For many years I thought that Apple’s “Think...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:21:56 -0600

For many years I thought that Apple’s “Think Different” campaign was a load of shit, and for many years had simply forgotten that it existed. Age is funny though. Somewhere in the 16 years since it was introduced I changed. I went from being someone who just went through life only doing what I was supposed to be doing to someone who recognizes many flaws in the status quo and actively wants to change it.

Somewhere in there this simple marketing fluff actually started meaning something to me. Maybe it’s because I have been called crazy by my peers for not being content to follow the path laid out. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been called a troublemaker for trying to do the right thing when it wasn’t convenient. Maybe it’s the fact that I would not be where I am today if I had listened to them, or had chosen to take the safe route instead of risking it all trying to be different.

Or maybe it’s just the fact I now recognize the simple truth that society is pushed forward by people who refuse to be bound by the way things are because they see the potential for the world to be so much more than it is.

Either way, I have grown to respect the philosophy at work here. And for what it’s worth, I have encountered a lot of people in the OS X and iOS developer community who not only believe this, but have lived their lives according to it. I’ve also seen a lot of Apple employees who live and work by a philosophy not to dissimilar from this.

It might just be marketing fluff, but these days it means a lot to me. Every now and then I forget that, but I usually wind up coming back to it eventually.

Thoughts on WWDC

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 01:08:00 -0600

Without breaking NDA, here are some random opinions of what was announced WWDC.

OS X 10.9 Mavericks

OS X continues it’s slow evolution with 10.9. The major focus has been on improving battery life and slowly smoothing it’s rough edges. In some ways, the refinements will help compensate for loses incurred during the transition to Lion.

Safari on OS X will be a nice improvement, but I expect a majority of it’s improvements to also be back ported to previous versions of OS X. The two standout features from their announcement is Keychain syncing via iCloud (finally) and the multi monitor improvements, however neither of them will be used by average users.

Aside from some very slight UI updates there isn’t much that most end-users will see or benefit from until application developers start taking advantage of it. Apps developed for it will benefit greatly from the work that they have done behind the scenes, but many people will question the need to upgrade and balk when apps require them to.

I appreciate their restraint from needlessly changing things that work well already, however this lack of user-visible improvements continues to be the biggest source of friction for OS X in general. Especially since it is a paid upgrade.

I wonder how long it will be before pundits start demanding more visible renovation of OS X. I also wonder how long it will be before Apple simply stops charging for OS X and subsidizes incremental development entirely from computer sales.

iOS 7

iOS continues evolving rapidly. Apple has focused on their new design language and with good reason. The thing that is not being communicated easily is that this design language extends significantly further than just a fresh coat of paint: UIKit itself has been extended significantly to bring never before seen depth and flexibility to applications. These new API’s will allow designers to be significantly more expressive, although in many cases it will take a complete redesign of the UI to take advantage of it.

Perhaps more relevant is the fact that it will be extremely hard to replicate this experience on other platforms. A lot of hard work has gone into enabling this experience, and Google and Microsoft will have difficulty implementing and encouraging adoption of similar mechanisms. I do have complaints about much of their design decisions at this stage, but I do not doubt that they will be refined significantly before release.

Aside from the design language, iOS 7 is full of improvements that continue to make it a significantly more robust operating system. Just about every app has been significantly reworked to support the new design language and as a result it feels much more coherent than iOS 6 did. As an aside, many long standing issues and gripes have been solved as part of this reworking and new features and usage patterns are now supported.

Behind the scenes there is a lot to love in iOS 7. Just about every framework has seen significant updates that address long standing issues and bring useful (and sometimes long-requested) features to the table. Without breaking NDA it is impossible to explain in detail, but the short version is that iOS 7 will allow applications to work and act in ways previously impossible on iOS, and generally provide a much better user experience. It also is significantly more protective of the user, and will help curb (but not eliminate) some of the more nefarious practices that app developers are taking advantage of.

