When Steve Jobs appeared on stage last Tuesday, he finally had some great news for the Mac faithful. We all know that he is a man of vision and that what he is visualizing is a world where portable devices will eventually replace most desktop computers. While this may be true, the Macintosh is still a cornerstone of Apple’s business and perhaps more surprisingly for him, an engine of growth for the company.
That means that even if there is doubt within Apple about the future of the PC, they still have to push the Mac, at least for now. My personal feeling is that those efforts are half-hearted at best. The new iMac is hardly a revolution, although it is still a great machine. The real news was software related. New versions of iLife and iWork were exactly what the Mac crowd was clamoring for. For those who are not familiar with the Mac platform, all this excitement about a new software release may seem strange. However, on the Mac, elegant, easy-to-use software is as important, if not more, than hardware. For Apple die-hard fans, Numbers is probably the most important announcement, as it allows most Mac users finally to work on their computers without having to rely on any products from Microsoft. The general public will probably care more about the major upgrades made to iPhoto and iMovie. Despite all the improvements and new features that will make iLife’08 and iWork’08 an instant success (by Apple software sales standards) I think that Mac users deserved more. My gut feeling, as a developer, is that Apple is not devoting a lot of resources to these products, otherwise we would have seen even more improvements. After all, they had eighteen months since the last release to update the software. Besides, some programs like iWeb or iDVD saw little change. I would love to believe that Apple is listening to their customers and that they have worked as hard as possible to deliver a release well planned years in advance, but it doesn’t seem likely. It looks much more like the work of a couple of passionate (and talented) developers.
The truth is that while I am very happy with all these announcements, as a Mac user I cannot help feel a little worried. This was probably the best keynote delivered by Steve Jobs to the Mac community in years. It deserved to be delivered during a high profile event. Instead, it was delivered to a small group of journalists at the Apple headquarters. Why?
I have just completed updating the template that I use on by my WordPress blog. I have finally eliminated the use of tables and replaced the old template with a new one that relies exclusively on CSS for object positioning.
While this is something that I should have done long ago (and that I still need to propagate the changes to the rest of my site), it was really the release of the iPhone that moved me to update my design. Now that Safari is using CSS design cues to display parts of the content in an optimal way, it is more than likely that Opera, Nokia and others will follow that very same path. Old design techniques, mainly based on the use of tables, which have been obsolete for years but are still used in many sites, are likely to disappear very quickly. We will certainly not miss them.
The adoption of standards by Web Designers has been slow at best. In most cases they have chosen simplicity over openness. Since IE was the dominant browser there was no compelling reason to check for compatibility with other browsers. Thankfully, Microsoft made a terrible mistake by not updating its browser in an attempt to maintain their desktop hegemony. That has allowed Firefox and Safari to slowly chip market share away from IE, but at a painfully slow pace. However, things are changing, by end of 2008 Apple will be selling each quarter more iPhones than Macs. Nokia will have sold millions of cell phones equipped with Web Kit based browsers and let’s not forget about Opera, their mobile browser is also very good. This will accelerate the rate of adoption of alternative browsers, since IE is not as dominant in the cell phone industry as it still is on the desktop.
Beleaguered Web designers like myself (if don’t really know how I dare call my self a web designer) have no choice. We need to adapt. CSS still has a lot of limitations. From my point of view it is an ugly and incomplete standard. However, if everyone understand that no single player can stop the standard from progressing, we will see it improve quickly. Today, companies like Microsoft and Adobe still believe that they can control the Web with products like Flash and initiatives such as AIR (a.k.a. Apollo) or Silverlight. We have a responsibility to show them that this is not what we want. What we need is simply better open standards.
As promised, the podcast for episode number 10 of IT Insight has been published earlier today. Get it while it is still hot!
When I look at my server stats it is clear that episode 7 of IT Insight is by far the most popular. It was also the only one not available in English. This has now been fixed. After all, I had to keep myself busy during the nine hour flight back from Sao Paulo.
After a very long hiatus, I have finally started working on a new episode of IT Insight. I am currently attending an IBM technical sales manager meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil and since the weather is terrible and there isn’t much to do around the hotel I decided to work on a presentation on a subject I really care about, the environment.
Few probably know that Data Centers in the U.S. currently consume 1.5% of the electric energy produced in the country. If Data Centers become greener by reducing energy consumption and recycling e-waste, it can mean a big difference. As technologists we have to understand what can and needs to be done in order to reach those objectives.
I have already published the slides, but I will record and publish the podcast episode once I get back home, probably this week-end.
Over the years I have seen countless TV shows in which a smart detective tried to find ways to sidestep diplomatic immunity in order to send behind bars foreigners who committed a crime on US soil. It seems therefore that Americans value accountability. If you do a crime, you do the time is a popular motto in the U.S.
Now we see the President of the United states pardoning a convicted criminal that helped his administration destroy a political opponent who was just trying to say the truth. Conservative representatives seem to be very happy with this move. However I cannot imagine the American people backing such an outrageous decision.
Who really believes that the sentence was too harsh? Thousands have died because of pre-war lies spread by the President and his entourage. Valerie Plame’s life and career was deliberately destroyed by Lewis Libby. This was proven by the case’s prosecutor and a jury declared him guilty despite countless attempts by his political friends to cast a positive light on this sinister character.
