8 ms·

MacOS XI: It's time to take the next step (concept)

59 points by okanesen 11y ago

Kjeldahl 11y ago
OSX and iOS need to converge into something new and unified. Touch and pen(cils) is becoming standard for new computers in the near future, and tablets with keyboards also need to support touchpad and mouse. It may not have been necessary earlier, but with Surface and iPad Pro it's becoming obvious that these are not completely separate platforms any longer.
- graeme 11y ago
  Can you name an example of desktop software convergence by Apple that went well? It wrecked Pages, which was one of my favourite software tools prior. I use very little Apple software now.
- calebgilbert 11y ago
  "OSX and iOS need to converge into something new and unified" ...Ubuntu here I come.
- thescribe 11y ago
  Nothing could make me abandon Apple faster.
mikhailt 11y ago
I like the concepts presented here but I cannot shake off the feeling that OS X is pretty much never going to get the love it deserves from Apple. Apple will just keep improving iOS to be more powerful, more flexible and so on. The iPad Pro with iOS 9 is just a rough draft, it will be iOS 10 or 11 that'll show the hardware off, at least I hope. iOS 9 was probably the biggest jump in productivity for the iPads and hopefully, Apple keeps it going from now on, not neglecting it like it did prior to iOS 9.
- frou_dh 11y ago
  Well the Mac has had a lot of love poured into it over all these years to get it to where it is today. I enjoy using the Mac in its present incarnation immensely.
  - api 11y ago
    Could we have with OSX a... gasp... stable platform that is just really good at doing desktop type work? IOS would have to evolve a lot and in many ways to take over desktop. Maybe it will. Android N seems to be moving there so maybe that's the future.
    - Kristine1975 11y ago
      You mean a second Snow Leopard that just fixes bugs and adds overall polish? Yes please!
      - icedchai 11y ago
        Isn't that pretty much all of the recent OS X releases? What major features did El Capitan add? Yosemite? Mavericks? I can't think of a single major thing. At one point they finally got multi monitor support working properly, but I forget when.
        riffraff 11y ago
        snow leopard had big performance improvements compared to its predecessor, I am not sure the latest releases had that.
        Kristine1975 11y ago
        Mavericks finally brought support for OpenGL 4.1. But granted, that's not something most users will notice. Also it removed some skeuomorphism, which depending on whether you like it or not counts as a major feature ;-)
      - kalleboo 11y ago
Kristine1975 11y ago
I'm not impressed: Tablets and smartphones have a touch screen, computers most often don't. Software that doesn't take this into account will be a second-class citizen on the respective platform. And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has its uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it comes to organizing my source code, for example.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has its uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it comes to organizing my source code, for example." The article touches on a concept called 'loops' for cases such as this. I think there's room for innovation with filesystems. Personally I'm a fan of the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku.
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    > Personally I'm a fan of the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku How do you see that working well? Microsoft tried to incorporate all the stuff like MP3 metadata into explorer way back when (XP? Vista? Can't recall) OS X has supported "saved searches" which act like a live database-backed file manager ever since Spotlight was added. More recently they added quick tagging of files. What are you imagining that would be more usable than these?
    - kalleboo 11y ago
      So for some simple cases it works great. I have my music, my music app queries the database, presents my with my music, tags them into playlists etc, great. I have my photos. OK, so I want to keep my screenshots and the memes I downloaded from imgur separate, but those are fairly easy to special-case. Now I'm writing a novel in my spare time. I got my text document, I got whatever Evernote/OneNote-style system for notes. I found this cool MMORPG map editor I'm using to keep track of where my characters live and go to work, does that count as a picture. And I recorded when I hummed a few bars because I wanted to add a song my character wrote when he was bored, and now it keeps shuffling that in my music. Hmm these things are getting difficult to associate now...
SimeVidas 11y ago
I’m not a Mac user; this kind-of looks like Windows 10.
mmastrac 11y ago
These concepts look nice, but never take into account the difficulty of working on complex projects with multiple people that hierarchical filesystem actually work well on. There's absolutely no way you could build an app in a big "bucket 'o' files". Sure, you can put together a flyer for a softball game or (maybe) type up a simplistic report for school, but eventually these "loops" are going to become big, unusable buckets of content that isn't easily searchable (do we have good search on music contents yet? better hope the filename is good before it goes into the bucket!). Perhaps the answer here is a "subloop". That's starting to look like we've come around to nested document folders again, isn't it? Somewhat amusing: the screenshot of Sublime Text in the mockup is using folders.
