3 posts tagged “macosx”

I'm as pleased as the next Apple cultist that Apple finally announced the Leopard release date . I read the list of the 300+ new features and came away a bit confused.

A lot of those features I already have with Tiger. A handful:

• "Google Map Addresses: View a detailed map of any address in Address Book. Just hold down the Control key while clicking any address and select “Map of” and Safari will show you its location in Google Maps." The only change here is to Google Maps from MapQuest. Is this a new feature or some code monkey replacing the MapQuest URL template with the Google one? I look forward to this being a new feature again in 10.6 when they switch to Yahoo Maps.
• "Boot Camp: Run Windows XP and Windows Vista on your Mac at native speed with full compatibility. (Windows not included.)" Been doing this since last year...
• "Apple Dictionary: Get to know your Mac even better. A dictionary of Apple terms is built into Dictionary." w00t! The built-in dictionary will quit complaining that I'm misspelling "iPod" and "iMac". When Apple releases their next iDoodad and adds the name to their dictionary, will that be a new feature too?
  
• "New Fonts: Use new built-in fonts such as Arial Unicode, Microsoft Sans Serif, Tahoma, Papyrus Condensed, and Wingdings." About damn time. Do I get credit for this one? I didn't even need Leopard to do that.
  
• "Front Row: Sit back and enjoy all of your digital media full screen on your Mac with Front Row. Now built in to Mac OS X Leopard." The fact that Front Row exists in Leopard is a new feature? Does the fact that Leopard exists counts as a new feature too?
  
• "DVD Playback in Front Row, Streaming iTunes Content, Movie Previews" Did someone forget to update Steve Jobs' Mac mini at home? I'm pretty sure that I watched season two of SG-1 last summer on DVD via Front Row.
• "Simplified Printing: Get the best-quality printouts with the least effort. The Print dialog is preconfigured for the most common print settings, while powerful presets optimize your settings without cluttering the screen with unused options. For most documents, simply click Print to produce great output." Umm. That's how printing works now.
• "Printer Support: Just plug in your USB printer and you’re ready to print. Leopard now supports over 2,000 of the most popular models from vendors including Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, and more." w00t! I hated being unable to print to my USB printer for the past five years.
• "Screen Savers" If they bundled the X11 screensavers, they would have 500+ new features.
• "AutoFS: Automatically mount and dismount network filesystems on separate threads to improve responsiveness and reliability." I think I'll start calling my bug fixes new features too.

These are just ten of the fifteen "new features" that I found perusing the linked document. I'll confess that I didn't scrutinize iChat and Photo Booth too closely, because I don't use those applications and don't know what's actually new in that list. So, chances are pretty good that I missed a few more.

Add your own below.

After a few days of obsessive hacking and coding, I'm happy to release the initial beta version of my work upon the rest of the world.

Shion is an open-source userspace driver for controlling INSTEON-compatible modules from a Mac that is equipped with a SmartHome PowerLinc USB. Shion is also a small management application that wraps the driver and exposes its currently-implemented functionality. (This will be an ongoing project.) Presently, Shion allows you to build a list of INSTEON modules and to control them. In this version (v. 1.0b1), Shion sends ON and OFF commands to other nodes on the local INSTEON network. I have only tested it with the SmartHome ApplianceLinc, but it should control other compatible modules (in theory).

My eventual goal for this application is to develop it to the point where the Shion driver supports other USB/RS-232 INSTEON modules and implements a full command set, including support for embedded SALad programs. When the code is a bit more robust and complete, I'll be packaging and releasing a Shion framework so that the driver may be used in other Mac applications.

For my own purposes, I'll use this code to build ambient displays for the purposes of testing them as environmental notifications. (For example: How well does the "You Have Mail"  notification work when it blinks a particular light in the room? Can a lava lamp be an effective Boolean indicator of whether I'm occupied or not? Etc.)

If you're a home automation geek that fits the current constraints (MacOS X + INSTEON network + PowerLinc USB + ON/OFF INSTEON modules), I invite you to give the software a spin and send me any feedback. The application and source code is released under a BSD license and is available at my Google Code site.

That said, I am disappointed about today's announcement that the next version of MacOS X will be delayed until October. I've really been looking forward to the new release (codenamed "Leopard") on a variety of fronts and I am a bit annoyed that the delay is due in part to Apple using Leopard developers to push the iPhone out on time. (I have no plans to get an iPhone, so I'm understanably annoyed that something I want has been delayed by something I really don't care about.)

