27 Dec 2009
Here's a few ill-informed predictions for the web/tech world in 2010. Well, some of them are not so much predictions, as things I'd like to see happen...
- The rumours already suggest there's going to be a new iPhone, and an Apple Tablet (let's call it the iTablet for now) launched in 2010, the former having a 5MP camera, and the latter running iPhone OS and apps. I'd predict that in addition, the new iPhone model have obligatory memory and processor upgrades and will sport a physical redesign (the first three generations of iPhone having been pretty much identical, this one will share a design with the iTablet) but the headline features will be haptic (touch) feedback and wireless synching, both of which will also feature in the iTablet too.
- Apple will realign the branding of the iPod Touch, iPhone and iTablet into a single product family, much as they did with Powerbook / MacBook / MacBook Pros in the past.
- iTunes will become a cloud based service, instead of the notion of being tied to a single copy of iTunes whenever you want to sync podcasts, apps, etc. They will continue to try and differentiate their downloads as "premium" over competitors by only allowing you to wirelessly sync music bought on iTunes, not ripped or bought legally elsewhere. They will also launch an "all you can eat" subscription service, like Spotify et al.
- Twitter will continue to expand in popularity, being to start charging corporate users, and will be bought out, probably by Google. Facebook's popularity will begin to wane, mainly because of concerns over privacy.
- Google Chrome will hit critical mass and rise dramatically in popularity. IE6 usage will drop steeply, and by the end of the year will be in enough of a minority that we won't be supporting it on new builds unless there is a specific requirement to do so.
- As one problem is solved, another will rear its head: HTML 5 still won't be approved as a standard, but the majority of browsers in the wild will support most of it anyway. However without an agreed standard, they will do so in patchy and inconsistent ways, meaning we still won't be able to rely on it for mainstream sites without hacks and workarounds.
- The big web design trend will be typography; at the end of 2009 various techniques for using more than the ten or so "web safe" fonts in web design are reaching maturity and will explode in popularity in 2010, leaving the web-safe font list as archaic as the old web-safe colour palette. Many more companies, including font foundries will launch their own "Font Embedding As A Service" services a la Typekit, and various clever JS libraries will be merged and consolidated to allow developers to use fonts without worrying about cross-browser issues or "flashes of unstyled fonts".
- The election in May will be declared to be either the "Twitter election", "Web 2.0 election" or "Social networking election" by the media as the web plays a significant role in the campaign. However it will not have as much of an impact on the result as it did in the US elections.
- A TV programme will get more viewers online (via iPlayer etc) than it does via broadcast for the first time.
- People will become more wary of trusting their data to the "cloud" as many smaller software-as-a-service companies go under or close down, taking customers' data with them.
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