Solipsism Gradient

Now that the waves around the iPhone have mostly died down, and we’re in a “silent period” between announcements, some further musings.

My earlier ideas about OS X in other products and a second-generation “tablet” device have percolated into the punditosphere. The trigger seems to have been the recent surge in larger or faster solid-state memory devices, as well as shipment of the first hybrid flash/disk drive. See, for instance, Jason D. O’Grady commenting about another analyst’s write-up:

There are numerous reasons why a diskless MacBook (or nanoBook) is the next logical progression of the notebook computer…

What’s interesting about the Reuters piece is that [it] claims that the nanoBook would run the stripped down, multi-touch version of Mac OS X that will ship with iPhone as opposed to the full-blown version…

In an included poll, however, 76% of voters said they’d want such a sub-notebook to run the full version of Mac OS X, and only 10% claim to accept with OS X (Lite). Others are skeptical of wider use of flash memory, even for larger iPods:

There is one brutally limiting factor to flash, though: cost. Flash is almost ten times more expensive than hard-disk memory. Although significant adoption of flash over the last 12 months has seen prices drop enormously, it’s still too costly to buy in the quantity needed for video iPods. Apple has a good relationship with its flash manufacturers though, and may secure a helpful price reduction it can pass on to consumers. But will that be enough to justify vanquishing the hard disk completely?

Still, I agree that prices are falling fast and that such a device may well be pre-announced at WWDC in June for shipment before the end of 2007. On the other hand, when so many financial analysts agree that such a device is in the works, it makes me suspect that they must be wrong…

Speaking of WWDC, only some radical holdouts (and a few financial analysts) still believe in an end-of-March launch of Leopard. I can’t say much about it because of NDAs; but to put Leopard on the market by the end of this month – meaning that, because of manufacturing and shipping times, it would be have to be ready about today – is impossible. Yes, some of the aforementioned radicals say that Apple has secret advanced builds in their labs and all the seed versions they sent out since last were just a cover. Hah. I’ll believe that when I see it; maybe not even then.

I just heard the news; it seems the rumors were right. This year’s WWDC is now officially set for June 11 to 15, 2007. As I said below, this further reinforces my belief that the availability of Leopard and of the iPhone will be announced simultaneously by Steve Jobs at the keynote – June 11 – and, very probably, that the Leopard DVD will be distributed to every developer after the keynote. Let’s hope an iPhone developer’s kit will be thrown in… and that I will be able to attend.

Seems that rumor sites are saying that this year’s WWDC will happen June 10th-15th. June used to be the standard month – the Great Intel Switch was announced June 6th (my birthday!), just 18 months ago. Last year it was August, and the consensus is that the delay was to allow the first Leopard seed to be ready… and a good thing it was, too.

Now, the rumored dates are coincidentally still unbooked at the Moscone Center site. Apple is, so far, mum on the subject but insiders say that an official date might be announced in February. Currently, my feeling is that June 10-15 might be accurate, and if it is, very possibly Steve Jobs will officially announce the availability of Leopard and of the iPhone at the keynote. And that may well be the first time that the rumored new Leopard GUI is shown in public; unless my suspicions that the iPhone interface was a preview of one of Leopard’s UI modes are confirmed, of course.

Other rumors speak of a “special announcement” in the second half of February, and some say specifically that Leopard will be shown then, and that it should be out in late March. I’m under NDA about details of course, but I frankly don’t believe Leopard will be sufficiently stable in March, and so, if any special event happens, it will be used to introduce new Mac hardware. Any upgrades to iApps will of course use the cool new Leopard technologies and so won’t be available before the big L ships.

I really hope to make it again to this year’s WWDC; the last two were great. We have a Scandinavia/Baltic trip starting in late June so we might even join the two trips.

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!