Hasbro reinvents Lazer Tag for the smartphone generation, lets you live out your Doom-fueled fantasies originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Hasbro reinvents Lazer Tag for the smartphone generation, lets you live out your Doom-fueled fantasies
Hasbro reinvents Lazer Tag for the smartphone generation, lets you live out your Doom-fueled fantasies: Xappr and appBlaster are fine weaponizers for your smartphone, provided you don't care to share your violent tendencies with your friends. Thankfully, Hasbro is bridging the gap between new-school AR shooter and that teenage classic -- laser tag. The NERF Lazer Tag system is getting an update for 2012 that lets you pair your blaster with an iPhone or iPod touch. The top of the plastic guns now sport a slot for your iDevice which, when loaded with the Lazer Tag app, provides you with an augmented HUD view. While you can play against purely virtual opponents, the real fun is in using to track your battles with fleshy foes. The app will display your gear and power level, and update your progress on a global Lazer Tag leaderboard. As you play, new attacks and gear will be unlocked for you to enhance your gaming experience. The app will even actually show your blasts' trajectory, letting you see exactly where you shot your former friend. The 2012 edition of Lazer Tag will hit shelves on August 1st with individual blasters costing $40 and sets of two $70. Check out the PR and a screen shot of the app after the break.
★ Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
★ Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’:
What is Apple at heart: a software company, or a hardware company?
This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither. Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience.
But, as a thought experiment, which is more important to you? What phone would you rather carry? An iPhone 4S modified to run Android or Windows Phone 7? Or a top-of-the-line HTC, Samsung, or Nokia handset running iOS 5?
What computer would you rather use? A MacBook running Windows 7, or, say, a Lenovo ThinkPad running Mac OS X 10.7?
For me, the answers are easy. It’s the software that matters most to me. I’d pick a Nokia Lumia running iOS 5 over an iPhone 4S running any other OS, and I’d pick the ThinkPad running Mac OS X over a Mac running Windows. No hesitation.
What do you think Steve Jobs would have chosen, facing the same choices?
Truth is he probably would have smashed any of such hypothetical devices against the nearest wall in a fit of rage, but, if forced to choose, I believe Jobs would have gone with the software.1 The hardware and the software are both important; Jobs clearly cared deeply about both. But I think Jobs ultimately thought software was more important. That was his whole explanation for the one-button design of the iPhone, on stage at Macworld Expo in January 2007, talking about the inherent problems with the existing smartphones then on the market. Jobs said:
They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them
or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons that
are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well,
every application wants a slightly different user interface, a
slightly optimized set of buttons, just for it. And what happens
if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can’t run
around and add a button to these things. They’re already shipped.So what do you do? It doesn’t work because the buttons and the
controls can’t change. They can’t change for each application, and
they can’t change down the road if you think of another great idea
you want to add to this product.Well, how do you solve this?
Hmm. It turns out, we have solved it! We solved it in computers 20
years ago. We solved it with a bit-mapped screen that could
display anything we want. Put any user interface up. And a
pointing device. We solved it with the mouse. Right? We solved
this problem. So how are we going take this to a mobile device?What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a
giant screen.
A few minutes later, Jobs said:
Now, you know, one of the pioneers of our industry, Alan Kay, has
had a lot of great quotes throughout the years. And I ran across
one of them recently that explains how we look at this. Explains
why we go about doing things the way we do, because we love
software.And here’s the quote: “People who are really serious about
software should make their own hardware.”You know, Alan said this 30 years ago, and this is how we feel
about it.
This design — getting rid of all those buttons and just making a giant screen — is today not only the ubiquitous standard for smartphones industry-wide, but also exactly describes another device you may have heard of, called the iPad.
Design Is How It Works
There is much that is wrong with Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, but its treatment of software is the most profound of the book’s flaws. Isaacson doesn’t merely neglect or underemphasize Jobs’s passion for software and design, but he flat-out paints the opposite picture.
Isaacson makes it seem as though Jobs was almost solely interested in hardware, and even there, only in what the hardware looked like. Superficial aesthetics.
In Chapter 26, “Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive”, Isaacson writes (p. 344 in the hardcover print edition):
“Before Steve came back, engineers would say ‘Here are the guts’
— processor, hard drive — and then it would go to the designers
to put it in a box,” said Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller.
