Former Apple Senior Engineer says OS X could adopt Front-Row-style iPhone OS implementation in future version

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After January 27th’s unveiling of the iPad, it became abundantly clear that Apple has meaningful plans for iPhone OS outside of the smartphone arena. In fact, given the App Store’s runaway success, it’s just good business sense for Apple to try to get iPhone apps on as many devices as possible: not just phones, portable media players and tablets, but more traditional laptop and desktop machines as well.

The question is, then, when will OS X and iPhone OS begin to converge? When will OS X become compatible with iPhone OS?

In a recent New York Times blog post, Nick Bilton examines this very question, and talks to a former senior Apple Engineer to get to the bottom of whether or not iPhone apps could run natively on OS X one day.

Unfortunately, according to Bilton’s source, implementing global multi-touch support on OS X would be a very thorny problem: the operating system simply wasn’t designed for touch input, so until Apple redesigns it from the ground up with multitouch in mind (OS Xi, anyone?) all they can do is program in some light support.

However, Bilton brings up an interesting solution to the problem: while redesigning OS X to support multitouch enough to bring apps to the operating system natively is a challenge, Apple could simply add iPhone OS as a new layer on top of OS X, just like how they handle Front Row or widgets.

This makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, it makes so much sense that I’d be shocked if the next version of OS X didn’t go for just such a solution towards bringing iPhone apps to Mac notebooks and desktops, in conjunction with a multitouch rollout across their iMac and MacBook lines. What do you think?

[via Mac Rumors]

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