So as usual every year WWDC is back. I will be catching up what's new from the various online sites and twitter buzz. Not sure if 10.6 will be officially out but I am sure there will be a lot of cool demo. In addition I am expecting that Apple will announce the next generation iPhone and I cross my finger that they will be adding a few more new or improved API for OS 3.0.
The SDK for iPhone is quite fun to work with but some areas definitely are lacking good features. The two area that right now on my mind are the UIImagePickerController and dealing with images data. Great concept but such poor execution ! The UIImagePickerController 'editing' mode is really cropping image to a really small size, the data you're getting back need potentially some 'manual' code to rotate it if you are saving it and reloading it... Will it have been too difficult for Apple to already handle that upfront.
Finally the worst with the UIImagePickerController and dealing with UIImage from the photo library : the SDK does not provide any API to access the EXIF meta data... The information is there since when you sync your photos taken with the official "Camera" app you get geo location information and so on. But third party developer are totally out of luck.
I hope the next generation iPhone will have at least a bump in the embedded RAM : while developing Photo+Map I discovered that trying to manipulate full size photo (1600x1200) and generating a new one from an original is a potential wild ride in iPhone memory management land. At least the developer tools like Instruments can help a lot to reduce the memory footprint but at one moment in time, the app need to have 2 copies of the image in memory and the current iPhone OS is quite sensitive. The app may be force to Quit by the OS and interestingly enough a second run and using the same photo will work fine. So more memory will definitely make a difference for application like Photo+Map.