“When you do it that way, you come up with awful products.” But
when Jobs returned and forged his bond with Ive, the balance was
again tilted toward the designers. “Steve kept impressing on us
that the design was integral to what would make us great,” said
Schiller. “Design once again dictated the engineering, not just
vice versa.”On occasion this could backfire, such as when Jobs and Ive
insisted on using a solid piece of brushed aluminum for the edge
of the iPhone 4 even when the engineers worried that it would
compromise the antenna. But usually the distinctiveness of its
designs — for the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad —
would set Apple apart and lead to its triumphs in the years after
Jobs returned.
Isaacson clearly believes that design is merely how a product looks and feels, and that “engineering” is how it actually works.
Jobs, in an interview with Rob Walker for his terrific 2003 New York Times Magazine profile on the creation of the iPod, said:
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks
like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are
handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we
think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like.
Design is how it works.”
That quote is absent from Isaacson’s book, despite the book’s frequent use of existing source material. Instead, Isaacson includes an older quote:
That was the fundamental principle Jobs and Ive shared. Design was
not just about what a product looked like on the surface. It had
to reflect the product’s essence. “In most people’s vocabularies,
design means veneer,” Jobs told Fortune shortly after retaking the
reins at Apple. “But to me, nothing could be further from the
meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made
creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer
layers.”
I think Jobs meant what he said to Fortune, and it’s an attempt to communicate the same core truth. But “Design is how it works” is a much better statement of Apple’s philosophy. Talk of a “product’s essence” (Isaacson’s words) or “the fundamental soul of a man-made creation” (Jobs’s) only serves to separate, conceptually, the art of design from the cold hard science of engineering. With just five words, “Design is how it works” expresses succinctly and accurately that engineering should and can be part of the art of design.
Design and engineering are, indeed, often in opposition — engineering constraints affect design; design goals affect engineering tradeoffs. But they are not separate endeavors. The philosophical question is which one is a subset of the other. What Schiller is telling Isaacson is that prior to Jobs’s return to Apple, design was what happened at the end of the engineering process. Post-Jobs, engineering became a component of the design process. This shift made all the difference in the world.
Isaacson does not understand this, and his telling of the Antennagate saga illustrates this perfectly. Again, the aforequoted bit from Chapter 26:
On occasion this could backfire, such as when Jobs and Ive
insisted on using a solid piece of brushed aluminum for the edge
of the iPhone 4 even when the engineers worried that it would
compromise the antenna.
The edge of the iPhone 4 (and now 4S) is the antenna.2 And it’s not made of brushed aluminum — it’s bead-blasted stainless steel.3 The engineering concern was therefore not that the steel edge would compromise the antennas, but rather that external antennas would compromise reception. The trade-off was that moving the antennas to the outside left more room on the inside — room for a bigger battery and other components, and allowed for the device to be thinner. Isaacson paints Jobs and Ive as being concerned only with how it looked and felt, with engineers left to worry about how it worked. The truth is that the design was how it worked.
Isaacson returns to this story in Chapter 39, in a section titled “Antennagate: Design vs. Engineering” (which section title again positions engineering as being separate from design, rather than part of design):
In many consumer product companies, there’s tension between the
designers, who want to make a product look beautiful, and the
engineers, who need to make sure it fulfills its functional
requirements. At Apple, where Jobs pushed both design and
engineering to the edge, that tension was even greater.
No passage in the book better illustrates Isaacson’s disregard for Steve Jobs’s philosophy of what “design” means.
Serious About Software
Isaacson, it seems clear, mistrusted Jobs. That’s good. But rather than using that mistrust to push back, to ask insightful questions, he instead simply turned to others. Regarding the early days of Apple and the original Mac, Isaacson turned to Andy Hertzfeld. The book does not suffer for this, because Hertzfeld is both honest and blessed with a seemingly extraordinary memory. But this history has been ably documented before — particularly well, no surprise, by Hertzfeld himself, with his Folklore website and the outstanding book compiled from that website, Revolution in the Valley.
Far less documented are the subsequent stages of Jobs’s career: the NeXT years and his return to Apple. As a counterpart to Jobs for those years, Isaacson repeatedly turned to Bill Gates.
