A good number of people, including Daring Fireball’s esteemed John Gruber painted the picture that last weeks WWDC keynote was about Google framing the future of computing in the browser vs. Apple framing it with native, local apps on their plattforms. As much as this being an interesting question, what strikes me as a very fundamental change — and one that’s gone fairly uncommented is Apple doing away with the need to understand or deal with files for the general user. The combination of never having to save your work, just naming it and using it seems so obvious, yet powerful. Adding Versions into the mix, and the iCloud storage strategy and suddenly you have a very powerful new way to deal with thr stuff you create. You do not synchronize, the »truth is in the cloud.« You just access what you have from the device you have nearby, and that’s it.
It will be interesting to see how this also works out with local file servers and stuff you don’t want to put up on Apple’s servers. But to me, the pictures the crew has painted of the future of desktop interfaces is the really fundamentally new thing that we saw.
