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The migration to Mac OS X has presented
us all with a new set of challenges — some
real, some imagined. Quite apart from the obvious
questions of software availability, hardware compatibility,
and UI performance, there are some more fundamental
forces at work that lend a grim, bewildering sort
of tint to the situation. This is that ungainly hydra
that goes by the name of the Multi-User Operating
System — and all that that implies.
When the first-time (or long-time)
Mac user first installs Mac OS X, he is immersed into
the polished, showoffy graphics of Aqua. The first
half-hour or so of the Mac OS X experience is taken
up with gleeful exploration of the slick interface — its
translucent menus, the Genie effect, movies playing
in the Dock, and all those fun little toys that look
so good in the PR videos on Apple's website. But then
the user rubs his hands together and prepares himself
to get down to work. He'll fiddle with some Word files,
he'll do some Web surfing, he'll snap some digital
photos and transfer them to his Mac... but wait a
minute. Where the heck are all the files supposed
to go?
Help! I'm lost in my own computer!
In the old, single-user days of Mac
OS 9 and earlier, the owner of the computer was the
lord of his domain. Anything in the computer could
be quite happily renamed, moved, thrown into the Trash,
duplicated, or torn into little tiny bits at the user's
whim, regardless of the harm it might do to the system's
operation. This was a perfectly fine model for a desktop
computer only intended to support one user — the
owner of the machine. This wasn't a server. The operating
system didn't have to contend with multiple users
concurrently working with files and programs on the
computer locally or over a network, or with misguided
or malicious users bent on destroying vital system
components. These concerns were for the big boys:
UNIX and Windows NT. The Mac and Windows lived in
a simpler world.
Consequently, a Mac user would set
up his computer to look just the way he wanted, furnishing
it like a studio apartment. Some Macs ended up looking
like showplace Manhattan penthouses, but the vast
majority of Macs turned into college dorm rooms: files
strewn haphazardly all over the Desktop, all over
the topmost level of the Macintosh HD, and in dozens
of little sub-folders inside that top level, organized
according to the owner's sense of taste and convenience,
however unpredictably such a thing varies from person
to person. Apple, in the later versions of the classic
Mac OS, tried to coax users to be a little more predictably
organized by providing ready-made Documents and Applications
folders, with their own custom ("blessed") folder
icons, but only a few applications ever paid proper
attention to them. Users put their folders full of
stuff right on their Desktops and settled comfortably
into the satisfying continuum of a personalized space
where only the owner can ever properly find anything.
Word files? They're over there, under the pile of
dirty laundry. MP3s? Some are on the shelf in the
closet, but there are a bunch under the bed. Photos?
Down here in this drawer. Yeah, I know it's a mess,
but it's MY mess!
But logging into Mac OS X is like stepping
into a brand-new room, with all the furniture rearranged,
new shelves and drawers all over the place, and all
your stuff still somewhere in there — but
it's up to you to figure out where. And once you've
done so, it's up to you to figure out a new way of
coping with the new organizational system into which
you've been dropped.
First of all, it's not obvious how
you even get into the filesystem. It used to be that
you'd simply double-click on the Macintosh HD in the
upper-right corner of the screen, and you'd be at
the top level of the hierarchy, free to delve down
as deep as you like, but encouraged to stay right
there at the top. And indeed you can still do that;
but something's different.
The folders you found there under Mac
OS 9 were friendly, welcoming, encouraging you to
dump your files wherever you like. The "Late Breaking
News" icon offered help like a kindly butler. Most
importantly, that brief listing of folders represented
the ONLY place a user could see to put things, aside
from right on the Desktop.
Mac OS X's hard drive view is a bit
more sterile, a bit more forbidding. Apple has done
a great job of hiding the cryptic UNIX-isms that typically
go into the root directory, but even so, a virgin
installation of OS X (especially in the future, when
it's the only thing to ship on new Macs) shows only
folders like Applications (something a user generally
knows only to touch by installing programs into it),
System (full of mystery), and Library (even more so).
Where's a user supposed to put his MP3s?
The Perils of UNIX (and how it could be so much
worse)
The Home folder, that's where. This
is where UNIX rears its misshapen head. In UNIX, individual
users are never supposed to start their exploration
of the filesystem at the top, like you do in single-user
operating systems like Windows and the classic Mac
OS. Instead, each user has a home directory, a place
where his personal domain of control begins, and everything
underneath THAT is his own to do with as he pleases.
Above him, though, there's a hierarchy of other home
folders for other users with the same restrictions
on each of their own hierarchies, and still higher
there's the forbidding no-man's-land of the Operating
System — now a much larger, somehow
more foreboding and sinister entity now that it seems
to exert a higher level of authority over the machine
than the guy who actually plunked down the money to
buy the thing. Even if he's the only person who will
ever use the computer, and if he'll never be adding
any further user accounts, he's not the boss. Not
anymore. And he doesn't live on top of the mountain
like he used to, but in a cottage in the foothills.
