Don Linsay, Apple User Interface group, WWDC 2000, Session 140: Aqua Overview
[excerpt starts at 07:20]
Now, we played around a lot with translucency. We tried translucent windows, we tried all sorts of controls that were fading in and fading out, and what we discovered in all of that exploration was that translucency is a novelty, that you could very quickly tire of this.
So, our conclusion was that translucency only added value if it had meaning. This is very important because it comes up again in something else I’m going to talk to. We chose to use translucency on those controls which are of more transient nature.
So, for example, I can see here a menu. Menus come and go, they only exist for a very short time. You make a selection and it disappears. Translucency is nice because it reinforces that a menu is very light.
Likewise we use translucency in our sheets. Sheets, again, typically only exist for a short time. They’re usually not presented for long periods of time: saving a document, printing a document, or an alert for example. Sheets come and go, therefore translucency was perfect. Translucency was perfect for sheets as well because sheets are tied to their parent document; of course they obscure some of the content that’s underneath, so using translucency allowed you to reveal just enough of what was underneath to remind you what that document was.
Like translucency, we had the opportunity to use a lot of color in Aqua, and we tried a lot of colors. We played around with colors for the better part of last year, trying to find what kinds of colors, what palette to use, what would be the theme of our color, but like translucency, we came to the conclusion that color was useful only, again, if it had meaning, and in this example, in this dialog where you see an assortment of controls, color says “I am the selected control; I’m the one you’ve chosen”. The tab, for example, that’s the selected tab. Radio buttons, check boxes, even the pop-up says that “I am the current choice that you have”. That’s the meaning of color and how we have chosen to color our controls.
In the windows, we actually have used three colors. We have three controls in our title bar, we have carried forward from Mac OS 9. We have the close box, we have the minimize control and we have the zoom control. And they have very different functionality, so first of all we knew we had to group them. Secondly, we had to distinguish them somehow. So we chose to go with three colors - somewhat of a playful decision but I think it’s quite effective.
Yes, the first version of Aqua looks gaudy by today’s standards, but a lot of thought went into principles that still hold up well today. The controls all had visibly different shapes. Color was used to mark selection (and the ability to select something) even on top of different other affordances - and as confirmed by the Graphite theme, the color affected the contrast, and so didn’t depend on being able to tell one color from another. Translucency was showy but was also relegated only to places where it would not grate on you by sticking around, and it was purposeful.
One way or another these principles are basically abandoned by now in macOS and iOS. Transparency is turned into a showier way to distinguish some element or other, and is continuously present, causing constantly new patterns to parse if laid over content, or making a desktop picture a decision that will seep through almost every app. And the only alternative to side-step these choices is to tell the OS wholesale to opt out of transparency.
One of the goals of Aqua was to find a UI that would be easy to learn and easy to be productive in, that would fit everyone. What we have now instead in macOS is a much more showy look — showy in the way that it abdicates usability to look slightly sleeker, or bleed backgrounds through in a slightly more sophisticated way. And instead of making it work for more people, they created elaborate escape hatches, which give up and add clarity almost passive-aggressively, at the cost of changing a deliberate experience to one annotated with a sharpie; like a restaurant staffed with quietly lilting mumblers as waiters, who upon each “what was that” take our a megaphone and e-nun-ci-ate ev-‘ry syl-la-ble.
I’m not asking for a return to Aqua (especially not the Mac OS X 10.0 version used in the video), but I do think it’s time for the current interface to undergo a revision to these ends, and to drop the obsession with letting things show through for its own sake, or to give the appearance of personalization. And look at a text field and a button in Aqua from the video, and then look at a text field and a button in today’s Finder toolbar - they both have practically identical bezels. With that kind of interface, you don’t make pros more productive, nor newcomers more familiar.
]]>But the response has been lowest-common-denominator design of apps and systems. Making web pages, or things of a similar structure, that look extremely similar, that try to feel at-home by aping some aspect or some part of the platform on each platform.
When there were fewer platforms, it was easier to spend the energy to make something that felt at home on each platform, especially if you only really had one platform to support. But now when there are many platforms, and with it more and more opportunities to provide a better experience on each one, fewer and fewer of them are able to be realized, and an increasing number of times, a substandard solution is chosen for more platforms instead.
The cambrian explosion backfired and sold us out. Likely as not, the platform proliferation will find itself contracting into fewer platforms, whose home is the substrate of forced, averaged commonalities. Likely as not, this substrate will be the web, where what isn’t built-in will need to be, essentially, cobbled together in an ad-hoc manner from scratch, either directly by the developer or by someone else.
More people than ever are working in the field of User Experience/Interface Design. But what they’re spending their days doing is inventing per-company, per-client, per-app, per-framework implementations of things we already figured out years ago. Be it web design, WPF/XAML or Cocoa for the past two decades, there’s no real need to define a checkbox from the ground up. Styling, okay, sure. On/off-style switches? Yes. We need more of contrast, context and wisdom in our controls. Not all buttons look alike, and you can send a message by making buttons used for different purposes look different while still making them feel buttonesque.
There should be different families of buttons. There are buttons that are grouped together because they toggle or perform related functions, there are big buttons that cancel or perform something or are red because they exit the program or perform a destructive action, there are small buttons that do do something, but to an area that won’t dismiss the task you’re working on, there are even buttons in text that look like slightly different, clickable text so as to indicate interaction but not ruin readability (links, they’re called). This is all part of having a rich vocabulary, it’s part of everyday design vocabulary among everything we do.
When we start over all the time, we never get to the rich vocabulary. We throw away the familiar, the dependable. Imagine mingling in a room with 500 interesting strangers that you’d love to talk to where, when you talk to them, if you get off-subject in a way they don’t like, they turn away, or slap you in the face. (Feel free to imagine Twitter, if you’d like.) At some point you’ll hole yourself up with the three people you understand, or you’ll talk to everyone but only about the most mundane things.
This is what using computers, devices, phones, anything with a UI is like for most people.
Learning a new platform, a new landscape of interaction is hard unless you’re at the right time and place in your life to do so, and have extreme incentive to do so. Most people never get anywhere, and have to fight to learn the basics little by little. When things change all the time, everywhere, and nothing stays the same, they get frustrated and they blame themselves. They think they’re not smart enough. Whether that makes them sad or angry, they lose interest; if they’re really unlucky, they have to stay and do battle with this application or system because they have to.
And even if, for some reason, you don’t care about these people because you think you have a better hand with computers, you are not immune to this. These inefficiencies, this lack of care and thoughtfulness is impacting your life too, all the time.
Software is eating the world, and there are many recent examples of how that makes people’s lives worse. There is something to be said for making it easier to go from an idea to a prototype with readily accessible tools, of course. And sometimes you need to do something off the beaten path to actually move forward or extend a metaphor already in use. But there’s no need to throw out any pretenses to grow a more sophisticated user interface. Unless the base of what you’re doing is inventing an entirely new metaphor to make something accessible in a way it just isn’t today, your users will thank you if you take the time you would have otherwise spent reinventing the wheel and spend it mostly following a predictable, established route that they can understand, learn and navigate.
]]>Podcasts is set up well for success - it is a relatively clean slice out of the now broken-up iTunes pie, it feels reasonably like a cohesive, first-class citizen app on iOS and it is an application with a handful of obvious actions and limited depth.
The Podcasts app that ships in macOS Catalina is not successful.
The longer I go, the more I could find, but I’m stopping here. There are so many problems here that I don’t know where to begin.
Almost all of the odd choices can be boiled down to, in my mind: it would be terribly inconvenient to have a shared code base for apps that would actually behave so differently. They already do behave differently enough to be confusing, though, so I have no idea what’s going on.
Podcasts should be the optimal poster child for Catalyst because it exists on many platforms, and I think it could be made to work so much better by being responsive to ways in which a Mac is not an iOS device. But what upsets me is not a lack of polish as such, it’s that this was deemed anywhere near good enough to ship. It’s not a good podcasting app, it’s not a good Catalyst example, it’s not a good macOS citizen and it’s not even a good reincarnation of the Podcasts app. It’s just a mess.
]]>My previous MacBook Pro was a mid-2014, 15-inch model, purchased somewhere shortly after the introduction of the ill-fated USB-C MacBook in 2015. In the first few months, I saw the butterfly keyboard essentially crash and burn in the press, the USB-C “dongle life” get ridiculed, and the Force Touch trackpad also land in a MacBook Pro revision.
Then, later on in the year, the first MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar was introduced and the butterfly keyboard and USB-C adopted wholesale. That’s when I got the sinking feeling that, without serious backlash, there’s a significant risk Apple has made up its mind and is going to turn a corner. Very rarely are hardware changes, once introduced, reverted. Floppy drive and pre-USB IO goes, it’s done. Unibody manufacturing, glass trackpads? Kept forever. Occasionally, a whole line is dropped, like the PowerMac G4 Cube, or the rare first-time-around MacBook aluminium is retconned into a MacBook Pro, and a unibody plastic MacBook introduced. Change is possible, but was it likely?
