You heard it here first. Apple will buy Tesla Motors. Yes, it's a crazy idea, but actually not so far off as you might think.

Apple has the cash. They also have the design and operations know-how. God knows they have the marketing acumen. An electric car is a pile of electronics and they have many engineers. The car industry, at least in this country, is out of touch with its customers, so ripe for the Apple touch. It's high-profile, begging to be integrated with practically everything, and all very glossy. Start high-end, move down-market, and create a whole new class of vehicle.

Can Steve and Jonathon resist? It would certainly be an amazing third act for Steve Jobs.

Tags: Wild Guesses, Apple, Cars

I'll be at WWDC next week, commuting daily from the South Bay. My iChat handle is bagelturf@mac.com, so feel free to say hi. I'm likely to be wearing one of these shirts, so you might be able to pick me out from the crowd of five thousand or so attendees.

I'll be there with my camera gear, including two lenses that were loaned to me by a friend, so there should be plenty of photos that week. Check my WWDC 2008 gallery for updates.

Predictions? A tough call as always. I have an almost 100% record of being wrong, but here goes:

1. 3G not only in the new iPhone, but in all new laptops from here on

2. A switch to LLVM as a base for all code compilation

3. A paid software update service for developers -- just like Software Update, but with more bells and whistles

4. A new .Mac offering scalable back-end services to iPhone developers

Tags: WWDC, Photography, Wild Guesses, Apple

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what will be in the next release of Aperture -- even as to whether it will be called 2.0 or 1.6 -- but now there are rumors starting to appear. I saw this one on DPReview. It's a typical "I have a friend of a friend whos hair cutter knows this guy who overheard two people on a bus talking" kind of rumor. So there is no way to know how accurate it is. There are so many things that could be changed or improved, that practically any subset would be believable. You can even see how people were thinking a while back at MacPredict (the site appears to no longer be updated).

What does appear to be unanimous is that either Apple will announce something at PMA this week, or thousands will defect to Lightroom. Apart from some bug fixes, it has been an awfully long time since any significant changes were made: 1.5 was released September 29, 2006 according to Wikipedia.

Fraser Speirs posted his wishes for Aperture a short time ago. And Eric Barzeski made his wish-list known a year ago and is itching for information. Sören Nils Kuklau has a list that he posted last year. Inside Aperture speculated some time ago, around the same time that Ed Fladung had a go. Chuqui hoped for 2.0 before Christmas 2007, but was disappointed.

My needs are modest, so I'm wishing for things like better speed and better keyboard navigation. For the product, I think the best thing that could happen would be a flexible plug-in architecture so that the application could be expanded by third parties. I would also like to be able to have Aperture handle all media types, not just photos, and to have a lightweight application that can read the database independently. That would allow plugins and automation scripts run at the same time as Aperture, so not interrupting workflow.

We shall see. I hope it's not Leopard-only because I'm still on Tiger, waiting for a compatible update to SuperDuper.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Wild Guesses, Photography, Anticipation

The big surprise at Macworld last year was that the keynote was pretty much about about one product: the iPhone. This year there seem to be many things that are already known: a slim laptop, an update to the iPhone, a new Apple TV and movie rentals. So none of these is probably the big thing. And the banners saying "There's something in the air" have everyone talking about wireless technologies.

[Update: Less then 100% wrong this year. Home storage yes, but not attached. In fact very unattached: Time Capsule. Apple is moving the world slowly to computer appliances. We did get the rambling CEO again]

Last year my predictions were 100% wrong. Throwing caution to the wind, I present my probably all wrong predictions for Macworld 2008:

A Home Storage System
I keep putting this one up, and one day I will be right. Nobody does home storage right, particularly for Mac users, so there is a big market opportunity there. I think it will not be a networked box (NAS), but instead will be locally attached for performance. If you want to make the storage available on the network, plug it into an Airport or a Mac. Software does the bridging.

Wireless Data Service In Every Laptop
WiMax is a little new to the market, so if Apple has built it into anything, they have been doing an awful lot of work with chip vendors and software in secret. It's quite possible that Apple is putting WiMax into everything portable, but more likely is the addition of 3G or EDGE into the laptops.

