There was an interesting post today about the future of iTunes. I thought I’d throw my two cents in. First I think a rewrite is inevitable if only because Apple wants everyone to go Cocoa so as to not have two separate development forks. Trying to get Carbon to be exactly the same as Cocoa was a losing battle and many of my most annoying problems with MS Office and Adobe CS can be tied to their use of Carbon libraries that weren’t quite right. (Here thinking of focus and Spaces issues, not to mention modal dialogs)
Beyond that though there is the leveraging of new technology like Grand Central. Also, as many have noted the code base is simply quite old going back to the Sys 9 days. Further iTunes has become bloatware in the sense that it attempts to do too many things.
My predictions?
First I think we’ll see a split. (Or we ought to) A separate iTMS store app, a separate video app and then a music app. They’ll have very tight integration but they’ll become separate. I think Apple was headed that way for a while with its Sync Services. But then inexplicably they rolled all syncing back into iTunes. It gives an unified experience but I think it’s reaching a scalability issue.
There’s also the issue of the Touch and the iPhone. The apps on that platform (and any future tablet platform) need their own syncing service. While Apple could just add this to iTunes it makes far more sense to leverage the Sync app again. They ought do this, although I can see their focus on the unified experience as going against it.
The other thing that Apple will do is allow better media management. I don’t think this is an issue with music because, despite the vocal “I have 1 TB of songs” crowd, most people’s music is 20 G – 40 G. Even if they are bigger it’s less because of the number of songs than the bitrate of the rips.
Movies are an other matter. The way people watch movies is simply quite different from how they deal with songs. Further it’s inevitable that 1080p high bitrate movies are coming. Maybe not this year but that’ll be the standard format within 5 years. And those are big. Yes hard drive size will increase. But let’s be honest. Hard drive size hasn’t exactly been keeping up with media use. (How many hard drives have you filled up with home movies alone?)
So big changes are inevitable with iTunes. It’s a question of when, not if, iTunes gets a Cocoa rewrite. But the real question is whether iTunes gets split.
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