9 ms·

The Future of the Mac After Lion | The Mac Observer

38 points by digiwizard 15y ago

pstuart 15y ago
One observation that really bugged me: > The burden is now on technically-skilled users to find out how to get where they want to go. It’s hard to argue with this logic. There should be no burden. Good UI should be scalable to let the 95% in to do their thing with no thought and no worries, but "expert mode" should follow that same mindset while exposing details.
- schrototo 15y ago
  I agree with that, but I don't understand how e.g. hiding the Library folder puts too much of a burden on those few who really need to access it. They're probably at home on the command line anyway. Sure, simplifications can go too far some times, but I'd say most self-declared "power users" don't really need what they think they need. When I saw that the new Safari doesn't display cookie details (like name, expiration date, etc.) in the privacy pane, I at first thought that they took away too much information. But then I came to realize that even though I could understand that information, I've never actually used it or had a need for it. All the information important in the context of privacy settings is available, and much more streamlined than in previous versions. And I shouldn't even really need to worry about any of that, since a good browser should take care of protecting my privacy for me (e.g. by blocking 3rd party and ad cookies by default, which Safari does). The only time I actually needed that cookie information was during web development, and in that context its still available via the Develop menu.
- rflrob 15y ago
  The potential problem here is that the mere existence of details sometimes trips up the 95%. A friend's spouse apparently likes to keep their home directory clean, and once deleted the Library folder because they hadn't put it there, and didn't think they needed it. When I upgrade to Lion, I know I'm going to try to figure out how to make ~/Library visible, but I think Apple may have made the right choice in making it invisible by default.
- mmariani 15y ago
  For those who want to have ~/Library where it always has been on Finder: chflags nohidden ~/Library
  - djacobs 15y ago
    An alternative is to use the SetFile command, which can alter all kinds of file attributes on HFS+ and non-HFS+ volumes. I have the following in my bash profile: alias see='SetFile -a v' alias hide='SetFile -a V'
r00fus 15y ago
Well reasoned article that follows along with the current trend (stop selling xserve, FCPX, Lion). I wonder what this implies for Apple if they've not only ditched the server and compute-farms, but are now ditching professional A/V as well (or at least pushing towards enthusiasts and "prosumers")... not sure I am convinced they are going to go that far and ditch the MacPro.
joebadmo 15y ago
As a Windows user, I get more tempted to switch with each new hardware release from Apple. But Apple's historical and maybe just now truly culminating priveleging of 'consumers' over power users scares me off in equal proportion. I'm very conflicted. It seems more and more likely that I'll just break down and get an Air and maybe run Windows on boot camp. Edit: Any veteran Mac users have misgivings about the issue? If not, what gives you confidence about the future of power users on Apple platforms?
- cageface 15y ago
  As a longtime Mac user I'm concerned about this as well as what appears to be a waning interest at Apple in supporting the professional creative market. However, Windows is much less friendly still to the command-line user and none of the apps I depend on are available on Linux so I'm not sure what to do.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Windows on the desktop, Linux on the server in your basement
    - jaxn 15y ago
      I.e. go back to 1998? No thanks.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        You have a better solution?
        jaxn 15y ago
        Well, having used Lion for the past few months, I can say that Terminal is unaffected by the changes they are talking about. Running open source development stacks hasn't been affected. So, I don't think a solution is needed. I still believe that no one makes better hardware than Apple and their OS is the best possible system for a developer that also needs to run things like MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. Do you have needs that are not met by Lion?
pnathan 15y ago
This makes a lot of sense. Well, the author makes a lot of sense. I suppose this is a more consumer-friendly way for Apple. As someone who lives in Emacs and the Terminal, I'm not sure I'm happy about this. I like my MBP with Snow Leopard. The Apple OSX Experience rocks my socks off - today. But I sure don't like the iOS experience... at all. It's not geek friendly. I'm afraid that the Apple train is leaving me behind, and I regret that - I like having a reliable & professional operating system that isn't weird^H^H^H^H^H Windows.
- jgh 15y ago
  I'm a little concerned as well - I really enjoy Mac OS X as it is - in Snow Leopard - with the Macbook Pro hardware and I really like Xcode. If the release after Lion ends up being iOS on a Mac, I'm gonna have to just install windows on my Macbook Pro ( hey, it'll still be the best laptop on the market even if it's not running OSX)
  - fossuser 15y ago
    Why jump to Windows instead of some other Unix based OS?
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      It has been my experience that Unix-based OS's besides OSX make for acceptable desktops, but rather poor laptops.
      - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
        My experience has been the opposite. The main problem for me is that people in real life expect me to read and manipulate MS office documents.
- jaxn 15y ago
  None of his changes affect Terminal. Who needs a GUI for these tasks anyway? Not us. I have had Lion for a few months and I haven't seen felt limited by any iOS-like features. Maybe the Mac Pro will go away, but with Thunderbolt allowing additional monitors on the iMac, I bet most pro users don't even mind.
wriq 15y ago
