Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Around the Mac Web for November 7, 2007, superior technology edition:

Computer World: Leopard Beats Vista

Macs Cheaper than PC's

OS X 10.5.1 Nearing Release

Apple Better than Microsoft to Make Tablet

The Java Controversy - Much Ado About Nothing

It seems like every day there's a new controversy on the Mac web. Today its Java (well, to be fair this controversy has been brewing for some time as we shall see). Specifically, Apple's support (or lack there of) for Java 6. 

Now, in order to understand this controversy, you have to know a little bit about Java.

Java 6 is Sun's (the creators of Java) most recent release of the Java platform (and Java is alot more than just a programming language. A fact that adds to the confusion. A couple of years ago Sun, in an effort to capitalize on all the good buzz the Java programming language was getting, decided it would be good marketing to name just about anything Java or base just about anything released by Sun on Java. And don't even get me started on Javascript).  

Java 6 was proceeded by Java 5, which makes sense but, Java 5 was proceeded by...Java 1.4. Oh, yes - Java 5 is alternatively known as Java 1.5 (and among the Java community you will sometimes hear Java 6 called Java 1.6, but I digress).

The Java on OS X Timeline spells out the details but, essentially, when Mac OS X added Java 1.4 support, Java developers sat up and took notice. By the time support for Java 1.5 came about, many Java developers were downright in love with Macs. Its not hard to see why, they could have their Java development environment with Unix tools and still be a good corporate citizen with Microsoft Office on the Mac. Plus, it was a Mac so things tended to just work (at the same time Java on Windows had issues). 

But, then things started to go wrong. I'll let the Java developers speak for themselves first:

Gosling Dumps OS X

Time for Java developers to Leave OS X

To summarize the controversy, Apple is very far behind porting Java 6 to Mac OS X. The Java Developers also have some gripes with some of the more advanced features of Java 5 on the Mac - specifically anything that has to to with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI's). 

Of course, there are two sides to this story- first, Porting Java on OS X is hard and, Java 5 on OS X is Pretty Good.

So that's the issue and there is an all out revolt from all those Java developers who traded in their Windows boxes a few years ago for Macs. 

My day job deals with Java so I might be considered to have a horse in this race - I'd love to see Apple support J2ME which is Java for smart phones and other small devices. But I don't think its ever going to happen as I'll explain below. 

All of this "controversy" is much ado about nothing.

First, I think that this controversy over Java 6 is bogus since most companies don't run Java 6. In the corporate world folks tend to lag about one version behind. Consequently, nearly all of the (money making) Java programing being done is on Java 5 (nee, 1.5). Related to this is the fact that nearly all of this Java work is server side Java and so all the Java GUI madness does not apply. 

But more importantly, I think Apple could care less. Java support by Apple is just not a priority anymore.

I think Apple will be happy to say goodbye to all these complaining Java developers. Why? I think they have (maybe rightly) assumed that Java is a technology that has reached middle age and grown about as much as its going to grow. As a result, just doesn't make sense to support Java with all of Apple's weight anymore. A few years ago it looked like Java would become an important technology on the desktop. It has not. It is important on servers, but how many desktop applications are written in Java? I can think of maybe two that are worth anything (that comment will generate a ton of hate mail I'm sure). 

More over, the imporant technology for Apple is Objective-C with Cocoa on the desktop (and soon to be on the iPhone & iPod) and a WebKit, JavaScript, Ajax and Quicktime H.264 on the internet. Consequently, Java (and Adobe's Flash) is a direct threat to Apple.

I think Apple is more than happy to support open standards (e.g. Ruby, Python) that compliment its technology stack. But I think that Apple has made the decision not to support its competitors or technology it does not see as complementary to Apple technology. Java is both a threat (J2ME) and is not complimentary (J2SE - i.e. desktop java). 

Will I be surprised if Apple finally releases support for Java 6? No. But I just don't think Apple is going to go out of its way to support Java nor have Java support drive its timelines or strategy. Apple has clearly decided that it can loose several thousand Java developers when it is picking up several thousand consumers every day.

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Here are today's interesting reads, mac and non-mac:

2 Million Cats on the Loose

Leopard is Apple if His Eye

Why it was Called the Manhattan Project

What is a Hulu anyway?

Apple needs an actual TV

How to Save Apple TV

Six Leopard Hidden Gems

Well, I've been up most of the night poking around Leopard and have come across some hidden gems: 

DASHBOARD MOVIE WIDGET: what the hell was Apple thinking holding this back? It is awesome, and I hardly ever use widgets. Be sure to check it out.