No, the user of Mac OS X is supposed
to make the logical leap of clicking on the Home icon
in the Finder toolbar — a nice, cheery-looking
house indeed, but still a foreign concept to anyone
wondering why his "Home" should be a different place
than the "Computer" sitting next to it. The conscientious
user should then realize the importance of this new
starting point, what with its much more homelike Music
and Movies and Documents folders, and train himself
to go directly there when working with his files.
He can do this by dragging the Home folder into the
Dock for easy access (as I've done), and/or by setting
the Finder to start in the Home folder rather than
at the top-level Computer view, so that clicking on
the Finder logo/face at the left end of the Dock launches
him right into his Home, where he's most likely going
to want to be.
So Mac OS X would really prefer you
to enter the filesystem through the new, unfamiliar
Finder icon in the Dock than from the Macintosh HD
icon (which you can elect to hide altogether, saving
valuable Desktop space). Okay, some time and education
(and the ubiquitous Windows-bred tendency to start
at the lower-left corner of the screen) will eventually
solve that. But by the time the user has mastered
this new skill, he's already faced some very tricky
concepts and overcome some clumsy obstacles which
really have no place in what's supposed to be the
easiest-to-use operating system on the planet. Before
he even gets to play with any files, he's frustrated
and alienated, and not even sure where his "Home"
really is.
And what's the next thing he sees?
Why, it's those officially "blessed" organizational
folders that Apple has kindly placed in your Home
for you: Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, the Desktop
folder (ahh, a second, more confusing way to see the
files that are sitting on the Desktop — just
like Windows), and the leering Library folder with
its mysterious contents.
The user's propensity to Think Different
is by this point seriously weary. Far from being an
operating system that lets him flop down on the couch
and make himself at home, OS X stands there like a
schoolmarm and points with a ruler at the places where
his stuff should go. "Hang up your jacket," it scolds.
"Right there, in the Jackets folder. And for goodness'
sake, don't just dump all your mail in a pile. Put
it in the proper folder. No, not later. Right now."
This comes across to the independent-thinking user
as onerous and unnecessary. While Apple's goals are
laudable — trying to get people to
keep their stuff in more predictable places — it
isn't going to win friends especially soon among people
who want to bang a few nails into the walls and replace
the ceiling light fixtures with subwoofers.
As an aside, though, we have it like
Greek gods compared to Windows XP users. They've got
much the same structure to deal with in their new
multi-user operating system, except that everything
there seems to be the result of the people who created
Active Directory trying to design a stereo. Users'
home folders in Mac OS X are found in — surprise — Users,
right under the top level of the hard drive. Where
are they in Windows XP? Why, "Documents and Settings",
of course.
And as The Register has recently so
gleefully
pointed out, the decisions Microsoft has made
in implementing a multi-user OS for consumer use are
mind-boggling. New user accounts, for example, are
created as "Administrator" accounts with blank passwords.
Er... pardon? Did we read that aright? Yes, it seems
we did. This is in order to work around painful permissions-related
problems such as mounted CDs not showing up unless
the user has Administrator access, and certain games
refusing to install or run without Administrator privileges — one
of Microsoft's proposed workarounds is to install
a separate copy of the game for each user who wants
to play it. Charming. At least Apple has made this
work very smoothly — any user can mount
CDs or iPods with impunity, and system-altering actions
simply prompt you for the password of an Administrator
user before they proceed. The "root" (Administrator)
user is disabled by default and cannot even operate
as a regular login user unless you specifically set
it up so that it can. Sensible.
Oh, and lest you think OS X's schoolmistress-like
strictness is bad, wait till you get your first admonishment
from Windows XP to clean up your desktop.
The New Face of Files
Ahem — anyway. Confronted
with all these carefully regimented folders for organizing
one's files by type, a user would be forgiven for
finding this kind of forced data organization to be
just another set of pointless rules to follow in dealing
with this new OS. Instead of creating new folders
in which to keep delightfully chaotic aggregations
of files, the user is encouraged to stick with what's
already there, bending his workflow to fit the one
that Apple has prescribed for him. Think Different,
indeed.
However, this reaction represents a
style of thinking that belongs more squarely in the
old, file-centric way of working with computers, and
it's less of a relevant concern today, and will become
still less of one as we continue to adjust. A higher
level of organization is necessary now in this multimedia-rich
world than was needed in the days when word-processing
and spreadsheet files walked the earth in their royal
splendor. Files are no longer seen as "files", per
se, but as "pictures" or "movies", and the new breed
of applications that work with them are going to encourage
the user to see them as such. Previews of files for
applicable file types are now here in the OS X Finder,
and none too soon, either. Whether a file represents
a picture, a song, an essay, or a Web page, users
are no longer in a position to keep track of them
through icons and cryptic filenames. Organization
and visibility are key.
