5 things I'd like to see from WWDC
It's that magical time of year again when we get shiny new Apple goodies to drool over. We pretty much know that the Leopard beta is going to have the limelight this week, but I thought I'd outline a few hopes of mine for other stuff we'll see.
The new Aqua. When OS X was first announced, Steve spent quite awhile just showing the audience what controls would look like in their then new OS. Everything was lickable and decidedly stripy. Over the past few years we've seen a migration to a reflective, smooth and dare I say a more professional look. Leopard is generally seen as being a milestone in terms of Apple's UI progression and many of us are hoping today we'll see a unified and beautiful OS X theme. Probably not as radical as the migration from Platinum to Aqua, but still a strong stride forward in terms of aesthetics.
A HIG for Core Animation. As amazing as Core Animation can potentially make many of our interfaces, it's also ripe for abuse in the same way technologies like Flash have made swarths of websites practically unusable. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
iPhone SDK. I want an iPhone, you want an iPhone, everyone wants an iPhone. The iPhone is to the mobile phone industry what the first Mac was to the computer industry. Most phones have awful user interfaces, horrible menus, horrible fonts, horrible icons. Even those that are generally considered as being 'good' are far from the kind of the UI nirvana that we take for granted in OS X. The iPhone changes all that, and a lot of Mac developers (including me!) are just itching to be able to write apps for it, to expand it from a cool device into a platform in its own right.
iPhone HIG. For the same reasons as the Core Animation HIG.
A mid-range tower/seriously bumped Mac mini. While I'm happy with my iMac, MacBook and Mac mini, my ideal development machine would still be some kind of headless iMac. The Mac Pro is simply too big, too noisy, too power-hungry and too expensive - we need a mid-range Mac tower. Why Apple continues to neglect this part of the market baffles and frustrates me.
posted by Rory Prior @ 9:48 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Why not a Mac HIG? :)
Well we already have one of those, hopefully it will get updated a bit for the new UI, but I imagine it will mostly remain the same.
I’d quite like them to put out an iPhone HIG several months before the SDK, and require you to pass an exam on the former to get the latter. The more I think about it, the more different the iPhone actually is, and I fully expect to see people trying to shoehorn desktop GUIs onto it in both obviously and subtly wrong ways.
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