Odds against me, having just gotten a new one, I decided to sit this out. (I’m also sitting out developing for iOS while they only have an App Store, so, you know, I’m that guy.)
I wasn’t the only one to miss the old MacBooks Pro though. Even if the whole keyboard debacle can be elided at this point (and strangely underreported by the non-Mac parts of the web, maybe under the impression that being failed by a keyboard was a mark of the parodically effete, and that surely not even Apple could so botch a keyboard), the picture of the old MacBook Pro generation being a stalwart warrior of comfort and utility earned some cultural purchase and nodding agreement. As much as you may like Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C, no one likes the dongle life per se. And as updates didn’t seem to address much aside from bumping specs (and prices), thermals cast yet more shadows, leaving recent Intel chips to throttle in a sweltering aluminium prison.
Earlier this year, rumors started spreading about another model which would finally clean up some of the weaknesses, and the days thence filled with silent prayer: let this bastard hold until the new one’s out. The rubber feet cracked and peeled off, and the battery bloated to push up against the trackpad, rendering it cumbersome to press and starting its own countdown to a required exchange (which would be the third of its kind for that generation of MacBook Pro for me, just as a reminder that they had their issues too). But my fingers now bounce on a reborn scissor-switch keyboard inside a Space Grey chassis; this is the very first MacBook Pro 16”. Our long national nightmare is over.
I find myself in the fresh embrace of multiple new technologies that aren’t really new to this model. The SSD is now NVMe-based, lapping the previous model by three or four times in both read and write performance. The display is capable of going almost disgustingly bright and covering the DCI P3 color space, although I’ve never discerned going to or from such a display.
Also new-but-not-really are several advances in input and human-computer interaction.
The idea behind the Touch Bar is, in isolation, admirable. F1 through F12 are originally remnants of terminal clients from the 70’s, and we deserve a clearer instrument for what is now often labeled “commanding”, the act of issuing an instruction to an application. Although I disagree with its implementation, and my immediate reaction to the physical Escape key being added back was that they were now ¹⁄₁₃ of the way to a solution, I have tried to give it its due.
To me, there are two major usability flaws. The first is that the commanding is constantly changing and dependent on state. This may sound strange, since this dynamism is the primary observation from which the Touch Bar springboards. But at least my eyes are constantly on the screen. The Touch Bar morphs to offer commands as you make changes or make your way across windows and input states. Knowing that some button is in some place will take repetitive learning.
Combined with the second flaw, that any sense of tactile or haptic feedback is missing, it adds up to an environment hostile to pattern forming. When you look at a tablet or a phone, your eyes are already looking at where your fingers are tapping. There’s no second step needed to acquire a new target and verify that it’s what you thought — you just do. The Touch Bar, at least set to the app-contextual “App Controls” commands, constantly needs these affirmations, landing you in the odd situation of diverting your attention from a ~1120 points high screen to one that is 30 points high, and from a tactile lattice of keys that we all know to operate from muscle memory built up over decades to a shallow strip with no feedback except visual. Since effective commanding is often about being able to do things blindfolded, this gets in the way.
The Touch Bar does open a few doors – it can display colors (and therefore also emoji), it can offer fine motor control without affecting the mouse cursor or requiring precision in two axes. If you can fit your workflow into scrubbing or sliding or panning, you can operate it without needing to look, allowing a new kind of gesture not offered by the trackpad with both precision and agility, and at least local efficiency gains.
I consciously have been keeping track of all F-key presses, and they add up to 0 now. (In sharp contrast to Escape key presses, which I lost count of the first day.) I mostly don’t use the Function keys themselves at all in my daily routine; many people do, especially developers, gamers, professional application users (which this thing is ostensibly for) and double/triple-booting multi-platform users, but not me. What I do use are the global control commands – controlling volume, music playback and brightness (both screen and key backlighting – the new backlighting looks much better). I use enough of the commands that they don’t fit well into the condensed right-edge “Control Strip” partition, which essentially kills the App Controls view for me, since the extra command to show the full Control Strip is to tap the smallest known target in the whole Touch Bar, an expander chevron sitting right next to one and often two commands I don’t wish to activate.
Set to show the Expanded Control Strip at all times, the predictability helps, but at what cost? An opportunity lost – App Controls tossed to the wolves because of how they shadowed the, for me, much more common global controls; the Touch Bar only existing to poorly and lossily reincarnate what was previously there. “So don’t get a Touch Bar” is a valid complaint, and if I could have gotten a model with plain function keys, I certainly would have. Or, better yet, a model with a Touch Bar set in a row beyond the function keys. Certainly in the 16” model, there’s room for another row up top, maybe at the cost of being slightly uncomfortable to reach for.
If you live your computing life inside the auspices of the Touch Bar’s functionality and manage to use it to the hilt, you may well feel fonder of its flexibility than I do, especially if it adds significantly to your personal workflow. For me, it just plain doesn’t – and I miss the utility, tactility, predictability and dependability of what was there before. It is tempting but harsh to say “the reason it’s called a bar is because it makes you want to drink”, but it nevertheless sums up my experience with it even after giving it a chance.
Touch ID exists and works. It works well, it works fast, it’s integrated in many places, it’s available to third-party applications and it’s convenient, even making double-clicking the Apple Watch side button (which also serves as authentication) feel like a comparative struggle. It is the best kind of feature, implemented in the best kind of way; it is also incredibly boring in its perfection.
The main conceit of the Force Touch trackpad — besides having an eyebrow-raising name — is the observation that administering haptic feedback from below (using the Taptic Engine linear actuator) feels, to the finger, indistinguishable from the trackpad button actually depressing, in the way of traditional “diving board” trackpads. For this to work, force has to be sensed, and the click simulated beyond a threshold, and this sensing is also used to provide “deeper” presses with alternate meanings.
As a side note: Being used to a trackpad misbehaving with a swelling battery underneath it, my clicks were forceful/deep enough to naturally trigger deep presses unless I took care to go feather light and feel for the activation point during the setup process, which lead me to activate the “deep press lookup” feature on many links, instead of merely following them to skip steps — a fate I posit is both common and confusing, since the force touch capability is not obvious and not explained along the way.
The trackpad allows configuring a click stiffness, as well as turning off deep presses entirely. In theory I like the idea of deep pressing to trigger lookups, and also to “press harder” to fast forward even faster, but I have switched the lookup feature to use the old three finger tap instead, since it was too easy to activate by accident; similarly, dragging files in the Finder is likely to accidentally trigger renaming. I am hopeful that, having some haptic feedback, there is room for muscle memory to relearn these parameters, unlike with the Touch Bar.
Lastly, the trackbar is also comically huge at first glance. The palm rejection is stellar – I have not given related errant input once in the form of clicks. As a consequence of its virtual nature, it also allows clicking at any point on its surface, which comes in handy but doesn’t yet readily occur to me.
Aside from the Escape key, the previously described features were all present and in full force on the models I resigned to stay away from. Readily absent, however, is the butterfly mechanism. The scissor switch is nicked almost wholesale from the standalone Magic Keyboard, with the notable adjustments of a slightly lower profile key and reintroducing the inverted-T layout of the arrow keys, which serves as a necessary locating feature. It feels different than the previous scissor switch mechanism, but is so close that it will take weeks to game out if there even is a winner in comparison.
San Francisco ably replaces VAG Rounded in the clear legend (and for what it’s worth, Apple maintains their decision to keep separate keyboards for Swedish/Finnish, Danish and Norwegian lettering, bucking the trend of laptop manufacturers smearing all Nordic languages onto the same key caps into an unreadable mess leaving some keys looking like an explosion in the glyph factory). Overall, it’s just plain good, and returns to the Apple laptop keyboard tradition of yore of being unremarkable in its silent exceptionalism.
I am not the right person to objectively judge the performance of this model, due to my upgrade path. A lot of things happen in five years. But thanks to the ability to load it up with significant GPU memory (a presumed funnel point; individual Safari tabs would often glitch out massively post-Catalina upgrade), RAM and SSD, there’s once again a lot of headroom for many medium-sized tasks, and I haven’t ran into being bottleneck by really anything. It plows through everything with ease. This makes sense: the thermal envelope has been raised by reconfiguring the inside to free up more airflow and allow the fans to do a better job, leading the CPU to throttle less.
The SSD upgrade pricing is extortionate, but notably less so than before a price adjustment earlier this year, and the 8 TB upgrade option is somewhat reasonable in its ridiculousness due to the lack of such options across the industry. I am expecting this model to last at least as long as the previous model, and to deliver solid performance for at least the first four years.