Isaacson refers many times throughout the book to Jobs’s famed “reality distortion field”. A search for the term in the iBooks edition returns 30 results, including the title of Chapter 11. In that chapter, Isaacson writes:
To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a
clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was in fact a
more complex form of dissembling. He would assert something — be
it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an
idea at a meeting — without even considering the truth.
I.e., Jobs had the ability to make people believe whatever he said, whether it was true or not. But not everyone:
But Gates was one person who was resistant to Jobs’s reality
distortion field, and as a result he decided not to create
software tailored for the NeXT platform.
I think Isaacson viewed Jobs’s RDF as something very much akin to the Jedi mind trick — something that worked against most people, but not those with strong minds. That might even be true. But I think Isaacson was so concerned with himself being “resistant” that he chose to treat much of what Jobs told him as false.
Again, skepticism is good. But rather than do the research to verify Jobs’s version of events, to learn the facts so as to be able to dispute Jobs himself, he simply turned to sources he did trust, like Hertzfeld and Gates. But Gates is an odd choice to trust, because he clearly has a conflict of interest. His company competed against Jobs’s, and at a personal level, he is Jobs’s only rival in terms of historical stature in the industry.
What happens then, repeatedly, is that Jobs tells Isaacson something that is true, but Isaacson doesn’t believe it, and he then quotes someone else, like Bill Gates, saying something that is false to refute it, and Isaacson lets that remark stand as fact.
One example stands above all others. Chapter 23, “The Second Coming”, tells the tale of Apple’s 1996 acquisition of NeXT and Jobs’s return. For context, then-CEO Gil Amelio had decided that Apple needed to go outside the company for a successor to the classic Mac OS. The options: acquiring Be or NeXT, or licensing Sun’s Solaris or Microsoft’s Windows NT. (Licensing Windows NT was, according to Isaacson, what Amelio favored early on — which goes to show just how profoundly fucked Apple was at the time.) On page 302, Isaacson writes:
After informing Gassée that Apple was buying NeXT, Amelio had what
turned out to be an even more uncomfortable task: telling Bill
Gates. “He went into orbit,” Amelio recalled. Gates found it
ridiculous, but perhaps not surprising, that Jobs had pulled off
this coup. “Do you really think Steve Jobs has anything there?”
Gates asked Amelio. “I know this technology, it’s nothing but
warmed-over UNIX, and you’ll never be able to make it work on your
machines.” Gates, like Jobs, had a way of working himself up, and
he did so now: “Don’t you understand that Steve doesn’t know
anything about technology? He’s just a super salesman. I can’t
believe you’re making such a stupid decision. … He doesn’t know
anything about engineering, and 99% of what he says and thinks is
wrong. What the hell are you buying that garbage for?”
The only thing interesting about this quote is that Gates was so utterly, astoundingly, completely wrong. But Isaacson never points that out.
In Gates’s defense, the above anti-NeXT invective is attributed to him second-hand. Isaacson drew it from Gil Amelio’s On the Firing Line. But what Gates did say to Isaacson, in the present day, paints an even less accurate picture. The next paragraph in the book reads:
Years later, when I raised it with him, Gates did not recall being
that upset. The purchase of NeXT, he argued, did not really give
Apple a new operating system. “Amelio paid a lot for NeXT, and
let’s be frank, the NeXT OS was never really used.” Instead the
purchase ended up bringing in Avie Tevanian, who could help the
existing Apple operating system evolve so that it eventually
incorporated the kernel of the NeXT technology. Gates knew that
the deal was destined to bring Jobs back to power. “But that was a
twist of fate,” he said. “What they ended up buying was a guy who
most people would not have predicted would be a great CEO, because
he didn’t have much experience at it, but he was a brilliant guy
with great design taste and great engineering taste. He suppressed
his craziness enough to get himself appointed interim CEO.”
So ends this section of the chapter, with no additional commentary from Isaacson or any other sources. The above is simply left to stand as a description. A reader with no knowledge, who trusts Isaacson, would be left to believe that the above is an accurate description of Apple’s NeXT acquisition.
It is, in fact, completely and utterly wrong. NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”. Apple did get NeXT’s OS to run on Mac hardware. Mac OS X 10.0 was a hybrid of Mac and NeXT technology, but it was clearly the NeXT system with Mac technologies integrated, not the other way around. iOS — the system that powers both the iPhone and iPad — is a direct descendent of NeXTStep. Even the original iPod, which wasn’t based on NeXT technology, used the column-view concept for hierarchical navigation that NeXT pioneered.
