Apple Musing

Apple has a long history of delivering tools and frameworks to support interactive media. From Hypercard, through Quicktime's various incarnations to the more recent iDVD and DVD Studio Pro. For a long time these technologies were a major part of Apple's line up, but in the last couple of years that has changed.

The last 2 versions of Final Cut Studio have not seen updates to DVD Studio Pro. Only theme additions for iDVD for a while. To the dismay of many Blu-Ray has remained a "bag of hurt", as Steve Jobs famously described it, and seen only token support added. In Snow Leopard Quicktime X is something of a step back with many interactive features removed and Flash, it seems, will never get a look in on the iPhone.

It would seem then that Apple is giving up on modern interactive content, or is it. There are signs that it is instead simply heading in another direction.

• HTML 5
• iTunes LP and Extras 

HTML 5

While it has been keeping Flash off of the iPhone Apple has also been pushing the capabilities of HTML 5 in its Safari browser. The Apple created addition of the Canvas tag and support for SVG allows for interactive vector graphics in an open standard format.

Another integral part of HTML 5 is support for inline audio and video content, which along with Apple's close relationship with Google now opens the door to a Flashless YouTube.

iTunes LP and Extras

With the launch of iTunes 9 Apple brought to the world downloadable special edition content for both music and movies. After a little investigation people soon found that these are created using open standard HTML, CSS and Javascript. Apple have said that they will soon publish the details of how to produce this content.

Tool Support

The one thing that Apple is yet to do is provide any particular tool support for this content. While it was unlikely that they would release something general and broad ranging to support interactive HTML 5 content it seems that there is a much better chance that they will offer a tools to develop iTunes LP and Extras.

If that were the case then where in the their line up of software would that tool sit? It could be reasoned that it is a developer tool and could live in XCode, but that would be more likely for a general HTML 5 tool. The people that would really want a tool for developing iTunes LP and Extras are the content producers themselves, the people that use Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio. The two suites already share Soundtrack Pro, why not software to finalise delivery?

The differences between delivery of music and movies are very few and far between these days. The music industry are relying more and more on DVD/Blu-Ray releases to make up revenues and the movie industry is relying more and more on downloadable content.

So to appeal to all widest potential audience what would such a tool have to do?

• CD
• DVD
• DVD-Audio
• Blu-Ray
• iTunes LP
• iTunes Extras

Both CD and DVD production are already catered for through Logic Studio's Waveburner and Final Cut Studio's DVD Studio Pro.

So if Apple were to produce a tool to support iTunes LP and Extras it makes a lot of sense to add in support to output DVD and CD using their existing software. Also if they ever to add support for Blu-Ray (which they must do or drop DVD Studio Pro completely) then it really belongs in the same place to.

Such a tool would off the unique capabilities of taking content directly from creation through to interactive output on all the formats that count. Having to produce something so complex and that supports the only recently released iTunes LP and Extras could explain why DVD Studio Pro has not been touched in such a long time.

This is of course all my personal pipe dream, but it's a very nice dream.