Solipsism Gradient

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…

Well, here are some questions I’ve been asked frequently at the conference, and the answers. (Some will no doubt be asked afterwards too, so I’ve included those too…)

Q: Why is my application not included on the RBSplitView adopters page?

A: Probably you didn’t send me e-mail about it, or my spam filter didn’t like it. So tell me again.

Q: I’ve been looking for you at the conference and didn’t find you!

A: I’m mostly around the labs. Look for me there, or in the intervals. I’m wearing a white XRay t-shirt and carrying a blue backpack.

Q: Where did you get that XRay t-shirt?

A: I had several made at CafePress just in time for the conference.

Q: Why isn’t Apple using RBSplitView? NSSplitView sucks.

A: Well, this time I actually talked to people in charge of that process (and of NSSplitView itself); they’ve agreed that it could be better and also agreed to take a look, no promises. So start bugging them instead of me.

Q: When is the next version of RBSplitView coming out, and what will be new?

A: Hopefully a few weeks after I get home. I’ve already fixed some bugs and extended some functionality. In particular, if you push a divider towards a direction where there are subviews already collapsed or at minimum dimension they’ll be pushed away. Also, RBSplitView will now behave correctly when inside a NSScrollView, and I’ve already used this to build a Finder-like filebrowser (columns mode). Finally, the new version will be Xcode 2.4-compliant and Universal out of the box, errh, download.

Q: Will RBSplitView run on Leopard?

A: Well, I’ll certainly have to do a completely new version implementing all the new stuff – 64 bits, palette for the new Interface Builder, Objective-C 2.0, NSAnimation, other stuff I can’t talk about. Meanwhile, the upcoming version will probably be the last one for Tiger. RBSplitView apps compiled for Tiger seem to run OK under Leopard as far as I could test.

Q: Will you/Apple sue Apple/you? Did they pay you big bucks? Will Apple/you change the XRay/Xray name?

A: No, no, no, and no. See my last post.

Q: When is XRay II coming out?

A: Well, my hope was to show a public beta perhaps a month after the conference. What I’ve seen at the conference has changed my mind about a number of things, made others obsolete, some impossible, some much easier than I anticipated. Still, I’ll have something visible out ASAP.

Q: What changed in Objective-C/Finder/Xcode/iChat/Mail/…/Leopard???

A: Not much, only Steve knows, nothing yet, a lot, didn’t see that, can’t tell. Guess which…

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Still, Steve Jobs said many features were still “top secret”. I suppose most of them will be revealed later under NDA.

And so they were. Well, at the least most of them that developers should be concerned about. I’ll talk about some fundamental issues here, but of course I can’t talk about details not released elsewhere.

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Xcode 3.0 features a cool new debugging feature called… “Xray”. So. Good thing I’m at XRay II already. Where’s my lawyer…?

Well, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Apple – informally, I hasten to add – and we’ve agreed there’s no conflict. A good thing too, as they have more lawyers than I do, hehe. Unofficially, I’ve heard that it was called PowerSomethingOrOther until nearly the last day before the show and then someone (marketing?) decided on the name change without doing a Google search. (Probably because PowerSomethings are on their way out, anyway.)

I’ve been floating ideas of possible name changes with other developers – GammaRay? CAT? PET? PowerSameThing? Nothing has quite the same zing, and I’d have to change the icon – and so I’ve decided keeping XRay II will be OK for me. It’s a full version ahead!

Anyway, I’ve been not-too-surprised about the mostly ho-hum reactions the keynote got among journalists, analysts and non-developer entities. And of course the stock is down. Well, no new iPod was revealed, right? And some people to this day think that Tiger was only Dashboard, Spotlight and some small cosmetic changes in the iApps…

…and from that point of view, the Leopard preview was only Time Machine, 64-bit support on some machines, and… HTML Mail templates? To-do in Mail. And erh, more effects in iChat and PhotoBooth, right? Personally, I was disappointed to see Steve Jobs waste so much detail on such trivia. And of course, HTML e-mail should be stamped out, not fomented!! Death to Mail templates!!! Argh. Sorry. Hm.

Well, it’s a developer conference and this was a preview for non-developers. The timing of this conference was very interesting. I’ve been to conferences where the timing was unfortunate. Way back when they showed the Copland preview absolutely nothing worked and most of the sessions were pure hand-waving. Last year, Tiger had already been out for a time and that conference was interesting more for its historical value (and for testing on the Intel kits, of course).

