Being CS

Ideas for the Post Panther Mac

Adam Angst raised some great points at his TenCon Keynote . In the future Apple needs to provide standard ways for programs to interact with each other. iPhoto, iTunes and the like are all great programs, but if they are to be integrated effectively, Apple needs to give independent programmers better ways of adding featuers to them.

Architectures, not Applications. iPhoto is just an application. iPhoto should be an image database that Apple provides at the system level for anyone to tie into. iPhoto becomes the built in front end, but has a layer at the bottom. This enables more inter-application communication (viz, rendezvous photo sharing.)

In this way it would be possible to use an improved iPhoto backend while still using iPhoto.app or to find new innovative ways of using the image database that do not just include viewing the pictures.

Even more important to me is the following point:

But sharing is too device driven, even with Rendezvous. We need a cloud of shared files instead, like DataClub. We need a peer to peer file sharing system to populate that cloud. Could be usable for backup and data recovery. Permissions and encryption is completely essential. The pieces are all here.

A friend of mine who uses Windows asked me whether it was possible to globally search shared music by song rather than for a song on one person's playlist. This led me to the idea of creating smart playlists of songs on networked computers. The difference between local computers and those on the network must be minimized. Apple is working in this direction, but they still have a long way to go, but I am very happy that somebody is making the right steps. Posted by Can Sar at October 29, 2003 10:20 AM to category Apple & Mac OS X | TrackBack