Lukas Mathis on Mac OS X Lion | Hacker News Reader

Lukas Mathis on Mac OS X Lion

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63 pointsearcar51 comments

I'm surprised that I haven't read anyone that has connected the dots on the app store for Mac and the emphasis on the Macbook Air. The app store solves the problem for how does one get shrink-wrapped applications onto a Mac with no optical drive? In the future, they may remove optical drives from their laptops entirely.

Eureka! That's exactly what I thought when I heard of the Mac App Store. The App Store seems to me like a move to simplify things for Macbook Air users, which is actually a niche product for regular people. Developers prefer a 13 or 15 inch Macbook Pro because of the computing power and screen real estate they provide. Hell they are called Macbook Pro for a reason. Designers prefer Macbook Pros on the larger side because for the scree real state also. It's off course true that a power user might buy a Air for development, but they are the exception to the rule. The market for the air is businessmen on the run, university students, hipster apple fanboys that don't want to carry a 10 pound machine in their over the shoulder bags. For this people opening a disk image and copying the app to the apps folder might prove too complicated, alas they now have the App Store. This will have absolutely no effect on the ecosystem of users that like OSX because it offers a Unix system with pretty graphics (which Ubuntu even with it's latest updates is lacking) and great usability for the most part. Hell I only use OSX because I do both design and code and I need a machine that can do both and is not Windows. The moment Macbook Pros becomes an oversized Ipad I'm biting the bullet, buying a system 76 laptop, putting Arch linux into it and start contributing code to Gimp.

I think you're reading a little too much into it. Steam solved this "problem" long ago.

Optical drives may eventually become less common. I admit mine rarely gets much use, but I still fancy throwing a DVD in there once and a while.

But that does present an interesting problem if you're, say, Microsoft. How do you sell Word to someone who doesn't have an optical drive? Would Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else who sells big-ticket shrink-wrapped software turn to the App Store to solve that problem? Not in a million years.

First, Steam distributes games only. Second, Apple does not tend to depend on third-parties for critical infrastructure.

You can already buy Office or CS online and download it. My local electronics store even sells cheap Office licenses with nothing but the key. Microsoft or Adobe don’t need the App Store.

Well that's exactly my point.

The Mac App Store isn't the game changer some people seem to think (or fear) it is. It could very well be a boon to small developers, or it could have no impact at all, but it doesn't change anything.

I don't think it's an enormous change, but it makes it easier for Apple to drop optical drives from all of their laptops. They could do it for the Air previously because it was marketed as a laptop with extra stuff removed - but they could not remove the optical drive in normal Macbooks partly because of this problem.

The other common use case for the optical drive are DVDs and music CDs. Streaming content is making those less necessary.

If anyone else developed an app store for Apple that took 30% of developer profits it would fail miserably, regardless of how wonderful it worked. I'm sure Apple will do fine with this new model, but it kind of amazes me people will go for it.

With the MacBook Air refresh, Apple made "No optical drive" a feature. The OS X Install USB key is an omen of things to come, too. I think you're right, and it's really just a matter of time until they bring it across almost all of their laptop lines.

I don't remember the last time I installed shrink-wrapped software. Adobe CS and Microsoft Office are both downloads these days and those are the only ones I have that I know come in a box too. No app store is needed and if you're big enough to be doing shrink-wrapped software, you're big enough to not want to pay Apple 30% to process your purchases.

Whenever and wherever there is some pain, there is an opportunity. The universal pain of the tech-savvy and the constant help they have to give to relatives and friends is simply huge. Neither has OS X made this go away, though much of it has been outsourced in the form of the Genius Bar. It's much the same in the workplace, if not more so! What the majority of the population wants is curated computing. What IT departments try to provide as had as they might is curated computing. It's also a fact that they're hindered by the open architecture of today's typical computer. (Why do you think enterprise IT tries so hard to lock everything down?)

There is still a huge amount of pain and therefore there's tremendous opportunity.

