iMac: the first generation - a Mac Semiotics (2)

Present-day hardware aesthetics include a dimension that hasn't been discussed very often, though it is registered by most people on a subconscious level. It is also the reason the first iMac very soon after its release was to be seen everywhere in those medias that are based on visual representation: adverts, fashion magazine illustrations, even Turkish youth television programs - wherever a statement of awareness of visual aesthetics and bleeding-edge digital technology is needed.

But the iMac also made a grand entrance in many offices where it stood as a symbol for precisely the same kind of awareness. How come that a computer primarily intended as a new generation home appliance acquired this role? Cosmopolitan is not intended for office people...

iMac did more than signal a desire to show individualism and the primary use of the computer to connect to other people and to handle JIT data. It went beyond stating, "I am not a one-way text writing person, I'm a two-ways ideas and connectivity person". Whereas the primordal iMac - the beige Macintosh 128 which was constructed around exactly the same principles of usage - symbolized creative productivity, this colorful creature first and foremost signals the user's aesthetic appreciation. And that an appreciation based on the 'soft' humanitarian values, the 'person-to-person' interface.

Note the operative words here: seen, show, sign-als, inter-face. Visual aesthetics taking over the symbol value from the practical, inherent productivity value. And here the new aesthetics dimension, as applied in the first iMac and the first non-beige Powermac, entered the picture: it presented an inherent understanding of their underlying roles which is easily grasped by people.

Looking at the first iMac, one immediately notices - on some level - the suggestion of a unit which singles itself out and is there for one single individual. It is primarily self-contained, one unit, as shown by the convex surface of its egg-shape (the procreative ovum). The one point of approach is the flat end - the Columbus solution suggesting nothing is impossible - where it interfaces with the user.

Here the oneness offers to the user all the necessary possibilities for connectivity without necessitating technically based control and use. All technical parts are no longer parts - they are merely hinted at by surface lines and patterns on the unit. Only the handling possibilities represented by the carrying handle, and the keyboard and mouse, respectively, of physical transport and input break this smoothness. The digital, non-tactile input possibilities of ports and CD/DVD-ROM are internalized and primarily represented in the GUI. Thus, the design of the iMac is humanized to a hitherto unseen degree.

Not long after the introduction of the iMac, a new PowerMac paradigm appeared to complement it. The New Apple Semiotics manifested itself here once again, and not just through the signal use of plastics. That, and the gradual modification of iMac aesthetics, will be discussed shortly.

Woz and the "Iceland" project: is it viable?

The intensity of the rumors concerning Apple introducing a mobile phone as the next node of the Digital Hub have increased over the last few days. Wireless Week is normally non-commital when it comes to the twirls of excitement stirring in the Apple universe, but they have produced an article which presents rumors about Steve Jobs being in contact with his old partner, Steve Wozniak, to develop a new mobile phone which could do for the stagnant mobile market what the Macintosh did for computers. The device, using technology being developed in Wozniak's company Wheels of Zeus, should enable the user to control many other aspects of hirs (for the sake of equality) daily life than that of the activities of the kids. While these aspects have not been specified officially, it is believed to include controlling and changing settings of electronic and mechanical home devices, finding out about the positioning of vehicles and any other mobile unit in one's possession, and contacting stores where one holds an account (a la email).

Another rumor popped up in a thread on AppleInsider's Future Hardware section, delivered by a deep (but not yet slashed) throat with the Nick allen mcjones. It concerns an apparently secret project at Apple, codenamed "Iceland", for the development of a socalled "device of convergence which will unify and electrify the dormant mobile phone markets in both of the named regions. Technologically, it should be able to work with standards from both areas, and it should harbor the best from advanced mobile phones and (dare we say it?) PDA's (we did!). Furthermore, it is described as being a development of the iPod.

Now, "Convergence" was an early 90'es catch-all phrase which didn't survive the new Millennium. It doesn't take much thought to realize that while there ARE combined devices out there, they are rarely succesfull: how many have a fridge that surfs the Internet?

PDA's are conveyers of visual data while mobile phones and MP3 players deliver sound. That is very evident in the way the form factors (a late 90'es catch phrase) of a mobile phone and a PDA-like device don't easily converge. Either the mobile phone will be too clumsy to hold (imagine trying to hold it against your ear with your shoulder), or the PDA-device will be too small to be able to incorporate a screen of a useful size.