- koenigdavidmj 11y ago
  I would assume that a file would correspond with an 'app project' with appropriately structured content inside. Analogies I'm thinking of include Smalltalk images, or how a compiled .app is a directory right now.
- jimminy 11y ago
  What I find most funny about it is that HFS actually provides the closest model framework for a heirarchial distributed FS, where pretty much no other does (btrfs does have some benefits as well.) Like the author, I worked on a distributed cloud FS, but hierarchy was a core goal. The abstracted reference system of HFS that split meta-data from the data resources is a huge boon to handling various common issues, from rights management to doing "fast" full-tree cloning over a distributed store and several other neat tricks like persistence. The biggest issue with distributed heirarchial file-systems is probably how to handle the full-tree cloning, in a way that isn't crippling, slow, or causes an enforced depth and file limits.
jupp0r 11y ago
I would rather have a modern file system optimized for SSDs instead of one with 16bit alignments for the Motorola 68k. It seems like OSX versions are more about tabs in Finder nowadays while Linux (and Windows) actually innovate.
kalleboo 11y ago
I don't see anything new here. Some apps were redesigned to behave a bit like Photos.app, but pretending that adding a menu bar and multiple window support will be an easy port shows an amazing lack of experience. edit: just realized that there are no multiple window apps. So, the distinction of a computer vs a mobile device is gone right there Organizing files into projects is waved away by "just search through an amorphous blob of data". "Kind: PDF". Who finds files like that? The user activity thread is nice, but it's clear Apple was already working in this direction with the links timeline in Safari, but all the social service TOS's forbid this kind of presentation and they're super-protective of their presentation to the point even Apple can't negotiate past it at this point.
blackhaz 11y ago
Can somebody please tell Apple to get color saturation of the GUI back to how it was in the Snow Leopard times? These Lego brick colors are HORRIBLE.
danpalmer 11y ago
I find these sorts of concept look great, and look they would work well, when you have 10 emails in your mailbox, or 3 tabs open in your browser, or 6 files in Sublime Text, etc etc. I get hundreds of emails a day, work in an editor that is indexing ~11000 files, regularly have 50 tabs open in Chrome, etc. I find many apps that follow the sorts of aesthetics and principles shown in these mockups just do not scale to what I would consider normal professional use.
- pbreit 11y ago
  I think your impression of normal professional use is bonkers. For example, we use Slack and I auto-filter auto-emails so I only get about 30/day in my inbox. While you probably don't need 50 tabs open, I'm not sure this direction would preclude handling that in a decent manner. The editing would work the same whether or not Finder presented the files hierarchically or not...no change there.
  - justinclift 11y ago
    The described behaviour isn't that unusual. Several of the people I've worked with have said they do things in almost exactly the same way. (and they're not idiots ;>)
  - danpalmer 11y ago
    It's not that these things can't be done, but I find time and time again that when you simplify software and focus it on typical consumer usage patterns, it fails to work for professional use. - A "people focused" email experience doesn't work very well with monitoring emails. I've had to turn off Gmail's smart inbox because me being CC'd into a person to person thread that I don't care much about is "high priority", but that Monit email saying CPU is at 99% on one of the webservers looks like every other Monit alert, and is a low priority update. - I use Slack extensively at work, but email is still incredibly important. - I may not need 50 tabs open, but after my 5 pinned tabs, a few reference/documentation tabs, the prod version of what I'm working on, the local version of what I'm working on, the PR page, and a few tabs of personal stuff, I'm easily reaching 20+, all it takes is one context switch to a different project and I've opened another 10. 50 isn't uncommon. - A hierarchical file system is pretty important when working with Git repos. And I'm not a contractor, but if I were, separating client data is of paramount importance.
0x0 11y ago
I don't get why people want osx to die and ios to run on mac. They are already pretty much the same OS. Open up the OSX UIKit port should be enough to solve that "problem". Also, removing the file system tree would be a huge step backwards. Organizing hundreds or thousands of files between dozens to hundreds of projects is just not suited for a "everything in one searchable bag" for a few reasons: To find something with search, you have to already know what you're looking for - something that browsing a folder solves instantly (how can you know you see all relevant files with a search? Maybe there's an important file that didn't match your query?!) - and the common "solution" with tagging/labels are just single-level folders in disguise.... I'm glad Apple decided to not port OSX to the iPad, or replace OSX with an iPad-esque iOS. Most people I've talked to that experienced windows 8 would agree that when Microsoft did just that, it was a misstep.
