Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Tiger: the death of helper applications
As my first of hopefully many happy weeks with Tiger winds down, and now that I've used it to do some real work instead of just throwing stuff at it to see what happens, one subtle trend has stood out above all others. Can anyone guess what it is?
Dashboard? Nah. Well, sort of, in a way.
Spotlight? Ah, it's part of it, I suppose.
But these are just new creatures in a monster mash that's been accumulating for as long as you've come to know operating sytems by a certain Roman numeral. Right from the first time you downloaded a PDF in MacOS X three years ago, and saw it open in Preview instead of Acrobat Reader. And it's been creeping up on you ever since. Figured it out yet?
It hit me, just a little bit, when I clicked on a PDF document on a website, and it rather understatedly opened...right in Safari. Hmm, in three years we've gone from downloaded PDFs opening in a separate third-party application (Acrobat Reader) you had to install yourself, to opening in a separate application (Preview) that's more or less an extension of the operating system, to now opening right in the browser itself. In other words, from lots of hubbub, to a little bit of hubbub, to none at all.
It hit me a little more yesterday when I double-clicked on a document that had been compressed in the ".sit" format, and it unstuffed itself just as you would expect -- except Stuffit Expander never launched. The Finder simply unstuffed the document by itself, and that was that.
The ongoing trend here, of course, is the death of the helper applications. And it makes perfect sense. Why should you have to wait for an entire separate application to launch and do its business before you can get on with a mundane task? But it's not just about the helper applications dying off. The even larger trend, which you have to step back a little more to fully appreciate, is the ongoing reduction in the number of times that you have to move from one application to another.
Look at what's going on with the iLife suite. Sure, iTunes controls your music. But if you're making a movie in iMovie and you need a song, you don't launch iTunes and then scratch your head about how to get it from point A to point B. In fact, you don't launch iTunes at all. Because the music in iTunes is automatically accessible from within iMovie whether iTunes is running or not. And more recently, we've been given iWork, in which you can pull a picture from your iPhoto library directly into your word processing document without having to go anywhere near iPhoto.
Which brings us to the new and shiny stuff.
Dashboard is, in a nutshell, a way to take all the little applications that don't deserve to be full-fledged applications and stapling them all to what is essentially the backside of your desktop. Flip it over, and they're all hanging out there, ready to be used, like a bunch of tools all sitting pretty on the same shelf. None of them have to be located, launched, or anything else that might waste a fractional moment of your time. Because now, you can just dip into any of them without ever really leaving the application you're currently working in.
And then we come to Spotlight. About a year ago a wrote a column on this site whose title asked if Tiger represented the "death" of the Finder. Perhaps a misfortunate choice of words, as what I was really trying to look at was simply a reduction in the number of times in which you have to go to the Finder. Think about it: why should you have to go to the Finder before you can perform a search of your hard drive? The Finder is designed to help you navigate to files and folders whose location you're already aware of. Why should you also have to go to the Finder to search for files whose locations you don't know? The Finder isn't going to help you. You have to do a search. So why not just go ahead do the search? And that's, more or less, what Spotlight is. Sure, it's a lot more than that. It brings up everything relating to your search term, but that fact is perhaps not nearly as important as the fact that you no longer have to go to the Finder before performing a search.
So what does Spotlight have to do with a reduction in the number of times you have to change applications? Well, when we moved to MacOS X, we saw the Finder itself become just another application. And although the Finder reached near-perfection with the release of Panther (thank you, Apple, for not messing with perfection for Tiger), the bottom line is that the fewer times you have to leave the application you're being productive in to go to the Finder, the more productive you'll be. In this particular case, the Finder simply represents another helper application that's no longer needed.
None of which is to say that the Finder is dead, dying, or otherwise diminutive. Nothing beats it when you actually know where something is located. No matter how much we pretty it up, performing a search is akin to failure. We've come a long way when it comes to searching both the internet and our own computer. But when it comes down to it, advancements in search technology are akin to having a really good method of breaking into your car when you accidentally leave your keys locked inside. The bottom line is that none of it would have been necessary if you could have simply remembered where you saved that document to in the first place.
Finally, I'll leave you with this thought: six or seven years ago, Mac enthusiasts could barely refrain from tripping over themselves to proclaim how the future of computing would revolve around the QuickTime player. You'd use it for communication, multimedia, accessing information, creativity, and even commerce. Well, if you're fairly new to the platform and you have no idea what the "QuickTime Player" is, it's the blue "Q" in your Dock that you've never once clicked on and likely never will.
So what happened, did QuickTime die? Were the enthusiasts wrong? Nah, not at all. You see, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Preview, half a dozen other apps, and even the computer's interface itself are all built on top of the QuickTime foundation. There's no need to launch QuickTime before doing anything in any of the apps that depend on it; they each have full access to what they need without you ever having to worry about it. At this point, the QuickTime player is, after all, just another helper application that has successfully faded out of your face and into the background.
I know it's a little early to be saying this, but I can't wait to see what MacOS 10.5 brings us.