There are mobile phones with built-in MP3 players (and even radios), at least on the European and Asian market. The most important user segment (the teenagers), however, prefer to have several, specialized units rather than one. Also, the one obvious way to alleviate the form factor problematics - hands-free earplugs-cum-microphone - takes away the cool factor of handling the phone: there is status in showing others that you got (yet another) call not only by the loud melodic sounds (vibrating phones aren't particularly cool either!), but also by your exaggerated gestic rhetoric. The revelation of the unit, the careful study of its screen, the outward/upward swing of your arm towards your ear are all cool-creating actions.

The trend in mobile phone aesthetics have moved towards unfolding units (after it reached a smallness of size that made miniaturizing it impractical ergonomically. The angled shape, when unfolded, makes the phone relatively easy to hold. Had it been possible to unfold it fully and flatten the form as much as it is technically possible (ie, no raised edges, etc), it would have become unacceptably angular in the hand. Don't think that mobile phone designers are unaware of the tactile (and thus to a large extent subconscious) experience involved in using them; it is a major reason why they make hundreds of mock-ups.

One factor that might change all that is the burgeoning market for SMS messages. It is surprising because the ergonomics are lousy, to say the least, but the feeling it conveys of being part of an underground network (Lot 49 over- or undertones here) has encouraged young generations of users to develop completely new patterns of thumb muscle movements to compensate for the handling problematics (it's true!)

SMS messages, and even more its successor, Picture MS (I daren't call it PMS), bridges the island between visual and aural data conveyance. Should videophone-like transmission find a market (depending very much on its price-wise positioning), I might be surprised regarding the convergence aspect - at least in this unit segment. However, it might tie in with the iPod development rumor: the aesthetics and ergonomics of a combined unit - with stereo earplugs/microphones connected to an iPod-like device with a full-face screen and a built-in WebCam via a cord or Bluetooth, the ability to play MP3 files and display Calendar and Address data - would be good. There are still technical questions, such as battery life (in the unit and in the earplug/mic part), miniaturization, and heat dissipation, and there is the small matter of price. But it MIGHT have the necessary cool factor.

Both rumors might be true - Woz might even have picked up the courage to work together with Jobs again...

Still, I doubt it.


PS- Peve has released a sketch of the socalled iThingie (see the full sketch here) to suggest what an Apple mobile phone-cum-PDA might look like.

Symbiotic Ware - an Apple Semiotics (1)

Apple is not a hardware company. Those who say so probably think of the history of Apple - the famous fifty motherboards created in a garage by two tinkerers. Steve Jobs driving from shop to shop, selling these foetoi of the modern computer. It's famous, almost mythical. Those who think of Apple as a hardware company probably think of Apple II and what a huge success that was. Of the days when the battle was between IBM and Apple, between Intel and Motorola.

But the fact of the matter is that Apple would never have lived beyond that if it had not embraced the Xerox technology and developed it into the MacOS. Apple has a history of embracing technology that turned out to be not only farsighted but even popular - in some circumstances. The mouse, 3 1/2" floppies, SCSI, laser printing.... - just as it has a history of brutally discarding the insufficient in order to make it obsolete.

Then came a period dominated by the NIH syndrome. Apple felt itself to be the only one bleeding on the edge, and a number of technologies, or extensions of the computing paradigm, were developed and introduced: a number of internal bus standards, AppleTalk, AppleSpeech, QuickTalk, QuickDraw.... the list of quiet deaths goes on and on. It far extends the number of inventions that remain in today's Macintosh.

Later, a number of established or new, free standards were embraced: IDE, standard RAM modules, graphics modes, PCI, the PCI bus... Of the technology developed inhouse, only QuickTime has caught on big time. ColorSync still lives, but for how long? As for FireWire, its success beyond a very specific niche of use yet remains to be seen. Superior hardware technology is hardly ever the winner....

Most recently, the bleeding edge has been redefined in Apple: choosing and introducing new technology in cooperation with other players - even to the extent of embracing emerging standards whose capabilities partly overlap others that Apple itself has been instrumental in developing. USB (but not USB2 as yet) has been taken to heart, as has Bluetooth, both less capable technologies than FireWire and AirPort, yet taken in to fill less capable roles in the Mac ecology. The one piece of hallowed hardware ground yet remaining seems to be the Motorola CPU which is Apple’s piece de resistánce (in the original sense, not the culinaric) - the differénce which has therefore also become the deemphatic sign in Apple’s structure of verticality.

Because: Apple is very much a software company. More specifically, a software company devoted to the development and use of operating system technology. But it is not only a software company. It's impossible to talk about one part of an Apple computer without including the other.

