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
Love this article, Hadley.
Spotlight is a start, but there is so much more potential for computing in this information-rich age.
I absolutely agree. As recently discussed, Spotlight as something the user interacts with - as a user interface - is pretty darn bad in Tiger. But as an idea, and, technologically, as an implementation, it is absolutely bloody brilliant. I completely agree with you, we have been patient while Apple lays the foundation for the potential for new concepts in user interface. Spotlight is a superb example: a deeply integrated metadata-based pseudo-database, or the potential to act like an infinitely flexible, extensible database for future developments.
There are countless other examples of gradually building a secure foundation, starting with a rough sketch as you say and evolving as what needs to be done becomes apparent. The Core tehchnologies being prime other examples.
I truly believe that what we see now emerging is a platform with possibilites: on the architectural basis developed by Apple over the past 7 years, things like Core Animation and spotlight ooze potential for innovative approaches to the way we interact with the computer. Apple’s smallest Mac, the iPhone is already exhibiting the rewards gained from “building for the future”. It is the absolute antithesis of Microsoft, and beautiful to behold.
I think many people miss the point about operating systems; they shouldn’t be in the foreground. You shouldn’t have to think about them, because they just work. Microsoft Windows is always in your face like a needy kid, yelling, “Look at me. Look at me.”
The Mac isn’t like that. The Mac is more like an ever-present servant who keeps out of your sight, except when you need to turn to him for a task. And he is right there. The smarter that servant is, the more likely he has already fetched what you are about to ask for. Forget about the computing cycles necessary to achieve this; most of the time the processor is at idle, anyway.
I think of where the hardware is going and Apple seems a better solution than either MS or the web applications. Do you remember when all we had were dumb terminals hooked to a mainframe? Now, we have dumb accessories hooked to our PC’s.
What happens when we have smart accessories? That is, when the accessories are all computers that talk to each other and have specialized functions? That you can set up rules that conform to how you like to do things, rather than how the machine wants them. That we humans become the most expensive accessory of a computer, so that everything revolves about minimizing our downtime.
We are likely to have many accessories spread out in our homes or offices. We will have many monitors that most of the time just look like photographs, windows or paintings. But when we want to see an output, it will be automatically routed to the closest monitor in the direction we are looking. If we pick up a drawing tablet, it records our input, decides if it is script, a command or a drawing based on our habit patterns, records and displays the result.
The point, in the future, is for the computer to take care of the minutia while we get on with what we are good at. Ease-of-use should morph toward a condition where we can forget that we are dealing with a machine. Instead, we will have a thoughtful servant that is constantly anticipating our needs and supplying them at a moments notice. In short, the computer gets out of the way. Apple is more likely to supply such an operating system than Microsoft, Google or the open source community.
I have been reading this blog since buying my first Mac a year ago and this is my first comment. I was thrilled to see someone finally dissagree with the idea that the OS is on it’s way out due to Web 2.0.
I could not agree more that the OS will become even more important in the future. When I show PC folks how my Mac works they are marveled at the magnification on the dock, the genie effect, expose and dashboard. I am always adamant that these things are all just icing on the cake and the value lies in the daily user experience. What makes OS X so good is how it lets me work unobtrusively and almost anticipates what I want to do next.
I think this is what MS does not understand. Windows takes the approach of many designed things in that it states “this is how I work so get use to it”. Apple seems to have done more homework with OS X by first asking how users work and developing an OS that allows just that. As a new Mac user I have not been present for the evolution of OS X but I will be for every release from now on and I am willing to be patient every step of the way.
Wonderful article and thanks for giving me my daily Apple fix for the last twelve months. Keep up the good work.
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.
Why is it then that every iteration of every Apple product is hailed as the GREATEST THANG EVAH! I remember the early years of OS X and all I remember is the din was the same as it is now, “it never crashes and is so superior to Windows!”
That never changes. What changes is the hindsight. OS 9 is now widely regarded as worse than OS 8. In my experience it was an unstable piece of crap. But at the time, it was the GREATEST THANG EVAH.
Same with 10.1. Same with Panther. Same with Tiger. And it will be the same with Leopard.
As with all things Apple, we won’t really know the impact of Leopard until about two years from now. Tiger didn’t change the world. It didn’t even dramatically impact Apple’s market share. Why would Leopard be any different?
Vista is a bad photocopy of Tiger
C’mon, Hadley. You can do better than that.
Vista is a bad photocopy of Tiger
Great comment, Hadley. Brilliantly illustrates that while Microsoft may have been jolted into improving the fit and finish on the surface, they are a thousand miles from the process of gradually laying developmental improvements to create an evolving architecture. Microsoft can con many people with superficial modifications, but without deep, radical development, they’re setting themselves up to lose the next leg of the race.
Spot on.
Beeb, agreed. I don’t think I’m as optimistic about Leopard as Hadley is. I’ve been burnt too often. But a least by being pessimistic I’ll have more chance of being pleased than disappointed.
Hadley, how much RAM you got?? With 1GB on my Intel iMac, it was still a reasonably common occurrence. That is until 10.4.9 when it became regular.
The biggest killer of my Macs has been, and still is, browsers. And lately, Firefox on 10.4.9 is the worst ever.
Microsoft can con many people with superficial modifications, but without deep, radical development, they’re setting themselves up to lose the next leg of the race.
What’s ironic, and deeply ignorant, about your defense of Hadley’s talking point regurgitation is that Apple stole Time Machine from a feature called Previous Versions in Vista, which is developed from Shadow Copy in XP.