I understand certain pro users being skeptical on the whole 'Back to Mac' iOS-ification of OSX, me included but i'm already loving the Lion terminal. Nice implementation of full screen, 256 colors , no distractions and just one swipe away from all the 'consumer' things I want to do. There's a lot of fluff in this release, but the new Terminal alone made the $30 upgrade worth it for me. As for the Mac Pro disappearing, I couldn't care less. I would think this would impact high res image/video guys more since that seems like the Pro's target market. Developers seem fine on laptops with an external display.
ethank 15y ago
I dont' get the fear that because some elements of iOS are added to Lion, it means its getting dumbed down. I've used Lion for a bit over a month now (in beta and release), and beyond some changes for the better in terms of my workflow (gestures for spaces, etc), nothing really changed. Ruby runs fine, autotest, Spork, git, etc. The things that are great, like Spaces and Mission Control (nearly) have made things easier. The system is a bit faster than it was before, and I don't have to install a bunch of mods to get rid of Aqua. But really, nothing got dumber or smarter. It changed, and mostly for the better. My wife likes it better, as do my parents. It makes more sense to them. My dad for instance never got the hang of the Applications folder, so he loves Launchpad. Until you can write iOS apps on an iOS device, OSX as we know it and use it isn't going anywhere, but I welcome it getting easier on the surface for others.
- djacobs 15y ago
  I would agree, except when such ease of use comes at the expense of your standard (or more experienced than standard) techie. It's my opinion that the Mac platform has been able to succeed because of its developers, and its developers flocked to the platform because it made coding so fun (and full of Unix goodness). (For more thoughts along those lines, see The Art of Unix Programming.) Hiding the Library & System folders isn't terrible, because it's easy for me to undo. However, requiring me to type in my password every time I move an application tells me that Apple is going in the wrong direction here, a direction that only hurts developers and, by extension, its own platform.
  - ethank 15y ago
    How? Protection against something for 99% of users causes inconvenience to 1%. Maybe. But it makes the platform more useful for those 99% who make up the economic ecosystem for the 1% using osx for profit. Protection of the apps folder is great.
    - djacobs 15y ago
      As I say, taking steps that make life harder for engineers & techies will eventually drive us away. I'm pretty sure that Apple has been successful because it's fostered a developer community, and if it stops fostering that, it's success could be a very reversible phenomenon.
dreamdu5t 15y ago
Lion is the same OS X with some interface changes. Everything for the power user is still there... Today I learned "power user" means someone who changes the Finder preferences and knows some shortcut keys.
- rkudeshi 15y ago
  I think that's actually a pretty apt, if trite, description of a power user. I think you may be confusing power users with developers (one is a very small subset of the other).
malkia 15y ago
I had minor problems since using Developer Preview 4 of it, and since I moved to GM, I haven't seen any significant. There is something strange with NVIDIA's CUDA driver (keep asking me to update). There was an issue with MacPorts due to Mono.Framework installed (might've been not related to Lion at all, MacPorts is now at 2.00, so who knows). I'm aquamacs (emacs clone) user, and it works pretty good.
junklight 15y ago
Do you know what - in my house I have a number of machines. They do things like cleaning clothes and dishes and making food hotter. They all have microprocessors in them and can do quite sophisticated stuff - but their interface - almost always a single dial. And that's great because I don't actually care how they do it I just want the job done. Yes I am technically capable of getting in their and reprograming the chips but why would I? And this is the thing - there is no reason why half the things on my computer should be hard. When I am working with documents (text , video , music , etc) then I just want to easily open the document and work on it. I want backups to be trivial etc. etc. And what is more 99% of users want this and only this. But the great thing about the mac is that if you look at the SDKs there is ever more sophistiation and "cool" stuff for us developers. Terminal had a lot of love this time round, Xcode might not have the greatest UI but it also gets a lot of attention - Apple take developers seriously It doesn't bother me that my computer is powerful and easy to use. I don't think this is a bad thing and I also think all the people reading into this "oh the mac is going to just be for idiots" are idiots themselves: go and download the SDKs and XCode and then tell me that Apple are dumbing down I do think that Apple are moving away from the "pro" market BTW - they have their sights on something much more interesting - the pervasive computing future when most of our computing needs are met by a cloud of little machines. I already love that I can walk into a room in my house and flick up stuff from my phone or ipad onto my TV or walk into another room and make music appear from said phone or iPad. There will come a day when your "computer" is a coming together of screen , processor unit and keyboard and when you get up taking the processor with you that computer is no longer physically there until next time you come past. We are going to see this in the video game world too - we aren't far from an ipad or iphone that is your portable gaming device and when you are near your TV is your console and when you are with your mates is your lan party (with or without screens and speakers) - and if Microsoft and Sony aren't paying attention they will loose the entire market overnight
- icebraining 15y ago
  The gap between turning a simple dial and having to code something up (even a bash script - and are the Mac APIs bash accessible?) is very deep, though, and lots of people don't have neither the time nor inclination to cross that gap. And frankly, why should them? On the other hand, my washing machine does have about twenty buttons, so I may be the wrong person to talk about that.

