Quite a number of people are speculating what the major announcements at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference might be…. well here is my prediction.

I just finished watching the historic Bill Gates - Steve Jobs discussion from D: All Things Digital and it shed a little light on what might be coming. There has been a lot of exposure in the past couple months about multi-touch and it’s no secret that the iPhone is going to be the first Apple device to support it and Apple also owns a patent.

It’s also interesting that at the D: conference that Microsoft introduces Surface and that an event sponsor HP has a working example on display.

If you watch the VoD of the interview with Bill and Steve (vid number 5 has the relevant piece) where Walt asks about interface evolution and when are we actually going to see a move away from the traditional “windowed” interface. Bill starts to answer the question and Steve looks like the cat that ate the canary.

I predict that the “secret innovations” that Apple has been holding back on in the early Leopard releases is full support for multi-touch. Remember that the iPhone is an OSX device and it’s operational and fully integrated with multi-touch. The catch here is that the hardware has to support it…. and here is the other potential major announcement…. the hardware introductions made at WWDC will have multi-touch capable screens integrated. I will also wager a guess that Apple might finally create a new Finder based on these innovations. I doubt the new multi-touch interface will replace the old interface outright but that Apple might do something like allow for the alternate interface through the same mechanisms that it invokes Expose, Spaces and Dashboard.

We’ll see how this pans out in the coming weeks. Stay tuned…. and buy Apple stock.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 12:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.