No Shows
This is not the venue for for a new release of Aperture. PMA is much more likely. There will also be no new iLife of iWork: we already got those last year. The no-show I am hoping for is the "other CEO" who comes in at about minute 35 and rambles with notes until the audience winces. I really think that Steve puts these in so we can deal with the calls of nature.

A New Mac
I think a new desktop Mac is quite likely. Something that fits between the high-end of the Mac Pro and the low end of the iMac. It would be bigger than a mini, with at least two hard drive bays and at least one open slot for a PCI card. This would keep many people happy who need some expansion and flexibility but don't have the wallet for a full-blown Mac Pro. What makes it possible now is the low-power Intel chips and the subsequent option to package the electronics compactly.

Multi-User Mac Software
This is a long shot, but I think it will come one day. The Macs are already multi-user, but not with with multiple simultaneous screens. This software will allow a number of people to plug mice, keyboards, and screens into one mac and all use that one machine as though it were their own machine. That makes things much cheaper for schools and other high-density applications.

A Recording Device
Except for building it into Macs, Apple has avoided making audio and video recording equipment of any kind. Even the iPhone and iPod can't record video or sound. So there is a product gap for some sort of device that does one or both. You sync it with your Mac or PC just like an iPod and iTunes tracks it in its library. What Apple can better the market with are ease of use, recording quality, and capacity. With iTunes, Garageband, iMovie, YouTube, all the infrastructure is in place for personal event recording, editing, and publishing. We just need the gadget.

Tags: Apple, Macworld, Wild Guesses, Server, Fun, MacPro, Wireless, iPhone, iMac, iMovie

Here we are at the start of 2008 and AAPL has a price of $198.08 per share. About a year ago when it was 91.66, I predicted that it would hit 160 by the end of 2007. To my surprise, it got there several months early (October), and has continued to rise.

In October 2007 I made another prediction: $225 by the end of 2008. That seemed pretty wild at the time, but soon after all the analysts moved their targets up and now they are mostly saying $225-$250 for the end of 2008. Some are toying with $300, and one has even said $600 in 18 months.

Just to confuse everyone Apple is notoriously conservative with their estimates, and so the analysts beef it up a little (and still come up short). Last quarter Apple was uncharacteristically bullish and everyone was surprised. But it seems that Apple was being conservative yet again, as all the indications are that this has been a blow-out season and the numbers will be very good again.

I got to $225 by taking $160 and adding 20% for growth and 20% for the "look out here they come" factor. Now the price is just shy of $200, I'm going to adjust my guess again. I'm increasing my annual growth estimate to 30% based on expectations for the Mac and iPhone, and adding 25% as the "look out here they come" factor. The latter is a wild guess based partly what I see in terms of realization that Apple really is taking over, and partly on the effect on the investing public of the products and stores. People go into the stores or buy the products for the first time and are so wowed that they (or their parents) go buy stock ASAP. For a high-flying stock AAPL has a remarkably small short ratio.

That puts my current wild guess at $310 for the end of 2008. It will be interesting to see what the quarter's results are like when they are announced January 22nd.

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, iPhone

A report that says iPhone browsing is approaching 0.1% market share has been causing a stir. It doesn't sound like a large amount, but the device has only been out for 5 months and that is a bigger share than a decade of Microsoft-based phones.

The stats for this blog show an even bigger percentage of mobile Safari users, close to that of Linux.

The yellow sliver is iPhone, and the blue sliver below it is iPod. Here are my numbers:

Macintosh	80.12%
Windows	17.97%
Linux	0.96%
iPhone	0.56%
iPod	0.22%
(not set)	0.12%

Here's the Wild Guess. Comparing my stats to those in the article, it is interesting to note that the ratio of Macintosh page views to the sum of iPhone and iPod page views is about the same: 100:1. So I conclude that roughly one in a hundred Mac owners have a mobile browser now. But with unit sales of Apple's mobile devices running something like 50% of Macs, I'd expect the 100:1 ratio to change dramatically over the next year: maybe to as much as 10:1.