- blackhaz 11y ago
  If they remove the file system tree I'll switch to another OS for sure. That's my red line.
  - rgacote 11y ago
    I'm a developer so I live and breath the file system tree. On the other hand, don't forget that the original Mac did not have a file system tree. Rather, it had a bunch of linked objects through which you could navigate. (It also had flags for file revision numbers which was never implemented.)
    - kabdib 11y ago
      HFS followed not soon after the original Mac, though. Losing a filesystem hierarchy is loony toons. I can't even
  - pbreit 11y ago
    I suspect it is easily hidden for the masses yet easily available for the few.
- gardano 11y ago
tsunamifury 11y ago
This is like looking at Porsche try to make a flatbed truck. It's stupid because it belays all the use cases that the product ctaegory needs. Designer: design isn't just about looking sleek, it's primarily about meeting the use case as simply and robustly as possible. All these use cases are better on other devices.
et1337 11y ago
This is way better for e.g. my mother's use case. It's horrible for power users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced some kind of "power user shell". I kind of do this already (on Win, Mac, and Linux) by almost exclusively using a terminal window and browser. edit: "macOS" is absolutely brilliant though. They should go for the throwback hipster vibe.
- gh02t 11y ago
  > It's horrible for power users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced some kind of "power user shell" That sounds like it could work in theory, but I dunno if I'd actually want that as a power user. Mostly because there's more "normal" users out there, I feel like any alternative UI would be neglected. Seems like you'd be consigning yourself to being a second class citizen. Maybe this works on Linux where there's less of a profit incentive because development on niche WM's and such is largely done by hobbyists, but I'm having a hard time imagining Apple spending a lot of resources on developing something large for a minority of users. Maybe if they opened it up a bit and had some sort of open plugin based build-your-own experience that could shift some of the effort off of them? I could see that working but it doesn't seem in line with Apple's philosophy.
tambourine_man 11y ago
I'd love for the name to switch back to plain system like the old days. So much cooler. I know I have a Mac, it's staring at me every day. Completely superfluous, of course, and they are probably going with macOS, but one can dream of a more sensible casing future.
- LeoNatan25 11y ago
  It hasn't been called "Mac OS X" in several years. It's just "OS X", which is much better.
hk__2 11y ago
How would you expect 3D Touch to work on a screen that moves if you press on it? You’d need to maintain the laptop screen in one hand while 3D Touch-ing with the other; that’s cumbersome.
- sellweek 11y ago
  3D Touch/Force Touch actually currently works on OS X on the 2015 MacBook Pro and the new MacBook. The touchpad doesn't move, it's just pressure sensitive and provides haptic feedback so you feel like you can depress it even more after clicking. OS X provides a dictionary/lookup popover when using it in Safari and some other apps.
  - hk__2 11y ago
    Oh right; I forgot about the touchpad ;)
thejerz 11y ago
This is clickbait. There is nothing in here that comes (anywhere) close to XI -- at best, it's OS X 10.12. OS XI will be a paradigm shift -- the way that OS 9 to OS X was -- not just a slightly different UI, desktop picture, and icons.
OJFord 11y ago
This fails to provide any motivation for such a merging/converging iOS/MacOS experience. Why do I want Netflix and CNN apps that have been so easily (but nonetheless with effort) adapted to support the platform from their iOS counterparts? I expect I'll choose the website in Chrome every time.
- thescribe 11y ago
  Because instead of brining iOS up this concept involves dragging OSX down.
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  Personally I’d love to have native apps for media-intensive and “app like” websites. Why? Well, for those sorts of sites a native app will easily perform better and their existence would allow me to dedicate my browser to more lightweight/traditional sites focused on delivering text and images.
thescribe 11y ago
I think I'm the sole person on earth who hates touch. I'd switch OS's before I bought a computer with a touch screen.
fit2rule 11y ago
Things I would do to make OSX great again: 1. Fix Finder. 2. Integrate the iDevice simulator into the OSX: all iOS apps can run on OSX. So let them. 3. Continue making kick-ass laptop/personal computers, with keyboards and screens and touchscreen, and make the difference between iOS and OSX go away, at the hardware layer. Plan B: 1. Put Xcode on iOS. 2. Make an iOS Touchscreen Laptop (8-core ARM with 16gigs RAM, etc.) 3. Abandon OSX completely.

