Apple’s Magnum Opus | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s Magnum Opus

brooksreview.net

118 pointsshowngo70 comments

I think this article pretty much nails a key part of it. What Apple wants to do is implement a seamless digital world that Just Works. (It remains to be seen whether it does in fact Just Work.)

Oddly enough, you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC (and, once again, be redirected to Douglas Englebart et al) ... the kind of thing Apple is demonstrating with iCloud, iOS5, and Lion is essentially the computing paradigm described in a Scientific American article on Xerox PARC in the 80s (I wish I could give the exact issue, but the article described four basic kinds of computers - post-it notes, slates, desktops, and wall screens - all, except the post-its which were a rough prototype with a rudimentary display, sharing a common UI with data stored on the network.)

An interesting remark that touches on this topic on The Talk Show was (and I paraphrase) "how come this [the app-centric universe] feels so reasonable and natural and yet has taken so long to come". In fact, there was a huge detour in the opposite direction exemplified by OpenDoc (on the Mac) and OLE (on Windows). How many of us remember copying a table from excel, pasting it into PowerPoint and getting some kind of weird icon? In the 90s the idea was to remove the app and make the document (or perhaps the workflow) the center of attention. This may actually have been a Good Idea but it was (in the case of OpenDoc) badly conceived and not especially well-implemented. Or, perhaps, it was just too far ahead of its time.

Oddly enough, you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC

Some people criticize Apple for this, but I think I'm actually quite okay with it to an extent if you think of this as just a natural example of science & engineering working hand in hand to make cool stuff.

Xerox PARC did the science, Apple is doing the Engineering. It's not really much different than basic R&D in materials science and physics modeling getting turned into a bridge or a skyscraper. Or basic academic research in medicine becoming the next billion dollar drug.

A side question is, with these kinds of R&D shops now quite rare (Microsoft Research and....) and seeing how Xerox and AT&T not able to capitalize on their research, what does this mean for the modern version of these places? Is some other company going to just come along and build what Microsoft is researching today? Or is there a chance for one of these companies to actually benefit from these paradigm shifting revolutions in research?

Of course I agree, but felt like I should point out that this was another example of Apple picking up a ball Xerox "dropped".

The article you're referring to I think was written by Mark Weiser. It was called "The Computer for the 21st Century" unless you were thinking of a different one.

It's quite a vision for 1991:

http://www.ubicomp.com/want/papers/ubi-sciam-sep91.pdf

Thank you sir, that's the one. I was off by a few years I guess :-)

I think this article pretty much nails a key part of it. What Apple wants to do is implement a seamless digital world that Just Works...

Oddly enough, you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC

It's also a pragmatic vision of what a seamless Object Oriented world would look like. Steve and the Next gang went and made it work. Now they're in a position to take the computing world out of the early 1990s, just like they took it out of the 70's with Macintosh.

In a way, Xerox PARC did get compensated for some of its ideas. Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

"The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product."

Yes, Xerox later did sue Apple but...

"The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge ruled "that Xerox's complaints were inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons,""

I guess the way I feel about ideas is that you don't own an idea just for having described it once, thus if someone else implements it they didn't steal it either.

In my opinion, you don't even own an idea that you've implemented poorly. Thus if someone else thinks they can implement it well, they didn't steal the idea.

You own an idea when you've implemented it well, maybe even really really well. Before that it's just a proof of concept.

And even then you still don't own the idea, you've just got bragging rights to it.

A good example would be the tablet. In the minds of most people, Apple owns that concept, everybody else are imitating it; that's what Apple gets for making the first really good implementation of it, even though Microsoft and a bunch of other companies made several really poor implementations of it years before.

I've just had my first branded backup device fail (with electronics grief, not media grief), received contradictory information about whether it was supported, and been told that, even if it was, there's no plan to put the media into new electronics, so I'm currently very resistant to any 'it just works' story.

Isn't GNUstep working on an evolution of OpenDOC? I thought I read or heard about it once, but couldn't find much info on it. OpenDoc is something I really want to work.

No. GNUStep is an implementation of the OpenStep standard (designed by NeXT and Sun, based on NeXTStep).

OpenDoc was designed by Apple in the pre-OS X days.

After more searching I realized I'm thinking about Etoile, a GNUstep based environment that's trying to break down the document model similar to how OpenDoc tried to. It's interesting, but seems a long way from maturity.

Interesting-looking project.

you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC

To steal means to deprive someone of something that by all rights they should have had. So the only way this could be construed as theft is if Xerox PARC's plan was to wait 20-30 years and then capitalize on the idea. But damn, Apple stole it at the last moment!

