one inch frame
the personal site of eric a. Farris
No new hardware, no earth shattering demos, no discussion of the super-secret features that will be shipping in October’s release of Mac OS X 10.5, “Leopard.” We ended up getting very little new information, some eerie silence on some features we were expecting, and a couple of puzzling announcements. Nevertheless, that’s not going to stop me. You are all entitled to my opinion on the WWDC keynote, and Leopard’s new desktop, dock, and finder, the iPhone, and Safari for Windows.
The semi-transparent menu bar is sheer pointlessness. I certainly hope we’ll be able to turn the opacity up. Transparency is popular now, (see Vista), it doesn’t go over well (see Vista Reviews) and people find it confusing when it’s over used (see Vista Users). Honestly, I don’t take advantage of any transparency options at all. I have experimented with transparent windows in Windows, transparent terminal sessions in Mac OS X and Linux, and I just don’t see the need. Extending transparency to the menu bar, unarguably the most clicked-on place on the Mac OS X desktop, doesn’t make any sense at all to me. The one thing you need to be opaque, and the last thing you want to be transparent, it seems to me, is the menu bar.
The new, pseudo-3d look of the Dock is welcome, and certainly makes for some pretty screenshots. But I, for one of many, would not shed a tear if the Dock would disappear entirely. I keep it anchored top-right (you can’t do this by default, but Googling reveals plenty of ways to accomplish this) and I keep it hidden. Were it not for the trashcan being on there (talk about paradigm shear), I wouldn’t even want it around. I think it’s a bad implementation of the NextStep/OpenStep/WindowMaker dock, which I love. Where is the aftermarket for Dock apps? It’s something Microsoft has right, with their implementation of the Sidebar in Vista. The Mac OS X Dock is worthless.
And that’s not going to change with the new “stacks” or, as old Applephiles remember, “piles,” a technology Apple has had a patent on since long before they started naming their OS releases after cats. Stacks are interesting, the eye candy and ‘jack-in-the-box’ arc of the flyout again make for good screenshots and are nifty to show in a demo, but it’s not clear to me how useful this technology is. People that need these sorts of stacks probably are (or should be) using Spotlight’s smart folders with tagging to accomplish this.
The “Downloads” stack is interesting, than for no other reason that it’s trying to actually solve a problem. Where our downloaded files go is something we all have to deal with. People seem to do one of two things: either things fall onto the Desktop, or a Downloads folder that they’ve either got on the Dock already, or an alias on the Desktop, or anchored on the Finder windows. The new Downloads stack seems to be an attempt to enforce behaviour, which is keeping with the Mac tradition. Apple has always had a knack for walking the double-edged statement that “This is how you do it on the Mac. You don’t want to change this because it’s the right way.” You learn to adjust your behaviour to match the machine’s, which breaks some fundamental laws of man-machine interaction. But, on the other hand, Apple usually gets it right, making us do things that are the right thing to do. We can debate this, but that’s another show.
Wait, there’s a new Finder? No, not really. There are a couple new features in the Finder, some extra items anchored on the sidebar, A more iTunes-ish look is commendable, and even long overdue, as iTunes is where a lot of us spend a lot of time. Itunes is the most often updated of Apple’s apps, and where the innovations first show up. It’ll be nice to see some of that research and experimentation make it into the Finder.
But then we come to Coverflow. I’ll be quite willing to eat these words in a year, after I’ve been using Leopard for a few months, but right now I have to say this: Coverflow in the Finder is the most useless “feature” to be made part of an operating system, ever. Again, worthwhile for screenshots and first demos, but totally without merit in everyday usage.
If they want to give me some iTunes technology and features in the Finder, give me the equivalent of the “Now Playing” box. Let me choose between a preview of the item or some of the Get Info metadata, down in the lower left corner of the sidebar, showing me the selected file or group. Or have a version of the iTunes Browser, giving me some drill-down metadata choices to filter the Finder view. Or give me the ability to choose the columns to show in the Finder’s columnar view, instead of the very slim pickings I have now. Or allow me to integrate a tree view in the sidebar. But Coverflow? Yeah, looks neat, but, sigh.
