Solipsism Gradient

I forgot to mention that now, for the first time, all shipping Macs have at least two CPU cores. Amazing. It also leaves behind with the machines I have available for testing, namely, an iBook (G3) which can still boot 10.0, a PowerBook G4, an iMac G5, and an Intel mini (core solo). So I need a dual-core 64-bit machine to round things out… hm.

I was reading over my own last and some other opinions on the net. Seems some people are expecting an Airport Express optimized for video… I’ve never used (or even seen from close-up) an Airport Express, but I’m not sure this would be all that interesting, or even possible within the current form factor. Wouldn’t it need a DVI or at least S-Video output, meaning a reasonable video card with all the DACs etc.?

Anyway, there are two other products I’d like to see from Apple.

The first might be a RAID network/backup box, but done right. Think Xsan for the home… maybe stackable modules to add any reasonable number of drives.

The second would be something in between an iPod nano and the Airport Express. An inexpensive (under $80) local controller, with a headphone jack, plugged into AC but with an iPod-like screen and controller to allow you to stream any playlist from a central music server. There are some boxes like that on the market, but they’re expensive and more geared towards connecting to an amplifier. Instead, think of something that could be mounted on a each threadmill in a gym, or at each table in a restaurant.

Not that I think these are too likely to happen, but who knows?

Things seem to be moving along well. Here are some random observations.

As I thought, Time Machine is starting to prompt manufacturers to begin offering affordable RAID backup systems. First out there was the D-Link DNS-323, which has 2 SATA drives and a gigabit network interface, and now there’s the Iomega UltraMax (no URL yet), 2 SATA drives and USB/Firewire interface. At WWDC I actually looked for such a product but couldn’t find anything suitable; they were all too large, too expensive or both. Time Machine without RAID means putting all your backups into one basket, so expect lots of better and less expensive backup drives to show up before or at next MacWorld Expo in January 2007.

The 64-bit iMacs are just out, as well as speed-bumped Mac minis. The timing on this is significant. There’s the mysterious “showtime” event announced for Sept.12, the initial day of Apple Expo Paris – and also the final day of IBC Amsterdam, the “content creation” conference. On the end of the month Apple will be present at Photokina. Of course this means that the upgrade are not significant enough to be presented at these events; rumors are flying about what media-related products will be announced. I suppose that movie sales over the iTunes Music Store is pretty much a given, although that’d a pretty unexciting, US-centric, thing by itself.

I suppose that the putative iPhone might be counted under “media”, as everybody seems to expect a phone-capable iPod instead of a music-capable cellphone under that name. While I’m a happy owner of a 3rd-gen iPod – by coincidence bought in Paris shortly after Steve Job’s last Apple Expo keynote 3 years ago – I can’t see why I would want a cellphone built into it. Or a PDA; I bought the original Palm Pilot when it came out and couldn’t get used to that either.

Should Apple bring out a product that might be classified as a “phone”, as a stockholder I seriously hope it’s not a me-too cellphone/music player/PDA. Just look at the restrictions that have so far hampered world-wide deployment of the iTMS. Combine that with the hundreds of technical and regulatory circumstances that govern cellphones in the various countries, and it’s a recipe for disaster; just check out what happened to that Motorola/Apple phone. So, hopefully, Apple will bring out something pioneering and generally usable – perhaps involving new wireless and VoIP technologies.

The iMac announcement also has deeper meaning. With the new 64-bit chips supposedly running faster at the same price point, it’s mostly a question of chip availability to convert all the line. I seriously expect all Macs to be 64-bit capable in January. Converting the iMacs at this time also means that more developers will have extra time to port their apps, if necessary. When Leopard comes out sometime between January and March a surprising number of applications will be ready for it.

Update: Apple has patented a “multi-functional hand-held device” that purports to:

… include two or more of the following device functionalities: PDA, cell phone, music player, video player, game player, digital camera, handtop, Internet terminal [and/or] GPS or remote control.

