More thoughts on Snow Leopard

I’ve given some more thought to the whole Snow Leopard issue that is probably going to be resolved tomorrow.

I’ve only been able to come up with one singular reason Apple would need to push a new OS release this quickly after Leopard (15 mo. or so), and that is that there is some OS level change required that cannot be fulfilled with a point release pushed out via software update. What do I think this feature is?

Resolution Independence.

And why would you want to debut Snow Leopard at MWSF in January 2009? Because you’ve got a nice new piece of hardware that will require this resolution independence. My guess is a high res 6.5″ multitouch tablet, but more than just an iPhone on steroids. This thought isn’t really new or novel, but allow me to expand on it in a few ways I haven’t seen people talk about it before…

The twist is that it will be that it will be twice as wide as the iphone, and one and a half times as tall. The need to keep its size constrained (in at least one dimension) is that you will still need to be able to facilitate keyboard input via the touch screen, and that requires being able to hold on to both sides of the device and type with your thumbs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the default orientation was portrait, like the iPhone, rather than landscape, like most computers. Plus, by keeping it skinny, you make it more likely to be able to fit in the big lab coat pockets.

There are many many more applications that just the medical field. But its the one usually talked about in tablet computing discussions. The requirement of course, will be that all the applications that run on Snow Leopard will be written in Cocoa Touch. Since there is no mouse cursor or hard keyboard, the apps will need to have all the hooks necessary for working with that kind of user interface.

Apple recognizes that they need something a little more beefy that the iPhone OS for a tablet device, given its hardware requirements – probably running either an Intel Atom chip or something from the PA Semi PPC stable, and that limited multitasking could work well (have a mail app going in the background while you enter some data into a program).