Gates makes it sound as though Apple’s NeXT acquisition was effectively only a talent acquisition. It was in fact both a talent and technology acquisition, and what was then NeXT technology now serves as the basis for both Mac OS X and iOS.
It’s almost impossible to overstate just how wrong Bill Gates is here, but Isaacson presents Gates’s side as the truth. This is no small thing for Steve Jobs’s biographer to get wrong. Jobs’s career was long, rich, and varied, but if you wanted to reduce his entire life’s work to a nutshell, it would be exactly what Isaacson, channeling Gates, so completely misunderstood: the software system created by NeXT, which was then continuously expanded upon and refined by Apple.
NeXT’s software was what brought Jobs back to Apple. It saved the Mac platform, then grew the Mac platform. It serves today as the foundation of the iPhone and iPad. NeXT did struggle in the market, but their software was a long bet that ultimately paid off. Arguably it took 20 years for it to thrive, but Steve Jobs seemingly never lost faith or confidence in it.
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about something; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
After reading about Jobs, it’s tempting to succumb to a Jobsian-style binary view of the world. Total shit, or the greatest thing ever; five stars, or zero stars. You can get fired up that way, and see my criticism here as condemning Isaacson’s book as total shit, zero stars. That would be a mistake. Steve Jobs is not literature, but it is a good book, but alas with several holes and egregious errors.
Isaacson includes that Alan Kay quote about serious software people making their own hardware, but doesn’t seem to heed it, or to recognize that it perfectly describes Steve Jobs’s career and explains the phenomenal success of Apple’s products.
Note that my complaints here are not about Isaacson being insufficiently deferential. That the book is not a hagiography is to its credit. The personal stuff — documentation of Jobs’s cruelty (and his talent for cruelty), his tantrums, his tendency to claim for himself the ideas of others — that’s not problematic. Isaacson handles that well, and what he reports in that regard jibes with everything we know about the man. My complaints are about outright technical inaccuracies, and getting the man’s work wrong. The design process, the resulting products, the centrality of software — Isaacson simply misses the boat.
You could learn more about Steve Jobs’s work by reading Rob Walker’s 2003 New York Times Magazine piece than by reading Isaacson’s book, but even then we’re left wanting for the stories behind any of Apple’s products after the iPod. Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, youth, eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
Isaacson gives us the story of an asshole. But the world is full of assholes. What we need is the story of the one man who spearheaded so many remarkable products and who built an amazing and unique company.
Famously, upon returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs used a ThinkPad running OpenStep until, presumably, Apple shipped a PowerBook that met his standards. ↩
To be pedantic, the edges are the antennas, plural. ↩
In Chapter 39, Isaacson writes, “In order to serve as an antenna, the steel rim had to have a tiny gap.” There, he gets the material and purpose of the edge correct. But that just shows how poorly edited and fact-checked the technical details of the book are. ↩
Mountain Lion
★ Mountain Lion:
“We’re starting to do some things differently,” Phil Schiller said to me.
We were sitting in a comfortable hotel suite in Manhattan just over a week ago. I’d been summoned a few days earlier by Apple PR with the offer of a private “product briefing”. I had no idea heading into the meeting what it was about. I had no idea how it would be conducted. This was new territory for me, and I think, for Apple.
I knew it wasn’t about the iPad 3 — that would get a full-force press event in California. Perhaps new retina display MacBooks, I thought. But that was just a wild guess, and it was wrong. It was about Mac OS X — or, as Apple now calls it almost everywhere, OS X. The meeting was structured and conducted very much like an Apple product announcement event. But instead of an auditorium with a stage and theater seating, it was simply with a couch, a chair, an iMac, and an Apple TV hooked up to a Sony HDTV. And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others from Apple — Brian Croll from product marketing and Bill Evans from PR. (From the outside, at least in my own experience, Apple’s product marketing and PR people are so well-coordinated that it’s hard to discern the difference between the two.)
Handshakes, a few pleasantries, good hot coffee, and then, well, then I got an Apple press event for one. Keynote slides that would have looked perfect had they been projected on stage at Moscone West or the Yerba Buena Center, but instead were shown on a big iMac on a coffee table in front of us. A presentation that started with the day’s focus (“We wanted you here today to talk about OS X”) and a review of the Mac’s success over the past few years (5.2 million Macs sold last quarter; 23 (soon to be 24) consecutive quarters of sales growth exceeding the overall PC industry; tremendous uptake among Mac users of the Mac App Store and the rapid adoption of Lion).
