TidBITS#711/05-Jan-04
=====================
What will the new year bring to the Macintosh? Adam looks ahead
at what Apple can do to improve the Mac, and also notes upcoming
changes to how we create and manage TidBITS using Web Crossing. We
also cover Apple's pre-holiday updates to Mac OS X, QuickTime, and
iTunes, as well as the release of Tinderbox 2.1. And, sadly, we
mourn the loss of Macintosh luminary Phil Goldman. We're at
Macworld Expo San Francisco this week; see you there!
Topics:
MailBITS/05-Jan-04
A Slew of Apple Software Updates
In Memoriam: Phil Goldman, 1964-2003
The Web Crossing Begins
Apple Computer, Going Forward into 2004
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/05-Jan-04
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-711.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2004/TidBITS#711_05-Jan-04.etx>
Copyright 2004 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
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* Bare Bones Software TextWrangler 1.5 -- General-purpose tool for
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MailBITS/05-Jan-04
------------------
**Macworld Expo Hess Events List Available** -- After a hiatus
for Macworld New York last year, Ilene Hoffman has once again
assembled the definitive guide to parties, speaking engagements,
and other events coinciding with this week's Macworld Expo in
San Francisco. The Hess Memorial Macworld Events and Party Page
includes press functions, booth appearances, and information
about which events are public or private. [JLC]
<http://www.ilenesmachine.com/partylist.shtml>
**Tinderbox 2.1 Enhances HTML Export, Text Display** -- Eastgate
Systems has released a minor update to their personal content
manager Tinderbox (see "Light Your Fire with Tinderbox" in
TidBITS-651_). New in Tinderbox 2.1 is a macro feature for
automatic text replacement, improved flexibility of HTML export,
better support for anti-aliased text, and more. Tinderbox 2.1
costs $145 with a year of free updates; a renewal of updates
for another year costs $70. It's a 4.4 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06959>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07292>
**DealBITS Drawing: Insider Software Winner** -- Congratulations
to David Graham of grahams.net, whose entry was chosen randomly in
our fourth DealBITS drawing and who will be receiving a boxed copy
of FontAgent Pro from Insider Software. Don't despair if we didn't
pick your entry, since Insider Software is offering a 20 percent
discount on FontAgent Pro for all TidBITS readers, bringing the
price down to $80. The discount is good through 12-Jan-04 via the
second link below. Thanks to the 525 people who entered, and keep
an eye out for future DealBITS drawings. [ACE]
<http://www.insidersoftware.com/>
<http://www.insidersoftware.com/dealbits1215.html>
<http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/insider-software.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07477>
A Slew of Apple Software Updates
--------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
We weren't the only ones in a mad rush toward the end of the year,
and some of Apple's engineers probably enjoyed their holiday
breaks more after shipping a variety of updates. They include Mac
OS X 10.3.2, iTunes 4.2, QuickTime 6.5, and Battery Update 1.1.
Most awaited of the updates is Mac OS X 10.3.2, which promises
improved file sharing and directory services for mixed Mac and PC
networks, more robust printing to PostScript printers, improved
font management, updates to Mail and Address Book, and new ATI and
Nvidia graphics drivers. Apple offers an expanded change list on
the Web. Improvements in 10.3.1 and recent security updates are
also bundled in for anyone who hasn't already gotten those.
Unfortunately, Apple says nothing about the problems users
experienced with FireWire 400 hard drives in Panther, merely
reiterating the note from 10.3.1 that says users with FireWire
800 drives should still upgrade their drives' firmware. Mac OS X
10.3.2 is available in Software Update as a 38.2 MB download;
it's also available separately as a 36.4 MB download.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25652>
<http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120288>
iTunes 4.2 appears to be a fairly minor release, primarily adding
support for signing into the iTunes Music Store from an AOL
account. You can now view the iTunes Music Store in a separate
window (useful for checking to make sure you don't already own a
particular song), and iTunes 4.2 also reportedly features a number
of performance improvements. iTunes 4.2 is a 6.4 MB download from
Software Update; it requires Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later, with Mac OS
X 10.2.4 or later necessary to share music. In related news, Apple
and AOL announced that AOL members can now preview, purchase, and
download songs available on AOL Music by clicking an iTunes button
next to featured tracks, a move that can only help iTunes Music
Store sales, which topped 25 million songs at the end of December.