Tags: iPhone, Linux, Microsoft, Apple, Browsers, Wild Guesses

Early in 2006, I predicted privately to friends and family that AAPL shares would close north of 90 at the end of 2006. In December 2006 when it was clear that my Wild Guess was correct, I made another Wild Guess, this time publicly:

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Earlier than I thought, AAPL has crossed 160. Today it closed at 167.91. Here is my currently absurd-sounding guess, made in August 2007:

I'll make another wild prediction, now we have the iPhone to play with: $225 by the end of 2008. Again that sounds like a lot, but I figure on continuing large gross margins and 20% growth, plus an extra 20% "look out here they come" factor. That will make AAPL seven tenths the size of MSFT, assuming MSFT stays static. And how could that assumption possibly be wrong?

It will be interesting to see how I do. Of course Microsoft is playing a huge part in Apple's current success. The market for computers, phones, PDAs, music players, and stores that actually work for their customers is huge, and only Apple is filling the demand.

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, Microsoft

Nine months ago, in December 2006, I made a wild prediction:

As I write, Apple is a $78.3B company and Microsoft a $288B company. I reckon that Microsoft has topped out, so Apple has to grow to less than four times its current size (3.6 times) to have a market capitalization greater than Microsoft. At 20% per year growth, that's only seven years. And during that time, they will eat a huge piece of the PC business away from the current players.

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Even though it has fallen recently and stands at 131.8 today, I still believe that 160 is possible by the end of the year. AAPL has gotten to within $11 of that goal already, and it's only a 21% rise. MSFT is at 28.96 today, with a market cap much the same as before, $271B, while AAPL has grown to $114B.

How is Apple doing this? With FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. But unlike Microsoft that spreads FUD to its customers, Apple is spreading FUD to its competitors, and doing it in spades. Over at ChangeWave, there is a nice graph that shows the effect:

These are bogus statistics of course, because all statistics are bogus. In this case the population is large, but very specific: early adopters. And that is the whole point. If Apple can rapidly and effectively swing early adopters away from your products, then your strategy is toast and you are faced with a great deal of FUD.

I'll make another wild prediction, now we have the iPhone to play with: $225 by the end of 2008. Again that sounds like a lot, but I figure on continuing large gross margins and 20% growth, plus an extra 20% "look out here they come" factor. That will make AAPL seven tenths the size of MSFT, assuming MSFT stays static. And how could that assumption possibly be wrong?

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, Microsoft, FUD

From my ignorant position as an outsider, I have three predictions for the super secret features that will be unveiled at WWDC 2007. Unfortunately one of them has just been stolen before I could make it. Sun's Jonathon Schwartz announced today that ZFS will be the default file system in Leopard. This is very good news. ZFS provides enormous advantages in flexibility, manageability and reliability over current file systems.

I better get the other two out before they get leaked as well:

OS-Level support for Windows NT applications
We already know that Apple is shying away from virtualization. But why is that? Because it still requires copies of Windows and all the problems that that entails. Much better is to run the applications directly, like WINE does. The implementation would include sandboxing so that Apple can provide a completely secure environment for running Windows apps. Apple could have been working secretly on this for many years and polishing it to perfection. It would provide the best upgrade path for companies who don't want Vista (almost all of them) and draw many more people from the Windows world.

A New Kernel
Mach has its problems and has needed a lot of work to make it granular enough to provide the performance needed by Mac OS X. So my third prediction is that Mach is out and something else is in. Be has shown us that a correctly-written kernel can provide excellent media, and real-time performance, so why would Apple not be doing this? It won't be Linux. My guess is that it will either be home-grown or something few people have heard of.

I am hoping that I will do better than my MacWorld 2007 predictions -- all wrong.