The model also has much improved speakers and microphone; I will not be mentioning them due to not listening a lot to speakers directly. But the going consensus is that they are genuine technical achievements and worth reading up on. And on the flip side, the 720p camera is laughable, and a pro laptop launched at this date should include Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), already present in this year’s iPhones.
There are four Thunderbolt 3, USB-C ports and one 3.5 mm headphone jack, and that’s still it. USB-C is more commonplace now, so the market has moved the needle and improved Apple’s justification.
It still carries all the previous problems of a budding universal connector, though; it connects directly to almost nothing, even for the many people who have made the deliberate transition. Not only early 2015 MacBook Pro models but also most laptops in the marketplace today come with additional ports for USB-A (the traditional plug), HDMI and, not unusually, an SD card slot. MacBook Pro also hosted the magnetically attached MagSafe 2 power connector, which absense is sorely felt not only in ease of detachment but in a charging LED indicator. (Its cable shroud is not known for its reliability, but I predict neither will the identical form used on the USB-C power cables be.) There are third-party alternatives available, but all of them look significantly clunkier, and almost none provide the full 96W offered by the included AC adapter.
Phil Schiller offers a reasonable-ish defense when pushed – that in their place, the connectors that deliver the widest landscape of opportunities are the Thunderbolt 3 ports, an argument clothed in the “giving the pros what they wanted” angle Apple chose for the release of this model. To me, it sounds off – Apple already makes plenty of sacrifices in the name of a more compact, more clean product. If giving the pros what they wanted was a high priority, delivering at least one of MagSafe, a USB-A port, an HDMI port or an SD card slot should have made the cut. (As would making the Touch Bar optional.) And the workaround dongles everyone will have to if not carry regularly, then at least acquire, do nothing to bolster a compact setup with a clean profile, and everything to highlight its inadequacy.
The major determinant of the product, the 16-inch display, has mostly gone unmentioned. Like Touch ID, it performs admirably in a boring way; unlike it, there are interesting details to mention. The slimmer bezels do a lot to make every other MacBook model look dated. True Tone (adjusting the white point to ambient lighting) is present and accounted for, and works as well here as every other Apple device it’s been implemented in (including the Touch Bar). The leap in resolution is not tremendous, but the added space is welcome. Although Apple is late to bring its ProMotion variable refresh rate (or high refresh rates of any kind) to any MacBook, it does offer manually selectable additional refresh rates that are integrally divisible with common refresh rates and thus avoids pull down.
The Catalina/iOS 13 feature Sidecar — using a recent iPad as a secondary display — is not new to this device, but it is the first time all the requirements have lined-up for me to be able to test it. It’s a wireless connection powering a retina-level display; knowing AirPlay’s performance, it shouldn’t work, but it is undeniably smooth with no discernable lag and runs miles around AirPlay in my brief testing (I’m not in the target audience). Look for matching wireless technology in a future Apple TV to upgrade AirPlay’s performance. I did see the Touch Bar having issues showing up, and also the triggering of another glitch, bringing us swiftly to the well-known nugget:
I have seen two glitches, both related to waking the MacBook Pro up. Some of the time, the display color reproduction gets out of wack with a saturated posterization and toggling True Tone, the refresh rate or automatic brightness adjustment is usually enough to get it to snap out of it. (The Sidecar tie-in is that changing its settings could result in triggering this condition, as well as causing the MacBook Pro display to forget its resolution and revert to the default.)
Worse, a significant fraction of the time, waking it from sleep will show either a login window that hasn’t finished initialization (no placeholder label in the login password field, for example), or a partially intact scene from one of the full-screen spaces, atop which a cursor forever beachballs, blissfully ignoring clicks, keys, Touch ID or Apple Watch unlocks. There’s no indication that this hang ever resolves.
(Both of these issues present on macOS Catalina 10.15.1, Supplemental Update included.)
A machine is more than the sum of its parts. It can also be a way of communicating changed priorities. There is no contest that this is the most powerful MacBook Pro ever offered; it would be mad for any new MacBook Pro to be less powerful, but how this model manages to be that much more powerful than its immediate predecessor while still using the same CPUs is noteworthy.
It also reconsiders blind allies, some of which I was starting to give up on as lost causes. It makes decisions that I love, and it makes decisions, still, that make me roll my eyes. In ways that previous MacBooks Pro have been sub-par, it is thoroughly, stupendously good, but it is also shockingly expensive compared to what it should cost. And at least during testing, it had impactful, worrying glitches, my recommendation hinging on their timely resolution.
In a sentence, it is both perfect and stupid, rolled into one. It is not the computer I wished for, but it has things in it that I wished for, and it is enough to get me through the next few years and feel like charting that course wasn’t a fool’s errand — money given to a company that’s still willing to listen to its customers, even if it could work on its humility and attitude.
As the old Swedish saying goes: If you don’t get what you love, you get to love what you get.
(As tested: 2.4GHz 8‑core Intel Core i9; 64GB of DDR4 RAM; 4TB SSD; AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.)
]]>“By allowing its platform to clear the way for an app that incites illegal behaviour, [does Apple] not worry about damaging its reputation and hurting the feelings of consumers?” said a bellicose commentary published on the app of People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece.
Apple’s current situation between a Communist dictatorship/market-that-the-stock-market-would-rather-it-found-its-future-growth-in and an increasingly concerned user base is entirely their own fault.
When the iPhone App Store first launched, downloadable and installable applications had been documented fact for several years, and even several generations of smartphones. What Steve Jobs - and there is significant evidence that as the last holdout when everyone else were foaming at the mouth to give developers permission and tools to make apps and games, it really was literally him - wrought upon the world was a form of developer platform that dressed up the closed market of an authoritarian state as a convenience and an enabler of security and trust.
I have discussed the flaws of the App Store at length, but looking at it from the prism of the current situation, an alternate universe emerges, where apps were possible to plainly and easily distribute, and Apple, among with other platforms, could have played the role it looks to define for itself as makers of tools for the misfits, rebels and square pegs in round holes. The alternate universe was the default, and Apple bent the arch of history towards the current situation.
Apple may not have created the first App Store in existence, but just as there was a before and after iPhone, there was a before and after App Store, and this model has now been picked up by most other platforms, making life easier not for the developer or customer, but for the platform runner, and certainly for illegitimate, repressive regimes like the one holding a sixth of the world’s population hostage.
Put a dent in the universe, indeed.
]]>For immediate release.
Apple Inc. today announced its all-new revolutionary line of MacBook Pro notebooks, headlined by the brand new 16-inch MacBook Pro. This model has a 120 Hz ProMotion HDR Retina display, powered by a built-in Vega II graphics processor and fitting one more inch of display into the device dimensions of the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
“This is what our customers have been dreaming of for years,” said Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller.
All MacBook Pro models sport a stunning, time-proven, industry-leading scissor-switch keyboard, improving upon the radical butterfly mechanism. Additionally, customers get a choice of a full Touch Bar + Touch ID configuration or function keys + Touch ID.
“This is what our customers have been dreaming of for years,” said Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller.
The Thunderbolt 3, USB-C ports and 3.5 mm headphone jack are joined by two USB-A ports, an SDXC card slot and an HDMI 2.1 port, capable of fully powering a 4K external display at 120 Hz or an 8K display at 60 Hz.
“This is what our customers have been dreaming of for years,” said Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller.
The new MacBook Pro line also contains numerous other improvements, like the latest Intel processors, a new user-serviceable battery with 20% longer all-day battery life, a 4K FaceTime camera with a built-in privacy slider, even faster flash storage, up to 128 GB RAM and a matte display configuration.
“This is what our customers have been dreaming of for years,” said Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller.
While no one was looking, Apple also announced a 5K Pro HDR Display for $999 including a Pro Stand, and a modular Mac Pro mini starting at $1499 with an 8-core Intel i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of NVMe M.2 storage and three PCI Express expansion slots.
“We think the significant fraction of our customers who don’t work at movie lots with functionally infinite resources will appreciate our new additions to the pro—“ attempted Vice President of Special Projects and previous head of Mac Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield, yelling from outside a third-level Apple Park press briefing room window, standing on a metal ladder that appeared to be indistinctly yanked away by an autonomous vehicle.
“This is what our customers have been dreaming of for years,” said mildly perspiring Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller.
]]>The new Mac Pro was introduced, and it again embraces what a fully loaded up computer can be and the power it gives to its user, going as far as to bake in the “cheese grater” worship into the visual. (They knew.) But it also starts at a wallet-melting $5999. (You know how much money that is? That’s, like, six Pro Stands!) The grater everyone was wishing for started at $2499, and was within range of many more Mac users.
The (12-inch, one-USB-C-port) MacBook was scrapped today, but so was the MacBook Pro “Escape”, the 13-inch model without a Touch Bar. The new models are upgraded and better, unless you want to do advanced things like press down a key and be reasonably sure which letter shows up on the screen and how many of them.
