Mac OS X.7 "Lion" preview
apple.com
apple.com
You'd have a hard time describing what a program or an application is to someone, but if you said the word 'app' they'd immediately know what you are talking about, because apps are these little icons that live on their phone.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone looking at Launchpad for the first time would be surprised that their macbook "has apps now", even though they are looking at the same applications that have already been on their mac for months.
'App' is definitely a better term than 'application' or 'program' from a UI perspective if more people can so easily understand it, but I don't understand why or how this happened. They're the same thing! It's strange.
Apple has done the job of making independent app developers into (pardon the phrase) rockstars.
When I speak of the triumph of the app, I don't mean it as a synonym for
"program." That definition has become archaic.
I'm talking about "the app" as the unit of software in popular perception.
It is the monad. It is the atom. It is the cell. It is the brick.
Software is abstract. An app is concrete.
Apps obey basic laws. You can install or uninstall their functionality
completely. Apps are indivisible. Apps do not come with other apps, they
stand alone. Apps do not touch other apps' data without being allowed.
In short, the term "app" could best be defined, more broadly, as the
finest, most granular level of control over the computing experience that
most users can consistently and comfortably exercise.But I think the iOS model is good too because the abstraction is not leaky (in the same way that package managers and and installer/uninstallers on windows are)
I still remember the moment it dawned on me that my new Mac didn't have a registry, I think I almost shed a tear of joy.
For whatever reason though, I guess I don't really reinstall apps very often. Once I decide to remove something, it's almost always after pondering the issue for a little while and making a decision that I very rarely go back on. The only time I can remember reinstalling something on my Mac was Filezilla. I got myself a new FTP client, removed Filezilla as I didn't think I'd be using it anymore and then found out that my new FTP client had a bug that prevented proper connectivity via FTPS. So I went back to Filezilla and as luck would have it, Filezilla's preferences are stored in ~/.filezilla and they were all still there (because I didn't know about this directory). That was a small time saver.
I suspect a great deal of my attitude towards being (likely overly) careful about what I install/uninstall and what's left behind afterwards comes from my many years as a Windows user. I remember it even took me a while to figure out that you can usually just drag stuff to the Applications folder to install on a Mac, I kept thinking to myself "I'm missing something, it can't be this simple..."
I think it's a change in perspective. A 'program' is how a programmer would describe what he codes. An app, is what it should look like to someone who is interested in just using it.
Since those using "an app" should outnumber those who wrote "the program", it is better if it's called an app. It's like how the term 'bacon' is better suited than 'pig's belly'.
I am also reminded of Homer Simpson's "they have the Internet on computers now?"
The computer industry started with mainframes and time-slicing. We then moved to personal computers. Recent years have seen the rise of cloud computing, which is analagous to... mainframes and time-slicing.
Web browsers and mobile devices are used in a way very similar to how thin clients and terminals were once used.
Part of it is that technology changes the value proposition of many approaches. We now have more computing power on a desktop PC than most reasonable people will ever need. Microsoft has never recovered from this lack of built-in obsolescence to churn old versions of Windows.
But part of it is that the grass is always greener and people are constantly chasing the next big thing that will make everything better. You see this in programming too. C++ is the ultimate proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Apart from the rise of garbage collection, very few things have made real productivity differences in programming in the last 10-20 years.
Joel Spolsky[1] covered this:
> A lot of us thought in the 1990s that the big battle would be between procedural and object oriented programming, and we thought that object oriented programming would provide a big boost in programmer productivity. I thought that, too. Some people still think that. It turns out we were wrong. Object oriented programming is handy dandy, but it's not really the productivity booster that was promised. The real significant productivity advance we've had in programming has been from languages which manage memory for you automatically. It can be with reference counting or garbage collection; it can be Java, Lisp, Visual Basic (even 1.0), Smalltalk, or any of a number of scripting languages. If your programming language allows you to grab a chunk of memory without thinking about how it's going to be released when you're done with it, you're using a managed-memory language, and you are going to be much more efficient than someone using a language in which you have to explicitly manage memory. Whenever you hear someone bragging about how productive their language is, they're probably getting most of that productivity from the automated memory management, even if they misattribute it.
[1] : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htmlObviously many of the web genes have come via the ipad/iphone.
Exactly. They needed Launchpad because (1) the App Store means that people will have more apps than can comfortably fit on the Dock and (2) average users aren't comfortable finding the Applications folder.
The Mac App Store
Maybe this is a naive point of view, but I can't see the value proposition for third-party devs to have their software in this store. Maybe I'm wrong and it'll be huge.
Launchpad
A touch interface for a screen that isn't touchable. Anyone I know that doesn't use Quicksilver or Spotlight uses an application stack in the dock. Nifty eye-candy feature, but I'm not seeing the usability gains.
