This years WWDC will take place from 6 till 10 June. Traditionally, Apple will announce some of their new products and services in a keynote during this event. In the invites they send, Apple made clear that this years keynote will be mainly focused on software: “Join us for a preview of the future of iOS and Mac OS X”. If we can believe the rumors, the coming version of iOS will be changed dramatically. What do I think we can expect from the new iOS?
Improved notifications
With the release of iOS 3.0, Apple introduced a way to notify the user without having the application opened. The push notification service was a very often requested future, so people where glad it finally came to iOS. But pretty fast it became clear that way Apple had implemented their notification system wasn’t very pretty. Reports have indicated that the developer of the popular jailbreak notification application MobileNotifier, Peter Hajas, may have been working for Apple, to assist them with development on improving the way its iOS software notifies users.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses of iOS on this moment, and I’m 99,99% sure that this will be one of the improvements in the next version of iOS. It’s hard to say what the UI of a new notification system will look like. Interfaces like on Android are better notifiers, but I think it’s not a really Apple type of UI. As normal, I think Apple will present us a very clever way.
Lockscreen info
On this moment, the lockscreen displays only the current time and date, status bar, unlock bar and a customizable background image, while there is plenty of room to display a lot more information. It’s an ideal place for general information such as today’s event in your calendar, your latest e-mails, wheater information, facebook status updates and so on. Take a look a this concept by Federico Bianco (along with some other great concepts).
Widgets
There are a lot of rumours about widgets in the next version of iOS, but I think all of the concepts and ideas I’ve heard are simply not in line with the design philosophies of iOS on this moment. This is where I think iOS stands out of other mobile operating systems like Android. It’s always simple and elegant, something that widgets are not. I hope to be surprised by Apple, because the functionality of a widget is great. I hope they came up with a brilliant idea which will have the function of widgets, but the looks of the rest of iOS.
iPhoto for iOS
Media is a very important point for mobile devices and images even more. As the camera’s on iPhone are improving, the software haven’t been changed much. Steve Jobs said last keynote, after presention GarageBand and iMovie for iOS: “We love making Apps”. In the mean time there is a pretty big list of Mac software allready available in a iOS version:
- Keynote
- Pages
- Numbers
- GarageBand
- iMovie
- PhotoBooth
As I look at this list, I miss a very populair Mac app, which isn’t available for iOS. iPhoto for iOS can bring photo managing and editing right to the devices.
Conclusion
iOS is a very sophisticated mobile operating system, but in my opinion, delivering the best user experience compared to the competition. This is just a short list of possible new futures of iOS. I am looking forward the the coming keynote. As soon as a developer version of the new iOS will be available, I will post my experiences. Stay tuned via this website, Twitter, Facebook or the RSS feed! You can find these pages at the top of the page, in the header of this website.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
