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Tea Leaves
Sometimes Apple appears to be so together. You get the feeling that that their events are impeccably stage managed, and every detail is thought through (despite occasional evidence to the contrary).
Apple is also a company of patterns. They tend to like yearly patterns. It made sense to expect that they would split their holiday offerings into two events, one in September and another in October. Instead, however, they decided to have one big bash this year, with focus on four(!) major product lines:
- Apple Watch
- iPad
- Apple TV
- iPhone
Notice any omissions?
As far as I can see, there are two reasons Apple chose to ignore the Mac during today’s press event.
The Optimistic Take
This event was all about new hardware. iPhone 6s. New Apple TV. iPad Pro. Even new colors of Apple Watch. However, with the exception of brief recap of watchOS 2, there was no mention of new hardware-agnostic software features. No review of iOS 9 (except for discussion of how great iPad multitasking is on that huge iPad Pro screen). Maybe Apple would have loved to talk about the Mac, but there was no new hardware ready. Intel doesn’t have the Skylake processors ready yet, so the Mac would simply not have fit in with this program. Soon enough it will be back in the spotlight.
The Pessimistic Take
Apple was focused on the future today. The Mac received about as much screen time as Windows PCs and Android phones. It is a platform that Apple supports out of obligation. Computing is now mobile (read “touch”) centric, and the Mac is no longer a first class citizen. Sure, some dinosaurs will insist on things like access to the file system and arbitrarily placed windows for the time being, but Apple is moving on.
So which of these positions is Apple telegraphing by virtually ignoring the Mac? My best guess is that there are camps on both sides inside the company. But we should be able to suss out what direction they’re going down soon enough. After all, Apple is a company of patterns.
Ground Floor
Estimating how long it will take to program something is famously difficult. So while I’ve been plunking away at my project for the last few months, I could see that I was still quite a ways away from anything I would be proud to release. And it’s not that I’m slow—well, I am slow, but that’s not the only reason—it’s that this project is very ambitious for a guy who’s doing this all in his spare time and teaching himself what he’s doing from scratch while he’s at it.
At this point I was starting to get a bit demoralized. I didn’t want to spend another year at this with nothing to show. Was there something quick I could whip up in the mean time? Basically a dry run to get something into the store. If I was going to make any mistakes, let’s do it on something that would only take a month or two, rather than 10 times that.
So I needed a new idea. I had a few criteria.
- Everything is self contained. Web service? Apple Watch app? One thing at a time please.
- Simple UI. Nothing’s coming from a web server, and no one wants to plug a ton of info into their phone.
- Useful. Frankly having a few dollars coming in would be a nice motivation to keep this going. It needs to be something I can charge at least $0.99 for.
- Not a game. I am not an artist, so interaction should be text based. That and I’m not really a gamer, so I don’t know what makes a good game.
So I talked it out with my girlfriend over some pizza. Erin suggested a budgeting app. That was useful, but it could easily violate number 1 and 2. Peoples budgeting systems get crazy complicated, and of course everyone’s going to want it to sync to… something. What about a lightweight budgeting app? After a week or so you’d realize this was completely inadequate. But what if you only needed it for a week or so?
Most people have some sort of budgeting system, from using elaborate spreadsheets to just roughly keeping it in their heads. But when you’re on vacation that all breaks down. Your routine goes out the window. You could use some way of making sure you’ve not blown all your cash by day two.
This was what I was looking for. An idea! One that seem feasible! Something to write about on my blog! Stay tuned.
Without A Map
Editors note: This will be nerdy
I haven’t written about iOS development in several months. I haven’t given up, I just hadn’t had much to say. I was still soaking it in.
I was reading two separate books, while occasionally going down rabbit holes to understand a topic a little better, and even watching some videos (specifically the much touted CS 193P). I even whipped up a few rough test apps just to prove to myself that I could get something running, even if it didn’t do much.
Then a little while ago I received an email from Apple saying it was time to renew my yearly developers membership. So I had been working on this for a year without much to show for it. So I decided I wanted to start something. Even if it’s terrible, even if I end up trashing it and starting from scratch later, this seems like a good time to take a first concrete steps.
That was my first impulsive decision. The second was, upon firing up Xcode, choosing Swift as the language for my new project.
Even though most of what I had learned so far had been Objective-C, which I have really enjoyed writing, I thought back to my initial feelings after WWDC last year. Swift was my chance to get in on the ground floor of something.
What made me confident enough to do this the fact that I now had a basic understanding of Objective-C. This is important because Cocoa makes a lot more sense if understand that it was created hand in hand with Objective C. You can still use the Cocoa APIs from Swift, but it still feels like there’s a layer of translation happening. You end up with some weird syntax and excessive casting that only makes sense when you understand that these APIs were designed for an entirely different language.
That said, what have I got to lose, at this point? This is the future, right? And WWDC made clear that Apple was still full speed ahead on Swift.
So I jumped in and started playing around. It had been a while since I read Apple’s The Swift Language, so there was a period of adjustment in getting used to the syntax. Swift is a very programmer-y language. It was built buy compiler guys, so “fast” was as important as “easy” or “intuitive”.
But after playing around for the last couple of months, I’m feeling comfortable with it. The pace of change has slowed down, and I’m finding myself able to work for longer and longer stretches without having to look up something basic. And Playgrounds have been really helpful. Sometimes you just can’t remember if arrays are passed by value or reference, but it’s easy enough to test in 10 lines of code on a Playground.
There have been stumbling blocks. I watched Apple’s session on Protocol Oriented Programming, and got so excited I went into my project and made all my model layers structs that conformed to a specific protocol. That did not work out so well, but that story is for another blog post (and if you want a more informed opinion, go back and read Brent Simmons’s Swift Diary). But in general when I sit down I make head way.
So I’m still working. In fact, I’ve got a couple ideas now. It’s all starting to feel manageable. Which, if experience tells me anything, means I’m only a couple of weeks from once again realizing I have no idea what I’m doing.
Mojo
The big question today on the tech blogs is has Apple lost it? You can rephrase that question several ways. Is Apple’s schedule of yearly iOS and OS X releases too ambitious? Are their priorities in the right place? Can any company reasonably expect to simultaneously grow platforms as complex as OS X and iOS and introduce a new watch platform while keeping software quality high?
I don’t know the answer to that. But I can tell you that I don’t see Apple slowing down any time soon.
Imagine a world where Apple held back several years between releases. We would all be using, what, Mountain Lion and iOS 6 today? Sure, it would be stable. But it would feel stagnant. Lacking of ideas. Your iPhone 6 would look antediluvian running a two year old OS, especially next to Android’s new Material design language. The “Apple bit off too much–is doomed!” argument would be replaced by “Apple is out of ideas–is doomed!”.
Apple are in a tough spot. On the mobile side, their competition is stronger than ever. Microsoft has stumbled on the desktop, but that doesn’t matter because the Mac is being measured against its younger siblings now. We expect our devices to work seamlessly together.
As a customer, I do think now would be a good time for a “Snow Leopard” type release. Fix the weird little bugs. But I don’t think Apple can get away with that. A year is a long time to tell the world that you’re busying working on bug fixes.
And frankly, while I do have complaints about the software I’m running today, I sure wouldn’t go back.
Nothing Was Delivered 