My prediction is that under Lion, end-user computing is going to run locked-down under a hypervisor, and only devs/power users will be running as we do today.

Spot-on criticism of the App Store.

The App Store is peerless as far as purchasing and installing go, but it's nearly useless for discovery unless you're looking for something on the order Angry Birds or Facebook. Calling the Mac version "the best place to find apps" wouldn't ring so hollow if the same were remotely true on iOS.

Useless is a bit harsh. It is, after all, a big web app that is nothing but fresh screenshots and reviews of apps. Somehow my friends and I manage to find tons of awesome apps all the time.

Google can be pretty awful to find software on. Search for "os x audio recorder" on it and you get one or two direct links to modern software, and the rest are really old or link jacked pages.

A search for "audio recorder" on the App Store is a remarkably different experience. The top hits are well written and well-reviewed apps.

So what is better for "discovery"?

Fair enough. Unfortunately, there really isn't a reliably good central place for discovery. Most of the good iOS finds I've made were from blogs, forums, or Twitter.

I must say, the deprecating of Java does concern me. I do agree that Apple has been somewhat slow to update their version of Java. It's also strange that they default to 1.5 instead of 1.6. In principle, having Oracle maintain the JVM sounds ok.

However, I understand that the Apple Java makes use of hidden API's in order to provide the level of integration that it does. That integration always impressed me and was one of the many things that originally sold me on using Macs for development. Will Apple work with Oracle to achieve the same level of integration? Or is this really a sneaky way of trying to kill Java on Mac?

I miss the Apple that loved Next, used Java internally, among other languages, and spent a lot of time trying to make technical users happy with things like X11 support and Apple integrated Java. These things are what brought me to the platform.

> It's also strange that they default to 1.5 instead of 1.6.

What are you looking at? 10.6 doesn't even ship Java 1.5.

Oh? Perhaps it was 10.5 then? Or maybe due to upgrading. I've had to switch the default from 1.5 to 1.6 on my machine and on several other peoples as well.

The Cocoa/Java bridge has been deprecated for ages; other than that, I can't think of any other secret sauce that Apple spreads on their JVM (of course, if there were hidden APIs, and if the Apple JVM used them, and if Apple wanted them to stay secret, I wouldn't be able to say). Regardless, it's not like Java on OS X is going to disappear; if nothing else, Apple's internal usage of Java and their desire to eat their own dog food guarantees as much.

This warning comes with considerably more heads-up than most such developer related warnings from Apple, so by the time 10.7 ships, I would imagine that an open JDK/JRE will be readily available.

I'm no expert on the matter, but from what I hear the APIs involve bridges to the graphics or windowing system. I do hope that a solid open JDK is built.

Interesting writeup. I think calling both the installation process and the window management system "broken" is a bit of an overstatement, but he's very right about de-emphasizing the Finder.

Lukas' blog in general is awesome — thought-provoking and mind-opening. If you have the smallest interest in design (as in "how thing work" in general, not only "how things look"), it's definitely worth a read.

LaunchPad: a no-hierarchy version of the Windows Start Menu. Desktops get too many programs installed to be able to find them reasonably in such a thing. We learned that fifteen years ago on Windows. Even my phone is starting to get unreasonable to manage with the number of programs installed. Windows Vista and 7 have the ability to search the start menu because of it.

The App Store: I love the ability to browse packages on my Ubuntu and PC-BSD systems and install them with no hassle. I wish this existed on Windows (MS toys with it every once in a while, with the Web Platform Install Kit and the Visual Studio Plugins site). But it sounds like Apple is going to lock it down. They could have their cake and eat it too if they would make the application repository configurable, with the default pointing to Apple's servers, and the config item roughly hidden in an obscure setting somewhere. But Apple continues to assert that you don't own your computer, you rent it from them.

Full-screen apps: welcome to 1990. From experience, I loathe default-full-screen programs. I like to have the option available, and I think we've come to a consensus that that should be through the F11 key, but starting a program, waiting, and having it take over the entire screen is going to be a pain in the ass. It also basically torpedoes a lot of Apple dogma from previous years with no true ability to fully maximize program windows.

