In my tongue-in-cheek article about WWDC, I made some predictions about what would happen. I thought I’d go six-for-six, but Apple didn’t take down its store, so I got that one wrong. I was dead right, though, on the other points. Apple’s shares slumped for no good reasons, analysts crowed, idiots were disappointed at Apple’s updates and Lion features were dismissed as lightweight changes.

The most obvious prediction I made, though, was this one:

Also, iOS 5 will in some way include features that bear a little resemblance to things Android can already do. This will cause an Android-user smugness overload on the internet, countered by an Apple fan-boy whinealanche that will cause almost half of the internet to CATCH FIRE.

Sure enough, iOS 5 now contains a notifications system that isn’t complete shit and bears a passing resemblance to the one in Android. Boo-fucking-hoo, tech fans and pundits. This isn’t the first time Apple’s ‘innovated’ by looking around and filtering ideas through Cupertino’s Apple-o-tron, and it won’t be the last. Besides, remember how Android looked before the iPhone appeared? Yeah, that.

My favourite response, though, comes from the Microsoft mob, such as Tom Warren at WinRumors. He quotes some tweets by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, Director of the Windows Phone program, and mentions the similarities between Windows Phone 7 and the upcoming iOS 5. Now, I like Windows Phone 7 a lot, and it’s the first time in a long while Microsoft’s dared to do something really different. If the company had any sense, Windows Phone 7 would be renamed and used as the basis for Microsoft tablets, rather than the Ballmer Machine forcing Windows-with-a-skin into such devices.

Looking deeper, though, Warren’s list of similarities is a real mixed bag, some of which is a stretch, to say the least.

Apple has built a notification center into iOS 5 that’s very similar to Google’s Android operating system. The notifications are now displayed at the top of iOS and can easily be dismissed in a similar way to how Windows Phone 7 operates.

In this case, Apple has clearly created something that mirrors what’s working elsewhere. It’s an exaggeration to suggest this is a copy of anything Microsoft has done, though, given that the notifications have aspects of Android and webOS, in terms of form and function.

Apple has now built a split ergonomic keyboard into iOS 5. The feature is eerily similar to an identical keyboard that Microsoft revealed in Windows 8 recently.

I never realised Microsoft invented split keyboards. All of the virtual and hardware ones I’ve seen for years must have been figments of my imagination. (Commenter Ryan also points towards this site that showed the concept on an iPad.)

Apple has integrated Twitter straight into iOS 5. You can tweet directly from Safari, Photos, Camera, YouTube or Maps. Microsoft is also building in Twitter integration deep into Windows Phone Mango, the company has yet to demonstrate exactly how this will work however.

So Apple’s ‘copied’ a feature that Microsoft has announced but hasn’t demonstrated yet? Uh-huh, got it.

Apple revealed its own background download service for Newsstand. The new feature lets magazines and newspaper app subscriptions download automatically. Windows Phone Mango also includes a similar service that application developers can build into their apps.

Background downloads? Man, never heard of those before.

Apple introduced iMessage on Monday. You can send unlimited text messages via Wi-Fi or 3G from the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to anyone who has an iDevice. Windows Phone Mango has also introduced deeper integration of messaging services directly into the operating system.

Messaging services? Man, never heard of those before. (And, for the record, iMessage is one of the things I sincerely wish Apple hadn’t announced. It already has too many messaging services, and none of them have enough reach. If Apple really wants to do messaging, it shouldn’t be restricting people to talking to friends that only own Apple kit. FaceTime should be open. Text chatting—regardless of the system used—should work with as many protocols as possible, including Facebook.)

Jobs also unveiled the ability for iOS to automatically upload pictures take from iOS devices. The pictures go into Apple’s iCloud system and are available for viewing online or on other devices. Windows Phone 7 also has an identical feature and uploads the pictures to Windows Live SkyDrive

I’m not really familiar with how Windows Live SkyDrive works, so I’ll have to give Warren the benefit of the doubt on this one. To my mind, Dropbox is the system that iOS’s cloud stuff mostly apes, although iCloud in theory has a much more ‘Apple’ approach, removing complexity even further from the equation.

iOS device owners can now wirelessly sync their device over wi-fi to a Mac or PC. As long as the iOS device is connected to a power source, it automatically syncs and backs up any new content to iTunes. Windows Phone 7 also has an identical feature with the Zune client.

Wi-Fi sync is something iOS owners have been banging on about ever since there were things you could sync with iOS devices—in fact, before iOS was even called iOS. This isn’t something Apple has copied, this is something Apple’s finally got around to doing right, rather than ‘first’. See also: multitasking and copy and paste.

