8 posts tagged “apple”

I've never been one of the people who's seen a need to use any terminal application in Mac OS X other than the one supplied by Apple in Utilities. It does the job, uses Monaco 9, doesn't anti-alias (or at least, can be made not to). It starts up in Mac-ish black on white, and generally Just Works.

10.5 saw a bit of an overhaul, with a much saner configuration interface (all in Preferences, rather than hidden in a rather baffling out-of-the-way inspector) and tabbed browsing. Now, I still don't use tabs on the Mac OS, personally; I like the established app/window split and don't see the need to bring a third level of indirection into play, especially when it doesn't even have consistent shortcuts. (Tabs on Windows? Now that's a different story.) In fact, for years I'd quite happily got by with a bunch of scripts in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Terminal/ that would neatly stack all the windows.

Sadly, the new version of Terminal also introduced an annoying AppleScript bug which renders these scripts less than useful. When positioning a window, the vertical positions aren't honoured correctly: instead, the window ends up 320 pixels up the screen from the desired location - OK if you want a window at the top, but certainly not if it's meant to be at the bottom right, which is my usual position. I mention this now because the bug in Terminal that broke my window arrangers will also affect a script to centre windows that TALlama (no really) posted in response to a lazytwitter invocation by John Siracusa. If you try to centre a Terminal window, it ends up jammed at the top of the screen, for no apparent reason.

Now, I'm not down with the cool kids who post radr:// URLs, so if anyone who's reading this is, it's really easy to replicate the error: get a Terminal window towards the bottom of the screen, run this script - which should do nothing, as it's merely putting the window back where it started - and watch your window shift around. Do that, report it, and hopefully eventually I'll be able to retire my "set voffset to 320 -- work around AppleScript bug" line.

tell application "Terminal"

    set b to bounds of window 1

    set bounds of window 1 to b

end tell

Anyway, thanks for listening, and here's hoping for a better Terminal AppleScript interface in 10.5.3.

When I first thought about writing a translation of the Apple's Windows Invasion piece by Joe Wilcox, it was Thursday morning, and nobody else seemed to be overly bothered about the details of the updater; John Gruber, for example, where I first saw the piece, merely linked to it saying, effectively, "well, that's interesting". However, on Friday morning, there was a bit more commentary, so I decided to put something out; well, it was a bank holiday, and it was quiet; why not?

As the day went on, there actually seemed to be a bit of a storm (admittedly, one in a small teacup, sized about the same as the overlap between iTunes and Windows users) growing about the feature. A fisking is more set out to tear down than to build up, and I've had time to think about it, so here's some further thoughts on the subject.

Were you trying to make any points with that post?

Firstly: Microsoft, and others, either push software through their updaters, or have updaters that are otherwise rubbish. Secondly: I just boggled at the line "Apple one-ups Microsoft with a presumably more standards-compliant browser than the Internet Explorer 8 beta" - has Wilcox never seen an acid test? However, even that was nothing compared to the arguments that Safari may be insecure, when IE 6 certainly was.

Generally, I thought the piece was far more alarmist than it needed to be.

Do you actually approve of Apple having their own software updater?

Not really. In an ideal fluffy happy kitten world, Windows and Mac OS X would have an open infrastucture for software updates, where applications could all use the system's libraries to pull down upgrades when needed. Nobody would have an excuse for an updater like Adobe's, which can't seem to manage what Apple call "combo updates" (want to take Acrobat from 7.0.1 to 7.0.9? Well, please install 7.0.5, reboot, 7.0.8, reboot...), and Mac users wouldn't have fifteen applications bundling (sometimes outdated) copies of Sparkle.

Of course, this could go horribly wrong (see the proposed iPhone app store), and as Mark Pilgrim points out, Linux has this sorted out already. Also, note I said "open infrastructure" - I'm not exactly keen to have every app have to pass through Apple or Microsoft before you were able to distribute it.

As it is, we do not live in an ideal world, and I'd rather have apps that were up to date than ones that weren't.

Would it make a difference is the checkbox for Safari were off by default instead?

I'd already installed Safari 3 betas on my Windows machine, so I didn't realise that the 3.1 update I was being offered was either being pimped to people who only had iTunes, nor that it was enabled by default. I don't have a problem with the first: I know that real people don't know about software releases the way the Twitterati do.

