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Lucid Nonsense

Here kitty kitty...

Apple are unveiling iPhone OS 3.0 tomorrow which should contain a few interesting changes no doubt. I’m certainly not as excited about this release as 2.0, my iPhone already meets pretty much all my requirements since the inception of the app store last year. What has piqued my interest about tomorrows event is whether we’ll hear any new information about Snow Leopard and in particular Snow Leopard Server, which I am very much impatiently waiting for.

Obviously this may be a bit clutching at straws here, because news about Snow Leopard Server has been a little slow to emerge (and we’re ADC Select members!), but there is a plausible link here - push services. These were promised as an addition to iPhone OS 2.0, and announced by Mr. Jobs himself. They just never appeared. So, there’s three possibilities as far as I can see:

1. Apple realised (especially after the MobileMe débacle) that having every third party app that required a “push” notification to be sent to a user, was going to be a bit of a nightmare on the server side. As a result the idea got shelved and true background apps will be added to iPhone OS 3.0.

2. Apple are sticking with the push notification service for apps (they run iTunes after all and that’s a pretty demanding server side system I’m sure) but decided to wait for Snow Leopard to provide the backend. Snow Leopard has extensive push support and may be providing the backend for the Push Notification Service in iPhone OS 3.0. With Snow Leopard due in the next few months the timing would make sense.

3. A bit of a mix of the above. Apple decided that running the service for all iPhone developers was a bit of a pain, so shelved that idea, and decided to add a service to Snow Leopard Server so that developers can run their own push server. Sells more copies of OS X Server, and puts the bandwidth and processing load in the hands of the developers creating the apps. Coupled with the recent move to allow virtualisation of OS X Server it may be a workable solution.

Personally I’m hoping 1 I think, expecting 2, and think 3 may be a bit too “out there”. Would be nice to see a big push towards OS X Server, although it’s fair to say that I am a bit biased!

Out of those 3 options though I think we’ve got a reasonable chance that we’ll find out a bit more about Snow Leopard Server, which is the Apple software release I’m personally the most interested in for the next few months.