YAHA! (Yet Another 'Hey, Apple…') Hey, SingTel, you, too.

Hey, Apple…

I like what works, and what helps me work better/faster/more enjoyably; the more of these boxes that get ticked, the better. After all, that's why I'm sitting in front of two iMacs with a MacBook Pro and iPad close to hand.

However…

The new iMacs are a wonder. A 27" display, 2560 x 1440 resolution; absolutely gorgeous. I can have two full-page views plus a Terminal open on the same screen. Two steps forward for usability.

Now for one step back. The mouse cursor appears to be the same size as on my 15" MacBook Pro, even though I'm now looking at nearly three times as many pixels and, more importantly, screen area. How about taking a page from somebody else's playbook (for a change) and have some key sequence that would do a "radar-style" visual locator for the mouse cursor?

The Middle, or The Muddle, or Both

Seriously, I'm in love all over again with this new system. And if I weren't in one of the last Soviet-class customer-last economies, I'd be able to make even better use of the new tool.

With new hardware and software come new opportunities for learning. Anyone who's ever learned or discovered or done something new, or even new to him- or herself, has experimented; has pushed boundaries. Sometimes, they push back the first few times. "You'll know the pioneers because they're the ones with all the arrows in their backs" might be an Americanism, but its meaning is perfectly clear to anyone who's ever challenged Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns"; it's the things you don't know that you don't know that offer the greatest opportunities for learning — if you survive them.

Apple have always had a symbiotic relationship with leading-edge technical norms. The latest example, in OS X Lion, is that for the very first time since Macs have shipped back in 1984, no operating-system media (floppies, CDs, DVDs) come with the system. If you want to nuke from orbit and start over fresh, you use something called Lion Recovery. It's a sweet, eminently sensible idea: most Mac customers have access to fast enough Internet connections that downloading most of what you need to reinstall is less of a hassle than rooting around trying to find some discs that you just know you put in a drawer. Somewhere. Maybe it was in your home office. Maybe in the away office. Maybe they're in one of those bulging boxes marked "Computer Stuff" up in the attic. It could easily take you longer to find physical media than to download four gig or so of bits on a reasonably-modern, properly-managed and -provisioned connection.

Hey, SingTel…

And then there's Singapore.

Advertising here is (in)famous for always having the language "Terms and Conditions Apply", which in practice seems to mean "We don't have to do a single thing we said we would once you give us the money if we can think of a reason not to, or if we do deign to provide the promised product or service, we expressly reserve the right to make the experience as unpleasant as our most innovative Government Scholars™ can conjure up".

Case in point: said Lion Recovery. The way it appears to work is that when your Mac phones home to Cupertino, it then fires up a for-purpose Web server that listens on the usual ports for authenticated incoming connections (from Apple). Cupertino or its CDN upload the data to your Mac, which uses it to reinitialise your installed system. This only works, of course, if your Mac is connected to a network that allows you to do such things, without being blocked by either policy or incompetence. Ah, those terms and conditions.

The Singaporean Interwebs are full of woe documenting Apple customers' fate as victims of SingTel policy and/or incompetence, with Lion Recovery being the latest poster child for the meme. SingTel and StarHub, two of the three major telecoms companies here (and the two popularly thought of as more closely tied to the PAP Government) have intermittent-or-worse problems, while the third (M1) is apparently less hassle. People speak of tethering their Macs to their M1 phones and spending over five hours (in at least one case) successfully performing Lion Recovery. This would be greatly preferable to not being able to recover at all. Unfortunately, the M1 signal in the HDB tenement-with-pretension that I'm living in is too weak and unreliable to support that.

So I'm back to waiting, impatiently, for SingTel to get their cranial appendage out of whatever orifice it's presently stuck in, and work with Apple on fixing the problem. Apparently Apple have run against the proverbial brick wall on multiple occasions to try to help solve a problem over which they have zero control.

Hey, SingTel…

The App Store: I Get It, but...hmmmmm...

