Extenuating Circumstances is a weblog by Dan Hon

WWDC 2007 – First Reactions

I missed live coverage of WWDC this year (and by live, I mean sitting in front of MacRumors Live) and an AIM chat ably hosted by Coates. Instead, I got home after the Stevenote finished and fired up the usual suspects as well as checking out my Twitter stream for any particularly enjoyable ejaculations of joy.

I find myself vaguely jaded by the announcements. After the unbearable tension of waiting for the ten new “features”, here’s the actual new stuff

Desktop

• The menu bar is now transparent. I apologise for being a little ranty, bitter or spool-y here, but isn’t the point of the menu bar, its anchoring to the same place, a nice Fitt’s law feature? I get that it’s easy to hit, that it has a nice target area, but it would also help if it were easy to read. I get that it’s trendy. It’s just my eyes really aren’t what they used to be.
• The Dock’s now in 3D. Well, ih. At least it doesn’t have physics. I guess that’s coming in 10.6.
• PilesStacks look like they can only live in your Dock, which I guess is a spatial-ish way of dealing with them, in that they’ll always be in the same place in your Dock. And only your Dock. They’re a bit like pie menus.
• You know, given Core Animation, I’m surprised AppleSteve was so restrained…
• Updated: Rich, in comments, asks what the Dock’ll look like for those of us who have it on the left side of the screen (Rich, rightly, keeps his Dock on the left side. I’ll shoot anyone who keeps it on the right).

Finder

• I don’t actually mind that much about Coverflow view. I can see how it could be useful. I ask that Ars add Coverflowed Address Book to Bingo for the next WWDC, though.
• The new “near my Mac” is nice. In a Network Neighbourhood kind of way.
• We had to wait for a major revision to enable “and,” “or,” or “not” in search requests, functionality that was already in the Spotlight API, just not exposed through the UI. I’M SO GLAD MAC OS X ENGINEERS WERE DIVERTED TO IPHONE.

Quick Look

• At least it wasn’t QuickLook
• I really could give a toss about Quick Look. XP’s got it, it’s called the shell. Apple might say “Opening files is so 2006″, in response, I say “Waiting until 2007 to be able to preview them is so XP”

I’m skipping Time Machine and Spaces because nothing at all appears to have changed.

Mail

• Why, exactly, are todos and notes in Mail? Did the iLife/Address Book/iCal team get distracted by the Mail team, who suddenly realised that they needed to justify their existence?
• Maybe Mail’s got a decent IMAP implementation in Leopard. And maybe I can have a pony.
• Oh wait. Mail also stole RSS from Safari. Which makes sense, I suppose.
• I do like this, though:
  

  Say you get an email invitation to dinner. What if Mail recognized the address of the restaurant and let you map directions on the web? Or let you click once to add the date to your iCal calendar? With Leopard, it does. Mail even recognizes combinations of data in phrases like “lunch tomorrow at 12 p.m. at 701 Baltic Ave, San Francisco, CA,” making it easy to make plans.

  I wonder if it’s system-wide for all text, or just inside Mail’s text windows?

Watch me callously proceed to not care about any changes to iChat. Instead:

iCal

• In a bizarre turn of events, iCal now looks more like Windows Calendar, which looked like iCal. My head hurts.
• OHMYGOD INLINE EDITING.
• The rest of iCal only really works with iCal Server or any other WebDAV server, and is only really interesting if you’re still annoyed that Exchange is still the only goodleast shit group calendaring solution, or you’re the kind of person who likes to send a fricking video along with a meeting invitation. And I know there are people out there who’d embed the video in a Word document first. Idiots.

I shall repeat the callous not-caring trick with Dashboard and skip on to:

Safari

• Resizable form fields are pretty funky, and my WordPress install form widgets all look different now
• Typeahead Find, oops, Find Inline, is nice and just repeats what Firefox does, only it looks like the kind of thing I’d be happy using while wearing a black “I (Apple Logo) Code” T-shirt and blue jeans in a Starbucks with a Macbook Pro. Oh wait, that’s me.
• Er, that’s it, really. I suppose there’s a graph that says it’s faster.
• Oh, and now, as Tom points out, now we have another browser target to test against. Only now, we can test against Safari for Windows on Parallels on a Mac!

The callous not-caring trick continues with Parental Controls, Boot Camp (because it’s pretty much the same as the current beta), Photo Booth (ARE YOU SERIOUS? PHOTO BOOTH’S A FEATURE?), Front Row, DVD Player, Accessibility and Automator.

