Some day…
... someone will come and use all the cool Cocoa/CoreImage/etc… technologies on MacOS X and combine them to make a very powerful, flexible and leightweight image editor. The technology is that powerful that it might even be as few as two people. They might even have the time to make it really beautiful and useable.
Well, all that just happened.
Are you listening, Adobe?
App development and Frameworks
Paul Kafasis of the independedent mac development company Rouge Amobea wrote an interesting piece called The Rise of the OS and another called Restarting Innovation that got quite a bit of attention in the mac development world.
Basically Paul says that the OS starts to make a lot of things that were formerly in the domain of third party applications. A modern operating system’s job isnt just to do Task scheduling, network and memory management and put a pretty UI on top of all this: Todays operating systems ship with mail clients, audio/photo/video management software, calendaring, contact management and a lot more. While this seems to be a good thing (You get more for less! Yeah!), it has some serious implications according to Paul: The developers of apps with similar functionality lose their markets and the Users don’t have many apps to chose from, since there is the OS vendor dominating the field.
This discussion began with some ranting about the missing functionality in Apple’s Mail and the fact that no developer wanting to improve that could possibly compete with the free Mail that comes with the OS. The solution proposed was to put Mail’s functionality into a Framework (named “MailKit”) and make it available for other applications. The Webkit framework is a good example for enabling successful applications by putting functionality into a reusable framwork, so why not do it for Mail, too?
I really like the Idea. Sure, Apple could concentrate more on existing frameworks instead of developing new ones, and while I agree with this point, I also think they are on the right track.
Operating systems need to provide the infrastructure that an application lives in. Formerly that was memory management and everything else that you learned in CS, but today’s MVC-driven applications need more things:
They want to share their Data model and make their data interoperable. This gets used more and more, the Address Book Framework is a good example of this, as is Leopard’s Calendar, Notes, and To-Do-List Framework (and some other Framworks that are still under NDA, but that are a huge deal.) A MailKit Framwork would fit right here: Providing a single Mail database to different Mail Applications and exposing functionality for sending and receiving mails. It would make it easy for the user to switch applications, since his actual Mail data is already there, all Mail Apps all access the same store. That’s a huge thing for developers: It doesn’t only cut down development cost for the Data model, it also makes the transition between apps very easy for the user.
In the Controller Layer, there can also be Frameworks, though most of this layser is really specific to the app. The speech Framework is an example, and we will also see some stuff in Leopard that will expose functionality to app developers that Apple used to have for themselves.
The View layer is a classic domain for Frameworks: Nothing here happens without them, as almost everything done here (Buttons, Windows, etc.) comes from AppKit. WebKit falls into this category, it’s a view framework.
This finally brings us to the point of this posting: I think the comparison between the fictional MailKit Framework and Webkit doesn’t fit. One is about shared Data, the other is about (isolated) use of the same view. I really like what Apple does with sharing data, however they can do a lot more. Frameworks are a very good solution of the problems that arise, when the OS is “taking over”. I hope to see ever more future Desktop Applications that work like “Mashups” of these Frameworks, and Leopard is bringing us a huge step into this direction. Also, a Framework that deals with the Data layer has to have the goal of sharing the data, and not only of sharing the model.
And… We’re live
Heute ist Bescherung: Das iPhone kommt. Es gibt definitiv nichts darüber zu schreiben, was nicht schon überall woanders zu lesen wäre, also werde ich mich hier auf ein anderes Thema konzentrieren, das aber immerhin mit dem Launch-Ereignis zusammenhängt:
Seit einiger Zeit zeichnet sich ein Trend ab, der jetzt in der Berichterstettung zum iPhone-Launch ihren ersten Höhepunkt erreicht: Live-Internet-Fernsehen.
Was Youtube für Videoaufzeichnungen ist, versuchen eine ganze Menge Mitbewerber für Livevideo zu sein: Das sieht meistens aus wie bei ustream.tv, momentan dem größten und beliebtesten dieser Unternehmen. Das Pirnzip ist einfach: Alles, was vor der Kamera stattfindet, wird so wie es ist ins Internet übertragen und eins zu eins live verteilt. Meistens ist das Ergebnis sehr amateurhaft und langweilig, wovon man sich einfach überzeugen kann.
Der Ansatz von Mogulus geht in eine andere Richtung, und beim iPhone-Launch zeigen sie auf iphonelaunch.tv was sie können: Sie statten den User nicht nur mit der Möglichkeit aus, das, was ihm vor die Linse läuft Live im Internet zu verbreiten, sondern geben ihm alles Werkzeug in die Hand, das normalen Fernsehstationen zur Verfügung steht: animierte Einblendungen, die Möglichkeit Aufzeichnungen einzubinden, Schnitt zwischen mehren Live-Bildquellen, verteiltes Arbeiten an mehreren Rechnern, und so weiter.