Apple's "post-PC," "new media" iDevices are selling quite nicely, thank you. Millions of people have become enthusiastic, loyal, even evangelistic customers without ever clicking a mouse on an Apple desktop or laptop computer. Given that Apple's profit from a laptop or desktop computer is several times what it is for an iDevice, it's almost imperative for them to find ways to make the Mac desktop/laptop user experience support the traits that have been most successful on iDevices. This includes, especially, the App Store.

Fans of the App Store, either on the iDevices or the Mac, point to the fact that you can have several different devices (iPad/iPhone, iMac/MacBook) using the same Apple ID, and thus can install "content" that you "purchase" on several devices; all you need to do is register them under the same ID.

But the Mac, historically, has had a rather different model. You would (and still can, fortunately; at least for now) either purchase a disk with software on it, or download a "disk image;" a file which appeared to Mac OS to be a disk. As soon as you did that, a window would open with the program icon in it and an icon for your Applications folder, and you'd drag the icon over onto the folder. The software would be copied to your hard disk, and you'd be able to then run it like any other program. Want to uninstall the program? Drag its icon to the trash.

Another benefit of that latter model is that you have actual media — either physical or virtual — which you can use to reinstall the program on your computer or, license permitting, on other computers you personally or corporately own. You're very aware during the "normal" installation process that you're working with some sort of artefact which contains the program you're installing. That artefact either is or tries reasonably successful to simulate a physical object.

We've built up certain expectations about physical objects. They exist; though they can be destroyed, they don't generally disappear without direct action by you or another person. With very few exceptions, they can be used more than once. These and other expected traits give the object some value — economic, sentimental or otherwise.

The App Store for the Mac does away with the artefact; it replaces it with an abstraction that's not "real" in any sense you can point to afterwards. To a degree that some find disturbing, it turns the product with which you previously dealt into a service. That service can become unavailable for any number of reasons, not all of which are necessarily a result of your actions or intent.

Put another way, it turns the old "software as a product" notion, and in particular the notion of free software, on their heads. Most free software licenses (try to) make clear that the user is In Charge of his or her own system, including use of the software being licensed. The copyright holder retains certain rights, but yields the remainder to the user under conditions designed to make sure that the software remains "free" in the sense that it was originally licensed. The user may examine the software, redistribute it as he got it, (under most FSF-approved licenses) can create modified or derivative works so long as they are licensed compatibly to the original, and so on. Above all else, the user has the unquestioned right to make as many backup copies of the software as desired in case the original installation becomes unavailable (hard disk crash, extreme weather event, etc.) The user has rights, and has the means to safeguard those rights by virtue of the fact that he has a physical copy of the software in its original, usable form.

The App Store says "Mr User, you don't have to worry your pretty little head with any of that. You just point-and-click your way through the store, and when you check out, the software will be installed automatically on your system." That's great — so far as it goes. But there's no option, at least none that I have yet found, to retain a copy of the disk-image file(s) for the software you just licensed. If your drive goes south for the winter and doesn't come back, you "just" replace the drive, reinstall Mac OS X and install all your apps from the App Store.

That's fine for small programs, especially if you have a high-speed Internet connection using a properly managed ISP. But, unlike the App Store for iDevices, several programs licensed through the App Store for the Mac are in the hundreds-of-megabytes-to-gigabytes range. Try downloading Xcode 4 on a 128K ISDN line. And iLife. And iWork. And... you see the problem. Wouldn't it be much better if you at least had the option to manage all that locally, yourself, the way it's traditionally been for the Mac? And that doesn't even take into account Apple's well-documented "control-freakery," where software available one day — or even already installed on your system — may not be available the next. Even if we give Apple the benefit of all doubt, ascribing to them motives as pure as the driven snow, there's still a real problem here.

The iTunes Music Store has now moved away from "protected" DRM-encumbered music, because customers made it clear that they wouldn't stand for the inconvenience and loss of control over product that they had paid for. I can back up my iTunes library however I wish, and be reasonably confident that should anything happen to my Mac, I'll be able to restore the library on my new replacement Mac without downloading it all again from the ITMS.