The patent covers:

Touch Screen, Touch Sensitive Housing, Display Actuator, Multi-Functionality, Form Factor, One-Handed vs. Two-Handed Operation, Footprint/Size, Full Screen Display, Limited Number of Mechanical Actuators, Adaptability, GUI Based on Functionality, Switching Between Devices (GUI), Operating at Least Two Functionalities Simultaneously, Configurable GUI (User Preferences), Input Devices, Pressure or Force Sensing Devices, Force Sensitive Housing, Motion Actuated Input Device, Mechanical Actuators, Microphone, Image Sensor, Touch Gestures, 3-D Spatial Gestures, Perform Action Based on Multiple Inputs, Differentiating Between Light and Hard Touches, Example of a New Touch Vocabulary, Speaker, Audio/Tactile Feedback Devices, Communication Devices (wired & wireless) and Change UI Based on Received Communication Signals.

…all that’s missing is a biological signal sensor and a recreational pharmaceutical dispensing device, to make this the functional equivalent of the “Joymaker” Frederik Pohl wrote about in his 1965 book The Age of the Pussyfoot. I wonder if that counts as “prior art”…?

It’s here, and about time. Hopefully I’ve fixed all known bugs and incorporated most reasonable suggestions…

…now back to XRay II.

Well, I’ve received a number of e-mails and comments about Nudge’s new “touch” behavior; some like it, some want it to go back to the old standard.

I’ll probably release a 1.1.1 version that switches from one to the other by using the Option key. However, what should be the default? I tend towards doing “Nudge & Touch” as the default, myself…

The Nudge Contextual Menu is now universal, with version 1.1. This will work on both PowerPC and Intel Macs under Tiger. It now also changes the nudged item’s access and modification timestamps, like the Unix command “touch”… this may be useful even for local items. Since Tiger, the Finder is much more responsive in updating changed items on local volumes, but still may lag behind for network volumes.

WWDC 2006 had two main topics: the new Mac Pros and Leopard. Regarding the Mac Pros, they seem quite competitive and well-built. I’m very content with my current iMac G5 (which I bought at last year’s WWDC), so I haven’t looked at them closely; desk space is important to me. By the way, it seems that Apple Brazil has just released the local price of the standard configuration, and it comes out to US$5400. Ouch.

Regarding Leopard, there’s a nice write-up at Wikipedia, so I won’t try to enumerate everything here.

All in all, I can say this was one of my best WWDCs yet. As I’ve said before, the timing was excellent. Apple has obviously made the most of the (unusual) June-to-August delay and from the developer standpoint all important stuff was in place. Most of the Leopard APIs seem to be well-defined, reasonably stable, and of course the tools are all in place. Xcode 3.0 and the new developer tools “just work”. In one Q&A session Chris Espinosa, was asked about the stability of the tools – whether developers should rely on them for new products, or should wait for the GM release – answered “we all use them daily for building Leopard, so they have to work well!”

So, this is important news for developers. Before, existing tools were used to build a new system and the next generation of tools came out with (or after) the GM release. Now, Apple has obviously been working on the new stuff iteratively; first versions of the new frameworks were used to build first versions of the new tools, then those were in turn re-used to work on the new frameworks. Certainly this has always happened to some extent, but I believe that this synergy between tools and frameworks has now hit an important inflection point.

Apple has clearly been working towards this for years. Mac OS X ‘s frameworks are now 4-way universal, containing binaries for PowerPC 32, PowerPC 64, Intel 32 and Intel 64 bits. Therefore, applications can now be built for all 4 environments, and all are fully supported by the new developer tools. This is a well-known capability of the Mach-O executable format by the way, not a new thing; NeXT applications were also distributed for several architectures, and the Virtual PC 7 executable has binaries optimized for 5 (!) different PowerPC variants.

Framework synergy is a marvelous thing. Apple has just released a short movie showing off CoreAnimation. The “city towers” effect in the second half can be now rendered in realtime on a MacPro – something that even two years ago would have been impossible. Looking very closely you can see that some of those squares are actually playing movies! But only a developer can fully appreciate the other important aspect: the code to generate this movie has shrunk down to less than 10% of what would have been necessary in Tiger.

Let’s talk somewhat vaguely (NDA mumble mumble) about how synergy might have made this happen in the CoreAnimation case. The MacPro has a faster, 64-bit CPU architecture, as well as faster video cards. 64-bit processes can use extra CPU registers and the new vector operations which seem to, finally, have equivalent power to the PowerPC G5’s AltiVec. The LLVM compiler is now used in the OpenGL stack to add a significant speedup (and this even for low-end machines!). Add in Quartz optimizations. Add in easy Cocoa support for all of these. Add in runtime efficiences introduced by Objective C 2.0. Add in new debugging and optimization made possible by implementing DTrace. Add in the ease of programming all this with less and more reliable code. Add in some extra stuff I can’t talk about… it adds up! And comparable gains are visible all through the new system.

