Commenting on unannounced products? Pinch me!

In a short, but extraordinarily revealing interview with Greg Joswiak, head of iPod and iPhone product marketing, Joswiak gives Extremetech the lowdown on three burning questions about the future of iPhone: cut and paste, GPS driving directions (aka speech synthesis) and office productivity suites (think iWork Touch). MacPredictions is still heady with excitement that three of this blog’s favourite topics could be discussed so openly by such a senior Apple staffer.

In a nutshell, cut and paste is coming, so are GPS driving directions (and therefore, presumably, speech synthesis services) and Jowsiak sees no obstacles for the development of 3rd party office suites, except perhaps the absence of a “cross-application file structure.” Sadly, Extremetech did not apparently get a chance to ask the obvious follow-up questions - when will you introduce a Finder-style file browser, and will Apple produce an iWork suite for iPhone. Nonetheless, in one blog posting, Extremetech have given us more than we often get in an entire keynote. I think I need to go and find somewhere to lie down now.

(link via MacNN)

More surprises in store for 11th? iWork Touch?

All has been quiet on the predictions front for a while now. The truth is, there just hasn’t been much to say, so Mac Predictions hasn’t said anything. In the meantime, this blog did enjoy getting the BBC’s attention with our last post - despite referring to them (with some accuracy) as the “British broadcast monopoly.”

But as the biggest day of the year for Apple approaches - iPhone 3G day - the time has come to post a new prediction. What surprises (if any) does Apple have in store for us this Friday? Here’s what we know to expect:

• iPhone 3G launch
  
• iPhone 2.0 firmware download
  
• App Store
  
• Free Apple Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback

This last item was inadvertently revealed by Apple with the developers pre-release version of iTunes 7.7. It’s a great idea - a free app, downloadable from the App Store, for iPhone and iPod Touch, which will presumably allow the user to browse an iTunes library on a remote Mac or PC, using a combination of Bonjour and WiFi. And in combination with Apple’s AirTunes solution for wireless streaming of music to a hi-fi, it may finally complete Apple’s living room audio solution. In terms of the remote interface on the iPhone itself, MacPredictions envisages that this will appear almost identical to the iPhone’s own iPod application - right down to browsing album art in Cover Flow.

Launching a free, high-value App like this is certainly a great way to incentivize users to trial the new App Store, although to be honest, Mac Predictions thinks it would have been more elegant to integrate this functionality into the iPod app itself - perhaps with the option to browse and pair with additional iTunes libraries via a new “Sources” menu in preferences, similar to Apple TV. In the iPod app, a new “Sources” icon would then appear alongside “Songs,” “Artists,” “Albums,” etc. But hey, who are we to challenge Apple on this point. If it must be a separate app, so be it!

...Anyway, what does Apple’s new, free Remote app tell us? Simply this: Apple has surprises up their sleeve for this Friday, and the Remote app may not be the only one. Our bet is that they’ll have more than just free App’s up their sleeves. It seems unlikely that Apple will take a back seat and allow 3rd parties to have all the fun with iPhone app development. That’s hardly been their strategy with the Mac after all. Sure, they bundle free apps with the Mac, such as Mail, Calendar, Safari, etc. But they have plenty of premium apps as well, such as iLife, iWork, Final Cut Studio, Aperture and Logic. Isn’t it likely that they’ll pursue a similar strategy with iPhone?

Why would they not have announced such a plan last month at WWDC? Perhaps because it wouldn’t be very diplomatic to highlight to their community of developers who are just beginning to embrace the iPhone SDK that they’re going to be competing against Apple itself. This blog still believes that the first paid-for apps to see the light of day from Apple will be the mobile for iWork, which we anticipate will be called iWork Touch, and it could be coming as soon as this Friday.

Steve Jobs' February 2008 SDK Keynote [Part 2]

Time is running out for Apple to organize a February keynote - but since they haven't announced a delay in the SDK, we're assuming invitations will go out on Monday for an event on Thursday or Friday next week. We can but hope! In the meantime - enjoy this fantasy transcript, a continuation from the previous post.

Of course, Apple has got a lot of experience with office productivity software. Our iWork package has been hugely popular on the Mac. So it’s simple, right? We just port iWork to the iPhone… Wrong! Because it turns out that word processing on a mobile device is an entirely different kind of application to word processing on a desktop. And you can’t make a business presentation on a mobile phone screen – even a beautiful high-density widescreen like the one we put in the iPhone.

So what do people want to do with documents, spreadsheets and presentations on their phone? Well the main thing is that they want to view their documents – and you already can do that on an iPhone because we’ve got this great feature built right into our Mail application that let’s you do just that. It’s built on the same rock-solid technology we use for QuickLook in Leopard. And for many users, that’s all they need. Which is great.

But then, what if I want to do more than read the document? Maybe I’ve got ten minutes to spare on my way to a meeting, and so I take the opportunity to read through a document. But I have changes that I want to share with my colleagues, and I want to track those changes. It’s amazing, but as far as we know, there is no mobile software out there right now that let’s you track changes on Word documents. Now we couldn’t believe that, so we spent a lot of time looking, but we really couldn’t find any.