Full Screen Apps
Not bad, but there are very few applications I want to run fullscreen at all, and even fewer I want to run fullscreen all the time.
Mission Control
Exposé, except there's a spaces overview at the top. A minor feature bump. Oh, and you can access the dashboard with it.
I understand this is a preview intended to excite people who aren't geeks, but still, it just seems so anticlimactic.
Subtle by nice.
Oh wait.... :-)
I think you're dead wrong on that one. Having a single, official, centralized place where users (and not only some of them, basically all OS X users) can find, rate and buy your product is a blessing for developers, especially smaller shops. I expect we'll see some of the "success stories" that happened on the iP* platform through the AppStore, because it gives considerable exposure to people that would otherwise probably struggle to get it. That part is probably worth the 30% cut — not so much for big brands like Adobe though. If it also provides updates for all software, as the App Store does, it's an awesome feature. I'd say it's basically the equivalent of a Linux repo, with built-in sales.
> Launchpad
I'm not sure about that one either. We'll see.
> Full Screen Apps
I'd tend to agree. Most app I would want to run fullscreen already have the possibility to do so (Aperture, web browsers, and that's basically all I can think of right now).
> Mission Control
Agreed.
You skipped over an important aspect of the current iPhone app store - updates. A unified update experience for 'all' our apps should be a pretty easy sell. (Not that there aren't already frameworks that do this like Google's Update Engine - http://code.google.com/p/update-engine/ )
Like Linux package managers since... ever. On my Ubuntu box I have the official software sources (OS and applications) but also have Skype, VirtualBox and Google repositories registered. It makes the machine self-update soon after an update is published.
I really wish Apple integrated that kind of behavior into OSX's core.
Actually, I think it's a nice productivity boost myself. Of course, the app I most want to fullscreen is Terminal.
Also, it's not like CS5 is going to show up in the Mac App Store.
Unlike with iPhones, where iTunes is the only installation point.
If I was an indie developer, I'd say 30% would be worth the extra exposure.
And shut down your servers / payment processor / update system, and enjoy your new found time to work on TextMate2 instead of maintaining infrastructure for TextMate 1.
TextMate is a great case study. It'd be very high up on the Top Grossing list, and therefore massively visible to many new eyeballs that are not Ruby on Rails hackers. I'd wager that it'd move a lot of new licenses if it was in the App Store.
Think of apt-get that also includes commercial software. Convenience is king for consumers. And for software makers, they gain one more distribution channel besides Google.
Launchpad = Launcher (with a bit of a facelift)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tg.online/apple_cps/applemenu/i...
However...
Mac App Store will be huge. Their is every reason to think this.
Touch interfaces: it's not so much touch as reacting to touch inputs. This is already accomplished in an abstract way with a mouse. Left and right click, moving around, scrolling the mouse wheel. This is a continuation on what's been happening already. Personally, I think this will be really nice for apps. I already use touch features for navigation where I can, and it's frustrating when an app doesn't support it.
If apple makes this a cohesive environment. Download, Launch apps, and full screen modes, then we are looking at the next step past the window/mouse GUI -- at least for the masses.
iOS and the iPad has been successful in part because of how simple it is to use. Touch metaphors make a lot of sense to non computer people. Not sure if it necessary makes as much sense abstracted to a trackpad interface but certainly one window at a time is much easier for novices to understand.
Think of the mom test where I want to talk my mom through installing an app. It's crazy how hard it can be with freely floating windows and disk images and downloading off the internet. App store and launched interface? I think this could be very big.
Now that said this sort of interface simplification has been tried for years... So we will see if it sticks this time.
If they provide the same kind of value through it like Steam has for gamers, it'll be big.
Also, there are probably a hundred other details to Lion they aren't sharing just yet. They are just giving us some glitter to drool over.
They don't need a touch screen they already have a fantastic horizontal touch space on the device: the trackpad. Personally I would look to see trackpads getting more and more functionality.
For me, it's sort of hard to see many iOS apps being particularly a big game changer on a desktop or laptop (so long as Macs continue to ship with Flash). There are simply a lot of existing alternatives for location based services, social networking, etc.
Part of me suspects that it's a response to Phone 7. What I mean is that it extends the "Apple technology stack" from phone to desktop somewhat like Microsoft does - of course the "Apple technology stack" doesn't extend up into enterprise and down into embedded devices so the analogy may be a bit weak depending on the terms one uses.
I'm seriously underwhelmed here.
What I am excited about is that Apple looks heading to truly "it just works" model for Mac.
I did not see anybody so far in comments mentioning thing that Jobs presented as things they have learned from iOS: instant-on, no explicit save, apps preserving state on closing. I think that's what Lion is going to be, allowing to combine power of full-fledged Macs with the user experience of iP*s.
I feel like the Launchpad was obsolete with the advent of Spotlight.