To prevent the world from benefiting from an idea just because it came to you first is the ultimate theft. Fortunate the Xerox PARC guys are not evil or dishonest and won't charge Apple with theft. If they don't call it theft, no one else can.

Re: the "this is how it should have always worked" comment.

I've watched my girlfriend use her computer, and this is essentially how she works. She just leaves everything open, never saving anything. She's comfortable using Expose to manage the million windows she ends up having open, but doesn't bother exiting apps when she's done with them and then starting them when she needs them again.

If she could do this and have everything always auto-save and be instantly available anywhere she went, she'd be ecstatic. And even though I grew up on the Windows 95 model of apps and documents... I gotta say I kinda see her angle. I hate that our IT policy makes us log out every night so I lose my windows. If I left for the night then came back and the cleaning person had put away all the papers on my physical desk I'd have a fit!

@Auto-Save

In Snow Leopard 10.6 when I close TextEdit the program asks me nicely and naggingly per pop up if I want to save the document as a file. To the hard disk. And this file needs a name. Because everything is a file. And if don't save I lose my changes!

In Lion 10.7 TextEdit simply quits dutiful. And opens at restart all unsaved documents again. Auto-save seems like a small feature, but conceptually it is big. Damn, it should have always worked that way!

(The TimeMachine-like versioning still needs a saved document. Every Command+S acts as a saved point you can go back in time.)

That's exactly how I use my computer. I reboot about once every 2 months, and only because I need to install a nagging security update or two. I never quit apps.

Sigh, I realized today that Ctrl+Alt+Del isn't that unrealistic to hit, when you use Emacs. :-(

(But then, most any key combination is probably quite easy to get in Emacs, by missing a couple of keys.)

My girlfriend does exactly the same thing. I wonder if its a gender thing? Her PC kept freezing, but she loves her new Mac Air.

I strong suspect it's a non-techy thing. The only reason it might seem to some here to be a gender thing is because the majority of people here are straight men, and ones girlfield/wife/partner is the person you'll see doing mudane things like typing on a PC.

Please don't say things like this. Why should it be a "gender thing"? This only alienates people. "You don't close your windows? Like a girl?"

I can say that one person is male and another person is female without insulting either of them. Pointing out a difference between genders is not automatically derogatory.

No, but saying "hey, your girlfriend does this, my girlfriend does this, too! It's probably because they are both women!" is insulting if there is no reason whatsoever to believe that there really is something genetic behind the behaviour. I have seen the reverse of this too, when a friend visited and told me that I had a big LCD, just like her boyfriend, and that it was typical for males to buy large screens for their computers.

I don't close programs anymore either, and I'm male. I do close documents to keep Exposé from getting unworkable, but my emacs usually has dozens of buffers open.

To provide a anecdotal counter point to balance this discussion, I obsessively close windows I'm not using.

I dislike clutter and distraction. If I leave a Twitter client open or IRC I easily get distracted by it, so I'm constantly hitting CMD-W and use Quicksilver to open them when I need distraction. Same with iTunes when no music is playing.

I enabled spaces so I could push the things I wasn't ready for into the corners.

More likely it's a non-tech-person thing. Leaving everything open and clicking around in expose until you find stuff is easy: closing programs and then trying to find where you saved stuff via a file manager is hard.

That's because "tech people" have been conditioned, through the years, by the limitations of the hardware (limited memory) and operating system. It's the OS's job to manage resources, but we still do it anyway. Which is why Apple's upcoming Lion OS with auto-save, auto-resume, window management etc will be a god-send for many people I know.

I like Windows 7's window management features well enough that I leave everything open (most things minimized) all the time. I've got 18 windows in 12 applications open, 3 of them visible. Win7 isn't perfect for this, but it's really pretty pleasant.

I'm also using about 6 gigs of RAM, but since I have 8 to play with, why not? :)

    I don’t know of a single other way to take a document
    I am working on with my iPad and jump to my Mac having 
    the document up-to-date

I do, it's called Google Docs.

I use Google Docs, and I like it fine. Apple is taking a different approach which takes advantage of the full power of a native app. The advantage of Google Docs is it works on any computer that has a modern browser. Apple's solution will not have the ubiquity of Google's, but it has the potential to provide a richer user experience. It may be worth it for many of us to buy Apple hardware to get that richer experience, and that is what Apple is counting on.

If I add a calendar event to google calendar I'm still a bit surprised when I later notice it in my iPhone calendar.