The next thing I might want to do is to make some comments on that document. Again, there isn’t much mobile software out there that allows you to do this, and there’s certainly no mobile software out there that makes it easy. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. We started from scratch to build a whole new kind of application – a mobile word processor that makes it really easy to read through documents, to track changes and to make comments. And I’d like to show it to you now. [Demo]

…so that’s Pages. But what about presentations?

We looked at the mobile presentation software out there, and a lot of it seems to be focused on letting you edit presentations. But we don’t think that’s what people want to do. Working with graphics isn’t easy on a handheld device. We just don’t think that people want to design this stuff on their phones. So what do people want to do with presentations on their phones? Simple – they want to present them. And there’s no slicker way of making a presentation than with Keynote.

So, we launched our Keynote application back in 2003, and the reaction has been huge. You see Keynote does the same thing as other presentation packages out there [show’s icon of PowerPoint on screen]. The difference is that Keynote does it a whole lot better. It really takes advantage of the amazing graphics capabilities in Mac OS X to deliver incredibly slick and impactful presentations. Well, the great news is that the same graphics technologies that Mac OS X ships with are also built right into iPhone. So we can deliver almost all of the amazing visual impact of Keynote from something as small and compact as an iPhone. It’s truly amazing. Of course, you’re not limited to viewing your presentations on the iPhone’s built in screen. You can plug in our Apple Component AV cable, and hook it right up to your TV. And today, we’re introducing a new iPhone compatible VGA cable, so that you can hook up your iPhone to any VGA display – it means you can leave you Mac behind, and still take your Keynote presentations with you on the road. And the great thing is that your iPhone turns into this wonderful remote. You see, we’ve made our VGA cable really thin and flexible, so that it doesn’t get in the way when you’re presenting. On your iPhone screen you have a big back and next button… you have speaker notes… you can even check out the next or previous slides. I don’t know any other presentation remote that lets you do all that.

So Keynote on iPhone really is a great new way to take presentations with you on the road, and you can even use it with PowerPoint presentations – you’ll just have to do without Keynote’s amazing graphics.

Then, of course, there’s Numbers. Now, not everybody loves number crunching – I guess only an accountant can really love a spreadsheet. But of course there are numbers that we all like to keep track of [shows chart tracking iTunes sales on an iPhone screen, to laughs from the audience]. Anyone in business has numbers that they need to have at their fingertips, and iWork Touch does exactly that. It literally puts your numbers at your fingers. You see it turns out that our MultiTouch interface is really great for working with spreadsheets. Scrolling across big spreadsheets is a breeze – and if you double tap on a cell, you can adjust numeric values with this neat slider, without even having to use the keyboard. Plus of course, there are all these great 3D graphs and charts. So that’s Numbers on iPhone.

So we have these three great applications. What do they all have in common? Well they’re all redesigned from the ground up as mobile applications – providing you with the stuff you need to carry on doing your job when you’re on the road. They all take advantage of our amazing MultiTouch user interface. They all work with our hugely popular iWork suite for Mac, and of course, Microsoft Office as well, including Office 2007 & 2008 for Mac.

So as you can see – with our new iWork Touch suite – Pages, Keynote and Numbers, we’ve re-invented mobile business software. And after today, I don’t think anyone will want to settle for anything less. But there are a couple more thing that all these applications need. [Copy & Paste appears in words on screen to another round of applause]. In fact it’s not just for iWork – as we’re getting more 3rd party apps, we’re going to need copy and paste system-wide. But how?

Well we already have this great magnifying glass that helps you to position your insertion point. Well now we’ve made it so that if you hold down one finger as you move the magnifying glass, it let’s you highlight text. They you can simply tap the highlighted text to bring up a context menu that gives you some options – you can choose cut; copy; make note; send as e-mail or send as text. Then when you want to paste, you just use the magnifying glass again to position the insertion point, and then tap the insertion point to paste the text. It’s that simple. Let me show you [Demo].

So that’s how we’ve done copy and paste. And we know a lot of users have been wanting this for a while now. Well it’s so simple to use, we think you’re going to find it was worth the wait.

But there is one more thing that we’re going to need for all these amazing new apps. On the Mac, we call if the “Finder” [Finder icon appears on screen]. It’s what we use to browse documents. And in Leopard, we introduced CoverFlow, so you can browser through these gorgeous large thumbnails of your documents. We’ll we thought – wouldn’t it be great to have that on your iPhone too, so that you can browse through documents using CoverFlow, just like you browse through your music. It’s amazing. This is a real, desktop class file browser, right here on your iPhone. And it couldn’t be simpler to use. Here’s how it works. We’ve got this new icon in iTunes, called “Documents” – it appears under your iPhone icon. You can either drag your documents straight to it, or you can set up a folder on your Mac or Windows PC to sync right onto your iPhone. But that’s not the only way you can send and receive files. You can…

• Sync with a folder on your Mac or PC via iTunes
• Save attachments from e-mail on iPhone
• Send and Receive files via Bluetooth from any compatible device
• .Mac integration, so you can access you iDisk directly from your iPhone via WiFi

Of course, you’ve got plenty of storage – whether you have the 8GB iPhone, or the new 16GB model that we launched last month. This is way more built-in storage than most smart phones come with, so there’s no need to fiddle around with tiny removable media – everything fits neatly into your iPhone.

