512 Pixels

Update: I’m donating my 25th birthday to charity: water. See the details here.

I’ve added a banner for charity: water on my sidebar, and I’d like to explain why. Here are some facts that I bet you didn’t know:

• Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80 percent of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren’t strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery and other illnesses.
• In Africa alone, people spend 40 billion hours every year just walking for water. Women and children usually bear the burden of water collection, walking miles to the nearest source, which is unprotected and likely to make them sick. Along their long walk, they’re subjected to a greater risk of harassment and sexual assault.
• In areas where gathering water is impossible, small-scale private water distributors charge full market prices, forcing the poorest households to spend up to 11% of their income on life’s most basic need. Even this water is most likely contaminated if it has been collected from unprotected rivers or ponds.

Charity: water is a non-profit group dedicated to bringing water to the most desperate people on the planet.

So here are some things you can do:

• Get informed. Check out this page on the charity: water website to learn more about why water is such a big deal. To see how the World Water Crisis affects other tragedies — including genocide, visit Operation Broken Silence’s¹ report on the World Water Crisis.
• Raise awareness. Tell people what the World Water Crisis is all about.
• Do something to help. You can donate directly to charity: water, purchase some kick-ass merchandise or even donate your birthday to help those in need.

Charity: water’s administrative expenses are privately covered, so 100% of public donations to directly fund sustainable water solutions in areas of greatest need. Just $20 can give one person clean water for 20 years.

After charity: water installs a well in a village or area, 6–10 community members are appointed to the Water Committee and are responsible for overseeing the functionality of the water point. Water Committees are often the first chance for women to step into elected leadership roles. This new responsibility can restore dignity, initiative and equality to community members.

A lack of clean water kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.

It doesn’t have to.

At yesterday’s event, Steve Jobs said this about touchscreen Macs:

It gives great demo, but after a while your arm feels like it’s going to fall off. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal.

I think most people assume that the future of the desktop computer is touch.

I got this email from ForkBombr reader Paul S.:

So I’ve been thinking, do you envision a fully touch-based Mac? Imagine two iPads clamshelled together like an 11-inch Air. Top mainly for display, bottom mainly for input.

As an editor, I can imagine a 24-inch (x2) version of this, using FCP full-screen: timeline, bins, controls on a large control surface in front of me, video displays up top.

The design would be clunky though, I think. and an Apple all-in-one in this manner is hard to imagine. I don’t much like the patent leaks for touch-based iMac that have been floating around (with the adjustable stand).

Paul is referring to this image, from an Apple patent outlining how an iMac could swivel down and become a touch-based computer.

This plan outlines a computer that is used like a “normal” desktop, with a keyboard and mouse, but that can also act as a single Multi-Touch device when lowered to a horizontal position. I don’t think Paul’s double-iPad-clamshell device would work, especially since there’d still be a disconnect between the input and what’s actually happening. The only thing more disjointed than the current keyboard and mouse would be touch a surface to have something move or happen on another surface.

I think that while this patent solves the “touch wants to be hardware” issue, it doesn’t solve the software issue.

Even with Lion’s new features,¹ Mac OS X is simply not ready for touch. Menus, window controls, lists² and complicated toolbars are too small of targets to be usable with a finger. The remarks Jobs made about 7-inch tablets and small targets can be applied to the desktop, too.

Rentzsch:

Software trials are loved by customers and developers alike. It’s easy to see why: customers get to try out first hand how an app works risk-free. Developers make their customers happier and reduce refunds. Yet, inexplicably, Apple doesn’t offer trials of any sort. In fact, their developer agreement forbids it. This is questionable policy for a $2.99 game, but inexcusable for a $60 Mac app.

See the entire PDF here, or just hit the high points courtesy of Nilay Patel.

Ben Brooks:

One thing that I noticed when Mac OS X Lion was being demoed yesterday was how difficult of a time the demo person was having utilizing the multi-touch gestures on the Magic Mouse. Take a look at the video from yesterday, you can clearly see that when he is trying to perform the swipe to the side to change to and from a fullscreen app he has to do it a couple of times to get that gesture to take. Not every time, just some times.

It is also important to note that this is a guy who has theoretically spent a lot of time practicing this very gesture.

Ben’s right — this was an awkward moment during the keynote. Without a doubt, the Magic Trackpad was invented with Lion in mind. Apple is the most methodical company on the planet — there’s nothing done without a reason. I’d bet that by the time Lion rolls around, iMacs will ship with the Magic Trackpad — not a mouse — by default.

