Apple Peel

Macworld Expo: Whatever Happened to “The Rest Of Us?”

I am not talking about the “rest of us” as in “the Macintosh is the computer for the rest of us” — meaning for people who are not nerds and have no time for endless trouble-shooting of their software or hardware.

No, that category of computer users is actually being fairly well treated by Apple these days. Products such as the iPod, iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD, are resounding successes because they are intuitive and, for the most part, well, “just work”.

Clean and Straightforward

Indeed, the “rest of us” category of people in the traditional sense of the phrase is currently being fairly well served.

The Mac OS itself, in its more recent incarnation as Mac OS X, has become much more stable and, although there is still some debate about the intuitiveness of the Aqua interface, it is hard to deny that, for simple tasks, things like the Dock and the better organized menu and file structures, as well as the robustness of the system itself, the built-in support for essential plug-and-play technologies, and the abundance of free, powerful multimedia software — all these things make for a nice, streamlined environment that looks cleaner than anything else in the computing world.

I recently had the opportunity to demonstrate to a group of students and teachers the abilities of a lab of iMacs and PowerMac G4s running iMovie, combined with a couple of Sony digital camcorders. The fact that, within half an hour, most of the students were already making music videos using their own digital footage and music without any outside help was nothing short of amazing.

Based on his recent keynote presentation, Steve Jobs seems intent on continuing to do serve this category of people well. The new iMac makes DVD authoring available to the masses — and iPhoto is obviously an effort to solve the many problems experienced by digital camera owners who enjoy the freedom of being able to take as many pictures as they like.

The thing is that, to me, the “rest of us” category is not limited to users who only have fairly basic computing needs and don’t want to have to spend time trouble-shooting their software and hardware, because they wouldn’t know how to do it.

The Other “Rest of Us”

No, this category also includes another kind of computer user — people who do have the ability to trouble-shoot their software and hardware, people who know how to use their computers to do many different and fairly complex things, but who also do not want to have to devote any more time than is strictly necessary to fixing up things that don’t work right. In other words, the “rest of us” category also includes “power users” who don’t want to spend time trouble-shooting, not because they wouldn’t know how to do it, but because they are fully aware that there are many much more useful and creative things that they can do with their time.

I count myself in this subcategory. The reason I use and like Macs is not because I like computers per se. Indeed, I will readily admit that I used to be on the nerdy side of things when I was a teenager — but I grew beyond that, and it was specifically the need to “get things done” as efficiently as possible that brought me into the Mac fold. Over the years, I have learned how to trouble-shoot Mac hardware and software, but the pleasure I derive from this type of activity is exclusively related to the ability it gives me to help other people achieve their goals. I no longer enjoy trouble-shooting for itself. Simply put, I have better things to do with my time.

On the other hand, this makes me a fairly demanding user. I want both simplicity and power. I want to be able to do simple things simply, but I also want to be able to do complex things as simply and efficiently as I believe — indeed, I know — is possible. And that’s where I feel that Apple is not paying as much attention to my needs as it could.

The iPhoto Disappointment

Steve Jobs’ latest brain-child, the free software iPhoto, is a typical example of this. Like many Mac users out there, I own a digital camera — and I am taking digital pictures by the dozens. Before iPhoto came out, in order to manage my digital pictures, I was using a combination of Graphic Converter (an OS X native application) and Photoshop 6 (still desperately stuck in Classic), as well as self-discipline in file organization. When I heard and saw Steve Jobs demonstrating iPhoto’s features, like many people I got excited. I didn’t expect it to be a “Photoshop Light” kind of product — and it wasn’t. It was an attempt to bring order to digital photography in the same way that iTunes had brought order to digital music activities. I couldn’t wait to try out the product, and I downloaded it on the very day of Steve Jobs’ presentation.

I was, however, quickly disappointed. The concept of the program is fine — in theory. As I said, it tries to be to digital photography what iTunes is to digital music. But iTunes was built on a solid, existing foundation (Casady & Greene’s SoundJam, which was purchased by Apple and on which iTunes is based), whereas iPhoto is brand new. And it definitely shows.

