Editorials @ Applelust

Panther Thoughts, Digressions and Wild Speculation

So the keynote came and went, serving few surprises for those of us who have followed the rumors up to the last minute. By now, everyone has been able to find out just about everything about the keynote, as well as about the products announced and the hype generated.

So let me just pick a few random points from the keynote—ones focusing on the scant information we got about Panther—and dwell on them a little. Notably absent from this piece will be any references to the Finder or looks in general—partly because there's little information available on those, but also because they will be the topics of a future article.

The Focus of Panther

There is no animal fur this time. The Panther logo is grey, metallic, and square. It looks like Apple's latest pro hardware offerings: it's sleek and professional. It was also introduced at a professional event targeted at geeks, coinciding the announcement of the Power Mac G5.

Perhaps it was also Apple's ploy to annoy IDG by snubbing its upcoming Expo, and using the Mac maker's own event to introduce the Mac's first new-generation processor in four years. We'll see more examples of Apple's growing independence a little later below. But in any case, Panther seems to be a release targeted at graphics (and other) professionals, maybe featuring fewer feel-good items than Jaguar did, and more hardcore pro stuff such as PDF generation from PostScript files, advanced font management, and new developer tools.

There are also cases of blatant technology show-offs. Think about the spinning desktop that accompanies Fast User Switching, or the cool animations that form part of Exposé. But then Apple has every reason to show off its own technology, as it can do much more than just eye candy. After growing tired of watching Genie effects and OpenGL demonstrations, we already have an application that puts these technologies to excellent use: Keynote. Mac OS X's ability to set publication-quality type comes in handy in applications like iPhoto which also doubles as a picture book layout solution. Apple's showing the way, but it's up to the developers to come up with more goodies.

As every new OS X release, Panther also targets different users. It wants OS 9 users to switch to OS X already. (This time, it seems to attract professionals more than casual users.) It also wants non-Mac users to see the light and buy a Mac. And obviously, it wants Jaguar users to upgrade, and let Apple have some money through Panther sales.

iChat AV: Suddenly the Pieces Fit

iChat AV is a very compelling reason for all three categories. Once again, Apple is showing the world how something is done right. Now it's perfectly clear why iChat was introduced in the first place: Apple got its feet in the instant messaging doorway, but it's only now that it actually delivers the goods. The original iChat merely paved the way for the AV version, just like iTunes 1.0 was a mere prelude to the iPod and the Music Store. Accompanying iChat AV is the iSight cam, which is far from being the next iPod. What it is an easy way for Apple to make money without investing too much R&D, and part of the clever scheme involving the iChat AV beta, the $30 price of the final version, and its inclusion in Panther. Beware: Apple wants your money! But then it really does offer a very cool package for it indeed. Let's hope iChat AV will be as big for video conferencing as the iPod has been for portable music... And besides, this piece of software might explain why Apple isn't so keen on building mobile phones. Perhaps its next gadget in the pipe is a portable iChat AV client?

Exposé: Bigger than it Seems

I'm not going to mention every Panther detail presented at WWDC, but one that's definitely worthy to dwell on a little is Exposé, simply because it addresses very, very, very real needs in a brilliant way. How many times did you just suddenly want to access your desktop, or a specific window of many? Exposé lets you do that—in an extremely cool, user-friendly, intuitive and effective fashion. I consider Exposé a pro or at least a power user feature, which can easily translate into increased efficiency and the elimination of a lot of frustration.

I cried for Window Shades in OS X, as a means of temporarily getting windows out of the way then easily retrieving them, like when repeatedly cutting and pasting from one window to another. I argued that Minimization to the Dock was not a replacement for this functionality (because "undoing" that minimization requires you to move your pointer to great distances on the screen). I hoped that the rumored "minimize in place" functionality would make its way to Jaguar, but it didn't. But now we have something even better: something no amount of Window Shading could provide that easily and elegantly. Quartz Extreme makes sure that your windows remain identifiable: the much-maligned animation effect is a tremendous help there. I have to repeat myself here: kudos to Apple for finding such a beautiful solution to an existing problem. Let's hope Apple will continue to find ways to improve our computing experience. Quite honestly, Mac OS X hasn't excelled in that department yet, none of its UI innovations have been that ground breaking, and some were downright mistaken.