As my first of hopefully many happy weeks with Tiger winds down, and now that I've used it to do some real work instead of just throwing stuff at it to see what happens, one subtle trend has stood out above all others. Can anyone guess what it is?
Dashboard? Nah. Well, sort of, in a way.
Spotlight? Ah, it's part of it, I suppose.
But these are just new creatures in a monster mash that's been accumulating for as long as you've come to know operating sytems by a certain Roman numeral. Right from the first time you downloaded a PDF in MacOS X three years ago, and saw it open in Preview instead of Acrobat Reader. And it's been creeping up on you ever since. Figured it out yet?
It hit me, just a little bit, when I clicked on a PDF document on a website, and it rather understatedly opened...right in Safari. Hmm, in three years we've gone from downloaded PDFs opening in a separate third-party application (Acrobat Reader) you had to install yourself, to opening in a separate application (Preview) that's more or less an extension of the operating system, to now opening right in the browser itself. In other words, from lots of hubbub, to a little bit of hubbub, to none at all.
It hit me a little more yesterday when I double-clicked on a document that had been compressed in the ".sit" format, and it unstuffed itself just as you would expect -- except Stuffit Expander never launched. The Finder simply unstuffed the document by itself, and that was that.
The ongoing trend here, of course, is the death of the helper applications. And it makes perfect sense. Why should you have to wait for an entire separate application to launch and do its business before you can get on with a mundane task? But it's not just about the helper applications dying off. The even larger trend, which you have to step back a little more to fully appreciate, is the ongoing reduction in the number of times that you have to move from one application to another.
Look at what's going on with the iLife suite. Sure, iTunes controls your music. But if you're making a movie in iMovie and you need a song, you don't launch iTunes and then scratch your head about how to get it from point A to point B. In fact, you don't launch iTunes at all. Because the music in iTunes is automatically accessible from within iMovie whether iTunes is running or not. And more recently, we've been given iWork, in which you can pull a picture from your iPhoto library directly into your word processing document without having to go anywhere near iPhoto.
Which brings us to the new and shiny stuff.
Dashboard is, in a nutshell, a way to take all the little applications that don't deserve to be full-fledged applications and stapling them all to what is essentially the backside of your desktop. Flip it over, and they're all hanging out there, ready to be used, like a bunch of tools all sitting pretty on the same shelf. None of them have to be located, launched, or anything else that might waste a fractional moment of your time. Because now, you can just dip into any of them without ever really leaving the application you're currently working in.
And then we come to Spotlight. About a year ago a wrote a column on this site whose title asked if Tiger represented the "death" of the Finder. Perhaps a misfortunate choice of words, as what I was really trying to look at was simply a reduction in the number of times in which you have to go to the Finder. Think about it: why should you have to go to the Finder before you can perform a search of your hard drive? The Finder is designed to help you navigate to files and folders whose location you're already aware of. Why should you also have to go to the Finder to search for files whose locations you don't know? The Finder isn't going to help you. You have to do a search. So why not just go ahead do the search? And that's, more or less, what Spotlight is. Sure, it's a lot more than that. It brings up everything relating to your search term, but that fact is perhaps not nearly as important as the fact that you no longer have to go to the Finder before performing a search.
So what does Spotlight have to do with a reduction in the number of times you have to change applications? Well, when we moved to MacOS X, we saw the Finder itself become just another application. And although the Finder reached near-perfection with the release of Panther (thank you, Apple, for not messing with perfection for Tiger), the bottom line is that the fewer times you have to leave the application you're being productive in to go to the Finder, the more productive you'll be. In this particular case, the Finder simply represents another helper application that's no longer needed.
None of which is to say that the Finder is dead, dying, or otherwise diminutive. Nothing beats it when you actually know where something is located. No matter how much we pretty it up, performing a search is akin to failure. We've come a long way when it comes to searching both the internet and our own computer. But when it comes down to it, advancements in search technology are akin to having a really good method of breaking into your car when you accidentally leave your keys locked inside. The bottom line is that none of it would have been necessary if you could have simply remembered where you saved that document to in the first place.
Finally, I'll leave you with this thought: six or seven years ago, Mac enthusiasts could barely refrain from tripping over themselves to proclaim how the future of computing would revolve around the QuickTime player. You'd use it for communication, multimedia, accessing information, creativity, and even commerce. Well, if you're fairly new to the platform and you have no idea what the "QuickTime Player" is, it's the blue "Q" in your Dock that you've never once clicked on and likely never will.
So what happened, did QuickTime die? Were the enthusiasts wrong? Nah, not at all. You see, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Preview, half a dozen other apps, and even the computer's interface itself are all built on top of the QuickTime foundation. There's no need to launch QuickTime before doing anything in any of the apps that depend on it; they each have full access to what they need without you ever having to worry about it. At this point, the QuickTime player is, after all, just another helper application that has successfully faded out of your face and into the background.
I know it's a little early to be saying this, but I can't wait to see what MacOS 10.5 brings us.
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