This time, the Leopard preview is at the right stage. Most of the new APIs and things are either working or in the final stages. There’s documentation! There are machines running the new system! The new system kernel panic a few times a day under hard use, but that’s normal. There’s the usual list of deprecated APIs we should avoid in the future, and the usual list of cool new APIs I’ll have to wait a year or more to really use. What is mostly not there is what those guys were looking for: a new kernel, a new Finder, the death of metal, new applications, radically improved applications (and I’ll explain below why they shouldn’t be here now).

More importantly, there’s a clear sense of direction. I’ve changed several ideas I had about XRay II’s implementation and most of them will make my life easier, mostly through having to write less code. Or, in the future, of being able to take code away, or to do cool new stuff on Leopard in the “just-works” mode.

So, what the non-developers don’t get is that Leopard is all about infrastructure – as was Tiger too, come to think of it. As someone (Lincoln?) is reputed to have said, “if I have 8 hours to fell a tree, I prefer to spend 6 hours sharpening my ax”. And that’s what’s going on. They’re sharpening the infrastructure. Then, a very short time (comparatively) before release, all the new infrastructure will make doing those cosmetic and application changes much easier, and they’ll be faster as a side-effect too. And they’ll be doing things not possible today. Some folks are catching this hint. For instance, Time Machine’s cool new UI is possible thanks to the new CoreAnimation framework, which itself rests on other stuff I can’t mention… and all this new infrastructure is interacting synergistically, so the rate of change of innovation is increasing without Apple having to add more engineers, or developers like me having to write more code. The new boring Mail features are based on new frameworks available to other apps, and so on.

More later…

Looks like I got most of it right… Xcode 3.0. 64-bit cleanness. Dual duo-core Mac Pro (Xeons), also in the new Xserves. No iPod or iAnything.

No new UI stuff was visible, but Time machine and CoreAnimation makes up for that; these were really cool. No new Finder, it seems.

No virtualization, unless they’re keeping the name “Boot Camp” for that. Still, Steve Jobs said many features were still “top secret”. I suppose most of them will be revealed later under NDA.

More later. Or not.

Update: Xcode 3.0 features a cool new debugging feature called… “Xray”. So. Good thing I’m at XRay II already. Where’s my lawyer…?

So, I’m just back from getting my WWDC badge. I’ve seen the famous banner and all icons on it are known – the only one I had doubts on (above the SpotLight icon) is supposedly from a Mac OS X Server utility. Even the 64-Bit icon was previously used when the G5 came out. Ah right, we now know what the Leopard “Big X” looks like – black with a white border. Drat, I need to change the XRay II icon to reflect that…

The relative sizes and positions give no hints. There are a few hardware icons. One iPod Nano. 3 iMacs, 2 laptops and one desktop – the latter one from the side, so the front may be different. Or the banner might just be there as a misdirection and may be changed on Thursday… the Xcode icon is very large – so large that one can read the small print on it, but then it’s a developer’s conference. On the other hand, people “in the know” did tell me to make sure not to miss the developer tools sessions.

Certainly a major release of Xcode is in the works. 2.5 or 3.0, it doesn’t matter, but my personal hunch is that the superannuated Interface Builder application will be phased out and integrated into Xcode. Let’s hope that connections like outlets and bindings will be easier to visualize and debug, and that the IBPalette interface is finally officialized so that we can write non-trivial palettes.

I’ll be under NDA for details – things announced at the keynote excepted – so these will be my final pre-WWDC speculations. On the hardware front, 64-Bits is of course guaranteed, with one of the new “Core 2 Duo” chips. A Mac Pro will certainly be out, although the name may not be exact, and the casing will probably be a minor variation on the current one. There’s a good Ars Technica writeup about the new Intel CPUs, and expectations are that the whole new range will fit nicely into the spectrum from MacBook Pros to the Mac Pros – possibly with a dual-core, dual-CPU at the top, although it might also be that Intel has been reserving their quad-core chip for Apple to announce. Intel Xserves might also appear.

I don’t expect a new iPod to be announced in a big way, except as a footnote to the usual summing-up of past sales; at a developer’s conference, it’ll be big news only if it had an official API for developers to extend its functionality, which might actually be a neat way for Apple start a new iPod generation in a privileged position; stranger things have happened.

