Practicalmadness

The fine folks at Macworld just published a rundown of their favorite Mac OS X Leopard features, and it seems like the consensus is that Time Machine and the new iChat are the top draft picks from the 300+ new features in the new OS.

On the eve of Leopard’s worldwide launch tomorrow, here’s my list of the top ten features I’m looking forward to sinking my fangs into:

1. Spaces: I’ve written previously about why Spaces is awesome.

2. AutoFS and other networking improvements: Yeah, this will never make it onto a t-shirt, but apart from finally having usable virtual desktops this is the one change that will solve the most day-to-day problems I have with Tiger. And if you’ve ever gotten a ten-minute Spinning Cursor of Doom while working with a network drive, WebDAV share or iDisk from the Finder, you’ll find Leopard’s new networking code is a godsend, as the system now has a multi-threaded, robust system for handling the mounting and unmounting of networked volumes. In English, that means no more Finder crashes when you try to open a shared disk on a computer that’s been turned off.

   It’s not clear how deep the improvements go — or, for example, if they’ve made the Finder’s WebDAV access solid enough for .Mac’s iDisk to be worth using — but just the mount/unmount improvements will make using shared volumes in the Finder much, much smoother.

3. Simple screen sharing in the Finder/iChat: You can now take over control of another Mac on your network — or, using iChat, over the internet — with a single click. While this feature is being positioned as a collaboration tool (where you can simply hand control of the screen off to whoever you’re working with so you could, say, collaborate on a document or get hands-on help from an IT guy), it’ll also be a great way for people or workgroups who are using another Mac as a server to manage those machines without leaving their chairs. I plan to use it with the old iMac G5 I’m using as a media server.

4. The new iCal: iCal’s UI has been a bit pathetic — it’s still brushed metal in Tiger, and has seen woefully few changes since the app was introduced way back in OS X Jaguar five years ago. In addition to now having the iTunes 7-like “Dark Metal” default appearance shared by all Leopard apps, there’s now inline editing of events and kick-ass integration with Mail. More importantly, iCal supports group scheduling using CalDAV, an open-source calendar sharing platform. Apple’s released a free, open-source Darwin Calendar Server, which serves as the backend for the iCal Server tool bundled with the server edition of Leopard. The main difference between the two is that Calendar Server requires some sysadmin know-how and is strictly DIY, whereas iCal Server has an easy-to-use graphical interface and is fully supported by Apple.

   I’m not keen on having to set up a CalDAV server for myself if I’m the only one using it. But imagine how cool it would be if Google were to add CalDAV access to Google Calendar?

5. Calculations in Spotlight: I mentioned this briefly in my last big Leopard post, but you can now run simple mathematical queries directly from the Spotlight search bar. Whenever I need to do some simple arithmetic, I’ve been opening up an iTerm window, launching the interactive Ruby interpreter (irb) and using that as a ridiculously powerful pocket calculator. This is like using a bulldozer to look for a china cup, and being able to use Spotlight will be much faster.

6. Tabs and other UI improvements in the Terminal: Speaking of iTerm, golly gee — I guess since 2005 somebody at Apple realized some of us use the Terminal for more than the occasional bit of Unix troubleshooting. iTerm (an open-source shell interface with such lovely features as tabbed windows) is nice enough and has gotten a lot less quirky in recent releases, but it’s never been as fast or solid as Apple’s built-in Terminal client. But I work in Rails, and my workflow involves having at least two terminals open at once (one for tailing logs, one for running commands). And Leopard’s Terminal also has a streamlined UI for customizing the look and feel of my command line experience, will be pretty nice.

7. Time Machine: I mention it just to get it out of the way. Time Machine is one of those things I hope I will never need and will seldom use, which is kind of the whole point. I’m not all that wild about the wacky full screen space-travel interface for navigating Time Machine backups, but at least it’s intuitive. And the important part is that it backs my stuff up automatically in the background.

8. Secure AirPort networks now denoted with an icon: Because seriously — looking for an open hotspot by trying every network and seeing which ones don’t prompt for a password is stupid.

9. iLife browser in the system file chooser: Because, really — why should I open up iPhoto or Photo Booth if all I need is to get to that one goofy photo I took of myself last week for a blog post?

10. Dashcode and Safari 3 (Final): I’m putting these in a tie for 10th place because they’ve both been out in beta for a while. Which isn’t to say there won’t be any welcome polishes or new features I’ll be glad to get into. I love the new, non-brushed metal look/feel in Safari, and it’ll be good for Safari 3 to be out of beta. And Dashcode is just awesome — not that one strictly needs an IDE to make a freakin’ Dashboard widget.