On my PowerMac G4/450 with 1 Gig of RAM, its performance level is, on average, simply not really acceptable. Granted, I have a high-quality digital camera that takes pictures that are typically each 1.5 Megs in size. Still, I honestly don’t think I can live with window controls and sliders that are so unresponsive. “Live window resizing” (where the computer redraws the contents of the window as you resize it, instead of drawing a simple outline and waiting until you’ve chosen your new size to actually redraw and rearrange the contents) is fine in theory, but we all know how frustrating it can be in Mac OS X’s own Finder. Even in version 10.1.2, live resizing of Finder windows is slow (there can be a several-second delay between the time you move the Resize widget and the time the Finder actually redraws the contents of the window to fit the new size) and makes the whole system feel very unresponsive. The very same thing happens with iPhoto in “Organize” mode, because the system has to resize several pictures “on the fly” — and that, again, can take several seconds, unlike what happened during Steve Jobs’ presentation. I suspect Steve Jobs was running iPhoto on a top-of-the-line G4 and was doing the demonstration with fairly low-quality JPEGs.

When you’ve spent several thousand dollars on a computer, you don’t expect it to be so unresponsive. I know that iPhoto is free, but it’s still being marketed as one of those “killer apps” that every Mac OS X users should have and is entitled to use. If it is only really usable on a top-of-the-line G4 with low-quality digital pictures, than that defeats a good part of the very purpose of the application.

Severely Limiting Simplicity

The frustrating aspects of iPhoto are not limited to performance issues. Apart from the cool integration of direct-to-print services in the program, the one major feature is the ability to organize your pictures. However, iPhoto is severely limited. There is no hierarchical organizing to speak of, except for the arbitrary division of your body of pictures into “rolls” based on the date that you took them. As iTunes brilliantly demonstrated, with a great number of digital files, organization needs to be much more flexible than that. The hierarchy needs to be several levels deep and customizable.

If, like many digital camera users, you had already started trying to give some semblance of order to your digital picture collection by organizing pictures into folders and subfolders in the Finder, there is no way that you can import this hierarchical structure into iPhoto. If you drag a folder containing pictures or folders of pictures, they are all imported into one single “roll”.

Worse still, iPhoto also differs from iTunes in the way it handles your picture files. iTunes is actually able to maintain an invisible and dynamically updated “link” between the reference to your file in the program and the actual file in the Finder, thereby giving you the flexibility to move your files around in the Finder without affecting your music library structures in iTunes. And iTunes doesn’t mind using your existing music files, wherever you stored them on your hard drives. You can even replace the “iTunes Music” folder inside your “Documents” folder with an alias called the same and pointing to your own music folder. Alternatively, you can go to the “Advanced” tab in the iTunes Preferences dialog and change the default music folder location to any folder you want (like the “Music” folder that’s included in your home folder, for example).

iPhoto, on the other hand, is extremely rigid. Whenever you import a picture into your iPhoto picture library, the program actually creates a new copy of your file in a folder called “iPhoto Library” inside your “Pictures” folder (in your home folder). And there is nothing you can do about this. You cannot replace this “iPhoto Library” folder with an alias. There is no “Advanced” tab in iPhoto’s Preferences dialog – a sure sign that the program is severely lacking.

Worse still, when importing your digital photos, iPhoto strips them of their so-called “EXIF header”, a header added to the JPEG file by your digital camera that contains all kinds of potentially useful information about the circumstances in which each photo was taken and the settings of your camera at the time. iPhoto also renames the photos and gives them a totally useless file name consisting of a number. Compare this to iTunes, which enables you to rename the reference to the file in your music library without changing the actual name of the file in the Finder. iTunes is just 10 times smarter than iPhoto.

In addition, in answer to the question “How many photos can my library hold?”, iPhoto’s help file states that “The iPhoto photo library can hold approximately 1000 to 2000 photos or more, depending on your computer’s memory.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve only had my digital camera for a month and I already have several hundred picture files! This number seems very small to me — and is all the more absurd when you think that one of the major benefits of digital photography is precisely that you can take as many pictures as you want without it costing you anything! My feeling is that one of the main reasons why so many people are confused by the mess of picture files that they have created with their digital camera is precisely because they have taken many pictures and don’t have anything to organize them. Giving them a “digital shoebox”, i.e. an intuitive tool to organize all those files, is a great idea — but iPhoto is so severely limited that you wonder how much thinking went into meeting the actual organizing needs of digital camera users.

