A Spotty Leopard
Two days ago, at the World Wide Developers Conference 2006, Steve Jobs introduced the world to Leopard, the next iteration of Mac OS X. I told you last week that I’d give you my thoughts on the whole thing. And though I may be a couple of days late, thanks to the design update of the blog, I refuse to let you down. So, off we go.
Oh, one more thing before we get into it. This post is quite long and it will be published in two parts. One today and one tomorrow. The question is why?
Now, I know from my site stats that most of you are not on Macs. Sure, that reason seems kind of silly — after all, if you’re not on a Mac, why should you care enough to read a long post about them? — but the way I figure it, you probably all own iPods. And sometime in the next few years, you’re going to buy a new computer. And now that the iPod has taught you how great it is to use an Apple-made product, there’s a good chance that your next computer may very well be an Apple (this is not to mention that you’ll be able to run all your Windows applications on Intel-based Macs too). So I’m going to treat this post as if you don’t know nuthin’ about Macs, and hope that you keep in mind that it is in your interest to get yourself edumucated on them.
But enough of the appetizer. On to the meat.
The Run Up
In the week leading up the presentation, the entire Mac community buzzed with all kinds of predictions. If you searched YouTube for “iPhone,” you would have found a dozen homemade commercials about Apple’s first foray into the mobile phone market. Several people (including yours truly) imagined that Apple would announce feature-film downloads from the iTunes Music Store. Rounding out the predictions were the Intel-powered replacement of the PowerMac G5 and an update to Apple’s server hardware, Xserve. But without a doubt, the majority of predictions were all about Leopard.
Here’s a quick roundup of what people thought hoped would be in the new Macintosh operating system (in no particular order):
- Virtualization: Intel-based Macs would be able to run Windows software without a hitch and right out of the box, which would mean buying a Mac would get you not one, but two!, “computers”;
- iChat 4.0: An update to Apple’s instant messenger application (which already includes audio and video chat) would give Mac users the opportunity to call traditional phone lines directly from the computer, ala Skype; other rumors included the introduction of tabbed messenger windows, which seem to be included in most other IM applications and therefore should really be a no brainer as far as updates go;
- Collaboration: Mac users would be able to collaborate on a document in real time with other Mac users over the Internet without any complex set-up process;
- Integrated GeoMapping: Think Google Earth, though integrated into the operating system; standing alone, it’s not that exciting, but if you give your imagination about 20 seconds to think about how your computer would be cooler if any application that wanted to could utilize satellite imagery in whatever way it wanted, then maybe you’d begin to imagine some pretty exciting things;
- Virtual Desktops: Leopard would give Mac users the opportunity to build virtual desktops, ala YouControl:Desktops; if you don’t know what virtual desktops are, then let me tell you that you already have them and you don’t even know it: you access your virtual desktop whenever you use scroll bars (where exactly is the text on the bottom of the page before you scroll to it?); the Apple variation (as in the YouControl:Desktop variation) just takes it a little bit further and lets you put anything you want in that virtual space, which is more of a cube (or any other polyhedron you can imagine) and less of a two-dimensional up/down thing;
- Updates to various other applications, including Mail, iCal, Spotlight, Dashboard, Safari, etc., all of which would be great but none of which seemed very exciting
- And finally, everyone and their mother expected Apple to introduce a major update to the Finder.
A History of the Big Hope
For those of you who don’t know what the Finder is, I think John Siracusa from Ars.Technica said it best:
In the days of classic Mac OS, the Finder was the interface–and, by extension, was the computer. When people raved about the Mac’s “ease of use” (especially back in the days when the Mac was home to the only mass-market personal computer GUI) what they were really raving about was the Finder. Applications may or may not have had pleasing, usable interfaces, but they were clearly “not the computer.” Applications ran on the computer. You launched applications, and then quit them. The Finder was what you saw when all the applications were closed. There was no closing the Finder. To close the Finder meant to turn off the computer. The Finder was the computer….[The Finder was the magic behind the graphical user interface.] It was the meticulously constructed, relentlessly maintained illusion that files and folders were real, physical things existing inside the computer that you could manipulate in familiar, direct, predictable ways.