Same with updating contacts across devices.

To speak the truth - the Android integration with Google's contacts could be better.

To transform all my locally stored contacts and make them Google contacts I had to first export them to a file, copy them on my laptop, upload to Google, mix&match duplicates and other corrections, download an export again on my computer, delete all my contacts from my phone (which also deleted my contacts from Google), reupload that export to Google, then synchronize my phone with Google's Contacts.

Now everything I do on my phone or in Google's Contacts is kept in sync nicely. I also have Facebook sync set so I get faces of people for free and sometimes email addresses or phone numbers that I didn't have :-)

But it was a painful experience to export my old sim-stored contacts and sometimes I get the feeling that while Google has the right idea about what people want, they are moving too slowly to fix their shit.

> download an export again on my computer

What does this step achieve?

The process was pretty easy for me - install Motorola Phone Tools, export the CSV file containing my contacts, make some changes in Excel, upload to Google. There's even an 'Import from SIM' option on my phone (possibly a feature of HTC's People app).

Even on a featurephone your SIM contacts will conflict with your phone-stored contacts. There's an easy solution: don't view your SIM contacts.

I don't see what shit Google needs to fix here, other than documentation, and in this case isn't that the handset manufacturer's responsibility?

Since I had to go through all this trouble, I also wanted to take care of all the duplicates and all the junk, to have a single source of truth for my phone numbers - so I deleted everything from my phone, which in turn deleted everything from Google, and that export was a backup that I uploaded to Google's Contacts again. It's weird, but that's what I did to get what I wanted.

This file I also processed locally with a script to merge entries that had different names / different phone numbers, using some heuristics I came up with.

I agree that SIM contacts are a common problem, but there should be an easier way to handle it.

My main problem was that there is no option to upload your SIM contacts to Google and no proper tools to get rid of the junk, only a merge option that functions differently in Google Contacts than it does on Android.

And the contacts export only exports on an external SD card -- now this seemed really weird to me. I actually had to go out and buy an external SD, otherwise I couldn't do it.

Don't get me wrong, I love Android and I love Google Apps, but if you're going to implement synchronization, you also have to give the user the proper tools to take care of legacy.

For reference this is the feature I'm talking about, and it will import it to your Google account (though it wasn't useful for me, since my contacts were stored on my old phone rather than a SIM).

http://www.htc.com/www/howto.aspx?id=14183&type=1&p_...

This kind of feature should be in the standard Android Contacts app IMO. But I can't comment on that, since I've not used a vanilla Android phone.

The Google Contacts 'find duplicates' feature did a passable job for the few duplicates I had, but I doubt it would fit some systems (e.g. matching together "Bill Posters" and "Bill Work") nor would it be worth the effort to try too hard. I guess that's a pain we have to live with.

You could also use something like http://www.soocial.com/

Disclaimer: I used to work there and they're working really hard on solving this kind of issues.

Have you tried editing something with Google Docs on your iPad?

No, I don't own an iPad - but I do own 2 laptops, 2 desktops, one Android and one iPhone - have Google Apps installed on my domain, and it has been the single most useful online service I ever used.

Email, Contacts, Calendar, Docs and Pictures are all available and in sync on every piece of equipment I have.

And of course Apple's products are working a lot better on the iPad and I'm pretty sure customers will be pleased with iCloud, but to sing it as if it is the second coming of Christ is really stretching it.

Am I the only one that thinks Apple is using revolutionary technology to work toward the perfection of a deprecated computing paradigm?

I mean, yes, iCloud makes computing work like magic, but it sort of ignores what post-web computing means. Computing anymore isn't just about working on the same documents on any device that you own seamlessly (that part is, to be sure, great), it's about sharing and collaboration. iCloud gives you access to your docs and photos and music wherever you are, but it doesn't seem to do anything to let you share your digital life.

Am I wrong? What am I missing?

I see your point but find it hard to accept the idea that letters to teachers, school assignments, price quotes, proposals, contracts, sales presentations, and reports are "deprecated" because the cloud enables other kinds of documents.

Deprecated was probably the wrong word. The things you cite are clearly still an important part of computing life, but it's still strange to me to use the connective tissue of the internet to enable computing, but completely ignore the actual connection part, the new part of what the web promises.

It feels a bit to me like publishing companies using the web to make their old publishing models better, instead of grappling with how the web challenges the fundamental underpinnings of their model.

Doesn't one lead to the other? What's the technical difference between allowing person to touch the same document on 4 devices, and two people touching the same document on 6 devices?