The last four or five years have been like a walk in the desert for Apple. They are exceptionally good at some things, like miniaturization and betting on new standards and “skating to where the puck is going to be”, and in a world where you risk getting stranded atop local maxima, it’s a good tool to have in your belt. But that’s all it is - it’s a tool.
Starting roughly around the 12-inch MacBook, they let it be their only virtue. The problem is that they are the only vendor in their own platform, and have an increasing number of people with a wide range of problems to solve. There’s nothing wrong with having a laptop with only USB-C ports, but if several years on people haven’t dropped the other ports, it’s quite possible it’s a good idea to have a computer with both USB-C and other ports on it. It’s quite possible you could shrink the Mac Pro down a bit to not be quite so monstrous, sell it with a moderately powerful i7/i9 (or AMD Ryzen, once USB 4 comes around and Thunderbolt support doesn’t have to be dropped) at less than half the price and rule the galaxy. It’s quite possible you could offer MacBook Pros with both Touch Bars and no Touch Bars, and letting people choose which they like.
None of this means they’ll have to stop doing what they were previously doing - which shouldn’t matter, but since to Apple “not being completely right” seems to be heart-aching, world-view-shattering anathema, maybe it helps. I notice that in the grand scale of things, a more capable computer in the MacBook Air won out either in the marketplace or in Apple’s plans (probably both) over the sleek-for-sleekness-sake 12” MacBook, and that seems promising.
Simplification is a useful tool, too. Having fewer products is better. But it’s only better as long as you end up making the right computer for your user base.
(Edit: Another positive sign I missed - the SSD upgrades have gone from armed robbery to mere pickpocketing. When you can slough off $1400 for an upgrade and prices are still high, at least you know they were extortionate to begin with.)
]]>SwiftUI is in software what so many of the hardware hits have been - a hundred small things that individually have been done before, but put together in a coherent package and seemingly done well. Whether you find precedence in Elm, Svelte, React or WPF/XAML, SwiftUI is an amalgam of sane, well-chosen ideas, mixed with some new ones, like the ostensive compaction of wrapper views down to a sparse and efficient rendered layer. And for once, SwiftUI isn’t a misnomer. It builds on years of wrangling a new language to the place that it allows something like it, like the pervasiveness of a deep and dependable mutability model, without which the checks signed by all the features couldn’t be cashed.
So many of Apple’s decisions, especially for operating systems and frameworks, have been made from a position of weakness and under the pressure of deadlines. If there had been no SwiftUI, this would still have been the biggest WWDC for many years. But SwiftUI looks like it’s been a new idea that’s been allowed to grow and mature; built after a long, hard think, driven by exploration and ideas instead of forced deadlines.
I rhetorically asked for a “Cocoa X” rethink. SwiftUI is only the UI, but it is a fundamental rethink of that problem. It’s additive and incremental, and still looks and feels native, because it is; no iPad-looking concoction transplanted into the middle of your Mac app, or vice versa.
James Joyce said: “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” Show last week’s Objective-C code written against the iOS 12 SDK UIKit to a NeXTStep developer, and they might still recognize most things. Code doesn’t rot, but new ideas do come around. It is worth looking back at the past, looking at the timeless gist of the problem, and wondering if, 32 years later, we don’t have a better way to get where we need to go.
]]>Anyone reading Waffle as a matter of course for the past dozen years or so know that most of it has been aimed at discussing Apple, or changes in the technology landscape, or preferably the overlap thereof. Most of what I write tends to come out saying the same things, which could be pointedly but not indefensibly summed up as change is wrong. I am a strange creature, both pouncing on the new and the exciting, rushing to extol its virtues and celebrate seeing things from a new angle, but also demanding what’s good about the old is maintained, lessons not lost like drawings in the sand.
In raving about the new, I am rarely alone, and in supplying critique, I am rarely the best, so it would not be a surprise to me being viewed as a one-trick pony, an obsessed kook. I should choose wider subjects, but I write about these things because the potential (and all too often actual) downsides affect all of us, and I see so few attempts to cover them end to end over time, in depth, with the focus of someone who for better or worse thinks about it all the time. Not only do I make these kinds of decisions for the software I work on, everyone else’s decisions have consequences for everyone, me included. I don’t think I can talk back the tide, but if the tide is going to swallow something I love, at least it shouldn’t go silently.
On Monday, June 3rd, Apple holds its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC, in San José, and is expected to set out its direction on a number of issues. It will be a momentuous day. I have at times made a series of predictions, but this time I thought it was better to talk about them instead.
First, Apple is supposed to complete the curveball it threw all of us for in last year’s WWDC, when it started to say that iOS apps are not coming to Mac, and following it up by saying that instead, UIKit is coming to the Mac, presenting four new apps that looked like straight-up ports from their new iOS incarnations that had in fact not even been ports. Supposedly, UIKit on Mac is codenamed “Marzipan”, and this codename leaked well ahead of last year’s WWDC.
I am not wild about Marzipan. Steve Troughton-Smith, who has at least a five year record of believing UIKit is the future of all UIs anywhere, likes to frame it as a fear of change. Of course there’s a point that if you start a new application framework design in 2005-2006, have the learnings of Mac OS X in fresh memory and are restrained from doing wild stuff by weak hardware and few resources, you’ll probably end up with a lot of fat trimmed, and many mistakes not repeated anew.
The reason I’m not wild about Marzipan is because wanting to use a Mac in the first place has always been about liking the way things are subtly different and subtly better. The Marzipan apps so far have been completely bled of this quality. They make the same mistake “Universal” Windows applications did, which is to believe that taking a touch interface and sprinkling keyboard-and-mouse adaptiveness on top of it is “enough”. It is “enough” for a dropdown menu to be one of those scrollable list pickers - the ones designed for a finger to swipe through on a constrained display, with haptic feedback guiding you. (This was UI that Apple actually shipped in an app that wasn’t just a major feature of an OS update but a flagship app of a new framework.) At least the UWP applications can more readily expect the screen on a laptop to respond to touch.
The thought of Marzipan being capable of delivering something Mac users will recognize and praise as Mac-like is laughable; the thought of it subsuming Cocoa to become the recommended default is offensive. Cocoa eclipsed Carbon because it was better at providing a Mac-like experience. For all the recent iOSsification of macOS, I still don’t see this being the case without extensive surgery. If anything, the way forward should have been a “Cocoa X”, designed from scratch with the learnings of both UIKit and AppKit/Cocoa in mind. The current Marzipan apps are abominations, not aspirations.
The Mac Pro timeline for the past 8 years is near comical. The classical big honkin’ tower Mac Pro (the only one with a traditional desktop form factor and support for expansion cards) was left without updates long enough that people worried where it was going, until finally, Apple revealed a cylindrical Mac Pro with almost no built-in expansion, under the promise of more to come, only to leave it, too, hung out with no updates for several years, until they invited a few journalists to leak that they were working on a new “modular” Mac Pro. This was now more than two years ago.
The Mac Pro doesn’t affect me personally - but it affects me in so far as it defines the bounds of the platform. If Apple wanted to give exactly zero figs about professional usage (such as it traditionally applied to the platform; primarily scientific work and media production), the time for them to silently drop their involvement, Xserve-style, has come and gone. They have dug in, and with the iMac Pro has produced a stopgap model that while not perfect is at least a milk bone to this demographic.
My prediction for the Mac Pro is that their opaque talk about “modular” doesn’t mean that they have vectored back to their customers’ wishes, despite them being inconveniently fueled by actual needs and requirements. They are going to produce a computer that is physically somewhere between a Mac mini and a “Shuttle PC”, with extremely minimal, if any, internal expansion, and most use cases still routed to external (and expensive) Thunderbolt 3 (or possibly extremely early USB4, which subsumes it to some extent) devices and chassis. The Mac tower will remain dead, “modular” will refer only to that of not including the display in the body of the computer and opinions driven by facts will be vented and dismissed as “emotional” due to their inclusion in the ongoing facepalm saga that is the modern Mac Pro era.
Marzipan will be the banner headline of a macOS release that will, years later, scarcely be remembered for anything aside from this. The way the Mac Pro goes will also give a clear signal of what’s most important to Apple at the end of the day. It has become apparent over the past few years that Apple is more interested in what is sleek and minimalist than what is actually useful, usable and powerful.
Apple’s first advertisement announced that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”; regular Mac users can enumerate many cases where the decision has gone for the simplistic or sophistry instead. People are holding on to their several year old laptops, hoping they don’t break, because the new keyboard is such a marvel of engineering it can’t successfully do things asked of every other keyboard on the planet. Steve Jobs once said that Apple doesn’t know how to build a $500 computer that isn’t a piece of shit - it’s now a worrying possibility that it has forgot how to supply a keyboard at any price that isn’t worse than the cheapest Dell pack-in.