And then the reveal: Mac OS X — sorry, OS X — is going on an iOS-esque one-major-update-per-year development schedule. This year’s update is scheduled for release in the summer, and is ready now for a developer preview release. Its name is Mountain Lion.1
There are many new features, I’m told, but today they’re going to focus on telling me about ten of them. This is just like an Apple event, I keep thinking. Just like with Lion, Mountain Lion is evolving in the direction of the iPad. But, just as with Lion last year, it’s about sharing ideas and concepts with iOS, not sharing the exact same interaction design or code. The words “Windows” and “Microsoft” are never mentioned, but the insinuation is clear: Apple sees a fundamental difference between software for the keyboard-and-mouse-pointer Mac and that for the touchscreen iPad. Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes.
Major new features
iCloud, with an iOS-style easy signup process upon first turning on a new Mac or first logging into a new user account. Mountain Lion wants you to have an iCloud account.
iCloud document storage, and the biggest change to Open and Save dialog boxes in the 28-year history of the Mac. Mac App Store apps effectively have two modes for opening/saving documents: iCloud or the traditional local hierarchical file system. The traditional way is mostly unchanged from Lion (and, really, from all previous versions of Mac OS X). The iCloud way is visually distinctive: it looks like the iPad springboard — linen background, iOS-style one-level-only drag-one-on-top-of-another-to-create-one “folders”. It’s not a replacement of traditional Mac file management and organization. It’s a radically simplified alternative.
Apps have been renamed for cross-OS consistency. iChat is now Messages; iCal is now Calendar; Address Book is now Contacts. Missing apps have been added: Reminders and Notes look like Mac versions of their iOS counterparts. Now that these apps exist for the Mac, to-dos have been removed from Calendar and notes have been removed from Mail, leaving Calendar to simply handle calendaring and Mail to handle email.
The recurring theme: Apple is fighting against cruft — inconsistencies and oddities that have accumulated over the years, which made sense at one point but no longer — like managing to-dos in iCal (because CalDAV was being used to sync them to a server) or notes in Mail (because IMAP was the syncing back-end). The changes and additions in Mountain Lion are in a consistent vein: making things simpler and more obvious, closer to how things should be rather than simply how they always have been.
Schiller has no notes. He is every bit as articulate, precise, and rehearsed as he is for major on-stage events. He knows the slide deck stone cold. It strikes me that I have spoken in front of a thousand people but I’ve never been as well-prepared for a presentation as Schiller is for this one-on-one meeting. (Note to self: I should be that rehearsed.)
This is an awful lot of effort and attention in order to brief what I’m guessing is a list of a dozen or two writers and journalists. It’s Phil Schiller, spending an entire week on the East Coast, repeating this presentation over and over to a series of audiences of one. There was no less effort put into the preparation of this presentation than there would have been if it had been the WWDC keynote address.
What do I think so far, Schiller asks. It all seems rather obvious now that I’ve seen it — and I mean obvious in a good way. I remain convinced that iCloud is exactly what Steve Jobs said it was: the cornerstone of everything Apple does for the next decade. So of course it makes sense to bring iCloud to the Mac in a big way. Simplified document storage, iMessage, Notification Center2, synced Notes and Reminders — all of these things are part of iCloud. It’s all a step toward making your Mac just another device managed in your iCloud account. Look at your iPad and think about the features it has that would work well, for a lot of people, if they were on the Mac. That’s Mountain Lion — and probably a good way to predict the future of the continuing parallel evolution of iOS and OS X.3
But this, I say, waving around at the room, this feels a little odd. I’m getting the presentation from an Apple announcement event without the event. I’ve already been told that I’ll be going home with an early developer preview release of Mountain Lion. I’ve never been at a meeting like this, and I’ve never heard of Apple seeding writers with an as-yet-unannounced major update to an operating system. Apple is not exactly known for sharing details of as-yet-unannounced products, even if only just one week in advance. Why not hold an event to announce Mountain Lion — or make the announcement on apple.com before talking to us?
That’s when Schiller tells me they’re doing some things differently now.