Apple has also changed the way the camera works. The volume + button now works as a hardware camera button

Just like on cameras with hardware buttons, which I’m fairly sure have been around for a while now. *checks Wikipedia* Yup. Turns out cameras have existed for at least a few years now.

and there’s even a lock screen shortcut to quickly allow iPhone users to take pictures. Both are identical features of Windows Phone 7.

I’ll give Warren this one.

I think any pundit or commentator would be crazy to insist that Company A doesn’t borrow or get inspired by whatever Company B is doing. What gets me is the hysteria regarding Apple in this regard. While Apple does slip sometimes in keynotes with its “we’re doing this first” shtick, this is rare; Apple typically goes for the “we’re not first, but we’re doing this best” angle. Even then, Apple’s not always right, but it is more often than its competitors. All I hope is that if Belfiore really is “flattered“, he and his team take Apple’s advances with iOS 5 to really kick Windows Phone 7 into gear and to another level. And the same goes for everyone involved with Android and webOS. Innovate, borrow, rework, recreate, redesign, until you have something that’s better than you could have imagined. If everyone does this, the smartphone and tablet market is going to be so much more exciting over the coming years than the desktop race ever was.

Through an unnamed source*, I have put together a list of sure-fire predictions for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2011 keynote and its knock-on effects for Apple and the tech industry.

• Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) will be demoed further. Apple pundits will bitch and complain about how the new features are rubbish, pointless, stupid and smell a bit of wee. These same pundits will then be writing up features and tutorials about how UNICORN AMAZING said features are, approximately fourteen seconds after they’ve had a chance to play with them themselves.
• iOS 5 will be revealed, with a number of features that improve Apple’s mobile platform immeasurably. However, because Apple won’t include features that tech pundits want, iOS 5 will be widely slammed, despite appealing more to consumers. Also, iOS 5 will in some way include features that bear a little resemblance to things Android can already do. This will cause an Android-user smugness overload on the internet, countered by an Apple fan-boy whinealanche that will cause almost half of the internet to CATCH FIRE.
• Analysts will react to the keynote by claiming their predictions, which were almost the exact opposite of what was revealed, were in fact the same as what was revealed, and will happily continue making up bullshit and getting paid for it. Forever.
• Apple is doomed will be a common theme, due to the company missing out the one thing a prominent tech pundit wanted to see in Lion or iOS 5, and also for not releasing devices that the competition are making but that themselves will in the long run be doomed to failure. Apple, naturally, will only remain doomed in the press, while making more money every second than you could stuff down your pants, even if you have really big, baggy pants.
• Apple will take down its entire store, just to fuck with people’s heads. With any luck, it will come back up, with only a single price-change to one product: the price of the Digital AV Adapter, down by a single Euro, and only in the Belgian store.
• Most people will be disappointed with whatever Apple announces, because most people believe the hype and don’t appreciate how stunning the technology we have is, and even how fantastic the incremental updates we’re getting are. As this YouTube video says, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. START BEING HAPPY. NOW.

Reckon I’ll be six-for-six this year.

* My brain, which doesn’t have a name, and is therefore thoroughly jealous of my kneecaps, Arthur and Gerald.

Charlie Brooker, in his latest piece for The Guardian:

Look at the App Store. Read the reviews of novelty games costing 59p. Lots of slaggings – which is fair enough when you’re actively warning other users not to bother shelling out for something substandard. But they often don’t stop there. In some cases, people insist the developers should be jailed for fraud, just because there weren’t enough levels for their liking. I once read an absolutely scathing one-star review in which the author bitterly complained that a game had only kept them entertained for four hours.

FOUR HOURS? FOR 59P? AND YOU’RE ANGRY ENOUGH TO WRITE AN ESSAY ABOUT IT? ON YOUR EXPENSIVE IPHONE? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?

He says this is human nature, with technology having left us hopelessly spoiled. I say people should get a sense of perspective, because their incessant moaning about App Store games is ridiculous. I wonder how many of these idiots whining about a good 59p game that provides four hours of entertainment have ever bought a game on another platform (such as the Nintendo DS, with its carts costing 15 quid a pop or more), or back in the days where you took a punt on an Amiga game for 25 quid. Even in the mid-1980s, the era of the C64 and ZX Spectrum, the absolute cheapest games were £1.99, came on cassette, and were—proportionately speaking—often as bad as the worst 59p iPhone ‘specials’, with the odd gem randomly lurking in the mix.

Four hours of fun gameplay for 59p isn’t something to complain about—it’s something that should be celebrated.

Apple’s announced that it will reveal iCloud at WWDC, and the rumour mill is swirling with what features the service will bring. Foremost among them is the claim Apple has signed up the four major record labels for a cloud music service. Other claims are that Apple will offer similar back-up/streaming services for movies, television shows and documents.