However, I think I do agree with the critics of the decision to install Safari by default, even if, as Tom said in the comment on my piece, it makes Apple just like everyone else in the Windows world. Boot Camp doesn't install crapware, for example (although apparently it does install the software updater we're all talking about), and Macs don't come with Intel Inside stickers. It would be nice for Apple to be able to take the moral high ground on updaters, too.

Anyway, for all the hullabaloo about Google search kickbacks, what good are they if nobody ever uses your app? There's a saying to do with honey and bees - or is it bears - which, if I could remember it, would be appropriate here.

So the iTunes+QuickTime bundling is bad, too?

Actually, no, I don't think it is. If you don't have QuickTime installed, video previews, and more importantly, video downloads, don't work. I think Apple is justified in bundling the two to a single download. The same goes for the background processes that make the iPod work on Windows; not installing those would be lead to an incredibly bad user experience.

One thing I've seen mentioned that also annoys me, though, is the way the stupid tray icon for QuickTime is reinstalled every damned time you update the library. There's no good reason for it to overwrite its preferences every time, and I wish it would stop doing so.

Did you realise that comments on your translation post were disabled?

Not until I posted this, and double-checked the sharing settings, no. I imagine this post means that there's not much more that people want to say, but you never know. Comments are now fixed for Vox members on both this and the previous post. (Oops.)

When is Easter next year?

Sunday 12th April, which should at least mean it isn't snowing outside.

Does this mean you're done wittering?

Yes. Shoo.

1. On footprints and forms.

Debate about whether or not the MacBook Air is, or deserves to be called, a subnotebook or ultramobile PC exposes some of the philosophy of Apple. Steve Jobs said himself in the keynote: "there's too much compromising on less than a full size display, less than a full-size keyboard". The upshot is that the footprint of the Air is no smaller than that of the other MacBooks¹. However, a lot of people would like a machine that was less wide and deep, no matter how thick it is. The Eee, of course, is the current poster-boy for such people, being the size of a DVD case.

Will Apple ever make a notebook for the people who would otherwise buy an Eee? Probably not, but I don't rule out them making a bigger touch-screen tablet, an iPod touch for the kitchen, if you will. It won't be a Mac, won't have a keyboard, and like the iPhone and touch, it'll be more geared to reading than to creating content (although if you're very lucky, it'll pair with a Bluetooth keyboard)². It also won't be released this year (maybe next?)

Are Apple right to ignore this market? A year ago I'd have said yes. Now, I still think they'll sell plenty of thin, stylish, relatively powerful (but expensive) machines. On the other hand, the cheap, Linux-based small laptops (we really need a category name for these gadgets, and one better than Eee-esque) will probably carve out quite the niche in the next year. Shuttle-based PCs heralded to move to the Mac mini from the Cube, so there'll maybe be a subnotebook to compete with the Eee's successors some years hence.

2. On secondaries and syncing.

John Gruber:

The MacBook Air is undeniably beautiful and clever, but clearly designed as a secondary machine, not a main machine. I like using a notebook as my sole machine, which means I'm almost certain to stick with the Pros.

and I think he's right, and, like him, it's one of the reasons I don't want one. Indeed, the fact is that, for at least five years, it's been perfectly fine to use a laptop as your primary computer. This is handy, because in the decade before that, there was a big problem with laptops: getting them to co-exist with desktops.

Way back in the early 1990s, Douglas Adams wrote about his desire to sync data between his Macintoshes³, and while we now have the option of .Mac (only $99/year, go on), I still don't think syncing is anywhere near a solved problem⁴. Perhaps that's OK, and we'll all end up storing our data in "the cloud", with Google, Flickr, Facebook and so on, but I don't quite know if the world's ready for that yet⁵.

I was intrigued to see that Wil Shipley is keen to get a MacBook Air. I wondered if compiling apps would be slow, and suddenly remembered the existence of Xgrid. I have no idea how well it works (it's not really something I've used in anger), but perhaps that's another part of the secondary machine puzzle, as are photo library management schemes like Fraser Speirs is considering.

All in all, perhaps a secondary machine isn't so much of a problem now, but I'm still not convinced I'd be happy splitting my life in two.

3. On phones and portable data.

Paul Boutin, in a piece entitled MacBook Err:

why has Apple failed to make foolproof, always-on Internet access—the iPhone's killer feature—a standard component of its next generation of computers?