Going it Alone, and Other Apple Trends

Apple seems to grow impatient with third parties, shrugging them off, choosing to do things on its own instead. Well, either that, or perhaps third parties have grown impatient with Apple, leaving the Mac maker to its own devices. Either way, Apple has displayed a trend of growing more and more independent lately, and the WWDC was a remarkable showcase of that trend.

Built-in faxing is just one area where Apple seemed to stop waiting for an acceptable third-party solution, and deliver its own instead. After all, if Apple has all the technologies available, why not leverage them and make some excellent use of them? I'm not crying for the vendors of faxing solutions, either, whose lunch Apple is eating right now: maybe they should have come up with something serviceable in time.

Another major announcement, though not strictly tied to Panther, was Safari. It was released as Version 1.0. No new features were announced, just the end of the beta period—now Mac OS X users can finally feel that they have a final browser, after being orphaned by Microsoft: That company had recently announced that there would be no more versions of Internet Explorer (MSIE) for the Mac (either).

The Big Microsoft Question

So who pulled the plug? According to Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, Microsoft decided not to compete against Apple's "close development between the browser and the OS," as PCPro reports. That quote shows the only way Microsoft seems to think about browsers and OSs, by the way. But some suspect that Apple developed Safari in the first place because it saw the end of MSIE coming. We cannot know for sure which one of the two theories is true. Despite the denials from both parties, relations between the arch-enemies-cum-best-buddies, Apple and Microsoft, seem to grow tense: just think about Apple's "Switch" campaign. Many fear that Microsoft will soon stop developing Office for the Mac.

Is there any validity behind such a fear? Not immediately, but there might be some on the long run. Stopping the development of Office would definitely thwart Apple's marketing efforts of positioning the Mac as a capable alternative to the Windows PC, and it's not a step Microsoft would easily take. First, the Windows maker can definitely use the revenue from Office sales for the Mac. Second, it may end up in court over anti-trust charges just about any time, and it may use the fact that there's a viable Mac platform around as Exhibit A in an attempt to prove that it has still not crushed all competition. Third, Microsoft is still in such a dominant position that it hardly feels the presence of Apple as a competitor.

But the IT business is far from predictable. Microsoft may soon find itself in a position where it will feel the need to declare open war on Apple, and discontinue Office—though I suspect it will at least wait till the results of the U.S. presidential elections to see whether it would face a new, harsher Department of Justice that could press charges against such anticompetitive behavior.

I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Apple took a preventive strike, and released its own Office replacement software first. Apple already has a Mail application that may easily be viewed as a weapon in a fight for freedom from Microsoft and its Outlook/Entourage titles. Keynote is an obvious PowerPoint replacement, and Apple, (quite uncharacteristically until recently), started releasing beta versions of its contact management and scheduling apps iSync and iCal. It also greatly revamped its Address Book, now a system-wide contacts repository. Since when has Apple been so keen on boring stuff like contacts and scheduling? Well, yours truly thinks that it's since Steve Jobs decided to rid the Mac of all Microsoft titles, slowly but steadily. But then I have no insider information to back up my theory.

As an aside: betas are all the rage now at Apple. It started with the OS X Public Beta itself (with the obvious goal of appeasing some masses), and continued with iSync, iCal, Safari, and now iChat AV too. It's nice to see the cloud of secrecy thinning from time to time, when it serves a good reason: getting user feedback about crucial products. Apple has realized that betas can be hyped just like final versions, they can generate an interest (maybe even willingness to pay for final products), and they can minimize discontent and dissatisfaction with final versions. Good thinking!

"Et Tu, Adobe?"

So we can't know for sure which was first: the Safari chicken or the MSIE egg on the Mac's face. However, we do seem to know more about a similar case: Adobe Type Manager Deluxe (ATM Deluxe), the font management tool of choice for many professionals.

