On a blog without a name

Apple had widely trailed the fact that it would make some announcement about the next version of its operating system yesterday, and sure enough, they have chosen to release some details. The highlights can all be found here.

In a remarkable exercise in humility, self-restraint and respect for those who don’t use the Mac, I’ve put my own comments in the extended version of this post.

Some of the things look truly exciting. The video conferencing offered by the current iChat software and Apple hardware already has me tied to the platform, but collaboration between people over the internet looks as if it is going to become a good deal easier. Combine what they are currently promising (the ability to present presentations remotely, the ability to “share” a desktop) with something like Subetheredit, and the Mac will make a truly compelling platform for collaboration. The Mac is already popular in academic settings: this should make it more so. As far as I can see, this is a truly innovative offering.

While many around the web have been quick to point out that version control has existed for a long time, Apple seem to be promising an innovative interface that makes version control of files not only easy but automatic. I have mixed feelings about this feature. The current interface being shown to the public seems a little heavy-handed to me and I have a serious question about disk space and a small but niggling worry about security. Being able to recover lost files is a neat trick, but so is being able to delete files and free up disk space. We shall have to wait and see how this one turns out in practice.

The security worry, by the way, also applies to the new iChat features, but there is as yet too little data available on them to comment further.

The Mail.app improvements fall into two groups. A central database for short notes and “todo” lists, that will be capitalised on by other application writers as well, seems a fantastic leap forward, and just the kind of thing the OS should be offering. On the “templates” I have nothing to say except that I hated them in Windows 95, where they did much to contribute to the notion that Windows users were bad net-citizens. Microsoft has quietly rowed back from such hideousness, and one hopes that Apple makes the button to activate these very, very small. About a pixel in width would be about right.

Virtual desktops were probably inevitable, and will stop much winging from Linux-users. But as a recovering Linux-user myself, I have found that I find the application-hiding offered by current OS X to be a flexible and powerful way to work.

Three cheers for the new text-to-speech system. I hope they’ve worked on the speech recognition side as well.

Xcode 3, which was announced yesterday but for which I still see no link, brings automatic garbage control to Objective C. Those of you who understood the last sentence will, I hope, agree that this makes Objective C a much more attractive option; those of you for whom that sentence meant nothing should stop worrying about it, but realise that those writing programs for the Mac have just been saved hours of pain.

If email “templates” seem bad, though, there is certainly more of that to come. Spurred on by Microsoft’s promises for its next release, Apple have made it as easy as possible to make your application not only sing and dance, but spin around and around with ever more dizzying effects.

This helps to highlight a real problem that Apple faces. On the one hand, many of the features it offers represent real advances for those using the platform for serious work. Schedule management, collaboration, easy version control – all of these ought to make the platform a compelling choice for academic and business settings. Yet Apple are also aiming their products not at the serious user, but at the journalist and the blogging teenager. This latter group will be impressed by features that pull Apple in a different direction entirely, and that threaten to make the user experience quirky, childish and distracting. They are navigating a dangerous path at the moment – one hopes they will not lose their way.