[Update: All wrong again. But then we've not seen the whole of Leopard, so I still could be right]

Tags: WWDC, Wild Guesses, ZFS, Microsoft, Apple

I have two [Update: three] predictions for Macworld 2007: one hardware and one software [and one squishyware] . I haven't seen anything close to these, so I'm either uniquely right or just as wrong as everyone else. [Post-keynote update: I scored zero out of three. However I hope I may simply be premature rather than plain wrong. There are plenty more announcements still to come before June since the Keynote concentrated on only two products, and the Beatles' music was conspicuous. You can also see how I did on the iPhone here]

Storage That Works
The hardware surprise is that Apple will show a home storage and streaming appliance. Specifically it will:

• House up to six drives
• Take the exact same drive modules as the MacPro
• Have dual Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo packet support and port trunking
• Have eSATA at 3Gbps, Firewire at 800 Mbps, and 802.11n wireless
• Support RAID and allow for incremental upgrades without downtime
• Have a built-in router
• Do back ups automatically in the background

Why? And who would want one?

The target market is the sub-SAN, sub-XServe content creation crowd, plus home power users. With six drives, the amount of storage is enormous and several RAID configurations are possible. It would be great with Aperture, Final Cut, or as a home streaming server for movies and music. The dual trunked Ethernet will allow direct connection to MacPros at maximum speed. With suitable switches it will work through a network as well. 802.11n wireless will let it stream to iTV with ease.

You can put it underneath the iTV and connect it with Ethernet, using the wireless to communicate with the rest of the world, or put it in a closet and use it wirelessly to the iTV, or put it next to a Mac and run it as a local storage box through Ethernet or eSATA or Firewire 800 and use it wirelessly at the same time. The built-in router allows you to wall off parts of the functionality among the network connections while still passing specific traffic.

Software That Sees
On the software side, the surprise will be Quicktime. Apple will show real-time facial recognition and object tracking and Steve Jobs will have even more fun showing it off than he did Photo Booth. It will let software treat scenes intelligently, allow iChat to know how many people are present, make games possible that use gestures, etc. You will have to wait for Leopard to get it though.

[Update: Final thoughts. I reckon that Paul McCartney and the remains of the Beatles will be there and will be providing some musical diversions]

What do you think? Any chance I am right?

Tags: Macworld, Apple, Server, Wild Guesses

Looking at this patent filing by Apple it appears that for Leopard 3D modeling will be used to generate interface elements. With all the talk of problems with huge bit maps and resolution-independence you would think there was a major crisis looming. I think otherwise. If you want an icon with a 3D look in Leopard, just give the OS a 3D model and a scene with lighting and it will build it for you when it is needed.

The problem with scaling 2D vector icons is that the vector data does not encode intent, just look. Fonts have the same problem: simply scaled vector fonts look awful because the scaling is applied without any knowledge of typography, visual cues, or alignment. Adobe and others solved this by adding hints to the vector data. For 3D icons, the shape encodes intent much better than for 2D, but hinting is almost certainly required for consistent quality. So I am predicting that Leopard will define a hinted 3D icon specification and provide tools that will give icon designers a clean resolution-independent environment.

Tags: Wild Guesses, Apple, User Interface

With all this talk of iPhones coming in January, it is interesting to speculate what Apple's overall strategy is. How will they get anyone to try it? What happens when someone decides to go Apple?

My wild guess is that from some point on (determined by the technology) every iPod will come with a phone built in. In just a few years there will be tens of millions of iPhones in circulation just waiting for their owner's contracts to expire.

And it will be very easy to try it out: just get an iTunes account and sync the iPod. Now you have a working phone and billing is automatic. Use the trail period of free calls to see how it works.

Tags: iPhone, Apple, Wild Guesses

In order to solve a problem, you have to solve the right problem. Obvious really, but not so easy to do in practice, because the root cause is not always waving a red flag.

There has been some interesting discussion online about the design of the Windows shutdown dialog -- or lack of it -- and that had led to more discussion about why Microsoft can't seem to fix things like this and get other things like the Zune anywhere near right. Much blame has been laid on the processes and systems Microsoft has in place to control the gargantuan thing that is Windows, and this comment came to its defense:

The people who designed the source control system for Windows were *not* idiots. They were trying to solve the following problem:
- thousands of developers,
- promiscuous dependency taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences
--> with a single codebase, if each developer broke the build once every two years there would never be a Longhorn build (or some such statistic - I forget the actual number)

And there you have it. Microsoft is trying to solve a problem that it should never have had in the first place: thousands of developers (ten thousand actually, costing $2B a year). Why? Promiscuous dependency? Why?