Much has been made of the so-called
"task-based interface" of Windows XP, but one shouldn't
think that Mac OS X is any less attuned to that new
way of working with data. We're entering a new phase
in computing history, one in which we don't think
in terms of files (as we did in DOS and UNIX) in order
to accomplish our goals, or in terms of applications
(as we did in Windows and the classic Mac OS), but
in terms of pictures and songs and documents and movies — the
terminology in which we live our lives. Just as the
"Digital Hub" vision illustrates how we are beginning
to use various digital devices to enhance our lives,
rather than just geeking with them for their own sake,
the task-based user interface is one that acknowledges
the inherent differences between different kinds of
files and handles them according to their strengths,
rather than trying to treat them all as the same kinds
of data with the same limited ways of organizing them.
A perfect example of this is music
files: specifically, MP3s. While you can play MP3s
in the Finder's preview window, or play them in QuickTime,
the real star of the show here is iTunes. Far from
being an "application" in the classic sense (drawing
attention to itself with a glitzy, marketable, Douglas
Adams-esque name and an interface that tries way too
hard to imitate a real-world device like a car stereo
or a VCR), iTunes is nothing less than a better Finder
than the Finder, specifically designed for music files.
One school of thought has Windows XP loading up the
Explorer with an endless list of meta-data by which
you can sort your lists of files, but iTunes instead
does its best to obscure the MP3 files themselves
and allow you to navigate through them not as "files",
but as "songs"; associated not with folders, but with
artists and albums and genres. It came as somewhat
of a shock to me recently when I realized that it
had been months since I last even considered what
the filenames were of the songs in my MP3 collection.
Who cares? iTunes is keeping track of all that junk
for me.
When you feel like listening to music
on your computer, no longer do you think of MP3 files.
You don't reach for a Finder window, pondering whether
you need to open up the Macintosh HD and root around
until you find them, or whether you need to jump through
hoops to get to your Home folder. Instead, you go
for the unmistakable iTunes icon in the Dock: a CD
with musical notes. Not some corporate logo, not a
symbol that's become iconic in its own right as synonymous
with something completely unrelated (like Internet
Explorer "e" as a symbol of the Web)... iTunes' icon
visually says, simply, "Music". And that's all you
have to think about. Music.
Incidentally, Mac OS X has a big advantage
over Windows in accomplishing this feat, one that
will make it really hard for Windows Media Player
to match iTunes' ability to be the primary view for
browsing your music. This advantage is the Unique
File ID, a strength of the HFS filesystem all throughout
Mac history that makes it completely unnecessary to
rely on folder paths for a program to locate files.
Unique IDs make possible such acrobatics as moving
a file from one folder to another while it's still
being downloaded from the Net without the program
that's doing the downloading missing a beat, or moving
a program's Preferences file wherever in the system
you want to put it without the program losing track
of it. This functionality is an oft-overlooked strength
of the Mac that seems like such an obvious and essential
feature that once you know it's there, a system that
doesn't have it (for instance, Windows) seems inherently
broken. Apple went to great trouble during OS X development
to modify the UFS filesystem to incorporate this feature,
and it's plain to see why. Unique File IDs are tailor-made
for iTunes. Once a song has been added to iTunes'
database, it knows where to find that file, no matter
where you move it, and without having to rely on any
special hooks into the filesystem to monitor whenever
a file it's tracking has been moved (as would be necessary
under Windows). iTunes suggests that you keep your
MP3s inside its special folder within Documents (where
it puts new MP3s encoded from your CDs), but that's
purely for convenience — get those
files out of sight, out of mind. iTunes is taking
care of all that. Don't give it another thought.
Where's All This Going?
iTunes is definitely the star player
in the new paradigm of data management, but it's by
no means the only one we'll ever see. The QuickTime
player got into the game early on by letting you keep
your favorite movie clips in its little drawer, but
that was hardly a friendly or useful UI (especially
since there was no way to sort the clips, and most
of them showed only the blank black or green frame
that begins most movies — well, the
tasteful ones, anyway), but it was an indication of
things to come. One day, QuickTime will let us fill
in fields in each of our movies to help us group and
navigate them just as we do now with iTunes. The long-rumored
iPicture/iPhoto/iWhatever tool, which if we're right
will do for our GIFs and JPEGs what iTunes has done
for our MP3s, will be a strong addition to that family.
Image Capture, the utility that pops up to download
stuff from our digital cameras, offers to sort the
files into their appropriate Pictures, Music, and
Movies folders, according to their types, instead
of dumping them all into a specified flat folder (which
you can also choose to do). And as we get more, till-now
unimagined types of files to sort through, we'll be
seeing more and more of these custom-tailored interfaces
to our data.
The operating system is getting more
and more intelligent about what to do with our files.