59 points by okanesen 11y ago

OSX and iOS need to converge into something new and unified. Touch and pen(cils) is becoming standard for new computers in the near future, and tablets with keyboards also need to support touchpad and mouse. It may not have been necessary earlier, but with Surface and iPad Pro it's becoming obvious that these are not completely separate platforms any longer.

graeme 11y ago
Can you name an example of desktop software convergence by Apple that went well? It wrecked Pages, which was one of my favourite software tools prior. I use very little Apple software now.
calebgilbert 11y ago
"OSX and iOS need to converge into something new and unified" ...Ubuntu here I come.
thescribe 11y ago
Nothing could make me abandon Apple faster.

mikhailt 11y ago

I like the concepts presented here but I cannot shake off the feeling that OS X is pretty much never going to get the love it deserves from Apple. Apple will just keep improving iOS to be more powerful, more flexible and so on. The iPad Pro with iOS 9 is just a rough draft, it will be iOS 10 or 11 that'll show the hardware off, at least I hope. iOS 9 was probably the biggest jump in productivity for the iPads and hopefully, Apple keeps it going from now on, not neglecting it like it did prior to iOS 9.

frou_dh 11y ago
Well the Mac has had a lot of love poured into it over all these years to get it to where it is today. I enjoy using the Mac in its present incarnation immensely.
- api 11y ago
  Could we have with OSX a... gasp... stable platform that is just really good at doing desktop type work? IOS would have to evolve a lot and in many ways to take over desktop. Maybe it will. Android N seems to be moving there so maybe that's the future.
  - Kristine1975 11y ago
    You mean a second Snow Leopard that just fixes bugs and adds overall polish? Yes please!
    - icedchai 11y ago
      Isn't that pretty much all of the recent OS X releases? What major features did El Capitan add? Yosemite? Mavericks? I can't think of a single major thing. At one point they finally got multi monitor support working properly, but I forget when.
      - riffraff 11y ago
        snow leopard had big performance improvements compared to its predecessor, I am not sure the latest releases had that.
      - Kristine1975 11y ago
        Mavericks finally brought support for OpenGL 4.1. But granted, that's not something most users will notice. Also it removed some skeuomorphism, which depending on whether you like it or not counts as a major feature ;-)
    - kalleboo 11y ago

Kristine1975 11y ago

I'm not impressed: Tablets and smartphones have a touch screen, computers most often don't. Software that doesn't take this into account will be a second-class citizen on the respective platform. And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has its uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it comes to organizing my source code, for example.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has its uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it comes to organizing my source code, for example." The article touches on a concept called 'loops' for cases such as this. I think there's room for innovation with filesystems. Personally I'm a fan of the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku.
- kalleboo 11y ago
  > Personally I'm a fan of the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku How do you see that working well? Microsoft tried to incorporate all the stuff like MP3 metadata into explorer way back when (XP? Vista? Can't recall) OS X has supported "saved searches" which act like a live database-backed file manager ever since Spotlight was added. More recently they added quick tagging of files. What are you imagining that would be more usable than these?
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    So for some simple cases it works great. I have my music, my music app queries the database, presents my with my music, tags them into playlists etc, great. I have my photos. OK, so I want to keep my screenshots and the memes I downloaded from imgur separate, but those are fairly easy to special-case. Now I'm writing a novel in my spare time. I got my text document, I got whatever Evernote/OneNote-style system for notes. I found this cool MMORPG map editor I'm using to keep track of where my characters live and go to work, does that count as a picture. And I recorded when I hummed a few bars because I wanted to add a song my character wrote when he was bored, and now it keeps shuffling that in my music. Hmm these things are getting difficult to associate now...

SimeVidas 11y ago

I’m not a Mac user; this kind-of looks like Windows 10.

mmastrac 11y ago

These concepts look nice, but never take into account the difficulty of working on complex projects with multiple people that hierarchical filesystem actually work well on. There's absolutely no way you could build an app in a big "bucket 'o' files". Sure, you can put together a flyer for a softball game or (maybe) type up a simplistic report for school, but eventually these "loops" are going to become big, unusable buckets of content that isn't easily searchable (do we have good search on music contents yet? better hope the filename is good before it goes into the bucket!). Perhaps the answer here is a "subloop". That's starting to look like we've come around to nested document folders again, isn't it? Somewhat amusing: the screenshot of Sublime Text in the mockup is using folders.