Adobe announced, as early as 2001, that it had no plans to come up with an OS X version of ATM Deluxe. No reasons were given. Much speculation has seen the light of the day about growing tensions (sigh) between Apple and Adobe. Is iPhoto stepping on Photoshop's toes? (No.) Is Final Cut Pro too much competition for Premiere? (Yes.) Is Adobe unhappy because Apple used the former's public (as opposed to proprietary) PDF specification? (Who knows?! Maybe a little.) Anyway, there's no ATM Deluxe, and even though Extensis Suitcase does exist for Mac OS X, Apple decided to please extensive font users (i.e. just about every Mac user) by including a free font management utility, Font Book, in Panther.

Little information is available on Font Book now. We don't know whether Apple is showing the world how font management is done right, or whether it's just adding a feeble toy to its latest OS X version hoping that more users will upgrade as a result. But suggesting that Apple really targets graphics professionals with the next release, Panther also offers new, cool features to Font Panels, which are said to be available in "any application that uses fonts." This raises a question: does that also mean Carbon applications (unlike now), including all Adobe titles, or only Cocoa titles (i.e. mostly completely new projects)? But then this is a different question, that of the Carbon-Cocoa dichotomy that has plagued Mac OS X since the beginning, and which I've written about before. We don't know if that situation is getting any better with Panther.

The new version of Preview is also one of the few things being touted as a great thing coming to Panther. I was hoping for a major Preview revamp (still am, actually), looking forward to changes in its handling of multiple images (right now, you cannot separately close or rearrange or drag or drop any one of the multiple images you get in one Preview window when opening them as a bunch). What I got instead was some apparent focus on PDF viewing functionality and optimizations.

Apple now touts Preview as the world's fastest PDF reader. Looking to replace perhaps the ugliest Carbon application ever, Adobe Acrobat Reader, it isn't only (claimed to be) faster, but also more user-friendly and efficient. For example, it lets you make continuous text selections in PDF files—something that has been often notoriously difficult with the "official" Acrobat Reader. Searching PDF files is also extremely fast and easy. It looks like Apple wants its OS to be able to work with PDF files without relying on a third party—even Adobe.

Tensions mounting? Don't know. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen did praise the new Power Mac G5, but only on video. But wait, there's more: Preview can take any EPS or PostScript file and convert it into PDF! Now, that's really something. If implemented correctly, it can make Adobe's Acrobat Distiller, part of its paid Acrobat package, superfluous. I hope Adobe doesn't have plans to abandon the Mac platform. I hope this isn't a preemptive strike from Apple's part...

But then what is it? Is it just a technology showcase, showing the world how much Apple, the Mac and OS X can do? Proving the point to graphics professionals that Mac OS X has all the major technologies that power desktop publishing (DTP) running in its veins? Because it is, honestly. PDF is behind everything OS X draws on the screen—or prints or faxes. ColorSync is built right into the core. Font kerning, antialiasing, ligatures are supported at OS level.

But something tells me that there is more to Apple's new-found PDF-awareness than meets the eye. I don't think it's part of an Adobe exit strategy. I don't think it's a mere technology showcase either. Steve Jobs seemed to evangelize about PDF, praising its ubiquity to a surprising extent. Was he going somewhere there?

Well, here's another piece of typical speculation from this writer. Suppose Apple were to face the possibility of losing Office—or, more specifically, Word—for the Mac. Suppose that it was working on a Word replacement application of some sorts. Knowing a bit about Apple, I hardly think it would be content with a kludge like OpenOffice that just about matches the bloat and ugliness of Microsoft Office itself. No, I think Apple would instead try to push the Word Document off its undeserved throne of word processing document standards, and also come up with an application that shows the world how word processing is done (yes, I know how many times I've used this phrase in this article). For quite frankly: it's hardly the Word way.

Word is a horrible, counterintuitive, bloated and buggy application. The Word document is a closed, proprietary standard that's kept alive not by its technical excellence (far from it) but by Microsoft's greed and its own momentum. It should go; and if Apple ever releases a Microsoft Word replacement, it should (while being able to read and write Word documents) offer an alternative format. And what could be better for that purpose than the already popular PDF, which anyone can at least read already? It displays and prints consistently between all systems, including fonts and graphics—which is already more than Word can ever hope to achieve. All Apple would need to do is also develop Windows and Linux versions of its "iWord" app, and turn PDF into a readable andwritable format. Sounds crazy? Maybe, but that hasn't stopped Apple in the past either.

- András Puiz

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