g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Tuesday, January 7, 2003
13:15 - "This is why we do the things we do"

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Okay-- so. That was a pretty ballsy keynote, all things considered. Steve evidently noticed as well that the rumor sites had gotten the idea that this would be a lackluster and unsurprising address, and he even joked about that toward the end. Good thing he had a lot of stuff with which to counter that claim.


The biggest news, politically, is the new browser-- Safari. Now, it's absolutely a good thing that Apple has thrown its weight behind creating a browsing experience that's undeniably fast; browsing speed is one of the things Apple has been dinged on many times in benchmarks lately, and while part of that is attributable to the CPU speed itself, a lot more of it has to do with the fact that IE on the Mac is sloooow. Microsoft's MacBU did put together a pretty nice package, but it's always been a bit gawky and non-native-feeling, and it was never properly optimized. And it doesn't help matters that the alternative browsers like OmniWeb tend to be even slower (though they do look and feel a whole lot smoother). I've been using Chimera for a while now, and it's actually a good deal faster than IE in a number of key ways (plus it has that tabbed-browsing feature that I've come to enjoy quite a lot), and on top of that it's Gecko/Mozilla-based, which means largely guaranteed compatibility with everything. But it too is buggy and incomplete, and it's not everything I wish it to be.

So now there's Safari, and its big thing is speed. Thus far I'm impressed on that front. It loads fast, renders fast, and even downloads fast (it's a 3MB archive file). Nice and small and efficient. Plus it looks excellent-- very subtle visual look, with unobtrusive buttons that break away from the mold by refusing to be big picture buttons, instead content to be utilitarian but elegant navigational controls that take up very little space. And the whole thing is in the brushed-metal metaphor, which I find lends an interesting "70s" kind of feel to the whole thing.

There are a lot of pleasant surprises. Bookmarks seem to sort themselves intelligently. Popup windows obey the programmatic values I've coded in the server software on my various sites more predictably than most other browsers I've seen (popup windows with images in them look very, very nice). And it's got unrequested-popup-window blocking, much like in Chimera. Interestingly, Safari is open-source (which works both ways-- Apple will be posting its code to the public domain, if I understand what Steve said correctly); but it's not Gecko-based. Instead it's based on KHTML, the KDE rendering engine used in Konqueror. I wonder what prompted that move? It's potentially a politically charged one. KHTML is a very well-organized engine, but it's not too well tested to date, having existed really only for Linux users. (It also hasn't had full coverage on all compatibility areas.) We'll see how well this works in terms of compatibility; Safari has a handy "submit bug" icon in the upper right, though, so you can send non-compliant URLs to Apple to get them to tweak the engine into proper behavior.

But... well, there are a number of things about Safari that tell me immediately that it's not ready for prime time. It's very buggy. Within the first five minutes of use, I'd noticed that a) many pages don't load all the way, leaving the trick blue progress bar (that overlays on top of the URL) unfinished, and there's no visible activity indicator; b) mousing-over the "Bookmark Library" icon makes it disappear, under certain circumstances; c) the Preferences window opened up with no icons, no window contents, and a debug message about "Please select a button first!"; and d) it crashed while I was testing one of my sites. It has no text focus on drop-down menus, so you can't go directly to an item by typing its text partially (something only IE does "correctly" at this point). It doesn't display the contents of non-parsed-header scripts progressively, which is essential for one of my maintenance tools. And the contextual menus are sparse and non-modal, a far cry from the uber-contextuality of OmniWeb's CM's. Plus it makes my own blog page look like ass. (Crank down the text size a whole bunch and it starts to look a little better, but still.)

Something tells me I'll be using the "submit bug to Apple" function a whole lot in the next few days. If Apple is willing to fire this shot across Microsoft's bow-- one more step in the emancipation-from-Microsoft push that's been going on for a couple of years now-- then they'd better be willing to make Safari into a world-class browser that does everything IE does and more. Being fast isn't good enough... particularly when browser speed is one of those things that's only an issue on the Mac. (Saurabh was watching the keynote over my shoulder; his first reaction to the news that Apple was releasing a browser to compete with IE was "They're out of their minds." Because he didn't realize that web browsing on the Mac is slow. On the Windows side, browsing has long since become so well optimized that launch and render times have vanished into the noise, and browsing speed is bottlenecked only by bandwidth.) Safari has great potential to bolster Apple's ability to direct its own future; but this thing has a long way to go yet. Good thing it's just a Public Beta.


But Safari wasn't the centerpiece of the keynote; there wasn't really a single "centerpiece". There were lots of cool things. Chief among the remaining candidates would have to be the new PowerBook-- all 17 inches of PowerBook. They're calling it "the world's first 17-inch notebook"; that'd better be true, because someone here was saying that Sony already had one. (A quick look through Sony's VAIO page doesn't seem to indicate that they have anything bigger than 16", though.) But even if there's a factual bloop there, this is a pretty sweet package. It's even thinner than the current TiBook (1"); it's got rounded edges, like the iBook; it's got a slot-load SuperDrive standard; it's got a GeForce4 with 64MB of RAM; it's even got a trick back-lit keyboard with ambient light detection so the letters light up when it gets dark. The screen is straight out of the 17" iMac (which is not discontinued, much though that might surprise a whole lot of Slashdot readers who were led to believe that the fact that Apple would no longer be buying 17" widescreen LCDs from LG Electronics meant that the 17" iMac was cancelled, rather than that they were simply switching suppliers because LG wasn't going to be making the screens anymore). Oh, and it's got FireWire 800-- quite a silent little rev there. It needs a different connector than FireWire 400 does; I wonder why that is. (More pins?) No USB 2.0, though; it's certainly not lacking in ports, however. Crikey. Everything from on-board BlueTooth to DVI to line-in to S-Video to USB on both sides is in here.

