Apple merging iOS and Mac OS X, how about that

August 4, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

I arrived to this article by AppleInsider via this article on Wired News, and my curiosity was piqued by the title of the latter: Analyst Predicts iOS and Mac Will Fully Converge by 2012. I immediately raised not one brow, but two. As a perfect link-bait victim, I went on reading the piece at AppleInsider:

Peter Misek with Jefferies & Co. said in a note to investors on Wednesday that he sees such a transition possible with a new MacBook Air running Apple’s custom next-generation “A6” processor. The theory, first reported on by Barron’s, would have a new iPad, iPhone and MacBook Air all running the A6 in 2012.

A new iPad in 2012 is possible, and if it’s going to have a big Retina Display, it’s probably obvious that it’ll need a more powerful processor (I’m also curious to see the impact it’ll have on battery life).

A new iPhone in 2012 with an A6 processor looks a little unlikely to me, considering that the last (and probably most credible) rumour is that the iPhone 5 will be introduced in October 2011 and will have an A5 processor. I believe that this iPhone will remain in production at least until late 2012 — early 2013.

A new MacBook Air in 2012 with a completely different CPU architecture, requiring a rewritten version of Mac OS X to run on it looks a little too early to me. And even if Apple does introduce it, who’s going to buy a Mac whose only compatible software is its system software? What about third-party applications? There has to be at least another WWDC before such a move, so that Apple can announce this intent and invite developers to start rewriting their Mac applications (again!).

“We believe Apple is ready to start sampling the A6 quad-core app processor and will be the first to such multi-device platform capable of PC-like strength,” Misek wrote.

For Apple’s more traditional and more powerful computers, like the MacBook Pro and Mac desktops, the analyst sees Apple sticking with Intel processors and the current Mac OS X software. But by 2016, he sees all of Apple’s Mac devices running on an ARM-based processor like the ones found in the iPhone and iPad.

Ah, so now we’re talking of 2016, not next year. Making this kind of stretched predictions, no matter how truthful they turn out to be, doesn’t make much sense, in my opinion. Five years is indeed a long time in technology. Look back: in 2006 the iPhone and the whole iOS platform didn’t even exist.

But anyway: from what I gather, this analyst thinks that Apple will start featuring the A6 processor on its less powerful machines first (the Airs) while sticking with Intel processors and Mac OS X as-we-know-it on the most powerful Macs. But what operating system will the ‘consumer’ Macs feature during this transition, exactly? An ARM variant of Mac OS X? If so, without third-party compatible apps, these Macs will be islands. Unless they’re able to run iOS applications natively. But they’ll also have to sport a touch-screen display, because iOS makes little sense without direct multi-touch.

“Our preliminary view is that Apple can use a 32-bit ARM architecture to address the vast majority of the OS X ecosystem’s needs in 2012–13 except for high-end professional devices,” he wrote. “When 64-bit ARM is available in 2016, we believe Apple will have a single OS and hardware architecture.”

After all the efforts to get to a full 64-bit Intel environment (hardware and software), what’s the point in making a step back to 32-bit ARM architecture as a temporary ‘solution’ to a non-existent problem, until 64-bit ARM architecture is available 5 years from now? I think this analyst should study past Apple transitions a bit better. I’m not excluding the possibility that one day Mac OS X and iOS will converge somehow, but for now it just seems too far-fetched.

iOS and Mac OS X are both solid, optimised platforms, each taking care of specific needs and tasks. iOS is tailored to work with mobile devices that have a touch-screen display and no physical keyboard or external input device. Mac OS X is the best a Mac can have. A complete merge of the two OSes makes sense only in combination with (or as a consequence of) a major hardware transformation. If it made sense to have the same OS on Macs and iDevices, Apple would have introduced the iPhone or the iPad running a full-blown version of Mac OS X in the first place. In my opinion, there has to be a big change in the devices themselves (and in the way we use them) before such a merge can occur. And let’s don’t forget that for now, from a business point of view, it’s more lucrative for Apple to maintain two platforms, each with its own App Store, rather than force a complete architecture redesign on developers of both platforms just to have a unified one.

From the lost drawer: miniature train catalogues

August 4, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Et Cetera

When my grandfather passed away back in 1997, I inherited a huge amount of stuff. He was a person with many hobbies, a collector and generally a hoarder. In 2001, when my parents moved to Tuscany, they brought my grandmother with them, and I went to live in my grandparents’ flat. Many of the things that belonged to grandpa remained where they were: the enormous bookshelves in the living-room (which became my studio), the vinyl records collection (more than 2,000), many of his paintings and paintboxes, photographs, postcards and other ephemera.

Among the things he loved was building plane and boat models and designing & building scale models for miniature trains. During my relocation in Spain, I found many beautiful catalogues he had been collecting since the 1950s. What’s amazing is their overall condition: many present no sign of discolouration or decay, and the paper is of a surprisingly good quality. All of them display wonderful illustration and typography. Here’s a small sample. More to come when I manage to find time to scan them properly. (Click on the images to enlarge)

Märklin 1954

Märklin 1954

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Trix Express 1954 front

Trix Express 1954 — front cover

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Trix Express 1954 back

Trix Express 1954 — back cover

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Trix 1955 cover

Trix Express 1955

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Trix Express 1958

Trix Express 1958

How to reset and manage the OS X 10.7 Launchpad interface

August 3, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Source: How to reset and manage the OS X 10.7 Launchpad interface | MacFixIt — CNET Reviews.