Ironically, these updates serve to make OS X even less differentiated than other Windows and KDE- or Gnome-based Linux distros than ever before.

a no-hierarchy version of the Windows Start Menu

Nonsense. LaunchPad does in fact have hierarchy in the form of user-created folders and pagination. Even if it didn't, comparisons to the Start Menu are odious. The main reason the Start Menu sucks is not "too many programs", but that it relies on notoriously unusable submenus[1]. And then it insists on nesting them. And then most of the items in the Start Menu are not actually applications. Even Windows 95 shipped with at least two ways of avoiding the use of the Start Menu as a launcher, and subsequent versions added at least two more. Search works well, but search has its own problems. For instance, you can't search with a mouse.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law

Windows Vista and 7 have the ability to search the start menu because of it.

Mac OS X likewise has the ability to launch applications from the system wide search. (As does iOS, for that matter.) Why does this somehow stop counting if they add an additional feature?

I loathe default-full-screen programs. I like to have the option available

That's what this is: an option. There is no indication that any application now launches full screen by default, or any reason that couldn't do that now if they chose to.

It also basically torpedoes a lot of Apple dogma from previous years with no true ability to fully maximize program windows.

Not really. Full screen mode still does not replicate "maximize" behavior. Even on Windows the two are distinct. Microsoft Word, for example, has a separate full screen mode which behaves differently than simply maximizing the window.

Overlapping Windows is a non-issue. Windows and full-screen intermingle with the new Mission Control.

Windows and Linux get Java from Oracle; why not OS X?

I prefer SizeUp to Divvy for OS X Window management: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

That's a lot of blah blah claiming to be about Lion, when it's really not so much about Lion at all. So far, these details are to the most part just about new applications for Lion - and you can be sure that at least one of these will be available for Snow Leopard later on.

Maybe people should hold back on their second-guessing regarding Lion until we actually get some technical and substantial details to hold on to, but I guess as long as there are fools, there will be wolf calls...

Apple listens. They don't always react but they do listen. The time to complain is now. And besides, this is a very even-handed text about things Apple itself announced under the heading of Mac OS X Lion.

But there's nothing substantial to complain about yet... What's been shown so far are applications; and the use of these is optional, not mandatory.

Huh? That shouldn't stop you from complaining! Technically you don't ever have to use anything but Terminal, that doesn't mean you shouldn't complain when new features are confusing or not quite coherent. Oh, and it would suck very much if the better app management would only availible for App Store apps. That's a complaint Apple should hear!

The BSD and GNU positions are that userland applications are part of the operating system.

It looks like I will finally have enough motivation to finally switch to Ubuntu. I just don't know if I can handle not having full control over my machine.

At the moment it looks like you will have no more or less control than on Snow Leopard.

Yes, however I think the changes being made are definitely putting Mac OS on track to become a lot of more like iOS in future iterations.

If that happens (and it almost definitely won't, at least for a long time), then switch. Making a decision based on pure speculation is a terrible idea. There are plenty of good reasons to switch to Ubuntu, but "I have a feeling Apple has a secret plan to turn OS X into iOS" isn't one of them.

Yes it is. They make much more money off of iOS than they do Mac OS. Therefore, Mac OS will become iOS because Apple isn't your friend they are trying to make money just like any business.

Ford makes more money selling trucks than they do selling anything else, but no one would argue that therefore all their cars will become trucks because Ford isn't our friend.

They are two products serving two populations, and it seems unlikely that their timelines will converge anytime soon. However, "not converging" doesn't translate to not sharing. There are obviously some things iOS that would be at the least nice to have in Mac OS (the app store being the one of discussion now), just as there are things in Mac OS that would be (or already have been scooped and are already) nice to have in iOS.

If the iOS model of a locked down consumption oriented operating proves to be more profitable that is what Apple will focus on. Its not evil or wrong it will just be what makes the most money. Its really that simple. Apple isn't out to make the core group of users happer but rather the casual user.

