All of this talk about OS X 10.5 Leopard being delayed until October is really shaking things up in the Mac world. According to Apple’s statement:

…we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned…We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing

So, Leopard would’ve been released at WWDC, eh? And developers will see a “near final version” and receive a “beta copy” to play with. But in reality, what does that really leave us at WWDC?

Well, for one, the actual release of the iPhone (stated to be released in June). However, IMO, that’s not really the type of tasty morsel that most developers would be looking for at WWDC. That’s really more of a MacWorld type of thing (as it was when it was announced).

I think the real jewel of WWDC will be what the Mac Developer and iPhone-awaiting community are looking for: the iPhone Developer Kit. This would most likely be something along the lines of an update to XCode that would enable developers to somehow port their applications to the iPhone platform. Granted, many apps wouldn’t port well to the iPhone (CS3 comes to mind right away), but other apps like Voodoo Pad, NetNewsWire, or even (gasp!) TextMate.

I’m not saying that Apple would open up the platform to 3rd-party distribution (you wouldn’t be able to download TextMate for the iPhone from macromates.com), but it would open up the platform to 3rd-party developers. Developers could then submit their apps to Apple for review and distribution (probably through the iTunes Store) and apps that would really be great to have in a hand-held form-factor would become available.