After its announcement, it occurred to me that iCloud is how Apple would do a service like Dropbox today. If this were 10 years ago, an Apple cloud service might look more like Dropbox itself. The difference being: obscuring, or not-obscuring, the filesystem.

Apple (especially under Steve) has always been about curating the computing experience for the masses. Looking back, it’s amazing how “geeky” the Mac OS used to be; over the years they’ve chipped away at obscuring the geekiness of computing so that at the surface it looks and works like a car dashboard. No one needs to see the engine to drive the car (an analogy my friend Mark used to talk about). The engine is still there, obviously. Brave tinkers and fully qualified engineers can pop the hood to do what they need to do in there. As Gruber pointed out today:

Perhaps not a bad definition of a post-PC device: one with no user-visible file system. Dropbox is very much a PC technology, conceptually, because it is all about the file system. That’s why we nerds love Dropbox on our post-PC devices — it gives us some PC-like control. Sometimes we want files.

Dropbox is a holdover to the old days — one that will continue to be extremely useful for “under-the-hood” guys — whereas iCloud is “Dropbox for the rest of us”.

Where it gets crazy is that I then FaceTimed with my five-year old daughter (yes, my life is just that high tech) and told her about Fruit Ninja Kinect. That’s all I said, nothing more. And I saw her immediately tell her Grandpa who was with her how the game worked by wildly swinging kung fu arms through the air and describing in detail just how, with Kinect, see, “you are the controller and you just chop ‘em, just like this, Grandpa.”

The Kinect is a touchscreen in the air. Even my daughter has it figured out.

Many of my friends misjudge it, thinking sport needs to be swift like a basketball game, or intense and concentrated like a football game. But baseball is more of an experience to have than a spectacle to see. It’s called a park for a reason: it’s a place of leisure, (hell, stretching is built into the format), and an opportunity to just be present.

Yeah that’s good stuff. Makes me miss Dave Niehaus all the more.

★

(An aside on that, I really am pretty sure that Field of Dreams is not only a great baseball movie but a great film. Someone’s dad once tried to tell me that it isn’t a baseball movie at all, it’s a story about a father and son. Which of course is true but at the same time, I always thought, who are we kidding? It’s a baseball movie and we all know it).

I digress. The trailer for Moneyball is here and I’m happy about it. The film definitely has a lighter feeling to it than I anticipated. At least as far as this trailer is concerned. Not being terribly familiar with Billy Beane and his mannerisms, as an appreciator of baseball I can definitively say that Brad Pitt makes a great Billy Beane. This film might be completely crap, and I’m unlikely to ever know it.

Baseball movies.

★

Not me.

★

Ironically, this Red-Pop Kickstarter project was announced just the other day. I’m guessing it’s not going to get very far.

★

One thing stuck out to me though, and it had to do with Steve’s comments about how hard they’ve been working to obscure the filesystem. I don’t think Apple is ever going to provide a way for users to browse their iCloud files and folders, either with Finder or any other app. Apple is slowly moving us away from having to even consider the file system. iTunes is your front end for music. iPhoto your front end for photos. Their vision is to have native apps that specialize in handling the file system for their own file types.

I wonder if my kids are ever going to use the term “file”. They’re already growing up with computers they assume they can touch — iPhones, iPads, Kinect to name a few. Even Apple TV, with the Remote app, becomes a touch-screen at a distance. All of these interfaces are more familiar to my kids than any Mac. Or, “desktop” I should say.

Ultimately I don’t think filesystems are ever going away at the developer level. I predict that the Mac will live on for decades in the form of the machine you use to make apps for other machines. Who knows. But at the very least, the “power users” will always use the file system.

So, I think Dropbox is going to live on. It’s a “power user” thing and a great (and free) secondary cloud. iCloud is going to be transparent to users. Dropbox will fit in right next to it.

Now I only wonder what will happen to Things.

Every pitch moves. Nothing stays straight. He’s able to throw any pitch for a strike. He’s just a competitor.

…and,

He kind of turns and hides the ball really well. He’s got really good arm action — every pitch looks the same.

★

I think the flip side is actually the truth. Yes, Apple’s hardware design is brilliant. Best in class. But I think it really is the software that really makes them tick. It’s OSX (both varieties) that carries Apple’s soul.

Next week at WWDC, Apple will (reportedly) not announce any new hardware products. This is rare. New Apple hardware typically takes center stage at the keynotes.

I’m sure there are quite a few disappointed people out there who have been holding out, for whatever reason, for the iPhone 5, and the pomp and circumstance we’re accustomed to experiencing. Ah well. But seriously. Look at how much new stuff they’ve got to talk about on the software front: iOS 5 (I’m assuming a new notification system is in there somewhere), Lion and iCloud.

The iPhone 4 is some great hardware. I’m sure 5 is going to be better in some way. But whereas in years past we’ve seen leaps-and-bounds advancements in hardware design and redesign, I think the pendulum is swinging, for the time being, back to the software. iPhone 5 will come, but the most interesting stuff for awhile is going to happen on the software side. My two cents.

Addendum: If Apple decides to integrate some simple hardware button to snap photos, that will make me quite happy. Some things you can’t do with software alone.

★

“320 and up” is thought to be the way the web is headed, thanks to Andy Clarke and smart people of his ilk.