I don't know what the technical differences are, but I'm not sure how that's relevant. My point is, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in enabling that. And I'm not necessarily talking about collaboration, but even just sharing. Apple has given me great ways to take, edit, store, and organize my photos, but my primary purpose for all of that is to show my photos to others. They seem to have ignored that part.

If you're implying that that's the obvious next step for them, then, great, I hope that's the case. But the only time as far as I can remember that they even made gestures toward addressing this was Ping, which was an unmitigated disaster.

The physical form of the iPad facilitates the photo equivalent of this: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/52-steve-jobs-just-put-it-in-...

Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't the system-wide Twitter integration addressing exactly the point you are talking about? I'm not saying this means they shouldn't be doing more, but I don't think saying they aren't doing anything on this front is correct either. iPhoto on the mac also got Facebook integration recently (though I find it to be buggy).

I also missed collaboration and sharing capabilities but Apple likes to take one step at a time. They are too good at this to just overlook collaboration and sharing, the only problem might be that implementing it could take them quite some time.

ICloud + sharing + permissions --> google wave. i wish google had delivered on the promise.

The deep Twitter integration into iOS 5 says that Apple is happy to let others do the foundational legwork in that domain. The fact that there is no public Photostream, for example, that you could publish to certain audiences, speaks volumes to Apple's conservative approach to the iCloud rollout.

Conceptually, it may be a lot to thrust on a user all at once that iCloud is not only your own personal magical data synching tool, but that it also publishes your data to others, which has data privacy implications. Maybe a gradual roll-out of social features gives time for people to be comfortable with using the existing features without worrying about the social implications of their actions.

I noticed the same and it is interesting that hyped-up "social features" are absent. But I don't think it is necessarily a bad or old-fashioned thing. More like, hm, old-school and retro.

Think about Facebook: It is part of its DNA that they want all data of their users to be open. But most of my photos, videos and documents I don't want to share with the world! I treasure every bad photo taken on a boring vacation, but I don't care to upload everything to Facebook or Flickr.

Quote:

"Apple’s keynote message was loud and clear: iOS 5, Lion, and iCloud are not feature bumps — they are revolutions in how consumers are to think and use computing devices."

My emphasis above highlights an amazing observation. Per this, Apple has now crossed over the line of "what people want" to "what people need."

I think Apple crossed this long ago with the iPod.

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

And similar sentiments were repeated with iPhone and even more with iPad. Apple does not do focus groups research for a reason.

The first iPod actually was pretty lame. Sales didn't take off until it was cheaper, used USB, and iTunes was Windows compatible - see also http://www.systemshootouts.org/ipod_sales.html ... Apple's "focus groups research" involves selling a product, sometimes with absurd flaws (e.g. the headphone jack on the 1st gen iPhone) and selling an updated version a year later. This works out because there are people who have bought every iteration of the iPod and keep them in collections, and people who deny to this day that the iPhone4 deathgrip exists (bought my iPhone4 three months ago, when I hold it like I've held my 1st gen iPhone, I lose signal, but have a case now so that's moot), and it seems to work out for them. Why pay for focus groups when you can have the focus groups pay you?

Its all about using what you've already done to save you unnecessary work, even if you move from one device to another. That's been a dream of mine for a long time.

The vast majority of bits on your computer are just copies from somewhere else. It is the things you do and the data that should be creating that are the valuable things.

These should be preserved and leveraged to serve YOU, not advertisers, wherever you happen to be.

"Documents you’ve written, presentations you’ve prepared, spreadsheets you’ve made — your iWork apps can store them in iCloud. Which means you can view and edit the same document, in its latest state, on all your devices. And since iCloud automatically updates any changes you make, you don’t even have to remember to save your work."

But I already do this on Google Docs, and I don't have to buy a Mac to do it. In fact, I don't have to buy anything to do it; I already have a desktop/laptop/phone, and Google Docs is free of charge. Plus, most people I know already have Google Accounts, so sharing is already implemented.

Google Docs is a limited suite of Web apps trying to mimic Microsoft Office. iCloud has an API that 3rd party developers can use for all sorts of applications. Neither Microsoft Office nor Google Docs is anything near the caliber of using Omnioutliner for note taking and doing great outlines. iCloud will allow the developer to store documents on iCloud and provide syncing across computers and mobile devies, which Omnioutliner for the iPad currently can't do.

Google Docs big selling point is collaboration. That's what I use it for, and I love it. But sometimes I need a richer and more powerful experience, and that's what dedicated apps provide. I'm glad that Apple is pursuing this strategy, because I believe there is a need for both.

