Mac OS X 10.7 Lion -- developer preview announced

[mhschmieder]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/?sr=hotnews.rss

Pretty exciting stuff. I've only just barely skimmed it, as I'm working from home today and am more diligent than when at the office. But this affects my work, so I will look at it a bit later today.

[mhschmieder]

Actually, I think the "Resume" feature will be worth the price of admission alone.

It takes me forever and a day to start a session, as I have so many cross-reference documents to open, and they take a while to locate and open.

One of my virulently anti-Mac co-workers (who resents having to support the platform) just complained that this release is "all fluff" because it once again fails to give him a way to turn off mouse acceleration.

[Prime Mover]

Wait... what? Mouse acceleration? I use Windows 7 at work and a OS X at home and I've never noticed any difference in mouse movement.

[mhschmieder]

It's just an excuse. This particular person has made a career out of making excuses.

I see someone started another thread about Lion from a different perspective; that of outmoded hardware. I guess we can let that be the "negative" thread and maybe make this the "positive" thread about exciting new features in Lion.

[James Steele]

Seems it's okay to lament that Core Duo Intel Macs are getting left behind. I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and I'm out in the cold as far as Lion goes. Oh well... $2,000 here, $2,000 there... pretty soon it adds up to real money!

[mhschmieder]

Oh, no complaints about the complaints, which are completely justified in this case!

I just figure that though it worked out this way accidentally, it's probably best to keep the complaints and the praise in separate threads, so that they don't battle each other out for supremacy.

It's funny how Microsoft takes the attitude of being backward compatible with the 1950's, thus hindering any progress at all; whilst Apple takes the opposite approach and seems to be squeezing the window of usability with each new technological advance.

Still, as long as people on "older" machines don't get orphaned with software updates from their main vendors, I look forward to Lion's embrace of new workflow features.

[FutureLegends]

Seems it's okay to lament that Core Duo Intel Macs are getting left behind. I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and I'm out in the cold as far as Lion goes. Oh well... $2,000 here, $2,000 there... pretty soon it adds up to real money!

Are you sure about that? Seems like the processors in these (I have one too) are far more powerful that the Core Duo's... Hmm... If so, damn, I want a new one too
Or is it maybe a 64bit thing? Requires the computer to be able to start in 64 bits? Gah.

[mhschmieder]

Is there any historical perspective on how the MUCH earlier 16-bit to 32-bit transition played out?

I personally came into computing at the time of the 8-bit to 16-bit transition, and it was not pretty, as a developer...

[SixStringGeek]

I have to agree - it looks pretty fluffy. Resume just formalizes a strategy for serializing UI state and adds hooks for the application to help it remember where it was. The OS is getting more supervisory like the ios - it will kill idle applications if the applications agree that they're not really busy. This is good for people like my mom who open dozens of apps and only close windows - she has no concept of "quit". Full screen apps are a carryover from ios (and HyperCard I guess). A couple new UI goodies (popovers - UI in a cartoon balloon). Autosaving and version history is awesome since I do a save as... in DP every time I save so I have history.

Multi-touch is coming from the ipad/iphone and some multi-user goodies I'll probably seldom use round it out. And then there's AVFoundation - a unified api for accessing all media on the device. First made its appearance in ios 4. Probably this is the return of QuickTime authoring.

Nothing in there I'm dying to get.

[mhschmieder]

Maybe not for DP users, but my own clients are DYING for some of these features and in particular have wondered why I can't give them a full-screen app.

[SixStringGeek]

Maybe not for DP users, but my own clients are DYING for some of these features and in particular have wondered why I can't give them a full-screen app.

App for what? Do you write Mac apps? There's nothing preventing a developer from doing a full screen app. Here's how it is done (since 2001 BTW).

But Apple used to frown on this in general. Now they've changed their tune. Silly Apple.

[mhschmieder]

I don't write Apple apps; I write cross-platform apps, with minimal platform-specific tweaking, that run on Macs. Apple kindly provided some stubs a couple of years ago that allowed for writing Mac-specific behaviour that no-ops on other platforms so that the same code base can be used. But of course they want everyone to write in ObjectiveC or Ruby, so anything they do at the OS-level that becomes a feature of just using the system, helps developers and end users alike.

[SixStringGeek]

I write cross-platform apps, with minimal platform-specific tweaking, that run on Macs.

Curious - what do you use for this? My day job requires I write apps that work on iPhones and droids and now I find myself writing "apps" that run in the webkit browser (with some extensions in the form of custom scheme handlers) and talk json over http to servers if necessary. I find it a bit odd that after 20 years in the biz I'm right back were I started writing client/server apps - only in web friendly technologies.

