These are some really... unlikely predictions. Especially this one:
Xcode for the iPad: This is more of a wet dream, but Apple is building on the iOS as their main operating system for the future, and to get the real hardcore users to move to it, they have to make an IDE available. The main reason I gave up on my iPad and gave it to my mom was the lack of a good IDE (plus she really liked it :-).
This one makes me a little ill. Who would ever choose to develop in a crippled OS on underpowered hardware with no keyboard?! Argh it's like sometimes I feel there are two groups of software developers and I'm in the increasingly shrinking sane one. Fortunately, everything from Apple indicates the exact opposite about OS X and that OS X is more likely to become a developer-only environment than iOS to become any kind of development environment.
Or if it's even possible. Doesn't the iPad 2 have 512mb of RAM? You'd have to do some serious black magic to run a heavy weight IDE, compiler/linker and underlying OS in that footprint.
Xcode is a monster as is. The UI is now streamlined in Xcode 4 (atleast somewhat), but scaling it down, no way this will happen any time soon. Apple doesn't seem to be too keen on making developer tools for iPhone/iPad: there's a lot that could be done in the space. (See the spare tools app for Android)
The widget prediction is very unlikely to happen, because that's what Apple was trying to get rid of in the first place. At least that's what I think.
For example, many of the Apple's original iPhone apps were adapted from Mac OS X dashboard widgets. The clock, calculator, notes, and weather widgets all were Mac OS widgets before they became apps. Apple just invented a new device form-factor exclusively for the widgets.
Why would they mess this clear division up by introducing widgets for iOS?
Besides, do you really need widgets that are always visible? Widgets on the homescreen or on the lockscreen would show information to you without you expressing an intent to view it. Wouldn't this potentially be distracting? Wouldn't you potentially waste your time by looking at and interacting with the widgets instead of doing things that you actually turned the device on for, because the widgets are the first thing that you see when you turn it on?
Let's say you turn on your iPhone to look something up on Wikipedia while you are at home on your couch. But then you suddenly see in a widget that you have new unread emails. If the email catches your attention you would likely read it. In this case you would likely forget what your original intent was.
You forget your original intents when you have widgets that contain interesting information, because those intents only live in your short-term memory and also there's nothing to help you remember, because most likely you don't write notes for small tasks.
I think this is also part of the reason why Apple has to refine the notification system. By showing those distracting dialog boxes on the lockscreen which demand a decision, the notification system does the same thing to you.
As a user of an Android phone... you have no idea how much you'll miss widgets until you've had them for an extended period of time. As soon as I unlock my phone I immediately see the weather at a glance, if I have any appointments coming up, the song I'm playing right now, and a ticker of the latest news from my RSS feeds. If either of those things are something I would have otherwise forgotten to check on, then it's given me an excellent reminder. If not, then nothing's lost and I can continue on to the app that I intended to use to begin with.
Not to mention all the stuff it gives to you as a power user, like being able to instantly switch my GPS or Wifi on or off without having to navigate through several settings screens.
You have a very good point there which I didn't think about while writing this. Still I think most iOS users have android widget envy... and Apple wants to satisfy them.
I seriously doubt iOS users have any kind of Android anything envy. Especially if they tried Android and its rightful predecessor, Windows Mobile. That is where widgets came from, actually.
I think a more "Apple-y" design choice than full-scale widgets will be "active icons".
There would be an API for an application to update its icon. The canonical example would be that the weather app could actually show the weather as its icon. (Similar to how Apple's built-in calendar app shows the current day.)
I'm as hopeful as you are, but they hired Peter days ago. I think his hiring is more about picking up an extremely talented iOS programmer than anything else.
With icloud, I'm really hoping for shared saves on games between devices. Ie I play a game on my iPad; then when I grab my iPhone I can pick up the same game where I left off.
> Cloud storage API: 3rd party apps will have access to iCloud storage as if it was local on the user's device.
Yeah something like Steam Cloud would be nice, especially if it can be made available from outside iOS, via the user's iTunes Store account. Still, there's the conflicting updates issue to solve.
> Lock screen is bye bye: there was no reason to have the lock screen to begin with
Some people actually enjoy the idea that their personal data will not be immediately available to anyone taking their phone.
Mail is allowed to sync whenever it wants, why shouldn't my RSS reader do that too? One problem is the amount of data, but with wifi only, that shouldn't be a problem.
One solution though would be for Apple to host parsing scripts on their servers so that you could parse XML to a very compact proprietary format, or at least compress it.
Xcode for the iPad: This is more of a wet dream, but Apple is building on the iOS as their main operating system for the future, and to get the real hardcore users to move to it, they have to make an IDE available. The main reason I gave up on my iPad and gave it to my mom was the lack of a good IDE (plus she really liked it :-).
This one makes me a little ill. Who would ever choose to develop in a crippled OS on underpowered hardware with no keyboard?! Argh it's like sometimes I feel there are two groups of software developers and I'm in the increasingly shrinking sane one. Fortunately, everything from Apple indicates the exact opposite about OS X and that OS X is more likely to become a developer-only environment than iOS to become any kind of development environment.