The irony is that what Apple added was a “superficial modification,” a “fit and finish” if you will of a crappy-looking retro-3d interface to essentially the SAME feature.
In fact, MS’s shortcoming is the LACK of shiny eye-candy and design that is Apple’s hallmark.
And of course it’s hard to criticize (well, hard if you’re NOT a hypocritical brainless Apple fanatic) for copying Widgets unless you’re accusing them of copying Apple’s stealing them from Konfabulator.
Chris, it’s not that I’m pessimistic. I just don’t care if Leopard changes the world or not and don’t care to predict either way (although I’d guess the safe money is on “not”). I’ll upgrade to it because many of my apps will probably require it eventually anyway and I like new operating systems. I have a Vista machine as well.
Firefox is a pig on any system. I’m also running 10.4.9 and it regularly chews up over 100+ megs of RAM. Always has. Same on XP and Vista.
Frankly, I’m a little miffed at both OS X and Vista. I’ve recently upgraded to 2 GBs on two of my work machines and it was like upgrading to all new hardware. No comparison. Kernel_task is always running in the hundreds of megs.
apple stole time machine from a feature called Previous Versions in Vista
Are you serious? Are you really serious? You who bandies the word “hypocritical” around like rumsfeld bandies soldiers’ lives, you are honestly saying that APPLE STOLE THE CONCEPT OFBACKUP FROM MICROSOFT???
Apple added was a “superficial modification,” a “fit and finish” if you will of a crappy-looking retro-3d interface to essentially the SAME feature.
Apple has added a deeply integrated system feature for tracking file changes. If you can’t see past the flashy interfaces that Apple is developing, if you have no interest in the architectural developments that conspire actually to build a quality platform, then don’t ******* criticise them for just adding flashy stuff because you’re either too lazy or completely, wilfully ignorant of the deeper changes apple is making, and indeed the entire point of this article or my comments that you were slagging off.
For anyone not wilfully ignorant, Daniel Eran’s latest article is a good description of how deep system-level platform evolution lays the foundation for the possibilities of cool new ways of doing and experiencing things.
I am very productive now with Tiger and I will be just as productive with Leopard, if not more so.
My point is, there will be no reason for me to upgrade my existing Macs to the latest unless Apple can show me the butter for my toast.
Just the same with Vista. My IT guy offered me the latest Dell desktop with Vista preinstalled but declined. I have XP working just fine. I have seen with my own eyes the gory trouble with printer drivers not working. Maybe, two years down the road I will replace my XP workhorse but until then…
Ben Hall:
By which you just exactly described Volume Shadow Copy (the basis of Vista’s “Previous Versions”), which has existed in Windows since at least 2003 in Windows Server 2003. It might even be the basis of “System Restore” in Windows XP.
It wasn’t the basis of System Restore:
In Windows Vista, System Restore features an improved interface and is now based on Shadow Copy technology. In prior Windows versions, it was based on a file filter that watched changes for a certain set of file extensions, and then copied files before they were overwritten.
However, interesting point. What I’ve really been saying though, is that Apple has implemented these sorts of changes in a systematic and architecturally beautiful way.
In fact, when I said “Apple has added a deeply integrated system feature for tracking file changes”, I’ve just realised, I was wrong. Apple’s system for doing this was implemented way back in Tiger. Spotlight’s elegant solution to search incorporated the following:
An in-kernel notification mechanism that can inform user-space “subscribers” of file system changes as they happen.
(reference)
As Siracusa says:
Time Machine leverages the same file system event notification system as Spotlight in order to keep track of which files have changed. (This notification system is open to third-party developers in Leopard. Yay!) This makes the backup process much less demanding; the entire volume does not need to be scoured for changed files, grinding the disk in the process. The list of changed files is ready immediately, at any time. Like Spotlight before it, Time Machine shows the incredible utility of global file system notifications.
But further than that, JS continues:
The most significant feature of Time Machine has nothing to do with the underlying file system or copy engine. Apple has set backups free from the traditional “utility application” model that so many people find intimidating and confusing.
Making the actual backup process automatic is pretty easy. Lots of existing backup products do that. The ingenious bit is that Apple has made the recovery process similarly free of any interaction with a dedicated backup application.[1] Files are recovered from a simple—fun, even!—interface right in the standard file manager. Even better, data can be recovered from within individual applications, and not just those from Apple. Third-party developers can also integrate Time Machine into their applications.
With the combination of kernel-level file system notification, sophisticated metadata-based indexing for very quick search, and of course Core Animation, Apple’s ease of implementation of Time Machine would have been absolutely sky-rocketed. Think how much more programming would have to go into producing a Time Machine-like interface without Core Animation. It could easily be ten times as much, if not more.
Apple set itself up - and its 3rd party developers - to be nimble. To produce new ways of doing things without having to cope with the tangle of a legacy operating system, and delay release by, you know, four years. That is the directive.
Ben, none of that actually disputes anything I said. Anyway, it should be obvious but if Microsoft was able to implement this feature for Windows XP (if not for System Restore, then for WindowsXP backup), 2003 and Vista, (all of which are out now before Leopard), then it means there was no problems with releasing this as it relates to building on top of a “legacy operating system”.
The only thing Apple has going for it is a user interface that some love and others loathe, which is far less impressive that you make it out to be. Actually, having to wait for CoreAnimation to cattch up before implimenting the backup solution belies the “nimbleness claim”. While Apple was designing a planetarium-like view, MS just threw it out there in Server 2003 and told people “here, have fun”.