That all changed with Mac OS X. The article I quoted above is 17 pages long and a good chunk of it has to do with why most of the changes were bad. Siracusa has been writing extensive reviews of each iteration of Mac OS X, and from the beginning, he has charged Apple with violating the rules of the game:
[The Finder's] current form in 10.1 is a disappointing sign that priorities have shifted at Apple. Yes, perhaps the interface inconsistency…will go unnoticed by the average user. But the measure of good interface design should not be based on which gaffes can be sneaked past the casual user. It’s Apple’s job to create an interface that’s better than what the average user might create. Apple is supposed to be the faithful keeper of the interface–the expert creator and the watchdog for consistency. Instead, they’ve violated the semantics of perhaps the oldest single interface on the Mac platform, either unknowingly, or in a misguided effort to duplicate Windows.
Siracusa reiterated his charges through each major upgrade of the operating system:
- For 10.2 (Jaguar): “I feel like the changes being made to the Mac OS X Finder betray a fundamental lack of vision–any vision. Tearing down the old Finder and starting over is all well and good, but the new Finder has yet to even get off the ground…Put simply, the Finder, once the crown jewel of the Mac user interface, no longer seems to be a priority at Apple.”
- For 10.3 (Panther): “The Mac OS X Finder is lost at sea…The Finder’s user interface designers either don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care what’s going on in the ‘hood…I would be more comfortable with this if the Finder team was aggressively pursing its own vision. But switching to a brushed metal appearance and adding a sidebar does not a vision make. The OS X Finder’s user interface has made amazingly little progress in over three years of development, and the changes that have been made appear largely directionless…Incremental performance improvements and feature additions make the Panther Finder better than its predecessor, but that is faint praise indeed.
- For 10.4 (Tiger): “The Tiger Finder does not include any significant new interface features beyond those added in service of Spotlight, and…even those suffer from the now-expected Finder malaise…I just wonder how many more years I’ll have to wait before the Mac OS X Finder finally bubbles up the priority list at Apple.
Now, you’re probably asking yourself, why all this focus on what some dude at Ars.Technica thinks of the Finder? Well, mostly because I agree with the man, and anything I could write on the Finder would have its source in his articles. But that’s not the only reason. The other reason is because he gets it. John Siracusa loved the classic Mac OS. And he compares every iteration of Mac OS X with the operating system he used to have. He’s not saying the classic Mac OS was perfect, but he does question every compromise that Apple seems to make between GUI perfection and commercial appeal. That’s why I want you to know what he thinks. Because he gets it.
Before we get back to Leopard, let me repeat what Siracusa said: The Finder is the computer. That’s why so many people were excited to hear what Apple had in store for it in Leopard. Because a major change to the Finder meant a major change to the way each user experienced their Macintosh. And for those of us who live on our computers, it meant a major change in our daily lives.
Jobs Takes The Stage
With all that excitement in the air, all that expectation, it really should come as no surprise that Mr. Jobs’ keynote presentation was slightly underwhelming.
The first thing Jobs did was introduce the expected Mac Pro, the Intel replacement of the PowerMac G5. As a non-rich person, this didn’t excite me too much. The Mac Pro starts at $2,499. Is it worth it? Maybe. But they tell me $1000 night hookers are worth it too. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m poor.
The second thing Jobs announced was an Intel-based Xserve. Again, nothing I got too excited about it. Servers are for companies, not for consumers. Of course, I could probably find some way to use it (I could host Fluid Imagination all by myself, as opposed to using someone else’s servers), but with a starting price of $2,999, not to mention an apartment that simply can’t fit any more electrical equipment, that just ain’t gonna happen. Again, for the consumers out there, this announcement was a big yawn.
Then came the introduction to Leopard.
Spanking Redmond (with an ulterior motive)
Before getting into what they’ve been doing in Cupertino, Apple decided they’d start their presentation on Leopard by spending a significant amount of time making fun of Microsoft’s major update to the Windows operating-system, which is now called Vista.
When Apple introduced Tiger, the current version of Mac OS X, they hung banners in the conference hall that said “Redmond, start your photocopiers.” The running joke about Vista is that Apple didn’t think Microsoft would take them so seriously (watch this YouTube video that puts the audio of Microsoft’s introduction of Vista to a video of Mac OS X).
The question some people were asking themselves was, “Why would Apple spend so much time blasting Microsoft? Sure, it’s fun and everyone enjoys when the Evil Empire of the technology universe gets a pie in the face, but c’mon, why spend five minutes on the thing?
