Some crazy Apple rumors (having nothing to do with Crazy Apple Rumors) have been floating around about why Apple has moved the date of their annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) to June instead of May. One of the stories is that Apple is doing it to coincide with an announcement of PPC 970 based Power Macs. Since I'm too lazy to register with MacRumors to comment, I'll lay down my comments here:
Basically, I don't think this is going to happen, for two reasons:
Of course, I have some rebuttals to my own statements. Apple has been wanting to take more control of their announcements (as mentioned above) so that unfinished technology doesn't cause Apple to deliver a "disappointing keynote" and all the stock and press related activity that results (when the keynote is usually just fine - except the crazy rumored teleportation technology was nowhere in sight!). They may reshape WWDC 2003 into a larger beast. Apple's QuickTime Live event has already been folded in to WWDC. Apple may choose that time to add in some hardware announcements as well (beyond just display price changes). Also, Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) has a lot of crazy rumors and speculation circling around it. A prominent speculation is that it will support 64 bit processors (like the PowerPC 970). With the 970 out there, and with its high (projected) clock speeds, it certainly would be stupid for Apple not to be going for it. It makes more sense than the perennial Intel/AMD speculation, since there would be little (or no) need to support multiple chip architectures (which Mac OS X does support as part of it's NeXT heritage, but users aren't likely to wait for the major software vendors to ship recompiled versions of their software again, after waiting so long for many apps to show up on OS X in the first place). But - it's Apple, and it's under the reign of Jobs, who has proven time and again that anything can happen.
To throw my wild speculations into the mix, I'm hoping to see a slow migration back towards OpenDoc style interoperability. The iLife applications show four separate applications all doing some kind of advanced communication with each other. The next generation of AppleWorks is rumored to be comprised of separate applications instead of a single monolith. One of these applications is apparently named "Document". The Jaguar Address Book, which makes its contact entries available to other applications, could be seen as another sign of things to come (in fact, there are other Address Book applications that offer more functionality while still using/writing to the general Address Book database for use by other apps). And finally, I wouldn't be surprised to see a smarter file system / Finder make its way into Panther. This is all hope, however, I have no real evidence that anything is heading in these directions. Although, there are a couple of interesting entries in the WWDC track listing:
Cocoa Text
The text system has always been one of the central components of Cocoa, but this year it's getting some exciting new features that will make it more useful and powerful than ever. We'll briefly review the architecture of the Cocoa text system, then dive in and show you how to start making use of its new capabilities.
SearchKit: A Powerful Text Indexing and Searching Framework
SearchKit is a powerful C language framework for searching, indexing, and summarizing text. Formerly known as AIAT (the Apple Information Access Toolkit) or by its code name V-Twin, SearchKit is the engine that provides fast content searching in Finder, Address Book, and Mail. Attend this session to learn how you can take advantage of this framework to provide similar functionality and powerful information access capabilities within your Mac OS X application.