Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Looking forward to One More Thing...

On Friday I'm off to the "one more thing" iOS developer conference in Melbourne. Last year was great. At the time I was only a part time iOS developer, now it's 24/7.

Developing apps for smartphones, more than any other software I've worked on, is a team effort where programmers work closely with designers. I love the way we iterate and what is only learned by playing with the app as it comes together.

The phrase "one more thing" references something that Steve Jobs used to do sometimes at, what seemed like, the end of a keynote speech where he would reveal something amazing. Past "things" have been the MacBook Air, Apple TV, Powermac and Airport.

WWDC is a few weeks away and there is much discussion in my office about what Apple might announce to fill the product void that has opened up since the iPad Mini last year. We can be confident that pretty much all laptops will be refreshed with the new Intel Haswell chipsets, we can hope that a new MacPro line will begin and that HiDPI (Retina) screens will come to the desktop.

I think there are some important technology transitions taking place that Apple has chosen to wait for rather than bring out products that will be vastly superseded in a few months: Thunderbolt - which is jumping in bandwidth to 20Gbps, presumably enough for 4K video, plus the ability to put cards - such as video cards, in the monitor; Intel's new generation of CPUs that reportedly will use 1/5th of the power of the previous generation in laptops, and large high resolution displays which will have taken time to come down in price.

On the software side, I can't wait to see what's in MacOS X 10.9, Xcode, and of course iOS 7 under new management.

While it might be nostalgic to hear Tim Cook say "one more thing", perhaps it best left to a bunch of us in Melbourne this Friday.

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