Expanding on iTunes

iTunes started life as one of those little programs that was made to let you rip your CDs and listen to your music via your computer. As an app it was pretty quant back in the day. However, with its purchase by Apple and its pairing with the iPod the app suddenly became useful and with great meaning. Then the iTunes Store opened and that made sense. Why bother buying physical if you are just going to rip anyway?

However soon the iTunes Store began offering movies, TV shows, and apps for iPods and iPhones! Of course, if you are going to buy something in the iTunes Store it is only logical that the iTunes app be where you access them. Right?

Well, with the newest section of the library, Books (which has a whole separate app, iBooks, on the iOS) I am pretty fed up with iTunes being such a catch-all. So I propose some kind of closely knit set of apps in OS X that might best be called the iLibrary.

(It is either this or overhaul iTunes into some kind of iMedia program that melts in iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. That would be a bad idea for many reasons, including the before mentioned bloat of the app. Of course, they don't want to alienate Windows users.)

The iLibrary Apps:

iTunes - Has your music, podcasts, audio books, ringtones, (better than now) streaming radio stations, and maybe even music videos.

iVideos - Has your movies, TV shows, music videos, and has a robust Internet video viewer that can let easily watch and download videos from YouTube and other sites.

iPhoto - Like it is now, but with a less odd library system and a more full integration into my life. Yeah, I use it now, but only because it is there. Most of the time it seems like Finder's abandoned child/frame.

iBooks - Can store any form of text document from .doc to .PDF to any of those other crazy ones AND it can read most of them so that you could theoretically search for specific passages within documents. It would also be able to provide you with bookmarks, highlighting, personal side notes, and other meta-editing. I would also hope that Apple might be able to introduce a new ebook open standard that puts these sorts meta-edits into a common file type.

iApps - Where you iOS apps are. I would hope that pretty soon we can run iOS apps across platforms from the iPhone to the iPad to OS X. This is an off the wall prediction, but I don't feel like it is too crazy.

iKnow - This is only kind of silly. Redo the Address Book app and turn it into something more socially connected. Connect Twitter, Facebook, etc to make my contacts more dynamic and useful.


Each of these would have a permanent app in iOS. Because we would be used to the apps being separate on our computers it would stop being so jarring to find that I have to close my iPod app and find my iBooks app to read a book then go back to my iPod app to watch a movie. Considering that all of this media is in one central library app right now does anyone else find this annoying?

From here the "iLibrary Apps" would include a number of editing and creation apps that should do more than the quick adjustments that might be around in the storage and meta-data management apps.

They would also be able to easily interact with the media libraries that our computers seem to be becoming more and more these days, at least if you are a Mac user. They would also be easily integrated into both iOS and OS X as apps both places.

iBand - Keeps the usefulness of GarageBand, but also can provide a simpler interface for people just wanting to make ringtones or to edit down any other .mp3. This will give GarageBand the respect it deserves while at the same time eliminating the need to hunt for Lifehacker articles on how to make a ringtone every time T.I. drops another single.

iMovie - It exists now in both desktop and iOS form and is actually pretty good for what it does. If Apple just keeps these apps up to snuff they will stay useful to people like me who just need to edit simple raw video.

iProgram - Apple should buy out GameSalad and turn it into a native app. I think we have reached the point where Apple can loosen its stranglehold on its apps and the AppStore. This would also encourage Apple and larger programers to keep their own products fresh.


We also need something that deals directly with the settings on our Apple gear:

iDevice - Directly reads and deals with any iDevice connected to the computer. Looks like iTunes is sort of doing this right now with AirPlay, but this is more. Here you will edit your iDevice's settings (be it pod, pad, or phone), manage what is stored on it, etc. No more having to go to iPhoto if I want to put any photos from the device onto my main library. It can just do it. Also, I should be able to use it as a kind of flash drive, gotdangit.


While I am expecting some major iOS integration into 10.7 (Lion?) I would like to see these things added in as well. We are still several years away from OS 11 which I can only see merging together OS X and iOS much more fully, but until then these updates to the core functions of the Apple software could make the entire product line into some much more functional.