I kept convincing myself that while really no news about the new release's technology or features have been released since last summer's MacWorld, a spring or early summer release would be soon enough to make up for the intentional information deficit. Since Apple's making us wait until October for the new release, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to gripe and moan about two things that are currently driving me nuts within the Mac ecosystem.

1. Steve Jobs

I regularly go back and forth on my thoughts on Apple's CEO and whether he deserves the laurels that he receives. On one hand, I believe that the sheer force of his personality is responsible for wonderful things like well-designed and well-engineered software (NextStep / Cocoa) and hardware (MacBook / iPod), revolutionizing the music and movie business (iTunes Store), and generally raising the user experience bar for things like software, computer hardware, and consumer electronic devices.

On the other hand, I debate whether Jobs was necessary for these good things or whether he was at the right places at the right time. Jobs is neither an engineer nor a designer. I think that his effectiveness comes from being very effective at pushing engineers and designers to do their best. I think that this takes a very stubborn and egotistical personality to do this.

While Jobs egotism and stubbornness has resulted in good things, I'm beginning to wonder if it has been taken too far and is beginning to hurt the company and its relationships with developers and customers. As I mentioned before, little new non-NDA information has been released about what the new version of MacOS X will bring. Sure, we have the snazzy pages on Leopard, but in all honesty we see two major new user features (Time Machine and Spaces), two new developer features (Core Animation, Obj-C 2.0), and a whole host of minor tweaks to preexisting Apple applications. Apple itself realizes that this is meager, promising "Top Secret" new features that will be released at an unspecified later point in time. The simple fact of the matter is that Apple is stingy with releasing new information about the operating system and the major reason I speculate is that Jobs is simply unwilling to have the information released until he is on a stage in front of a crowd of adoring Mac fans.

At the last WWDC, Apple famously posted banners basically claiming that Microsoft's Vista was a MacOS X ripoff. Jobs joked on stage that they were keeping some features under wrap because they didn't want Redmond lifting them at the last minute for inclusion in Vista. Well, Vista has been out for a couple of months now. Is there really any decent reason for keeping everything under wraps now? (A cynic might speculate that some of the secret Leopard features might be as vaporous as WinFS.)

2. The slow death of the consistent Mac user interface

When I first began developing Cocoa applications, I loved that the tools I had were the same ones used by Apple and by using these tools (and their accompanying guidelines), I could create just as attractive and usable applications as the ones Apple shipped.

I don't know when this really became a problem, but since the release of Tiger, I have noticed that that as we get further from the last major OS release, the gulf between what Apple tells developers to do (as encoded in the latest releases of Xcode and the dated HIG) and what they ship themselves continues to grow. Pre-10.2, there was the Aqua interface for applications. 10.2 saw the release of the metal theme and widgets. 10.3 faded the pinstripes, and 10.4 introduced the option for unified title and toolbars. During these releases, Apple released a number of new applications and updates sporting new interface layouts, designs, and widgets. What was true in the "good old days" (independent developers were on the same UI field as Apple's developers) no longer holds. If I wanted to make an app that looked like Mail.app or iTunes, I'd be spending quite a bit of time creating custom controls for common widgets like splitview panes and text fields.

This trend wouldn't be annoying if there was some rhyme or reason for the proliferation of new Apple applications that violate the human interface guidelines (HIG), or of the HIG was updated occasionally to provide some explanation about the new looks and feels. However, neither is happening and because of this, one of the Mac's major advantages (user interface consistency) is disappearing as third party developer mimic Apple and release apps of their own that either try and follow Apple's examples or "innovate" beyond it. A great example of this is the much-hyped unreleased screen capture application Skitch. I'm sure that it is probably a decent application, but honestly to me it looks like a piece of Windows shareware. A less extreme example is Schoolhouse, a homework management application. It's a very nice and good looking piece of software, but a quick peek into the application bundle reveals a whole hell of a lot of custom widget graphics that the developer painstakingly put together so that his app looked something like the modern iLife programs. I speculate that the developer of this program spent more time in Photoshop creating his custom widgets  and tweaking minor UI details than working on the underlying bits and logic that make his application unique and useful within the Mac platform.

To be completely honest, there is a valuable point that consistency isn't everything, but the amount of wheel reinventing that has been going on within the third party Mac developer community these days is depressing. What's the point of great tools like Interface Builder if Apple won't keep the widget pallet and UI guidelines up-to-date, and the developers feel compelled to reskin and reinvent basic widgets to produce modern-looking applications?