We need to talk, kupo

Apple did a funny thing this week. They announced a new desktop operating system with little fanfare and took the entire internet by surprise. For as secretive as Apple try to be, hiding new phones in plain sight where no one would think to look, the internet has enough rumors about them that we practically always know what they're going to announce before they do, even if some of those predictions are a year off (I’m looking at you iPhone 5). And yet, with the announcement of Mountain Lion, the internet knew nothing. I came home from work having not looked at the news all day and just discovered that it had been announced.

Perhaps the reason why the internet hadn’t even gotten around to making up features for Apple’s next OS release is because Lion only came out seven months ago. Since 2003 OS X has been on a two year release cycle (in stark contrast to Microsoft’s “when we get round to it” cycle), but Apple seems keen to break this with Mountain Lion, moving to a yearly release cycle that matches their mobile OS. This could be either good or bad really. Yearly updates mean we get more frequent feature updates, but they could just be trying to get you to pay for an upgrade more often and releases could become more iterative in nature.

Like Lion, Mountain Lion is all about bringing iOS features to the desktop, but hopefully this time with more success. When Lion brought yet another method of launching apps to OS X that looked like iOS’s springboard we all rolled our eyes just a little. Despite already having the dock, stacks, spotlight and the finder, obviously the feature the Mac was missing was iOS’s worst part.

Mountain Lion brings some great features of iOS to the desktop, such as AirPlay mirroring to an Apple TV and a unified notification center. Having a centralised place to see a list of alerts and messages you received while you were away from the computer seems like an obvious omission from OS X, and anyone who has ever tried to explain to their parents how to connect a laptop to a big screen will appreciate the simplicity of AirPlay. 

With this release Apple is also trying to make the OS make more sense. Currently notes you have syncing in iCloud end up (for no apparent reason) in your e-mail inbox and reminders appear in iCal as to dos. In Mountain Lion these have been split out into separate apps which make much more sense. Speaking of iCloud, it’s being integrated more deeply at the OS level, allowing you to save and open iCloud documents in Pages or TextEdit for example. 

I wish they had gone much further with this however. While notes in Mail and reminders in iCal were minor grumbles, everyone has complained about the monstrosity of iTunes for years. It’s understandable how it happened, but iTunes as an app no longer makes sense. iTunes should go back to being a media player and anything not related to that should be its own thing, such as iOS app purchasing/management and iBooks. In fact, splitting iBooks into its own app would be the perfect opportunity to introduce a Mac reader for iBooks, which is bizarrely absent.

The most obvious feature that should be torn out of iTunes is iPad and iPhone syncing. It’s there because that’s where you put music on an iPod, but now that iDevices are grown up and WiFi syncing means you need to leave iTunes open all the time, device syncing should become a system level feature.

Finally one of Mountain Lion’s curious new additions is Gatekeeper, a security control that by default blocks the installation of apps from the internet that aren’t signed by an Apple certificate. Getting a certificate doesn’t require you to get into the app store, but it does require you to pay the developer licensee fee. The feature can be turned off (or made more vigilant) and I don’t have anything fundamentally against it as it protects against malware and still allows un-approved apps, but the direction we are going in concerns me. In a couple more versions of OS X I could easily see the “anywhere” option quietly disappear. 

But maybe that’s just my tinfoil hat talking.

Overall I look forward to this upgrade, but I certainly hope that next years upgrade isn’t just another iOS catch up and they invest time in genuinely developing new features for the Mac.

Drink cactus juice! It'll quench ya! Nothing's quenchier! It's the quenchiest!

WOA!!!!!!So Microsoft announced on Thursday, through a monstrous eight thousand word blog post I didn’t read, more details about Windows 8. Specifically they talked about Windows on ARM, or WOA for short, because everyone loves an acronym. New acronyms are like a little piece of Christmas in February, which is fitting because there is a metric fuckton of snow outside right now. 

One of the curious revelations in this blog post was the news that Windows 8 on ARM would feature the traditional desktop (it had long been speculated that it wouldn’t), but that the desktop would only be available to use Office 15 (slightly modified for touch), Internet Explorer 10 and the file explorer. No other programs will be allowed to use the desktop on ARM. It makes sense from Microsoft’s prospective; they want to put Windows on ARM devices, but they also want everyone to use the cross-platform WinRT (Metro styled apps) to develop for it.