1.A control in the lower left corner on the screen that let's you access your apps.
2.A screen full of shortcuts.
3.A maximize button that works as expected.
It's Windows 95!
-- wait a minute! where's my task bar?
I wish they'd let me resize windows from any corner.
I wish they'd let me resize windows from any corner.
(Actually, I do want an iPad, but that still doesn't mean I want anything near a similar UI on my Macbook.)
They can't do a satisfying touch-screen on computers because it can't be done. There are certain tasks that are fundamentally "mousy" today. Can you imagine doing those tasks with your hands stretched out in front of you? Imagine a designer working in photoshop all day having to hold his arms out in front of him for 8+ hours a day.
And there's no reason to. We're already long used to the indirection of a mouse. The trackpad suitably acts like a touch screen that just isn't the actual screen.
I just despise that phony two-level way of organizing your applications that is so prevalent on Windows, i.e. their applications folder(s) and the Start Menu.
If the old Applications folder continues to be accessible I really hope that there is, unlike in the Windows Start Menu, a 1:1 mapping, i.e. folders created in the Launchpad are also created in the Applications folder and applications deleted in the Launchpad are also deleted in the Applications folder.
I’m not sure whether I’m a fan of keeping both prominent file system access around and adding the Launchpad which would then presumably store all its folders and arrangements in a preference file and not in the filesystem. That’s just so damn inelegant!
What I would like, though, is if they gave developers who don’t want or can distribute their app through the App Store some way to easily hook up with the way the real App Store is doing things, i.e. you download a file, open it and the app is installed. You don’t have to run an installer or drag the App to your folder. That would be nice but I’m not expecting it.
How?
Comparing XP to Windows 7, there are really awesome reasons why I should make the switch. Improved performance, graphics, the pin bar, windows search, easy network management and a plethora of other useless/useful features.
I really like Mission Control, but I want to hear about a finder that's finally good (tried the alternatives, didn't like any of them) or resolution independence.
None of these features had the whiz-bang appeal of past innovations like Time Machine, etc.
There is a precedent for this in Leopard, where a significant UI overhaul and some other features were actually announced and demoed many months after the initial showing.
(Also: it's amusing that you skipped Vista.)
Another question -- is there a "low end" in Apple's world? Are they building an ecosystem that cheap PCs won't be able to participate in? What about old Macs? It would be ironic if my parents had to buy a fancy new 64-bit Mac in order to have a more iPad-like experience when they share photos with me.
1. A new window management model. Cascaded windows don't do it for me.
2. 256 colors in Terminal.app.
256 colours will never happen. I'm stuck with either urxvt or settling for the SIMBL terminal colours plugin.
A new model for managing windows wouldn't be too far fetched though and I was really holding my thumbs during the talk. I shone up when they started talking about full screen applications but it fell kind of flat. Please Apple, if you're going to force me to work in 8 colours, at-least add a means to tile windows and navigate between them with sensible, configurable keyboard shortcuts! :)
I have Arch Linux installed on a VirtualBox instance, but then it's the hassle of moving files between computers.
I'll come up with something that works for me eventually, but right now Terminal.app is the best option.
Launchpad - I firmly believe technology is to help save time. Launchpad doesn't do that. There's already an app called Quicksilver that will get your app opened, without you having to move the mouse or even swipe
Full-screen apps - Great. But have an option not to go fullscreen as well. Not all apps need 1080p equivalent resolutions to work.
Mission Control - Can't say anything much without using this. But meanwhile the CMD+Tab has been serving me very well.
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Voice recognition/Voice command, that's what I would like to see. The ability to launch apps or menu commands just by saying their name.
Snow Leopard offered more than this coming from Leopard.
So there's no doubt more to come. For instance, Jobs hinted at some new features and APIs coming across from iOS to enable things like instant-on, the automatic and implicit saving of files and state-preservation on quit, none of which was described in any detail.
So I highly doubt that what we saw yesterday was the sum total of the innovations and updates that Apple is planning for Lion.
But despite all that, dollars to doughnuts ZFS won't be in there. But because of ownership issues, not because it wasn't announced today.
Touch Screen would work fine on an Air, at least.
In general, the idea that Jobs constantly says something sucks and then does it himself mostly seems to come from people over-interpreting what he says. In this particular case, I can't think of what you're referring to. Do you have a link?
This sounds like a real problem to me - my desk at school is too high up, so I've even ditched my laptop stand as otherwise I'd have to lift my arms up to reach the keyboard half the time. I would definitely be uncomfortable constantly touching a screen. And what do you think those enormous trackpads are for?
I thought it was just one of those crazy things that companies patent anyway - but with the iOS-ification of OSX this looks to be more and more likely.
I doubt they'd do this with the laptops - that just seems to close the gap too much between the iPad and the MacBook Air, honestly.