WWDC Post Conference Thoughts

As everyone predicted the iPhone was the major focus of this year’s WWDC keynote. My prediction of Apple spending a great deal of time on 3rd party developers was true as well. It is crystal clear at this point that the iPhone/Touch is truly a platform. Its future is greater than any other smartphone on the market today. Really in a league of its own. The iPhone focus was so intense, Apple’s new OS announcements were pushed out of the spotlight to an afternoon session. Clearly, Apple is throwing a tremendous amount of resources at the iPhone platform. The keynote was all about creating the most compelling case possible regarding 1) iPhone Enterprise capability 2) iPhone SDK components and 3) End user features. Never before have I seen such an overt attempt by Apple to reach out to the Enterprise and Development communities individually or at the same time.

Additional observations:

The stand out feature with long term potential is Apple’s Core Location. Core Location allows applications to take advantage of an iPhone users whereabouts. With the new iPhone, location content will be determined by wifi, cell or GPS. The potential of leveraging a user’s location is unlimited. Examples include applications that can deliver new content based on where you’re located and social networking applications.

Sega’s gaming demonstration was fascinating. The iPhone IS a game console. It won’t replace the Gameboy anytime soon, but mobile gaming on a phone has been reinvented.

I appreciate Apple’s attempt to minimize power and processor consumption by disabling applications running in the background. The big unanswered question, until the keynote was, how does an application in the background alert the user if it is disabled. Apple’s answer is a background service that provides a push notification service that sends all application messages through Apple and then to the device. This feature won’t be available until September and there are lots of unanswered questions related to how it will work, but we now have more clarity on how developers should plan on alerting users of application events when they are in the background. Got that all you Instant Messenger developers?

I was disappointed by the uninspiring end user features. End user features were barely covered and not demoed. The end user features are hardly the focus of the development team at this point as Apple has bigger fish to fry in terms of adoption. The features announced are welcome, but hardly inspiring. Perhaps seeing the enhancements will help create more enthusiasm. Not much to speak of with the limited coverage at the event. I want my copy and paste functionality!

The keynote covered more details on the App Store. Of note, businesses will have the ability to push applications to business owned iPhones. This was yet another example of Apple bending over backwards for the enterprise environment.

Apple’s new MobileMe is a very attractive service It replaces the aging Dot Mac service with a new set of features and experiences (more remains the same than changes). The last time Dot Mac was upgraded, the results were hardly impressive and failed to keep up with other mail vendors such as Google. If Apple’s implementation is as good as the demo, Apple will finally position itself with a strong web platform for email, calendar and contacts. It will also provide non enterprise Blackberry users with a justification for leaving Blackberry.