38 points by digiwizard 15y ago

One observation that really bugged me: > The burden is now on technically-skilled users to find out how to get where they want to go. It’s hard to argue with this logic. There should be no burden. Good UI should be scalable to let the 95% in to do their thing with no thought and no worries, but "expert mode" should follow that same mindset while exposing details.

schrototo 15y ago
I agree with that, but I don't understand how e.g. hiding the Library folder puts too much of a burden on those few who really need to access it. They're probably at home on the command line anyway. Sure, simplifications can go too far some times, but I'd say most self-declared "power users" don't really need what they think they need. When I saw that the new Safari doesn't display cookie details (like name, expiration date, etc.) in the privacy pane, I at first thought that they took away too much information. But then I came to realize that even though I could understand that information, I've never actually used it or had a need for it. All the information important in the context of privacy settings is available, and much more streamlined than in previous versions. And I shouldn't even really need to worry about any of that, since a good browser should take care of protecting my privacy for me (e.g. by blocking 3rd party and ad cookies by default, which Safari does). The only time I actually needed that cookie information was during web development, and in that context its still available via the Develop menu.
rflrob 15y ago
The potential problem here is that the mere existence of details sometimes trips up the 95%. A friend's spouse apparently likes to keep their home directory clean, and once deleted the Library folder because they hadn't put it there, and didn't think they needed it. When I upgrade to Lion, I know I'm going to try to figure out how to make ~/Library visible, but I think Apple may have made the right choice in making it invisible by default.
mmariani 15y ago
For those who want to have ~/Library where it always has been on Finder: chflags nohidden ~/Library
- djacobs 15y ago
  An alternative is to use the SetFile command, which can alter all kinds of file attributes on HFS+ and non-HFS+ volumes. I have the following in my bash profile: alias see='SetFile -a v' alias hide='SetFile -a V'

r00fus 15y ago

Well reasoned article that follows along with the current trend (stop selling xserve, FCPX, Lion). I wonder what this implies for Apple if they've not only ditched the server and compute-farms, but are now ditching professional A/V as well (or at least pushing towards enthusiasts and "prosumers")... not sure I am convinced they are going to go that far and ditch the MacPro.