Was dabei herauskommt, ist erstaunlich: Eine Sendung, die zwar auch nicht ohne Längen ist, aber live hin- und herschaltet zwischen dem Applestore in Soho und 5th Avenue in New York, ein Studio mit Moderatoren und Studiogästen hat und Schaltungen per Skype in alle Welt vornimmt z.B. zu StuffMC hier in Deutschland. Dass Entfernungen keine Rolle mehr spielen, wurde selten so eindrucksvoll demonstriert wie hier.
Allerdings: In dieser Minute, in der ich das hier schreibe, wird das Über-Telefon gerade unter die ersten Käufer gebracht, und da ist das System unter der Last von fast 1200 gleichzeitigen Zuschauern leider zusammengebrochen.
Dennoch ist das, was wir hier sehen, die Geburtsstunde eines neuen Mediums: Live, unmittelbar und praktisch kostenfrei können normale Leute mit professionellen Mitteln live und gemeinsam eine Sendung machen. Da werden keine Satellitenverbindungen gebucht, keine Korrespondenten bezahlt, und kein teures Studioequipment angeschafft. Denn die Verbindungen sind kostenlos, die Leute sowieso vor Ort und das Equipment ist im eigenen Rechner oder im Netz.
Wenn ein System wie dieses seine Kinderkrankheiten überwunden hat und ermöglicht, zuverlässig aus einzelnen Videoquellen ein Programm zu machen, dann hat das durchaus Potential. Gerade bei Großereignissen und Katastrophen. Die herkömmlichen 24/7-News-Networks haben da einiges an Konkurrenz zu erwarten.
Timeout
I have to admit: I didn’t have the time recently to work on Readomatic. I have a lot of plans for things to include: Google Gears integration, a menu bar, auto-updates via sparkle, external updating of the stylesheet, support for online readers besides Google Reader and many other things. But for the time being, this release just sets a new expiration date: It’s July 15 2007 now.
The Reality Distortion Field just crashed
I guess, that when you constantly ride on a wave of success, and have to meet very high expectations, you will most certainly disappoint at some point in time. That’s a good chance to get in touch with reality again. Seen this way, Apples WWDC07-Keynote was a huge underperformance, and I hope Apple listens to the critics. Because there are many.
First of all, the 10 new Leopard features. Don’t get me wrong here, Leopard is awesome and I agree that it is the biggest step forward in any OSX update. The stuff under the hood, like some new frameworks and the new developer tools are amazing. But if you claim to have “super cool top secret features” that you hold back almost a year, you better deliver. But out of the 10 features presented, only two were new: The new Desktop and the new Finder. It was about time that these two areas get their updates, that was the minimum one could expect. But is there more, than could have been expected? I doubt so. CoreAnimation and Quicklook have been announced last year, and as great as they are (and they truly are) they are not new. Next time please keep the expectations low, maybe you then keep the disappointment low, too. Leopard will be awesome when it’s released, one can write great Apps for it, but this Keynote was WWDC06 reloaded but without the “Wow”.
The next thing is Safari 3. I like it. I used it in the Leopard seed I got last year, and thought it would be great to have it now, on the Tiger system that I use for most of my work. Now I have this, and so far it works great. But there are some things:
- Safari is not the worlds most innovative browser. Look at how many people crash Safari 3 right now, because they have incompatible extensions installed via obscure input managers. Look at how elegantly Firefox solves the problem of extending the browser. To be truly innovative, you need to do something like this. Right now, Safari is not as innovative as it could be, and you have your existing userbase complain very loudly that this thing crashes, because they made up for that lack of innovation.
- Safari on Windows seems to be very, very unstable. Apple alienates its future userbase with such an unstable release. Yes it’s beta. But it shouldn’t be “public Beta” at this point, Apple needs to find some way of testing software between the two choices “closed alpha for a handful of people in cupertino” and “public beta for everyone”, because if done wrong, the latter may crash your reputation. The word “beta” means nothing these days. If you release it to the public, it better works. Safari on Windows doesn’t work at all.
- On another note, I’ve got a question: How did Apple port Safari? Webkit, the rendering engine – ok, that’s clear. But how did they port the rest of the app, the windows, tabs and menus? It’s either a completely different codebase or they have finally ported the Objective-C runtime and some of the CoreFoundation and Appkit Frameworks to windows. Because, unlike iTunes, Safari is a Cocoa Application.
But Apple saved the worst for last. I have to agree that claiming Websites are like native apps, no matter how ajaxy and web2.0 they might be, is an insult to app developers. When I first heard this, I thought: “Well they will expose some functionality via Javascript and give us Google-Gears- or Apollo-like functionality that bridges the gap between what you can do with a web app and what you can do with a standalone app. Like having your data and application logic offline. Or do what they do in Dashboard Widgets: They let us make custom Plugins that have access to the system.” Well, they don’t. We can’t even go to the icon dashboard with our apps, they are just websites, you access them via the bookmarks, and they run in the normal Safari.