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/>
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/dec/18aol.html>
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/dec/15itunes.html>
QuickTime 6.5, an 18.2 MB download from Software Update, enables
creation and playback of 3GPP2 and AMC "mobile multimedia"
formats, improves text track support and DV playback options, and
enhances support for iMovie, iDVD, and Final Cut Pro. QuickTime
6.5 requires Mac OS X 10.2.5 or later.
<http://www.apple.com/quicktime/>
Lastly, owners of white iBooks and aluminum PowerBooks will see
Battery Update 1.1 appear in Software Update as a 520K download
(it's also available as a 160K standalone installer). Battery
Update 1.1 claims to enhance the performance of the battery to
ensure that full capacity is available. Some users on TidBITS Talk
reported significantly increased fan activity after installing
Battery Update 1.1 and Mac OS X 10.3.2; see the discussion on
TidBITS Talk. If you download and install the update manually,
it alerts you if it's not necessary for your computer; relying
on Software Update is probably easiest.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120281>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2133>
In Memoriam: Phil Goldman, 1964-2003
------------------------------------
by Jorg Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'm saddened to relay this news, but Phil Goldman, who started
his career at Apple and co-authored the System 6 MultiFinder with
Erich Ringewald, passed away the day after Christmas. If you don't
remember his name from the "About MultiFinder" about box, you've
probably heard of his most famous venture, WebTV, which he co-
founded. More recently he founded Mailblocks, a company which
provides spam-free email using a challenge-response approach.
The usual obituaries point out his career, his wife and two kids,
and his work with Brave Kids, a charity that helps families with
severely ill children remain connected through the Internet, in
part by giving them free WebTVs.
But I will remember him as one of a very small class of people who
understood software at the deepest levels. He could talk to you
passionately about simplifying user interfaces and making software
accessible, all the way down to how the Mac OS did process swaps
efficiently... and he could debug it in MacsBug. He was also an
exceptionally nice guy; in the WebTV days, he often had extra San
Francisco 49ers tickets available, and he would send out email and
give them away to whomever made it to his office first. Many of us
in the computer industry will miss him personally, and the future
will be poorer for the lack of his intelligence, insight, and
passion.
<http://biz.yahoo.com/ao/031230/obit_goldman_1.html>
<http://nytimes.com/2003/12/31/technology/31GOLD.html>
<http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/7597357.htm>
<http://about.mailblocks.com/press_1228_2003_goldman.asp>
The Web Crossing Begins
-----------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Over the last few weeks, I've been taking a break from visions of
sugar plums to delve into the great mysteries of completely new
server software. As I noted a few months ago in "Seven Hundred
Issues, a CMS, and Creative Commons" in TidBITS-700_, we're in the
lengthy process of switching all of our Internet services over to
the industrial-strength Web Crossing running on a dual-processor
Xserve hosted at digital.forest.
<http://www.webcrossing.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07385>
Making such a major switch while keeping everything running is
tricky, but I've started by moving most of our local email users
over and converted some of our internal mailing lists to Web
Crossing. That's all in preparation for moving our much larger
mailing lists as well, starting with the translation distribution
lists and TidBITS Talk, and finishing up with the main TidBITS
lists, after which we'll turn our attention to Web services.
I tell you all this for two reasons. First, it's possible that
I'll make a mistake that could result in mail bouncing briefly,
duplicate messages, or some similar confusion. Don't stress about
such issues, and unless the problem continues, assume I already
know about it.
Second, and more important, one of the big advantages of Web
Crossing is that you'll be able to manage your own subscriptions,
which of course requires an account. Whenever I move a mailing
list from our old list software to Web Crossing, the Mailing List
Manager account will send you a message telling you that you've
been subscribed to a list. Pay special attention to the first
message you get, because, at the bottom, it will display your Web
Crossing username (which is your email username, possibly with a
random number appended to it to avoid duplicates), a randomly
generated password, and a link to our Web Crossing server. With
that information, you can log in to Web Crossing to change your
password to something you'll remember, manage your subscriptions,
and change your email address. If you forget your password, Web
Crossing can create a new one and email it to you.
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/>
I'm taking the conversion slowly, partially because it takes
time to learn and configure software as powerful as Web Crossing
(especially while doing all my normal work), and partially because
the folks at Web Crossing are making requested changes as I go.
So far, it's been a great learning process, so keep your fingers
crossed as I keep working at it!
