The Coming Mac Renaissance
We Mac users are known for our infinite patience. I remember installing the first public beta of OS X and thinking, what an absolute mess.
I remember picking up OS 10.1 at a special event, running home and installing it and thinking, better, but still, what a mess.
We took many many steps backwards in the beginning with OS X. Copying more than 10 files by dragging from one window to another was close to impossible. Gone were all the goodies we were used to in OS 9, like labels and an OS that was actually responsive.
Skip ahead to 10.3, or Panther. Now our patience was really starting to pay off. With Panther we had the first really usable OS X operating system. Sure there was still some funkiness, including the ever-omnipresent Beach Ball. But you could use Panther day in and day out professionally. OS 9 was a thing of the past.
This leads us up to our current incarnation of OS X, Tiger. Panther was an unpolished beast, but Tiger truly is a very stable, fast, and useful operating system. The Beach Ball is thankfully a rare sight. And the Finder is polished, not only meeting the usability of OS 9 but far exceeding it.
Where does that leave us now? When I studied drawing at art school the concept that was taught in live drawing was you don’t try to get the perfect drawing first. You start with big strokes, getting more and more focused over time, until, finally, you have a drawing. There was a lot of erasing, of moving things around, and looking at things from a different perspective.
Apply that metaphor to OS X and I think with Tiger we have the beginnings of a decent drawing. Leopard is going to turn the underlying technologies into a work of art. In so many ways the GUI we use now is the GUI of the original Mac. Sure, things are faster and much more polished, but the basic metaphor is there. I truly hope that Leopard will take us to the next level, introducing new metaphors for navigating our increasing gigabytes and terabytes of content. Spotlight is a start, but there is so much more potential for computing in this information-rich age.
I’ve written before that the OS doesn’t matter that much anymore. I’m beginning to realize that it matters more than anything. Web 2.0 tools, or software-as-service, can be fantastic for certain things. But for true productivity and innovation, desktop applications, I’m convinced, will continue to lead the way. As applications like Second Life and more immersive 3D environments begin to appear, more and more the Operating System they function in will be critical.
I have no inside information about Leopard, but I am very optimistic that Apple understands that now is time for some large paradigm shifts in the operating system world. Vista is a bad photocopy of Tiger, and now is the golden moment for Apple to take a quantum leap ahead of all other operating systems.
We have been patient! Now it is time to be rewarded.
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Comments
Ben, none of that actually disputes anything I said.
No, and it wasn’t meant to. The point is the wider one that I have made explicitly clear throughout.
The effect of Time Machine will be wider use of backup in the population of users than any other system has ever managed to achieve. And this point that some “loathe” the interface is total rubbish. None of us have used the interface yet. There are those who suspect it will be very useful, and others who suspect it won’t.
Amazingly, those who suspect it won’t are exactly the ones anyone familiar to this place would expect. Hypocrits should note that this is at least as suspicious as the inverse.
Oh, and that user interface is not “the only thing… going for it”. The Time Machine API is an innovation that should not be underestimated. That TM will make incrementally restoring data like emails, contacts and so on is a terrifically important advantage over purely file-oriented UIs like those employed by windows.
If you watch some of the tech demos from the Apple seminars, you’ll see Core Animation being used in little demo applications that a programmer can now literally throw together in a few hours, and yet are of a kind that is quite new and exciting in terms of how intuitively UI elements can be introduced and controlled.
Think for a moment how much work it would have taken Apple to produce an iPhone firmware without using OS X’s architectural attributes to exactly mimic the one they’ve produced. The difference would be enormous. And this is to say nothing of how easy it is for Apple to make future developments on the platform.
Actually, having to wait for CoreAnimation to cattch up before implimenting the backup solution belies the “nimbleness claim”.
The backup solution belies my ass. As is completely obvious to all but the most disingenuous of parties, the entire point of this is that building an architecture that allows one to be nimble takes time, but after those components are there, THEN one can be nimble.