I wonder immediately about that “now”. I don’t press, because I find the question that immediately sprang to mind uncomfortable. And some things remain unchanged: Apple executives explain what they want to explain, and they explain nothing more.
My gut feeling though, is this. Apple didn’t want to hold an event to announce Mountain Lion because those press events are precious. They just used one for the iBooks/education thing, and they’re almost certainly on the cusp of holding a major one for the iPad. They don’t want to wait to release the Mountain Lion preview because they want to give Mac developers months of time to adopt new APIs and to help Apple shake out bugs. So: an announcement without an event. But they don’t want Mountain Lion to go unheralded. They are keenly aware that many observers suspect or at least worry that the Mac is on the wane, relegated to the sideline in favor of the new and sensationally popular iPad.
Thus, these private briefings. Not merely to explain what Mountain Lion is — that could just as easily be done with a website or PDF feature guide — but to convey that the Mac and OS X remain both important and the subject of the company’s attention. The move to a roughly annual release cycle, to me, suggests that Apple is attempting to prove itself a walk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time company. Remember this, five years ago?
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification
tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t
wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and
experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is.
However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever
shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come
without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering
and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will
not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers
Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will
be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we
and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our
developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give
them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing,
and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the
wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure
we’ve made the right ones.
Putting both iOS and OS X on an annual release schedule is a sign that Apple is confident it no longer needs to make such tradeoffs in engineering resources. There’s an aspect of Apple’s “now” — changes it needs to make, ways the company needs to adapt — that simply relate to just how damn big, and how successful, the company has become. They are in uncharted territory, success-wise. They are cognizant that they’re no longer the upstart, and are changing accordingly.
It seems important to Apple that the Mac not be perceived as an afterthought compared to the iPad, and, perhaps more importantly, that Apple not be perceived as itself considering or treating the Mac as an afterthought.
I’ve been using Mountain Lion for a week, preinstalled on a MacBook Air loaned to me by Apple. I have little to report: it’s good, and I look forward to installing the developer preview on my own personal Air. It’s a preview, incomplete and with bugs, but it feels at least as solid as Lion did a year ago in its developer previews.
I’m interested to see how developer support for Mac App Store-only features plays out. Two big ones: iCloud document storage and Notification Center. Both of these are slated only for third-party apps from the Mac App Store. Many developers, though, have been maintaining non-Mac App Store versions of their apps. If this continues, such apps are going to lose feature parity between the App Store and non-App Store versions. Apple is not taking the Mac in iOS’s “all apps must come through the App Store” direction, but they’re certainly encouraging developers to go Mac App Store-only with iCloud features that are only available to Mac App Store apps (and, thus, which have gone through the App Store approval process).
My favorite Mountain Lion feature, though, is one that hardly even has a visible interface. Apple is calling it “Gatekeeper”. It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications. If an app is found to be malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s certificate, rendering the app (along with any others from the same developer) inert on any Mac where it’s been installed. In effect, it offers all the security benefits of the App Store, except for the process of approving apps by Apple. Users have three choices which type of apps can run on Mountain Lion:
- Only those from the App Store
- Only those from the App Store or which are signed by a developer ID
- Any app, whether signed or unsigned
The default for this setting is, I say, exactly right: the one in the middle, disallowing only unsigned apps. This default setting benefits users by increasing practical security, and also benefits developers, preserving the freedom to ship whatever software they want for the Mac, with no approval process.
Call me nuts, but that’s one feature I hope will someday go in the other direction — from OS X to iOS.
As soon as Schiller told me the name, I silently cursed myself for not having predicted it. Apple is a company of patterns. iPhone 3G, followed by a same-form-factor-but-faster 3GS; iPhone 4 followed by a same-form-factor-but-faster 4S. Leopard followed by Snow Leopard; so, of course: Lion followed by Mountain Lion. ↩
On the Mac, Notification Center alerts are decidedly inspired by those of Growl, a longstanding open source project that is now sold for $2 in the Mac App Store. I hereby predict “Apple ripped off Growl” as the mini-scandal of the day. ↩
There is a feature from the iPhone that I would love to see ported to the Mac, but which is not present in Mountain Lion: Siri. There’s either a strategic reason to keep Siri iPhone 4S-exclusive, or it’s a card Apple is holding to play at a later date. ↩
