Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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money. I think.
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Friday, August 11, 2006

11:24 - OUTATIME

(top)

Sure, Time Machine is conceptually nothing new; there have been version-control systems for developers and administrators dating back to VMS, and reinvented numerous times since then (including by me�I have a document checking/archival system at work that lets you retrieve any revision in a doc's history).

But what's interesting about this (aside, of course, from the whiz-bang execution) is that it's bringing this kind of automated history eraser button to the consumer, in a way that anybody can use and understand.

Evariste writes:

Time Machine brings the benefit of revision control-and the kind of power you could only get by installing filesystems like ZFS-to the masses, and goes a long way to answer those who may be swayed by Mark Pilgrim's grounds for switching to Ubuntu: that staying with Mac unacceptably endangered the longevity of his data. Scott Forstall went on and on about how devastated he would be if he lost a photo of his children, sounding almost Pilgrim-esque. Nothing about the closed file formats that bug Mark so much, but this has a very strong "we heard what Mark's saying" vibe to it.

Also, Time Machine finally brings *useful* 3D to the desktop, unlike Sun's Looking Glass and other abortive attempts. It turns out that the third dimension is temporal, not spatial.

Yeah. There's an impulse in software design that says we must use all our hardware to its utmost capacity in bringing ever more awesome graphics to the common operating system environment. Yeah, well, screw that. There comes a point of diminishing returns, when adding drop shadows and translucency-based compositing gives an OS an advantage that's purely aesthetic and that nobody has even noticed since 2001. You'll notice that the really visually swoopy features of Mac OS X these days rely on good old 2D scaling; thanks to the fact that you can do it live in Quartz, we get functionality in Expos� and Dashboard that frankly does not need all that much horsepower in order to look really sweet. And it's way more functional than something like SphereXP, which is more CPU-intensive, less pretty, less live and interactive, and doesn't show you everything at once (sort of defeating the purpose of a desktop organizer, and making it instead into a gee-whiz curiosity that the user runs long enough to show his friends and then turns it off when he gets sick of it).

Microsoft is now putting translucency into Vista, with bonus glass-brick distortion effects and reduced navigational awareness at no extra charge. But we also remember the earlier demos, back when it was Longhorn, of windows that waved and fluttered like flags in the breeze, taking advantage of a new blow-Quartz-out-of-the-water compositing and 3D engine that was supposed to underpin the new operating system and revolutionize the world. Because, see, what's really standing in the way of our productivity on our computers is the fact that our windows don't flutter in the breeze.

The visual effects in Time Machine are pure 2D goodness�the same routines we've come to know and love in Expos� and Dashboard. But while some people have pushed for wacky ideas like replacing the Desktop metaphor with a time-based thing (where documents exist in a "stack", where they're closer to you the more recently you've looked at them, and future appointments and other such items come toward you visually from The Future), fighting against the well-understood tenets that the human brain likes working with vague spatial references ("the document is over there") rather than temporal ones ("the document was last touched in mid-June"), Apple seems to have embraced the idea of temporal navigation only as a sideshow to the main event�only coming into play in the rare occasion when you need to expand your data along the hidden temporal axis.

Also:

Interestingly, Xcode 3.0 brings another form of simplified revision control to an audience that you wouldn't expect to need it, since they already generally use subversion or cvs: developers. Check out the sidebar about Project Snapshots: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html

Interesting. CVS is certainly a well-established technology and workflow, but I'm not sure how well it would handle a wholesale reversion to a specific date. Probably just fine, depending on the front-end software doing it well. But if Apple's got the Time Machine hooks built into the structure of the OS, hell, why not make it available to everything? It's free. It'll be interesting to see whether anybody jumps on that particular bandwagon, or if Project Snapshots turns out to be less versatile than CVS by sheer dint of newness.

Naturally, Time Machine will have to have some safeguards built in before it can be rolled out for general use�the ability to exempt certain kinds of files, for instance, or files above a certain size (I have lots of 60MB-plus Photoshop files); or to clear out all the historically saved revisions of a certain document or class of documents all at once, essentially making the user no worse off than they were before Leopard, at least for those files. Even with those safeguards it will depend on average users having tons of disk space available, because even a non-savvy user who isn't into tweaking the knobs can create large data files that Time Machine would then have to duplicate through time with every revision. But Apple's touting this as being the backup solution for "your digital life", meaning that it's supposed to be geared toward your photos and videos every bit as much as to your shopping lists and term papers. I agree with evariste�this almost seems like a feature that was kicked to the top of the priority stack in response to people reading Pilgrim's blog and freaking out over Apple's seeming lack of attention paid to media archival. Well, here's the answer. Those four drive bays in the Mac Pros are going to be more welcome than any of us realize.

UPDATE: More thoughts on this subject from Kevin at Atomic Glee. The gist of his examples is that it's not a particularly good idea to try to imitate real-world devices (with real-world physical limitations) in software. It doesn't gain you anything except possibly a career-enhancing demo. See also the iTunes widget in Dashboard, which still suffers from the I-work-like-an-iPod-even-though-I'm-software moronism of its beta days.