The other big plus of Apple's iCloud strategy is offline support.

I think Apple is trying to differentiate by having the best of both worlds (native software and webapps). Personally I think it's really compelling.

I love Google Docs, but can find the interface really frustrating. If you told me I could have all of the benefits of Google Docs with a native software experience, I'd be at least willing to try it out.

Ok, that all sounds grandiose, but I think that perhaps people are overplaying the impact of iCloud. Yes, it's a big deal to be sure, but perhaps some pragmatism is in order.

The author gets one bit right, that what Apple is theoretically "killing" is mostly irrelevant. On the other hand, what Apple showed thus far with iCloud is more about the fact that they are doing the cloud quite a bit differently than Google is.

Apple is saying, yes syncing and pushing is important, but so are rich apps. They are showing that cloud doesn't just mean doing HTML5 apps. That is the right approach IMO. The cloud isn't just the web, it's your data across all devices in the best possible format for each device. Dropbox got this right, Apple is getting this right(on their own platforms), Google doesn't seem to do this as much yet and their products seem to suffer as a result.

I would love Google to do more with say Google Docs on Android than forcing mobile web apps down our throats, but they have a web-based advertising business to prop up so of course they love the web-only approach.

In theory Microsoft is doing some kind of hybrid approach or something to the Office cloud, but really I wish they would just put out a killer version of Office on all platforms. It would make them lots of money and would enable them to lock people into their cloud (for better or worse). As it stands, Microsoft's cloud strategy by comparison is to throw crap at the wall and hope something sticks. Thank goodness they didn't offer $9 Billion to buy Dropbox...

I recently switched password manager to 1password. It syncs with dropbox on the iphone as well. Indeed feels like magic.

My budgeting app syncs over wifi and feels bad somehow. It is nice to get rid of this unnecessary obligation to sync stuff. Kinda as if the garbage walked itself down to the container. One thing less to take care of.

Yes to the Office on all platforms - Google docs is really amateurish. It baffles me that they haven't improved it.

Google is not forcing web apps on mobile devices. There are Android apps for Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Maps, and Reader.

That's kind of what I'm thinking. This only looks revolutionary if you haven't been watching Android at all. When the G1 shipped with universal integration with gmail, calendar, contacts, google checkout, etc... it was a revelation. When the "share via..." interface was extended (often via third parties) to handle youtube and twitter and facebook etc... it was really great...

And now this is a focus for Apple too. Great, I'm sure they'll do a good job and come up with some fantastic new ideas. But let's not pretend this is a whole new market or a fundamental innovation. Handsets have been moving in this direction for 3+ years now.

>Handsets have been moving in this direction for 3+ years now.

And iTools is 11 years old. Don't believe the popular iTools/dotMac/MobileMe is crap argument either, iDisk was badass when it debuted.

And despite all the press regarding MobileMe's launch, the syncing actually works really well too. You can image a machine, plug in your AppleID, and within a few minutes - all of your stuff (including individual app preferences, wallpapers, Dock icons, etc.) show up. Restart and launch Migration Assistant on a gig network, and within an hour or so you can completely mirror entire workstations. It even copies Photoshop registration and *nix config files.

iCloud is simply the continuation of a vision Apple has been working on for more than a decade.

Exactly. For Steve Jobs it's closer to two decades, even.

As described in Steve Jobs' closing keynote of WWDC 1997, where he outlines his setup from eight years earlier (1989).

http://youtu.be/3LEXae1j6EY?t=14m25s

This idea didn't come to Apple via Google, it predates Google's existence, by a decade.

The technical solution was different then, but Steve's focus is on the user experience, and that is quite similar.

Everything I really want in the cloud, I have in the cloud - music (Rdio), podcasts (Instacast), books (Kindle), text files (Dropbox/apps). I am hopeful that Apple can simplify cloud services for appmakers. I've found many of the Dropbox syncing apps (ie text editors) fairly wonky - requiring an explicit sync confirmation or mostly just allowing me to push a file to a Dropbox. I hope that they enable/encourage a more seamless "autosave" experience to be standard.

Am I the only one who thinks that a secure git server is so much ore useful than Dropbox, iCloud, etc.? Versioning. Access to old versions of artifacts.

A van with a V8 and a manual transmission is so much more useful than a compact four-banger auto-trans hatchback. What kind of car do you drive?

YAWN

This is all big news for anyone who never uses anything but Apple products, but not so much for the rest of the world.

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