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A Multi-Touch iPhone OS Layer On Top of Mac OS X?
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Please elaborate? I really have no idea what you mean by this.
I thought we all wanted MORE options, whats wrong with this one for those who would like to use it?
- Lack of any news items about the development of desktop OSX (heck 10.3 update has taken longer than any other point release, and it's to update a full release that give most users no benefit)
- Outdated hardware (Mac Pro and Macbook Pro are both well beyond when they would normally be refreshed, with little more than speculation about when they could get refreshes).
- Agressive push on iphone and now very aggressively pushing a new 9inch ipod touch.
- A number of recent official statements from the company they are a mobile company now
These trends have me contemplating the future direction of Apple. They don't seem to be able to focus on more than one thing at a time.
Certainly a very interesting idea...
That has been implemented several times..... including Apple.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh1085.html
Simple Finder.
The day my computer becomes a giant touchscreen joke a la 1980's computing, I'm switching.
What is Apple's penchant with touchscreen crap?
No, no I do not want to poke at my laptop screen all day, what a retarded idea.
Can you imagine the complaints from MacRumors users? Everyone says it's cool now, until their screen is full of nasty fingerprints and grime, and their hinges are too weak to stand being poked all day. As it is, everyone here hates people touching their screens on their computers (myself included), so why would anyone want to touch it all day long?
Most retarded idea ever.
What is Apple's penchant with touchscreen crap?
No, no I do not want to poke at my laptop screen all day, what a retarded idea.
Can you imagine the complaints from MacRumors users? Everyone says it's cool now, until their screen is full of nasty fingerprints and grime, and their hinges are too weak to stand being poked all day. As it is, everyone here hates people touching their screens on their computers (myself included), so why would anyone want to touch it all day long?
Most retarded idea ever.
Apparently the author believes giving users fewer choices and less features would make an OS easier for some to use.
Some people seem to need the protection of a walled garden, and a OS that's so very simple and limiting that "even a toddler can figure out", to use the author's words. Personally, I want to do things on a computer beyond what a toddler could do.
Changing font size isn't exactly rocket science. Maybe the author should have written an article entitled "Why can't my family learn anything new?" and explored his family's learning problem...
Who knows? Maybe someday soon they'll bring back AOL in its original walled garden form, so the "easily confused" won't be confused by the "real" Internet.
Dashboard Replacement!
Would be great to have the iPhone OS act as a dashboard replacement... could imagine some interesting opportunities.
Would be great to have the iPhone OS act as a dashboard replacement... could imagine some interesting opportunities.
The theme of this particular discussion was about whether or not the touch OS is an "easier computing paradigm", but about whether or not it is required.
For what it is worth, I use a touch screen monitor at work in conjunction with a program designed for touch input (large buttons and such). It's really better only when stepping up to the computer to press the screen once or twice and leaving. When actually sitting down and using it, however, using the mouse is superior. It gets tiresome reaching up to touch the screen constantly. A mouse can move much faster, is more accurate, and requires less effort.
You have it all 100% backwards.
The ModBook is the lazy approach. The new multi-touch API and new ways of interacting with on-screen content is the innovation.
As soon as I saw the iPad I thought about the possibilities of my iPhone interface on my Mac Laptop. For the most part I think the addition of this interface ON TOP OF OSX gives you something beyond what we now have (OSXI ??). It would be hard to hide this with developers, so I expect this to be unveiled at a developers conference. The first to go with this interface would be the iMac. But soon I could see the whole line adopting this. Since when is the mouse such the end-all-be-all? The ideal mac in the future will probably support a number of interfaces, including voice and hand gestures (not necessarily only by touching the screen, like Minority Report, which was based on a real company's product). For a lot of what I do in audio, a finger or a pen on a screen would be MUCH faster than any mouse could accomplish. The iPhone shows us that Keyboards are optional. As we progress with computing and voice recognition most of what we do with the keyboard will also become outdated. Still seems like science fiction, but in 20 years what will our multicore monsters do with all of that power - even in the size of a phone?