Recently I linked to a blog post about Windows Vista, where the author was countering the Vista backlash on the basis that Microsoft’s boring little baby is (in fact) not as bad as everyone says. And you know, I’m inclined to agree with that. Vista is far from a terrible product, and it’s got a lot of things to recommend it, especially for less savvy users who need enhanced protection from viruses and other malware baked right in.

But from an end-user standpoint, Vista comes off as totally lacking in imagination. The biggest, most noticeable changes from XP at the user level are changes to existing functionality, which for a non-enthusiast with other things they could spend $149 on would beg the question: what was wrong with the old way that I should pay for the same features done over again?

I mention that to say this: the difference between Apple and Microsoft — at least when it comes to marketing an OS upgrade — is that Apple knows the value of giving us something new, even if it’s silly or stupid, to create the impression that when we pay $130 for software we mostly already have we’re actually getting something out of the deal.

So today, in honor of Apple’s new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard finally having a ship date, I’d like to highlight a couple of unsung Leopard features, for the benefit of fellow Mac fans who’ve been hearing about the new Leopard hotness for over a year and thus probably already know about headlining acts like the new system UI or Time Machine.

‘Cos while it’s one thing for Apple to just tell us there are “300 new features” in Leopard, it’s quite another to see them all listed on a really, really long web page.

Some of the highlights you may not already know about:

• The Terminal app — praise jebus hallelujah — has got tabs, just like iTerm. Tabs in Terminal work just like they do in Safari 3 (complete with dragging and a “Merge All Windows” command). And that horrific window settings panel (or panels) have been consolidated into an Inspector palette.

• There are tons of small security improvements, most of which could be called preventative since (unlike Windows) there have never been any truly major security exploits on Mac OS X.

  • New applications downloaded to your Mac from the Internet are “tagged” as such, and the first time you run such an app the system asks for your okay.

  • Apps can now be signed with a security certificate for added trustiness, with all Apple-created bundled apps (e.g. iChat, Safari, Mail) coming signed by default.

  • Apps can also be “sandboxed,” limiting their access to the system so as to prevent a security flaw in one app or service from exposing the whole shebang.

  • You can create one-off “Guest” user accounts that are purged automatically on log out, so visitors and other transients can use your computer without mucking around in your stuff or leaving behind a bunch of their own.

  • And Leopard has a “library randomization” feature similar to the one Microsoft introduced in Vista, which places system libraries in randomly-chosen memory addresses to prevent hackers from using their knowledge of where certain things are in memory to break into your system.

• Know how you can type an equation into Google and get a calculation instead of a search? Now Spotlight does that too. (This will be a welcome replacement for my current habit of using an interactive Ruby shell as a calculator.)

• Open/Save dialogs can now display an icon view, in addition to list and column views. The Open dialog now also includes an iLife browser — systemwide. Which means that de facto Photoshop-iPhoto integration is coming in just ten short days.

• Automator (the utility that lets you create automated “workflows” without the use of scripting) now includes a “Watch Me Do” feature that lets you record GUI events (like clicking a button) or actions from apps without their own Automator events.

• iChat now has built-in support for AOL’s Mobile Forwarding service, so you can turn SMS forwarding on or off easily. iChat also now (finally) supports the “invisible” status option.

• The AirPort menu extra (you know, the menu where you select which hotspot you’re using) now denotes secure networks with a lil’ padlock icon, so you can easily find open access points for all your wardriving needs.

• Because all parents are kept up at night by the fear that their children will be scarred by profanity on a Wikipedia article about Teletubbies, Leopard includes a “Wikipedia Content Filter” that “limit[s] access to profanity in Wikipedia.” Sounds good, now how about the other 9,999,999,999 websites?

• The system text-to-speech synthesizer is getting a new, English-accented voice named “Alex.” If you don’t think this is cool, you just haven’t watched enough sci-fi. Or heard John Cleese narrate your GPS directions in your car.

• You may already know that Leopard’s Mail app now has a built-in RSS reader. But not that Safari and Mail’s RSS-reading functions share information, so that if you view an RSS feed in Safari it’ll show up as read in Mail (and vice versa). So really, what you get is one systemwide RSS feature, with your choice of user experiences — Firefox-like, Thunderbird-like or both.

Trading Spaces

All of the things I mentioned are cool things, and I may use some or all of them. But there’s another reason I told my little “feature marketing” parable about Vista at the top of the post, which speaks to the real heart of why Vista’s percieved as a failure.

