"The reason OS X has a different interface than iOS isn't because one came after the other or because this one’s old and this one’s new," Federighi said. Instead, it's because using a mouse and keyboard just isn't the same as tapping with your finger. "This device," Federighi said, pointing at a MacBook Air screen, "has been honed over 30 years to be optimal" for keyboards and mice. Schiller and Federighi both made clear that Apple believes that competitors who try to attach a touchscreen to a PC or a clamshell keyboard onto a tablet are barking up the wrong tree."It’s obvious and easy enough to slap a touchscreen on a piece of hardware, but is that a good experience?" Federighi said. "We believe, no."“We don't waste time thinking, 'But it should be one interface!' How do you make these [operating systems] merge together?’ What a waste of energy that would be,” Schiller said. But he added that the company definitely tries to smooth out bumps in the road that make it difficult for its customers to switch between a Mac and an iOS device - for example, making sure its messaging and calendaring apps have the same name on both OS X and iOS."To say OS X and iOS should be the same, independent of their purpose? Let's just converge, for the sake of convergence? It's absolutely a nongoal," Federighi said. "You don't want to say the Mac became less good at being a Mac because someone tried to turn it into iOS. At the same time, you don't want to feel like iOS was designed by one company and Mac was designed by a different company, and they're different for reasons of lack of common vision. We have a common sense of aesthetics, a common set of principles that drive us, and we’re building the best products we can for their unique purposes. So you'll see them be the same where that makes sense, and you’ll see them be different in those things that are critical to their essence."
Ubuntu store apps won't work across mobile and desktop in 14.04Canonical's dream of a converged mobile and desktop platform advances - slowly.One of Canonical's main goals in bringing Ubuntu to mobile devices is to create a converged platform across smartphones, tablets, and PCs. As such, a developer should be able to write an app that has a single code base yet runs on all three types of devices, presenting a different interface to the user on each form factor.Technically, this has already been achieved. Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon this week showed off Karma Machine, a reddit client built by a third-party developer using the Ubuntu SDK.
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