[mhschmieder]

Well, this thread, after all, is about the developer preview, and we are developers discussing developer issues, so this is all pertinent to the topic.

My own client/server app went through many technologies and approaches -- including before my tenure at the company -- before we settled upon client-side Java (and later Java servlets as well, but still C/C++ for core server-side computational stuff), back in 2001.

We also were cloud-based at various points in times, but I am very anti-browser when it comes to sophisticated apps as it limits workflow, as browsers are resource hogs like no other apps, and makes multi-tasking, cross-referencing, and inter-app integration way more tedious and counter-intuitive. Every technology has its place, of course!

I may have to conform to later products that got absorbed through acquisition, by switching at least partially to Nokia's Qt (formerly from Trolltech in Norway), which also insulates the OS level specifics from the developer, but I like the direction Java is going in under the new stewardship of Oracle so am starting to argue for preserving the Java technology choice as it also is a bit easier to tailor to platform look-and-feel vs. making everything look like Windows on all platforms.

The problem is that Java is not available on iOS, from what I understand. The people I know in Silly-con Valley who write phone apps are going crazy having to write distinct code bases for each platform, with almost no code-sharing between them, and with iOS being the hardest to write for.

I'm wondering if some of this will change as Apple seems to now be integrating the iOS and OS X platforms. Apple's official policy for a couple of years has been ObjectiveC for primary language coding and Ruby for scripting.

The new wrinkle is that Apple has dropped support for Java. I am hoping this will turn out to be a good thing, as I have always had to lag one release in functionality due to the slow adoption of each release on Mac OS X. I think Apache or another open source community may take it on, as OS X is Unix-based and there's already some rumbling that existing ports for Linux and other flavours of Unix may simply add the OS X support for Java as well. I doubt Oracle will take it on themselves. But I am optimistic that Java will revive on the Mac soon (it still works; there just aren't any more planned updates), and will be more consistent with releases for other platforms.

The funny part is that Java on the Mac is way better than on Windows, in almost every respect. Qt's GUI toolkit is better designed than AWT/Swing, and more spartan than IBM's SWT/JFace/RCP, but I can't figure out why Qt fonts seem so fuzzy when Java has such sharp anti-aliased fonts on the Mac (though it is a preference for Java).

For examples of Qt in use, look at East/West PLAY, Vienna Instruments PRO (but not vanilla Vienna Instruments), all of the voice editors for Yamaha's MOTIF XS and XF line, and I think maybe other analog synth voice editors from Sound Tower as well. Maybe also Cubase. To me, they are all a bit fuzzy and Windows-like, but as I mentioned earlier, I'm not yet doing Qt development at my company so I'm not sure if it's simply a matter of anti-aliased fonts having been turned off.

I have worked some with Apple's developer tools, and much prefer them to what is available on Windows. They really thought things out. I used Code Warrior years ago, on all platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, etc.) before Metrowerks was absorbed by Motorola and lost interest in anything other than embedded systems. Apple's Cocoa developer's kit has an excellent and highly adaptive workflow. Even Eclipse IDE is better on the Mac than on Windows, as you get more complete access to source code for dependencies and core language support.

So, I can say that I like ObjectiveC quite a bit, but it is not an option for me, as I am a sole programmer with only occasional additional resources, and cannot afford the development time of doing separate versions of apps for different platforms. I'm not quite sure why this is a Mac-only language, as so many single-system languages get ported by some resourceful third-party at some point. But C# is also an excellent language -- arguably an improvement upon both C++ and Java -- that is off the table for consideration due to being Windows-only. I think in that case it is due to being layered atop some OS-level dependencies such as .nET. Maybe something similar applies to ObjectiveC.

Am I right that most iOS apps are written in ObjectiveC, or is the iOS developer toolkit based on yet another set of tools and languages? And if so, does this have implications for OS X Lion when it comes out, being that apps might start porting from iOS to OS X and form a subset of a user's full desktop Mac experience, with enough shared commonality with their mobile solution that it becomes almost a parallel to Windows vs. Windows Embedded in terms of expectation of one being more or less a limited subset of the full system?

BTW, although it seems like I've provided a lot of details about my day job, none of this aspect is proprietary and is freely discussed on our website. Well, except for maybe strategic stuff, which is up in the air anyway. Our end users seem to like Qt, so I may be the odd one out in having mixed feelings about its better toolkit and better vector graphics support but in my view illegible fonts .

[SixStringGeek]

we settled upon client-side Java (and later Java servlets as well, but still C/C++ for core server-side computational stuff), back in 2001.

