Picture courtesy of RoughlyDrafted

WWDC07 takes place in a mere 12 hours and I wanted to quickly make my predictions. I’ll most likely get more than half wrong, but its fun. Plus if I’m right, I have the pleasure of gloating and saying “I told you so!”

First, let’s take a look at all the rumours that’s been floating about. John Siracusa of Ars Technica has posted his WWDC Keynote Bingo card that nicely summarises all the major rumours. Among those rumours are:

• .Mac overhauled
• iLife unveiled
• VoIP or iChat on iPhone
• Native virtualisation in Leopard
• New UI for Leopard
• iPhone developer kit
• Ultraportable MacBook
• New Mac desktop

From everything that I’ve seen, it appears that WWDC07 will focus mainly on Leopard and developer education. I don’t think that Apple will introduce new hardware like an ultraportable Mac.

Looking at Monday’s schedule, we see that Steve Jobs’ keynote is 1.5 hours long. He couldn’t have that much to announce in that time right? Let’s asume he spends half an hour on his introduction and on Apple’s achievements and growth, that leaves an hour for the real meat.

We know for certain Steve will talk about Leopard and unveil all it’s “Secret Features” (one of them has already been leaked). My predictions for Leopard’s new features are closer integration between Mac OS X and Windows, e.g. easier to write and move files between partitions; a dramatic update to iCal; and a new user interface–no more brushed metal, plus Finder with Quickview.

I think that Steve will spend the next half hour talking about the iPhone to drum up even more interest for the next generation mobile phone as it will be available just over 2 weeks away. Steve will also announce a developer kit for the iPhone, as was hinted in the New York Times, opening up a new market for software development and possibly a new source of revenue for Apple.

Then there will be that big “One More Thing”. It may be new hardware, I really wouldn’t know. But maybe, just maybe, Steve will invite the AT&T CEO on stage and they’ll announce a fixed-mobile convergence service for the iPhone.

So there’s my WWDC07 predictions. We’ll find out far off I was tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll be staying up to check the news sites for the liveblogs and updates. Sweet WWDC dreams!