| Wednesday, June 25, 2003 |
11:16 - Doin' it right
http://www.whatithinkiknow.com/Archive/WIT20030625.html
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How cool is iChat AV and iSight? This cool:
What completely blew me away, though, was how easy it was to hookup. After my wife opened the package, I asked her for the installer disk - woops, old Windows habit! "There's no disk!" she admonished, "It's Apple!". And lo, I plugged in the iSight, opened iChat AV (downloaded the beta from the Apple website for free yesterday). The application popped open, and boom, there I was, staring back at myself. No installation (except the software itself), no configuration, nothing. (My only complaint is that the plastic clip mount doesn't hold very well onto an iBook screen.)
So, I had an idea. I went upstairs and grabbed my digital video camera, plugged in the firewire to my desktop, and opened iChat AV. Boom, same thing - staring back at myself. I look at the windows, and there is the other computer, noticed by Rendezvous, which is some sort of local networking thingy (the same thing that lets me listen to music from one computer on the other one). So, I click on it, and run downstairs to accept the request for a chat. Run back upstairs, and start yelling "Yin! Come here!". I watch on my upstairs computer as she wanders over from the kitchen, looks into the computer screen, and sees me. "Hey! Check this out!"
The most telling bit about this whole story, to me, is the thing about Rendezvous: it's finally starting to come into its own. When introduced in Jaguar, Rendezvous' utility was somewhat, shall we say, limited. I think, in fact, that it had no effect on anything except iChat and the little iChat integration deely in Mail. Not terribly useful. Jobs and Schiller had demoed iTunes Music Sharing over Rendezvous on-stage, but such a feature was not to be seen in Jaguar.
It wasn't until iTunes 4 that Rendezvous-based Music Sharing saw the light of day; but by that time, little things here and there had started to Rendezvous their way into our hearts. Safari automatically discovered websites on other Macs on the LAN. Screen savers like Fluid use Rendezvous now to auto-discover visual themes served from others' machines. Xcode-- which I think deserves a closer look-- uses Rendezvous to auto-discover other Macs on the network, which it can then use to distribute compile tasks in parallel, with zero configuration. Just press a button and it goes to town.
A little more about Xcode, by the way: this is some hot stuff. Aside from the Rendezvous-enabled distributed compiles, there's plenty more cool stuff in there now. Like, oh, I don't know, the ability to apply hot-fixes to runnig code. A little Scotch-tape icon that lets you change your in-development program while it's running. I don't know how well this will work on highly complex, modular software, but in the demo it was certainly cool.
I love how they framed it, too. The slide that Chris Espinosa showed was of the standard programming turnaround loop, the procedure you have to go through when you encounter a bug in the software you're writing:
Stop -- Debug -- Compile -- Link -- Start
Xcode, Espinosa said, eliminated the Link phase right off the bat by removing the necessity to link the whole runtime executable-- just what's necessary to launch. (The five-tile illustration shrank to four.) Then, he said, the Compile phase was now reduced by about half, because of the distributed-compile feature and the new predictive, background-task compiles that Xcode now does-- it starts compiling the object code in the background as soon as you make changes. The bar shrinks to three-and-a-half: Stop, Debug, (Compile), Start.
Then, Espinosa said the Stop and Start phases-- which actually do take up a non-trivial amount of time in the turnaround loop-- are now eliminated by the Fix and Continue feature, making the update to the running code right in the debugger. Scratch two more phases, and we're down to one-and-a-half.
Then some wag in the front row yells, "Now eliminate the Debug stage!" (Mike Silverman filled me in on this one; so that's what that laughter from the video feed was about.)
Anyway: Xcode is worth attention for these features alone, as well as for the newly redesigned iTunes-like datasource-and-contents interface. As Mark reminds me, the fix-and-go stuff isn't new-- it was actually an OpenSTEP 4.0 feature, once thought consigned to the dustbin of history, but now resurrected and made mainstream. "Everything old is new again", said Mark in e-mail. "Good ideas never die." Ain't it great?
And now iChat has been taken to the next level with the AV stuff-- Rendezvous, of course, making the whole thing seamless, to the point where nobody has to think about it or understand it or even know it's there. And you can plug in any FireWire camera you want-- they all work the same, Apple's drivers support them all natively, and there's no need for specialized software-- making apps like EvoCam possible. I know this is starting to sound like a mantra, but that's the whole point: It just works.
Oh, and a look at the Exposé page reminds me of just how far off-base the people are who think that the key to Apple's success is to adopt Intel processors, multi-button mice, a taskbar on the bottom, OEMed VIA chipsets, and in effect just make PCs:
Using mouse buttons.
And those of you who use a multi-button mouse can also assign Exposé actions to the extra buttons on your favorite rodent.
In other words, Apple's too busy coming up with the next envelope-pushing thing made possible by their overengineered, Quadrant-II infrastructure to worry about whether people think they should be more like Microsoft. Apple isn't about twitching the knob from 2 to 2.1; their dials go to 11.
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