Jobs answered that question after the fifth minute, when he said, “Today we want to give you a preview of Leopard. So let me start off with some of the stuff that we can’t show you. There are some top secret features to Leopard that we’re going to keep a little close to the vest and not going to show you today. I just want you to know they’re there. We don’t want our friends to start their photocopiers any sooner than they have to and uh, so we’re going to keep a few things a little secret.”
In other words, Jobs was saying that all that stuff you were getting excited about…yeah, you’re not going to see any of it today. But hey, that doesn’t mean it’s not there (of course, it also doesn’t mean that it is).
Ten Things
But they did show us “ten major things” about Leopard. Let’s run down the list, shall we?
1. Support for 64-bit Applications: If you’re not a hard-core techy (as I am not), then this doesn’t mean much to you. What it does mean is better, faster performance for all applications without any extra work having to be done by the developers. Again, great, but ho hum in terms of generating an iErection.
2. Time Machine: There’s two things to talk about when it comes to Time Machine. The first is what it does, the second is how you use it. First, Time Machine is essentially a way to back-up everything on your computer. We all know we’re supposed to be doing it, but only about a quarter of us actually do. Time Machine will make backing up an integrated part of the operating system. From now on, we’ll all do it, and we’ll all do it because we won’t have to do it. It’ll simply get done.
Okay, that’s kind of cool, but nothing spectacular, right? After all, automatic back-up seems like something we should expect from a modern operating-system. But I haven’t told you about the second thing yet.
Check this shit out.
Pretty cool, huh? That’s the Apple way. Take something that should be rather basic, and make it cool to use. Christ, if they put this much thought and effort into something as simple as backing up and restoring files, imagine what they’re gonna do to the Finder itself!
3. The Complete Package: Basically, it means that everything that Apple has been installing on new Macs only, things like Boot Camp (ability to run Windows), Front Row (a media browser that runs with a remote control), and Photo Booth (web-cam fun), will come in Leopard. For someone like me, who doesn’t have an Intel-based Mac, nor one that comes with a remote-control censor, nor a web-cam, I couldn’t care less.
4. Spaces: Jobs tells us that “Spaces is a new way of working on your Mac.” Unless, of course, you shelled out a couple of bucks for YouControl:Desktops, because it’s basically the same thing. That’s right, Spaces is the virtual desktop thing that everyone was predicting. Yeah, it’s pretty cool to have it be integrated right into Mac OS X, but nothing revolutionary.
5. Spotlight: An upgrade to the search technology introduced in 10.4. Now you can search multiple machines on your network. You can also search servers. Apple also added advanced searching capabilities, like Boolean searches. They turned it into application launcher too: type in the name of an app, and bam! it’s launched. And finally, they’re putting recent files right at the top of the Spotlight results window, which, to me, seems like they just moved that function from the Apple menu in the top left corner of your screen to the Spotlight menu in the top right. Talk about innovation, huh?
6. Core Animation: I’m gonna tell you right off the bat that this one could be very fucking cool, but that it requires some imagination on the part of the developers before end-users like me can enjoy it.
Basically, Core Animation allows developers to “dramatically increase the production value of [their] applications.” It’s the secret behind the Time Machine interface that you saw above. By making it a part of the OS, Apple has made it easy for any developer to make an interface just as cool.
7. Universal Access: Hey, if you’re deaf or blind, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to enjoy the Macintosh experience. In 10.4, Apple made a lot of innovations in the OS to make it easy for those with special needs to have access to everything they need. In Leopard, they’re improving all of that, including state-of-the-art VoiceOver technology that will transforms text to speech for those users whose eyesight prevents them from seeing the screen.
8. Mail: Jobs only spoke on three new features for Apple’s integrated e-mail application: HTML templates for sending photos (yawn), Notes for keeping track of whatever needs to be kept track of (meh), and an integrated To Do Tracker, which allows you to make pretty much anything into a “To Do” item and then keep track of it in one place (kind of cool).
I don’t really see myself using the templates, and the notes thing will be nice to have, but I can do that now using the NotePad Dashboard widget. The To Do Tracker will be cool, but I’ve found in the past that I don’t usually keep on top of To Do lists. Maybe having it integrated into my email inbox will help that, but I doubt it.
