This morning when I started reading rumors of Apple announcing 10.6 at WWDC on Monday, I thought “not gonna happen”.
My reasoning was the following:
- 10.5 hasn’t been out long enough for a really wide user adaption.
- Users won’t want to pay another $120ish for a new OS so soon.
- Apple doesn’t have enough engineers to add enough new features to an OS to be a big enough upgrade.
Then John Gruber posted a few interesting comments – first to an article about Snow Leopard being ‘pure Cocoa‘. This makes complete sense to me – see the QTKit as an example of the start of that. Having a consistent Cocoa API for everything is a win for newer developers who don’t know (or care) about Carbon.
Gruber also points to TUAW’s post on the subject, in which they comment that it’s a stability and performance release, and even perhaps a grand unifying OS release (Touch/Macintosh/Apple TV).
This unifying theory more than anything makes the most sense to me. Apple, like every Mac programming company these days, is hurting for good people. When they try and hire folks, it’s often a hard sell to get someone to move to the bay area given it’s high cost of living. So, why not consolidate the code, and have one repository containing all three from which you can build off of, with a shared base of source. It would alleviate having to build three large teams, or even three medium teams. One core OS team, and then three smaller teams to do the respective UI and platform specific frameworks.
What would this allow them to provide? Well, we’ve seen two – AppKit and UIKit. How about a third? AppleTVKit? I wonder if one of the unannounced sessions is one on the programming environment for the next release of the Apple TV ‘operating system’? I wonder if Apple will have a built in application store? It would be a fantastic opportunity for Apple to pull ahead in the set top box arena. Netflix Player anyone?
Here’s hoping….
I can’t see them opening the AppleTV up. They only relented for the iPhone after realizing that trying to pass Web apps off as native wasn’t going to sit with developers. I haven’t really seen anyone clamoring to develop native apps for the AppleTV.
I’m still conflicted on this whole 10.6 in January thing. Unless they offer this as a free upgrade (plus a $19 S&H fee) like 10.1, I can’t see people really lining up for this. 10.1 at least offered DVD playback and disc burning.
From a consumer standpoint, it just doesn’t make sense. From a developer’s standpoint, I’ll do a backflip.
That is a good point, I don’t think I’ve read of anyone really wanting to develop a plugin/app for the Apple TV. The device might just be a way for them to get users to purchase iTunes store content.
It will be an interesting keynote if this 10.6 stuff is actually true.