What I Want From WWDC 2011

In less than 24 hours, we’ll know what iCloud is, what Tiger entails and how iOS 5 will change the way we use our iPhones and iPads.

For my money, I’m hoping to hear how Apple has introduced a better file sharing system than what they have in iDisk. I love Dropbox, and it does about 75 percent of what I want. That last 25 percent, however, is killer.

That last 25 percent is seamlessly moving files between my MacBook and my iPad. It’s keeping every machine I have in perfect sync. That’s what I want.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball predicts this in his WWDC 2011 Prelude:

Syncing data between devices tends to work best when there’s a canonical store. I.e. with Dropbox, you might have three, four, five devices syncing data on the same account. The canonical central store, however, is Dropbox’s cloud-based server. With iPhones, iPods, and iPads, the central store for almost all data stored on the devices is iTunes running on your Mac or PC.

With iCloud, that should shift to the cloud. iTunes, the desktop app, currently syncs the following things with iOS devices: audio, movies and TV shows, iBooks e-books, App Store apps, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, notes, and any sort of files shared between iOS apps. All of these things would be better served syncing over-the-air via the so-called cloud.

As it was put to him, “think of iCloud as the new iTunes”. That would be a good start. I’d prefer it be an ingenious combination of iTune and Dropbox. That would be the perfect announcement for me.

Streaming music will be nice, but it’s a far secondary concern for my workflow.