It’s always a little bit cool and a little bit funny when Apple says they’ve packed over a hundred (or 200! Or 300!) new features into the next Mac OS X, but when you get down to brass tacks there are always just one or two features that get your ass into the stores and your credit card out of your Scooby-Doo wallet. Like when Tiger came out: as much as I could try to convince myself that I was really paying for¹ Core Data or .Mac Syncing or some of the system-level improvements, I must admit the feature I was looking forward to playing with when I got the thing home was Dashboard.

When FedEx brings me my Leopard DVD a week from Friday, I know that after I install it I’ll be enjoying the Ruby scripting bridge, the new Finder UI and many other things for all the months and years until 10.6 comes out. But for me that One Big Feature — the one I’m jonesing for even now — is Spaces.

Yes, I know that virtual desktops have been around forever, and that Mac OS X has had two very decent implementations — Desktop Manager and VirtueDesktops — for a while now. But VirtueDesktops can be a little bit arcane, and it really does not play nicely with multiple displays, particularly with hot-plugging my Cinema Display into my laptop for when I’m at my desk.

I played around with a pre-release build of Leopard a few weeks ago, and Spaces simply blew me away. Apple really has done a terrific job making virtual desktops easy for anyone to set up, navigate and use without sacrificing any power. The killer feature is the ability to zoom out (Exposé-style) and see all your desktops at once, and then to not only jump between them but also to move windows and apps across the different spaces by simply dragging their windows around.

And not only can Spaces gracefully handle losing a second display (each Space simply gets its windows consolidated onto the remaining screen real estate), when that second display is plugged in each space is shown in the correct shape and proportion.

For example, when my 23-inch Cinema is hooked up to my 15-inch MacBook Pro with the lid open, instead of seeing four rectangular spaces I see four shapes matching my current screen layout. I like to use my laptop screen as a “dashboard” of sorts, holding my e-mail inbox, iTunes miniplayer and RSS reader while I reserve the larger main display for actual work. Spaces allows me to not just move windows off into the ether to limit clutter, but to create separate (and separately useful) distinct workspaces that are perfectly tuned to whatever task I’m on.

VirtueDesktops and Desktop Manager can do this too, to an extent. But where Spaces allows me to click and drag, VirtueDesktops forces me to use an arcane set of key commands that don’t always work the way I need them to. Spaces isn’t great because it’s a revolutionary concept, but because Apple has taken so much of the hassle out of using virtual desktops that I can quit fussing with my tools and simply focus on doing great work.

And that is absolutely worth $129 to me.²

¹ Full disclosure: I didn’t actually pay for my OS X Tiger upgrade, because I was working for Apple at the time.

² And I’m not paying $129 for Leopard because unlike some of my fellow iPhone early adopters who used their thirty pieces of silver $100 rebate to buy accessories or shiny new accessories, I chose to hold onto it until it would actually save me money on something I needed. But my point here, and with the Tiger footnote above, is that I would have paid full price for these upgrades if I’d had to.³

³ But I should probably also tell you that as I used a student discount on Panther back in 2003, I have to date never actually paid full price for a Mac OS X upgrade. But if I hadn’t been a college student, an Apple retail employee or an easily-bribed iPhone early adopter I totally would have.

Those hard-hitting, curious investigative journalists at the Associated Press have noted that golly gee, for a company that makes almost all its money from advertising Google doesn’t seem to spend much of that money advertising itself.

The funny thing is, the AP story can’t really seem to explain how Google became such an industry player despite spending almost nothing on marketing over the past few years. They do try, but the quotes and explanations they find tend to sound good while explaining nothing:

Although Google regularly promotes its brand and services on its own online ad network, that soapbox hasn’t been the key to its ubiquity.

Instead, Google has relied on word-of-mouth and the media’s obsessive coverage of its every move to establish a prized brand just nine years after Page and Brin first set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.

Okay, so “word-of-mouth” and “media obsession” — two things which, in consumer marketing terms, are virtually the same thing as “magic pixie dust.” Even word-of-mouth or (if you must) “viral” campaigns can be cultivated by a savvy marketer, and noting that a product or service is simply promoted via word-of-mouth isn’t news.

What the AP is trying to sound intelligent about here is how Google can become not just successful but ubiquitous with few or no media buys. And ironically they come closest to explaining it by citing an example of another company that’s managed to become ingrained in the American consumer landscape while spending almost nothing on traditional mass advertising:

Starbucks Corp. spent just $95 million on advertising last year, 49 percent less than Google did. Like Google, Starbucks made a name for itself by developing a distinctive product that quickly resonated with consumers whose enthusiasm became infectious.