Let's look at what this does in real life. From this Slashdot discussion: Why Vista Took So Long

I'd also like to sketch out how actual coding -- what there is of it -- works on the Windows team.

In small programming projects, there's a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product.

In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository -- among other problems, the infrastructure just won't support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.

So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.

The end result of all this is what finally shipped: the lowest common denominator, the simplest and least controversial option.

Now contrast this to what happens Apple:

I used to work at Apple, in the OS and frameworks groups.

There is a master "train" for a release; projects that don't change are "forwarded" to that train, meaning no source changes are required. When a project needs to be submitted for a change for the new release, a new "view" is created for its specific changes. Every few days, a build is produced, sometimes using previously compiled bits from the old "train", sometimes its a full world build (which can take several days) but otherwise building all the latest submissions.

Then there's a fairly labor intensive "integration" phase where the built bits are all put on a box and booted. If a "quicklook" QA process shows that the build is hoarked, the integrator goes and pesters the submitters of the latest project that was submitted and gets them to fix it. (Some percentage of the time, the new code has exposed a bug elsewhere, regardless, the project that is the proximal cause of the failure is rolled back to the previous revision, it anticipation that all the projects that need to rev be submitted at once.)

The whole thing is set up through symlinks via NFS, so if you want to see the latest version of any piece of code in the system (modulus those projects that are "locked down" for security issues) you can just get your release name, append the build number, and you've got the source code, symbol'd binaries and build log *for any release* at your fingertips.

When a new build comes out, you just do a clean install. It takes about two hours on the internal network, so typically you pull the disk image and slam it to a firewire drive, (usually, you can bum a disk with the image already grabbed from a teammate) and do a full install in 15 minutes. I can't imagine having to spend a day (as some other posted mentioned) setting up a machine...

Most projects have 3 or 4 contributors. In many cases, and entire framework is the responsibility of a single person (and he or she may actually own several small frameworks.) Lots of small projects produce cleaner interfaces that lead to fewer dependencies. (Of course there are dependencies, and circular ones, but these are kept to a minimum.) Projects are encouraged to use public API from other projects, rather than SPI or other project internals. If there's something useful enough for some other project to use, its first made into SPI for internal consumption, with the goal that developers will eventually be able to use it through a public API.

Most groups don't have dedicated QA by the way - the engineers are responsible for their code, and everyone is generally just very smart about what they're doing.

As to this start menu problem: the entire UI team is about 5 individuals, plus Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall - and they're likely to say "Thats fucking stupid, just do this" and boom(tm), the decision has been made the product ships, and life goes on.

It looks to me like Apple has solved Microsoft's problem by simply not having the problem: many fewer developers, many fewer dependencies. And of course Apple has its not-so-secret weapon: Objective C. What this means is that Apple has the capability to scale much further than where they are now without getting crippled by complexity and bloat. And because they are actually in control of their products (rather than by large customers or record companies), they can maintain this situation as they scale.

As I write, Apple is a $78.3B company and Microsoft a $288B company. I reckon that Microsoft has topped out, so Apple has to grow to less than four times its current size (3.6 times) to have a market capitalization greater than Microsoft. At 20% per year growth, that's only seven years. And during that time, they will eat a huge piece of the PC business away from the current players.

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Tags: Microsoft, Apple, Wild Guesses

The Fishbowl describes Apple's handling of DRM very well in a piece entitled The Greatest Trick:

The greatest trick Apple pulled was to build a market where lock-in is mandated, but convince the world that this was something they did reluctantly, at the behest of the villainous recording industry.

Apple gets to define the technology, the terms of interoperability, the delivery system, customer expectations, price points -- practically the entire customer experience for digital audio players -- patent it all, and cement it in place with trademarks.

But this is not all that they have done. Apple used its might and market position to ensure that no other competitor has a more customer-friendly DRM than they have, so ensuring their continued success spearheaded with ease of use. Look at it from the content provider's viewpoint: they created a tiny monkey five years ago and now it has grown up to be an enormous gorilla. No way are they going to fall for that one again. The 800 lb gorilla may be tough to deal with, but let's face it, anything over 200 lb will be be just as bad. So the record companies put all the other monkeys on a diet and ensure Apple's continued dominance.

