Solipsism Gradient

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Apple: Pull iPhone Firmware 1.1.1?

There are some reports that some folks are finding that the 1.1.1 firmware update for the iPhone has been pulled from Apple, and that the most recent version of iTunes is now reporting 1.0.2 as the most recent version….

After several months of tinkering and getting used to the new IB, I just published a first beta of the IB3 plugin for RBSplitView 1.1.4.

Some things haven’t been tested (copy&paste), others don’t work fully (undo), but it seems to work mostly. Please post bug reports in the source forum, or e-mail me. To install, close IB3, unzip the plugin in a convenient location (I don’t think there’s a standard one for IB3), and double-click it.

A full Leopard version will be out around the end of this month, along with source code for the plugin.

Some time ago I published Flipr source code:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…a category on NSWindow to flip from some window to another window.

I’m not sure how many people adopted it, but the nice Karelia folks are using it in the upcoming iMedia browser. A few days ago they asked me to look into a “hesitation” effect which could be seen in the first frames of the animation in certain circumstances, and it’s now fixed… so if you used it somewhere, download it again (and tell me).

A heads-up to Nudge users that version 1.2 is now available. Here are further details.

We’re back from a 10-day vacation in São Paulo and surroundings. Good to get away, better to get back. I was offline most of the time and am still catching up on news and e-mail.

Had less time to work underway than I anticipated but I made progress on the Leopard version of RBSplitView – including the Interface Builder plugin – and had some new ideas about other things too.

The new iMacs look very nice. Wonder if the lower prices will be reflected here, though.

The iPhone update makes me almost sure Apple isn’t using the TrustZone at all. Deliberately, of course. Makes one wonder what is behind that…

…more as I catch up.

If you’re an XRay user – even if not registered – please go to this poll and respond. I need to know ASAP if I can, as I want to, make XRay II a Leopard-only application. Also please post suggestions there; although I’ll keep on commenting about progress and programming issues here, I’d like to keep actual feature discussions over there at the poll topic.

The decision on Leopard needs to be made in the next 2 weeks, so if a majority of users agrees – or if I get too few responses – I’ll decide in favor of Leopard.

One of the salient points repeated at the WWDC keynote was Leopard‘s support for “64 bits top to bottom“. However, a close peek at the slide shown this year showed a subtle difference to last year’s – the word “Carbon” was missing. Of course a storm of confusion soon ensued, with the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth from some quarters and polite shrugging from others. Apple stock fell and rose again, some developers professed bliss while others threatened to leave the platform, non-developers wrote learned analyses about obscure technical points, not to speak of reports of raining frogs or even an unconfirmed Elvis sighting in a Moscone restroom. Allow me to try to explain all (well, Elvis excepted).

First of all, there are a few implications in moving an operating system to 64 bits. I hear that Windows Vista comes in distinct 32-bit and 64-bit versions and that the latter is able to run 32-bit applications (with some restrictions) inside a compatibility box. In contrast, Leopard uses Apple’s experience with architectural migrations to support 32 and 64 bit applications natively on both PowerPC and x86 architectures – not so easy in the second case, but necessary since nearly all currently shipping Macs use Intel’s Core 2 Duo, which is 64-bit capable.

For this, Apple took advantage of Mach-O’s support for “fat binaries” – in this instance called “obese”. Obese binaries contain four different executables: PowerPC 32, PowerPC 64, x86 32 and x86 64. When running one of these applications, the system selects the best supported architecture and links the application to the corresponding (and equally obese) system libraries.

Enter the Carbon vs. Cocoa question. Cocoa APIs are derived from NeXT’s software and are called, usually, from Objective-C. Carbon APIs, to be called indistinctly from C, ++ or Objective-C, were first introduced in Mac OS 8.5 or thereabouts and were, themselves, a much-needed simplification of the “Classic” Mac APIs. Carbon was thereafter positioned as the way to port existing applications to Mac OS X, while Cocoa was supposed to be the right way to write new applications for the new system. No doubt the old NeXTies inside Apple pressed for Carbon being excluded from the start, but Microsoft, Adobe and Macromedia (to quote just the big companies) didn’t want to recode everything on short notice.

A necessary sidenote: the exact definition of “Carbon” is surprisingly hard to pin down, even among experienced developers. Here’s my own (although I’ve never written a Carbon app myself). There are Carbon APIs and Carbon applications. A Carbon application, for me, uses the Carbon Event Model – calling Carbon APIs to get events from the system. Until recently, a Carbon application would also, necessarily, use Carbon windows and the GUI widgets for those, mostly contained in the HIToolbox framework. Starting with Tiger it’s possible for Carbon applications to use Cocoa windows containing Cocoa GUI widgets, with some contortions of course. Other Carbon APIs – like the File Manager, or QuickTime – can be called indistinctly from Carbon or Cocoa applications.