As usual, it’s in the Technology section that we find some gems. Or, rather, two gems:

Multicore

• NSOperation looks interesting: “NSOperation, a breakthrough new API that optimizes applications for the world of multicore processing. Independent chunks of computation (operations) are added to an NSOperationQueue, which dynamically determines how many operations to run in parallel based on the current architectures. So there’s no need to hand-code the complexities of threading and locking. You simply describe the operations in a program along with their dependencies. Cocoa takes care of the rest.”

Unix

• Autofs
• Did you hear that? Autofs
• This is what Apple has to say about Autofs: “The brand-new multithreaded autofs filesystem layer keeps track of which paths are actually located on remote AFP, SMB, or NFS fileservers — even across symlinks — and automatically mounts the appropriate server. The Finder and other applications needn’t wait for one mount to complete before requesting another. Now you can specify automount paths for your entire organization using the same standard automounter maps (e.g., NIS) supported by Linux or Solaris.”
• Let me pick out some key words there. Like multithreaded and, say, a phrase like “the Finder and other applications needn’t wait for one mount to complete before requesting another“.
• I think this is something along the lines of “you mean, if I disconnect from a network share, Finder in Leopard shouldn’t beachball? I can has hat and eated it for you pls kthx?

Er, that’s it. There’s also the news that iPhone development will be AJAXy, which, as Jones puts it is either genius or madness. Ih. Facebook on the iPhone will mean it won’t matter.

So. I think I’m pretty jaded.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering how the new 3D dock will look to those of us who like to keep their docks on the left side of the screen.

I think the new Finder looks like a huge improvement. If only there were a “pro” version of it that incorporated some of the neat stuff in PathFinder. Also, there doesn’t appear to be a tabbed Finder interface, which was a bit of a surprise.

(Left-handed people are allowed to keep it on the right, although I guess they also have to turn off display of discs and things on their desktop or else it will all clash horribly. I have no reference to back this up at the moment, but research shows that right-handed people can hit targets more accurately sweeping from right to left than from left to right; I guess that the opposite is true for left-handed people.)

Wouldn’t Fitt’s Law make that point moot, though?

On the other hand, I’m not even sure Leopard will even allow you to have icons on your desktop, so…

[...] transparent menu bar is insane. If you had asked me a couple years ago whether this or the gratuitous Dock reflections were [...]

Re Garoo: I suppose Fitt’s Law makes hitting the menubar as an entire target moot, but once you’re at the menubar, hitting individual menubar items might become somewhat harder now that they’re transparent…

I was mentioning Fitt’s Law as a reply to Rich’s comment :) The transparent menubar makes me want to throw up.

Having now looked, I can’t find anything on anisotropies in Fitt’s law. So I’ll revise my position to: I find it easier to hit targets on the left than on the right, using either mouse or trackpad.

I also fail to understand the point of a transparent menu bar. Maybe it’s so Leopard can have 300 new features rather than merely 299.

You are going to shoot me? Can I get a date on that?

I founded and sold a general purpose search site in the 1990s and I currently own a niche site whose main feature involves search. As much as it personally mystifies and pains me, I can tell you: NOBODY USES ADVANCED SEARCH FEATURES. I have the logs to prove it. Nobody uses booleans. Nobody uses phrase or adjacency searches. Nobody. They’ll send you an e-mail before they use stuff like that.

I still think it’s worth it as a hidden feature, with a defined search syntax, as Google handles it. But it does take development time and add complexity. We first got rid of the boolean radio buttons and then the link to Advanced Search. It makes the page much cleaner.

So I think Apple may not care about adding search features because (1) they like simplicity, and (2) they know it’s something that only librarians would use.

[...] reflections were Leopard or Vista features, I would have guessed Vista.(via:daringfireball.net) I get that it’s easy to hit, that it has a nice target area, but it would also help if it were easy to read. I get that it’s [...]

Re Stephen – I take and understand your point about only a tiny minority using advanced search features. I think the point still stands though that it’s bizarre that Spotlight itself supported booleans, but that all Apple appear to have done is added support for keywords in the Spotlight interface at top right.

I see your point about simplicity and librarians – I guess it jibes a little with my assumption that Apple strived for simplicity and functionality at the same time – yes, strip away what’s not needed, but intelligently provide a simple interface for advanced features at the same time.

Talking about Fitt’s Law – Windows versions of Safari and iTunes throw out Fitt’s Law COMPLETELY, even by replacing perfectly acceptable top-left and top-right infinite targets in Windows OS with nothing, and a five-pixel-from-the-edge X button, respectively. Form over function. This is supposed to win people over?