Why can't I have that same confidence with the software products I license through the App Store? Apple aren't the only ones who think they should have a fair amount of control over "their" "stuff."

Comments?

Protecting Yourself and Others from Yourself and Others

Nowadays, there's simply no excuse for any computer connected to the Internet, regardless of operating system, not to have both a hardware firewall (usually implemented in your router/broadband "modem") and a software firewall, monitoring both incoming and outgoing traffic.

The software firewall I've been recommending to those "unable"/unwilling to leave the hypersonic train wreck that is Windows has been ZoneAlarm's free firewall. Users of modern operating systems should start off by enabling and configuring the firewall built into their OS (either ipfw on Mac OS X/BSD Unix, or netfilter for Linux). That can be tricky to manage; fortunately there are several good "front end" helper packages out there, such as WaterRoof. Another excellent, popular Mac tool is Little Snitch; the latter two work quite well together.

However, no matter which tools you use to secure your system's Net connection, one of the main threats to continued secure, reliable operation remains you, the user. This has a habit of popping up in unexpected but obvious-in-hindsight ways.

For instance, I recently changed my Web/email hosting service. Long prior to doing so, I had defined a pair of ipfw rules that basically said "Allow outgoing SMTP (mail-sending) connections to my hosting provider; prevent outgoing mail-sending connections to any other address." Thus, were any of the Windows apps I ran inside a VMware Fusion VM to become compromised (as essentially all Windows PCs in Singapore are), they couldn't flood spam out onto the Net – at least not using normal protocols. This didn't do anything to protect the Net from other people's Windows PCs that might sometimes legitimately connect to my network, but it did ensure that the Windows VM (or anything else) running on the Mac was far less likely to contribute to the problem.

A few days after I made the change, I noticed that my outgoing mail server configured in my email client wasn't changed over to the new provider, so I fixed that. And then, I couldn't send mail anymore. It took an embarrassingly long time (and a search of my personal Wiki) to remember "hey, I blocked all outgoing mail except to (the old provider) in my software firewall." Two minutes later, WaterRoof had told ipfw to change the "allowed" SMTP connection, and I soon heard the "mail sent" tone from my client.

Mea culpa, indeed. But why bother blogging about this? To reinforce these ideas to my reader(s):

1. First, that if you aren't already using a software firewall in addition to the hardware one you probably have (especially if you're not aware of it), you should be. It will make you a better Net citizen; and

2. Use a Wiki, either a hosted one like PBworks or one running on your own system. (I use Dokuwiki; this page on Wikipedia has a list of other packages for the host-it-yourselfer.)

3. Use your Wiki to record things that you'd previously think of writing in a dead-tree notebook or a bajillion Post-it® notes stuck to all available surfaces. This specifically and emphatically includes details of your system configuration(s).

Of course, if using a public, hosted wiki, you'll want to make sure that you can secure pages with sensitive data, like system configurations; why make Andrei Cracker's job easier than it already is?

This whole rant is basically a single case of the age-old warning, "if you don't write it down (in a way that it can be found again at need), it never happened." As the gargantuan information fire-hose that is the Internet continually increases the flow of information as well as increasing the rate of increase, this becomes all the more critical for any of us.

Again, Standards Matter

People who I've worked with, or worked for, or read my writing here and elsewhere, have probably figured out that I'm a huge fan of standards just about everywhere they make sense: data formats, user interfaces, and so on. After all, why should we have to relearn how to drive a car simply because we buy a new Ford in place of a Toyota that the Government doesn't want us driving anymore? (You see very few old — or even fully-paid-for — cars in Singapore.) The steering wheel, pedals, and other controls are in a familiar layout; any slight differences are quickly adapted to.

Not so with the Western world's most widely-sold word processing software (for instance); when Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows shipped with a different, unique ('innovative', whether or not you find it debatable, is beside the current point) interface. Bloggers bloviated, many users were deeply confused, and corporate help-desk calls (and support/training costs) spiked. People running Windows PCs were very rarely neutral about the change.

