What’s coming up in 2010

With 2009 in the books, and people starting to see the reality of the app store, I imagine we will see a general decline in the app craze that currently surrounds us. New platforms, and devices, create a sort of gold rush when they are announced. As technologies change quicker and quicker these gold rushes get shorter and shorter. I think it is obvious that as more apps are released and as more developers enter the marketplace, flawless common experiences will be required for apps to be successful. Things like sharing (Twitter, Facebook, Email) are likely to all assimilate as more open source modules for this are introduced. I think an emerging market right now are applications based around accessories. Apple just this month rolled out iPhone accessories for checkout at Apple Stores, along with several others. I imagine we will see things like universal remote adapters, fm transmitters, heath care accessories, scales, and gaming controllers. If these kinds of devices are introduced and gain some popularity it will help to solidify the iPhone in the marketplace, as accessories for any device are really a sort of investment in them. In terms of development changes in 2010, I’m sure we will see SDK 4.0 being released at some point. I can’t speak to new features since they would all essentially be guesses, but I do see apple enhancing one specific type of operation in the next OS revision. A great new feature in OS 3.0 was the introduction of NSOperation and Core Data (Tutorial coming soon I promise!). These tools are Apple’s solution for simplifying the interface to SQLite and NSThreading. I could see apple adding even more abilities to these classes to make background processing even simpler. This could eventually lead to Apple letting the next iPhone run apps in the background like the Palm Pre and some Android distributions.