But from a user’s prospective this will be a terrible experience. If you give a non-technical user a Windows 8 desktop PC and a Windows 8 ARM tablet, just try explaining to them why seemingly identical operating systems can’t both run Photoshop. In fact, explain to them why they can’t do anything in the desktop. Want to zip some files to send in an email? Don’t try installing WinZip. Want to listen to music in the media player of your choice? Sorry about that.

Which begs the question; why is the desktop even there when giving users an environment they recognise just gives them false expectations of the product? The answer is obvious, this is a stop gap to allow you to run traditional Office apps and to access Windows features that haven’t been ported to Metro, such as advance settings panels, the file explorer, the registry, etc, etc. The desktop is hanging of Windows 8 on ARM like a cancerous growth because Microsoft is afraid (or doesn’t have time) to go the whole way and ditch the classic desktop.

Microsoft has been touting “no compromises” as the selling point of Windows 8, but so far it’s sounding like nothing but compromises. I understand they wanted to build a single operating system for both desktop and mobile, but if the classic desktop on mobile devices is almost useless and a terrible user experience, and desktop users don’t want the metro start screen (the experience of that is still a question), you begin to wonder if they should be two distinct products.

Microsoft could easily present them as two separate products, one for desktop and one for mobile and have the underlying core OS be the same under the hood. In fact, isn’t that exactly what Mac OS X and iOS is? Both the improvements in the Windows 8 desktop and the Metro start screen for tablets look like they could be successful products, but I just don’t understand why Microsoft seems determined to make an inferior product by making them conjoined twins.

Uh, I suppose this is the part where I should tell you that I've always loved you, but I don't. I really, really don't.

So last week Microsoft took the covers of Windows 8 (still the code name right now) and released a developer preview of the OS so that folks could get their grubby mitts on a pre-beta version a year from its public release. Microsoft's move with Windows 8 is clearly a response to the growing popularity in touch based operating systems, namely Apple's iOS, HP's (now deceased) webOS and Google's Android. While Apple, HP and Google have answered the tablet question by trying to enhance simpler operating systems designed for smart phones, Microsoft is trying to sell the idea of "no compromises", by trying to simplify the mess that is Windows into something that can be run on touch devices.

Their answer to this question is a new interface for Windows inspired by Windows Phone 7 called Metro. These metro styled apps run in full screen, are built in HTML5 and Javascript to support multiple architectures and are designed specifically for touch. Metro apps are displayed front and centre in the new start screen. On a tablet this seems to make a lot of sense and is somewhat familiar. A screen full of tiles, full screen apps with large icons for touch, hidden menus that only appear when required, where have I seen this before?

Where things get a bit uncomfortable is when you realise that alongside this metro interface is the ability to switch back to the classic Windows desktop (Microsoft truly are the kings of backwards compatibility). Here things have been tweaked and improved in places (multiple task bars in multi-monitor mode is particularly great), but for the most part this is Windows 7 as you know it. This may have been fine if tablet users could use metro and desktop users could use classic Windows, but they can't, at least in this build. Your classic desktop experience is all fine and dandy until you want to click the start button and launch anything. Thats when you find out the start menu as we know it is dead. It was taken round the back with a double barrelled shot gun and beaten in the face until its parents no longer recognised or loved it. Clicking that button in Windows 8 takes you back to the metro start screen, even if all you want to do is type a search and launch an application that requires you to go back to the classic desktop. Not everything is even accessible in the start screen. There is now simply no way to launch device manager by hitting the windows key and typing its name, for example.

Before I sound like a complete negative nancy, please don't get me wrong. I'm very excited to see Microsoft doing something entirely different with Windows and I love the look and feel of metro. I can't wait to see what types of apps people build for metro and am even curious to see if I can build one myself. I'm just not entirely sure whether this experience is going to work outside of tablets. Windows without windows on a 30inch monitor makes as much sense as full screen mode in OS X Lion on a large display.

Also, while Microsoft claim they haven't just stuck an additional shell on top of Windows (apparently the desktop is treated like another app and doesn't even load if you don't use it), as a user it certainly feels like they have. The clash between classic Windows and metro is incredibly jarring, as if I'm trying to use a computer that has two operating systems installed that are battling for control.

