When Steve Jobs first returned to Apple, he simplified the hardware offerings and crafted a software plan. At early keynote addresses he would differentiate Mac offerings with the saying something was available "first on the Mac and only on the Mac." Kevin Brown, until recently the head of Microsoft's Business Unit, would echo that phrase as he showed off features of the upcoming releases of Microsoft office. Unlike the dark days of Word 6 and ugly ports from the Windows side, Brown was showing off software that truly had features available "first on the Mac and only on the Mac." Back in the days of Mac OS 8 and 9, that was enough.
Now that Mac OS X truly presents us with a new OS from the kernel to the graphics stack, an app can differentiate itself by taking advantage of these features. Maybe the app embraces Unix, or uses OpenGL, or finds some way to leverage Rendezvous. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the applications which distinguish themselves, which show in some way that they "get it." For the most part these apps are from small companies which are investing heavily in following Apple's lead. In fact, many of them can't afford to exhibit at MacWorld. They know it's not enough to carbonize your app and announce that you run on Mac OS X; it's a minimum requirement but it isn't enough.
There are vendors who just don't get it. Intuit has gotten requests for years to bring QuickBooks to Mac OS X. At last they have released a version and Apple is bundling it with the new 12" and 17" PowerBooks. But according to the Intuit engineers, the Mac and Windows versions are incompatible. So if you have a Mac and your accountant has a Windows box, you can't share data with your accountant. One engineer at the Intuit booth suggested that we show our accountant PDFs of our past year's activities.
I worried that Watson would die when Apple announced Sherlock 3. Several of us criticized Apple for clearly pirating the look and feel of this award winning application. Meanwhile, Watson author Dan Wood kept adding tools, and new features to existing tools, and people kept buying it. During fall the football tool replaced the baseball tool in my Watson toolbar. I use the weather and TV tools way too much. Version tracker, eBay, and Amazon are easier to navigate from Watson than from their web sites. I can easily customize Meerkat and glance through the geek news that interests me in a moment or two.
Apple has wisely recently opened up their Sherlock APIs. This is a smart move. Already sites such as iCalShare have Sherlock channels that allow you to easily find recent calendars. Wood has also included resources for developing Watson tools. From a developer's or technology perspective the tools are quite different. There is room on the platform for both applications and hopefully soon they'll develop separate enough personalities that end users will better understand the sweet spot for each.
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In one fell swoop, I stopped using Watson for my Google searches. The Google bar at the top of the Safari browser makes searching so easy. Although not every page renders right, this is a fast browser that seems to respect standards (we'll wait to see what Code Bitch has to say) and looks great. This browser embraces the iTunes metaphor for managing bookmarks. The look is that of the other metal iApps. It may seem odd to be praising Apple for getting what Apple is doing -- but there are lots of companies where one software group doesn't work in concert with other app groups or with the OS.
A product who's slogan is "It doesn't suck" could easily just carbonize itself and be done with development. Rich Siegal and the rest of the team are never content to rest on their laurels. With the move from the classic Mac to Mac OS X, BBEdit has embraced the underlying UNIX. You can run bbedit from the Terminal app. Open up the Terminal and type in bbedit. Wondering what the commands are? BBEdit, like any good Unix citizen, has provided a man page. Type man bbedit and you'll find the syntax of the command along with examples. A paragraph or two down you'll see that you can pipe stdin to bbedit. Their example of " ls -la | bbedit" lists the contents of the current directory in long form and writes it to a new untitled document."
BBEdit also supports creating and running Unix scripts and filters from the #! menu. Version 7.0 added CVS integration. Once you have checked out a module, BBEdit makes it very easy to add, update, commit and to perform many of your other favorite CVS operations. AppleScripting BBEdit isn't new, but you can open up the AppleScript beta version of the ScriptEditor from the AppleScript menu.
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As a recovering mathematician, I had to pick one piece of mathematical visualization software. If you want to understand a curve or a surface, the freely available 3D-XplorMath (renamed from the original 3D-FilmStrip) is a beautiful piece of software. In the accompanying documentation, original author Richard Palais explains the thoughts behind the drawing algorithms. Sometimes the right thing to do when you are exposed to a new platform full of toys is to ignore them. The charm and usefulness of this product might be lost if it embraced OpenGL and the rest of what is available in Quartz Extreme.
