While I was cycling today, I had an interesting thought.

I always have my ol’ iPod Nano with me while I’m cycling. As usual, if I want to listen to a song again, I click the left button to repeat, if I don’t like a song, I click the right button to skip to the next song. But while cycling, I have to do this without looking at it. It is possible because I can feel the click-wheel and it has a good feedback so that I know when the press has worked.

Compare this with the touch-screen rage - can a person use the iPod Touch/iPhone without looking? From my limited usage of a friend’s iphone, I do not think it is possible.

It makes me wonder which is really the “Touch” - the one I can use without looking (using only sense of touch), or the one that has a touch-screen UI (requires both sense of touch and sense of sight)?

From New York Times, November 26, 1991:

DOS computers, made by I.B.M., Compaq, Tandy and about a million other companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans will note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not connote a higher life form. There is strength in numbers, however. The White House uses DOS computers.

I read the iCon book recently and have been wondering what makes people (like me) so fascinated about Steve Jobs?

• He didn’t create any great technology or product, it was people who worked with him who did all that, for example, Steve Wozniak and John Lasseter.
• He was a leader, a manager, that was his role. He’s an inspiring leader, is that why he’s admired?
• Or is it because he’s ruthless in executing his visions and ideas?
• Or is it because he gives such enrapturing keynote speeches that they are now called “Stevenotes”?

I guess it just goes to show that he’s a man of many contradictions.

The best example that I’ve come across of how he can inspire people is his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (the official video is available for download using iTunes). This speech was so powerful that I know of one friend who quit his job after hearing that speech and decided to go chase his dreams. That was a huge risk but guess what, he’s doing much better than before now.

The book has some interesting accounts of how Steve came to India in search of “truth”, wore a lungi, went travelling in cities and deserts, and even meeting a baba in the Himalayas (which itself is quite a story). Another story was how he hung out with his New Age buddies at an apple farm in Oregon, which is eventually how the company was named Apple. Then there are the accounts of how Steve demanded absolute loyalty from his friends to accounts of his taste in the kind of ads that Apple made and so on. It was a good read.

The bottom line is that he led Apple and Pixar and collectively changed three major industries for the better - the computer industry, the animated movies industry and the music industry. And he has battled cancer and survived. All this in a single lifetime. And he’s only fifty. That’s why I admire him so much.

For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product.

Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day!

I’m talking about “the ion” - a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug in the iPod and connect the other end to the electric socket, and your iPod gets charged. No PC, no fuss, no muss.

In fact, it works with any device that charges through USB, whether it is your iRiver, or any mp3 player, or your mobile phone!

Some more cool features:

• The ion is portable, you can carry it around anywhere, especially to places where you will not have access to a computer.
• Do you really need to switch on your computer the whole night just to charge your iPod?
• You can listen to your music when your iPod is getting charged by the ion, instead of staring at the ‘Do not disconnect’ message.
• An awesome looking product. A great companion for the iPod.

All this for just Rs.399 only. As a bonus, you get solid reliability because the ion has a voltage regulator circuit that protects your device from power surges. Most existing charger products out there do not have such protection.

We’re going to get the product out in the stores soon, but^* the quickest way to get an ion is to buy it online right now!

We’ll also be trying to get the posters put up in all the IT companies so that more people get to know about the ion. If you can help us with this, please do drop us a line, we’d be glad to hear from you. If you want to grab the posters yourself, you can get the digital version and set it as your wallpaper and help us spread the word about ion

If you are curious about how the ion was born and how it was transformed into a real product that we are holding in our hand today, you can read about the interesting history of the ion.

Last but not the least, if you have any sorts of questions, doubts, queries or feedback, please do write to us.

^* Due to various circumstances, ion will not be available in stores, it will only be available online!

Jeff Han’s “touch-driven computer screen” is so cool. That would make things so much easier to organize my photos, heh. But I wonder how ergonomic it would be since we will have to be looking down at the screen all the time and it would not be at the eye level.

I can imagine how editing of home movies would be so much easier with this, and of course more interesting games. It would also mean no keyboard and no mouse.

Then Apple brings some design fu into this… and lo, the iPhone. The interesting thing is that they have 200+ patents on it, will anybody else be able to do a multi-touch interface? Relatedly, I wonder how Steve Jobs can argue that DRM is bad while patents are okay…

Anybody interested in buying my PowerBook?

The only reason to sell it is because I hardly use it any more, even though it’s in perfect working condition.

For those interested, I might throw in my copy of iWork for free (which costs a separate $79).

To recap on the features:

It is a 12″ Powerbook with Mac OS X 10.4.8 Tiger. It has a 1.5 GHz RISC processor (apparently, equivalent to a 3GHz CISC processor such as Intel/AMD ones) with 512 MB DDR RAM, 60 GB hard disk, Combo drive which can read DVDs and write CDs, a GeForce video card with 64 MB dedicated video RAM, Airport Extreme for wireless networking, Bluetooth built-in, very clear speakers, keyboard with big keys, and much more.

Update : Sold!

A happy moment for me - my old jeans fit me again.