Technically, putting a phone's 3G or better data connection into a computer isn't that hard. Sony did it over two years ago⁶. The problems are economic. Who's the data connection with, and how is it paid for? How do you do deals with providers worldwide⁷? (Remember, the iPhone is only available in four countries, the Kindle⁸ in one.)

Anyway, there are already ways to get online via mobile data connections. Boutin mentions 3G dongles (available in the UK for free, plus £10/month for 1GB of data), but doesn't mention a much more elegant way to go online: Bluetooth to a phone. Nokia's N810 internet tablet, for example, doesn't have 3G, but it does make pairing to (and using the data from) a phone very easy, and Mac OS X isn't exactly hard to configure either. As Tom Insam pointed out, you can even configure it to dial up when needed.

There are, admittedly, two problems here. Firstly, it seems that some (predominantly American?) carriers don't like letting you use your phone like this. The solution there, naturally, is to change carriers, and if you can't, lobby them until they change. Secondly, and more fundamentally, some phones doesn't support the right Bluetooth commands. Bafflingly, one such device is Apple's own iPhone. However, there are far more smartphonese that do Bluetooth dial-up networking than those that don't.

Personally, I'm still not convinced that truly always-on connections are either a good nor profitable idea. I'd find myself distracted and prone to looking up facts rather than debating the more interesting ideas around them, while I wonder if "normal people"⁹ want it? I admit that the same things were said about always-on wired Internet merely a decade ago, but this time perhaps there's a point in resisting technology for its own sake, if only for a few years.

¹ The weight isn't the same, of course, and apparently that's enough for some people. Personally it's never been a great concern.

² People have managed to put Mac OS X on an Eee, and if I had a couple of hundred pounds and some time spare I might be tempted to try it, but to be honest, I think it'd be painful. Apple don't support the latest release of Mac OS X on a machine with a screen smaller than 1024x768, and I think there's a good reason for that. Try setting your Mac to 800x600 and see if you can use iPhoto.

³ He also wrote about the pain of multiple power supplies. Sven-S. Porst touches on the idea of the Mac mini, Time Capsule and so on sharing a single power connector design, and more, in his post about the Macworld announcments.

⁴ Whatever happened to the Windows "Briefcase" feature anyway?

⁵ Having said that, gOS do.

⁶ Well, actually, it was EDGE, which is 2.5G, but you get the idea.

⁷ I still think the chances of a tuner in the Apple TV are basically zero, not just because of the iTunes Store, but also because there's no longer anything like a dominant standard for broadcast television within a given country, let alone worldwide.

⁸ The Kindle, of course, has a built-in EVDO modem. Amazon managed to get away without a service charge for the Kindle, but I doubt that Apple are going to subsidise the sort of use you'd see from a computer as opposed to a specialist device.

⁹ Geeks really need a better way of saying that.

Over a million iPhones have been sold.  Have you: bought one, considered it, or decided it's not for you?

I'm still undecided on whether I'm interested in an iPhone or not. At the moment, my music player is still the second generation iPod, with 10GB of disk space, that I bought over five years ago, and while it's no longer exactly huge, I'm quite fond of its physical buttons, heft and shape. (Is it just me that finds new iPods to seem rather too thin?)

On the other hand, I've never really been taken with any of the phones I've owned since the T610, way back when. If I'd timed the upgrade to hit the K750 or N73 when they were new, it might have been a different story, but I didn't. I'm currently wavering between upgrading to a K850 - I hate cameras without rotation sensors, so that is a nice feature - or just going down to PAYG on the Nokia 6230 I'm still borrowing from candace.

Of course, the iPhone is a third option, but to be honest, I'm waiting for 3G (just like half of Europe, perhaps), and I'd love to see how useful the promised API is before I get one with the idea that I'd hack on it. I'm also not yet sure if there's room for a device like the iPhone, or iPod touch or N810, in my life. I'm on my laptop at home or desktop at work so much of the time, do I really need mobile data? I'm sure once I have it I'll find it impossible to do without, just as it's now inconceivable to be without a mobile phone at all, so maybe putting off that day is a good idea.

So, to answer the QotD: I'm considering the iPhone, but I'm good at procrastinating, so I haven't really decided either way yet.