Despite the fact that unifying two codebases makes much more sense than selling a truck to a family I must say that I disagree.

The problem for me is not convergence per see, I would not mind having features from an portable OS in the OS that I use in my laptop or workstation, the problem is the impression that since iOS devices came to exist OS X is becoming more irrelevant, I think this tweet summarizes the situation: http://twitter.com/iTod/status/27297928138#

@jpdbaugh, it's not an either-or proposition, it's a both-and proposition. Creating an app store will make the Mac both better for "average" consumers AND creative developers who want to monetize. Additionally I think increased usability from increased touch gestures and advanced expose functionality will help everyone. It's very difficult to argue that OS X advancements have been tailored to strictly one the consumer or the other creative professional: Time Machine, Spaces, Expose...these have been a win for everybody.

I think if there's something to learn from Apple it is trying to take seemingly divergent markets or divergent goals and finding creative ways to reconcile them: form and function (look at the battery compartments in their wireless keyboard, for example), cost and sustainability, business and consumer markets, young and old.

>Making a decision based on pure speculation is a terrible idea.

That's how practically all decisions about the future are made.

Buying Lion with the proposed changes is voting with your dollar that you want more of those changes in future iterations. Not buying it and switching to something else says that you don't like the product. I use Snow Leopard right now but I think brand loyalty is stupid. I don't owe anything to Apple to keep using their product if I don't like the direction it is going in.

Those proposed changes being changes that give users and developers more features and options?

Sure: don't buy it because of loyalty, that'd be stupid — but not buying it because of some worry about changes that the next version might have (and that Apple has said nothing about and that would be fraught with a number of technical and political difficulties anyway) is cutting off your nose to spite your face. And to use your phrase, it's voting with your dollars against something that's not harmful - if anything, it's sending a message to Apple that a certain group isn't going to buy their freedomful product anyway, so they might as well let those people use Linux/etc and turn the Mac into what you're afraid of.

You are making a mistake in not realizing that is Apples end game to make Mac OS much more like iOS. Don't you think they realize how much money they are making off of iOS developers? They want the same thing for desktops. Not to mention the huge amount they would save in customer support from not allowing users to do anything beyond Apples control on their machines.

The truth is for Apple this might as well be a great business decision. It is probably in their best interests, because their goal at the end of the day is to make as much money as possible. There is nothing wrong with that I just won't be buying it.

Apple makes money selling hardware. The money they make from iOS developers is a drop in the ocean — the App Store is merely a means to an end; to provide users with lots of great apps, so more people buy Apple hardware.

Sorry, but that's not true at all. iTunes alone makes Apple over $1 billion in revenue per quarter. That's a lot of money and alone could almost vie for a Fortune 500 listing.

Yeah, I exaggerated. But out of $20.34 billion in revenue this quarter, that revenue is still a sliver. That sliver isn't going to lit Steve's eyes up and get him to go all crazy. You don't get Apple levels of success by acting shortsighted or stupid.

Revenue is irrelevant. The question is how much profit iTunes draws in. I don't believe that Apple has ever released exact figures, but I've always heard that iTunes is a fairly low-margin business for them, so it's contributions to Apple's total profits are probably much lower than the contributions from the Mac business. Granted, the App Store may draw in much higher margins, but talking about revenue is still missing the point.

No, buying Lion (or any other product for that matter) means you find THAT product of value. Not buying it based on conspiracy theories about future directions doesn't tell the company what the delta was that actually made you mad and provided no/less value.

Come on, this is a simple software purchase, $100 or so. It's not a moral choice of any significance whatsoever, and laying the moral dimension onto it is not productive or helpful.

Well, that same decision from some users in 1995 made Microsoft what it was in the later 90's and early 00's.

EDIT: And still is in the corporate market.

Hey, that's great! App Store, instant-on, implicit saving, restore on open—wonderful features.

OS X Server is a pretty good counterpoint for me. Hard to have a Server version that runs software that complies with the app store guidelines.

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