I’m reasonably certain that we’ll each get a Leopard preview DVD. I’ve seen rumors of changes to applications, which I consider less interesting as they’re not really a part of the OS itself, at least from my developer’s standpoint. I use relatively few of the iApps every day – Safari and iChat are the ones I leave open, and my wishlist for those is small.

Real Leopard features I expect to see:

– RBSplitView adopted! Well, not likely, but it’d be nice… I’ve told Apple I’d gladly give them the code, anyway.

– A new UI theme, or at least a migration of the default windows theme to the new “cool gradient/smooth metal” look.

– Some new Cocoa widgets, especially the more successful ones from the Tiger iApps. I hope to see them do Brent Simmon’s “big time tabs control”; I need it badly for XRay II.

– A new Finder. I’ve mostly gotten used to the old one, but still…

– Resolution independence. We need to get away from the pre-rendered bitmap widgets. People are already starting to use object-based PDF files for that, but they’re a pain to make and don’t look good at all resolutions. My ideal solution here would be a new NSImageRep and corresponding file format that would do for images what the TrueType format did for fonts: resolution-independence with special hinting for small sizes.

– More extensions to Objective-C. Garbage collection should be a given. Unloading NSBundles is supposed to be in the works. Frameworks included inside applications can’t be easily updated and versioning is pretty much useless for practical purposes.

– Hopefully we’ll see expanded metadata capabilities and a more useable SpotLight. I hardly use it in Tiger because it’s so slow and limited. The ability to have additional named forks should go hand-in-hand with full NTFS support. Other file systems would also be nice (ZFS, anyone?).

– Virtualization. I’ve written about this several times. My personal opinion is that Apple should write a fully trusted hypervisor into the EFI (using the TPM) and run everything inside virtual machines, including Mac OS X for Intel itself. Booting some version of Windows into a second VM would be easy, then, and there wouldn’t be a full version of Mac OS X for Intel for people to run on standard PCs either. I don’t think dual-booting is a good solution, I believe Apple was just testing the waters with BootCamp. No idea what would happen to Parallels in this scenario; they might be bought out by Apple, or by Microsoft, I suppose. Here are more thoughts on virtualization from Daniel Jalkut and Paul Kafasis.

– 64-bit “cleanness”. Meaning, Carbon and Cocoa and everything else running in 64-bit apps. And very probably, also, on the G5s. However, I’m not sure (and no time to research at this moment) how mixing 32 and 64 bits works on the Intel CPUs. I remember reading somewhere that it’s not as easy as it is on the G5, where you can have 32-bit processes co-existing with 64-bit processes.

Unlikely or even impossible:

– A new kernel.

– iPhone, iPDA, iGame, iTablet. iAnything in fact. There are rumors about VoIP support and there might be some sort of hardware for that, but I can’t see Apple doing a me-too cellphone.

– Some goodie under the seat (like when the iSight was introduced, which I missed out on, argh!).

In the meantime, I’d better get back to my coding… more after the keynote!

Since yesterday, we’re safely ensconced at a nice hotel in downtown San Francisco, where we’ll stay for 4 weeks – leaving just after WWDC.

The trip up to Corvallis (OR) was marvellous, especially the visit to Crater Lake. It’s the prettiest lake I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a lot. All this took a little more time and energy than we’d budgeted for, and after visiting with some friends we passed up a chance to see the famous DaVinci Days Festival. Instead, we opted to just walk around the beautiful Oregon State University campus, which was well worth the visit.

Going south the next day we opted for the more scenic 101 route (instead of the 5, which we’d driven up on), and it also was great. The Pacific shore is always beautiful and we also had an opportunity to revisit Ferndale, where we’d been on a previous Los Angeles-Vancouver trip.

So, everything’s settling down and for the next 3 weeks I’ll try to do some extra work on XRay II. Hopefully I’ll have a working alpha to show off at WWDC. Or at least a T-Shirt…

hmafra wrote:

He did it again! One of his takes now is the kernel thing. Speed, he says.

What he writes makes some of sense, like the part on cross-licensing agreement. I still don’t buy it, though.

I was about to comment on that.

