No other company in the mobile sphere has done quite as good a job of courting mobile app developers as Apple. While part of the reason iOS has by far the largest library of apps still is due to the inherent ease of Objective-C, a major part is the effort Apple puts into winning over developers. It still has yet to translate that success to the personal computer side, though, where its software selection is still a little sparse.
On Thursday, Apple released a preview build of its upcoming next-generation personal computer operating system: OS X 10.7, “Lion”. Apple appears very conscious of its greater mobile success, as Lion is very different than its predecessor Snow Leopard.
The new OS reads like an effort to bring iOS to the desktop. Apple puts it [press release] as taking “some of the best ideas from iPad and brings them back to the Mac.”
The result is an OS that’s built around the new Mac OS X app store and multi-touch. A new Launchpad offers the ability for users to arrange and run apps much like they would in iOS.
A new feature dubbed Mission Control allows users to use multi-touch input to preview and switch between running apps. Describes Apple:
Mission Control is a powerful, entirely new feature that unifies Exposé®, Dashboard, Spaces, and full screen apps to give you a bird’s eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps as well as your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a click.
Apple is convinced that developers will love what it’s cooking up and will embrace OS X, much as they have iOS. States Apple, “Developers are going to love Mission Control and Launchpad, and can now start adding great new Lion features like full screen, gestures, Versions and Auto Save to their own apps.”
There’s already a bit of momentum when it comes to gaming on the Mac. If Apple can truly convince a large number of iOS developers to make OS X apps that could be very good news indeed for the trendy gadget maker, as a broader app library would help make more a compelling case for prospective customers to buy a Mac.