Tech Talk

by Luis Villazon The next version of OS X will probably be announced in a few months at the WWDC event. I don’t know what it will be called, or what little tweaks it will offer. But one thing I can say with confidence: it will be version 10.11, not OS XI. And I say that it’s time for change. I want iOS and the Mac OS to both jump straight to version 11 - the same operating system on all devices. We’ve been creeping towards this slowly since Lion, but the sticking point is the file and folder system for organising data on the desktop. This might seem like too fundamental a thing to throw away, but

“Files are fiddly to manipulate… they get accidentally deleted and we need to recall where we’ve put them”

on my iPad, I’m barely aware of the concept of files. I’m just doing stuff and sharing stuff; where it gets stored and what it gets called is rarely a concern. Files are fiddly to manipulate with a trackpad, and exposing them directly to the user means they get accidentally deleted and we need to recall where we’ve put them.

Desktop Macs could break free of the mouse paradigm and give us an appdriven interface, with swipeable menu options and invisibly managed storage. New Macs would only ship with a Magic Trackpad and the mouse would be relegated to a gaming peripheral. Sure it would be shocking at first, just like the GUI of the original Macintosh was in 1984. But I think I can handle a shock every 30 years.