So as we promised at the end of last year, today we’re launching our SDK. Although we’re admittedly pushing it a little for “February” – fortunately this year is a leap year! [Laughs from audience]. But it’s actually a whole lot more than just an SDK that we’re introducing today:

• iPhone Games
• Buy Software from iTunes Store
• Finder for iPhone with CoverFlow
• Bluetooth File Exchange
• Copy and Paste
• New iPhone VGA Cable support

We already had the world’s most advanced mobile wireless platform – now we’re taking the next leap – we’re calling it “iPhone 2.0 Software Update”. It’s available today. It’s free of charge to our iPhone customers, and it’s also free to all our iPod Touch customers who have purchased the January Software Update. [More applause]. Plus, once you've installed the update, you can buy iWork Touch from the iTunes store for $79.

Well, that’s all we have for you today – we’ve been working really hard on this over the past twelve months. The entire team have been putting in a monumental effort to make this update something truly special, and I think you’ll agree, they’ve done a fantastic job. Thank you.

apple

Steve Jobs' February 2008 SDK Keynote

The following is just creative writing for fun - it is entirely speculation based upon publicly available information.

So we have this fantastic new SDK for our touch platform. It means we can build more great apps. But what apps should we build? After all, the iPhone and iPod Touch already do so much.

Well the first question we asked was “do people really want to buy more apps?” It seems like most smart phone users decide to just stick with the software their phone comes with. And that’s no surprise when you see what’s involved in buying and installing software on most smart phones. I don’t want to name any names, but you know what I mean. It’s not a great experience today.

But then in January, we released a software update for our iPod Touch customers, and it turns out that the response has been huge. We were absolutely staggered by the numbers on this – in the first week after it was released, over XX% of iPod Touch owners had bought the upgrade. That’s an amazing number.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that people will buy software for their mobile devices, as long as we get three things right:

• Make it easy – buying mobile software right now is just too hard
• Make it good – let’s be honest, the downloadable mobile software on the market today just isn’t great
• Make it affordable – people don’t want to pay desktop prices for mobile software

So if people want to buy mobile software, what kind of software do they want to buy? Well let’s take a look at what kinds of software you get on a desktop Mac or PC:

• Multimedia already have the iPod built in
• Calendars already have a great calendar
• Communication already have world’s best mobile phone and desktop class e-mail
• Creative Professionals people don’t want to design or make music on their mobile
• Utilities don’t need utilities, iPhone works beautifully just as it is
• Education phones are not really for the classroom
• Games
• Business Productivity

That just leaves two areas – games and business. Well we’ve been selling games on our classic iPods for years now, and it turns out they’re really popular. But not with hard-core gamers. You know, we don’t have people playing World of Warcraft on their iPods. No. These games are different – they’re for mere mortals, and they’re fun. And one of our biggest games on the 5th generation iPod is from a company called PopCap, and it’s called Zuma. Well we gave PopCap an advanced copy of our SDK, and they’ve been busily working on developing some great games of our MultiTouch devices, including Zuma. These games are not simple ports – PopCap have really got into the whole touch interface thing, and it turns out that Zuma is even better with a MultiTouch display. And at this point, I’m delighted to introduce PopCap’s CEO, David Roberts who’s here to tell us all about it…

…Thanks David, that really was something special. So that’s games, and we think you’re really going to have a lot of fun with them. But what about Business? Do business users want to use an iPhone? Isn’t it really for fun stuff like music? Well in fact, ever since we launched the iPhone, AT&T, O2, T-Mobile and Orange have been inundated by requests for special business plans. Turns out most business users were no more impressed with the competitors’ offerings that we were. That’s why in January both AT&T in the US, and O2 in the UK announced new business plans. Because business users also want the full internet experience and desktop class e-mail on their mobile. But what else do business users want? Well what they really want is this… [shows graphic of spreadsheet, document and presentation icons moving onto an iPhone display, to a round of applause] That’s why today I’m delighted to announce a brand new Apple product, and the first piece of iPhone software that we’re going to make available on the iTunes store. iWork Touch. Because we felt this was a piece of software that was so important to the iPhone, that we wanted to do it ourselves, to make sure that we get it right.

Of course, Apple has got a lot of experience with office productivity software. Our iWork package has been hugely popular on the Mac. So it’s simple, right? We just port iWork to the iPhone… Wrong! Because Word processing on a mobile device is an entirely different kind of application to word processing on a desktop…

To be continued – Part Two this weekend.