WWDC 2011 AppleTV Apps And iCloud For App Developers
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2011
Tomorrow begins WWDC 2011, the annual Worldwide Developer Conference for iOS developers and Mac OS developers. ArcTouch’s San Francisco based app development team will be there for the entire 5 days. There’s been alot of speculation about what is going to be announced at the WWDC keynote address, but here’s two things that ArcTouch would like to see.
AppleTV Apps
AppleTV makes it simple to enjoy your music, photos, and video through your TV/home theater system in the comfort of your living room. ArcTouch believes that what’s coming next is AppleTV apps. Imagine the possibilities if you could install any of the hundreds of thousand of iOS games on your AppleTV? It would put Apple on equal footing in the living room with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, and open up a whole new world of possibilities for iOS app development companies like ArcTouch.
We hope that at WWDC Apple opens up the AppleTV platform, much like they opened up the iPhone platform 3 years ago, and allow 3rd party developers to create apps for the AppleTV. We would be excited to see an updated version of Xcode and iOS software development tools that help you reformat your apps to take advantage of the AppleTV UI with minimal effort. We would also expect that AppleTV apps could be developed that allow the AppleTV and other iDevices (iPhone/iPod touch/iPad) to work together. We believe you’ll use your iPhone/iPod/iPad devices as external controls to your AppleTV – like game controllers. The screen on your iDevice will be a companion display to the app running on the AppleTV, and your touch gestures or shake/tilt movement on the iDevice will control the app on the AppleTV (think like a Wii controller). Imagine of a sporting game app, such as multi-player football, where each player controls their team and can set their plays on their own iDevice, but the rest of the game runs on the AppleTV. Now THAT would be fun!
iCloud For App Developers
Apple announced they will be unveiling something called iCloud at WWDC. There is wide speculation that iCloud is a cloud service offering for streaming music to consumers’ iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Mac/PC and AppleTV. Although this is a likely component of it, ArcTouch feels that there must be more to the iCloud announcement, since the unveiling is during WWDC – a developer-oriented event and not a consumer-oriented event.
We’re hoping that iCloud is also for app developers, and provides a suite of cloud-based services that helps iOS developers create better apps in a shorter amount of time. We can imagine something very similar to the cloud services provided by Amazon’s Web Services or Google’s App Engine. Xcode and the iOS SDK can be updated to provide developers with the building blocks that allow their apps to easily connect to and use cloud services for user storage, synchronization and playback. Cloud services would allow developers to minimize much of the heavy lifting of setting up and managing IT infrastructure. They are cost-effective, reliable, scalable, and secure. This would fit nicely with AppleTV apps, since the AppleTV is more of a streaming device and has little local storage, so it could rely on the iCloud services for access to app specific content.
We’re sure that it’s going to be an exciting week at WWDC and we look forward to whatever is announced, but AppleTV apps and iCloud services for app developers would cross off two items on our wish list. We’ll be waiting on line for the keynote at 7:30 AM tomorrow at the Moscone Center with our fingers crossed!