I’m not a professional software programmer. I don’t have years of Apple or Macintosh programming experience. That said, I’d like to offer some predictions of things we’ll see at Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference. I base the predictions on hours of reading writeups of the Apple/NeXT merger and my recent foray into learning Objective-C:

1. Xcode 2.4/3.0 with the ability to compile for Windows.
2. Dashboard widget development environment.
3. MacPro desktop announcement.
4. Mail.app gains a tabbed interface.

The first one on the list is easy since NeXT had a library of code for Windows years ago. You can bet hard cash that if they’ve been running MacOS X on bastardized Intel motherboards for 5 years, they’ve got Cocoa libraries for Windows. Add the defacto endorsement of Parallels Workstation you have a developer’s wet dream: Mac and Windows apps using roughly the same code base all developed and tested on a single piece of hardware.

The second one on the list is easy to see: the WebKit open source project has been compiling a javascript debugger for about a month and distributing it in nightly builds. The only thing left is a unified app with that code and a good user interface.

Third is obvious too–Intel announced new processors recently and that’s similar to what happened when the iMac with Core Duo was announced.

Fourth is more of a stretch because you have to read the tea leaves of the descriptions of WebKit code commits. When the developers upload new code, they generally put a note of some kind in the code management system that will help them remember why they did it. I’m having trouble finding the right one or two that said this, but the gist was fixes concerned tabs opened in Mail.

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