Apple Computer, Going Forward into 2004
---------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
In the first issue of the new year in past years, I've attempted
to predict some of the big stories of the coming months with
varying degrees of success. You can check how well I did over
the last few years yourself; this year I want to change direction
slightly and look at where Apple _should_ go.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07035>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06688>
Some of these ideas come from the keynote I gave at the O'Reilly
Mac OS X Conference in October of 2003; after that talk, Tim
O'Reilly and I were chatting about Apple's inconsistency in
emphasizing a particular technology or feature in one product,
but ignoring it entirely in another. As Tim said, iTunes has some
truly neat features, such as Rendezvous-based discovery of shared
music; wouldn't it be useful if iPhoto had Rendezvous-based
discovery of shared photos? To put it another way, from the
outside, it looks like the "Not Invented Here" syndrome (any
technology we didn't invent isn't worthwhile) scaled down to
the product group.
Let's look at specific areas Apple can and should focus effort to
improve both their products and the Macintosh experience for the
rest of us.
**Proactive Hardware Testing** -- Mac OS X has radically improved
the overall stability of the Macintosh, although I've found
Panther to be quirkier than Jaguar, with occasional inexplicable
hard freezes on my dual-processor 1 GHz Power Mac G4. Other
TidBITS staffers ran into trouble with third-party RAM modules
that worked fine in Jaguar, but caused constant crashes in
Panther.
Specific troubles will come and go; as long as the overall trend
is toward more reliability, I won't complain too loudly. My larger
concern is that we still lack sufficient diagnostic and reporting
mechanisms to identify and isolate bad hardware of all sorts
before it causes trouble. How do you tell if a FireWire or
USB device is bad, for instance? Trial and error, just like
the old days.
Apple is making some steps in the right direction. Panther's Disk
Utility can now report on the SMART status of your hard drives.
SMART, or Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, is
a feature built into most modern hard drives. By monitoring
numerous variables about the drive operation, SMART can
theoretically predict when a drive is about to fail. It won't
predict catastrophic failures, but identifying failures that
will occur because of cumulative small problems over time is
a good start. Open Disk Utility, select the drive (not a volume)
in the left column, and look at the bottom of the window for
the SMART status.
<http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/featuresSMART.html>
Similarly, Panther now reports actual network status in the
Network preference pane, including telling you if a cable is
unplugged or if you have a self-assigned IP address, both of which
can save significant troubleshooting time. A final good move is
that Apple now provides (with at least some new Macs; I can't
vouch for all of them) the Apple Hardware Test Utility for testing
many of a Mac's hardware subsystems. Look on the discs that come
with your Mac; for my 12-inch PowerBook G4, Apple Hardware Test
is on the Software Install and Restore DVD, and you launch it by
holding down Option at startup, and then selecting it instead of
a boot disk.
I'd like to see Apple wrap all these pieces together and figure
out a way to run them automatically. I learned about the Apple
Hardware Test utility only when the Small Dog Electronics tech
support staff asked me to run it to help track down the cause of
the constant kernel panics and hard freezes I was seeing on the
PowerBook (it was bad RAM). A better approach might be to have
a program, perhaps in firmware, look for any hardware changes at
startup and automatically offer to test the new device, and then
to run the tests on an automatic basis alongside the regularly
scheduled Unix cleanup tasks that take place while the Mac is
idle.
Such a feature might not seem sexy, but I think it would be easy
for Apple to justify on a marketing basis, not to mention reduced
tech support costs and increased customer satisfaction. Call it
"Proactive Testing" and sell it as a technology that ensures that
the user's Mac will perform some basic verification on anything
the user adds, be it RAM, an internal or external hard drive, or
a USB device. Everyone knows that computers can be a royal pain
when they don't work right; being able to identify bad hardware
before it causes trouble would be a big win for Apple.
**Emphasize Identity** -- Projects like the Virginia Tech
Terascale Cluster of 1,100 Power Mac G5s aside, the Mac has always
concentrated more on communication than number crunching. From day
one, the Macintosh has been a tool for communicating with others,
with MacWrite and MacPaint in the early days, and, more recently,
via the Internet with a slew of applications like iChat AV,
iTunes, and iPhoto. Apple has done a good job with most of
these applications, providing better interfaces, integrating
communications technologies into Mac OS X, and building a
better mousetrap with small devices like the iPod and iSight.
<http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terascale/>
What should come next? An emphasis on identity. Central to all
communication is the concept of identity, but Apple's software and
services are extremely fuzzy about identity at the moment. Think
about all the places you must identify yourself: when logging into
your Mac, when connecting to file servers, when sending email,
when connecting to many Web sites (including Apple's own .Mac and
Apple Store), when using iChat, when sharing music via iTunes, and
more. For each of those places, you probably have a different way
of identifying yourself, but you're the same person in each place.
