| Wednesday, July 31, 2002 |
18:39 - The winners write the history books, but the pioneers come up with the names
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It's been seeming more and more strange to me lately how we have developed within the framework of the technology industry as it has been passed down to us, using terminology and vocabulary that is completely ideographic-- having no bearing at all upon what it is intended to represent or describe.
I'm referring to things like file formats. Because of one circumstance and another, and what formats happened to be public-domain and which ones were easy to implement and provided good quality/compression tradeoffs and features, we now find ourselves dealing in a market where we do not talk about "picture files", but instead we refer to "JPEGs" and "GIFs" and "PNGs" and "BMPs". Similarly, the movie files we use are "AVIs" and "WMVs" and "MPEGs" and "RMs".
Just put yourself in the shoes of someone who's new to computers. Does any of this make even a tiny bit of sense? Is someone really expected to learn all these acronyms, and which ones mean "pictures" and which ones mean "movies" and which ones mean "music"?
We've inherited these oddly-named formats because of circumstance. But they weren't the first formats to become widely used; far from it.
As should hardly come as a surprise, Apple was the first company to scout the uncharted fields of image and movie and sound media, and so they were the first to give names to what their customers would be using.
What did they call their picture files? Why, PICTs. As in, PICTures. Not some funky acronym, not something referring to a standards body or a working group or a company that popularized it. Nobody had to think about what it stood for or what kind of file it represented. It was a PICTure. No filename extensions, either-- just an icon that clearly demonstrated that this was a picture. Take a screen shot on a Mac, and you'd get an output file called "Picture 1". There was never any question about what format it was in. It was just a picture.
And PICT wasn't an inflexible format, either. Like TIFF, it could incorporate a variety of encodings and compression algorithms, and you could have PICTs with internal JPEG compression at arbitrary levels, or with color depth from 1-bit to 32-bit, including alpha.
PICT didn't catch on in the world at large, though. I'm not entirely sure why.
At any rate, QuickTime was the first movie-file format to really enable the desktop computer user to do video. Apple referred to the files as "movies", and so the filename extension that the files received (when saved for cross-platform use) was ".mov". As in, movie. (The Type code for the file, incidentally, was MooV.) There wasn't any question what kind of file it was; rather than giving it an implementation-specific extension like ".qt", Apple got to lay claim to the "movie" moniker because, well, they were there first.
Same with sound files. .WAV? .AIFF? No, the native Apple sound file was known as "SND". Sound. (UNIX vendors tried to do the same sort of thing, referring to them as "audio" files, with an extension of ".au".)
Leave it to the company whose computers don't need filename extensions to lay claim to the choicest plain-language extensions, eh?
But that's just it, though. It's a perfect illustration of the philosophical difference between the two schools of thought. Apple wanted to think everything through, to overengineer the user experience so nobody would have to deal with any technical trivia that computers should be able to deal with better than humans can anyway, and automatically. They designed everything so extensions would never interfere with a person's ability to freely name a file, without fear that it would break some mysterious app-binding spell deep in the bowels of the machine. And they wanted to make sure people thought in terms of pictures and movies and sounds, not in terms of JPEG and GIF and MPEG and WAV. Who needs to put up with that kind of useless trivia? Shouldn't computers be doing that sort of thing for us?
I've written before about how today we're entering a new phase of the same philosophy, where Windows XP has espoused a newly-discovered "task-based interface" concept, something that can be pretty well described in the same terms as I've already just covered: thinking in terms of your content, not in terms of file-formats or in terms of applications. Apple's iApps illustrate the new, modern incarnation of that same philosophy, the one they've been promoting all these years but now applied to modern media: iTunes lets you think in terms of music, in terms of songs and artists and albums, instead of in terms of MP3 files and folders and encoding and filenames.mp3. Likewise, iPhoto lets you think in terms of pictures, browsing them visually as well as by assigned meta-data and descriptions, not by obscure filenames with .JPG extensions. They're grouped into albums and named and dated "film rolls", not by anonymous folders. This is the task-based interface, as envisioned back in the early 80s with the first Mac OS.
Apple's job, as they see it, is to deliver abilities to their customers, not just features. They refuse to do anything half-assed. If they can't obscure the technical trivialities entirely, except to those who want to work with them, they don't bother trying-- because they know what they uniquely bring to the table. What they offer the technological community is a philosophy, a way of designing computers so that those who use them can quite literally just sit down and get things done-- the operating system takes care of the most trivialities that it possibly can, and leaves to the user only those things that a human is uniquely equipped to do. And that's the actual creating and enjoying.
Apple has had to jettison some of its cherished ideals on some fronts; PICT is now relegated to the ash-heap of history in favor of TIFF for client-side uncompressed image manipulation, and JPEG and PNG and GIF are fully supported for export. QuickTime will play AVI and MPEG files as well as its own MooVies, and it will faithfully tack on filename extensions so Windows users won't choke on video content created on a Mac. And as ungainly as the MP3 name is, Apple has recognized the ubiquity of the format and adopted it in its own unique way: letting iTunes make MP3 files from CDs, filename extensions and everything, but pushing the organizational aspects of dealing with those files upward into iTunes itself, where the interface is all about the contents of the ID3 tags and querying the song database rather than filenames and folders. iTunes keeps the files and folders dutifully organized and named to match the ID3 tags as the user changes them in iTunes itself, and even numbers them according to your chosen name scheme so you can export them efficiently onto MP3 CDs for use with Windows... but during normal everyday use, it's not MP3s-- its music. It floats through the fabric of the computer like electricity. It makes listening to music into a complete no-brainer, without the slightest hint of technical expertise required in order to use it. All it takes to operate iTunes is the ability to move a mouse and manipulate scrollbars. You don't ever have to have seen a folder before. You never have to think about one.
The conquistadors gave the names of their Catholic saints to the towns they founded throughout the Southwest, even though today they're filled with McDonald's and Blockbusters and Wal-Marts. Half the South and half the East Coast is named after Indian place-names and tribal monikers, though the ones who gave those names are now long gone.
And if the computer industry ever comes to understand how important it is to design software that human beings don't have to think of as software, they will owe that discovery to Apple-- or else if they stumble upon it entirely independently, they will have embarked upon a laudable but ultimately unprofitable journey, one that has been traveled before and found to be no match for the marketability of unusable, if gaudy, fluffware.
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