Application installers for many years have automatically
put things into the Applications (and Program Files,
in Windows) folders by default, and the classic Mac
OS has almost always been able to handle such things
as font suitcases and system extensions automatically,
sorting them into the proper sub-folders when you
simply dragged them onto the System Folder, with the
user never having to see them as "files" again. But
now, that function is expanding to our hoarded data
as well. iTunes and Image Capture are the first harbingers
of a new age in which the computer will sort new files
into prescribed locations without your having to tell
it to do so, and yet we won't have to see the files
in those locations unless we choose to — because
more efficient sorting interfaces (such as iTunes,
or like the Extensions Manager in the old OS) will
be more and more prevalent. The filesystem will become
an underlying fallback substrate, the common-denominator
navigation method that's always there for advanced
users to accomplish tasks outside the standard workflow.
Someday, we'll never have to think about files and
folders unless we so choose. Is this a good thing?
It's debatable, and I've had feelings both ways — but
I'm leaning more and more toward "yes".
Once upon a time, "music" on the computer
meant inserting a CD, copying AIFF files to a temporary
folder, using some tool to encode them into MP3 files,
and then giving those files long, hyphenated names
that attempt to describe their contents. Then we'd
sort them into equally clumsily named folders, and
play them in whatever media player was nearest to
hand. Or we'd plug in our MP3 players and transfer
the files laboriously into them, either by dragging
files and folders around, or by using whatever third-party
applications knew how to interface with the devices.
We thought in terms of MP3, AIFF, CDDA, folders, and
files with .mp3 extensions.
Today, however, "music" means taking
your favorite album from its rack, putting it into
your computer, pressing a button, and a few minutes
later all your songs are there, sorted by track name,
artist, album, and so on, ready to play. Plug in your
iPod, and your music — not your MP3s,
your music — is instantly there,
a spin of the dial away. We now think in terms of
artists, songs, albums, playlists, and picking out
a shirt with a breast pocket.
Mac OS X is in the middle of a period
of growing pains. Some of them are going to hurt quite
a bit, especially for people who expect an operating
system to be lax enough to let the user handle files
in his own personal way — his own folder
structure, his own naming scheme, his own themes,
his own views. But it might be the right time for
us to step back a bit from our desktops and realize
what it is that computers can truly do for us. Why
should we take such pride in our ability to adapt
to a clumsy interface in our own special, individual
ways? Mac OS X does let us do such things with more
flexibility than ever before (with the notable exception
of themes), but are customizable window elements and
folder icons really a productive way for us to express
ourselves — when instead we can let
the system handle such onerous chores in a way that
frees us to express our computing creativity in other
ways?
The evolution of OS X's interface continues
rapidly — perhaps not so rapidly as
it did in the days of the Public Beta, but the lengthy
to-do list at Apple R&D is still being chipped
away. One of their top priorities for OS 11 will surely
be to make more intuitive the process of guiding a
user into the Home folder rather than to the top level
of the Computer. (And will the Home folder always
be where it is now? How about each person having a
single Home folder on a single machine, which opens
up the same way no matter where or from what computer
you access it from?) But even so, the days of the
everything about the Mac being inherently understandable
may have met their end with the introduction of UNIX
and true multiple users. Apple's biggest challenge
right now has got to be that of reconciling the seemingly
mutually exclusive concepts of the unavoidable structural
complexity of UNIX and the "legendary ease-of-use
of the Macintosh". They've done an outstanding job
so far, but it's not over yet. Fortunately, there's
this whole new paradigm of data-based file organization
which will help ease the transition. It adds complexity
in some ways, but — if we let it — it
will free us from the tedious organizational tasks
that shouldn't be ours to worry about anyway.
We'll always be able to lollygag around
in our underwear on the couch in our personal Mac
desktops. We'll be able to toss our sweater and our
backpack wherever we like. The only difference is
that instead of our music CDs being piled on the floor
along with our laundry they'll be incorporated into
the air itself — as ubiquitous and
effortless and foolproof as the light switch. So now
we can save our valuable floor space for pizza boxes
and soda cans, like it was intended.
And is picking up our room once in
a while really so terrible?
Brian
Tiemann is the co-author of FreeBSD Unleashed
for SAMS Publishing, a webmaster from back in the
days when that meant knowing what the <BODY>
tag did, and an Apple fan who has gone from his grade-school
//c+ through various DOS, Windows, and UNIX boxes
to come home to the Mac fold once again. And
this is where he's staying.
What do you think? Talk about it in
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Brian
Tiemann is the co-author of FreeBSD Unleashed
for SAMS Publishing, a webmaster from back in the
days when that meant knowing what the <BODY>
tag did, and an Apple fan who has gone from his grade-school
//c+ through various DOS, Windows, and UNIX boxes
to come home to the Mac fold once again. 
