Solipsism Gradient

A couple of weeks ago I noticed some complaints out on the net about the Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) Finder not updating its windows. Later on, I myself noticed that it happens sometimes.

The thing is, today the Finder usually waits passively for notification that one of its items has been changed. And not all applications post that notification. Yes, it polls certain folders at strategic times, but apparently not in a way that covers all eventualities.

In Panther, parity with FreeBSD 5 introduced the so-called kqueue mechanism (PDF file), but unfortunately it’s still experimental, and the Finder doesn’t use it. I suppose 10.4 will implement that…

…in the meantime, I wrote a little Contextual Menu called “Nudge” and sent it to some people who complained about that problem. Mosty, there were no replies. Since it worked for me, I let it rest until today, when I noticed a MacFixit article about this very same problem. So, I took a few hours off to recompile “Nudge”, have a half-hearted stab at designing an icon for it, and publish it. So here it is (VersionTracker listing).

Preliminary reports indicate it works in most situations. Icon donations are accepted – I tried to draw an elbow (or fist) whacking a folder, but results were unsatisfactory .

Yesterday, January 24, the Mac turned 20.

Chris Hanson shows how the price point is the same. Rather than just repost his table, here’s mostly the same info with increases added:

Meanwhile, Andy Hertzfeld and the rest of the original Mac gang are collaborating to write the definite, unsurpassable Mac Folklore website. Not to be missed by any Mac fan! It even has a RSS feed ! (Thanks to “Daring Fireball” John Gruber for the link.)

On Jan.24th 2004, the Macintosh celebrates its 20th anniversary. Added to the usual write-ups in the foreign press, Macmania magazine published a special anniversary issue (including several references to Yours Truly) and has an extensive timeline. They also have a write-up of the famous Brazilian Mac clone – the Unitron Mac512 – where I had a small participation. I plan to write more about this in a future Interesting Times column.

There’s also a similar article at the MacPress site, as well as a long interview with the aforementioned Y.T., whom they call “A Brazilian Mac Legend“. I swear it wasn’t my idea… 😳

My mother’s tickled pink about all this, of course…

Steve Jobs himself said that hell froze over; but even so, as he repeated in a Nov. 5 conference call, Apple won’t switch to Intel Microprocessors. “It’s perfectly technically feasible to port Panther to any processor.. but we’re very happy with PowerPC”, he said. “The G5 is the fastest personal computer in the world… right now we don’t see a compelling need to switch processor families and the stuff that’s in the PowerPC roadmap… is really good.”

Nothe that he didn’t mention Intel explicitly, nor did he use the word platform. Why did our glorious leader feel the need to repeat the obvious? There has always been speculation about Apple migrating to Intel processors, especially while Motorola was responsible for the “megahertz gap” between top-of-the-line Macs and the competition. There actually is a version of Darwin, Apple’s open-source base for Mac OS X, for the Intel platform, and a rumored “Marklar Project” that supposedly keeps an up-to-date full Mac OS X running on top of that version.

I’m emphasizing the difference between “Intel processor” and Intel (or x86, or AMD) platform. Apparently, nearly all speculators thinks those terms are synonyms; they’re not. Beyond the processor itself, the Intel platform also includes support chips, BIOS, and standard peripheral controllers – a standard motherboard, for all practical purposes.

Every now and then, well-known analysts say that Apple’s only hope to survive would be to migrate to the Intel platform. Last March, John C. Dvorak predicted that “Apple Computer Corp. will switch to Intel processors within the next 12 to 18 months… announcing the new architecture in July at the next Macworld Expo would be ideal”. Soon after that, he again predicted that Apple would come out with a dual-architecture Itanium/G5 Mac in early 2004, then later offer Mac OS X for generic Dell/HP/IBM computers. Instead, in July, Apple announced the IBM PowerPC 970-based G5!

Former Apple CEO John Sculley said recently that Apple considered the Intel option in 1992 – when Apple was leaving the 68K architecture – but this was discarded in favor of the PowerPC architecture. Even though Sculley still considers that decision “one of the biggest strategic mistakes that Apple ever made”, it’s clear in hindsight that only the PowerPC had enough capacity to emulate the 68K in software without any performance loss; a decisive factor in easing the platform transition.

Whoever wants Apple to migrate to the Intel platform wants, in essence, to run Mac OS X on a cut-rate PC assembled in some anonymous Far-East factory, or by some hardware geek in his own living room, and of course, also wants to run Linux or Windows on the same machine. The chance of this happening is zero. What would be the consequences of the release of Mac OS X for any generic PC? Apple, of course, would have to close down their computer assembly lines. They’d never be able to compete with someone like Dell on price only; just look what happened to Gateway and dozens of others.

It would be a support nightmare; they’d have to test and consider all possible variations of motherboards, peripherals, displays, BIOS, in other words, all those things that already bedevil PC users today. And finally, they’d have to do battle with Microsoft and their ironclad contracts with hardware vendors. Who would pay US$129 (or even US$49?) for an operating system if, owing to contractual requirements, their PC already came with Windows installed? That’s one of the reasons that the BeOS went under.

Let’s bury the notion of migrating to the Intel platform, and consider the use of the Intel processor itself. Apple could, for the sake of argument, build Macs with motherboards based on a Pentium IV (or Itanium, or Opteron), but with its own architecture. So, it would have Open Firmware instead of a BIOS and no concerns whatsoever about Windows compatibility. It would be a Mac as we know it today, but with different processor and support chips. Mac OS X would be recompiled for this new platform and wouldn’t run on common PCs. This option (and not the first!) is what Steve Jobs discarded in the interview I cited earlier.

