Will you be attending the expo to give us a first hand account of what went down?

I personally have doubts about the iPhone/whatever. It’s hyped, sure, but Apple hasn’t indicated that they want to move into that space. And, as Dan Benjamin and John Gruber said, they’d have to offer the entire top-to-bottom deal, which would be a ginormous undertaking, just to improve the user interface of a mobile phone. I doubt it.

Also, I think most of the new stuff is going to be constumer related, not pro-related, given that it is MacWorld Expo, not WWDC.

I think you might be on to something about iTheater though. Although, I’m not sure the US has the broadband infrastructure to make it a reality (unlike, say, Sweden where just about everybody has 20-100 mbps). So that might be too early to be practically possible.

I’m seriously hoping for updated MacBook Pros, because I’m buying one next Tuesday whether or not they get updated or not. My 667Mhz TiBook has reached the end of its useful life…

(Hint: They have a new name!)

Same thing if you type something like “Dear John”; your word processor should pop up and begin a well-formed letter.

I think Word (at least on Windows) already does this, no? It’s been a while since I’ve used it, but I remember typing Dear So-and-so, and it popped up something like “it looks like you’re writing a letter! Can I format this as such?”

Tomas: Yep, definitely gutsy… but who wants another round of vague, vanilla predictions. I could very easily be 100% wrong about everything… we’ll see.

Sage: Ah yes, you’re right. “Mac Pro” is it? Shows how much I care about that pro desktop line these days.

Austin: Yeah, Word does this, but I’m talking about on any OS level. So you could literally just sit down in front of an OS with no applications open and start typing. Call it an “intention-aware” OS maybe.

The major studios we work with have shifted their attitudes towards BD in the past few months. One source even *claiming* that for future releases requiring advanced types of interactive features will not be released on both formats, instead they will only be released on HD-DVD. What’s winning the format war to date is the difference in advanced navigation frameworks of HDi (HD-DVD/Microsoft) and BD-Java (BD/Sun). Being initially biased towards the Java implementation, I quickly gravitated towards HDi (a mix of JScript, XML, SMIL, CSS3 and Markup).

I think the biggest sign for me was not too long ago when I read an interview with Don Eklund (Executive Vice President of Advanced Technologies, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment). Specifically this part:

“Another criticism of Blu-ray has been that it is also lagging behind HD DVD in terms of basic interactivity, such as the bookmark feature Warner has introduced on its HD DVD titles.

DE: We can do bookmarks and those kinds of interactive features with a Java-based disc. That’s not difficult to do. We have not actually found that there is a sizable consumer interest in the function, though.“
source: http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/feature_visitwithsony.html

Yet at the same time all our clients (the studios) are asking for more and more interactive features. That’s a telling contradiction to what Eklund is saying. Make your own conclusions on why he said it ;)

I’m curious to hear your reasoning.

I mean, unless Apple has fixed the broadband issue then my turnaround time with Netflix is about the same as my download time for a viewing experience of equal quality. Not an entire exageration when you consider HD quality.

iPhone: unless they have teamed up with a proved phone maker, a.k.a Nokia, then it could suffer the same issues that the Motorola had with their interface.

Would be cool though

Like I said… I could be wrong. Perhaps the timing isn’t right yet, but I think with standard DVD quality as the benchmark, it’s feasible today.