Notably absent, however, is iPad support. Given that UIKit never really scaled well to the iPad, it isn’t a total shock. That said, the new design language should work significantly better with the iPad than the old while also greatly simplifying the work involved with porting applications between the two. In some ways, the iPad will actually get more benefit out of iOS 7 - both in terms of a better user experience from the new design language, and in terms of efficiency improvements targeted at the iPhone providing a more visible benefit on the beefier iPad.

Something that has occurred to me, that I unfortunately cannot explain in depth, is that iOS 7 will allow Apple to push iOS onto new form factors and into new use scenarios. While I have no idea what they are planning, the fact of the matter is that iOS 7 also addresses many of the shortcomings that prevented it from moving off of phones and tablets while enabling better integration between devices. This is a good thing.

In the end, iOS will be a significantly different experience in 6 months. It’s a great time to be a developer or a user, and these improvements create a ton of potential for the future.

iCloud

OS X and iOS support for iCloud has been improved, but the only major user facing feature is the keychain syncing support. This will prove to be really nice, but most people probably won’t ever enable it.

iWork for iCloud seems like it could be a potential misstep for Apple as their strength has never been in web apps. However, it doesn’t seem like they are attempting to fight Google here. If anything this seems like they are competing more directly with Office 365. Time will tell if this winds up being a win for them or not. It does, however, make me wonder if they will be rolling out significant updates to their iWork applications on both OS X an iOS in the near future.

In the end, there is still a lot of room for Apple to improve iCloud and it does suffer from some nasty limitations. That said, I applaud their decision to put the effort into fixing it instead of rolling out new features, and if anything it demonstrates how serious they are about making this a success.

Hardware

Not much new hardware, however what was shown is somewhat interesting.

Haswell offers computer manufacturers two possible courses of action: maintain performance and dramatically increase efficiency, or improve performance for the same power budget. With the MacBook Air’s Apple chose to do the former - there wasn’t a significant update in terms of feature set but the battery life has increased significantly, with some reviewers claiming to see the 13” model hitting 12-15 hours. Given how similar the hardware between the MacBook Pro’s and the MacBook Air’s have gotten in recent years I expect that this will wind up being the key delineation between the Air and the Pro lines. I would expect that the next generation Retina Pro models will embrace the opposite philosophy: providing as much power as possible in the same power envelope. This isn’t a bad decision, as the move to high resolution screens dramatically increased the workload of these machines. More powerful hardware in them will not only increase the user experience, but also will likely improve “worst case” battery life for those products.

The new Mac Pro is a very interesting device, although I have doubts. The best description I have heard is that it is basically the MacBook Air of desktops, and I don’t necessarily disagree. It sheds much of what defines a legacy PC in favor of a cleaner, significantly tighter integrated hardware design. The issue is that this also presents a radical departure from the traditional Mac Pro’s, and may well alienate existing customers. In eliminating legacy workstation “cruft” they have simply externalized the costs associated with those features, not eliminated the need for the features. That said, it still offers significant advantages to high end users and fits well with the trends both by Apple and in the industry to support GPU computing for high end applications.

Conclusion

In general, Apple is continuing to do what it does best: applying a mix of incremental improvements with deliberately developed major features that benefit the platform. With OS X we are seeing more of the former as it is a mature and robust platform, while with iOS we are seeing significant amounts of work being invested in addressing limitations that have been inherent to iOS since day one. This also indicates that Apple is continuing to use it’s tight integration between hardware and software as well as it’s tight control over the ecosystem as a competitive advantage, and it is going to be difficult for competitors to follow suit.

While it’s not what everyone wanted, it puts them in a great position to deliver some truly innovative features next year.

New look, new site.

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:12:45 -0600

In an effort to realign some of my social media stuff, I’ve swapped the backend for this blog in order to separate out my technical and professional writing from my more personal presence. Right now this is slightly empty, but more is on it’s way.

dghost.net

For many years I thought that Apple’s “Think...

Thoughts on WWDC

New look, new site.