14 DAY TRIAL // When Apple opens up a position for Siri UI Engineer that’s not for iOS, but OS X, you know something is up. It also helps to know that the company is actively testing OS X 10.9 builds, with a potential beta on its way to developers soon.
A job posting on Apple’s website revealed yesterday that the Cupertino giant was seeking a Siri UI Engineer with experience in Unix, “especially Mac OS X” and a “Passion for the Macintosh platform and writing simple, elegant software that is easy and fun to use.”
Sounds like Siri for OS X to us.
Apple also noted that the new recruit would be taking up “a broad-ranging task,” adding that the company “take[s] every application that Siri interacts with, distill it down to fundamentals, and implement that application's UI in a theme fitting with Siri.”
“Consider it an entire miniature OS within the OS, and you get a good idea of the scope!” Apple said, according to several reports covering the now-gone job description.
That’s right, Apple has already hired a man for the Siri UI Designer role, and we can’t help but be excited about the first OS X 10.9 beta, which should arrive as early as this month, if history is any indication.
The job description also said, “Of course, each of these little ‘snippets’ corresponds to an individual application, so you will have extensive cross-functional work with many other teams.”
Read “other Siri teams.” Since the software has its roots in mobile, it will help to collaborate with the iOS division to achieve a proper implementation of the digital assistant into desktop systems.
“You'll need to work with them to enable access to their data and behaviors, and wire them up to your implementations. As a result, strong API design is needed to keep communications ideal,” Apple added.