joebadmo 15y ago

As a Windows user, I get more tempted to switch with each new hardware release from Apple. But Apple's historical and maybe just now truly culminating priveleging of 'consumers' over power users scares me off in equal proportion. I'm very conflicted. It seems more and more likely that I'll just break down and get an Air and maybe run Windows on boot camp. Edit: Any veteran Mac users have misgivings about the issue? If not, what gives you confidence about the future of power users on Apple platforms?

cageface 15y ago
As a longtime Mac user I'm concerned about this as well as what appears to be a waning interest at Apple in supporting the professional creative market. However, Windows is much less friendly still to the command-line user and none of the apps I depend on are available on Linux so I'm not sure what to do.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Windows on the desktop, Linux on the server in your basement
  - jaxn 15y ago
    I.e. go back to 1998? No thanks.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      You have a better solution?
      - jaxn 15y ago
        Well, having used Lion for the past few months, I can say that Terminal is unaffected by the changes they are talking about. Running open source development stacks hasn't been affected. So, I don't think a solution is needed. I still believe that no one makes better hardware than Apple and their OS is the best possible system for a developer that also needs to run things like MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. Do you have needs that are not met by Lion?

pnathan 15y ago

This makes a lot of sense. Well, the author makes a lot of sense. I suppose this is a more consumer-friendly way for Apple. As someone who lives in Emacs and the Terminal, I'm not sure I'm happy about this. I like my MBP with Snow Leopard. The Apple OSX Experience rocks my socks off - today. But I sure don't like the iOS experience... at all. It's not geek friendly. I'm afraid that the Apple train is leaving me behind, and I regret that - I like having a reliable & professional operating system that isn't weird^H^H^H^H^H Windows.

jgh 15y ago
I'm a little concerned as well - I really enjoy Mac OS X as it is - in Snow Leopard - with the Macbook Pro hardware and I really like Xcode. If the release after Lion ends up being iOS on a Mac, I'm gonna have to just install windows on my Macbook Pro ( hey, it'll still be the best laptop on the market even if it's not running OSX)
- fossuser 15y ago
  Why jump to Windows instead of some other Unix based OS?
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    It has been my experience that Unix-based OS's besides OSX make for acceptable desktops, but rather poor laptops.
    - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
      My experience has been the opposite. The main problem for me is that people in real life expect me to read and manipulate MS office documents.
jaxn 15y ago
None of his changes affect Terminal. Who needs a GUI for these tasks anyway? Not us. I have had Lion for a few months and I haven't seen felt limited by any iOS-like features. Maybe the Mac Pro will go away, but with Thunderbolt allowing additional monitors on the iMac, I bet most pro users don't even mind.

wriq 15y ago

I understand certain pro users being skeptical on the whole 'Back to Mac' iOS-ification of OSX, me included but i'm already loving the Lion terminal. Nice implementation of full screen, 256 colors , no distractions and just one swipe away from all the 'consumer' things I want to do. There's a lot of fluff in this release, but the new Terminal alone made the $30 upgrade worth it for me. As for the Mac Pro disappearing, I couldn't care less. I would think this would impact high res image/video guys more since that seems like the Pro's target market. Developers seem fine on laptops with an external display.

ethank 15y ago

I dont' get the fear that because some elements of iOS are added to Lion, it means its getting dumbed down. I've used Lion for a bit over a month now (in beta and release), and beyond some changes for the better in terms of my workflow (gestures for spaces, etc), nothing really changed. Ruby runs fine, autotest, Spork, git, etc. The things that are great, like Spaces and Mission Control (nearly) have made things easier. The system is a bit faster than it was before, and I don't have to install a bunch of mods to get rid of Aqua. But really, nothing got dumber or smarter. It changed, and mostly for the better. My wife likes it better, as do my parents. It makes more sense to them. My dad for instance never got the hang of the Applications folder, so he loves Launchpad. Until you can write iOS apps on an iOS device, OSX as we know it and use it isn't going anywhere, but I welcome it getting easier on the surface for others.

