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The personal site of Jamie Knight, an autistic web developer, speaker and mountain biker who is never seen far from his plush sidekick Lion. View the Archive

Topics: Autism Development

Device Convergence Please.

I think the recent talk of iOS and OS X convergence is interesting. I think is also misses the point a bit. I don’t want a single converged OS, but I do want converged devices.

I find the idea of a single device which can run iOS and OS X appealing. A device which I can carry with me, then dock to use for basic computing taks such as word processing and perhaps software development.

This is not a new idea, Motorola did this with the Atrix. However, the Atrix did not offer me iOS and OS X… it only offered Andriod and Ubuntu which don’t appeal to me.

I think, my ideal combination would offer the following.

Combined Storage

If I had OS X and iOS on a single device; I would want a single storage pool for both systems. I would expect iTunes on OSX and iOS to share the same files / database.

Keep iOS file system free.

While I want the same databases (eg, photo library, iTunes library) I don’t want a file system. I want to keep file management outside of the UI.

All the power of OS X.

I would like OS X to offer the complete UNIX enviroment and to be able to run my regular apps*. I want to be able to dock my iPhone, do some work in Coda 2, then undock it to watch a movie on the train.

A light touch.

iOS and OS X are both best of breed. Even when on a single device they have to remain themselves. I want both, not a horrible mixture. Keeping OS X just when docked is fine by me.

Published: 23 February 2014 | Categories: , Permalink

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