The 5 km jogs (5 days a week) have finally paid off. I have now progressed to 8 km (almost every) day - 1 km walk + 5 km jog + 2 km walk.

It’s almost funny how, 6 months ago, I used to struggle for just 1 km.

My only company during jogging is my iPod. Sometimes I listen to podcasts (such as Inside the Net). Sometimes I listen to music. There’s really nothing like listening to Yeh Hai Meri Kahani (K Rap Mix) and jogging at night under the lights in the track field.

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“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.” — Lance Armstrong

Just discovered a new shortcut for the Dictionary in Mac OS X Tiger - Press Cmd-Ctrl-D and voila, it shows the meanings of the selected word in my browser!

P.S. In case you are wondering, I’m reading the RSS feed for Sepia Mutiny.

Update: The shortcut works everywhere, not just the browser.

Update: Premshree has written a Greasemonkey script that does the same for you on Firefox, although I don’t know if it’s okay by OneLook’s TOS since it does site-scraping.

Note: Pictures, courtesy of the community at Flickr. All rights reserved by the respective owners.

Introduction

I’ve been using Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on my Apple PowerBook since nearly a month now….. I can’t help but think “this is how computers should be”.

I’m trying to understand and jot down my thoughts on why it has made me more productive and why it is such a pleasure to use.

Disclaimer

Note that whatever I am writing here is from the point of view of a Linux user and a non-geeky one at that too. I like using Linux because it gives me many advantages and features that are suited to me but I don’t compile kernels or ./configure every application that I want to install. I’m not an advanced user by any means (see my blog’s tag line for more information).

What is Mac OS X ?

For the uninitiated, what is Mac OS X? Well, Mac OS X is the operating system (similar to Windows) that runs (only) on Apple Macintosh computers.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is claimed to be the “most advanced operating system in the world”. Hmm, not quite. Why? Because it is more like a Linux distribution rather than a core operating system like Windows. Distributions contain lots of applications bundled so that you have almost everything you need when installing a distribution. On the other hand, when you install an operating system (in the true definition of the term), you need to install all your required applications separately such as photo software, bluetooth software, calendar, addressbook and email applications, office suites, DVD player software and so on. Tiger has most of this stuff as part of the system, these applications are not core of the operating system but are certainly central to getting your work done.

The lines are certainly blurring about where an operating system starts and the applications begin. For example, Microsoft Longhorn (the next generation of Microsoft Windows) is adding RSS capabilities to the core system which also means Internet Explorer (following the example set by Firefox and Safari browsers).

User Experience

First and foremost, every user expects the computer to be simple and usable. Needless to say, Mac OS X is miles ahead of the competition here. Simplicity just oozes out of the system. I find that aspect more appealing than any other “feature”.

For example, there is no Start menu and there is no taskbar. To run applications, open the Finder application (which is sort of like Windows Explorer), click on Applications folder and then double-click the application you want to run. Browsing your hard disk follows the exact same paradigm. Notice, that applications are treated just like files and are no different.

Under the hood, applications are just folders with .app extension - they show up as “applications” in the GUI. It can’t get more simpler than that and retains the Unix tradition of ‘treat everything like a file’.

Without a taskbar, how do you see what all you’re running? Press F9 and it shows you all the windows that you are running, and you can select the one you want to look at. There are keyboard shortcuts to cycle through applications as well as cycle through windows of the current application.

That reminds me that Mac OS X makes a distinction between application and windows of the application. For example, if I can start the Safari browser and close the window that opens up, the Safari application is still running. I can press Command-N to open a new window and continue. To completely quit Safari, you have to press Command-Q. This paradigm is consistently followed by all software. One of the advantages of this approach is that opening new windows are a snap compared to opening the full application every time. Also, you can have applications running even without a window open, such as the iTunes music player.

The Help functionality has radically improved over the previous Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther” where it used to take 6-7 minutes to just open! In Tiger, it opens instantly and the find functionality makes it really usable. I know that most developers sneer on the mention of documentation, but I feel a good to-the-point documentation is very important and has certainly solved many issues for me as a user.

The Devil is in the details

There are many applications that come with the Mac OS X such as the iCal calendar application (which I particularly like), QuickTime audio/video software, iTunes music player, Mail application, iPhoto photo software, Garage Band professional music-making software, iMovie HD for making home movies, etc.

What I like in most of them is the level of attention to detail. Mail.app is a good example. Mail has threads like every other modern email client, but what made it useful for me is the ability to move threads (which I was never able to do in Thunderbird). Similarly, the preferences section is to-the-point and makes it very easy to add new accounts, etc. without confusing the user.

Another thing I really really liked was the Activity Viewer. Press Command-0 (command-zero), and it pops up a window which shows you exactly what Mail is doing. You can even cancel operations in this Activity Viewer.

Keyboard shortcuts are a different story, though - Command-Shift-D for sending email is not very convenient.

Built on Open Source - great for developers

Remember that I mentioned that Mac OS X retains Unix traditions? That’s because it is based on BSD Unix. The core of Mac OS X is open source and is called Darwin. Mac OS X builds on top of Darwin and adds many features like the GUI and many other technologies.