Why do I have to identify myself repeatedly to access my own
accounts on other Macs on my network? Why, when I access my own
shared music in iTunes with my other Macs, do I have no more
privileges to create playlists or manipulate songs than any other
user? Why do I have to remember different user names and passwords
not just for multiple Web sites, but for multiple Web services run
by Apple itself? Where is Apple's vaunted hardware, software, and
Web services integration when it comes to identity?
Identity, and the associated concept of permissions, will be key
to communications in the future. We need ways both to identify
ourselves to others and to identify people wanting to communicate
with us. Even more important, we need ways of saying exactly what
each person is allowed to do in a particular communication
scenario. Apple has the building blocks necessary to give Mac
users the opportunity of creating and using a single electronic
identity, and Apple has more of a chance to anoint a standard than
almost any other company out there. (If Microsoft had a better
reputation for trustworthiness and had chosen to make .NET
Passport an open standard, I think it would have had a much
large impact.)
I've long believed that identity will be a major issue; it's
why I put a lot of effort into the XNS (eXtensible Name Service)
effort a few years back. Unfortunately, XNS suffered from
intellectual property baggage and a confusing split of management
responsibilities and capabilities between XNSORG (the non-profit
organization I chaired) and OneName Corporation (the company
that developed XNS and licensed it to XNSORG). Also damaging
was OneName's difficulty in finding funding; the company has
survived, but only by the skin of its teeth, and it is currently
reorganizing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. XNSORG has
essentially been in limbo for much of this time as well.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06133>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06485>
<http://www.onename.com/>
<http://www.xns.org/>
Despite these discouraging signs, and thanks almost single-
handedly to the efforts of Drummond Reed, XNS is still alive, and
chunks of the technical specification are now under the auspices
of OASIS, a global non-profit standards consortium. The Extensible
Resource Identifier specification was approved last month by the
OASIS XRI Technical Committee, and the charter for a second
OASIS technical committee for the XDI (XRI Data Interchange)
specification was also submitted last month. With luck, having
these technical specifications at OASIS will make it easier for
other organizations, like Apple, to start developing identity
services based on these open standards.
<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xri>
<http://www.onename.com/standards.html>
**The Open/Proprietary Balance Beam** -- Mac OS X has been a grand
experiment in melding the best of the open source world and the
best of the proprietary source world, building Apple's legendary
ease-of-use on top of the equally legendary power of an open-
source Unix implementation. Even at higher levels, Apple has done
a good job of creating open frameworks that enable developers to
create applications quickly and easily. Some are relatively well
known, such as the WebKit framework that significantly simplifies
building Web access into an application. Other examples are less
well known, such as Address Book, Apple's system-wide contact
database.
To users, Address Book appears to be a relatively simple
application for tracking contacts, but in fact it's just a front
end to the Address Book framework, and that in turn is just a
way of talking to an open source database called MetaKit. As
a result, any application can read from and write to the Address
Book database, picking and choosing which fields interest them,
adding custom fields, and even marking fields as coming from a
specific application. An ever-increasing number of applications
take advantage of these capabilities now.
<http://www.equi4.com/metakit.html>
There are at least two huge benefits to creating these frameworks.
Developers are empowered, and as much as it might seem difficult
to compete with Safari, the effort of doing so is significantly
less thanks to the WebKit framework. (In fact, OmniWeb 5, a
pre-release version of which will be shown at Macworld Expo
this week, uses WebKit to match Safari's rendering while offering
Omni Development's take on what a Web browser interface should
be.) But the more interesting benefit is that you don't have to
worry about your data being held hostage. With Address Book, for
instance, if you didn't like Apple's interface, you could, at
least in theory, use a front-end from another developer.
<http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/5/>
But Apple isn't consistent here. If iPhoto were merely Apple's own
front-end to a generic image cataloging framework, instead of the
proprietary solution it is today, users wouldn't have to worry
about entrusting not just all their photos to iPhoto, but also all
the metadata (titles, keywords, and albums) that gives meaning to
all those photos. Also, if developers could extend or even replace
portions of iPhoto's functionality, those people for whom iPhoto
falls down would have significantly more options.