djacobs 15y ago
I would agree, except when such ease of use comes at the expense of your standard (or more experienced than standard) techie. It's my opinion that the Mac platform has been able to succeed because of its developers, and its developers flocked to the platform because it made coding so fun (and full of Unix goodness). (For more thoughts along those lines, see The Art of Unix Programming.) Hiding the Library & System folders isn't terrible, because it's easy for me to undo. However, requiring me to type in my password every time I move an application tells me that Apple is going in the wrong direction here, a direction that only hurts developers and, by extension, its own platform.
- ethank 15y ago
  How? Protection against something for 99% of users causes inconvenience to 1%. Maybe. But it makes the platform more useful for those 99% who make up the economic ecosystem for the 1% using osx for profit. Protection of the apps folder is great.
  - djacobs 15y ago
    As I say, taking steps that make life harder for engineers & techies will eventually drive us away. I'm pretty sure that Apple has been successful because it's fostered a developer community, and if it stops fostering that, it's success could be a very reversible phenomenon.

dreamdu5t 15y ago

Lion is the same OS X with some interface changes. Everything for the power user is still there... Today I learned "power user" means someone who changes the Finder preferences and knows some shortcut keys.

rkudeshi 15y ago
I think that's actually a pretty apt, if trite, description of a power user. I think you may be confusing power users with developers (one is a very small subset of the other).

malkia 15y ago

I had minor problems since using Developer Preview 4 of it, and since I moved to GM, I haven't seen any significant. There is something strange with NVIDIA's CUDA driver (keep asking me to update). There was an issue with MacPorts due to Mono.Framework installed (might've been not related to Lion at all, MacPorts is now at 2.00, so who knows). I'm aquamacs (emacs clone) user, and it works pretty good.

junklight 15y ago

Do you know what - in my house I have a number of machines. They do things like cleaning clothes and dishes and making food hotter. They all have microprocessors in them and can do quite sophisticated stuff - but their interface - almost always a single dial. And that's great because I don't actually care how they do it I just want the job done. Yes I am technically capable of getting in their and reprograming the chips but why would I? And this is the thing - there is no reason why half the things on my computer should be hard. When I am working with documents (text , video , music , etc) then I just want to easily open the document and work on it. I want backups to be trivial etc. etc. And what is more 99% of users want this and only this. But the great thing about the mac is that if you look at the SDKs there is ever more sophistiation and "cool" stuff for us developers. Terminal had a lot of love this time round, Xcode might not have the greatest UI but it also gets a lot of attention - Apple take developers seriously It doesn't bother me that my computer is powerful and easy to use. I don't think this is a bad thing and I also think all the people reading into this "oh the mac is going to just be for idiots" are idiots themselves: go and download the SDKs and XCode and then tell me that Apple are dumbing down I do think that Apple are moving away from the "pro" market BTW - they have their sights on something much more interesting - the pervasive computing future when most of our computing needs are met by a cloud of little machines. I already love that I can walk into a room in my house and flick up stuff from my phone or ipad onto my TV or walk into another room and make music appear from said phone or iPad. There will come a day when your "computer" is a coming together of screen , processor unit and keyboard and when you get up taking the processor with you that computer is no longer physically there until next time you come past. We are going to see this in the video game world too - we aren't far from an ipad or iphone that is your portable gaming device and when you are near your TV is your console and when you are with your mates is your lan party (with or without screens and speakers) - and if Microsoft and Sony aren't paying attention they will loose the entire market overnight

icebraining 15y ago
The gap between turning a simple dial and having to code something up (even a bash script - and are the Mac APIs bash accessible?) is very deep, though, and lots of people don't have neither the time nor inclination to cross that gap. And frankly, why should them? On the other hand, my washing machine does have about twenty buttons, so I may be the wrong person to talk about that.