Ok, I know my track record with rumors is not that great, but…

Last week, I attended  a talk about Color at the Montreal Final Cut usergroup and, at the end, a rep from a third party reseller told us that he had been ask by Apple to schedule meetings after the NAB with his clients who have attended the conference.

Anyone in the business knows what it means: new product!

The question is: what is this product going to be? It is probably not a piece of hardware since it wouldn’t make sense to meet clients to talk about a new Mac (book)Pro. So it has to be a new software or a major change to an existing one.

Some people talked about a new version of Final Cut Studio, I doubt it. The people behind Apple are brilliant and usually follow a well crafted roadmap. 2010 is the year of the iPad in Apple strategic plan. This is why I think the announcement will be related to the iPad. More precisely, it will be some authoring tool targeted at iPad content supplier.

I have no idea of the format of the tool: plugin to FCP, pro version of Pages, totally new app, etc… Yet, I am pretty sure that it is coming. I hope this tool will be accessible to business of every size, like what they did with the App Store instead of the Music Store which is only available to major players.

I know this is all speculations right now but, from a big picture point of view, it makes sense to have such a tool to standardize content development across suppliers.