Finally, something I can get excited about. I certainly hope this can take full advantage of the ZFS filesystem (early comments by Apple that ZFS did not make the cut were misquoted; the builds have included ZFS as an option for a while, and it will be in there). Implementing this with HFS+ is certainly doable by the filesystem hooks, but a ZFS version of instant snapshots is a no-brainer. This is something I’m very eager to see in practice. I’m convinced they can do it, and do it well, but I do have some reservations. I’m not averse, and, in fact, am planning on, making a partition on an external drive to use as a Time Machine backup partition. But, I don’t want to have to carry the thing around with me as I commute between home and work. I certainly hope there’s a way to queue the changes up and have them write back to the TM partition when I’m back at work, or, at least, have the older stuff moved onto there or something. If I get an error saying Leopard couldn’t keep TM data because the partition is (temporarily) unavailable, it’s just not going to work for me. But I hold out hope that Apple has implemented this correctly. It could immediately and permanently solve the backup crisis.
Who cares. Well, of course, lots of people do, but I can’t think of an Apple product that has meant less to me personally since the TAM. I am much more excited about the AppleTV. I live in an area that’s basically a cell phone wasteland. I carry a cell phone only because my employer demands it, though I do like the piece of mind it gives me in case of emergency. I do almost 0% business over phone; a new phone, as cool and as groundbreaking as it might be, just doesn’t get me excited. At all.
That said, I do appreciate the technologies going into the device. I’m happy to see a multitouch interface, and I think Apple particularly can be counted upon to implement it properly. I’m eager to see some under-the-hood reviews and analysis of the “real” OS X that it’s supposedly running, and what that might mean for upcoming devices like future iPods, a tablet Mac, even the potential of a new Newton-ish device. I would be much more interested in an iPhone - phone, as some, like Alex Lindsay, have wished for. Having no need for a cell phone, I do find myself wanting a better iPod than the existing iPods (I don’t even own an iPod, can you believe that?), and a small-ish internet device that could replace my Palm Tungsten T3, which I love, but is rather long in the tooth at this point.
Having said all that, I was still hoping for a real iPhone SDK for developers, because that’s where the real innovation happens. When the same people that develop my favorite OS X apps are allowed to innovate on a completely different platform, some of those great ideas will doubtless trickle down to my MacBook Pro, and that’s a Very Good Thing as far as I’m concerned. I was disappointed, therefore, not to see a real development platform for the iPhone, and instead have to hear how it’s “real Safari” and that “Web 2.0” apps can be written to run in Safari, and that’s how you can develop for the iPhone. That’s just a cop out, just like it would be to tell them that they can use PHP and Apache to write their apps for Leopard. Developers want to hear about APIs and SDKs and tools and platforms, not that they can simply do what they’ve always done, and get something that they’ve never gotten. It just doesn’t work that way.
Nevertheless, the apps that Steve demoed do look nice, and appear quite iPhone-ish. It’s unclear to me whether this class of “app” will require an internet connection (it seemed that the ones he demoed do), which would be a deal breaker, and Apple has confirmed that iPhone Safari will not be able to handle Flash. The lack of flash support is telling; it certainly seems that the iPhone now will not be a portable YouTube player, which seems to me to be a real use case for the device. Adobe, and Macromedia before them, has not been able to adequately nail down Flash security, and, since security and stability was given as the major reasons for not allowing true iPhone apps, it does make sense for Apple to leave that off the device, at least initially. On the other hand, a lot of people are going to be truly bummed out when they can’t play Desktop Tower Defense on their iPhone.
The ‘One More Thing’ this time was the release of a beta of Safari, and now for Windows as well as the Mac. I was shocked, not because of the coolness factor but rather because of the sheer “WHY?!?” factor of it all.
