Friday, June 06, 2008

Looking forward to WWDC 08

This year I'm not attending Apple's WWDC in person. I try to go every few years as it's a very energising experience.

Like many, I'm looking forward to the announcement of a 3G iPhone that I can buy here in Australia, but I'm also wondering what goodies we might see on the MacOS X and developer front. "Snow Leopard" sounds like an incremental update to Leopard, (which seems to be a very stable OS to me), but it would have to have some major changes under the hood. What comes to mind is:

  • Switching to a more modern, faster kernel, such as L4.
  • Make other languages, hopefully python, a first class AppleScripting language
  • Dropping support for PowerPC and no doubt cleaning out the code somewhat
  • Home directory in the cloud, or at least properly on a flash key drive
  • Build in the best of Wine, to make it at least easy to port Windows software to the Mac
  • A framework for making application uninstallers
  • ZFS or something to update HFS+


I'm also looking forward to an updated copy of "Cocoa Programming for MacOS X".

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Sorry you're not here for the action this year Pete.

I got 3rd edition (2008) of Hillegass yesterday at Borders, he's a great writer. Now I'm slowly starting to understand Cocoa, but I secretly wish I could use Ruby with Xcode.

George