Apple misses a big opportunity here. With multi-touch and CoreAnimation a whole new class of applications is possible. These things are the beginning of a huge revolution in interface design, and we’ve literally only touched the surface. We as developers want to be part of this, we want to contribute and make things that even Apple could not have imagined. That’s why everyone asked for an SDK so loudly, and I think – and hope – that those voices will even get louder.
What Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall have to get, is that their target group is a lot bigger than “Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg”. Apple has a lot of professional customers out there that want to do more than just email their photos. And if they provide their developers with the right tools to make amazing apps instead of feeding them bulls**t like they did at the keynote, the developers will build things that will please these professional customers as well as Steve and Walt and push the iPhone even more forward.
Apple themselves are not using the web technology they claim to be “sweet” anywhere on their iPhone applications, their Apps are all native. They know why. So please, Apple, hire some security engineer, add some sandbox layers, or in any other way, get your phone secure. So that you can be brave enough to let third-party developers start making real apps for it. It will be worth it. If you don’t, the developers will find a way to hack your system, and do it anyways. But as you see right now, just by looking at the disappointed Safari 3 users that hacked their old Safari to make it a little more “innovative”: That is not the best way to go.
Announcing Readomatic.
As I stated before, I started a little experiment using Jon Hicks’ Stylesheet for the Google Reader in a Standalone Application. The preliminary name for this project is Readomatic.
This is the first release and it’s in the early alpha stages. It’s been assembled on one evening and two train rides. Obviously, there are a lot of things it does not do, and a lof of ideas for improving it. We will come to those later ;-). So far, it does the following things:
- Display the Google reader in a beautiful mac-like way, thanks to Jon.
- Show the number of unread messages in the Dock. You can turn this off, if you want.
- Act as the standard newsreader on OSX. Whenever you click on a Feed in Safari, it opens in Readomatic and you can subscribe to it if you want.
- Open links in the browser in the foreground or in the background.
It does not, but will:
- have a beautiful icon.
- handle connection problems better.
- have a better name. Readomatic really is a “codename”, if anyone comes up with something better, please post it here.
Without further words, here it is:
This is an early alpha release and will stop working on May 30th, 2007.
Barcamp Frankfurt und ein kleines Projekt
Vielen, vielen Dank an die Organisatoren und Sponsoren des Frankfurter Barcamps, die eine wie ich finde sehr gelungene Veranstaltung auf die Beine gestellt haben! Viele nette und interessante Leute, sehr gutes Essen (und Saft!) und nicht zuletzt Vorträge und Gespräche, die man so eigentlich nur auf Barcamps findet, und wegen denen ich immer wieder gerne da bin :-)
Da das Konzept vorsieht, dass sich jeder ein bisschen beteiligt, und sich am Besten sogar mit einem eigenen Vortrag einbringt, habe ich mich entschieden, bei den “Lightning Talks” einen kleinen 5-Minuten-Vortrag über ein kleines Nebenprojekt von mir zu halten:
(Video auf Sevenload, gefilmt aus einer seltsamen Froschperspektive von Gerrits MacBook )
Ich denke mit einem Verhältnis von Vortragslänge zu Vorbereitung inkl. Produkterstellung von 1:3 liege ich ganz gut ;-). Ich plane, wenn ich ein paar Stunden Zeit finde, das ganze Projekt zu einer sinnvoll nutzbaren Applikation auszubauen und hier zu veröffentlichen. Wer Ideen hat, oder sich gerne beteiligen möchte, ist herzlich willkommen!
(... und zu den Barcamp-Fotos gehts hier.)
Wiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Ich habe zwar schon seit Weihnachten eine Wii aber ich habe immernoch nicht meinen Wii-Code veröffentlicht, damit ihr mir eure Figuren schicken könnt:
5539 2528 8963 6844
Man kann das irgendwo im Adressbuch bei den Nachrichten eintragen. Und dann passiert irgendwas. Ich bin gespannt.
Suchen in CoverFlow
Weil ichs noch nirgendwo gelesen habe: Wenn man im neuen iTunes 7.1 Coverflow im Vollbildmodus hat, kann man durch “blindes” eingeben eines Bandnamens zur jeweiligen Band springen. Sehr praktisch ;-)
Die Web 2.0-Selbsthilfegruppe tagt in Köln
Ich erzähls zwar fleissig rum, werde auch als Tippgeber verlinkt, aber poste es selbst nicht auf meine Seite…
Das hol ich hiermit nach: Am 25. und 26. November findet in meiner neuen Heimatstadt Köln das zweite BarCamp in Deutschland statt. Das erste in Berlin war klasse, ich werde also vor Ort sein :-)
