Quote:
Originally Posted by
PopinFRESH 
I'm thinking Mac OSX 10.7 Cougar. As for "features" of 10.7 I'd have to say that anything really consumer facing that was dropped from 10.6 to develop the foundation will get revisited.
New Marble UI will likely be introduced?
I see a bigger expansion of MobileMe integration with the system (TimeMachine) and iLife '11
OpenGL will get fully updated to 100% support of all versions including the latest version
OpenCL will be expanded into the core frameworks
New interfaces will be included such as facial recognition, head and eye tracking, etc..
who knows what else they might add, I'm hoping for a peak at WWDC '10 but I'm thinking it will be mostly focused on new iPhone hardware, and new iPhone OS4 features for that new hardware, and demoing pandora as background app, some games with fast app switching, and a few other examples of the multi-tasking modals. they increased the $$$ for a ticket by more than $300 so maybe this year the 5000 attendees will get a new iPhoneHD/4G instead of a dev preview of 10.7
Welcome the boards PopinFRESH.
I agree. Apple will likely unify the whole OS so that it doesn't look like a hodge podge of UI elements from 3 generations of OS X.
Mobileme 2.0 hopefully should show up this year and by the time 10.7 hits more Cloud features will be rolled into the OS. Apple's NC Datacenter will be operational and there to take the additional load.
Open GL 4.x will ship with 10.7 which will provide full backwards compatibility with OpenGL 3.x yet give Apple and others pretty much every features they'd want for games and general 3D work.
OpenCL 1.1 will be delivered which will integrate nicely within a OpenGL workflow and will erase alot of those maiden voyage kinks.
Apple will deliver a new filesystem. The filesystem will be heavily metadata infused. It'll have data corruption prevention features and it'll allow Time Machine to only back up delta file changes (block level). We may even get dedupe features for secondary storage.
Apple will bring the notification system from the iPhone to the Mac and like Growl. Instead of RAM hungry helper apps running in the background eating up cycles applications that need to "listen" in will use a similar system to what's on the iphone. Keeping the OS running lean and mean.
Quicktime X will take a LARGE leap forward (right now it doesn't support enough features to power Final Cut Studio to 64-bit). 10.7 QTX will change that.
Software update will support more 3rd party apps.
CoreData goes multi-user (finally)
Resolution Independence is delivered (finally)
Xcode 4.0 makes it much easier to move code from Mac to iPhone. This is important because Apple may begin to place an ARM chip on board
future Macbooks. This would allow the Macbooks to run essential apps like retrieve mail, twitter feeds, etc based on a scaled down iPhone like OS.