Following the Evidence: iOS 5

Word on the street is that Apple may preview the next incarnation of iOS in April. Exciting stuff considering how little was present in the recent iOS 4.3 upgrade. And despite Apple’s usual tight-lipped attitude towards upcoming projects, a little cyber investigating could lead one to make many educated conclusions. So, for the sake of blog content, I present to you iOS 5: the evidence…

Better notifications
Apple’s current “pop-up” notification system is pretty much the bane of every iOS user existence. To put it bluntly, it’s a lousy way to alert us to the various goings on in our digital world. And, quite honestly, everyone else does it better.

Thankfully, Apple has seemingly heard the lament and is working on a solution. How do we know? Last June, Rich Dellinger, the man responsible for WebOS’s very slick and very non-intrusive notification system, left Palm to work for Apple. Oh sure, Rich had worked at Apple before moving on to Palm and one could pin his move back on job security since HP was in the process of an intellectual property takeover. However, it does strike me as more than just a coincidence. 

Then last month, Cult of Mac reported that Apple had acquired an unknown company to build their new notification technology. Although, they didn’t know who exactly, the article speculated that it might be App Remix, who’s Boxcar app has garnered a lot of praise for its handling of social media notifications.

Either way, Apple seems to be on the case.

Multi-touch Gestures
During last year’s ‘Back to the Mac’ keynote, Steve Jobs made a lot of noise about how multi-touch gestures were the future of user interaction. Since then, we’ve seen them incorporated into Apple’s current laptop line-up, their latest wireless mouse and now (it seems) iOS devices.

Last year an early developer’s build of iOS 4.3 went online with a new and surprising feature: multi-touch gestures. These included everything from upward swipes to get back to the home screen, to “clawing” at the screen to flip between multitasking applications. A surprising addition for sure, but not completely out of left field as its been rumored for a while that Apple has been looking to get rid of the home button completely. The video below showcases these gestures in action:



However, noticeably absent from this week’s iOS 4.3 update was said feature set. The current thinking is that Apple wanted to introduce these additions to developers as a means to gauge their functionality. Its exclusion could very well indicate that there were technical issues, reports tended to single out the iPhone’s small screen as problematic, or that they were simply being withheld until iOS 5.

Syncing
The rumored April announcement may also include a cloud-based syncing and data storage service using Apple's own MobileMe service. How does this tie into iOS you ask? For one thing, speculation points to MobileMe becoming free to all Apple users. This would be a huge boon to those looking to sync simple items such as contact lists, calendar entries and bookmarks between their various Apple devices. Additionally, it would put Apple in a competitive stance against Google who offers similar functionality to its web and phone users.

Why such a move also seems likely can be explained by Apple’s recently completed $1 billion data center in North Carolina. Although the company has been mum on the actual purpose of the center, its scale (about three to five times the size of a regular data center) coupled with Apple’s recent purchase of Lala, an online music streaming service, seems to indicate their plans for a cloud-fueled future are ramping up.

The real question is to what end? The Lala acquisition was thought to bring iTunes into the cloud. Allowing customers to have access to their purchases through a, sort-of, virtual locker. At any moment, you could stream your purchased media from an iOS device rather than having to relay on flash or disk based storage.

Additionally and somewhat interestingly, MobileMe’s retail offering was discontinued a few months back as well. Although, this could just mark a shift in Apple’s stance towards boxed software in lieu of their recently launched OS X App Store.

Finally, users who upgraded to iOS 4.2 were given free access to the “Find My iPhone/iPad” service that had been previously available to only MobileMe customers. Perhaps a sign that Apple is warming up to sharing these arguably important services with their entire user base?

That said, its always possible the free version of MobileMe might have some limitations and “pro” offering would fill in the gaps for those needing additional storage space. Whatever the implementation, if this is indeed the direction Apple plans to go in, iPhone and iPad users stand to gain a lot from the overhaul.

Conclusion
As usual, nothing is certain when it comes to Apple’s future endeavors. However, the evidence above does seem to indicate we’ll be seeing at least one or two of these features in the upcoming release of iOS 5. If not, well, then I’ll have to scrap my plans for a freelance online detective agency. Shame, I had already invested in several Fedoras.