I'm definitely no fan of Java. The Cocoa integration never worked all that well and I found the usually portable toolkits disappointing.

I am very anti-browser when it comes to sophisticated apps as it limits workflow, as browsers are resource hogs like no other apps, and makes multi-tasking, cross-referencing, and inter-app integration

I've gone full circle on this. WebKit on ios is quite lean and html is now insanely powerful. You can now ape the native widgets of most anything in the browser much better than any Java toolkit ever did. For instance http://iphone.hohli.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and it is easier to create strange new interfaces in html5 than it is to code up new native widgets. OTOH, you don't get a nice model layer like with conventional toolkits. Since WebKit is also the browser on Droid - I've found I can write a small program that just presents a webkit ui and register custom url scheme handlers to provide access to the device's resources - effectively embedding a local server. I did this with sqlite to get a local database and now I can code up a CRUD app in html and a little javascript in no time at all. Probably I would not use this approach so much on desktops - but for iPhone/iPad and Droid this lets me write on simple little shell program once and then deploy the same "application" on each without tweaking.

The problem is that Java is not available on iOS, from what I understand. The people I know in Silly-con Valley who write phone apps are going crazy having to write distinct code bases for each platform, with almost no code-sharing between them, and with iOS being the hardest to write for.

I find ios easiest to work with. The Droid give me hives - but I'm allergic to Java and kind of a Mac head I guess. An iPhone is basically a little Mac.

I'm wondering if some of this will change as Apple seems to now be integrating the iOS and OS X platforms. Apple's official policy for a couple of years has been ObjectiveC for primary language coding and Ruby for scripting.

The Apple developer community does not like Java in general and is very unlikely to pour resources into adding it. If you consider browsers to be heavy resources users, the typical Java runtime is a whole other level of pork. Droid skirts the issue by compiling their java to a custom runtime (Dalvik VM).

The new wrinkle is that Apple has dropped support for Java. I am hoping this will turn out to be a good thing, as I have always had to lag one release in functionality due to the slow adoption of each release on Mac OS X.

I kind of view this as a good thing for Apple because the Java runtime model and the Objective C model are fundamentally at odds. Furthermore, the advancements in Objective C with blocks and GC make it even worse. Anything that is likely to work is only likely to work by providing its own widget set and interacting with the OS runtime at the lowest level for graphics context sharing. This is why Qt works (and isn't a bad choice at all if you can deal with C++).

But I am optimistic that Java will revive on the Mac soon (it still works; there just aren't any more planned updates), and will be more consistent with releases for other platforms.

Unless some company steps up to provide it, I don't see it happening. Java isn't "cool" enough for the open source community to pick it up.

I can't figure out why Qt fonts seem so fuzzy when Java has such sharp anti-aliased fonts on the Mac (though it is a preference for Java).

Apple did the Java UI layer and it sits atop Apple's Quartz/ATSUI tech. Qt makes use of its own more portable (and sadly more ugly) graphics and font rendering - FreeType I think.

I have worked some with Apple's developer tools, and much prefer them to what is available on Windows

.

I pretty much live in XCode - even for web stuff it has the "organizer" and it works pretty well.

So, I can say that I like ObjectiveC quite a bit, but it is not an option for me, as I am a sole programmer with only occasional additional resources, and cannot afford the development time of doing separate versions of apps for different platforms. I'm not quite sure why this is a Mac-only language, as so many single-system languages get ported by some resourceful third-party at some point.

There have been attempts. GNUStep kind of works. But the magic isn't in the language - it is in the libraries and Apple innovates faster than the open source people can keep up.

But C# is also an excellent language -- arguably an improvement upon both C++ and Java -- that is off the table for consideration due to being Windows-only. I think in that case it is due to being layered atop some OS-level dependencies such as .nET.

Did you check out mono? I'd guess this has better longevity than Java on OS X.

Am I right that most iOS apps are written in ObjectiveC, or is the iOS developer toolkit based on yet another set of tools and languages?

There are a couple different strategies - either develop to the Cocoa api on iPhone (ObjectiveC) or build a little shell program that just brings up WebKit full screen and design your app as a bunch of html/javascript. I've recently been doing more and more of the latter.

BTW, although it seems like I've provided a lot of details about my day job,

I still have no clue what kind of apps you build or even what industry you serve.

Lately I'm doing enforcement tools for parking attendants on the iPhone - cash register and enforcement (writing parking tickets, looking up license plates or permit numbers) and I'm finding I can do those entirely in HTML/Javascript with some native components callable via javascript. The story on how to best do cross platform stuff changes often with the application requirements.