Because the majority of non-tech people can't figure out multitasking. I know people who still can't figure out what window has focus. And it's a lot of people.
From the article
Here's actually another good discussion about it, if you want to ready a lengthy piece on it: http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/359224392/i-need-to-talk-to-you-about-computers-ive-been
arn
The mouse is designed to replicate my hand. So, a hand manipulation replacing indirect hand manipulation?
The term paradigm gets thrown around way too often. Again, for the trillionth time, the only people who think this is a paradigm shift are those who are mesmerized with a different input method. Save the paradigms for BloomServers.
I think Apple could integrate iPhone/iPad apps that ran in windows kind of like Quicktime X. They would show only their content until you mouse over them which would show the title bar and allow you to move them around with the mouse.
Other than that they could interact like normal mac applications, only having better support for touch input. One problem would be the fact that they wouldn't really be easily resized considering they would be designed for 1024x768 or 480x320. Unless the OS just scaled down the entire window...
Other than that they could interact like normal mac applications, only having better support for touch input. One problem would be the fact that they wouldn't really be easily resized considering they would be designed for 1024x768 or 480x320. Unless the OS just scaled down the entire window...
My experience is that there is very few people under the age of 30 right now who is this clueless about desktop computing. For those that are, its not a complexity thing, but more likely a lack of access due to financial constraints, etc.
Can't figure out multi-tasking? That's a bit extreme. If people can figure out how to drive a car at 60 miles per hour, navigate, and obey traffic rules, I have a very hard time imagining they cannot operate something as intuitive as OSX.
Desktop computing : iPad :: real world : Disneyland
I am willing to put up with the closed software ecosystem on my phone. But not so much on my laptop.
I am willing to put up with the closed software ecosystem on my phone. But not so much on my laptop.
What we are fast approaching is a fork in the road for computing as we know it. For the VAST majority of consumers out there, people who just want to get basic things done quickly, simply, and efficiently, the iPhone/iPad style OS works. This isn't the people on these forums, or any forums. People who don't even know what a forum is. There will always be classic style OS's and computers out there for people like us here who love to tinker and can multitask. But for mom and dad, basic is king. As portable computing technology advances, more and more consumers will go that way. You don't need a Core i7 to surf the web and write email. We here will always want the latest and greatest, and want to tweak the hell out of it, but John and Jane consumer just want it easy. iPad and iPhone OS does a great job for that. As Apple pushes more and more into the consumer space, we will see more and more simplicity. I hope the niche of us hardcore users will still be served, but there are a lot more dollars out there from average people then the hardcore.
Maybe Microsoft Bob was just way ahead of its time....
Maybe Microsoft Bob was just way ahead of its time....
I've thought about this for a while and it seems pretty clear to me that the future of Mac OS X is the iPhone OS. Now I'm sure there will be plenty of changes made to make it more apt and able to do stuff but with the lack of recent innovation on the OS X front and Apple's continued emphasis on the iPhone OS it seems very plausible. I personally hope that if this is the case that perhaps aside from the general aesthetics of things that vast changes are made so that it doesn't require the use of a touchscreen computer as using one would obviously get physically tiring. I would also hope that it becomes much more flexible. But the signs have been around for a while. IPhone style buttons popped up in Leopard (the time machine system preferences) along with the new scrollbars, momentum scrolling, and now multitouch input devices which are a much better idea than touchscreen larger computers. Now obviously I don't know anything and apple probably will do things that annoy us but i'd wager a lot that the iPhone and now the iPad's influence will continue to be felt more and more on the big cats.
Now this isn't necessarily what I want to see happen...I like some aspects of the concept but loathe others. It really depends on the execution. I think it is safeto say though that this is where we are headed.
Now this isn't necessarily what I want to see happen...I like some aspects of the concept but loathe others. It really depends on the execution. I think it is safeto say though that this is where we are headed.
