It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings. A couple of notes:
I don't care that the ipod isn't on the icons, you know, its a developer banner. Most of those items are developer related, not all, but most, in one way or another. What is more interesting is they didnt show the front of the powermac....but that doesn't mean anything. Everything they show on that banner is publically released. There needs to be visuals when people first come in that aren't covered in black cloth! So don't read anything into that, they could completely change the design.
Its doubful much of the hanging banners will be OS X 10.5 related unless their is a huge feature. They are already taking up a considerable amount of hanging space for bragging rights. I would expect new hardware to be hidden under those displays, atleast two of them.... MacPro and Xserve. Possibly something unexpected. Maybe Xcode 3 or something will be heavily promoted.
I know I personally would love better SOAP integration with XCode. We use .NET at work all the time to write web services, and we end up using .NET clients running under parallels on our macs, because keeping the SOAP proxy stub code up-to-date is automatic with .NET....you have to go thru hell with Xcode. I think Apple will fill that gap with the new xcode (there were command line tools in the latest version).
Obviously we will have the resolution independance in OS X 10.5. Probably some new security and new workgroup/networking enhancements. We probably can all agree one would be networked spotlight, if you are running 10.5 servers, the clients will ask the server to search its spotlight data for the same data the client is searching for, and give a combined response.....its the one thing of OS X Tiger I hated, the inability to search the network with the same ease.
I'd probably also expect desktop widgets from dashboard....why? Why not, people have used hacks to do it, plus MS has it as an option in Vista.
We'll probably see Apple rolling in features that Vista has, such as combined videos and photos in slideshows. Not that its nessecary, but its damn easy with Cocoa to do such things and why get left behind? Don't let microsoft take a win.
We may also see a system wide Software Update now, which would really be nice. Letting 3rd party developers update their software with the same system.
My employees here at the office really don't care for apple's Mail program, I'd expect some updates to give it the features its been lacking. Same with address book. Of course, these have been rumored for a long time...and for good reason, its needed. Maybe expect a new mail/scheduling server like Exchange, Apple's been rumored to be working on one.
I'd also expect major updates to iChat.... probably MSN and Yahoo support, as well as VoIP.
but none of those things I've said are that huge........so I'm hoping for some really major surprises