But the keyword is “forgot”. There used to be a time when Apple had no trouble pumping out regular updates to its Macs, leaving the generational upgrades for every few years, and just putting out a spec bump now and then. Over the past few months they have seemingly been trying to get back into the habit of doing it again. It’s nothing a company jousting for the position of the world’s most highly valued should beat itself on the chest over, but when a sign of health has been missing, its recurrence is appreciated.
The maligned butterfly keyboard is still there on the MacBook Pro just bumped a few weeks back, and bizarrely listed the same day on the list of eligibility for the keyboard repair program. The favorable interpretation is that it’s there to calm customers, but that by definition it can’t be a status quo that lasts forever, so it’s a tacit confirmation that a keyboard free of all these issues is again being planned for future products. (When that’s the favorable interpretation, you know you’ve fucked up.)
Be it the increasingly tightened application environment (in the name of security), the inscrutable hardware decisions, the software quality issues and the increasing lack of a long-term roadmap, Mac users have been stuck in a time loop for years now. New OS versions bring few new features but many incompatibility worries, and applications not updated recently risk falling by the wayside, as do developers not ready to jump into whichever incremental feature or user interface fashion refresh ultimately will not benefit macOS users as much as a good old focus on bringing the productivity, usability and flexibility up.
Apple is a big company, devoting medium company resources to a small company mindset. Being a startup in terms of being agile and willing to take risks is great, but it’s now juggling both macOS Mac and iOS iPad as competing computing visions, where both can be said to be troubled, stymied by hardware and increasingly unwilling to let developers unleash their own creativity for the benefit of their users’ productivity and flexibility.
Whether I’ll like the outcome or not, the cards are stacked for Apple to weigh in heavily on all these things (including possibly by inaction, to focus much more on iOS) come Monday. If optimism left me easily, I would be typing this on a capable PC laptop instead (although possibly swearing equally at a UWP Windows future). But I am holding my breath, because one way or another, when all of WWDC has been summed up, we’ll be able to look back at it and say that it was the moment where everything finally, ultimately, irrevocably changed.
(Postscript, five minutes before the keynote: I see via Twitter that I have left out contact details on this weblog. Since I am indeed a Comic Book Guy-like curmudgeon who can be dismissed as such, you should not feel the need to send any emails, since it would probably be a pointless exercise. Better yet, write up the reasons why I’m wrong and post them somewhere! That way you’ll inform more people than me. It’s okay if it takes more than 280 characters. And yes, it’s also okay if someone halfway across the Internet is wrong, puerile or misinformed.)
]]>What I love about it is a recently recurring theme that’s, amidst a polarized and increasingly de-humanized society, been easy to disregard: the glimmers of hope. A group of under a dozen people can still create a little thing like this, including its own damn OS, just because they love the feel of technology built by those who care.
There were a thousand reasons to not build it. There were a thousand reasons to run in the opposite direction, to give up, to completely cede the ground to consoles and touch and game streaming, to things that can be screen captured to Twitch.
But there are also a thousand reasons to do it. The reason our world is crap is because of the funneling of everything into gargantuan seas of milky mediocrity. The biggest entrant wins by subsuming everyone else, by swallowing and outspending and walking all over the competition. The only way out is for life to be a puzzle again, a challenge, for someone’s charming ideas and pet projects to be valued beyond digits on a bank balance readout.
Technology, science, human progress all exists so that we may stand on the shoulders of our forebearers. For decades we have bent semiconductors and materials to our will, but to see that a collection of people who can fit inside the average kitchen can build something more or less from the ground up with so much character but also so significantly outside of their comfort zone is truly inspiring. In a world full of cynicism and derivative madness, what could be better?
Who knows if I’ll get one, but I’m on their side.
]]>It was a justification to do something differently than the behemoth.
Today’s event was about an Apple that may still have their sights of some important values compared to other behemoths, but where the focus is on the fervent belief that whole-banana-ism needs to extend to every corner of everyone’s life. Behemoths like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft act as if they need to have fingers in every pie, provide solutions to every problem, build complete stacks.
Even people who loved Think Different and who still love Apple know there’s more to reading News than Apple News+ (or indeed the normal Apple News app), more to games than Apple Arcade (and indeed indie games have been turning conventions inside out for decades) and more to TV than Apple TV+. Regardless of whether they include good products, Apple is starting to insult both the people who use their products and the heroes they hopefully still respect.
The Internet has torn down walls and connected people, and even though everyone has a full stack and a streaming platform, no single place is a catch-all any longer. Every bucket of “exclusives” is a dated prayer for a dream of control and containment and world domination. What we all crave is for a world that understands interests and respects choice and diversity, where you choose what you want without juggling worries of incompatibility. Not snooty, self-important “curators”, claiming themselves the world’s greatest in fields they have not entered into before, when they can’t even keep fake “antivirus” apps out of their own decade-old App Store, stabilize spiraling software quality years in the making, and when their user interface vocabulary has you pressing a “Share” button to use a “Find on page” command.
]]>Picking a desktop PC platform right now is a classic case of picking your poison. Apple cares way less about their desktop platform for every passing day, but so apparently does the rest of the world. I use Windows 10 every day, and I wish I didn’t - if Microsoft was still interested in advancing their platform in the way they did between Windows Vista and Windows 7, I might switch to Windows tomorrow and make my life much easier.
It’s frighteningly clear that no one at Apple or Microsoft values the way macOS and Windows respectively has worked enough to not see turning parts of it into a tablet OS – irrespective of the fact that tablets have not gone beyond gimmicks for most desktop users – as progress.
The Linux crowd is what’s left, and they cook their own punch, so they seem like an obvious refuge. I’ve been giving them short shrift for reasons that make sense to me, but may not be obvious.
The words “user experience” is thrown around a lot these days in place of “UI” and sadly also in place of “usability”. I’ve always been curious and tried using many platforms. I cut my teeth learning to use computers in the System 6 era of the Macintosh, during the period where there was a clear chasm between the Macintosh OS and Windows 3.11. The Mac was a coherently designed platform, with cohesion, with a sense of nuance and personality. It, and Windows 95 after it, had a culture that became synonymous with the OS, that put clear expectations in your head as a user and that you could fulfill as a developer. You don’t need a single company to do this, but you need a place of authority that’s open to criticism and change, that will adapt and survive, that exudes longevity.
Unix is a platform like this, and it has a coherent and cohesive user experience. It has clear rules and ideals that make sense - they’re all about doing one thing and being able to be reused. The problem isn’t Unix. The problem is that if you don’t want to live your life inside a command prompt (no offense to the people who do), it starts to fall apart. Package managers work great. X is a trainwreck, fixing it is impossible and getting people to move to Wayland is still an uphill battle. The Unix idioms and ideas are being applied to graphical UIs, where they don’t make sense, and what results is a cacaphonic mess, not conducive to a pleasant and effortless user experience; things will look different and work different and be largely programmed, structured and maintained by people who do not care about usability. There are people who do care about it, but in this culture they tend to move on to other things.
All this said, the significant time I’ve spent in various forms of GNOME or KDE over two decades has not once instilled confidence in me. (Again, aside from package managers. Although with systemd now being a sprawling, hot mess prone to extreme security flaws but still heading to near universal adoption, maybe I just have no idea what’s going on, and all of this can be ignored.)
The previous section was not simply a detour. You may notice that other platforms have their own signature viewed through the platform cohesion prism. Windows 95 and Windows XP were both very cohesive. iOS started out being incredibly cohesive, has gone here and there, and is arriving at a point where I may not agree with all the decisions, but at least the apps in the OS feel reasonably consistent.
The Web is a difficult beast. Web pages, by and large, are easily understood. They have an easier job because they’re not asking for a lot of interaction. They are mostly vehicles for information (text, video) with limited interactivity. Web pages are cohesive, for the same reason reading a magazine is cohesive. There’s no learning curve.
Web apps? It depends on the app itself. The original version of Gmail looked like someone had made a UI toolkit out of Google’s own web site, but it was easy enough to use and solved more problems than it created.
Web apps as a way to implement the range of functionality most often associated with full-on desktop applications? Only very rarely done well, and I can’t think of a good example off the top of my head.
Web apps are part of the problem, but they’re not even the only part of the problem. The other part is the copy-that-floppy road of lazily emergent (read: lack of) user experience design. People wanted to make early mobile apps that put many choices at a user’s fingertips, so they invented the hamburger button, opening a sidebar menu, as a reduced example of a menu bar. Other people wanted to not change user paradigms, so they put the same interface on a tablet app. Yet other people wanted to make desktop apps look modern, so they made them look like tablet apps. And so what we now have are web implementations of 3.5”-ish touch screen assumptions for a desktop platform. If your goal is to make an application that users of desktop applications will find familiar, you couldn’t start from a worse place if you tried.