My point here is that although some parts of Apple understand
the concept of building on top of open frameworks, the religion
clearly hasn't spread everywhere within the company. Closed
solutions like iPhoto may serve the purpose of making the Mac
attractive to consumers, but they don't let other developers
make the Mac even more attractive to consumers.
**I Need More Speed, Scotty!** Performance is a tricky topic to
complain about, because it's easy to rely on speed increases
thanks to hardware improvements, particularly when doing so
guarantees obsolescence and encourages Mac users to buy new
computers every few years. If older Macs didn't seem slow running
the latest software, many people would stick with them even
longer than they do now, which would reflect poorly on Apple's
bottom line.
Mac OS X's performance was nearly unusable in 10.0, distinctly
usable in 10.1, and perfectly reasonable in 10.2, and Apple seems
to have decided that perfectly reasonable is all that's necessary.
On some machines, Panther seems a little faster than Jaguar, but
on my dual-processor 1 GHz Power Mac G4, I see the spinning pizza
of death far more frequently in Panther than I ever did in Jaguar,
and overall, the Mac just feels more sluggish. Either way, I'm
disappointed because Mac OS X has never achieved the snappiness
of Mac OS 9, and given the kind of hardware we have in today's
computers, I expect blazing speed.
So as much as I'd like to see Mac OS X increase in speed
significantly, I don't expect it to happen, since I don't think
Apple wants to spend the engineering resources necessary to do
it, particularly when maintaining the status quo keeps money
from hardware upgrades flowing in.
That said, there are three other performance-related areas where
Apple could and should improve the Macintosh experience. All rely
on improvements in functional performance, not computational
performance. Computational performance involves increasing the
speed of the processor or streamlining code so it executes more
quickly. More important is functional performance, or improving
ease-of-use so users can complete tasks more quickly. Ironically,
functional performance usually comes at the expense of
computational performance, as a program consumes CPU cycles
to simplify user actions - the sheer popularity of the graphical
interface is evidence of the importance of spending CPU time on
functional performance.
First, Mac OS X's dreaded spinning pizza of death indicates that
an application isn't responding, either because it crashed, at
which point there's no recovering, or because it's performing a
lengthy task. In Mac OS 9, you could often interrupt those lengthy
tasks with Command-period; I'd like to see that capability return
to Mac OS X. It's so frustrating to make a mistake that results in
an application going away for a few minutes without being able to
interrupt the task, and it's especially frustrating when you're
waiting for the Finder to realize that a network volume isn't
accessible.
Second, remember Hiro Yamamoto's Boomerang utility from the days
of yore? It simplified opening files and folders that you'd opened
recently, and although Boomerang itself was both enhanced (to
Super Boomerang) and imitated over the years, relatively few
developers picked up on its overall lesson. Boomerang understood
that your recent past actions were the ones you were most likely
to want to repeat. To generalize that point, existing data can be
used to simplify (and therefore speed up) future actions. It's
a subtle and valuable lesson, and some of Apple's software
understands it. Address Book can automatically complete many
fields based on data in those fields for existing contacts;
the Displays menu shows just your recently selected resolution
switches; and a quick press of Command-Tab switches between your
two most recently used applications rather than show the entire
list of running programs. But too many applications don't
understand Boomerang's lesson, or don't implement it fully, so
although Safari can auto-complete URLs, based on pages you've
previously visited, it can do so only if you start typing from
either the beginning of the URL or the part of the domain after
www. And iPhoto currently does nothing to aid the organization
and categorization of newly imported photos based either on
comparisons with previously imported photos or your previous
actions. Every product team, whether inside Apple or working
on an independent application, should think hard about how their
software could do more work for the user based on past data or
actions.
Third is a frustration with system instrumentation that Tim
O'Reilly has articulated on numerous occasions. Someone at Apple
needs to _analyze_ which of Apple's products have come up with
highly functional interface elements that help users work faster,
and work to spread those ideas to other product groups. For
instance, iTunes can track which songs you play most frequently
using the Top 25 Most Played playlist; offering a similar option
in iChat and Mail for the people with whom you chat or email
the most would also have significant benefits. (This example
actually overlaps with the Boomerang lesson, since the people
you've communicated with recently are probably the people you'll
want to communicate with next, too.) How should this spread of
ideas take place? Tim's idea, and it's a good one because it
would serve developers outside Apple as well, is that we need
a systematic document, akin to the original Apple Human Interface
Guidelines, that would look at the best practices of existing
applications and talk about how interconnected applications
should behave.