Among the many disadvantages that Windows users have, chief among them is a dirth of browsers. Microsoft’s bundling of IE since Windows 95 SR2 (I believe) almost singlehandedly killed off Windows browsers. OK, the complete bungling of Netscape 4 and 5 had quite a bit to do with it. And it’s not until Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox appeared did we finally have a decent competing browser for Windows. The good part was that it didn’t only compete, but was far superior in almost every way. The downside is that it has stayed a two-horse race ever since. Of course Opera lives here too, but it doesn’t really belong in this conversation. There are others, like Flock, that are up and coming, but just not there yet.
Mac users, on the other hand, have quite a few browsers to choose from. Along with the bundled Safari and the ever-present Firefox, A very popular browser on the Mac (and the one I personally use) is Camino. There’s also OmniWeb, from the fine folks at the Omni Group, Shiira, and the other cross-platform browsers like Opera and Flock. The point is that there are four or five viable alternative browsers for the Mac platform, and really only two for Windows. Well, now, there are three.
Safari on Windows is an interesting move for Apple. There are cases where it makes sense (more on that later) but other cases where it really doesn’t. Safari will be the third major application ported to Windows, and it’s not clear to me that they yet know what they’re doing. The Quicktime player, frankly, one of the uglier apps for Windows (and that’s a space completely crowded with ugly apps), and, with iTunes, they broke a lot of rules as to how Windows users expect an app to behave. With Safari, it’s even worse, as they force the Mac UI onto the poor, unsuspecting Windows masses. Let’s throw out the HIG for the moment, as Apple seems to not be following their own rules, anyway. But Windows people expect certain things from their applications, and Mac people expect different things. Safari for Windows is a Mac app, running Parallels-esque in a foreign land. People will be confused. Some have already suggested that numerous people are going to report a bug because Safari only lets you resize it from the lower-right corner. Windows apps have borders, and can be resized from any of them. Mac apps don’t have borders, and can only be resized from the lower-right. Safari for Windows behaves as a Mac app. Then there’s the whole different look to the menus and font smoothing, never mind the title bar decorations, and it just ends up being a confusing experience for Windows users. I can appreciate the thinking that people will see the simplicity of Safari and finally come to the conclusion that maybe the Mac OS is just as simple and beautiful, and they’d be right, but I don’t think there will be nearly as many people that come to that conclusion as come to the conclusion that Safari for Windows is just poorly designed. We Mac people know better, but our ideas just don’t fly over there in Windows land.
Nevertheless, there are cases where having Safari on Windows does make sense. For one, having choice in Windows browsers is nothing but a good thing. Setting aside the discussion on whether it’s well done or not, it is a choice, an immediately viable one, and that’s simply good. Also, it gives those web developers that are, for whatever reason, stuck designing in Windows a chance to see how their apps and pages and sites will look in Safari. That, again, is a good thing, but there are much better things awaiting those developers once they finally trade in their Dell laptops for something in Apple’s line.
Another way this makes sense actually has to do with money. Having the Google search bar prominently displayed in Safari’s menu bar area means that Google pays Apple every time it’s used. The Mozilla Foundation has reported in the past the vast sums of money Google has paid them for the similar feature of Firefox. The same thing works for Apple, and opening their browser up to the much larger Windows world means more money for Apple.
The last area where this makes sense to me goes back to the iPhone. Given that Steve has gone out of his way to tout the “real Safari” experience on the iPhone, and given that developers are relegated to developing Safari apps instead of true iPhone apps, and given the large Windows developer market, it’s easy to draw a line and see it lead to giving Windows developers the heads-up to developing iPhone apps using Safari. There’s where it might just work. Remember, that Apple does nothing in the software space without considering its positive impact on their core business, hardware. So, while some of us might think that Safari for Windows is just as bad for Macs as iTunes for Windows, remember that the release of iTunes for Windows had an immediate impact on iPod sales, particularly because of the iTunes Store. Safari for Windows could have a similar impact for the iPhone, particularly when you consider not just developers but users, with things like bookmark syncing and (maybe) the loading of Safari apps onto the phone.