Reporter Michael Liedtke wants to attribute Starbucks’s market dominance to some more of that “infectious enthusiasm” pixie dust, but I think the answer — both for them and for Google — is way simpler than that.

It’s a strategy you might call “designed ubiquity,” where you force your target market to engage with your product by going to where your target market lives. For Starbucks, that means opening more than 13,000 retail stores in locations with a lot of visibility for a large number of well-heeled consumers. On many a Chicago street corner, it’s easier to notice an actual Starbucks than it would be to notice an ad for a Starbucks.

And the placement of Starbucks locations corresponds to both the “Third Place” marketing philosophy and the migratory pattern of the ideal Starbucks customer. If you’re a well-heeled white person living in an affluent North Side neighborhood, you’re likely to pass at least one Starbucks on the way to and from work, and if you work in the Loop you’ll spend your day literally surrounded by them.

Starbucks locations aren’t really ubiquitous, though — they just seem that way in certain major cities. Most Chicago neighborhoods have no Starbucks stores at all, and most have just one or two locations. But they’re on every corner of the parts of the city where their most desired market (yuppies) lives and works, that’s enough to forcibly insert their brand into our national psyche, and the rest, indeed, is just word of mouth.

How does this relate to Google? Well, let me ask you something, Readers — how often do you go to google.com these days? I know we all end up there, and I’ll allow that many of you start there. But do you really type that URL (or click a bookmark of it) into your browser when you want to search for something?

Or do you just type your search query into a handy little box in the corner of your browser window?

Currently and since at least 2003, Google has been the default search engine in both Firefox and Safari. (I won’t even mention the Google Toolbar for IE and Firefox, which has been around even longer.)

As with Starbucks’s targeted ubiquity, being the default search provider for those browsers puts the Google search product at the fingertips of only the roughly 20% of the market who use them. But that’s a valuable 20%. Firefox users are more likely to be savvy, experienced users who other people turn to for advice or recommendations. And until this year, Safari was a Mac-only product that had the benefit of being the only factory-installed browser on any new Apple computer, and Mac users likewise tend to be folks other people listen to when it comes to technology.

My point here is that these placements didn’t simply come out of the clear blue sky. Google made deals with Mozilla and Apple to become their default search provider, allowing them to place themselves directly onto their most valuable target market’s browser windows, inserting themselves effectively into the zeitgeist without the expense and uncertainty of a big media buy.

The AP may be right that traditional advertising is becoming less and less relevant to the success of a company or product. But the alternative isn’t magic pixie dust. It’s a very simple and very humane: Google and Starbucks created compelling products, then found ways to challenge people to interact with their product in a way that — oh my god — was useful in its own right. For Starbucks, it was the convenience of being able to walk to the corner for a latté in less time than it took to hit the break room at your office. For Google, it was removing the added step of visiting their site to initiate a search.

Advertising is begging users who may have no desire or need for your product to come to you and ask for it. The secret to these companies’ success was to identify the customers they needed to reach and then to go after them aggressively while still finding a way to bring some value to the party.

Maybe that’s why Google’s marketing model is so hard for other companies and the media to figure out — they’re way too busy to beg.

Steven Levitt posts to the Freakonomics blog, relaying a (possibly apocryphal) Craigslist exchange between a “beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25-year-old girl” in NYC very open about looking to marry a guy making at least $500K/year, and a respondent who followed her lead and pointed out some of the flaws in her plan.

From the girl’s post, the passage that sticks out for me is this one:

I dated a businessman who makes average around 200 - 250K. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000K won’t get me to Central Park West. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

This just reminds me so much of the folks who think they could just be the next internet mogul if only they can somehow get 4 million users for their stupid social dating startup, or bad filmmakers who think the only reason they’re not bigger than Spielberg is because of some massive conspiracy of Jews.

As for what this woman in her yoga class is doing that makes her more of a catch than our dear heroine, the question I really want to ask is what they both do with their lives besides marrying rich men (or try to) and doing yoga. For most men (shallow beasts that we are) tend to marry women we could see living with for kind of a long while. That often means they’ve got something more going on than surface beauty.

If you’re looking for how this relates back to something nerdy, here it is: in the marketplace of love, this girl is competing on her looks alone. Now, let’s imagine for a moment that what this girl is selling isn’t her spectacularly beautiful body, but rather a spectacularly beautiful product — say, a hot new music player that, if looks were everything, should be an “iPod killer.”