If you're familiar with high end tools, you may wrongly conclude that the drawing methodology in 3D-XplorMath is inferior. It looks primitive. For a surface, you see the back soon to be hidden side drawn and then you see the near side drawn on top of the initial image. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just draw the visible portions? Sure, but the purpose of this software is to help you get a feel for different surfaces -- by seeing it all drawn this way you get a feel for a complex surface. Similarly, when you grab a piece of surface to rotate it, you see the mesh rotating. Surely, in these days of OpenGL a flashier rotation could have been accomplished. But, again, by not seeing the entire colored-in surface, you get a better feel for what's being rotated and better understand the surface.
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No tour of 3D-XplorMath is complete without a pair of red green 3D glasses. You can choose to view space curves and surfaces in stereo. The math objects seem to pop out of the screen at you. This is a great teaching tool for everything from high school level mathematics through graduate studies and beyond. 3D-XplorMath supports Apple events for making movies or JPGs, for drawing, for executing menu commands, and for making lists of surfaces or space curves.
I think Rendezvous is a great idea. Simply put, the idea is that machines communicate using IP on a Wide Area Network, so why not use IP for local networks. If you know much about networking, you know the answer to that question is that you don't want to have to mess with assigning IP addresses and names. Rendezvous allows devices to choose their own, locally unique IP address without a DHCP server and their own, locally unique domain name without a DNS server.
You've seen how Rendezvous is used in demos of music streaming from one iTunes collection to another and in your use of iChat on local networks. At MacWorld Expo this week, Brother announced that they are shipping the first Rendezvous-enabled printer for workgroups. You plug in your printer and machines on your network will recognize it and be able to use it. TiVo is using Rendezvous to discover Macs in a local network and stream pictures and music from the Macs to your TV. Aspyr has announced that all of their future networked games are going to use Rendezvous to allow players to easily find and join games on their local network, beginning with NASCAR Racing 2002.
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Related coverage: Apple on Top of Its Game: the Macworld SF 2003 Report -- From the moment the keynote began to when the final door was closed to the Expo show floor, Apple and its 350 vendors had the petal to the metal. Daniel Steinberg provides a comprehensive overview of new announcements from the mother ship. A First Look at the Safari Web Browser -- It's lean, it's fast, but is it your browser of the future? Wei Meng Lee examines the beta version of Apple's Safari Web browser and explains some of its features. The DigiCam Chronicles: Assignment Macworld -- This is the first installment of a series dedicated to taking great digital images in a variety of settings. Today's stop: San Francisco for great architecture and interesting people shots from Macworld Expo. This photo essay includes 10 images with notes on how they were captured, plus a QuickTime movie. |
iStorm is a cool application that allows you to collaborate with others in real time on a document. You might start up a document and then decide that you'd like to share it with others. When you do, they will see it in a list of possible documents to join. The documents are registered and discovered using Rendezvous. The iStorm interface is clean and easy to use. A single button at the bottom of the screen is grey if you aren't currently connected to a shared document. It is green if the current document is available for you to edit. It is Blue if you have pressed the green button to take control of the document. Finally Red indicates that someone else has control of the document.
If the button is red you can forcibly take control back by repeatedly pressing the red button. The first time you press the red button a scratch pad will pop up to allow you to record your ideas and later cut and paste them into the document. It would be nice if pressing the red button somehow signaled the person with control of the document that someone wanted it. In pair programming, for example, this is a much nicer way to pass a keyboard remotely than snatching it by pressing the red button six times. The folks at the Math Game House have put a lot of thought into the interface. The application is easy to learn and the documentation is very clear.
It's hard to know whether or not the open source community is happy with the release of X11 for Mac OS X. X11 apps can run on the desktop along with your other Mac OS X apps. X11 apps are now piped through the standard Apple graphic stack. This means that standard Unix windows apps can now take advantage of Quartz in hardware accelerated two dimensional and three dimensional applications.
This is a pretty aggressive move by Apple to support these X11 applications. At the same time, Apple has just trumped the effort of groups that have been working to bring X11 to the Mac. The good news for the end user is that this version of X is easy for end users to install. This makes it easier for many Linux and Unix applications to be ported to the Mac platform.
Daniel H. Steinberg is the editor for the new series of Mac Developer titles for the Pragmatic Programmers. He writes feature articles for Apple's ADC web site and is a regular contributor to Mac Devcenter. He has presented at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, MacWorld, MacHack and other Mac developer conferences.
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