Tags: DRM, Apple, Wild Guesses

Speculation about the "iPhone" has been rampant, with discussion, speculation, mock-ups, fakes, history, concepts, and jokes like the one above.

Here's my prediction about Apple's phone: it's just a phone. Yes, there will be a camera and a click wheel, and games, and it will play music, and it will make calls of course, but it will still just be a phone.

JUST A PHONE??? This is Apple and they always make this groundbreaking stuff, so how can it just be a phone? Actually I may be overstating things. It probably does not have a camera, and may well not have all sorts of other features that high-end phones have today. That's because Apple wants mass appeal and they want something that is basically a low-price, simple device. A very simple device. Because simple devices are easier to design, make, sell, support, market, and everything else. Apple wants to do one thing well with this phone, one thing so well that it is head and shoulders over the other phones that are out there. So what is there?

Integration. This phone will be so integrated with the iPod, the Mac, and the internet that it will be hard to tell where one ends and another starts. Many of the features that would normally be crammed onto a small display and keyboard will be missing entirely, transferred to your desktop. Syncing will be effortless and automatic. Your address book and calendar will be there. And your music and games. And the phone will have multiple identities, like fast user switching, to allow families and other groups to share one phone. You'll be able to listen to your voice mail on your iPod or in front of your TV (via iTV) because your Mac will automatically download voicemail for you, and you will be able to manage it in iTunes. You'll also be able to use the phone as a voice recorder and have it drop those files into iTunes. If you call someone else's phone (any phone) and get voicemail, you'll be able to press a button and have your phone leave a standard message.

Wonder why speech is going to be so much better in Leopard? You'll be able to have your Mac call you as long as it is connected to the internet to provide status information or to pass on voice mail it has received. There will be exclusive Apple ring tones that you buy on the iTunes store. You'll be able to use your iTunes account to pay for time used on the phone. And you'll be able to use your phone number as an identity for email, iChat, and other forms of communication through the Mac.

Your calling history will download to your Mac and display in nifty ways. If you pull up a contact in the address book you'll see when you last called that person. Reminders will be able to ring you phone when they occur. The phone will be able to take part in audio iChats too. You'll be able to start a chat on your Mac and then dial out to anyone you want to include. Chat invitations that come in will be routable to your phone. All phone functions like call forwarding will be done on your Mac.

You'll have a choice of bandwidth too: need it fast, pay for the call and deal with a slow transfer rate. If you can wait until you get in the office, sync through Bluetooth for a faster choice. Or for best speed (USB 2.0), use the cradle. The screen and keyboard will adapt to the environmental light level so it is never dim or glaring. It will have an audio input jack so you can hook up an iPod to it and play through one set of headphones attached to the phone.

But despite all that, it will still be just a phone.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, Wild Guesses

I opened up the Aperture application today and looked through the resources -- images, tool tips, error messages, that sort of thing. There are some big clues in there as to where Aperture could be heading. You can do this too. Control-click on the application icon and select Show Package Contents. Now poke around -- but don't change anything.

A Bigger Role For Vaults

It looks like vaults will be able to store full size master images and Aperture itself will be able to work with lower-resolution proxies. When you access the originals it will pull them from the vaults as needed, prompting for the appropriate vault of it is off line. It will also track how many vaults a master is stored in and warn you if you delete all but one master. Archiving to DVDs will be supported. New badges for low resolution and offline status support this theory.

Brush HUD

Masking and mask painting support will be provided through a brush HUD. Though there are just some odd images in place right now: a picture of a red rock, three clouds, and a happy meal. Those are Apple code names for Aperture and another pro app. Brush sets will be accessed via Option Shift 0, 1, 2, 3.

Support For Audio And Video

In several places I found support for audio files, iTunes, movie formats, and text files. So I would guess that Aperture will be able to store these other formats just like iView can.

It also looks like user-definable workspaces will be supported too.

Tags: Aperture, Wild Guesses