The chance of this happening isn’t zero, but very nearly so. What advantages could Apple gain from this option? They might have some price advantages in buying the processors and support chips, perhaps a shorter design time, since Apple wouldn’t have to design their own bus controller. The machines would have to have more complex cooling systems to hold noise down; even iMacs would need several fans, in a G5-like scheme. iBooks and PowerBooks would probably be a little larger.

But in terms of performance, I’d bet that there would be a sizable disadvantage. Why? There’s an obvious answer: AltiVec. (Steve Jobs mentioned this precise point last year, in fact.) Not for nothing Apple now has its whole product line based on G4 and G5 CPUs, all of which have AltiVec built in; part of the noticeable speed increase seen between Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.3 can be credited to the gradual optimization of basic OS routines with AltiVec. Many people mistakenly believe that this PowerPC section is restricted to multimedia applications; far from the truth. AltiVec also has specialized instructions for data pre-caching, as well as for high-bandwidth data conversion and movement. And of course, Quartz Extreme itself needs AltiVec’s pixel conversion and vector instructions to implement Mac OS X’s visual subtleties. Only Microsoft would benefit from an Intel processor, as their Virtual PC emulator would then run at native speeds.

Together with these arguments, consider the excellent roadmap of the PowerPC architecture, with IBM widely adopting the G5 (970) and its successors, and it’s easy to see that Steve Jobs is right – there’s no compelling reason to switch. So, why does Apple still maintain the x86 version of Darwin, as well as the fabled “Marklar Project”? That’s because this helps finding bugs which might otherwise be masked by the processor architecture, and to simplify future architectural changes. For instance, without these precautions, the recent release of the G5 machines, with their 64-bit memory addresses, would no doubt have been delayed for several months.

Despite Jobs’ repeated denials, we can be sure that the “Mac Intel Inside” rumors won’t die; they tickle the fancy of PC users and are the kind of “too good to be checked” items that certain journalists love so much.

(This is a somewhat edited and updated version of my “Ombudsmac” column for issue #114 of Macmania magazine.)

One of my favorite constantly-used applications, NetNewsWire, wins the Eddy Award. Congratulations to Brent Simmons! Well deserved.

So last Saturday morning (or was it Friday?) I was chatting with my editor at Macmania magazine about Panther stuff… we were commenting on the strangely missing “Fax received” notification, when I said I’d seen a suggestion to attach a folder action to the Fax folder; there’s a “new item” script at /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/add – new item alert.scpt.

So he said, why don’t you change that script a little and write a note how to install it? Hmmm… I said that I knew zilch about AppleScript, but would give it a try.

I thought, perhaps it’ll be too boring to write this up… why not write a little installer in Cocoa… and learn some AppleScript while I’m at it? So four hours later (two were used for drawing the icon, of course!), there was born – ta-dah! – the Fax Alert Installer!

Freeware, for Panther only. There’ve been about 700 downloads already…

I was tabulating the income from XRay registrations and thought the graph might be interesting for other shareware authors:

The initial peak is probably due to the fact that I had a relatively long public beta period – about 6 months, if I recall correctly – so the product was already well-known when 1.0 came out. I suppose that software released without a public beta would have a registration peak some weeks after release. After such a peak, if the product is left alone, registrations fall exponentially, approaching but never quite reaching zero.

The 1.0.5 release seems to have been well-timed; the curve had already stopped falling steeply and there was demand for new functionality, so the new version attracted a number of new clients. Publicity was favorable and XRay had been included on several CDROMs (some of which published the previous version), so there was a new, shallower peak.

For various reasons I then stepped on the ball, as they say here, and essentially left the product alone for nearly a year, except of course for user support. I should have begun working on 1.0.6 (or even 1.1) immediately, aiming for a release date around November 2002, to jack the curve up again. When I finally went back to the old drawing board a couple of months ago, the initial buzz about the product had long died down, and some of the functions which made it attractive when Mac OS X 10.1.x was new had been gradually added to later releases over time.

So the slight peak for the recent string of releases is due solely to some new users attracted by the release notices; there’ve been no reviews for some time, though I believe a couple will come out now. So part of the lukewarm reception is probably due to a lack of proper publicity; the bulk of downloads, from what I gather from my e-mail statistics, was from already registered users.

So the correct strategy now seems to be, release 1.1 with sufficient additional functionality to attract a substantial number of new users, and generate sufficient publicity around it. I’m working on that…

So I spent a somewhat more relaxed day starting up my new application, <censored>, which will be the new killer app for doing <censored> to <censored>. (Sorry, can’t be more specific at this time – all I can say is that the name starts with an “Y” ).

As I said before, real Mac application development’s step one is to design the application icon (step zero is to design the T-Shirt, which I usually skip, as it makes no sense unless it’s a team effort). After making three mock-up icons I ended up with one which I liked, but some friends who saw it were less than enthusiastic. Perhaps I should make a design contest? Winner gets a free lifetime registration and About Box whuffie? Hmm…

Meanwhile, I found the story of my life in this comic reenactment. See how a fellow geek/marginal Asperger sufferer handles interpersonal relationships! This sort of thing happens to me all the time… (for the record, I did see “Maid in Manhattan”, on a plane, but thought it a little silly).

Ben Hammersley points at Umberto Eco‘s great essay Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books:

Good news: books will remain indispensable, not only for literature but for any circumstances in which one needs to read carefully, not only in order to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it. To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book.

…

After having spent 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and I feel the need of sitting down comfortably in an armchair and reading a newspaper, or maybe a good poem. Therefore, I think that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy, but they are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.

Very true. I rarely look up anything in a reference work anymore, but reading fiction on-screen is not as satisfying as with a physical book – and the latter can be read at table or on the toilet, too