I’d be excited about this, if it wasn’t for two things. First, I don’t buy a lot of iTunes content, and I’ve a horrible feeling Steve Jobs is going to bang on about some ‘magical’ system that backs up your iTunes purchases to the cloud. I can’t imagine there’s any chance we’ll see all your music, regardless of source, available. In part, this is because Apple itself won’t have copies of all tracks anyway, but also labels are greedy and will almost certainly block any attempt to enable access to tracks that might have been downloaded on the sly, even if they would make money from streaming subscriptions. Another possibility would be for Apple to offer a small ‘upgrade’ fee per track, like it did for iTunes Plus, but that also seems a stretch. In any case, Spotify will probably remain a better bet for Brits.

The second concern I have stems from my experience with the Apple TV. Using my UK iTunes account, it’s still the same content-light box it was when I got the device at Christmas, and that’s never changed for Brits since the dawn of the revamped black box. By contrast, Americans get Netflix, TV rentals, baseball and more. It’s understandable that Apple concentrates first on the US, which is a large, affluent market, but it’s disappointing there are no Apple TV deals in the UK to integrate iPlayer, 4OD and LoveFilm at the very least—and UK TV rentals might never happen. With iCloud, you can bet Jobs will reveal a bunch of great features, only for anyone outside of the USA to chance across a subtly different web page on their country’s Apple site, missing features but, crucially, not missing any of an associated price-tag. (You can also bet that the US tech media will fail to report on this, too, as always.)

The one saving grace here will be if Apple finally manages to provide some kind of usable, useful back-up and restoration process for iOS devices. If my iPod, iPhone and iPad could save app data and preferences to the cloud and reinstate them on an app reinstall, and perhaps even optionally sync data (such as progress in videogames), I’ll be prepared to overlook Apple overlooking my country.

Fighting talk from Dan Grabham over at TechRadar in Windows 8 could make you rethink buying iPad 3:

An iPad isn’t a do-everything device. Windows 8 tablets will be

Of course, it remains to be seen if Windows 8 tablets are do-everything well devices. Given that many apps will still be designed for mouse pointers rather than touch, I doubt that will be the case.

Despite slow sales, Windows Phone is a surprisingly good phone OS. If you’re guffawing at that last sentence, we reckon you probably haven’t used it.

I totally agree with Grabham here. I’ve only used Windows Phone briefly a few times, but I was impressed with what Microsoft has done. The UI is interesting and, importantly, Redmond didn’t just rip-off Apple’s iOS, unlike pretty much everyone else in the smartphone race. The system being called Windows Phone is fucking stupid, though, and hints at problems Microsoft has in moving on from its past.

Microsoft’s new OS has a potentially game-changing trick up its sleeve. Microsoft isn’t redesigning the Windows that we all know. Indeed, Windows 8 will have a desktop that’s actually very similar to Windows 7. But it will be overlaid by the Windows Phone-style interface. Two operating systems in one, you might say. And that’s actually going to propel Windows 8 devices past their competitors in terms of do-it-all devices.

That actually sounds extremely risky. Mac OS X and iOS share certain aspects of architecture, but they are each designed from the ground up to be suitable for the interfaces of the hardware they run on. Having a single operating system run across traditional computers and tablets is an extremely challenging prospect. Kudos to Microsoft if they pull this off and ‘force’ software creators to make their products work brilliantly with pointers and touch, but I worry Windows 8 will be the same old Windows on the desktop, and also the same old Windows on a tablet, just with a touch skin overlay that works really well for very few applications.

As John Gruber deftly points out in Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad:

[I]t’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.

Microsoft’s demo video shows [the full version of] Excel running alongside new touch-based apps. They can make buttons more ‘touch friendly’ all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI. Consider the differences between the iWork apps for the Mac and iPad. The iPad versions aren’t ‘touch friendly”’ versions of the Mac apps — they’re entirely new beasts designed and programmed from the ground up for the touchscreen and for the different rules and tradeoffs of the iOS interface

Gruber claims that the ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system and other Mac conventions, would make the iPad worse, and that the device is popular due to it eliminating complexity. I think he’s right—in keeping complexity under the hood, Apple has made a system that is so intuitive even toddlers can happily use it. I find it hard to see how Microsoft will be able to do the same with Windows 8, if it remains the same old Windows. Windows Phone, on the other hand, was exactly the right foundation to build on for next-generation Microsoft, so it’s only natural Redmond is marginalising it in favour of ‘proper’ Windows.

Grabham again:

Finally, Windows can emerge from the shadow of the PC as we know it.

And yet remain in the shadow of Windows as we know it.