Apple Replaces 'Mac OS X' with 'iTunes OS'
During CEO Steve Job’s keynote presentation at the annual Apple Developer Conference this week, he announced to a stunned crowed, that the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, dubbed “Leopard”, will be the last. Replaced by what is being called ‘iTunes OS’.
Apple ‘iTunes OS’ may be the long rumored cross-platfrom OS some claim will supplant Microsoft’s Windows while saving Apple millions of dollars annually on development, marketing, and support costs.
The first signs of this change can be seen in the Leopard Finder, the sidebar with ‘devices’, smart searches, and the integrated Apple Store make it indistinguishable from the cross-platform iTunes media player.
This surprise “one more thing” hasn’t been well received by the Mac blogging community:
One Comment
Umm… I didn’t watch the eventually posted stream of the keynote on Apple.com, but I was keeping track of it via MacRumors and some other site that was offering live updates… and in neither of those situations did they say anything about OS X going away. Yes, Finder is going to look like iTunes (which may or may not be a good thing… not sure yet), but OS X isn’t going away.
Of course, it’s also entirely possible that my sarcasm detector is on the fritz.
The iTunes interface is best when dealing with one type of data, and slightly less good when dealing with small numbers of similar data types. I LOVE it for music! (Music Geek + IA + iTunes = hours of OCD bliss.) But a file browser… man… a file browser needs to deal with TONS of different types of content. I don’t really see how a media-focused interface will be a good thing here. Yes, dealing with media is more and more becoming a primary task for computer users, but it’s not the ONLY task. Especially if you work on that same computer.
I don’t know… I’ll have to wait to get my hands on it to pass judgement upon it. One thing’s for sure, though… OS X’s Finder, as is, is highly broken. Yuck! As far as I’m concerned, it’s the #2 problem with OS X (the print dialog being #1… what the hell is with that horrid thing???). It does definitely need to be fixed. I’m just not sure CoverFlow + iTunes is the way to do it.