Mac OS X 10.5 is out today, and as usual I'm waiting for a while to see how it shakes out before installing it. In fact, I think I'm looking forward to the usual review by John Siracusa on Ars Technica more than I'm looking forward to the OS itself.

Nonetheless, with the release providing fodder for commentators and reviewers everywhere, I have picked up on a few of the new features of Leopard that I'm looking forward to. The thing is, I have a long memory, so some of them are actually old. In fact, they date back to System 7 or Mac OS 8.

• Grid Spacing - an old Finder feature, which Pogue accepts is a rerun
  
• File Sharing - as with the old Mac OS, you can now share folders other than just ~/Public
• Sharp Corners - again, Mac OS 9 didn't draw rounded corners on an LCD. Bafflingly, people have got so used to something that was originally a workaround for CRTs that a hack is apparently on its way to restore them
• Apple Data Detectors - a strange little feature that I've covered before on the 2lmc spool
  

All in all, it sometimes seems that bits of Apple have a reverse gear. Mind you, given how much of the baby got junked with the bathwater of the old Mac OS, it's not exactly unwelcome. Roll on a decent spatial Finder in 10.6! (Well, you've got to have a dream, haven't you?)

Today's Technology Guardian carries an opinion piece by Charles Arthur titled "Why the world says 'meh' to Apple's next product". Thankfully, it's not yet more iPhone commentary, but instead a piece on why the world isn't caring about Mac OS X 10.5, or as Apple would rather we called it, Leopard*.

Largely I think he's about right. There is more innovation on the web, and in web services, than in desktop apps generally and operating systems in particular (for obvious reasons; a web service can throw away convention at will, whereas something like Vista can be hamstrung by decades-old apps that must remain compatible). He also points the blame at a couple of high-profile demos of the OS, at developer conferences, and he's probably right that they're both underwhelming yet overfamiliar.

However, I do think he's missing something; the role of third-party applications as upgrade drivers. I wrote about this back when 10.4 was due, because despite the fact that, as he has it

People were excited about the Spotlight search facility, the Dashboard widgets system, Smart Folders to create dynamic views of files or emails, and RSS detection built into the Safari web browser

I was deeply suspicious (sometimes of the same features; for me the HFS+ b-tree catalog provided a useful search index 99% of the time, so Spotlight's additional metadata isn't much of an improvement and the UI was a regression). What finally prompted me to upgrade was the fact that almost every application I wanted wasn't available for 10.3.9; neither Lightroom nor Aperture, for example. Even BBEdit, once a poster child of running on old OSes, now insists on a 10.4 for its latest version.

I probably could have squeezed this observation into a delicious note, except for one thing: this is particularly important in the light of Wil Shipley's post today on the iPod, iPhone and Apple's greed:

I don't write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment. But I've always said that I will move from the platform the day Apple starts acting like a monopoly -- trying to make money by using its marketing position to extort money from users, instead of innovating so quickly that users willing throw money at Apple.

For all that I dislike Delicious Library, I don't doubt that version 2, which is 10.5 only, will encourage at least a few people who would otherwise have thought "10.4 does all I want" to upgrade. Multiply that by all the applications out there which have already declared they're going to be Leopard only, and you have a powerful marketing tool that Apple are being given, free. Now think about these developers chafing as they go out and spend money on iPhones, yet find them less useful than they could be, and the touch of resentment creeping in. That's the thought Steve Jobs needs to be having, or there'll be a lot more "meh" out there.

* In a rare concession to non-Mac types, I prefer using the version numbers to the code names. Maybe that's also partly because I don't find them that memorable. Do you? Quick, how far before Panther was Cheetah?

Since the introduction of the iPod touch a couple of weeks ago, there's been a lot of commentary, understandably. A lot has touched on what the differences in functionality between the iPhone and the Touch, since they're obviously very similar products. However, I'm also interested in something that neither of them do: iTunes shared library access.

Since iTunes 4, it's been easy to listen to music from another copy of iTunes over a network (although Apple have steadily reduced the usefulness of the implementation, and it's no longer a bullet point feature, just the subject of a how to document). Nonetheless, given iTunes dominance as a music library manager, it's still popular.

