With all rumors focused intensely on the upcoming iPad that seems almost certain to drop in March, I felt pretty blindsided by Apple popping up and going “Hey! New version of the Mac OS is here! Guess what comes after Lion? Mountain Lion. Bwa ha ha ha.”
So, 10.6.8 is on the horizon, and in time honored traditions, it adds Stuff to the operating system and Opinions to the Mac nerds out there. Of which I am one. So I have Opinions, and I get to Share! I love capitalizing things.
Mountain Lion continues, not surprisingly, what Lion started: merging what you find on the iPad and iPhone (iOS) into the Mac (Mac OS). I’ve started putting the various OS’s in parentheses so people can ignore them, as I’ve found the minute I utter a phrase like Mac OS eyes begin to glaze. Acronyms are the most powerful eye glazing material known to man.
Aaat any rate, there are a bunch of new features, like moving notes out of Mail and into it’s own application (thank goodness), renaming iCal into Calendar (bittersweet but obvious) and making it be a little less lame at the same time.
I’m going to hit the top 3 points for me:
1. Notifications. One of the really nifty new features in the latest version of the iOS was the Notification Center. It gets lost a little in the hoopla surrounding iCloud, but it’s one of the most useful features that your iDevice has. Swipe your finger from the top, and boom, all your recent text messages, phone calls, voicemails, emails, appointments, and so on, in one easy to read screen. It’s a concept that’s been around for a while, and it took Apple their sweet time to get to it.
Now they’ve rolled this into the Mac, as well. How it works, in theory, is that you either swipe on your trackpad, or click a little button on the screen, and you get a panel that fulfills the same function. This makes it to a top 3 point for me because in all honesty, I’m dubious that this is particularly useful on the Mac, where you have a thousand other ways for applications to notify you of what’s happening that don’t involve a hidden panel.
The trick is, Notifications works so well on the iOS because iOS doesn’t really give you a way to view multiple open windows. It’s one thing at a time, buster. The power of a computer operating system like the Mac lies precisely in the fact that it allows multiple windows and applications running side by side; I’d argue that a more elegant solution would lie in harnessing that.
That isn’t to say it’s a horrible feature – not at all, and indeed, I’m sure there will be plenty of people who use it. It’s just I hardly feel it’s an essential feature, and it represents a curious lifecycle operating systems seem to go through. Start out basic, improve, add features, add more features, START FROM COMPLETE SCRATCH BASIC AGAIN ISN’T SIMPLICITY GREAT. I mean, does anyone really use the Dashboard on their Mac a lot? The what-board? I thought so.
Of course, this ties into:
2. Gatekeeper. A fair bit of unfair hoopla has surrounded this feature. Gatekeeper would check each application you download – if the developer of the application had a applied to Apple and gotten a key to ‘sign’ the application to run, it would be allowed to run. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t. The concept being that Apple can revoke the keys of software that turns out bad (there’s no pre-screening process) and prevent it from running.
This is actually really, really cool. Apple has, correctly, realized the trying to identify threats and stop them is a fools game. Having systems in place that prevent malicious individuals from having access to your computer at all is the only way to ‘win’ the security arms race against malware. For years, everyone has been saying that it’s only a matter of time before Malware starts making it’s way onto the Mac, but with features like these, that advent is going to be seriously dented, if not made trivial.
The fear of course, is that this means that it will create a ‘walled garden’ scenario on the Mac, much as you currently have on the iOS. If an application isn’t approved by Apple, by whatever flighty metric they might have, well then, you are out of luck.
Currently, that certainly isn’t the case – turning off Gatekeeper is a flip of the switch. And unlike most of the Apple-Orwellians, I don’t see a future where any major desktop operating system becomes ‘closed’ – it would be far too much of an advantage to give to a competitor like Windows that is increasingly becoming more palatable and can certainly run everything under the sun.
Of course, should Microsoft go the same route, we can probably kiss our OS freedoms goodbye or revolt and join the current hard-core rebels in Linux land.
The reason I say this ‘ties into’ the Notification center, though, is that it represents another way in which Apple wants to shift to the iOS in more than just the general concepts of features and application parity. With its focus on full-screen applications, centralized information centers, and different open and save dialogue boxes, Apple obviously desires not to increase complexity on the iOS but decrease complexity on the Mac OS (notably now simply titled OS X by them). As I’ve mentioned before, this makes sense in any number of ways, particularly considering that the vast majority of computers it now sells are laptops – smaller laptops, at that. With screen real estate at a premium on a laptop that is barely larger than an iPad, a windows-centric OS makes less sense.
But what I would love to know is where this leaves the pro market in the future – graphic designers, photo editors, videographers, heck, people who just deal with three or four spreadsheets at a time. Are they in this roadmap?
3. Messages. Considering you can download this software now, as Apple released a beta version of the software along with the announcement, and considering we’re talking about chat messages, this might seem a bit absurd. Or maybe it is absurd, I don’t know. But for me, this is actually the most exciting thing about the whole kaboodle; it’s something that almost every user of every Mac out there is going to benefit from. Messages lets you send text messages to people who also have the application on their Mac – or to people running a recent enough version of their iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. In a nutshell, you can send and receive text messages on the computer, for free, with other iOS or Mac OS users. It also supports audio and video chats, which its predecessor, iChat, has for quite a while.
I’m a huge proponent of instant messaging – it’s an incredibly effective way to share quick snippets of information, links, updates, or inquiries that you want to draw more attention to than an email but aren’t as immediate or urgent as a phone call. I encourage everyone in every office I support to set up a chat system of some kind, and invariably, in time, they come to appreciate it immensely (it’s also really useful in computer support). But as it stands now, it involves specific applications, accounts, setups, signs ins, and so on.
And to some degree, with Messages, you still do. But it’s where it’s going that makes me happy – a future where rather than suffer through email settings, text message quirks and charges, chat programs, and any number of other endless communication permutations, you can have one username and password to talk to people quickly and easily on whatever they happen to be using at the time. That’s the kind of roadmap I want to see from people who work on computers and operating systems – not features for the sake of features, but the simple, small things that will actually make our life better.