Using metro is also not a fluid and intuitive experience, especially on the desktop. In metro apps you right click to bring up menus, and press the Windows key to get back to the start screen. Every keyboard on the planet has an escape key designed to "get you out" of the thing your currently in, and yet it doesn't exit a metro app. In fact, press escape on the start screen and it goes back to your previous app. Applications that scroll left and right also make no sense on desktop computers with a mouse that have been designed to scroll up and down. On the start screen the scroll wheel actually scrolls left and right, but in apps where you have panes inside the app that go up and down, you are forced to use the scroll bar to go left and right. And just when I thought we were finally done with scroll bars.

It's clear that Windows 8 has some way to go (it's a year from release) and I shouldn't be judging it now, but Windows 8 concern me as much as it excited me, because Steven Sinofsky has a reputation for only revealing products when they are feature complete, and not making changes or taking feedback. We will have to just wait and see.

Images from thisismynext.com

I'm sorry. It's just... I react to certain doom in a certain way. It's a bad habit.

So on Tuesday Google took the covers off their new social endeavour, Google+. Anyone not looking very hard would simply dismiss it as a clone of Facebook, and admittedly parts of it are, however I feel that Google+ may just be what the social and communication space needs to move forward and that people shouldn't ignore its possibilities.

Saying that, it still worries me that Google is running this product. Innovation and great technology are their bread and butter, but understanding people is something they have yet to fully wrap their heads around. Just look at Buzz, an ill-conceived twitter clone, Wave, a communication product that no one understood what its purpose in life was and Android, incredibly sophisticated and customisable, but a mess for the non-techy to understand.

With plus Google is off to a good start, and the general UI improvements rolling out across all of Google's services gives me much hope. So what is Google+ and why is it worth moving from the Facebooks? In a nutshell, its because (amazingly) Google has understood how social interaction works better than Facebook and it all comes down to circles.

Facebook achieved mass acceptance when everyones mum started joining it. The problem with this is not that I don't want my mum there, but that I don't want to tell her everything about my life. As much as I lover her, she is not my "friend" as Facebook so elegantly characterises everyone. My University lecturer is also not my friend, but there are certainly reasons I would want to communicate and share things online with both of them. In Mark Zuckerberg's world everyone is a friend or a stranger, and I have the option to send status updates to all my friends or everyone on the Internet. There is no granularity.

What Google has created is an elegant UI for creating groups of people I know known as circles. Whenever I post a status update, share a link or upload a photo, I can choose which social circles I share this information with. This is much closer to how the world actually works. The human mind segments people into groups and in life you deliberately change how you behave and what you say with these groups. While I would be more than happy to show pictures of my graduation with everyone I know, I would be much less comfortable with my parents seeing pictures from the nights drinking that followed it. In the same fashion, I might want to rant about a bad day at work with friends, but if my boss or other employees are my friends on Facebook, I would be much less eager to do so. Google has solved this problem in the geekiest way possible; venn diagrams.

We're "hanging" outWhile launching a competitor to Facebook they simultaneously created a Skype killer on the same day. One of the best features of Google+ is "hangouts", the ability to launch a live video chat in the browser window (no desktop client required) and invite different circles to join. This allows you to have interactive video chat in the browser with multiple people for free, and it even has some great technology behind it, like focus switching to the person currently talking and the ability to share YouTube videos and scrub to the same location for everyone watching. To use Skype I had to instal and teach my mum how to use it. Now when I move out my whole extended family could have a group video call, and I wouldn't have to teach them how to get it working.

They also integrated Twitter functionality at the same time, allowing you to follow anyones public updates without a "friend request". Its up to me who I show data to, and my friends if they share with me. This is much more natural than the incredibly formal "request" of friendship.

I think Google is onto a real winner here. They have fixed the major flaw in Facebook's design and introduced socially revolutionary technology to people of all skills. And thats not forgetting that it doesn't have a lot of the cruft that Facebook has, such as application spam and is inherently open about the data it collects where Facebook is closed. Facebook could (and may) integrate Skype and create friend lists tomorrow, but Google has put their stake in the ground and isn't likely to give up easily.

The problem will be in convincing everyone to move over. And if everyone doesn't, how people handle a fractured landscape where some people are on Facebook, others on Google+ and others on both. Its certainly going to be very interesting.