Why the Mac Store will grow the cloud
The logic is a little roundabout, but an excellent case can be made for OS X following iOS4 into the app store model as a good thing for Mac developers, and thus for OS X users as well.
The logic starts in the cloud, where so many futurists have placed the future of the computer, though it has not quite gotten there yet. For about 15 years pundits have been saying that we did not need to store our data on our personal computers. Instead, our computers should be built to compute and our data should be stored on file servers, which are good at that sort of thing. In the beginning, those file servers were down the hall or across the country; lately they have begin to appear in what is called the cloud, ubiquitous repositories of data in the sky. Only the location has changed, not the theory.
To this end, much development has been done on the browser, which seems the obvious tool with which to connect to the cloud. Lately comes the Chrome OS, which is more operating system than browser, and in which will run those apps that been important to us: email, social networking, media downloads, web publishing, and a few others. Yes, the apps that access the data will run in the chrome browser, from the user’s desktop, and not from inside the cloud. There is a reason for that: a Web browser is a lousy tool through which to run applications stored in the cloud, according to a Cult of Mac story.
Instead, we need something like what Apple has been doing with iOS4, an operating system which runs small but elegant apps that are better at accessing cloud data than Web-borne apps through a browser, though perhaps not quite as good at it as programs under an OS like OS X or (shudder) Windows. These smaller, more elegant apps are beginning to exist on the iPad, and even the iPhone, addressing our data with some elegance.
Now, if we envision our data in the cloud, and also envision similar apps on OS X, we can begin to see the birth of truly portable computing. Mac Developers are seeing a whole new world open up, a world in which they can write those apps to run on OSX, apps that are the perfect counterpoint to iOS4 apps, allowing us to address our data with any of our computing devices with much more elegance and utility than is available from cloud systems like Google Apps. Beginning now, Mac developers have the opportunity to rock the world of cloud data with apps that run on OS X and match up to the apps on iOS4.
Related Posts:
