Apple's Special Back To The Mac Event - What To Expect? OS X - iOS Fusion & More
October 19, 2010
Apple's special event is due to take place tomorrow. Named "Back to the Mac," and believed to be focusing on a new version of Mac OS X (possibly called Lion), it might still hold some pleasant surprises for us iDevice owners.
Let's look at what we expect to happen or not happen tomorrow, and what's being said about it around the web.
iOS-Mac OS Fusion
One of the main points floating around about tomorrow's event is that Apple will bring Mac OS even closer to iOS. This alone doesn't make much sense as iOS is Mac OS for all intents and purposes. Yet, when Steve announced that the iPhone runs "real OS X" back at the iPhone launch, it was nowhere near as true as it is today, and it will be even more so tomorrow. Over the years, Apple has put a lot of effort into bringing Mac OS and iOS together; mostly under the hood. The concept, which is made possible by Apple's development language, is to allow authors to create apps that can work on both Macs and iOS devices. The only difference being the visual interface you're interacting with. On iOS 1.0, this was hardly the case. By iOS 4 however, Apple has made both platforms extremely similar, and letting people make apps that will run on both platforms is more of a reality than ever before. This in turn creates huge incentives for developers. In the same spirit, we're seeing Mac OS being influenced by our iDevices. Recently, Apple rolled out inertial scrolling for the Mac OS, and if you believe Macstories, there is much more of that to come. For example, they report Mac OS will be getting the same minimalistic scroll bars and behavior that you know from iOS. We might also be seeing things like "pull-to-refresh" come to our desktops. We don't know how far they'll take it. In the worst case scenario, you should at least see improved multi-touch support on your MacBook Pro's trackpad.Widgets & TouchScreen Macs
Another idea bouncing around is that Apple might bring iOS apps to the desktop, and let them replace the current widgets. This seems a bit far-fetched, but it would still be a great idea. Afterall, these apps can easily run in the developer's simulators, and while the experience isn't great, some of these apps would come in very handy on our dashboard. The corollary of such thinking is that Apple might bring touch-capabilities to Mac OS. That is, equip upcoming Macs with multi-touch capacitive touch screens. Again, that sounds like a strange hybrid. The combination of touchscreen desktops and iOS App-Widgets could however be a gateway for what Steve Jobs believes to be the future of computing; namely the iPad.The Cloud
In the same spirit, we still haven't heard from Apple on what they're doing about the cloud. Mostly a buzz word, it stands for capabilities that allow you to access all your files on any device anywhere. Or, streaming your content from Apple's upcoming data center. Even better, what if Apple managed to fuse iOS and Mac OS so deeply that you would get something of a continuous client? Imagine, that whenever you surf the web, download a file, listen to music, watch a movie, or chat on AIM, Apple could create a way that would allow you to continue that activity on your mobile device, or vice-versa. Also, remember that commenting on the Apple TV recently, Steve Jobs was very clear that people don't understand, nor want traditional sync:“They don’t want to manage storage. They don’t want to sync to a computer. They want to pull some content off; they want silent, cool and small."With its capabilities to integrate services today, Apple is better positioned than anyone else to finally make this happen, and create another revolution in the history of computing.