It’s not that desktop apps should look the same if you leave the planet and come back ten years later. It’s that they should at least not completely give up everything that was put in place to make them understandable and efficient; and that if they do replace those things, that they are replaced with things designed with desktop applications in mind. Shrugging your shoulders and saying “but everyone has a phone and everyone uses the web” is like arguing the door on a microwave should look like an actual house door or the lid of a toilet.
So what’s the answer?
Wipe the slate clean. I don’t mean of influences - I mean to take everything that has worked at some point or another, everything that wasn’t just ported over from somewhere else in the name of expediency, and build something new from those parts. Flat design for things that are interactive is a usability disaster because not being able to tell when things are different will slow you down. (If nothing is interactive, you don’t have a problem that a magazine art director from 1965 couldn’t solve; go about your day.)
We’re at a saddle point in history right now, where the road back makes you look old, and the road forward is daunting because who even talks about desktop PC environments anymore, right? But that line of thinking has gotten us 10-15 years of a desktop rat king, made from tablets, phones, web pages and a little backported, misappropriated good old magazine layouting. It’s time for someone to sit in a hammock for a year and work this out.
]]>This is a complicated question with a complicated answer. (If it makes things more expedient for you, feel free to just call me a shill, cult member and/or idiot.)
Picking a desktop PC platform right now is a classic case of picking your poison. Apple cares way less about their desktop platform for every passing day, but so apparently does the rest of the world. I use Windows 10 every day, and I wish I didn’t - if Microsoft was still interested in advancing their platform in the way they did between Windows Vista and Windows 7, I might switch tomorrow.
At the risk of disappearing up my own butt for a moment, it’s frighteningly clear that no one at Apple or Microsoft values the way macOS and Windows respectively has worked enough to not see turning parts of it into a tablet OS – irrespective of the fact that tablets have not gone beyond gimmicks for most desktop users – as progress.
The Linux crowd is what’s left, and they cook their own punch, so they seem like an obvious refuge. I’ve been giving them short shrift for reasons that make sense to me, but may not be obvious.
The words “user experience” is thrown around a lot these days in place of “UI” and sadly also in place of “usability”. I’ve always been curious and tried using many platforms. I cut my teeth learning to use computers in the System 6 era of the Macintosh, during the period where there was a clear chasm between the Macintosh OS and Windows 3.11. The Mac was a coherently designed platform, with cohesion, with a sense of nuance and personality. It, and Windows 95 after it, had a culture that became synonymous with the OS, that put clear expectations in your head as a user and that you could fulfill as a developer. You don’t need a single company to do this, but you need a place of authority that’s open to criticism and change, that will adapt and survive, that exudes longevity.
Unix is a platform like this, and it has a coherent and cohesive user experience. It has clear rules and ideals that make sense - they’re all about doing one thing and being able to be reused. The problem isn’t Unix. The problem is that if you don’t want to live your life inside a command prompt (no offense to the people who do), it starts to fall apart. Package managers work great. X is a trainwreck, fixing it is impossible and getting people to move to Wayland is still an uphill battle. The Unix idioms and ideas are being applied to graphical UIs, where they don’t make sense, and what results is a cacaphonic mess, not conducive to a pleasant and effortless user experience; things will look different and work different and be largely programmed, structured and maintained by people who do not care about usability. There are people who do care about it, but in this culture they tend to move on to other things.
All this said, the significant time I’ve spent in various forms of GNOME or KDE over two decades has not once instilled confidence in me. (Again, aside from package managers. Although with systemd now being a sprawling, hot mess prone to extreme security flaws but still heading to near universal adoption, maybe I just have no idea what’s going on, and all of this can be ignored.)
The previous section was not simply a detour. You may notice that other platforms have their own signature viewed through the platform cohesion prism. Windows 95 and Windows XP were both very cohesive. iOS started out being incredibly cohesive, has gone here and there, and is arriving at a point where I may not agree with all the decisions, but at least the apps in the OS feel reasonably consistent.
The Web is a difficult beast. Web pages, by and large, are easily understood. They have an easier job because they’re not asking for a lot of interaction. They are mostly vehicles for information (text, video) with limited interactivity. Web pages are cohesive, for the same reason reading a magazine is cohesive. There’s no learning curve.
Web apps? It depends on the app itself. The original version of Gmail looked like someone had made a UI toolkit out of Google’s own web site, but it was easy enough to use and solved more problems than it created.
Web apps as a way to implement the range of functionality most often associated with full-on desktop applications? Only very rarely done well, and I can’t think of a good example off the top of my head.
Web apps are part of the problem, but they’re not even the only part of the problem. The other part is the copy-that-floppy road of lazily emergent (read: lack of) user experience design. People wanted to make early mobile apps that put many choices at a user’s fingertips, so they invented the hamburger button, opening a sidebar menu, as a reduced example of a menu bar. Other people wanted to not change user paradigms, so they put the same interface on a tablet app. Yet other people wanted to make desktop apps look modern, so they made them look like tablet apps. And so what we now have are web implementations of 3.5” touch screen assumptions for a desktop platform. If your goal is to make an application that users of desktop applications will find familiar, you couldn’t start from a worse place if you tried.
It’s not that desktop apps should look the same if you leave the planet and come back ten years later. It’s that they should at least not completely give up everything that was put in place to make them understandable and efficient; and that if they do replace those things, that they are replaced with things designed with desktop applications in mind. Shrugging your shoulders and saying “but everyone has a phone and everyone uses the web” is like arguing the door on a microwave should look like an actual house door or the lid of a toilet.
]]>Being human sometimes means being gruff and conservative, sometimes wide-eyed and progressive, sometimes strict, sometimes random, sometimes irreverent. What it really boils down to is that you are many different things, often contradictory, all at the same time.
For example: When my sometimes acquaintance John Gruber writes the latest instalment in his personal bet that the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack is not long for this world and insisting that sentimentalism must not inpinge on the need for progress, he is doing so on a Movable Type installation that has been tweaked over years, on top of a background color that’s been set so long it had a Flickr group before it had a Twitter hashtag.
There’s good reason for John to do this. He writes for a living. He invented (together with the late Aaron Swartz) his own formatting language Markdown, to minimize the distance between the raw text and the desired formatting, and before that the quote curler SmartyPants, to keep typography alive on a platform that seems to have forgotten them. His site has looked more or less the exact same for at least 10 years now, and his writing process seems to be identical too. (My guess is that he’s still using BBEdit, a piece of software that debuted in 1992 for System 6.)
He has molded his tools to fit him like a glove, the way you do with something you care about. You pick through alternatives, you try new things, you settle on what works well for you.
Recently I attempted to survive a week with my phone set to the greyscale color filter, under the premise that it might seem less appealing and cool down the desire to activate it during every idle moment and bounce around between the apps. I am more hooked than I think, but it also drove home just how dysfunctional flat design (or “iOS 7 Thought”) can be.
The primary differentiator in iOS for an active button is color. Wash out colors and you’re hanging on by trying to discern the level of saturation, which varies not only from app to app, but from screen to screen. The colors are all different, since the color is intended to be a primary method of personalizing and branding apps. For me, this hell is self-imposed - for the color blind or visually impaired, this is constant. There are color filters for improving life for people living with color blindness, and there are accessibility options to turn on “button shapes”, just as to minimize motion and translucency, make text bold and set the font size.
I was going to write this post partially about Agenda, a promising app that seems to take an approach to continuous note taking that I’ve long requested. But when I downloaded it and opened it and looked around, even though it had got the mental model closer to what I’d like, it was too flat, too barren. And while iOS has a single dial for font size, Agenda has none, and no way to zoom in or increase the font size. I tried typing but it did not feel right to me. When I type posts or articles, I want my text a bit bigger; when I type other things, I want it smaller, when I read, I go back and forth.
I’m instead writing this post in Visual Studio Code, of all things, because it is a competent Markdown experience also keeping related files in reach. It’s not particularly important for this post, but it’s worth noting that it also has a flat design motif without once leaving it up for question what’s clickable. If it’s there, it’s either text in the editor or clickable - it is most likely selectable and the state of the tabs is never confusing. There are issues with the app as a whole, but they got this more right than iOS.
The phone or tablet iOS runs on is a physical object. It was considered in endless variants. The volume buttons, the lock button, the home button (something else possibly not long for this world) has to work for everyone. The user interface, the software, the soul of the device, does not have to. It is adaptive. All of iOS can change with a software update. We can go from having buttons that are clearly demarcated as buttons to buttons that we just know are buttons because of contextual cues and because the text is blue.
It’s not worth imagining this is a fundamental insight or new information, but iOS’s flat soul was inspired by advertisement materials, by page layouted brochures. The hurdle in this is that a brochure has very few, if any, interactive parts, while software is almost all interactive parts. Wanting for the elimination of computer administrative debris is worthwhile and even enviable. Wanting it to the elimination of usability, of utility, of cognitive agility is less enviable.