Plus 802.11g-- er, excuse me: AirPort Extreme. They've gone up to the new 54Mbps standard, the one that's backwards-compatible with 802.11b (802.11a is not). It's a bigger card, which is interesting; no more PCMCIA version, at least not yet. But the new 802.11g Base Station has a whole heap of new features, including automatic bridging, USB printing, and 50 simultaneous real users-- for 2/3 the prior price. It's now down to $200. I'd say there's been a major stair-step here in value. I may in fact have to get one of these monster laptops. Steve did say that one of Apple's explicit goals is to get more people off of desktop computers and onto laptops; that does seem a sound plan, since Apple seems to have a knack for producing kickass laptops that don't have as much potential for attendant derision as their desktops do. It's a market they seem to be a bit better in. Aziz Poonawalla suggested to me in e-mail a while back that Apple might do well to stop making desktops-- or at least de-emphasize them-- and focus their efforts on their laptop line, where they seem to have more of a natural advantage these days. I was skeptical, but Steve appears to have the same idea after all.

To say nothing of the new 12-inch PowerBook. Yikes. Okay, at $1799, it's no iBook-killer; but damn, that's small. They had some pro photographers in the promo video who were talking about how this is exactly what they'd been hoping for: a full-featured, top-end laptop that's really damned small. And the contrast in what's now an extremely well-positioned notebook line is quite a kicker; wait'll you see the new TV ad starring NBA star Yao Ming and Verne Troyer (Mini-Me) on an airplane with their respective PowerBooks. There were about three people in my cubicle when the ad came on; by the time it was over, we had a roaring party of six or seven, attracted by the gales of laughter rolling across the floor. The jubilant MacWorld spirit was in high gear by that point, and even the Mac skeptics here at work were really getting into it. Nicely played, Steve.


So then there's the new "iLife" packaging for the iApps, with new major versions of iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD, as well as the unlocking of cool new stuff in iTunes. This won't be ready until later this month, but judging by the demos, it'll all be well worth waiting for. Microsoft has been making great strides trying to catch up with Apple's "digital hub" stuff, and we've been left to speculate about the "media-based interface" metaphors and concepts that seem to be apparent in the various apps. It's all been speculation, though; but now it's clear that this is where Apple wants to go. Until now, each iApp worked independently; you had to know how to get into iTunes for your music, or iPhoto for your pictures, and only then would your media-specific metaphors become useful. But now, each iApp has visibility and interaction into each of the other iApps; iMovie can list and import your songs and photos directly, iPhoto and iMovie can burn straight to DVD, and so on. There's no no longer the need to rely on the old standby "files and folders" metaphors when you have to take your data out of one context and import it into another. Now you can stay within the media-based context of your task and simply do it, without having to export anything to Quicktime files or create folders full of pictures. This was an essential stepping-stone toward the media-based strategy being comprehensive and genuinely useful, and it looks like they've taken it that last mile now. And once again Apple has taken a clear lead in showing where this market ought to go. I can't wait to get my boxed copy ($50 for all four apps, or a free download for everything except iDVD, which has an ass-load of new transitions which now incorporate your own video into their funky artsy effects). Color me impressed, and impatient at that.

Speaking of video, the first thing Jobs (actually, Schiller) showed off was Final Cut Express: a lite version of FCP whose purpose would appear to be to apply a pincers movement to Premiere. Adobe can't be all that happy with Apple right about now; Premiere has the bottom rung at the $600 slot, FCP comes in mid-range at $1000, and Avid fits at the top-end at $1500 and up. But now that FCE will be sitting below Premiere-- with most of the critical FCP features-- Premiere is going to have a hard time making its case. FCP is already fast amassing an industry all its own, and now there's going to be a low-ball $300 version that will eliminate the price-based reasons to go with Premiere instead of FCP. Adobe will have to counter this move with a "Premiere Elements" or something. Ballsy move by Apple here. No way could they have done this before Photoshop 7 was released.

And then there's Keynote, which I can imagine getting a copy of just to screw around with. It looks so fun. The fact that it has import/export compatibility with PowerPoint is the linchpin, but far more important to me is the fact that we finally now have an app that gleefully shows off all those cool Quartz tricks that were part of all the early Mac OS X demos, but that the standard apps never really took advantage of or gave users control over. Now we see why Jobs touted such things so much: he got to use them all the time, considering that this is the very tool that he's apparently been using to put together these keynote presentations. The text and graphics compositing tools alone look like the stuff with which one can waste days on end, and then there are those insane transitions and themes. At $100, this looks like one of those things that they just thought was too much fun not to release and let everybody play with. Considering the unusually long and loud applause Jobs got when he announced that everybody in attendance at the keynote would get their own free copy on their way out the door, it would seem he called that one pretty much on the mark.

So yeah-- it wasn't by any means a downer of a keynote, and I'm feeling that all-too-familiar tug on my wallet. Yeah, I do need a new laptop. I suppose it would make some sense for me to go drop $3K on a laptop with a bigger screen than my desktop machine here at work. Or at least I can convince myself of that, I'm confident.

I'm sure I'll get to discuss all this in person tonight at the blogger bash in San Francisco. I hope to get to match up some faces with well-known opinions; and there'll be plenty to talk about, even without such things as international terrorism to occupy the conversation.

Whew.

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© Brian Tiemann