Now, I can understand why the users of the iPhone - intended more as a roving device, perhaps, then the iPod touch - didn't miss this feature. The Touch, though, seems ideally suited to it, either when it's docked to speakers elsewhere, or for routing sound between a server and remote speakers, and the hardware needed to support it is certainly all there, with the wifi and good interface that both devices have. However, there's no sign at all that Apple care, instead deciding that it's more important to build a Wi-Fi music store and a gimmicky tie-in to a coffee chain, leaving the market to the likes of Sonos.

Given the continued lack of an open implementation that will connect to iTunes 7, due to Apple's encryption of the library sharing protocol, it's not even possible for a third party to build a generally useful version. (Believe me, if there was, I'd be far keener to buy an iPod touch. Ironically, I know a few people who are more interested in it as a development platform than as a music player; Cover Flow just isn't that interesting to most, it seems.)

I'm not the first person to mention this lack - Kevin Marks has a similar lament - but I wonder if there's something more going on. After all, the AirPort Express hasn't been updated to 802.11n (although arguably that's due to issues shrinking the hardware sufficiently, rather than lack of will), while Apple's lead in easy sharing and connection seems to be eroding, as uPNP sharing gains a foothold (after all, Microsoft must expect some return on all those Xbox 360s), and iTunes sharing still only has one licencee, Roku. I'm sad to say I was surprised to find that Front Row supported shared libraries; I was assuming that Apple wouldn't care.

There's also a lack of development on the underlying protocol that worries me. iTunes sharing explicitly doesn't support wide-area Bonjour, which seems to me to provide a theoretical mechanism for streaming from your own library to an iPhone on the move. Cover art isn't well supported by the protocol either (which is especially annoying now that Cover Flow is such a prominent feature). While I know that it can chew up a lot of bandwidth, I'm running a large library over file sharing - just the sort of thing iTunes is meant to save you messing with - and the cover art works fine, although admittedly the local cache is quite large and transferring it may be problematic.

My dismay is more acute because this a problem that's worth solving. At dConstruct last week, Peter Merholz quoted Steve Jobs on experience design; someone builds a prototype, then makes it a product. The third step, and the one most people fail to take, is making it really nice. Apple may consider iTunes sharing to be nice enough, but I see its possibilities for truly handling home audio from one server through multiple clients to many listening devices, and shake my head. Things don't seem to have improved in the three years since Chris Heathcote was rolling his own glue to handle music listening.

There have been a couple of posts since Apple's press event on Tuesday, which saw the launch of the new .Mac Galleries - an online, read-only version of iPhoto, kind of - that state that "Apple doesn't get the web". Jeremy Keith says

in the fast-moving, messy world of online services I don’t think the genius-led design of Apple can compete with the truckloads of nimble young upstarts making snazzily addictive products on the Web

and Chris Heathcote writes

Whenever Apple strays towards software and the web recently, there’s a lot of flashy interfaces, and little substance.

I think there's a slight qualification to be made here. I think Apple are great at web publishing. Their site is one of the best product sites I've seen (despite the fact I dislike the new bigger-than-800-pixel width). I've been going on about the elegance of URLs - it's possible to guess that there's something at apple.com/keyboard, for example - since 2001 or something, and even when they drop in AJAX their pages still have usable permanent links.

When designing for consumers, Apple takes the same approach. They produce tools for publishing, using a one-to-many, one-direction mode of thinking. As James Duncan Davidson notes as he writes about the .Mac galleries, "It’s not Flickr, and comparing it to Flickr is probably pointless." Well, no. Flickr is the archetypal Web 2.0 application, being almost as much about community as about photographs themselves. The .Mac gallery, on the other hand, is all about putting your work online. There's no comments, no notes, no tags, but the people who it's aimed at don't want that. They're about publishing, not interaction, and while they pages are undoubtedly heavy, and probably scale badly, they're also slick enough that a lot of people will like them.

Similarly, iWeb-generated blogs have no comments, but well-designed templates (from which it's hard to stray.)* Again, it's designed for publishing. The problem for Apple is that it's not 1999 any more. People expect more from their sites now, and thankfully more and more of the sites I use are applications, not brochureware. So perhaps the statement needs to be refined, because despite the JavaScript libraries and slick visuals, Apple doesn't get Web 2.0.

* One point where iWeb fails is that it doesn't preserve Apple's nice URLs; the ones it generates are distinctly ugly. At least, they were in the first version.