Needing bolder text and bigger fonts and inverted colors is fine. Needing fundamental tweaks to the aesthetics to make the user interface tractable at all means that you have failed at your job as a user interface designer. Apple’s WWDC theme is intriguing because it suggests a return in some form to user interface elements as semi-physical objects with weight, with depth, with importance and character. Laying the red herring of loupe-inspected linen textures aside, hints to inform the character of each element make the interface a thousand times smoother.
I am not going to (successfully) unite the frayed ends into a red thread. But there is something fundamentally similar in a working headphone jack being thrown out, in a flat design esthetic with little to no backing in user interface lore being forced on an entire platform and in the feeling both programmers, pro users and everyday people get when something they use has been all of a sudden “updated”. So often, the new does not maintain the core of what was useful and expedient. So often, the desire to simply progress shortchanges the priorities of the people of flesh and blood who are relying on this tool every day.
By all means, introduce new things, and by all means get rid of stuff when it’s old and busted. But new iPhones don’t make it impossible to use new wired headphones - they make it impossible to use good, common, reasonably priced wired headphones without an adapter. Bluetooth headphones may be great, but they’re not for everyone, and we are left high and dry.
And iOS’s flat aesthetic gives it an airy and maybe subjectively less dated feel, but one which still has reasonably basic usability issues even four versions in. In particular, its options may be confused for personalization at a distance, but amount to escape hatches unworthy of the world’s second most used mobile operating system. It should all be much clearer than this, and this kind of upheaval says, first and foremost, that respecting the tool’s ability to fit you like a glove is not as high a priority as, say, Apple’s desire to dip everything in new paint, some of which is vibrantly acrylic, and or ham-handedly attempt to copy the dynamic Material Design headers.
]]>We could be excused for thinking that Micro.blog is like App.net — a Twitter alternative greeted with enthusiasm but that eventually closed.
It’s not the same thing, though, and I’ll explain why.
[reasonable explanation worth reading on its own merits elided]
You might think this is too difficult for normal people, that it’s all too nerdy, and that it won’t make headway against Twitter, so who cares.
My reply: it’s okay if this is a work in progress and isn’t ready for everybody yet. It’s okay if it takes time. We don’t know how it will all work in the end.
We’re discovering the future as we build it.
I don’t fundamentally have a problem with this line of reasoning. But I do have a problem with where we end up.
You don’t need to tell me that Twitter was created as a sidecar to other projects, and was intended as a way to “check in” so that the rest of the original bunch of people knew what you were up to. The problem with Twitter isn’t that. The problem with Twitter isn’t the role that it’s played in the past few years, it’s not in a set character limit.
The problem with Twitter is that it encourages conversations with people you don’t know in a medium that is almost uniquely poorly designed to follow a conversation. It is the software equivalent to setting up a conversationalist convention, and holding it in a dark, smelly, crowded room with loud music playing and having a blood alcohol level requirement before you can enter.
And furthermore, the problem with Twitter being created, the reason it was created, is that time and time again the simple solutions get reinvented.
Unwind the tape to the start of the century. “Everyone” had a weblog. (Since I still use that term, I was obviously present.) “Everyone” hosted it themselves and could duct tape Movable Type or debate the merits of Textile. In retrospect, it is easy to understand that this wasn’t some Sheikah-like ancient civilization where every interesting person on the face of the Earth knew these things - it’s just that it was chiefly open to them.
What’s happened since then? If you’re tempted to say Facebook and Twitter, I don’t disagree with that. Tumblr also happened. Tumblr was first and more brazen about taking the very simplest expressions and pulling them into individual posts, and then gradually turning it into a “social network” with reposts.
The problem isn’t that Tumblr handles the “Mac-and-cheese” of publishing. The problem is that it is so successful at doing so that it moves the spectrum. If people have Tumblr, they are more likely to feed it with found items and paraphernalia, and less likely to write engaging things. If people have Twitter, they are more likely to feed it with one-liners and retweets and the briefest of observations. And if people have a crafted Movable Type installation, they are more likely to publish posts.
Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other platforms hooked us on the idea that the web does not have to be funny shaped and unruly and different. Twitter’s Bootstrap is helping out with the normalization process, but we’re all drawn to use the simplest thing we can figure out to share our own thoughts and the most voluble thing we can figure out to ingest those of others.
RSS and its related technologies is in some way at the core of all this. RSS had to be refined to podcasting and brought into a semi-benevolently maintained directory (Apple’s) to reach the success and adoption that it has. It’s not that no one listened - it’s that for everyone to listen, it has to come down to pointing and clicking.
There’s been precious few technologies like this for personal publishing. Those that have not had an agenda have been providing their value in a shrinking ecosystem. Even if ten useful, new and fully developed solutions popped up tomorrow, they would be subject to the same realities. And this is one half of the problem of the Do It With Open Technologies path.
The other half is that they are trying to pull together some aspect that the closed platforms handle. Most problems that the closed platforms handle are legitimate research efforts. Navigating the friend graph on Facebook, indexing tweets for hashtags, even deciding on a tweet’s ID are Hard Problems. And we’re trying to do it in a distributed way. Ask anyone doing distributed systems if this way is easier. We’re not literally trying to reconstruct and solve every problem, of course. But the result is that whatever we build, whatever our solution looks like, when viewed from a distance, is not going to be as coherent as the closed platforms.
If you’re yelling at your screen that this is the point, and that we’re not trying to remake Facebook, you’re correct. But someone moved the goal posts on us.
I am not going to touch on actual apps. But being relegated to a 3.5” prison meant that clarity had to come to the fore. Things had to be easy. Getting around had to be obvious. (And it was, before someone starting making hamburgers.) We were all taught to think in terms of the unit, and to deliver the unit, to concentrate on the morsel, which possibly could be expanded into the short scroll view.
The app for Twitter is obvious. The app for Facebook is obvious. The apps for Tumblr, Reddit, Medium and Instagram are all obvious. We could all close our eyes and imagine how they would work. The app for weblog-shaped objects is stuck at being the RSS reader. There’s nothing wrong with the RSS reader, but the focus is entirely on the technology. Maybe you could argue that it has to be to some extent because in a decentralized system you have to be able to discover things and add in other things.
Consider the web browser - if people still relied on typing in web addresses, we would all browse much, much less every day. But we don’t. We have our favorite search engine and we have links. They all depend on, but abstract, the technology below. The RSS reader is best described, when masking away particular technologies, as a “feed” reader. People understand what a web is. Most people don’t like that they have to tend to, curate, maintain a list of feeds. Maybe they wisely consider that the friction of adding a feed, not only in finding the subscribe button but in thenceforth reading more stuff, leads them to listen to fewer or more palatable opinions.
The apps that exist and are somewhat successful are the platform apps of individual actors, like Tumblr, Medium, Reddit and news aggregation apps like Apple News. (These all tend to be local, so it’s hard to exemplify them.) They all have the podcasting problem too. But being decentralized, like the web, means that everyone has to run a little piece of infrastructure wherever they host what they write. And it means that there will have to be a few open vendors to collect or refine the result of this infrastructure (Technorati then, Disqus now).
This is where I’m stuck as I think about this. I am less inclined than ever to imagine that people will start demanding sharper crayons from their hosting providers - or to consider whichever way they publish their thinking a “hosting provider”. I am less inclined than ever to imagine that individual vendors will pop up to solve the hard problems or to provide the bird’s eye view that would bring more clarity to the process.
Medium is interesting to prove that people haven’t stopped wanting to think and to publish. They’ll do so given the tools available to them. But Medium itself is still just another closed platform that would rather you read more from its network. It’s not in Medium’s best interest to point readers to things hosted outside of Medium, and it’s not even obvious to me how Medium will survive for the next few years.
Decentralization tends to lead to parts that survive on their lonesome no matter what. It would be great if this resiliency, this freedom could form an open platform. But like asking for seven red lines, all of them strictly perpendicular, some with green ink and some with transparent, there are boulders in our path that I don’t know how to work around, that make me think that what I remember wasn’t so much a golden age to which we can return but a fortuitous pocket in history, a reality that was inevitable to lose and that we would have to work very hard to bring back.
Look for something else, something big, something that changes the equation, something that makes it easier to write and less frustrating to follow and discover. For lack of anything new, we may as well all be wearing red hats.
]]>As always, there’s a risk by taking a bunch of ideas and putting them together in a concrete way that someone might say “I don’t like that, therefore the whole thing is crap”, and that’s fine. But there’s also a chance it can get people thinking “why don’t we have anything like this now?” or “why is it that no one is thinking in these terms?” and that’s what I want, more than Apple or Google or Samsung or HTC or Huawei taking this thing and literally implementing it.
So let’s start describing Up Top as if it existed and was already implemented. (This is not a rumored feature. This is just me dreaming.)
