<http://smokingapples.com> ------------------------------
Mac OS X Lion<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Smoking-Apples/~3/BoKTEkxqE9k/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email> Posted: 14 Oct 2010 05:57 PM PDT [image: Post image for Mac OS X Lion]<http://smokingapples.com/opinion/mac-os-x-lion/> That’s what it’s going to be called. Not Mac OS 11, or anything else. There’s lot of chatter about what the next big cat from Apple could be. The Lion is, after all, the king of all cats (or so they say), and the last version of OS X was nothing but a featureless overhaul of the underpinnings of the system. Lion is going to be big on features, focussed on the consumer, and it’s going to be available somewhere the summer of 2011. That’s my prediction at least. But what are these new features? Well, surely we’ll find out about at least a few of the *tentpole* features during the preview, but it’s always fun to take a guess. The following are but a series of guesses, many of which will probably not come true, and I’ll have to delete this article in shame. But there’s time for that, so here goes. There’s been a lot of speculation as to whether Lion will be a touchscreen based OS. Not a full blown touch OS like on the iOS devices, but something in between. Not happening. Lion may support touch based devices like a hybrid MacBook Air-iPad, just as OS X’s underpinnings have supported iOS devices all these years, but that touchscreen Mac will be a device on its own, not part of an operating system you can pick up off the shelves. Moreover, I cannot imagine Steve Jobs telling everyone about this wonderful new operating system, that will ship next year, and will run on brand new unannounced hardware to function. Lion is going to bring a lot of iOS back to the Mac. We’re going to see revamped user interfaces for Mail, iCal, borrowing from those icon metaphors and UI styles. Everything is going to look much cleaner than before, much like QuickTime X did with its previous version (though I hope not at the cost of power and functionality). But where iOS segregates its functionality into ‘apps’, the Mac will feature a more integrated workflow of its different services. Imagine the Mail app featuring the Address Book and iCal interfaces in one single glorified window. The same addressbook showing up in iChat, ready for FaceTime. The thought of running iOS apps on a mouse/keyboard environment is sour at best, and Apple would never go for it. Those are touch based user interfaces, depending on a lot of functionality inherent on those devices, that would not work on any Mac as we know it. They just wouldn’t work. But what if Apple introduces a new way of writing Mac specific applications that are kind of like iOS apps? I’m not a developer, but I hear it’s easier to develop iOS apps than Mac apps, so maybe Xcode could be put to the task of integrating those easy to use APIs. Maybe that’s going to be the de facto way to write applications on 10.7. Another ‘application platform’ that hasn’t been discussed, is web applications. Safari 4 beta featured a site-specific-app generator, where you could have a website run in its own window. Apple could bring back this feature in a much more developer-centric way, so people can publish high performance webkit-based cocoa apps without much effort. Facebook would be the first to jump to the opportunity. This would also make it viable to have a ‘Mac App Store’, possibly right inside Finder. Yes, the Finder. I haven’t had a problem with the Finder, but it needs a revamp. I can’t see Apple doing tabs, or dual panes, or a tree structure in the left sidebar. Those are user interfaces that are best kept on Windows. What we could have, is more data centric approach to organising files, probably powered by the much talked about ZFS. Finder will be like the iTunes of files. Imagine if your documents in a library instead of just in a documents folder. Or your pictures were viewable as events and projects right inside the Finder, with access to all that metadata. I’m sure there would be generic folders for all your other junk, but a database works much better in this world of syncing and cloud computing. These databases could then tie into cloud services like iDisk and iWork.com, gaining worry free file management on all iOS devices. This database structure could also be extensible, so that non-Apple apps can manipulate them and even create databases of their own. The benefits of this are endless. This would allow the iPad to live outside of the iTunes ecosystem, as many have been clamouring for. Or perhaps integrate iDisk and Time Machine in a single user interface. People say Apple needs to buy Dropbox. But there’s no reason Apple couldn’t build a killer solution on their own. Lion has at least another year before it hits the market. Their massive data center thingy would be ready by then. All of this will make iOS devices truly integrate with the Mac, and with each other, without having to go through iTunes every time. This could also be the OS that makes MobileMe a free service, with paid upgrades for additional space and bandwidth. The marginal cost of maintaining an ad-free service would be supplemented by the huge value add for the entire ecosystem, where consumers would be compelled to have devices from all of Apple’s platforms, which would even include the cheap little AppleTV they just introduced. The one aspect of OS X that hasn’t received much attention, is the Dashboard. Those webkit based widgets are always out of reach, and though I regularly use some of them, there’s no reason for them to be so isolated from the rest of the system. The Dashboard is probably going to be removed in favour of those ‘apps’ I talked about, or perhaps there’s a way to have them intermingle with the windows on the desktop without cluttering up the workspace. No, I’m not talking about stuffing them in a sidebar. The preview of 10.7, along with new iLife and iWork suites (and a possible MacBook Air refresh), is going to be totally… what’s the word after every Apple keynote… disappointing magical. -- IMUG Users website: www.imug.in