Here’s where things started going awry, from the standpoint of established or multiplatform developers. Apple has always been of several minds about Carbon policy – it was often dismissed as a temporary “transition” technology, while people who interfaced with those developers had to reassure them that Carbon was not going away anytime soon and was not a second-class citizen. Porting software from the Classic Mac OS to Carbon wasn’t always easy; some larger applications took over a year. At the same time, it was seen as being much easier than tossing the whole codebase and recoding in Objective-C/Cocoa.

Now, a few years after Mac OS X was introduced Microsoft, Adobe and so forth had a substantial investment in maintaining parallel codebases for their Carbon applications and, understandably, began dragging their feet about converting to Cocoa at any time soon, or even at all. Due to pressure from these developers the Carbon GUI APIs began to incorporate new elements present only in Cocoa until then, and to all appearances Carbon and Cocoa were now positioned as equal and parallel APIs. In secret, of course, Apple hoped that “those people” would sooner or later see the light and begin doing their next x.0 version in Cocoa. In turn, “those people” harbored serious doubts about Objective-C (seeing it as a dead language with an unreadable syntax) and secretly hoped Apple would “recode Cocoa in C++”. Here’s a significant e-mail from an Apple engineer to the carbon-dev list:

No one reading this list should be under any illusions about Apple’s use of Objective C. Apple really likes Objective C. There are a lot of third-party developers who are using Objective C to program for Mac OS X and who really like it. Apple is not going to stop using Objective C. I’m not making a value judgement here, just stating a simple reality that everyone needs to understand. Do not think that someday Apple will “wake up” and realize that it would be better to recast all of our APIs in C++. That’s not going to happen.

So then came the PowerPC/Intel transition. Cocoa developers already were using Xcode, while many Carbon developers still were using the defunct Metrowerks CodeWarrior; transitioning large codebases to Xcode proved to be cumbersome. Still, people threw in more person-years to bring their apps up to the new standard. Then, at last year’s WWDC, Apple announced the migration to 64 bits, taking the opportunity to remove all legacy, obsolete or deprecated APIs from the new frameworks. Some Cocoa APIs were removed but, again, Carbon developers had more work to do. So once again, more person-years of work were invested.

It now seems that someone in Apple engineering management decided that they couldn’t afford to keep supporting two separate-but-equal APIs anymore, and the “transition” policy was revived regarding 64-bit Carbon applications. From what transpired during WWDC I deduce that some more of the Carbon APIs were taken off the “supported for 64-bit” list, most notably the part of the HIToolbox that concerns Carbon windows and GUI widgets. Therefore, 64-bit Carbon applications would seem to be either not supported at all, or supported only in a transition mode that used Cocoa windows and GUI widgets.

Naturally, Carbon developers were very bitter about this, while some Cocoa developers were asking if their 64-bit Cocoa apps would be able to call normal Carbon APIs (the answer is yes). So far, the most complete explanation I could find is this one (from the same engineer):

Fundamentally, Apple engineering is focused on Cocoa much more than Carbon, and Apple’s engineering management made the decision to un-support 64-bit Carbon to emphasize that fact.

So there you have it. Summary: 32-bit Carbon stays where it is and works fine until further notice – I don’t think they’ll be “deprecated” any time soon. The Leopard Finder itself is still a 32-bit Carbon application! Not until Mac OS 10.6 (LOLCAT, or whatever they’ll call it) comes out, which may take 3-4 years at least, and probably not even then. But 64-bit pure-Carbon apps may be unsupported, or even not run properly, when Leopard comes out in October. Cocoa isn’t going away, and is the future. Has been the future since Mac OS X 10.0 came out, in fact. On the other hand, there’s a migration path – use the Cocoa GUI, then later convert to a Cocoa app. People who have invested a lot of time in Carbon feel really bad about this, and I agree Apple mishandled this badly from a PR standpoint. On the other hand, investing a lot of time in Carbon is now revealed to have been a throw-good-money-after-bad move; some people say “I told you so”.

The final question is, how come neither Microsoft nor Adobe are screaming their heads off about this? While I was wondering about this, I realized that, for normal Mac users, Microsoft Office really doesn’t handle data sets big enough to need 64 bits; they can stay on 32 bit as long as it exists. As for Adobe, at first glance, Photoshop at the very least is just begging for 64 bits… really? Here’s what one Adobe engineer says:

I could have spent this whole cycle moving us to 64 bit rather than working on startup time, but would that give you more of what you want? Add 20 seconds to the startup time you are seeing for the beta for all versions/platforms of Photoshop and compare the value of that version to one where the histogram would be 10% faster on 64 bit machines (and most of the rest of Photoshop being 5% slower). It is true, there are some things, like histogram, that would be 10% faster, I wrote the code to verify this. But, the rest of the product would have been slower without a few people spending the whole cycle going over all of the slow parts and bringing them back to where they were on 32 bit. Most operations on a 64 bit application like Photoshop are actually slower by a small amount if time isn’t spent optimizing them.

Read the excellent comments on that post, especially the more recent ones, for much more discussion of the details on the Photoshop side – I suppose many of those would apply equally to other large Adobe/Macromedia apps.

