So Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference got underway this morning, and Steve outlined the forthcoming OS 10.2 called 'Jaguar.' This pisses me off incredibly, and makes me euphoric with joy.

First, the shit (the bad kind): Apple's including iChat, an Instant Message client that will work with AOL Instant Messenger's network. This pisses me off because as the interaction designer for Yahoo's Messenger for Mac, I think that picking one chat network and 'blessing' it with an Apple client is as bad a move as binding Internet Explorer into the Windows OS. I'm also pissed off because they didn't choose Yahoo to do it with. Fuck'em. We'll show them.

Second, the shit (the good kind): One technology being introduced in Jaguar is Inkwell, OS X's implementation of handwriting recognition. They've taken the Rosetta handwriting engine from Newton 2.0 and ported it to OS X, likely improving it along the way.

They mention that you'll need a digitizing tablet to use Inkwell, and there is flat out no way that they went through the engineering effort of porting Rosetta just to support text entry for people with Wacom tablets.

As far as I'm concerned (and I'm not usually so vehement about rumored products) I am absolutely certain that this means the iPad (all) is on its way, possibly in October, but more probably in January.

By releasing Inkwell into the OS months earlier, Apple is softening the ground and testing the waters for user acceptance of this handwriting recognition engine, and handwriting recognition in general. Once Inkwell has positive (or at least non-negative) buzz, the time is right to launch iPad, the killer hardware.