A year later, Microsoft shipped Word 2008 for the Mac. Although there were some interface changes, the points of loudest discussion in the Word:Mac user community seemed to be

• the omission of Visual Basic for Applications as an attempted cross-platform macro language; and
• the new semi-proprietary document format, which allowed flawless interchange with Windows users (VBA notwithstanding).

Interface changes, per se, didn't spark nearly as much angst as had the Windows version of the year before. While a certain amount of this should no doubt be attributed to Microsoft's experience with the earlier release, the main reason was both different and obvious.

When developing Mac applications, it's much easier and better to follow the Apple Human Interface Guidelines than to "roll your own" interface. Developers, including Microsoft, are well aware of the ways in which the Mac development tools make your life easier if you structure and style your app to meet the Guidelines (and user expectations), as opposed to how much scutwork needs to be reinvented from scratch to do things differently. Users benefit even more, as the amount of learning needed to use a new app, or a new version of an existing app, are much less than is the average under Windows or Linux. And, unlike far too many Windows programs, Mac programs are usually highly discoverable; the user may not know how to accomplish a desired action, but there is one (and preferably only one) obvious path to follow, and mis-steps are generally not heavily penalised.

Right, "everybody" knows this, so why did I spend five paragraphs restating the reasonably obvious? Because the real intent of this post is to draw your attention to a phenomenon which is a necessary outcome of that standardisation and discovery: it is much easier to switch from one Mac app that performs a given task to another than it is on Windows. Most Mac users periodically switch between different applications for a given purpose, even keeping two or three installed on their systems. When you ask them why, they don't (generally) point to bugs or deficiencies in one product over another; they merely switch between them as their use cases change. For example, though I have both Microsoft Office and Apple iWork on this Mac, I will often create or open smaller Word documents in a simpler application such as AbiWord instead. It doesn't have all the features of Word or Pages, but it has the basics, and it loads more quickly and uses fewer resources than its two "big brothers."

The average Mac user is also generally more willing to try new applications, and generally owns more applications, than is the average for Windows. Since she is confident in her ability to pick up and use a new program, generally without resorting to a manual or even online help, there is a much more open discussion between users and developers, since both have seen a good bit of "the competition" and know what they like and don't like.

More rarely than is the case elsewhere, but not rarely enough, this easy migration from one app to another is due to real or perceived defects in a previously-used program. This happened to me recently; the program I had been using for a few months as my main Twitter client was not showing me all the tweets of people I was following in the "mainline" stream that I would see when I looked at each person's stream individually. Once you start following more than about two or three people, the mainline becomes absolutely indispensable; you simply don't want to have to take the time to look at each stream in isolation. So, I moved to another client, Nambu (now in "private beta" for a new release; version 1.2.1 can be found via web search).

Two immediate observations: I already know how to use this, even though Nambu has a far more dense presentation than my earlier client. And, because of that "dense presentation", it now takes me about a fifth as much time to get through my morning and afternoon Twitter catchups as it did previously. (Multi-column view is the killer feature, guys; there's only one little thing I'd like to see different...)

Again, why make noise about this? Simple: I've been a Windows user (usee?) and developer quite literally as long as there's been a "Windows"; I ran across my 1.0-beta developer kit floppies (5-1/4", of course) a couple of weeks ago (thinking about having them bronzed...or mounted on a dartboard. Maybe both.) But the nasty truth is, I very rarely change applications that perform a given task in Windows. The pain level and the (hopefully temporary) hit on my productivity aren't worth it until the pain becomes absolutely excruciating. I don't have that problem with the Mac, at all. I can try out new applications at will, even daily-workflow applications, secure in the knowledge that

• I already know how to use this, at least well enough to get started, and
• I can go back — or on to another candidate — any time I want to.

There's a word for the feeling that having that kind of freedom, that control over your computing experience gives you:

Empowerment.