The choice of technologies do go hand in hand with the operating system technologies, for the many services built into it require great hardware: just think of the way a Favorites alias in the Apple menu is automatically updated when you dump a program or an alias into the original Favorites folder; or the automatic appearance of removable media on the Desktop. And then there is the whole system of network services - it all takes computing power and slows down basic OS chores, as can be seen when comparing MacOSX to AmigaOS or Atari's TOS. However, OS functionality is topologically on higher ground than hardware efficiency.

But let us return to the central argument: Many, not least Steve Jobs, see Apple in terms of a symbiotic relationship, and this is made manifest most recently in the GUI of OSX which fuses the hardware exterior with very advanced UNIX derived underpinnings. In the mind of the user, aesthetic form thus becomes the interface that turns two parts into one statement.

The shell, or graphic user interface, on top of the UNIX operating system (the forefather of which ten years ago was considered not only oldfashioned but old, and expected to be ousted by more modern systems such as AmigaOS or AcornOS) is what fuses a mature but highly abstract OS with Apple's well-constructed UMA, Unified Motherboard Architecture. In a sense, the physical exterior of the post-resurrection apostles - iMac/iBook/Pismo II/Powermac - and the Aqua GUI (for so it is, the GUI subordinate to the declaration of Aqua’s built-in capabilities) became a unified aesthetics linking their hardware and software even more than the pre-8.1 MacOS and the beige appearance of the hardware produced then.

With the return of Steven Jobs and through the brilliance of Jonathan Ives, symbiosis emerged again - a temporary lapse of semiosis had come to an end.

Sweet-Sour Apple Sauce

Two friends of mine, Jacob and Tommy, are not only Mac-buffs but also graduate programmers. They both do cross-platform work - preferably with Java - and have their homes stuffed with Macs old and new. Recently I listened in on a mail conversation of theirs and found it interesting and relevant enough to publish it here. What sparked it off was a problem they had with a Canon Ixus digital camera: while transferring photos to their Macs, the camera's "sleep" mode kicked in and broke the connection.

To: Jacob Schultz
Subject: Re: Card reader
I have the same problem with the camera, but I simply "forward" on the camera now and then to keep it from falling asleep.
Tommy

Hi Tommy
I tried that trick too but the result was that some of the photos ended up looking completely crushed. I bet it's because Apple merely guessed at how connecting and transferring to Ixus should be programmed, which means that an unexpected situation arises when one tries to go forward while transferring. Which means that I daren't do that.
Also, iTunes is bad in connection with the Nomad MP3 player; it's no longer possible to drag new tracks onto the transfer queue while it's transferring those you chose first. That means that you have to sit and wait. Sod it! but of course, now the Nomad is competing with iPod.... grr...
In some ways I think Apple has begun to slide downwards, the way OSX and AirPort is "functioning". Added to that, I am unable to burn CDs from Toast, simply because the Finder takes over the burn process! ******! Toast quits when I want to burn, and Finder pops up with a burn dialogue! What is this, MicroSoft or what?
"Okay, then we'll just burn from the Finder." No, we ****ing don't; when the Finder formats it leaves 30MB less space than Toast, and that means that there's not enough room for my movies. So where do you go when you want to change the Finder burn preferences? Surely there must be options beyond a yes/no dialogue box?
**** **, Simple is Good, but surely not when the OS takes over everything with no possibilities of changing preferences. I simply had to give up burning anything. I hate OSX, AirPort, iTunes, iPhoto... iApps make me sick, and unless 10.2 is better I'm going accept that OS'es will never improve, and throw it all out of the window.
Anyway, until then I'm hoping to escape from both iPhoto and iTunes by buying a PCMCIA card reader.
Jax

Hi Jacob,
I have to agree with you; from now on I will do my burns in Windows! And when I was reading the new issue of mediaMac [a Danish Macazine. ed.] yesterday.
Apple has finally made a backup program, but of course it only works with .mac!!! It's ridiculous that all those new Services you are only able to take advantage of if you have a .mac account - many of them are only relevant if you are living in the States, or you have a broadband connection. They are completely incorporated into the OS - almost more than M$ does it. If Apple earns too little money, they ought to put the price for the OS higher.
By now the only good argument for using Apple stuff is their use of open standards, a point that our friend Jobs spent a whole Keynote presentation making.
It makes me feel very tired too, but it's still the best alternative.
Tommy

I don't share all of their views, but a number of points are valid. Both Tommy and Jacob were OSX enthusiasts and early adaptors, but their patience is evidently wearing rather thin now. Having said that, threatening to throw the whole caboodle out of the window has been a semi-regular occurrence for as long as I have known Jacob.
It will be interesting to hear their reactions when they receive and install 10.2 - they have put in orders for it, frustrations or no frustrations.

iNabling everyone - the handheld Apple should have made

I have already discussed ways in which I, along with others, feel that Apple have disappointed its customers, and so I would like to be slightly more constructive. Briefly, it is regarding a device that I believe Apple should have developed and marketed.

