WWDC 2013 

Tomorrow, Apple opens WWDC with the normal keynote, and for the first time in a while, I don't think anyone really has a clue what to expect.

Everyone out there is making their predictions, so I thought I'd make mine. Of course, hours before I finished typing this, I listened to the most recent Accidental Tech Podcast and they pretty much hit on my expectations. But I figured I'd shared them anyway.

In iOS 7 (which I think we're all pretty sure will be announced), I'm betting on two major changes: the ability for apps to share and edit the same data, and some sort of background processing API.

For the former, I'm guessing that there will be some changes to iCloud to support data sharing—letting apps see data from other apps, where maybe you'll have to approve that the app can edit the data, which would (behind the scenes) drop a symlink into its data store, so that both apps can see an edit the data. You could remove access for an app to see data, but different apps could all see and edit files if allowed.

(Another thought would be iCloud doing away with the per-app storage and moving to some sort of file-type based store.)

I would also guess that apps will be able to expose that they can handle certain file types and you'll see that in the share widget. There's going to have to be some way to edit those share widgets; if I install a few different apps that say they can handle text files, it might get unwieldy to see a list of 30 apps that I have to scroll through to pick out the one I want. But hold and tap to remove from the widget would seem to work.

Newsstand can trigger a background update of content for the apps that live in it. It would be nice to expand that ability to all apps. Either triggered on a schedule (wake up and run this code—not the full app—every four hours) or maybe started by a push notification, the ability for an app (let's say an RSS reader or Instapaper or Omnifocus or the like) to grab some data and update themeselves in the background, without destroying the phone's battery.

On the Mac front, I don't have a lot of predictions, but if Apple could update iPhoto to do wireless sync, it'd be nice. And maybe having a second display not be useless when your using a full-screen app. Small wishes.

The WWDC Keynote is always an interesting beast. It's dork heaven, but maybe not the most interesting thing to not developers/technologists. It starts at 1pm ET and will likely distract half of our engineering and ops teams and ruin our productivity.