The trouble is, looks (while certainly relevant) are not the only thing, nor even the most important thing. The reason why the iPod bests the Zune, or why the Wii is kicking the asses of both the Xbox 360 and PS3, is because those products provide a better overall experience than the competition. They’ve all got beauty and charm, but the winners are the products that have beauty, charm and brains. They’re the girls who’ll keep you up until 4 AM talking about French films, or sharing stupid jokes about whatever nonsense.

Ultimately, it’s the difference between saying you’re better and being better. ‘Cause if this girl really were prettier, wittier and classier than some schlub in her yoga class, she wouldn’t have to think about how to attract her sugar daddy. The moral of the story here is: in marketing as in dating, you’ll always do better if you can actually bring something to the relationship besides a snotty attitude about your looks.

It seems to me that with their amazingly daring approach to selling and marketing their upcoming album In Rainbows, Radiohead are not only challenging the traditional, label-dominated music industry business model but also forcing us all to think about what it is we’re buying when we buy music.

A lot of attention is being focused, of course, on their decision to release the digital version of In Rainbows on a “pay what you want” basis, which I think Pitchfork is spot on in describing as “basically the band leaking the album and asking you for a donation to access it.”

But I’m way more intrigued by the decision to make the first (and so far only) physical release, the £40 ($82) “discbox” due to ship in December, a deluxe product aimed at fans, collectors and serious audiophiles.

It’s fair to assume, I think, that casual listeners — the ones who’d buy a CD release only to rip it onto their iPods or listen to it on a Discman or car stereo, not a bitchin’ home stereo — will be entirely satisfied the digital release. For one thing it’s (more or less) free, and while casual listeners aren’t really the brazen pirates the major labels think they are, they’re definitely price-conscious. And while an audiophile might complain about the difference in quality between an MP3 and a well-mastered CD, a casual listener would neither notice nor care.

In this post-Napster, post-iPod era, there really are only three reasons why one would buy a CD rather than a download:

• The listener doesn’t have a computer or broadband internet access, or a friend who would rip them a copy of something. I.e., they buy the CD because it’s truly their only option.

• They can get it online, but prefer the superior audio quality of the CD release, and/or want their music without DRM. That being said, in either of these first two cases the packaging is less important than the music.

• They can get it online, and may rip a copy for use on an iPod or some such, but more than that they want the physical object to add to their collection.

It’s important to bear in mind that this initial self-release of the album is really just a first step, aimed at would-be pirates and “early adopters” who want the music more quickly than the creaky wheels of retail distribution will allow. Radiohead have confirmed that they’re talking to a number of labels (including their former label, the EMI-owned Capitol/Parlophone) about a retail release of In Rainbows to come out next year.

For that first group of consumers who buy CDs because that’s their only option, In Rainbows isn’t going to be available until it’s out on CD. And the second group, who want the higher quality or openness of a CD but don’t actually care about the physical packaging, will be more or less taken care of by the MP3 release.

That leaves the third group: people who buy CDs or vinyl LPs because they genuinely want a tactile, physical object, not just a distribution platter for the content. The discbox version of In Rainbows is absolutely aimed at this group.

The discbox, as shown in photographs and described on the band’s site, is more like an art object than a music release. It’s not just that it’s an expanded edition of the album, or that it includes both CD and vinyl versions of it. It’s the fact that each box is made to order, with none of the usual compromises that are made in trying to fit a band’s work into an easily shippable retail package. It’s an absolutely uncompromising version of the work, for people who would buy such a beautiful, special, semi-unique object.

For a band that’s so critical of globalization and homogenized corporate culture, the In Rainbows discbox is like the ultimate repudiation of the way music has been distributed and sold for the last few decades. A discbox may not be handmade, per se, but neither is it mass-produced. The point of it isn’t to deliver the content to a particular consumer format, but to showcase that content in the best way(s) possible, creating a wonderful, personal connection between the band and the listeners engaged (and yes, rich) enough to pay eighty bucks for something more special than just another CD.

In a way, the “free” digital release of the album is Radiohead’s concession to mass culture: if the object of a music release is simply dissemination, then why not remove all the barriers and put the thing out there in a way that people can get it, conveniently and right dammit now? They’re still a working band, of course, and they’re still asking for money in return for their work (while allowing for the likelihood that a number of people will still take the music without paying for it).

I doubt that the band is under any illusion about the discbox — it’s definitely a premium product, and it’s designed and priced accordingly. But I think it’s great that their idea of a “deluxe” edition is more than just a second disc or a slightly fancier CD case, but an object people can really enjoy owning.