TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Daring Fireball: ‘Snow Leopard’ at WWDC:

In short, if you’ve ever wished that Apple would spend more time focusing on making existing parts of the OS work better rather than adding new features, this is going to be the release for you. Sounds great to me. A big part of the effort, from what I’m hearing, is unifying the various branches of OS X at Apple: Mac OS X, iPhone OS, Apple TV, etc.

I was skeptical of this, too, but it looks like it’s true. Apple’s WWDC invitation certainly hints at it — “Landmark event, in more ways than one.”

I was most interested, though, in Gruber’s comment above, where he says that OS X’s next release will in part be focused on unifying the different branches of OS X. What precisely does this mean? Are they unifying how they develop each different branch, so they do not need to work in parallel as much as before?

If that’s the case, I kind of like the idea of a stability and under the hood upgrade (battery management, for example; I’d love to squeak out more battery life from my MBA through an OS update), to clean up the code in preparation for greater things, such as new mobile devices as Ars’s Jacqui Cheng suggests.

Michael Mistretta writes:

If this rumor is true, and Apple is working on an Intel-only, leaner, faster, more reliable version of OS X, I have to give props to the people over at Apple. This is something that Microsoft has never done, and has put them into the hole they are today with Vista. Feature-ridden bloated code is no solution for an OS. Sure, there will be some unhappy devs, but in the long run, this decision will prove it’s worth to both Apple and it’s user-base.

It isn’t that Leopard is unstable — I haven’t had many problems. But unifying OS X’s development process, and getting control of it as Apple moves into the mobile devices field, is a smart thing to do. It would be very easy to let each branch of OS X grow in its own separate direction, and become more or less completely different. It would be a mess attempting to develop new versions of OS X because Apple would effectively be developing for three (or more) different operating systems. That is a scary thought.

Apple’s move into mobile devices, which I think is where the company is ultimately heading (if Jobs’s comments at D5 are any suggestion), is an important shift that also signals a shift in the computer industry away from computers as we currently know them, and it is good to see they are taking the time to do it right.