Visions of a future filled with the sweet touch of Apple OS

Yesterday's rumor from Gizmodo created a flood of visions on Apple's future plans in some obscure creative corner of my brain, based on thoughts that have been growing in me for quite some time now.

Why are Apple releasing a new operating system, Snow Leopard, that is merely an optimized and touched up version of Leopard? Because they need some kind of meat to feed us Mac-o-maniacs while more revolutionary innovation is taking place in some of the more secluded areas of Apple's R'n'D department. What innovation? The all-new Apple OS, of course.

What is Apple OS, then? These ideas spring to mind:

• A merge of Mac OS X and iPhone OS into a joint platform.
• An OS that enables current AppStore apps to be run on all Apple devices, ranging from iPhone/iPod Touch to laptops and stationary computers. Apps already developed for iPhone/iPod Touch will be runnable without changes on devices with larger screens. All that is needed to achieve this is to repackage and embed the iPhone Simulator from XCode into the ordinary OS functionality.
• Most current Apps will with minor adjustments be able to make use of larger screen sizes. My guess is that the iPhone OS components can be refactored in such a way that many times the only adjustment that is necessary will be to change a switch in the source code, that states that this app can be run in larger screen sizes.
• Applications that today are written for Mac OS X, will be able to be distributed through the AppStore. It will still be possible, though, to write and distribute applications just like today, outside the AppStore. The advantage to releasing applications through the AppStore, will be that they are "validated" by Apple, so that you can be certain that it doesn't constitute malware, etc.
• The implication of a merge between the multitouch based iPhone OS and the mouse/keyboard based Mac OS X is that all future devices from Apple will be full-screen multi touch. The touch pad will disappear, and so will probably the keyboard in the future equivalent of today's laptops. All we are left with are tablets of a number of different sizes (2.8, 3.5 – current iPhone, 6, 10, 13, 15 and 17 inches?), a range of iMac's with multi touch screens (20, 24 inches?) and a new generation of super thin multi touch LED-displays (20, 24, 30, 40 inches?) to be used with future versions of the Mac Mini/Mac Pro-series.
• One day, the mouse will be gone. But only if the ergonomy of using touch screens is found to be at least as good as using a mouse.
• Typical multi touch features, such as gestures, with a new range of two-hand gestures will be used throughout the future Apple OS. Even apps tailored for the smallest screen sizes will be able to use these gestures, but it will not be recommended.
• The new Apple OS will sport a full size, touch based on-screen keyboard for devices with a large enough screen, but external physical keyboards still be around and popular in offices and homes, but not on the road.
• Another generation away is pressure sensitive touch and haptic feedback, maybe this is when physical keyboards will start getting more and more uncommon?

I guess that's all my visions for today. This is all, of course, very speculative but a general feeling is that this kind of "merge all into one" is very Apple-ish. For one, it creates a very clean offering of a versatile range of hardware that all make use of the same development API's. And the idea of being able to apply the success of the AppStore concept to all Apple's hardware platforms seems like it potentially can be very lucrative. I mean, profit has always been held high at Apple, and I kind of buy that. They want to build great products and generate a good profit so that they can keep building great products.

In summary, I can't wait to get hold of a 10-13 inch tablet, as a complement to my iPhone and MacBook Pro...

Some reflections 17 months later...

First of all, I'm still very, very happy about being able to use my Mac every day. I've been keeping Leopard updated, so that is still running smooth as ever. Windows XP, on the other hand, has started to lag in the way characteristic for a Windows installation, despite the fact that basically all I do in Windows is use Outlook and Office. Apparently that is enough to degrade performance. I will definitely upgrade to Windows 7 when it arrives this fall. More on this in subsequent posts.

Some tips for those of you who are about to install a Mac to dual boot OS X/Windows using VMWare Fusion:

1. One mistake I made when partitioning the disk, was to allocate way too much space for the NTFS partition (80 Gb out of 250), which has led to my Mac OS X partition being just about full, while the NTFS partition is only filled about 25%.
   
   I save all files that I work with in the Mac OS X partition, by sharing my home directory in Mac OS X with XP using the "Shared folders" feature in VMWare Tools. I really like this setup, since I can write my documents in Office 2007 for Windows to ensure full compatibility with my all-PC-colleagues, and at the same time use Spotlight in Leopard for full text search (a lot faster than Desktop Search in XP) and last, but not least, use the lightning fast Preview function to preview Office and PDF documents.
   
   I see two alternative ways out of this:
   
   a) Shrink the NTFS partition to, say, 30 Gb.
   b) Remove the NTFS partition alltogether, and stop using a Boot Camp partition.
   
   I'm leaning towards b), which leads me to my next mistake.
   
   
2. I shouldn't have made a Boot Camp partition. So, why did I do it in the first place? Well, being at a new job and having no previous experience with dual booting a Mac, I really didn't want to take any risks of compatibility issues in the Windows installation. Therefore, I chose to use a Boot Camp partition, so that I could boot the machine straight into Windows, to rule out VMWare compatibility as a cause of eventual problems. After 17 months, I haven't used Boot Camp even once!
   
   In addition, when I had the system set up, I got a problem with the Windows license, since the hardware configuration is different when booting the Boot Camp partition in VMWare Fusion, compared to booting up in Boot Camp. I had to call Microsoft to beg for more chances, since I have an OEM-license of XP, that only allows for a couple of hardware configurations within a rather long time span, or it will lock me out. Since I first installed Windows on one machine, and next week moved it to a new machine, I went through a few hardware configurations.
   
   Note: I'm not sure, but there might be a chance that VMWare Fusion now has been updated to address the issue of changing hardware profiles, so this may not be an issue any more. Hang on, let me google that for you. ;-)
   
   
   
   Maybe the biggest reason for using just a virtual machine without a separate partition, is to be able to suspend Windows during Mac OS X restarts, etc. That way, I'll be able to avoid having to go through the shutdown/startup-procedure in Windows every time I want to reboot OS X.
   
   
3. All these things considered, I'm looking forward to the release of Windows 7, so that I can start migrating to a virtual machine containing that instead of my current Boot Camp partition.
   
   
4. Of course, being the Macomaniac that I am, I'm looking forward even more to the release of Snow Leopard. With Exchange support in OS X Mail, I'll probably be able to quit using Outlook altogether, and have all my mail activity in OS X instead. With an Office 2008 for Mac-license, I'll almost be able to leave Windows altogether. The only things I really need to use Windows for are the VPN-client that I use to connect to my office servers and SourceGear Vault.
   
   If I'm not able to make a colleague check in my documents on their PC :-)