I checked with some friends who know more about the kernel, and they say he’s completely wrong. In fact, there are two myths at work here. The first one says that Mac OS X uses a Mach microkernel, which is wrong. XNU, which is the Mac OS X kernel, is effectively monolithic as the whole BSD stuff runs right alongside the Mach stuff in the same context. The Mach code takes care of memory allocation and thread scheduling, the BSD code does most of the rest. None of the switching that would make a pure microkernel inefficient. Granted that there are some kernel functions which are slower than the equivalent calls in, say, Linux; but this just means that Mac OS X isn’t currently suited to huge server farms, and that Apple can tinker with this if necessary without switching kernels at all. In fact, they’re probably already doing this with the Intel versions of Leopard.

The second myth is that only Avie Tevanian was holding Mach in place by sheer orneriness, and that now that he’s gone, everybody will heave a sigh of relief, throw Darwin out, and shoehorn Linux (or even XP) into its place. That too is completely wrong. Bertrand Serlet has been in charge of the OS policy for at least two years now. And consider that XNU, because of the Mach component, is well-suited to scale to a larger number of processors. And consider that Intel is coming out with new chips that supposedly will scale well to 4, 8 or even more cores…

The idea of Leopard implementing the Windows API is, at first look, interesting. (Let’s discard the misinformation about “Microsoft saving Apple”, and that the cross-licensing included the Windows API.)

After all, Mac OS X already has several APIs for writing applications. BSD with X11, Carbon, Cocoa, Java, and so forth. Why not an additional one? Well, it’s possible in theory. In fact, the WINE people are working on such a thing. However, why should Apple make it too easy to move applications into Mac OS X? Such apps would never be full-class citizens, the appearance would be awkward, drag&drop would probably be impossible… no, virtualization is the way to go. Running Windows inside a secondary window would also be a constant reminder of which environment is the native one, which is more in Apple’s interest.

Yes, the times sure are changing. Today I even found myself largely agreeing with a Paul Thurrott article:

Since the euphoria of PDC 2003, Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and dismissed, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like the ill-fated Copland project?

Sadly, Gates, too, is part of the Bad Microsoft, a vestige of the past who should have had the class to either formally step down from the company or at least play just an honorary role, not step up his involvement and get his hands dirty with the next Windows version. If blame is to be assessed, we must start with Gates. He has guided – or, through lack of leadership – failed to guide the development of Microsoft’s most prized asset.

Perhaps Microsoft’s most serious mistake, retrospectively, was that Gates and Ballmer were too compatible. Ballmer should have driven Gates out of the company in the 80s, then Gates should have matured elsewhere, only to return triumphantly in the 90s with new, cool technology, in the nick of time to save the company that was going broke after Ballmer in turn had been pushed out… sounds familiar, too?

Now here’s another interesting part:

Here’s what you have to go through to actually delete those files in Windows Vista. First, you get a File Access Denied dialog (Figure) explaining that you don’t, in fact, have permission to delete a … shortcut?? To an application you just installed??? Seriously?

…What if you’re doing something a bit more complicated? Well, lucky you, the dialogs stack right up, one after the other, in a seemingly never-ending display of stupidity. Indeed, sometimes you’ll find yourself unable to do certain things for no good reason, and you click Allow buttons until you’re blue in the face. It will never stop bothering you, unless you agree to stop your silliness and leave that file on the desktop where it belongs. Mark my words, this will happen to you. And you will hate it.

This is exactly what happened to me when I, a few months ago, had to install Windows XP for my wife’s business (to run a proprietary vertical app, if you must know). I tried to set up an admin account for myself and a normal user account for the receptionist. This being the first time I’d ever seen XP, I did them in the wrong order… and then tried to organize the desktop and taskbars. In the end I had to wipe and reinstall everything. It seems Vista won’t be any better, sadly.

Thurrott goes on to complain about glass windows and the Media Center UI, which I can’t comment on myself. But, here’s a thought:

One of the “stealth” features of Apple products is that more and more people are being subconsciously educated as to what constitutes good design.

We certainly aren’t that used to columnists criticizing details of the Windows UI; specialists like Don Norman, sure, but not mainstream columnists. Personally, I’d about given up commenting on bad UI to Windows users… they either just emit a blank “huh?” or say somewhat ruefully “well, that’s what computers are like, you know”. Not that the Mac UI is itself perfect – it’s still a work in progress – but at least we developers, and many people inside Apple, deeply care about producing good UI. (Here’s one example among hundreds.) If that attitude is now leaking out to the general public, so much the better.

Thanks to John C. Randolph for pointing out that article.