At this point it is clear that George W. Bush has lost any moral authority he had left. However, this scandal goes way beyond the Presidency. The political right has always claimed the ownership of the words morality and decency. It is evident that we must all hope that these values can be found elsewhere, because when it comes to the Republicans, the facts have proven that they see them simply as empty words.
For me, at least, the third time was a charm. I was finally able to install Safari 3.02 on my IBM ThinkPad. Having been unable to install any of the previous betas I did not expect a stable product and I was not disappointed. The Windows beta is definitively not ready for prime time as it gets hung quite frequently and seems to still have serious memory management issues, specially when working with a large number of tabs.
Despite all its current flaws, I enjoy using Safari on my laptop at work. Unlike regular Windows users, I like the way it renders fonts and images. It makes me feel right at home. In my mind there is no doubt that other Mac users will also enjoy it.
Something is missing in the current version of Safari for Windows, though. I would really want to be able to use .Mac syncing with it. Right now this is impossible because there is no iSync for Windows, and that is fine with me. However it would be nice if Safari had a preference pane to set .Mac preferences. I have already submitted a bug report asking Apple to support this feature and I encourage all .Mac customers who agree with me to do the same. Who knows, maybe Apple will listen?
There has been a lot of speculation on the Net that the main reason for Apple to release Safari on Windows is the money they can get from Google or Yahoo by directing users to their respective search engines. While there is a lot of money to be made from this rather trivial functionality (estimations put the the annual income of the Mozilla Foundation at over US$ 70 million because of their search agreement with Google), I doubt this is the main or even one of the most important reasons Apple decided to release their browser on Windows.
It is important to understand that there are many areas where Apple stands to benefit from having their browser ported to Windows.
So far, Apple’s most successful has been iTunes. With over 500 million distributed copies, the digital jukebox application is probably one of the most popular applications ever. On Mac OS X, the iTunes store view is implemented using WebKit (the core web render engine used by Safari). On Windows, since WebKit was not available, they probably had to embed IE. That means that there are serious limitations to what Apple can do with the look and feel of their music store. By releasing Safari on Windows (and hence WebKit), iTunes can now use the same web engine on both platforms. This simplifies web development and allows Apple to use many of the advanced HTML features not available on IE. Safari 3 also offers great integration with Quicktime which will allow for better video support inside the store. Once Apple releases Safari 3 and bundles it with iTunes on Windows, they finally get a lot more design freedom that will help them differentiate from other music selling sites that have to support older browsers.
Another area where Apple should to benefit from releasing Safari 3 on Windows is their .Mac online service. Today Apple has to make sure that .Mac can be used on any web browser. Developing the online .Mac mail reader application must have been extremely complex because of substantial differences between the main browsers. Now that Apple offers Safari on Windows they could decide to drop support for other browsers. This would allow them to save money, release new services more quickly and offer an enhanced user experience. Dropping support for IE is something most Apple .Mac customers can probably live with, specially if that decision comes accompanied by new interesting services enabled by a better browser.
Finally, as many have pointed out, by increasing Safari’s market share, Apple is cornering web designers into testing their sites against that browser, which will help both iPhone and Mac sales.
This is just a short list of ideas that could explain why Apple decided to release Safari on Windows, but it certainly proves that there are many more reasons that justify porting Safari than just easy money.
On Wednesday, after another exhausting day, I went to the CocoaHeads meeting held at the San Francisco Apple Store. The theatre was totally packed to listen to a panel of independent Mac developers talking about the challenges of getting into this industry.
I think that it is fair to say that this session was extremely interesting. The insight provided by Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster (who, by the way, had just earned one day earlier an Apple Design Award for his upcoming version of Delicious library) was very valuable, as well as just plain fun. He proved that there currently is a market for innovative independent developers, although he also made clear that there are many challenges on the road to success. All in all, it was a very interesting, open and fresh discussion.
For most, the WWDC keynote was a disappointment. Few new details were unveiled about Leopard and there were no hardware announcements. I can understand that. I can even understand that someone would start selling a t-shirt that says Worst Keynote ever. What I do not agree with is that some are starting to belittle Leopard and call it a minor update. That simply is not true.From what Apple has shared with developers at WWDC it is clear that a major code cleanup is at the heart of this new OS release. After adding tons of new functionality in previous releases, that was really needed. We like to say that OS X is efficient and not bloated. A lot of work was required to maintain this assertion true. Also, computer processors have changed, they are now 64 bits and have now more cores and applications have to learn to support them. This represents a major change. If Apple had decided to focus on eye candy and had ignored this fact, OS X would have been obsolete in 18 months. Instead they focused on the fundamentals and it seems that their work is paying off.The problem, however, is that core improvements to the OS are not sexy. They are difficult to demonstrate and do not generate much positive feedback from the press. Steve made quite a good job demonstrating the value of 64 bits, however that demo did not generate nearly as much interest as the video wall demo. On the long run though, great 64 bit support for consumer applications may be one of the most important differentiators in Apple’s battle against Microsoft. Despite Steve’s problems communicating that message to consumers, Leopard is clearly one of the most important OS updates in recent history.