This is undoubtedly appealing to many people like me, and is certainly one of the reasons that lot of researchers and students are switching to Mac OS X. As Paul Graham says:

If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they’re doing, you’ll be doing.

Mac OS X has many open source software that comes as part of the system including programming languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby. In fact, Mac OS X makes a big list of open source software part of the system including SQLite and wxWidgets and even Apache!

If you think Apple only takes from open source and does not give, you are mistaken. For example, Apple has something called kdrive that makes rendering of the screen very fast (which is why it is called an accelerator). This has been provided as open source and now Trolltech is porting kdrive to X.org to replace the existing outdated accelerator architecture which will make composition managers like xcompmgr really fast and able to do some of the ‘display tricks’ Mac OS X has been doing for awhile.

Apple has also recently made WebKit a fully open source community-involved project. WebKit is based on the open source KHTML and other KDE-based technologies. WebKit is the core of the Safari browser and other technologies that are part of Mac OS X. What’s remarkable is that Apple has managed to make it platform-independent and enabling Nokia to port it to their Series 60 mobile phones!

MS-land is nearby

If you really need MS-office, there’s the official Microsoft Office on Mac.

I have Windows Media Player 9 for Mac installed so that I can see all those great Channel 9 videos.

Integration - great for everyone

Spotlight

What makes Mac OS X wonderful is the integration of all the parts. The best example is Spotlight - the search engine for your desktop. Spotlight, by itself, was not impressive for me (you already have Google’s and Yahoo!’s version of it for Windows, and you have Beagle for Linux). What did impress me was the integration into the system. For example, I was browsing my Music directory in Finder and I wanted to look for that old song that I had made a few years ago. I just searched for my name in the search tab and voila, Finder/Spotlight fetched it for me in a couple of seconds!

The next thing I discovered about Spotlight was that there are hooks built in to Mac OS X such that every time you close a file after editing it, Spotlight comes into action instantly and indexes it. As a result, I was able to search in Spotlight for the email that dropped in my inbox a mere second ago.

Spotlight also provides a command line client called mdfind which you can use to search for files in shell scripts.

iPhoto and Mail

Another good example is iPhoto and Mail. In iPhoto, I can select a few photos, and click on Share -> Email, it automatically creates a new mail with the resized photos (to save bandwidth; and it is configurable) and all I have to do is enter the email address and click on Send. I haven’t found a similarly easy tool on Linux or Windows.

Not impressive? Well, Share -> Burn Disc writes to a CD in a couple of clicks.

The “Just Works” factor

• Bluetooth is built-in to the system. Just click on the icon in the top bar and and click on ‘Set up Bluetooth device’ and voila! You can start transferring files from/to your bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. It works with printers, mice, etc. in the same manner.

• Plug in your digital camera into the USB port - iPhoto starts up, click on ‘Import’ and you have the photos on your computer.

• Plug in your iPod and iTunes opens up the same way. This one works seamlessly because Mac OS X, iPod and iTunes are all from Apple.

• Software management is easy as well. The Windows-style installers are used, otherwise it is a simple unzip, double-click and run style of working. For OSS lovers, Fink allows you to apt-get install anything for Mac OS X. If you ever want to get rid of Fink, just do rm -rf /sw and you have a clean system again. Now, that is really cool. (Note that you have to install Fink separately)

• If you download a zip file using Safari, it automatically unzips the archive for you and puts it in a folder.

• PDFs are part of the system just like text files. The Preview software makes it a joy to read PDFs. Also, the Quartz rendering engine is based on PDF technology, so the rendering is lightning fast. In the print dialog of any application, you can choose to create a PDF.

Dashboard and the Dictionary

The dictionary feature is usually ignored by most people when they talk about Tiger, but it is one of those small but incredibly useful things for me, especially when combined with Dashboard. Dashboard is like a separate desktop that runs whenever you open it. You have “widgets” running in Dashboard that are like mini-applications. If I just move the mouse to the lower right corner (as per my settings), Dashboard opens up and I click on the dictionary widget and start reading meanings of some words I came across while reading. Similarly, I use the calculator and the Wikipedia widget in the Dashboard.

The flip side

Not everything is hunky-dory though. For example, in the print menu, if I click on Mail PDF, it used to give me an ‘unknown error’. It was fixed when I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.1, though. There are a few glitches here and there but I haven’t hit a roadblock yet.

Help

The Apple user forums have been very helpful to me. There are tons of sites out there with useful info including MacZealots and MacDevCenter.

Concluding remarks

There is a much more to explore but I’ll stop here for now. The combination of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and PowerBook has been an incredible experience for me, I have truly begun to appreciate the value of good design and attention to detail.

It also has made me believe that computers can work as you would expect them to, and it doesn’t have to be hard to get your work done.

Relatedly, I’m looking forward to a Leopard vs Longhorn vs Linux comparison next year.

Further reading material

• ArsTechnica review of Tiger
• Apple’s introduction to Tiger for developers
• Tiger details collected by John Gruber
• MacZealot’s article on Tiger for Developers
• MacZealot’s article on what’s different about Tiger
• Microsoft Mactopia

Update : Added MS-land section