Re: [NTLK] The "iMoleskine" ?

Marty,

> > Well the iPodisation continues industry-wide but I have a feeling
> > that while OSX and Cocoa are strategically very important for Apple,
> > they are getting bored with the Mac. The Mac instantiation of OSX
> > does not really seem to be going anywhere but the proliferation of
> > touch-related patents indicates they are thinking about new ways to
> > control the machine. There are three possibilities:

> I disagree completely with this characterization. I feel that you are
> projecting your own dissatisfaction with the state of desktop OS (mac
> in this case) onto Apple's engineers/product designers.

Quite right too. All inventors are dissatisfied with stasis. Their
nature and their function is to say that something is dead and needs
to be replaced long before anyone else agrees. When it finally does
get replaced, as it will, people will Oooh! and Ahhhh! but it will be
old news here.

Mac OS is moribund. There has been no innovation of any real
significance for a very long time and all the major behaviours and
principles are unchanged other than in tiny details. Swapping out
processors and the OS underpinnings do not constitute innovation
other than the sort of housekeeping necessary to keep up with
hardware developments (which _are_ genuine progress) and the need to
keep the product looking fresh while not really changing anything. As
Mac OS has ambled down the decades we have lost as much as we have
gained. Dotting Is and crossing Ts is not progress when so many new
problems and bugs are constantly being created.

People getting excited by corner radii on windows is what we are left
with.

If Steve's guys are not bored, why does the product look and feel so
old? Oh yes, they must have been writing a new Finder that works -
no, wait a minute that's not right, err... how about an improvement
to opening and saving files? Nope, same as my 1980s Mac. Soups,
shared data, linked data, embedded data? None of that either.
Look, the artificial divisions between application data must have
been broken down in all this time! No?
What, it can't read its own files from a few years ago either? Pity.

Must be the apps. then. Funny though how Mail looks and works exactly
like Outlook Express from more than a decade ago and Pages is like
MacWrite but slower, buggier, harder to use and getting to look more
and more like MacWrite after every release. All those cool ideas of
using font and colour panels not working so well then?

Heck, it must be something. Window widgets? They look pretty much the
same to me as they always did. Overlapping windows with a title bar
and some buttons? Scroll bars? Modal dialogs? Menus? Volumes that
mount on the desktop? How about a user configurable file system
database? Not likely.

OK, how about not losing data when an app. crashes? Ummmm, no, it
still disappears like it always did. I know, how about anticipating
the users next likely action or learning from past actions? Can't say
I have seen much of this. Come on, how about having to constantly
switch between 20 windows and 12 applications just to manage some
small project, surely that has got better? Hasn't it?

Copying and pasting data from one app. to another should be a breeze
now! What, it's still a bit of a lucky dip? No format conversion? No
automatic recognition of tabular or outline data? In 24 years! No
multiple system clipboard? Not even a shelf?

Surely, there has to be something! Or is it that Apple have really,
really, innovated the Mac but no one knows what that actually is or
why we spend the same time or longer doing the same things we did in
the 90s or that the Mac is still a fearsomely complex machine to manage?

The Mac was a huge innovation, as was the Newton and the iTouch
machines but that first one was nearly quarter of a century ago -
glacial change.

Joel.

====================================================================
The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://www.newtontalk.net/
The Official Newton FAQ - http://www.splorp.com/newton/faq/
The Newton Glossary - http://www.splorp.com/newton/glossary/
WikiWikiNewt - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
====================================================================
Received on Mon May 19 19:10:22 2008