The Last Straw

I still tried to use iPhoto for a few days. The last straw came the other day when I wanted to import 33 pictures that I had taken with my camera of a young deer that had wandered into our garden and was munching on the grass.

Unlike Mac OS X’s Image Capture utility, iPhoto gives you no option but to download all the pictures at once. iPhoto, however, systematically choked on me after the 14th picture. No matter how many times I tried, it couldn’t go past that number of pictures. Instead, it “unexpectedly quit” and forced me to start all over again. And again. And again. I gave up and went back to Image Capture. Things worked without a hitch. iPhoto is supposed to replace Image Capture, and should rightly be expected to improve on it. Instead, it’s less flexible, and it crashes where Image Capture doesn’t crash.

Image Capture is not perfect, but at least it gives you the option to “download some” of your files rather than all of them at once. And, in my experience, it doesn’t crash while importing pictures. Luckily for me, I had read warnings from other people on the Net and didn’t check the option in iPhoto to automatically delete the pictures on my camera’s CompactFlash card once they were imported. Who knows what might have happened to them with those repeated crashes during the import process in iPhoto!

Of course, one can argue that this is only version “1.0” of the product, and that many things will be improved in future revisions of it, just like they were with iTunes. What I cannot understand, however, is why Apple released a product that has the exact types of flaws that iTunes managed to solve for music files. It is as if iPhoto’s developers hadn’t learned anything from the evolution of iTunes and customer feedback on the product. Indeed, it is as if iPhoto’s developers haven’t even used iTunes.

This situation pretty much sums up some of my feelings since Apple released Mac OS X. While the benefits of the new OS X, as I have described in several columns already, are great and many, and there is clearly no going back — I just cannot understand why, for so many basic things and fundamental aspects of interface design, we seemingly have to go back and start the process all over again and again. It seems to me that a little more communication and attention to user feedback could go a long way towards saving everyone a lot of effort and trouble and achieving an environment that is indeed the “best OS in the world” much more quickly and efficiently.

User-Centered Design

This brings me back to my initial point. There are many “power users” out there. They are people who have a long experience with using and trouble-shooting Mac products and a great wealth of knowledge and expertise that Apple could tap into. The Internet has brought unprecedented ease of communication. Yet, currently Apple seems to operate in two separate worlds, neither of which has any room for power users: the world of “consumers”, who want simplicity, trendiness and affordability, and who do not demand much beyond the basic features offered by Apple’s software and hardware products — and the world of engineers and developers, where those products are developed with, apparently, only a rather simplistic vision of what it is that Mac users — both beginners and advanced users — actually want.

In that respect, while the new iMac is a great advancement in terms of display quality and flexibility and DVD authoring affordability, there is little else about it that lives up to the hype generated by Apple itself. The same thing happened with the original iMac: it was a cool design, it had the all-in-one simplicity and USB flexibility — but it was still a PowerPC Mac running the exact same software as other Macs. It was a significant success, but it was not a revolution in computer usability. The same thing will happen with the new iMac. It will be a commercial success, and iPhoto will, hopefully, evolve into a reasonably useful and effective digital photography application — but it won’t change the face of computing as we know it, at least not for many years to come. I tend to think that the lack of real innovation in interface design and computer usability is an obvious consequence of the status quo situation that we have with consumers, power users and developers all working in separate spheres with little communication between them.

I don’t want to go back to the Mac Plus. I don’t want to go back to Mac OS 9, 8, 7, or 6. I don’t want — God forbid! — to switch to Windows. But I’d like to see signs, especially coming from Apple, that what The Trouble with Computers author Thomas K. Landauer described convincingly as “User-Centered Design” (UCD) is beginning to play a more and more significant role in the computer industry. And, unfortunately, iPhoto, in spite of the glowing reviews, is still far from being such a sign.

Pierre Igot

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