Despite the fact that not everyone can learn to play the guitar, we still make guitars for those who can. And for those who can't, they make Guitar Hero so those folks can pretend to play a guitar.
But I get the impression some would argue that we should stop making (real) guitars altogether...? Because doing so would somehow help those who can't learn to play guitar?
A new iMac line with a multitouch screen, and the screen could tilt back and pull out (sort of like the g4 one) so you could easily touch it right in front of you at the right angle without having to hold up your arms. Then they could have iPhone and iPad apps available (normal or scaled up) and developers would be able to make apps that are compatible with the 2 different screen sizes. (21 and 27) Then of course it would have all the current features, keyboard, and mouse so people could use it either way.
Ironically, Multifinder was just that switching between "modes", as you call them. It wasn't multitasking. Mac OS never had proper, pre-emptive multitasking until OS X came along. Amiga had it in 1985, Windows got it ten years later with Windows 95, Mac OS got it 6 years after that with OS X 10.0 in 2001.
(and if you want to quibble yes, OS 9 (1999) had a special mode that allowed pre-emptive multitasking, but the app had to enable it specifically
)
I'd have to strongly disagree.
The generation of people that don't know how to use computers is dwindling, why would we need to create simplified operating systems to cater to them? Standard operating systems are really not that complicated in the first place. Any novice user is going to feel lost if they've never used a computer before, young or old. It's just a skill that must be learned, and it's no more difficult than any of the other basic skills a person learns throughout their life.
If it was pushed like Dashboard, sure.
But it will be pushed as the "future," like how Apple has been with the iphone and ipad. I don't want a 24" monitor 12" in front of my face. I want it pushed 2-3 feet away, so I can relax my arms and do my work with very minimal hand movements on a wacom. I can flick my pen two inches and span two feet.
Apple would start out slowly, introducing this as a feature in OSX, and then eventually, "We have learned that our users enjoy this mode of input so much, we will be focusing on touch interface as our new way of creating OSX."
I don't want to wave my arms around for 10 straight hours editing photographs. My finger can't reduce to 3 pixels for precise edits. So no thank you on sneaking multitouch into the eventual replacement of OSX.
But it will be pushed as the "future," like how Apple has been with the iphone and ipad. I don't want a 24" monitor 12" in front of my face. I want it pushed 2-3 feet away, so I can relax my arms and do my work with very minimal hand movements on a wacom. I can flick my pen two inches and span two feet.
Apple would start out slowly, introducing this as a feature in OSX, and then eventually, "We have learned that our users enjoy this mode of input so much, we will be focusing on touch interface as our new way of creating OSX."
I don't want to wave my arms around for 10 straight hours editing photographs. My finger can't reduce to 3 pixels for precise edits. So no thank you on sneaking multitouch into the eventual replacement of OSX.
Gimmicks and whizbangery are not a good way to change the world.
There are two major trends that will dominate "computing" (for lack of a better term than that increasingly antiquated one) for the next couple decades: transparent computing and ubiquitous computing.
Transparent computing is the idea that when you're doing a computery-task-thing, the computer should vanish. This is what inspired multi-touch, in large part: You're no longer interacting with a computer which interacts with digital representations of things. You're directly interacting with things. The Jeff Han demo at Ted captured this idea perfectly: You reach out and touch a photograph, and it responds like a thing. There's a powerful computer behind all of that, of course, but the goal is for the person to be unaware of the machine. More and more, we're seeing these principles put into action. We've got it down for photos and scrolling through lists or documents; we haven't figured out how it should work for other types of interactions yet, but things like accelerometers and AGPS give hints of possible future developments.
Ubiquitous computing is the simple idea that where you are is more important than where the machine is. There are several ways to tackle this problem. "Everybody should have a laptop" is one; an iPhone-like device in your pocket is another. But we're still a long way from the ideal there. If I want to move a document from my laptop to my phone, I have to go through an abstract, mediated process like syncing or mounting a shared filesystem over a network. I should be able to put the phone next to the laptop screen and simply drag the document to the phone with my finger. We're not there yet.