What is Up Top?
Up Top is a new part of using your phone. Up Top is where your ongoing things end up. Just like Siri is a person you can ask, Up Top is a place you can look.
It’s called Up Top because it’s above the status bar. Pull down on the status bar (or the left ear of the iPhone X) and you pull down Up Top. Pull even further to pull down the lock screen and see your notifications.
What’s in Up Top?
Anything you put there. We’ll call the things you put in Up Top items for now. There should be a snappier name for them, I just haven’t been able to think of one yet.
In a transit app, you can put the countdown to a bus or train there. In your calendar, you can put an event there, for quick access. Turn-based games like Words with Friends or Chess can put an ongoing match there.
Each of these items are the size of two app icons - you can fit two of them side by side, and if there’s a lot of information you’d like to see, you can let an item be twice as wide and fill the screen.
Sounds like notifications to me.
Notifications are a bit messy - they show up out of nowhere, go away, all show up in the same list from which they have to be cleared out. Items in Up Top are more focused. They are each associated with a thing, so they are persistent, and they’re like a little part of the app you add them from. Each item is like a widget dedicated to the thing you added.
So if you added a bus or train ride, you see the countdown in minutes, and you see how far away you are, and you can tap the item to hop straight into the app and go directly to the ride to see the rest of the info. And once you’re done with it, you can toss it.
So this is just for things that are about to happen?
No - you can also add places and people to Up Top and associate/tag other items or other things with them. You can add a store across town, and tag it with a review or shopping list. You can add a friend, and tag them with something you want to show them the next time you see them, like a link or a photo album.
That must get very crowded.
Yes and no. You can put a lot of items there, but it won’t be as crowded as you might think.
By default, what you see is the current items (like the bus countdown) and the items that are relevant to you right now.
If you have a conversation with your friend open in an app and pull down Up Top and you added them to it, their items will show up there. Same with places - if you’re physically close to a place and pull down Up Top, the items you linked with the place will show up. The friend and the place will be like folders of items - you tap them to show everything.
And of course, you can choose to see everything you put Up Top, and search for what you found.
So I have to pull down Up Top to look at things?
Yes and no.
For one thing, Up Top shows up on the lock screen too, for the same reason your recent notifications do. They’re relevant to you right now. But Up Top items also integrate with notifications.
Now, if you have a countdown or a stock quote there, it would be very distracting if they sent notifications every time it changed, every time there’s a new minute, every time there’s a new stock market tick, so that’s not what happens. But for example, the bus countdown could send you a notification when it’s about time to leave. A game match could send you a notification when it’s your turn. And you could have a stop or limit or alert for the stock quote, so that it would tell you when the market price has reached a certain point.
And when you get a notification from an item, both the item itself and the notification message will slide down and give you much more information and context than if just the notification message had appeared - which means that the notification message itself can be shorter. You can pull down Up Top and take a look at your items as they are, and when something notable happens, like your ride is here or your order has shipped, the item slides down along with the notification.
Okay, so this sounds fine, but what about the more fleeting items? I’ll have to go into apps to readd these things all the time.
You could. But when the app lets you add an item to Up Top, it can also recommend a pattern or attach to the people and places you already have there.
For example: If you have your home as a place in Up Top, you could have a template of sorts for keeping track of the next ride with the bus you take to work. It wouldn’t send you any notifications or be visually conspicuous, but if you have to head off to the bus, you slide down Up Top, tap Home and tap the template item for your bus. It turns into the real item, you see the countdown, you start getting any related notifications, and so on - all without you having to set it up again from scratch.
So what’s the difference between this and a widget then?
A widget is one thing to summarize the state of an entire app. It’s an overview (like the next few upcoming calendar events), or it’s a mirror of the most important function in an app (like a mini calculator or the result of the number in a clipboard for a directory app). Widgets are still useful for what they are. Up Top items are like what would happen if the particular thing you were interested in in one app got to have its own widget.
]]>* Mileage may vary.
** Available with sports package.
*** While supplies last. Limited to two per household. Star Wars is a registered trademark of the Walt Disney Corporation.
**** Suggested retail price.
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Dear senior executive,
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I sat down to read an article shared to me by my grandmother on FACEBOOK, INC. [FB; 184.33; -0.34 (-0.18%); at close: 4:00PM EST; stock prices provided by Varyzen for informational uses only] and I was simply put, floored – for quality flooring, enjoy Lowe’s new line of walnut parquet – by the clarity and efficacy of your original content – create your own weblog now at WordPress.com.
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Not only was it relevant and insightful, I was unable to locate any promotional consideration. As a concerned customer, I must insist that you include more advertisements, so as to ensure your continued survival – stock your go bag and bunker with quality MREs at The End is Nigh.
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The Average Internet Content Consumer
If you are one of the five now living people who have not yet seen one of the first TED talks to break when they started being published, allow me to summarize the Malcolm Gladwell talk on spaghetti sauce:
Howard Moskowitz is a psychophysicist - an expert in what satisfies us. One of his clients is Pepsi, who is developing Diet Pepsi and demands of him to find the right level of sweetness in a small span of allowed sweetness. He does the obvious thing of making small batches of Pepsi at each interval of sweetness, but there’s no dominant, obvious perfect match. This bedevils him long past the end of the contract until he figures out that there’s not necessarily one perfect, platonic Diet Pepsi.
He sets out to broadcast this notion, at significant loss for his career. Eventually he is hired by Prego spaghetti sauce, where he tries out his theories by varying many constituent parts, and uncovering the need (and untapped market demand) for chunky spaghetti sauce, which is launched to great commercial success. With products that cater better to many different stances, customers will be happier, because they get something closer to what they desire.
The arrow of Apple, over time, is to strip down products to bare essentials. Fewer parts. Design that does not hit you over the head with how someone sweated over something. (You may think that Apple products look ostentatious, but go pick up a “gaming” oriented product and count the number of discrete surfaces, or angles, or glowing LEDs, or trackpads placed above the keyboard, and consider how much worse anodizing the whole thing rose gold really would have been.)
This is fine and good, but it also means that they want to remove as much as they can possibly remove. Make thinner as much as they possibly can make thinner. Recently, we’re seeing this desire fight actual purposefulness.
Apple has to keep around last generation’s MacBook Pro and MacBook Air for the increasing number of people who do not want to live the dongle life, or worry that keys will be put out of commission by pieces of dust. And Apple had to publicly admit defeat in having bet on the wrong, minimalistic, two-GPUs-bolted-to-the-side-of-a-cooling-core horse and remake the Mac Pro from scratch.
What I’m proposing is that it doesn’t have to be a tug of war. There is a way to solve this. It’s called introducing another product.
Slide the current Touch Bar MacBook Pro down and call it MacBook Pro Mini. (This or Pro Air. It’s not a perfect name, but they currently sell both the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro and they’re both pricey Pro desktops that differ by four years and one letter, so get off my back.) Leave it as is - allow it to get even thinner, even.
Introduce a new MacBook Pro, that is as “thick” as the previous MacBook Pro. Put MagSafe 2 on it, put Thunderbolt 3 on it, put USB-A 3.1 on it, put an SD card slot on it, put a headphone jack on it. Put its existing keyboard on it, function keys and all. Upgrade it to some variation of the butterfly mechanism if the improvements involve figuring out a way for it not to be disabled by individual specks of dust.
What about the Touch Bar? Make it a customizable option and put it above the keyboard (between it and the hinge) where it rests outside of the keyboard area.
Stuff it full of batteries. Stuff it full of discrete graphics capable of running two 5K displays. Stuff it full of 2 TB worth of SSD, 32 GB full of RAM.
Slice off some of it for the 13” version, to make it all fit. For extra credit, make a 17” version again and go nuts.
There’s nothing controversial about this. (Maybe the Touch Bar.) I know the traumas and the war stories, but this is not a return to Steve Jobs coming to Apple and finding 15 lines of Macs whose strengths he couldn’t figure out. This is the same number of Mac laptops Apple already sells today, and with significantly improved messaging. This is a single spectrum: thinner means less capable but also less power hungry, and, well, thinner. Thicker means more capable. And even the thickest model isn’t thicker than what Apple is comfortable selling today.
If you are comfortable living the dongle life and not having function keys, pick the Pro Mini. If you need the power, pick the Pro. If your needs are the computational equivalent of subsisting on water and plankton and plug nothing in ever, pick the MacBook. No labyrinthine flowcharts required. No need to axe products that already exist. Just to offer more beside them, so that those of us who care can still do our job.
Apple isn’t uncomfortable making tradeoffs, it’s uncomfortable admitting to them. Don’t keep around last year’s model - simply make more models with clear and meaningful distinctions that appeal to more people, and put the desire for optimization to good use in making fewer debilitating compomises for each of them. Don’t pretend that you can only make one.
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