At the risk of repeating myself, all this ho-hum talk about Leopard just being Spaces, Time Machine and some UI tweaks to iChat and Mail is so wrong. Granted that Steve Jobs had to show some non-developer news at the keynote, given the wildly unrealistic expectations. But, it really was a Developer Preview. It was released at the right time and to the right people in order to make sure that, whenever the Leopard GM comes out (my guess would be in January at MacWorld Expo), some hundred cool new applications will be available on the same day. And they’ll necessarily be Leopard-only; expect Leopard to be adopted by a significant portion of the user base in a very short timeframe.

Now to my own projects. I’d really love to have the upcoming XRay II to be Leopard-only, but that would delay release too much, and it doesn’t really need 64-bit capabilities. However, I’ll really need some fixes introduced in the last Tiger updates, so 10.4.7 will be the minimum supported version, which should be no hardship, as I can’t imagine anyone voluntarily staying with older Tiger versions. However, some of the stuff I’ve seen at WWDC has completely changed my plans regarding certain features and capabilities, so I’ll opt for implementing things in a way that might be a little constrained under Tiger but will really be much better under Leopard.

RBSplitView has been a marvelous experience for me. It’s been very widely adopted and even the Cocoa team has promised to take a look at it (no promises, of course). And it was very gratifying to be instantly recognized by many famous developers – of course my XRay II/RBSplitView t-shirt was intended to make this very easy! I’ve received lots of positive feedback and I’m working hard on implementing my own fixes and all suggestions. Hopefully I’ll have version 1.1.4 out in a very short time. This should be universal and fully compatible with Xcode 2.4. A 64-bit version compatible with the new Interface Builder will, unfortunately, have to wait until a more widely available Leopard beta comes out – I’m waiting for word from Apple about when it’ll be kosher, as I’ll necessarily have to include some new Leopard headers and APIs.

I have updated Nudge to be universal, and it seems to still be useful on Tiger for mounted network volumes. Expect the update to be available in a few days – I’m still doing some last-minute checking. Zingg! is, unfortunately, much harder to update at the moment. I haven’t touched it since 1.4.1 came out over 2 years ago, and the source code has been pushed out to some CDR backups – and the two I’ve found are, sadly, unreadable. I still have some hope of finding a copy someday (there’s a ton of stuff stashed away from my move), but don’t count on it. Recoding it from the ground up will have to wait for Leopard, where it’ll be much easier to do – there were some awful undocumented things I had to do at the time. Sorry about that. The USInternational keyboard layout will soon be repackaged in a way that (hopefully) will work around the “custom keyboard layout is randomly deselected” bug in Tiger. I’ll need to wait for a Leopard beta to come out to check if it’ll be upwardly compatible, though. I’m trying (again) to go through Apple channels to have it included with the standard system, perhaps this time it’ll work out?

OK, we’re back and I’m in the process of merging my data and getting stuff back into place… updates later in the day.

Well, WWDC was over yesterday, a bit too abruptly for my taste. Even more abruptly than usual, they started pushing people out of Moscone at 12:30 sharp, and I somehow had counted on the labs being open until 1PM.

As it stands, several people I hadn’t had a chance to met did turn up on the last minute, and we had to have a somewhat uncomfortable short chat at the doors. I think that Apple should have a long lunch on the last day, closing the doors not before 2PM. Or reschedule the (to me, largely useless) Beer Bash for Friday afternoon.

My feelings about the conference are best expressed by the famous Gary Larson cartoon “My brain is full”. Well, it may not be full now, but it certainly felt like it during the first 3 days. So much to learn, or even to glance over to see if it will apply to what I’m doing.

That said, we’ve had a day to relax, do a final stroll around San Francisco, and get our stuff packed in a reasonably TSA-compliant way. I bought Amit Singh‘s magnum opus, “Mac OS X Internals” and it contains even more information. Whew. But I’m certain all this has been an excellent investment.

At least, this time, I won’t have a significant e-mail backlog and will be able to get right back to work on Tuesday, after sleeping off the jetlag. I made over 900 pictures with my new camera, so expect Flickr posting to resume soon…