The shortsighted person and I mean no offense here, but what else would you call it? looks at a technology like multitouch and shouts "Bolt this onto the side of my existing computer immediately!" Except that's nonsense, because multitouch is one aspect of a different vision for human-machine interaction. Multitouch by itself is useless; it only has value to the extent that it lets us get closer to transparent computing.
I've got a year-old Macbook Pro. It has multitouch. I can use multitouch gestures on the trackpad to do things like zooming in to a PDF or tell my browser to go back a page. I NEVER use these features. Why? Because they don't do anything for me. They don't make the computer disappear. I'm still interacting with a machine, and the machine interacts with whatever I'm looking at on the screen. It's like those plexi boxes that you see in science labs in movies, the kind with two joysticks and a pair of robot arms. You move the joysticks to control the arms which lift the lid off the barrel of atomic waste, or whatever the heck. It sucks, and we only put up with it because there's no alternative that doesn't involve a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning.
Okay, so maybe my simile broke down a little at the end there, but you get my point. Multitouch isn't a feature that should be stuck on to existing clumsy, abstracted, in-ten-years-we'll-laugh interaction paradigms. It should be used as one of many features to create new, better interaction paradigms. Anything else is just painting the brontosaur's toenails as the comet streaks across the sky.
There are two major trends that will dominate "computing" (for lack of a better term than that increasingly antiquated one) for the next couple decades: transparent computing and ubiquitous computing.
Transparent computing is the idea that when you're doing a computery-task-thing, the computer should vanish. This is what inspired multi-touch, in large part: You're no longer interacting with a computer which interacts with digital representations of things. You're directly interacting with things. The Jeff Han demo at Ted captured this idea perfectly: You reach out and touch a photograph, and it responds like a thing. There's a powerful computer behind all of that, of course, but the goal is for the person to be unaware of the machine. More and more, we're seeing these principles put into action. We've got it down for photos and scrolling through lists or documents; we haven't figured out how it should work for other types of interactions yet, but things like accelerometers and AGPS give hints of possible future developments.
Ubiquitous computing is the simple idea that where you are is more important than where the machine is. There are several ways to tackle this problem. "Everybody should have a laptop" is one; an iPhone-like device in your pocket is another. But we're still a long way from the ideal there. If I want to move a document from my laptop to my phone, I have to go through an abstract, mediated process like syncing or mounting a shared filesystem over a network. I should be able to put the phone next to the laptop screen and simply drag the document to the phone with my finger. We're not there yet.
The shortsighted person and I mean no offense here, but what else would you call it? looks at a technology like multitouch and shouts "Bolt this onto the side of my existing computer immediately!" Except that's nonsense, because multitouch is one aspect of a different vision for human-machine interaction. Multitouch by itself is useless; it only has value to the extent that it lets us get closer to transparent computing.
I've got a year-old Macbook Pro. It has multitouch. I can use multitouch gestures on the trackpad to do things like zooming in to a PDF or tell my browser to go back a page. I NEVER use these features. Why? Because they don't do anything for me. They don't make the computer disappear. I'm still interacting with a machine, and the machine interacts with whatever I'm looking at on the screen. It's like those plexi boxes that you see in science labs in movies, the kind with two joysticks and a pair of robot arms. You move the joysticks to control the arms which lift the lid off the barrel of atomic waste, or whatever the heck. It sucks, and we only put up with it because there's no alternative that doesn't involve a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning.
Okay, so maybe my simile broke down a little at the end there, but you get my point. Multitouch isn't a feature that should be stuck on to existing clumsy, abstracted, in-ten-years-we'll-laugh interaction paradigms. It should be used as one of many features to create new, better interaction paradigms. Anything else is just painting the brontosaur's toenails as the comet streaks across the sky.