9. Dashboard: Dashboard was an awesome feature that was built into 10.4. Outside of Expose, it was my favorite addition to the Macintosh operating system, and it almost made me forget all the things we lost from the classic Mac OS. I now have one-button access to weather updates, my iCal appointments and to-dos, the stats for Fluid Imagination via Google Analytics, a dictionary/thesaurus, my address book, my digital photos, a calculator, a searchable index of cocktail ingredients, the number of days I have left until the insurance companies think I’m going to die (18,564 days, if you must know), flight tracking, sports scores, ski reports, stock updates, soduku, a translation tool, a unit conversion tool, and, finally, one-button access to Wikipedia. And that’s just what I have installed. There are thousands of Dashboard widgets that are available on Apple’s website.
In Leopard, they’re adding at least two things to Dashboard. The first is “DashCode,” a developer’s kit to make it easy for developers to create their own widgets.
The second is “Dashclip,” which makes it incredibly easy for users like me to create our own widgets. Basically, you go to a website, decide what part of it you want to check regularly, drag a little box around the part of the site you want to see, click a button, and bam! you’ve got a widget of it. For example, go to the NY Times website, find the Best Seller list, drag a box around it, click a button, and bam! you’ve got a widget that will show you whenever the list gets updated.
Are there other ways to achieve this? Sure. RSS will do the same thing, provided the site you want serves an RSS feed. But with DashClip, you can track any web page and not just those that serve feeds. Plus, Dashboard is more fun to use than RSS, so nyeh, nyeh, nyeh.
I really like the Dashboard update.
10. iChat: Apple’s instant messenging client is going to get multiple logins, invisbility, animated buddy icons, video recording, and tabbed chats. Cool. But what else you got?
As Steve Jobs said himself, “We wanna go further than this.”
The first thing they’re doing is bringing Photo Booth into iChat. This isn’t that big of a deal. It means you can add special effects to your video chats. What kind of special effects? You can make it look like Picasso drew your face. Great.
The second thing is iChat Theater. This one is cool. You can now do presentations and photo slide-shows right through iChat. This means that, if you’re in Oregon and I’m in Vermont, I can bore you with a slideshow of pictures from my vacation right through iChat. But if you’re a business person, it also means that you can do presentations right through your instant message application. It’ll make it easier for companies to present to their clients without having to get on a plane. Provided everyone is on a Mac, of course. They didn’t announce anything on this, but it seems it’s only a few steps away to be able to collaborate on the same document via iChat. If that’s not one of the Top Secret Features, I’d be a little surprised.
The third thing is Back Drops. Without the benefit of a green screen, you can now add your own backdrop so that it looks like you’re standing in a cloud as opposed to sitting in your cubicle. You can use photos or videos as the backdrop, so you can be underwater and have fish swim by. I guess this is neat, but, as I said before, I don’t have a webcam, so no video chat for me.
And again, these are only great if the person you’re chatting with is on a Mac too.
And that’s it. That’s all they introduced at the WWDC 2006.
What About The Finder?
“Okay, Kyle,” you’re saying, “Except for Time Machine, which is really cool, the rest of those things sound a little whatever, but what about the Finder? I mean, you spent a couple of hundred words telling me about how much John Siracusa says that the Finder sucks, so what are they doing to improve the friggin’ thing? And if they’re doing nothing and introduced nothing, why the hell did you even bring it up to begin with?”
First things first, I said earlier that John Siracuse gets it, and he does, but what he gets is the Spatial Finder, which as he made clear, is the computer. Take a look at Time Machine again. Do you notice that Apple has introduced a full third-dimension into their computer interface? Sure, they’ve had various 3-D effects for a decade (can you say “shadows,” “pop-up folders,” and more recently, “Dashboard”?), but with Time Machine, they’ve literally (well, virtually, I guess) blown the back out of the box. The third dimension doesn’t stop on a “desktop” but goes on infinitely “behind” it.” Apple has introduced space — as in “Star Trek” space — into the Spatial Finder.
Sure, Time Machine has a name and is its own application with an icon and everything, but if you watch the video, you can see that, for the user, it’s completely new way to experience the computer.
Which means Time Machine is an upgrade to the Finder. To say that they didn’t say anything about the new Finder is simply to forget about how the user experiences Time Machine.
But that seems like the lawyer’s way out of your complaint, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s not like they “changed” the Finder. They just added to it. And to those who, like me, agree with Siracusa, it may seem akin to putting lipstick on a donkey. What about the Finder!!!?
The Death Rattle
I’m going to make a conservative prediction and say that the Finder is five generations away from extinction. Come Mac OS XI, the Finder will be gone for good. There is a chance, however, that it may not even last that long.
Come back tomorrow and I’ll you why.