I'd meant to make this a video at the beginning of the year, but things -- like my third hip -- got in the way. So here's a bit of awesome from the past, about the future:

This is Walt Mossberg; shut up.

Every year I like to offer my predictions for what will happen every year. If you check my record, you'll see I've been 100% accurate for 40 years, so pay attention to this list of 10 things that WILL happen within the next 12 months:

1. Apple - CEO Tim Cook will send iPad 4s out to tech journalists in new packaging that says "iPad 5" to see if they're even paying attention anymore, and will be saddened when everyone talks about how much better this new version is. His sadness will fail, however, when there's a massive sales spike. 

2. Microsoft - Steve Ballmer will contemplate flinging himself off a roof a month after the announcement of the Xbox 720 -- the next version of the popular video game console slash media centre -- when a minor update to the Apple TV prompts everyone keeps talking about how they're winning the race for the living room even though 70 million Xbox 360s have been sold and the 720 will beat the Apple TV like King Kong mashing a dandelion. 

3. RIM - RIM will finally release BB10, the next operating system for its Blackberry phones, which the company hopes will change its fortunes. The tech press will call it a failure the next day. Rim will be delisted on July 29, and if you live in the Kitchener-Waterloo area you'll be able to get some really cheap office furniture, and an only slightly used CEO, on August 16.

4. Tornadoes - There will be a tornado in June, which will cause some amount of property damage.

5. Google - Google Glasses will be released to wide acclaim but little usage, since the initial for-developers release will cost $1500. The first 3rd-party accessory will be released shortly after, which will be a Bluetooth-enabled video camera that attaches to your shoes to allow perverts to watch and share their upskirt videos in real time.  

6. Scoble - Robert Scoble will interview Tom Cruise and the two will collapse into a singularity of infinite smugness that will destroy all of Silicon Valley, and will only be stopped when it gets clogged by a glut of hipsters who come to watch it destroy all the complicit sheeple there to take pictures of it.

7. Chrome - Google Chrome will reach version 100 in April, and nobody working on it will be able to name a single feature added after version 21.

8. Drones - Some lucky script-kiddies from Anonymous will manage to hack into a US military drone, causing millions of property damage and killing 5 people before the military shuts them down. In response, the NRA will call for drones to be positioned every 5 miles across the company to prevent other people from having access to drones.

9. Phones - Smartphones will continue to offer more functionality than featurephones, with no change in sight. People will continue to view Windows Phone as being about as useful as a feature phone, also with no change in sight.

10. Driverless cars - California and Nevada have legalized driverless cars, so 2013 will feature a rash of reports to 911 of ghost drivers operating in the US, culminating in at least two different ghost hunting shows doing episodes about them, at the end of which each will say that can't say that these marvels of modern technology aren't really just haunted.

This is the way the year will unfold. Believe it!

This has been Walt Mossberg. Shut up!

This is goddamn madness.

Click here to watch it, if you want.

It will probably look like this? Where the crap are you getting this from? Are you high, Cultofmac? How does yet another piece of concept art equal "probably," other than that you're bait the hell out of that link?

Concept art is concept art. Some random person made this design as a thing and now it's of course what Apple will do. They have to, because he made a video!

Good Christ, I wish that site had someone in charge of keeping it sane. 

I with they'd have an indicator at the top of the screen that shows you that you have notifications, like Android has done for years. Seriously, the notification center is such a half-measure, and the lack of one simple persistent graphic means I forgot to check it for days, and then I have this annoying thing where I hit "X" and then "Clear" and then it only clears some of the notifications if I've got more than five in a given application, and it looks like the phone isn't letting me clear them, and is instead telling me to screw off.

But it doesn't matter if it has a "linen" background or a white background; it matters if it's useful.

Shut up.

Now, the speed with which you can add new projects and tasks seems nice, but come on, a wheel-based todo app? You're going to use as your visual motif something that implies a finite amount of space to add items to? More than that, you're going to abdicate a chunk of functional space in an app that exists to be functional, just because circles spin around and go woosh?

The needless arbitrary use of a spinning wheel screams "arbitrary change to distinguish ourselves in an overcrowded market" to me. Here's an idea, you obviously talented Sooner-programmers: don't make yet another todo app. Do something else! It may be that all 200,000 todo apps for iOS are deeply flawed, but sweet crap, do you know how long it would take me to try them all to figure that out? I mean, did you use them all and find them lacking, then said to yourselves "we can fix this?"

Seriously, you guys. Seriously.

This market is mature; is there really anything new and necessary you can add to a todo app? Sweet crap, I don't believe so. So you're left with new entrants having to add random stuff just to get noticed, because "recording my tasks" and "marking my tasks as complete" and "saving my tasks to a server to sync with other devices" and "look nice" have all been taken care of pretty thoroughly. And it's only going to get worse. We're already seeing it, obviously, but we're going to see more and more apps with even wilder "features" that look cool at first blush but do nothing to improve the crapdamn experience of an app you ideally are using several times a day. 

I haven't used Sooner, but it looks like I'd get tired of that wheel really quickly, just like I would've gotten tired of Clear's day-glo koolaid vomit colour scheme, and Epic Win's admittedly fun looking RPG aspect. Not to be the old guy curmudgeon or anything -- even though I do it spectacularly -- but the more cruft you add to a todo app, the more fun features designed to give good demo, the slower your usage of the app is, because you need to wade through it in actual day-to-day usage.

I use Wunderlist. It's nice because it syncs across devices, there's a desktop app and a web interface. There are lists and you add todos and mark them as done. There's not much else because you don't need much else because if I'm consulting this app dozens of times a day -- like I goddamn do -- then I don't want to have to watch animations or spin crap or tend to a stupid garden or anything; I want to mark off my list and then start on the next thing. In some tracker apps this is fine: in Fitocracy it works, and the animations are fun, because they're minimal and anyway I only use the app after I exercise, not constantly throughout the day.

I mean, crap, what's next, a todo app where your "list" is a 3D gardenscape, and every one of your items is an animated fluffy bunny, and to mark your bunny item as complete you have to catch it with two fingers and feed it a carrot with a third?

Sadly, something like that is probably already in development.

Shut up.

I return with holiday wishes that will haunt your dreams and scar your soul!

Music is "Wang Wang Blues" by Paul Whiteman And His Orchestra .

It's chapping my ass.

But before I record my complaints in lovely video, I wanted you fine folks to tell me if there are any apps that are abusing push notifications. I'll add 'em to my list in the video.

Comment!