koenigdavidmj 11y ago
I would assume that a file would correspond with an 'app project' with appropriately structured content inside. Analogies I'm thinking of include Smalltalk images, or how a compiled .app is a directory right now.
jimminy 11y ago
What I find most funny about it is that HFS actually provides the closest model framework for a heirarchial distributed FS, where pretty much no other does (btrfs does have some benefits as well.) Like the author, I worked on a distributed cloud FS, but hierarchy was a core goal. The abstracted reference system of HFS that split meta-data from the data resources is a huge boon to handling various common issues, from rights management to doing "fast" full-tree cloning over a distributed store and several other neat tricks like persistence. The biggest issue with distributed heirarchial file-systems is probably how to handle the full-tree cloning, in a way that isn't crippling, slow, or causes an enforced depth and file limits.

jupp0r 11y ago

I would rather have a modern file system optimized for SSDs instead of one with 16bit alignments for the Motorola 68k. It seems like OSX versions are more about tabs in Finder nowadays while Linux (and Windows) actually innovate.

kalleboo 11y ago

I don't see anything new here. Some apps were redesigned to behave a bit like Photos.app, but pretending that adding a menu bar and multiple window support will be an easy port shows an amazing lack of experience. edit: just realized that there are no multiple window apps. So, the distinction of a computer vs a mobile device is gone right there Organizing files into projects is waved away by "just search through an amorphous blob of data". "Kind: PDF". Who finds files like that? The user activity thread is nice, but it's clear Apple was already working in this direction with the links timeline in Safari, but all the social service TOS's forbid this kind of presentation and they're super-protective of their presentation to the point even Apple can't negotiate past it at this point.

blackhaz 11y ago

Can somebody please tell Apple to get color saturation of the GUI back to how it was in the Snow Leopard times? These Lego brick colors are HORRIBLE.

danpalmer 11y ago

I find these sorts of concept look great, and look they would work well, when you have 10 emails in your mailbox, or 3 tabs open in your browser, or 6 files in Sublime Text, etc etc. I get hundreds of emails a day, work in an editor that is indexing ~11000 files, regularly have 50 tabs open in Chrome, etc. I find many apps that follow the sorts of aesthetics and principles shown in these mockups just do not scale to what I would consider normal professional use.

pbreit 11y ago
I think your impression of normal professional use is bonkers. For example, we use Slack and I auto-filter auto-emails so I only get about 30/day in my inbox. While you probably don't need 50 tabs open, I'm not sure this direction would preclude handling that in a decent manner. The editing would work the same whether or not Finder presented the files hierarchically or not...no change there.
- justinclift 11y ago
  The described behaviour isn't that unusual. Several of the people I've worked with have said they do things in almost exactly the same way. (and they're not idiots ;>)
- danpalmer 11y ago
  It's not that these things can't be done, but I find time and time again that when you simplify software and focus it on typical consumer usage patterns, it fails to work for professional use. - A "people focused" email experience doesn't work very well with monitoring emails. I've had to turn off Gmail's smart inbox because me being CC'd into a person to person thread that I don't care much about is "high priority", but that Monit email saying CPU is at 99% on one of the webservers looks like every other Monit alert, and is a low priority update. - I use Slack extensively at work, but email is still incredibly important. - I may not need 50 tabs open, but after my 5 pinned tabs, a few reference/documentation tabs, the prod version of what I'm working on, the local version of what I'm working on, the PR page, and a few tabs of personal stuff, I'm easily reaching 20+, all it takes is one context switch to a different project and I've opened another 10. 50 isn't uncommon. - A hierarchical file system is pretty important when working with Git repos. And I'm not a contractor, but if I were, separating client data is of paramount importance.

0x0 11y ago

I don't get why people want osx to die and ios to run on mac. They are already pretty much the same OS. Open up the OSX UIKit port should be enough to solve that "problem". Also, removing the file system tree would be a huge step backwards. Organizing hundreds or thousands of files between dozens to hundreds of projects is just not suited for a "everything in one searchable bag" for a few reasons: To find something with search, you have to already know what you're looking for - something that browsing a folder solves instantly (how can you know you see all relevant files with a search? Maybe there's an important file that didn't match your query?!) - and the common "solution" with tagging/labels are just single-level folders in disguise.... I'm glad Apple decided to not port OSX to the iPad, or replace OSX with an iPad-esque iOS. Most people I've talked to that experienced windows 8 would agree that when Microsoft did just that, it was a misstep.