**File Sharing, The Next Generation** -- The Macintosh broke new
ground with the introduction of Personal File Sharing because it
enabled any Mac to act as a file server. We've come a long way
since then, as evidenced by the hefty list of file sharing
protocols in Mac OS X's Sharing preference pane, and Rendezvous
gave us back some of the ease of device discovery we lost in
the switch from AppleTalk to TCP/IP as the primary networking
protocol.
Despite these many new ways of sharing files and improvements
like Rendezvous, Apple has done nothing with the most important
development in file sharing over the last decade: peer-to-peer
file sharing. We're still stuck in a device-driven model of file
sharing, so if you want to work with a shared file, you must know
what server holds that file, have a user name and password, and
explicitly make a connection to that server. And all that assumes
you can make a network connection to the server.
File sharing doesn't have to be so limited, and in fact, a product
called DataClub from the early 1990s showed an alternative. With
DataClub, every Mac on the network devoted some space to a "cloud"
that could hold shared files. All the files in the cloud, no
matter which Mac actually held them, appeared as though in a
single volume, and if the Mac that held a particular file was
turned off, that file was greyed out to indicate it wasn't
available.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=03212>
Since the days of DataClub, we've seen the rise of peer-to-peer
file sharing networks like Napster, Kazaa, eDonkey2000, and a host
of others. But none of that technology has appeared in the Mac OS,
perhaps due to the fear that the uninformed would somehow equate
it with trading of music or other copyrighted content.
I'd like to see Apple build peer-to-peer file sharing technologies
into Mac OS X so a network of Macs and Macintosh users could
become more powerful and flexible than the mere sum of its parts.
Multiple copies of shared files could be stored across multiple
machines, eliminating the problem of a turned-off Mac or traveling
PowerBook. Browsing for servers would become a thing of the past;
shared files would simply be accessible at all times in what
seemed like a local set of folders. Such a system could even
automatically maintain backups of data that wasn't shared by
distributing it in encrypted chunks around other Macs on the
network. All this would work best over a high-speed local network,
but designed and implemented properly, nothing would stop it from
extending to the Internet.
**File System Databases** -- To finish this look into a possible
future direction for Apple and Mac OS X, think briefly about what
my ideas about a cloud of shared files would require at a slightly
lower technical level. How would you mark a file to be shared,
and how would you determine who would be allowed to access the
file, and in what ways? On the other side of the equation, how
would another user find the files you shared, and what would
happen if that person started editing a file while someone
else had it open?
The answer to all these questions lies in treating files as
objects in a database, since database technology long ago
addressed all these issues with permissions, users and groups,
metadata, and record locking. But the file system that manages
files on disk is a rather poor database, and putting a robust,
high-performance database underneath the file system might be
necessary for such a peer-to-peer file sharing system to work
effectively. This isn't a new concept - I hinted at it in a
TidBITS April Fools article from 1992, and talked more about
the utility of a system-level database in a pair of articles
in 1996.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=03159>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00906>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00900>
With a database underneath the file system, folders in the Finder
could be more generic containers whose contents would be based on
constantly updated searches, so they could hold all files shared
by a particular user, for instance, or all files available to a
particular group. Additional metadata could further refine the
list of available files, enabling you to limit the available files
to those created by a specific program, or during a specific date
range. Record-locking could prevent one user from overwriting
another user's changes when two people wanted to use the same file
simultaneously. In some situations, the locking could perhaps take
place at a more granular level than the entire file, so multiple
people could work on the same file simultaneously without stepping
on each other's changes, much as SubEthaEdit provides real-time
collaborative text editing now.
<http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/>
The idea of a database underneath the file system is not only not
new, it's where Microsoft is going with WinFS in the next major
revision to Windows, due at some point in a few years.
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/pillars/WinFS/default.aspx>
**The Next Step** -- I won't pretend that these suggestions are
easy, but it's clear that at least some groups at Apple understand
their importance, so I hope my words won't fall on deaf ears. The
question is if Apple management can identify the most powerful
of these general concepts and appropriately spread them to other
products so the overall Mac experience can benefit from the best
work being done now in specific areas.
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/05-Jan-04
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
**Recent updates causing PowerBook fan activity** -- Apple's
Battery Update 1.1, perhaps in conjunction with Mac OS X 10.3.2,
seems to have caused increased fan activity on some PowerBooks and
iBooks. Is it a glitch, or a way to cool down those hot aluminum
PowerBooks? (11 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2133>
$$
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