Yebot

One year ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall, vice president of Platform Experience tag-teamed a demo of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The demo revolved around 10 key features. Jobs mentioned that there were three features of Leopard that they wanted to keep secret. Here is my speculation as to what these three features are. We should find out in about two hours from now when Jobs takes the keynote stage for Apple’s WWDC 2007 today at 1pm.

1. Multi-Touch - The rumor mill is abuzz about a new touchpad device that is supposed to replace the mouse as a primary navigation device for a Mac. While I don’t agree with the hardware aspect of this rumor, I do suspect that all of the Multi-Touch technology that Apple has crammed into the iPhone will ultimately find use in Leopard. (e.g. Two-finger zooming, iPod-esque “throw” scrolling, etc)

2. Enhanced User Interface - One of the coolest eye-candy features of Leopard is the implementation of Core-Animation. My expectation is that the default Leopard interface is going to use this technology in the finder and other system interface elements. (Don’t be surprised to see the addition of resolution independence to the overall GUI too.)

3. Mobile Widgets - There are rumors of a forthcoming SDK for developers to port desktop apps to the iPhone. The WWDC is an ideal place to launch such a technology. I believe that this SDK will manifest itself not as an update to Xcode, but as an update to Dashcode. Picture an enhanced Dashboard that allows an iPhone owner to drag a Dashboard widget to their iPhone for use on the go.