blackhaz 11y ago
If they remove the file system tree I'll switch to another OS for sure. That's my red line.
- rgacote 11y ago
  I'm a developer so I live and breath the file system tree. On the other hand, don't forget that the original Mac did not have a file system tree. Rather, it had a bunch of linked objects through which you could navigate. (It also had flags for file revision numbers which was never implemented.)
  - kabdib 11y ago
    HFS followed not soon after the original Mac, though. Losing a filesystem hierarchy is loony toons. I can't even
- pbreit 11y ago
  I suspect it is easily hidden for the masses yet easily available for the few.
gardano 11y ago

tsunamifury 11y ago

This is like looking at Porsche try to make a flatbed truck. It's stupid because it belays all the use cases that the product ctaegory needs. Designer: design isn't just about looking sleek, it's primarily about meeting the use case as simply and robustly as possible. All these use cases are better on other devices.

et1337 11y ago

This is way better for e.g. my mother's use case. It's horrible for power users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced some kind of "power user shell". I kind of do this already (on Win, Mac, and Linux) by almost exclusively using a terminal window and browser. edit: "macOS" is absolutely brilliant though. They should go for the throwback hipster vibe.

gh02t 11y ago
> It's horrible for power users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced some kind of "power user shell" That sounds like it could work in theory, but I dunno if I'd actually want that as a power user. Mostly because there's more "normal" users out there, I feel like any alternative UI would be neglected. Seems like you'd be consigning yourself to being a second class citizen. Maybe this works on Linux where there's less of a profit incentive because development on niche WM's and such is largely done by hobbyists, but I'm having a hard time imagining Apple spending a lot of resources on developing something large for a minority of users. Maybe if they opened it up a bit and had some sort of open plugin based build-your-own experience that could shift some of the effort off of them? I could see that working but it doesn't seem in line with Apple's philosophy.

tambourine_man 11y ago

I'd love for the name to switch back to plain system like the old days. So much cooler. I know I have a Mac, it's staring at me every day. Completely superfluous, of course, and they are probably going with macOS, but one can dream of a more sensible casing future.

LeoNatan25 11y ago
It hasn't been called "Mac OS X" in several years. It's just "OS X", which is much better.

hk__2 11y ago

How would you expect 3D Touch to work on a screen that moves if you press on it? You’d need to maintain the laptop screen in one hand while 3D Touch-ing with the other; that’s cumbersome.

sellweek 11y ago
3D Touch/Force Touch actually currently works on OS X on the 2015 MacBook Pro and the new MacBook. The touchpad doesn't move, it's just pressure sensitive and provides haptic feedback so you feel like you can depress it even more after clicking. OS X provides a dictionary/lookup popover when using it in Safari and some other apps.
- hk__2 11y ago
  Oh right; I forgot about the touchpad ;)

thejerz 11y ago

This is clickbait. There is nothing in here that comes (anywhere) close to XI -- at best, it's OS X 10.12. OS XI will be a paradigm shift -- the way that OS 9 to OS X was -- not just a slightly different UI, desktop picture, and icons.

OJFord 11y ago

This fails to provide any motivation for such a merging/converging iOS/MacOS experience. Why do I want Netflix and CNN apps that have been so easily (but nonetheless with effort) adapted to support the platform from their iOS counterparts? I expect I'll choose the website in Chrome every time.

thescribe 11y ago
Because instead of brining iOS up this concept involves dragging OSX down.
kitsunesoba 11y ago
Personally I’d love to have native apps for media-intensive and “app like” websites. Why? Well, for those sorts of sites a native app will easily perform better and their existence would allow me to dedicate my browser to more lightweight/traditional sites focused on delivering text and images.

thescribe 11y ago

I think I'm the sole person on earth who hates touch. I'd switch OS's before I bought a computer with a touch screen.

fit2rule 11y ago

Things I would do to make OSX great again: 1. Fix Finder. 2. Integrate the iDevice simulator into the OSX: all iOS apps can run on OSX. So let them. 3. Continue making kick-ass laptop/personal computers, with keyboards and screens and touchscreen, and make the difference between iOS and OSX go away, at the hardware layer. Plan B: 1. Put Xcode on iOS. 2. Make an iOS Touchscreen Laptop (8-core ARM with 16gigs RAM, etc.) 3. Abandon OSX completely.