So there you have it.. the big guys don’t need to move up for now. The small guys are mostly in Cocoa already. Unfortunately, the intermediate cases have fallen into the crack for now – think multiplatform CAD software for instance. It’d be very sad to see them leaving the platform in a huff about this; I sincerely hope Apple will contact all of them privately and smooth things over for now, somehow, though I can’t really imagine how. Maybe they’ll even re-add support in October, now that the point has been made.

Update: fixed a misconception about the PowerPC->Intel migration, see explanation above.

One significant announcement (some say the only one) at WWDC is the Safari 3 Beta, which includes Safari for Windows; at least it’s the one I’ve seen the most varied interpretations of, so far.

Considered as a beta release, Safari 3 is so-so. The Mac version needs a reboot because it also substitutes the Dock (which runs Dashboard widgets) and the system-wide webkit. It also substitutes the standard Safari installations. I had to reinstall Flash afterwards to get some sites to work. For my usual sites, it performed quite well although I had one crash. I don’t have a XP machine to test the Windows version on, but I hear it’s unusable on non-English versions, and very flaky on most English systems as well.

Steve Jobs stated the primary intention was to widen Safari’s marketshare, and the demo concentrated on a supposed serious speed advantage on Windows – “more than twice as fast as Internet Explorer”. And then, in the “one last thing” section, he refers to a “very sweet solution” for developing apps for the iPhone : the full Safari engine, no SDK needed allows Web 2.0/AJAX applications. (The entire section was received with silence by the crowd.) Steve’s statement that this is “a very modern way to build applications” somewhat contradicts what he said at D5:

…I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn?t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they?d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we?re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable.

…

And you can?t do that stuff in a browser.

So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you?re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you?re connected or not.

But it?s happening fairly slowly and there?s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment.

So here we have at least two apparent intentions: get more penetration in the global browser “market” (maybe “mindshare” would be a better term as they’re nearly all free for the end-user), and open up iPhone development for Windows owners. Both sound logical.

More market penetration would surely be good for Apple. As John Gruber notes, Apple gets income from the Google search bar – tens of millions of dollars per year isn’t bad. And having Safari available on Windows removes one lame excuse for webmasters that build sites that don’t render properly (or at all) on Safari; it’s no longer necessary to own a Mac for checking that out.

Speaking of rendering properly, Safari for Windows, or rather WebKit, includes the Lucida fonts and several low-level frameworks, among them CoreGraphics, ColorSync, ImageIO and CoreFoundation. Some people believe this is a first step towards reviving the Yellow Box for Windows idea, but Cocoa is much larger than that… Safari is just a relatively thin shell around WebKit, and the Windows version shows no signs of being written in Objective-C, for one. Of course many people are once more complaining that Safari for Windows renders fonts differently. Joel Spolksy explains:

Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low resolution screens. Where they differ is in philosophy.

– Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.

– Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

I’ve talked to several people about this issue. Beyond the expected bias of familiarity – everyone is used to their main working platform and finds the other’s rendering strange – I found that most graphic artists and font designers prefer the Mac rendering, while most web designers and IT people seem to prefer the Windows rendering.

But beyond that, the fact that Safari for Windows tries to reproduce exactly the Mac rendering is important (and not a bug, as many Windows users are claiming). I’ve seen this myself on my site; tweaking font size etc. so the page looks good on the Mac often produces quite different layout when you view it on a Windows browser, and it’s impossible to get it to look exactly the same, down to line breaks and text heights. This is doubly important when you’re viewing the page on a small screen like the iPhone has. Zooming the page display like the iPhone does seems to mandate the Apple rendering engine: Windows’ pixel alignment is counterproductive there.

Coming back to the “zero-cost iPhone (non)SDK” idea. Reactions in the developer community seem fairly mixed. At WWDC itself, of course, most developers aren’t web app developers, but were looking forward to doing Cocoa on the iPhone. And of course that implies that everybody thought that, when Apple would come out with an iPhone SDK (or even a generic OS X SDK, as I thought before the conference) Cocoa/OS X developers would have a monopoly… after all, they already own the development hardware and software. Nobody seriously believed that Apple would invest in doing a separate iPhone SDK that would include a simulator or even a compiler for one of the existing Windows IDEs, as Palm used to do when their products were still 68K-based (no idea what they do today).

Instead, so “real” Mac developers think, every newbie with a few weeks JavaScript under their belt are now free to declare themselves “iPhone developers”. It’s the same thing that happened with typographers when the original Mac 128K came out, and what will happen with animators when the final Leopard will come out – look for the equivalent of tags or impenetrable DVD menus in most of the new iPhone and Leopard apps. We’ll be pretty sick of moving GUI elements soon, and there’s no hope of standardizing web apps anyway. It’s the millennium of the amateurs… head for the hills!

Well, while I think some of it will be that bad – just as ransom-note typography was in the 80s, and garish pages assaulted us in the 90s (and still do, come to think of it), it’s won’t be all that bad. Apple will have new category for its Design Awards and there will be some cool, well-designed apps out. Let Darwin take care of the rest.