By Greg Mills
Sometimes rumors are floated that are so absurd they ought to sink right away. The notion that Apple's iTunes and Safari are going to be merged into one mammoth app to help propel Safari's popularity is one of those sinkers. The iTunes app is already quite bloated, by Apple standards. Adding a lot more to it, such as folding Safari, in does not sound like an Apple solution to me.
Most of the time things happen across the entire product line at Apple; thus a move in one Apple platform gives credence to a similar move in the other platform. If something is changed in the iOS platform that supports the iPod touch, iPad and iPhone, look for a similar move in the Mac OS supporting Apple computers.
Question: has iTunes been bundled into a larger package recently in the iOS? No, actually just the opposite is true. Instead of having a giant iTune app in the iOS, iTunes has been broken up to include a separate app for the App Store, Music Store, Books and Movies.
The flawed theory is that bundling iTunes functions into Safari would cause a much larger installed base for Safari, especially in the PC world. The Microsoft notion that "bigger applications are better applications" is not Apple's guiding theory. The larger a program is, the more likely it is to crash. Having things in manageable sized chunks allows quicker loading and requires less memory to operate.
Safari is fast. What track star could excel with Roseanne Barr ridding piggyback? The size of apps is important as downloading takes longer far larger apps and requires more device storage and RAM to operate. For all these reasons, iTunes and Safari will not be lumped together. Instead, look for iTunes on the Mac and PCs to be split into smaller, more manageable apps.
Keep the big picture in mind. Apple intends to dominate the downloading everything digital. Having movies, music, books, magazines and who-knows-what-else riding in a mega gigabyte chunk on peoples hard drive is asking for problems. Apple is about minimization and refinement, not bloating the heck out of applications and burning hard drive space in a vain effort to gain market share for Safari.
As flash memory storage in computers continues to gain traction, expect the Mac OS to become more nimble and applications to require less memory and do more. That is refinement and what Apple is all about.
Thats's Greg's Bite for today.
(Greg Mills, is a Faux Artist in Kansas City. Formerly a new product R&D man for the paint sundry market, he holds 11 US patents. He's working on a solar energy startup, www.CottageIndustrySolar.com using a patent pending process of turning waste dual pane glass into thermal solar panels used to heat water. Greg writes for intellectual web sites and Mac related issues. See Greg's art web site at www.gregmills.info ; His email is gregmills@mac.com )
