Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

Is it just me, or is every developer blogging their predictions about WWDC this year?

Not wanting to miss out on the fun, I guess I should come up with at least one. If it's interesting enough, maybe Brent will link to it; he seems to be maintaining the master archive of these. :-)

So my prediction has to do with resolution independence. It's been a technology that has been sort of available for developers, using the "Quartz Debug" utility, so I won't be surprised to have it show up more center-stage in Leopard. But I think it's going to be more than what people expect, being able to just set their resolution to some fixed DPI that works with their monitor's capabilities and the user's sharpness of vision. (I know how precious pixels are; many people with decent vision would just set their resolution to the maximum possible, even if there menu bar ended up being 1 mm tall!) No, that would be boring and not Apple-like. Think of how you read a printed map (compared to a Web-based map), for instance ... the detail is there if you want it; you can get closer to the map to see the tiny printing, or step back and get the big picture. What if this were also the case with your interaction with your Mac? So I'm predicting that Apple will come up with some technique, probably working in concert with Quartz Extreme, that will be much cooler. I don't know what it will look like, but I think it will be a really cool "zoom" kind of funcationality that will allow you to bring windows "closer" and "farther" or some other kind of metaphor that allows you to really take advantage of higher screen resolutions without wasting pixels.

Sorry, that's all I have time for now ... I'll be happy to add some more predictions to my list after the keynote, though!