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 When the Apple TV 2 debuted last fall, people were hoping for an Apple TV App Store to be among its features. This was not the case and one has to ask why? We know the Apple TV runs the same operating system as the iPhone and iPad, so creating an SDK and app store would be easy.
In its current stand alone state, the Apple TV has no way of controlling applications and this is a big problem for developers. The current remote is used to choose which media to view or listen to, but it is not sufficient to control applications. Apple will have to come up with a better controller, if they want developers to build Apple TV applications.
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When Steve Jobs introduced us to Lion (OS X 10.7) back in October, there were a few items that were certainly interesting to note:
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| Lion OS X 10.7 |
| Lion will be the next giant step away from computing as we have known it for the past 25 years. |
App Store was a Lion Feature but will be available four-five months before Lion is released — We should mark our calendars for January 20th, which will be 90 days since Jobs' announcement. Will Apple will release iWork 11 on that date and make it available only via the App Store? Expect Apple to move this way to make their Apple Store shelves less filled with software (I mean how many iPhone Apps can you buy at an Apple Store? Answer: Zero) and more filled with accessories and Mac/iPhone gear that is tangible.
- Lion is a move away from the Finder — The Finder was Apple's original way of helping us technical neophytes understand directory structures and files. It is clear that Steve wants to move to the next step which is to make us less dependent on files and where they are stored. Instead we are just use them in the appropriate application. For example, think of Mail.app. Do you deal with files per se? No, you are dealing with an App called Mail.app and it helps you organize "files" called E-mails. A better example is iPhoto. Few of us rarely ever see the actual files in iPhoto but instead manipulating those files through the application. Never must one go to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/ and so on. My bet is Steve would like to make our computing day file-and-directory-structure-free. Apps just handle everything for us, in a more useful way.
- Lion is a move away from the Dock — We were introduced to the Dock (in its current form) with OS X 10.0 (sure there were previews of it in OS 9 and 8). But the Dock is limiting. There are only so many items one can fit on the Dock until it becomes so small that you need a magnifying glass to understand what is in there. You should see Mark (Guy #1's) dock. It is so small and so busy, only he can use his computer. If you think about it, the iOS has a dock, but it is far more flexible and far more customizable... yes the main screens (or windows) we swipe through to find,.... what? Apps. See the previous point. Apps become center stage and Lion will make this more evident.
- Lion will make files, not apps, cloud-centric — In Lion expect to see that auto-save also means auto-save to the cloud. For those of you who use IMAP as your e-mail protocol or MobileMe (based on IMAP), you can quickly picture how all files could work that way — not just e-mail. This makes sense with Apple's massive data center in North Carolina. So with Lion I can work on a presentation, then continue when I get on the plane with my iPad.... because all files are synced (like IMAP e-mail). Apps on the other hand are not. They must be installed on each device. In the future, I'm sure if you buy an app for the Mac (through the App Store) it will also have an iOS flavor as well (like iWork does).
A lot more is in-store for us with Lion. Steve said he only had a limited amount of time to share with us some key features. What I think that really meant is he wasn't quite ready to reveal the massive change (and improvements) Lion will bring to our computing lives. Lion will be the next giant step away from computing as we have known it for the past 25 years.
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