With just a few short weeks until Apple’s annual worldwide developers conference kicks off, I wanted to give you my predictions as to what I think will be announced during this year’s WWDC’11. First of all, WWDC is a developers conference where software developers from all over the world, developing for the Mac OS X platform as well as the iOS platform, gather together and have a conference to discuss about how to develop software for these platforms whilst taking advantage of the new technologies that are built-in to the OS. To start the entire week off, Steve Jobs presents a keynote to announce exciting new products.

Until WWDC’07, Apple’s main focus was on Mac OS X. However, as the iPhone was introduced in Macworld 2007, Apple’s main focus turned to the iOS (originally known as iPhone OS) platform. In WWDC’08, the iPhone 3G was announced, as well as the public release of iPhone OS 2.0. In WWDC’09, Scott Forstall discussed about iPhone OS 3.0, whilst Phil Schiller introduced the iPhone 3GS. And in WWDC’10, Steve Jobs covered the iPhone 4, as well as the re-branded iOS 4. During these years, the main focus was on iOS. The only time the Mac OS X was discussed was when Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was almost ready for shipment in 2009.

This year, however, the focus will be on both Mac OS X and iOS. The next generation of Mac OS X Lion was first previewed back in October 2010, where Apple introduced new features such as Mission Control, Full Screen Apps, LaunchPad and the Mac App Store. Since then, alongside the Early 2011 MacBook Pro announcements, Apple previewed even more features of Lion on their website, such as further Multitouch Gesture support, Mail 5, Versions, Auto-Save and AirDrop. Apple has been releasing developer preview versions since then (up to version 3 as of now) for developers to test out the new OS, as well as test their own apps. We expect the Mac OS X Lion to start shipping 2 weeks after the WWDC event, through both the Mac App Store, for people who run Snow Leopard, and with DVDs for people with Leopard or below.

On the iOS side, Apple usually holds a preview event during the March-April timeframe. However, this year, that did not happen. Instead, we had the iPad 2 announcement, with iOS 4.3 (disappointing many people as they were expecting iOS 5). Therefore, during this year’s WWDC, it is certain that Apple will be previewing their next generation of their mobile operating system, iOS 5. My thoughts on what I would like to see in iOS 5 can be found by clicking here. Because this will just be a preview, the actual launch of the new OS will not happen until the Golden Master Candidate Beta has been released, which we suspect to be a few months later. This has lead many people to believe that the next iPhone 5 to be announced in September, where Apple usually announce new iPods and new versions of iTunes. It would be disappointing if Apple did not announce iPhone 5 during WWDC, but it would also be awkward and outdated for the iPhone 5 to still be running iOS 4. We will keep you updated about this as new sources appear.

Here is my video on my predictions of WWDC’11:

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About the Author: Kenta Arai is a tech enthusiast who was born in the Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan. He passion towards technology began to develop as he grew up in Hong Kong, where technology had its solid place in the mass market. Arai became one of the most enthusiastic technophile student in his high-school, and was also well-known for consulting many of his school-mates when purchasing new computers. His expertise in the tech industry is focused on Apple Inc. and Google Inc.