Listlessly watching cnn the other night, I was arrested by a report of a handheld computer which is being developed in India. The aim is not to earn money by selling it to yuppies (and face it: most of the recent Apple products, innovations and standards are targeted squarely on that - iMac II, iSync, iCal, rendezvous; need I say more?). The aim is to be able to offer people in the more poor and less developed regions of the world access to Internet knowledge and email contact through a device that is small, robust, uses an intuitive interface and is sold at a low price. Ignoring for a moment the last bit, doesn't it sound familiar?

Read about it here: iNable, and then tell me what you think...

Steve Jobs is always going on about how people should be empowered, and he USED to talk about "Computing for the rest of us". Well, had he put the resources of Apple into developing, producing and distributing a product like this, I would have respected him and his rhetorics far more than I am doing right now.

iNable shows that it IS possible to produce a reasonably priced handheld device with a touch screen, and that, at least, Apple could emulate. Apple is not idealistic - but at least they could be reasonable.

And they could still bring everyone in touch - it is possible but not probable...

Watson and Sherlock? Without a Clue?

Some of us Mac owners probably have too much sky in our eyes for our own good. We keep getting disappointed when Apple Computers, Inc do things that we feel are unethical, stupid or outright wrong. Upping prices on products for reasons that are plainly bad excuses, refusing to acknowledge faults in products in spite of hundreds of complaints, deriding M$ for things like complexity, multiple bugs and BigBrother mentality and then going on to do more or less the same itself... you want examples? just ask me!

One recent action has disappointed me more than most of the other things I alluded to: the rebuilding of Sherlock so it steals and uses the ideas of Karelia's shareware product Watson. Now, this is not the first time Apple has done such things; a crucial part of MacOS' UI development has been acknowledging that a particular interaction is useful by seeing that many users have taken a shareware extension to their collected heards, and then integrating it into the OS as a standard feature. Probably the most well-known example (until the present incarnation of Sherlock) was integrating cascading menues (submenues) after seeing how many people wanted to pay extra to get it (I forgot the name of the company - was it called BeHierarchic?).

I had hoped that Apple had stopped stealing ideas. To me, there are two ethical ways of extending UI usefulness: by developing the ideas and technologies themselves (and they are able to do so: just think "springloaded folders" and "tabbed windows" (ooops, they threw out that one , the bastards!)); or by buying/licensing them.

I don't have the energy to enter into a description of how they first gave Karelia a price on May 8, 2002, for Watson being the "Most Innovative Product", and then ripped it off. I'm not going to argue about why Apple should have licensed Watson instead of just offering Dan Wood a job - how about admitting that it IS possible for non-Apple ideas to be good enough to use, or copy? It's obvious. Oh, and I'm not going to go into how many UI ideas from Windows Apple has tweaked and touted...

But I will answer those who defend Apple by saying that "Watson stole the idea from Sherlock in the first place". Oh yeah? In that case, Apple stole the basic ideas for HFS from IBM's DOS standard.

Which they of course didn't - they just used some very fundamental principles for storing and registering data on magnetic medias which had also been used in DOS. It's about the same as the difference between Karelia's use and filtering of XML-presented data, and Sherlock's initial use of meta-search. Sherlock3, on the other hand, uses very similar (if much less efficient) parsing and filtering techniques to those introduced in Watson 1.0...

Apple insists that they had begun developing Sherlock3 a couple of years ago. That may be so - but the original development, I am certain, had very little in common with the creature they have only just released. There is, after all, a REASON why Sherlock3 is actually v. 3.5 (!) rather than 3.0.

I have little doubt that Apple stole a lot of inspiration from Watson - and at present, Sherlock3(.5) looks little more than the ghost of Watson. It is exactly like the movie "Without a Clue" portrayed it. Exactly.

All the goodwill that Apple gained when they released Darwin, their BSD clone, has been spilled by their handling of the Watson affair - and then some.