PREVIEW: Good Lord, has preview been beefed up. Try this: take a picture of someone and save it as a jpg. Then open it in preview and use the Extract Shape tool to "carve them out" of the background. Preview is like the cheap person's photoshop now. You can play with the color levels, put text over pictures, crop, flip and adjust. Oh yeah, it does some cool things with PDF's too.

TEXT EDIT: A free word processor. It checks grammar and spelling. It does bullets and outlines. You can make up styles. For 80% of the world, its as good as M$ Word.

WEB CLIP: I check the lottery numbers web page ever day. No more. That strange box next to the reload button in safari, just click it and then "Clip out" a section of an web page that you want you check and is often updated. Ta Da! instant, updating Dashboard widget, no need to launch in the web page browser, just hit F12.

DICTIONARY: Not sexy, but useful. The dictionary has been beefed up with Oxford American Dictionary, a thesaurus and wikipedia. Just highlight a word, control-click and chose dictionary.

ALEX: The new leopard voice is so good its scary sometimes. I have had my mac speak the time since OS X 10.1 but when Alex did it tonight, I thought for sure someone else was in my house at 2 a.m.

There's a ton of other cool things (print preview is very cool now, back to my mac makes the $99 dot mac worth the cost, quick look is very handy, spotlight searching is beefed up and faster, there's a ton of hi-resolution pictures of mac hardware hidden in one of the library folders) but these are 6 things that I had either forgotten about or didn't know about. Let me know if you find any other hidden gems.

Five Minute Leopard Install Review

Still in the process of getting everything up and running since I did an erase and install, but here are my first impressions: 

1. Snappy. 

2. Make sure you disable Airport before you boot the Leopard install disk. With Airport on, it did not see my laptop's hard disk. 

3. File icons are flat, not sure if I like that, especially since its harder to distinguish between them. 

4. What happened to Airport Disc Utility? 

5. No Time Machine over Airport? I actually saw several websites note this. Hopefully Apple will fix this with an update down the line. Kind of takes the ooomph out of Airport Discs when your primary machine is a laptop (I mean who wants to be tethered to a USB disc all the time?). 

6. Started install at 7 p.m., got the welcome video a little over 1 hr later (note that I let the install verify the install disk which took about 30 minutes). 

7. Still getting things back into shape. I tried to cut corners by not doing a full hard disk back up (just applications and the user folder since I keep my documents, movies and iTunes and iPhoto libraries on an Airport Disc).

Probably could have saved time by doing an archive and install, but I wanted a fresh start. This messed me up with my calendars and mail accounts. Got the calendars working pretty easily. Still working on the mailboxes and hoping that when I sync iPhone my contacts will fill in. Also looks like some of my applications need to have the serial numbers put back in. 

8. Some old applications are showing the generic OS X icon in the finder. I'm hoping that disc utility will fix that. 

9. Dock on the right will show flat (which is good) and in 3D when it is on the bottom. 

10. Like the new Leopard voice.

Well, in the time it took me to write this, the last of my files have copied onto my laptop. Looks like I have a bit of clean-up and then I'll need to run disk utility to repair permissions and I should be good to go.

Welcome to Leopard everyone!

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

Right now, somewhere in central New Jersey there is a FedEx truck. On that truck is a package with my name on it. Inside that package is Apple's Big Cat. Until it arrives, here's today's interesting reads:

Leopard Hidden Gems

Macworld's Leopard Review

Leopard Install Tips

What to do Before and After installing Leopard

Leopard Key to iPhone Enhancements

With the release tomorrow of Mac OS X Leopard, I expect that the iPhone will finally "come home" to the OS it was designed to operate with. Consequently, over the next couple of months iPhone users should see a significant increase in the iPhone's capabilities.

It has been argued, correctly I think, that the iPhone is a Leopard device and needs the new technology of Leopard to reach its maximum potential. With Leopard's release, I expect that the iPhone firmware is due for an update - probably within the next 2 weeks. 

We should see, at a minimum, an update to the iPhone's mail and calendar applications to support the enhancements Leopard makes in those applications and, maybe some other goodies. 

For mail, expect Leopard to allow you synchronize the iPhone Notes application (edit and start new notes on the desktop that are then uploaded to iPhone on the next sync). I imagine the iPhone will also get its missing To-Do app to integrate with Leopards enhanced To-Dos.

On the Calendar side, I suspect that the iPhone calendar app already supports Apple's new iCal Server and the CalDAV format but if it doesn't yet, the next iPhone software update will take care of that.

