Despite the attempts at secrecy, there are some large (and perhaps small) elephants in the room that Apple is bound to acknowledge in some way. These range from the necessity to acknowledge the ascendancy of JavaScript as a serious complement and competitor to Apple's own iOS to the ways that the rise of wearables and location-based devices (the Internet of things, the networked home) will lead to a radical simplification of the design sensibility of iOS and the apps made with it.
I have JavaScript on the brain after writing two stories on the launch of the Famo.us platform this week (read Part I and Part II here.) One of the particularly surprising aspects of these stories is the integration with one of open source app platforms that
In all of the sessions and labs there is only one mention of JavaScript (more will surely be announced at the keynote.) The session entitled "Web Inspector and Modern JavaScript" will cover, "Web Inspector, the powerful debugging tool in WebKit, is now available to JavaScriptCore-based apps. Find out how to leverage Web Inspector in your WebKit- and JavaScriptCore-based apps on iOS and OS X. Gain an overview of what's new in the JavaScript language and how to use modern JavaScript in your apps." This is an interesting acknowledgement of how prevalent hybrid JavaScript-inside-of-iOS apps have become, and the increased support in Web Inspector will make this process even easier for developers.
The really big question (the big/small elephant) is how much of a presence the iWatch will have at WWDC. Very few Apple watchers expect an actual product reveal next week, but I think it is highly likely that it will be alluded too fairly directly in terms of its anticipatory impact on iOS 8. I would expect subtle, teasing product placements for the iWatch to appear in some of the WWDC keynote videos. Much screen-shoting, tweeting and meme-ing will ensue!
As you can see from the iWatch concept app designs above by Dutch designer Nermin Hasonovic, simplicity rules the wrist. To be effective, smartwatch apps have to convey a single quanta of information that can be interacted with a minimum of attention and gesture. In many ways, "wrist first" is the ultimate "mobile first." Luke Wroblewski, who coined the term "mobile first" and wrote a book of the same name, argued that if companies pruned their web content down to what would work on a phone screen first they would discover that much of what was on their websites didn't need to be there. Doubling down on that same approach gets you "watch first." This idea really applies to apps with simple functions that are even capable of being usable on a 2-inch screen.
This simplification of core methods and concepts in iOS is the second shoe dropping after the introduction of "flat" design in iOS 7. It will also provide a further linkage between iOS and Mac OS X in the form of dashboard gadgets that, in principle, could retain configuration between desktop, tablet, phone and smartwatch.
One of the best concept imaginings of the iWatch hardware, designed by San Jose creative director Mark Bell of Belm Designs (see video below), is a great guess at what Jony Ive might do with a round, minimalist iWatch, but it completely gets the scale of the interface wrong. Not only are many elements too small to be usable (or even legible) at watch scale in his screen designs, but he also does not account for the importance of minimizing power usage for core apps as a way of being able to afford the requisite slim silhouette. Don't look for video on your wrist any time soon, sorry Dick Tracy.
The widely rumored Healthbook app should be included in iOS 8, iWatch or not. Allowing developers to work with phone-based versions of the health monitoring apps could help sort out which functions and displays can eventually live on the wrist (see image below) as opposed to admin functions that can only be managed on an iPhone or iPad. But once the simplicity required by a small (and especially circular) screen takes hold among designers it will have a "mobile first" effect across wider swaths of apps.
Reports about Apple's advance into the connected home market are another point in this same trend. Dutch designer Martin Hajek created a concept below of what a central hub "iHome" device might look like. It, too, will require very simple interface design because it will need to be viewed, in many cases, from across the room. There is a ccalculus at play here between the size of the screens that Apple is managing and the distance from which they are viewed. Why isn't Hajek's design round, like the iWatch is supposed to be and like the earpieces of Apple's new Beats headphone line? Well, there is that company called Nest that Google bought...
There will clearly be a play between round interfaces that imply a focal point, as is rumored for the iWatch and the continuation of rectangular displays that work well for displaying arrays of icons. AS you can see in the Mark Bell iWatch video above, grids beyond 2 by 2 don't work that well in small, circular spaces. Apple's recently announced CarPlay system is an example of a rectangular display system that is intended to be interacted with by voice or quick gesture. This range between simple, one-point focused apps and simple arrays will likely be reflected in iOS 8 and lead to a new emphasis on simplicity in screen design for all apps.
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