As I wandered MacWorld yesterday I found myself liking what I was seeing with the various iApps.
But I wonder about what Apple is making. Is the plumbing for these applications exposed so programmers can make their own connections to the AddressBook, iCal, iPhoto and iTunes so I can spin my own application?
Or has Apple hidden these links that connect these?
I would hope the plumbing is exposed.
If it is then a whole wealth of other, unforeseen, applications may come along and make our lives that much better by improving on the small applications that Apple has provided. (I don't call iDVD a small application though.)
Years ago the concept of "software tools" was built into the design of UNIX. The concept was simple: build a tool to do ONE THING really well and then use the plumbing in the OS to efficiently put together the inputs and the outputs of these programs so they could work together. UNIX did this wonderfully well. You can look at the myriad of little programs and see it. For example write a shell script to count the number of unique words in a file.
Now Apple has made some wonderful tools to handle music, addresses, photos, e-mail, etc and the data managed by these tools should be available in much the same way.
I was struck by the design of Adobe's GoLive because they have their own internal system which runs with PhotoShop and GoLive and Illustrator. It makes sense of course. Making these kinds of connections open to everyone increases their value. I don't expect Adobe to do that - but I do think Apple should.
10:19:15 AM 
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