I love the productivity, the power, and the fun that these tools provide. The weakness in developing on the Mac is Xcode. Xcode is adequate and I realize that it is a holdover from the NeXT days, but please, please give me the Apple usability I get with the iLife and iWork suites.
Changing build settings and project properties tend to be confusing and inconsistent and even seemingly have no impact.
Refactoring tools have made it into every other major platforms development tools (see Eclipse and Visual Studio 2005), why can’t we have these in Xcode?
Whatever gets announced this coming week, I’m sure I’ll be pleased and excited to get the chance to play with it all.
I hope that all the developers that are making out to San Fransico this year have a great, fun, and productive week.