I also suspect that we will finally see iChat for the iPhone sometime soon. 

However, the biggest enhancements the iPhone will see are a direct result of Apple's confirmation that it will release a Third-Party Developer Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow new applications on the iPhone. Despite all of the gnashing of teeth about the iPhone's lack of a real development kit for third party software developers, I had always assumed that Apple would eventually open up the iPhone for its developers. Steve Jobs' announcement that a SDK will be released in Febuary caused much rejoicing in the Mac development community.
 

The release of Leopard also gives a glimpse of what kind of SDK Apple will provide. For example, Core Animation is already known to be a part of the iPhone software and it is expected that some of Leopard's security features were put into OS X specifically for iPhone. As folks begin to unlock the secrets of Leopard in the next few months, expect that some of those hidden features will become part of the iPhone. 

One of the overlooked things that Apple has done in the past couple of weeks is to create a new section of their developer web site geared specifically to the iPhone. They've also given registered developers access to recorded video from the iPhone tech talks Apple scheduled in various major cities a few months ago. The new iPhone development site should be a hub of activity over the next couple of months. 

Now, I suspect the iPhone development environment will be a separete or unique mode of XCode (or quite possibly an enhancement to Dashcode) and that Apple will build into the development tool the security it needs to support 3rd party iPhone development. Once that new tool is in developers hands (and developers will probably get it at or soon after January's Macworld Conference), iPhone users should begin to see new iPhone applications roll out a a nice pace.

The next couple of months should be an exciting time for iPhone users. 

With Leopard's release iPhone users should see an software update in the next couple of weeks (since Apple will want to put it out before the holiday buying season starts in earnest), and probably one right after Macworld in January as Third-Party developers begin to crank out new iPhone applications. Let the fun begin!

Odds & Ends: Today's Interesting Reads

One day before the Leopard release, so today's odds & ends provides a roundup of Leopard reviews:

Leopard is one cool cat

Leopard beats Vista

Leopard's bright new spots

Leopard spot on

The Real iPhone Revolution - iPhone in OS X

On the brink of Apple releasing its quarterly earnings today and the long awaited OS X Leopard on Friday, the New York Times has an article today on the increase in Mac marketshare. The article quotes Steve Jobs as saying that Mac users should expect an OS upgrade every 12 to 18 months (which is consistant with Apple's past OS X practice and, probably not too bad to Apple's bottom line at $129 a pop).

But, the real news burried at the bottom of the article is this comment by Jobs:

Mr. Jobs said he was struck by the success of the multitouch interface that is at the heart of the iPhone version of the OS X. This allows a user to touch the screen at more than one point to zoom in on a portion of a photo, for example.“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.He contrasted it with stylus interfaces, like the approach Microsoft took with its tablet computer. That interface is not so different from what most computers have been using since the mid-1980s.In contrast, Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.The Apple development team worried constantly that the approach might fail during the years they were creating the iPhone, he said.“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.” 

Why is this so important? Everyone and their brother has assumed that the iPhone interface would eventually make its way to the iPod and, of course, it did. But, I suspect Apple is thinking beyond the iPod product line. There has been spectualtion here and there that Apple would port the touch interface to MacBook laptops (most likely via a touch trackpad) as well as some speculation that Apple's desktops could use a touch interface (which Jobs has rightly rejected as unworkable in the current form factor - try holding your arm up to your monitor for 5 minutes). But Jobs explaination should give you and idea to the furture of the Mac OS X interface - "verbs" v "nouns."

I suspect that over the next 2 years we are going to see more "noun" type interfaces from Apple in OS X, with or without a touch input mechanism. More "one click" or "one touch" standalone widgets that do one thing only. Don't forget that the iPhone was in development for years at Apple and its "culture" is most likely entrenched at the stakeholder level of Apple. Thus, I suspect that there will be more "iPhone in OS X" over the next couple of years rather than more "OS X in the iPhone."

Want some evidence? How about Widgets? Or Coverflow (now there's an interface that works amazingly well on the iPhone and is good, yet not as good, in iTunes. And, of course, OS X Leopard will have coverflow everywhere). Or how about iMovie 08 (which amazingly lost features from its previous version)? I submit that all of these Apple "innovations" were born out of, or refined by, the iPhone interface work.

10/26/2007: The Cat's out of The Bag

After a long wait, Apple has finally announced that on October 26, 2007, Mac OS X (Leopard) will be released. While I am sure there will be long lines at all the Apple stores that night, let me make a plug for ordering via Amazon.com and supporting this blog:

And the Family Pack: