Kevin Fox –– who leads design at Mozilla Labs and previously led the design of Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar 1.0, Google Reader 2.0, FriendFeed, the Facebook Games Dashboard, and more –– writes, “I get the feeling that the announcements at next week’s Apple WWDC are going to represent the same kind of fundamental shift in Apple’s offering that the iPod did in 2001.”
“I don’t have any inside info, and I make a point of not trying to pry secrets from my friends who work at Apple, but the rumblings are huge,” Fox writes. “In no particular order, here are some thoughts about where Apple may be going. These are not based on any inside info, and they certainly won’t all be right:”
• Seamless remote access to any data kept in your Documents folder, and synchronization across machines.
• Universal login using your Apple account: Walk up to any Mac, sign in as a guest using your Apple account credentials and you’ll be brought to the same desktop you get on your personal machine.
• Realtime, continuous syncing of iOS devices will mean never having to plug your iPhone or iPad in to your computer again, or even the need for a computer for syncing at all.
• iOS runtime within Mac OS to allow iPhone apps to run as Dashboard widgets and iPad apps as first-class desktop apps.
• Your canonical music library exists in the cloud. Your Mac, Windows, or iOS device can sync with all or part of it in the same way that your iOS devices sync with your computer’s iTunes library today.
• Unification of the App Store to encompass Mac, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV and iPad apps.
• Stripping out the App Store from iTunes. iTunes will be the media storefront and the App Store will be the resource storefront.
• Apple TV + App Store updates probably aren’t there yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear announcements in order to get developers building apps.
More of Fox’s thoughts in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jax44” for the heads up.]