Kessler:

By default Launchpad will show all of your installed applications, and if you click and hold one application they will all go into the familiar iOS “wiggle” mode in which you can then drag them into groups and move them around as you see fit. While you might enjoy doing this on a new system, if you have a number of applications already installed on a system that you have upgraded to Lion, then you may experience a certain level of frustration in dealing with pages and pages of application icons, especially if you have multiple Parallels Desktop virtual machines installed.

If you are experiencing these frustrations with Launchpad and still wish to use the feature, then one approach you might consider is to clear out Launchpad and start it over from scratch, to organize as you see fit.

As for me, I still haven’t upgraded to Lion, but from what I’ve seen of the Launchpad so far, I can safely say it’s a nice idea, but I don’t think I’ll use it at all.

Bookmark management: another step forward

August 2, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Despite all the progress we’ve made with browsers, and despite the variety of choices we have at our disposal in Mac OS X, I still think that bookmark management is their weakest, most overlooked feature. But since things aren’t improving, I thought that maybe I could start rethinking my bookmark organisation on Safari, which is my main browser.

Back in May, I wrote:

The other day I was browsing all the bookmarks I saved in Safari since day one and, despite my repeated attempts to organise them, the whole picture is just a big, sad mess. Drastic times call for drastic measures, and the next move is indeed a bold one: I will erase my Bookmarks file and start anew. Of course, I won’t just throw everything into oblivion’s whirlpool and get rid of more than 6 years of accumulated links. I’m willing to carry out a preliminary step that is probably going to be painful and somewhat time-consuming, but I hope it’ll be worthwhile: sifting.

Then, after isolating a core base of links (mostly shortcuts to places I frequently visit on the Web), I’ll start again with a different approach to prevent this kind of almost uncontrollable growth. The goal is to use Safari’s Bookmarks Bar basically for bookmarklets, and to have there just a couple of bookmark folders: one for the aforementioned core base of links, another as a temporary parking space for bits and pieces I’ll use in future articles.

This post is basically an update on how this operation is proceeding. I still haven’t reached the minimalistic results I hoped for when I was writing that above, but during these past two months I’ve done most of the sifting, which is the hardest part.

This is a rather faithful representation of the Bookmark Bar’s layout when I set up the G4 Cube a couple of years ago and synced the Safari Bookmarks on my MacBook Pro to the Cube via MobileMe (but keep in mind that since then I’ve removed at least three bookmark folders plus another folder containing feeds):

Safari bookmark bar 2009

My Safari Bookmarks Bar in 2009 (click to enlarge)

While this is my current Bookmark Bar layout:

Safari bookmarks bar 2011

My current Safari Bookmarks Bar (click to enlarge)

Visually, the bar may still appear full of stuff, but note that the first ten items are bookmarklets, 9 of which can be accessed easily and rapidly using the keyboard shortcuts displayed in the figure.

As I said, the goal of having just a couple of bookmark folders: one for the aforementioned core base of links, another as a temporary parking space for bits and pieces I’ll use in future articles is still a bit far, but not that far, and ultimately I may even be satisfied enough by the current layout. I’ve been using this bookmark configuration for a while and I’m noticing it’s quite effective, and a lot more effective than the previous situation.

As you can see, the number of bookmark folders is lower than before (12 against 17+4), but most of all the contents of each folder have been considerably trimmed and therefore now it’s much easier to navigate them (the Reads bookmark folder, for example, used to contain no fewer than 150 items — now they’re down to 25). I could reduce the items on the Bookmark Bar even more by grouping the direct links to Flickr (f), Tumblr, Twitter (T) and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) into a single folder of most frequently accessed links, but I prefer having a faster access to each one of them and saving a click, rather than create a minimal Bookmark Bar just for visual tidiness, while sacrificing functionality. Also, now that Safari 5.1 comes with the Reading List feature, I’ll probably delete my ‘Ten Items or Less’ (10-) folder, in which I usually put the articles to read at a later date (no more than ten, as the name implies, so as to have things under control and avoid the Read It Later routine I mentioned back in May).

Back to the underlying sifting and cleaning process:

  1. I realised that I had kept a huge archive of bookmarks in Safari by examining the folders on the left-hand panel of the Show All Bookmarks window. These folders contained, among other things, leftovers from past imports, and a lot of duplicates. By following the principle that if you never use something, you probably don’t need it, I mercilessly deleted all that stuff.
  2. Then I examined the bookmarks in the Bookmarks Menu. Here again, I deleted never-revisited folders and links and moved in the left-hand panel of the Show All Bookmarks window all the items I rarely access but still want to preserve.
  3. Similarly, I moved the less frequented folders in the Bookmarks Bar to the Bookmarks Menu, and now the Bookmarks Bar is way cleaner and functional. Also, while before the Bookmarks Menu contained 87 items (subfolders + single bookmarks), now that number is down to 20.

If I had to make an overall estimate, I’d say that the whole number of bookmarks I have now in Safari is more or less 30% of what it was just 2 months ago, which — you’ll agree — is a remarkable improvement. I still have a lot of stuff to go through, but now at least the situation is manageable.