Apple’s WWDC starts next week and the rumor sites are uncharacteristically quiet even though Steve Jobs’ keynote is only four days away. It’s very unlikely we’ll see any talk about 10.5, since 10.4 just shipped and there are a ton of wrinkles to iron out. I’m expecting to see a lot of new hardware development, or else a two hour buzzkill Tiger demo. There are 18 TBA sessions scheduled including at least one in the big room, so something new is likely to be announced.

The past year seems like it’s been a good for hardware innovation. Now that AMD and Intel both have multicore and 64bit chips in the market the G5 doesn’t seem as competitive as it was two years ago (not to mention being two years overdue for 3ghz). IBM’s Cell Processor is another unknown, but arguments could be made about cramming one into a PowerBook. A friend with reasonably good contacts thinks we’re going to finally see a G5 PowerBook. I hope so, and my credit card is ready to go. Hopefully we’ll at least get that Powerbook HD referenced by the typo in the current PowerBook manuals. And maybe PowerBooks will do a little better to close the speed gap with desktops (or at least iMacs). According to MacRumors Buyer’s Guide, Powerbooks will be 126 days into their product cycle and iBooks will be overdue for a refresh at 230 days. Seems like a good time to announce new portables, especially since nearly everyone at the conference is carrying one.

The tracks seem a lot more technical this year, which is good. The previous two years I ended up in several sessions where I was bored or didn’t learn anything.

My primary goals for this year are a bit more modest than last year. First, I’m focusing on related technologies to FXScript, FCP and graphics stuff. This includes all the pro-video apps, especially Motion and the Shake SDK, plus the Quartz Composer labs. I’m still very interested in CoreImage and CoreVideo, but there aren’t very many of those sessions scheduled.

I have a feeling I’d be bored by too many Dashboard sessions since I’m pretty good with JavaScript and CSS and don’t really have any ideas for widgets that haven’t been done already. Unix scripting and shell commands will be a focus, I’d like to see how other people work with them since I taught myself and feel like I’m often stumbling around.

The best thing I got last year was better programming practices, so I’ll be making a more deliberate effort to be in sessions related to source-code control, development tools and better working methods.

Aside from that, I’m hoping to pick up a bit of Cocoa, get over the AppleScript Studio hump, and find more fascinating stuff that doesn’t fly too far over my head.

Wednesday’s Brown Bag Lunches are a problem because I want to attend three of them; Python Today with the language’s creator Guido van Rossum, PHP on a PowerBook with that language’s creator Rasmus Lerdorf and the MySQL and SQLite lunch with author Brian Jepson. I’ll probably be at either the PHP or Python lunch, PHP because I’ve done a lot of work with it, Python because I’ve been meaning to learn it. Thursday I’m going to the Advanced Scripting with brian_d_foy, who I’m looking forward to meeting.

I’ll also be attending Buzz Andersen’s WWDC 2005 Weblogger Dinner on Monday night. Looking forward to meeting a bunch of people there.