10 things i want to see in 2010
A Viable Tablet
Rumor has it that Apple will be announcing the iSlate later this month. Speculation is that it will feature a 10″ touchscreen and look like an enlarged iPhone. That’s all well and good, but I’ve gotten no indication to actually what this machine will actually do.
On the other hand, The Microsoft Courier, still not a confirmed product, has some quite interesting “leaked” videos available. The feature set in this utility make it a must buy for me. That is, if Apple doesn’t beat them to the punch.
Solution to Web Fonts – More Realistically Hoeffler-Jones Foundry to Typekit
I’ve written signiciantly about the web font problem. Playing it safe, many developers will choose to use one of the 6 or 7 standard web fonts to ensure that their site renders in all browsers across all platforms. The result is mundane and ugly websites. Alternatives include capturing images of specialized fonts – but that’s not good for actual copy, using a replacement utility like sIFR or Cufon – but that results in ugly code and requires the use of javascript or flash to render, or using a commercial service like Typekit – which provides a lot of quality fonts, but you’re still limited.
I don’t see a solution coming this year, but I’d settle with the Hoeffler-Jones Foundry signing on with Typekit.
Total Decommission and Destruction of IE6
Ok, this isn’t realistic at all, but one can dream…
Chrome OS
The Cloud is sexy. The Cloud is in. The next thing to move to it is, well, the entire operating system of a computer. Imagine only needing to buy shells of computers: a display and a box with a motherboard, network card, video card, and sound card. Maybe some RAM, but drastically less than what we need now. And then being able to boot that computer up and pulling your applications, your documents, your music, everything from computers in the sky. Then go to the local library and boot up their shell computer and have it pull the exact same information to that computer as well. The possibilities seem absolutely endless, until your RoadRunner service gets bogged down with all the network traffic and opening Microsoft Word feels like pulling up The New York Times with a 56K modem…
Tethering to AT&T
I don’t care how many commercials you put up featuring Luke Wilson – and besides, the commercials aren’t convincing at all… we iPhone owners know that AT&T certainly is not the best service available. AT&T needs to pony up on promises it has long forgotten. GIVE US TETHERING!
Smart Phone Video Conferencing
Maybe with the next generation iPhone – or with the Google Nexus One – we’ll get a decent video conferencing handset. Rumors for the next iPhone say that the camera has been put on the front of the device, not the back specifically for this purpose. I would imagine that there would either need to be 2 cameras (one for photos on the back of the camera so you can see what you’re shooting) and one on the front for video conferencing, or have the camera be dual use and flippable from front to back.
Wordpress 3.0
We’re up to 2.9.1 and hopefully, 3.0 takes Wordpress into full bona-fide CMS as opposed to simply a blogging platform. Developers like us (because we’re smart) can make Wordpress do what we want it to do anyway, but it’d be nice for most of those features to be done natively as opposed to custom developing or finding unsupported plugins to do the trick.
Timeline View for Facebook
Looking at status messages of years back – make that months back – no, days back can sometimes take forever clicking more posts over and over and over again until you find what you need… I’d like an archive view to come to Facebook if for no other reason that just because I want to be able to increase the efficiency of my Internet stalking 
Google Tasks 2.0
I love Google but their Tasks service is lacking. I want tasks built into GMail and Calendars, have alerts on days that tasks are due and I want that syncable to smartphones. That’s not too much to ask!
Increased HTML5 Support
This would be nice. But I have a feeling that we’ll never fully be able to move to HTML5 until certain browsers are done away with…
