macOS: immaginando il successore di OS X

Andrew Ambrosino ha delle buone idee su come dovrebbe essere il prossimo OS X (o macOS, data la nomenclatura recente: watchOS, tvOS), che ha raccolto su Medium. Il primo OS X risale al 2001, circa 15 anni fa. È evoluto molto negli anni — sia in termini di design che funzionalità — finendo con l’includere App Store, Continuity, e altre funzionalità perlopiù prese da iOS, ma non ha cambiato il modo in cui pensa e funziona: l’organizzazione delle cose (file system al centro di tutto) è rimasta la stessa:

We produce far too much content and our work is too often collaborative to rely on a manual model that was designed many, many years ago.

Last year I had the privilege of working at Upthere (if you haven’t seen what they’re doing, go take a look). Started by Bertrand Serlet and others a few years ago, the goal has been to introduce a brand new stack that forms a cloud filesystem and model for organizing content. The model is simple and the implementation complex– it lacks hierarchy and relies on powerful search and self-organization, along with building in sharing and collaboration into the filesystem itself. It’s about time for macOS to shift to this type of organization.

Un altro punto debole di OS X riportato dall’articolo è l’assenza di molte delle applicazioni sociali di cui facciamo uso sui dispositivi mobili. Perché c’è un app per Instagr.am, Facebook, Gmail, etc. sull’iPhone mentre sul Mac, spesso, dobbiamo ricorrere a un browser — riempiendoci di tab?

MacOS 11 should introduce a common framework for presentation, a brand new model for content, and a common thread for people.

On iOS we’re used to using native apps for just about everything, yet on OS X, much of the same services are only available as web apps. While they don’t suffer from the same performance degradation as the mobile web (or at least the old mobile web), does it really make sense that so many of us keep open 10 tabs for the services we use most? The browser is really a terrible window manager. But of course, developers haven’t wanted to build their apps for yet another platform, so web apps have been simply good enough.