I have to disagree with you about keeping the dock on the left. Maybe things have changed since the early days of OS X, but when I first started with it, many programs had problems with opening windows on the left hand of the screen and not respecting left side dockness. This made it a major pain in the ass to close a window since the close button was always under the dock. That’s when I started putting the dock on the right and I quite frankly think its the best way to go.

However, putting the dock on the bottom just seems absurd to me since virtually all Mac users have horizontal pixels to burn, yet lack in the vertical space department.

Re Hank: Yes, Apple on Windows is a mess. I don’t imagine that it’s going to win people over – not in the UI sense – in that regard, Safari and iTunes will aggravate Windows users who’ve become used to the conventions of the Windows interface; it’s just more evidence that the new post-Jobs Apple appears to be paying less strict attention to the HIG and, yes, more to form over function.

Re Ed: I remember there being problems with programs opening windows on the left and not respecting left-sided docking, but that problem appears to have more or less vanished now.

On the other hand, I agree with this predisposition for placing the Dock on the bottom. Okay, fine, it’s visually pleasing, centred and balanced, but you’re right: there just aren’t enough vertical pixels.

Jaded is putting it kindly. Anyone who says that Apple isn’t a consumer electronics company first is fooling themselves at this point.

Coverflow in the finder? iTunes would have been a good model for the Finder if they had taken the feature that people actually care about, the metadata. If I could use the Finder as a metadata repository for my photos, music, etc… then a lot of organization apps would no longer be necessary (iTunes and iPhoto, I am looking at you.) Instead we got large flipping previews.

Weak.

Oh, and the autofs stuff? That should be in a point release from maybe 10.2. How about fixing finder FTP (and adding SFTP?)

MS, pay attention, you have just been granted the largest reprieve ever, don’t squander it, take your A-teams and fix up Vista properly.

So what should Leopard have had?

Top of my list is support for client-server database connections in Cocoa.

“I’ll shoot anyone who keeps it on the right”

fight you! i know the window widgets are on the left, but i always use key commands. holy crap, the only thing that feels worse than having the dock on the bottom is the LEFT. parts stick out and overlap important stuff.

i sure get tired of apple saying there’s xyz new features, then discovering there’s only 3 i care anything about, and that they’re all things people have been yelling about for years. or that “features” really means “anything we changed around to make things look different, new functionality optional”. the unified interface is a welcome “feature”, and by that i mean “long overdue like since 10.1″.

Shoot me for having the dock on the right? I think that’s where it makes the most sense. Every window we work on, we try to maximize its size – by moving it as far left as possible, and dragging it as far down as possible. A Dock on the left or bottom gets in the way.

I keep my dock on the right, Where God Intended It To Be.

Okay I am left handed…

But still the Bottom makes no sense given widescreen displays, the real estate is on the sides.

The left is much more likely to clash with document windows, which belong with the menubar, tucked up in the corner and along the left.

The obvious free space is the right, and who has disk icons up visible anyway…

:o)

Stacks: Anyone else notice they’re upside-down?

Take the Downloads stack demo’d. You download something and want to access it. So, you click on the Downloads stack. Then, you have to go to the TOP (far end) of the fanned-out items to hit the one you want!

IMHO, the “front” of the stack should remain at the bottom, close to right where your mouse already is. Would save significant mouse mileage.

Re akatsuki: Yes, autofs should’ve been a point release from around 10.2, so there’s a little of cutting Apple some slack for something as simple as not locking up a machine when a network mount goes missing.

As for Coverflow in the Finder – well, I can see how it might be useful. It’s just not particularly exciting. I’m also quite sure that metadata in users’ files is a complicated UI mess, and given how people are quite happy to use Google’s one text-input field solution as being ‘good enough’, probably something that we won’t get, not when Spotlight’s around.

As for the right-vs-left Dock debate (I hope you all realise that it’s all light-hearted, but then again, this is Apple we’re talking about, so we’ll be going all religious wars in a day or so), I only rather belatedly realised that one of the reasons why I’m probably more comfortable with the Dock on the left is just through scanning text from left-to-right. My eyes are drawn more naturally to the top-left corner of the screen. I wonder if there’s a correlation with right-to-left language readers preferring the Dock on the right.

Re Tom Dibble: Yes, Stacks are upside down. I also read somewhere that they rather unfortunately take on the name of the first item selected in a group when they’re created (so a bunch of applications used to create a Stack in one of the demos becomes the “Address Book Stack”).

[...] about Apple all day. Here’s what my Google Analytics stats looked like after I wrote my WWDC reactions [...]

[...] Originally Posted by analogika  That’s kind of the opposite of what you’re claiming. Yeah, but I think that inkhead’s high.   And also in the minority. [...]