Arnold Kim:

With the announcement of the upcoming Mac App Store just a few hours old, Australian game studio Firemint has already announced that they will be delivering their award-winning game Flight Control to the Mac. They released the above screenshot which is said to be an actual screenshot of Flight Control HD running on a Mac.

While gaming has never been a strongpoint for OS X, some of the best games around exists for iOS. If converting iOS apps to run on the Mac is simple, the Mac App Store may be a huge deal — far beyond just gaming.

Jeff Carlson:

When Apple radically changed iMovie between the ‘06 and ‘08 releases, one of the biggest criticisms was the abandonment of the traditional editing timeline. Instead of one horizontal succession of clips at the bottom of the screen, iMovie ’08 introduced an editing area at the top-left of the screen where the movie wrapped like a paragraph.

Well, if you’ve been pining for a “real” timeline, it’s time to re-evaluate iMovie ’11. With a couple of clicks, you can have it back.

This is awesome, since I still use iMovie HD for this very feature.

Ross Miller:

Amusingly enough, you know what’s missing from the new MacBook Air models? Adobe Flash Player. While preloaded on Apple’s past hardware, out of the box here it just says missing plugin, with no click to install option. To be fair, Flash doesn’t come standard on a lot of machines, even for Windows, but we wonder if past models will continue to ship out with Adobe’s plugin, especially once OS X 10.7 becomes de facto.

Holy shit.

Update: Nilay Patel confirms.

Well, the next big cat has a name, and that name is Lion. Here’s is Apple’s introduction of OS X 10.7:

We took our best thinking from Mac OS X and brought it to the iPhone. Then we took our best thinking from the iPhone and brought it to iPad. And now we’re bringing it all back to the Mac with our eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system.

While I’ve already discussed one of the big features¹ of Lion, the Mac App Store, let’s dive into the other things the company outlined today.

Launchpad

Under Snow Leopard, there are three ways to open an application:

• Click the icon in the Dock
• Search for it using Spotlight
• Navigate to the Applications folder and find it
• Set up a Stack for the Applications folder, click on that Stack and find the program

Launchpad is a glorified Stack, really. Here’s Apple’s descripition:

The Launchpad gives you instant access to your apps — iPad style. Just click the Launchpad icon in your Dock. Your open windows fade away, replaced by an elegant, full-screen display of all the apps on your Mac. It takes just a swipe to see multiple pages of apps, and you can arrange apps any way you like by dragging an app icon to a new location or by grouping apps in folders. Downloaded an app from the App Store? Your new app automatically appears on the Launchpad, ready to blast off.

So, in short, click a Dock icon, and get a big grid of your apps.

This is a pretty obvious carryover from the iPad. While it will simplify opening new apps, I’m not sure that it simplifies things radically. Seems like a silly headline feature to me.

Of course, there are those that makes this fear for Finder’s life. Launchpad works outside of any Finder window. Is this one step closer to an Finder-less Mac? iPhoto, iMovie, iCal and other applications already store their data in ways that users can’t directly access. It’s not a small jump to hide regular old documents as well.

iWork on the iPad simply shows you a list of what is available to open, hiding the actual structure. iWork on the Mac uses the Media Palette to pull in photos — this seems like a tiny step in that direction, and while I’m not scared yet, I understand that some people are.

Full-screen Apps

While Apple is touting this is a new-to-Lion feature, it’s really a very old idea that disappeared before OS X even made it to Public Beta stage almost 10 yeas ago.

Full-screen apps take up every pixel on the display — getting rid of the Dock, the Menubar, everything. The only current built-in app that does this on the Mac is Time Machine.

While visually reminiscent of the iPad, single window mode on OS X is drastically different — several apps are still fully running in the background. Instead of doing one task at a time, this lets users simply focus on one task at a time. That’s a critical difference.

Mission Control

This is the biggest UI change Apple has made in years:

Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that provides you with a comprehensive view of what’s running on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything — including Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard, and full-screen apps— all in one place. With a simple swipe gesture, your desktop zooms out to Mission Control. There you can see your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full-screen apps, Dashboard, and even other Spaces, arranged in a unified view. And you can get to anything you see on Mission Control with just one click. Making you the master of all you survey.

I think it’s a change for the better. While it may take some getting used to, I think that Mission Control will be a very handy feature. Spaces and Exposé are easily confused by most users.

Don’t miss the detail that the background for Mission Control is the default image used on the iPad while waiting for UI elements to build in. It is a subtle, but purposeful thing.

“Auto-Save” and “Resume at Launch”

While Apple didn’t give much detail about these features, it will make life easier for many users. It is unclear if these APIs will be available only to App Store programs. I see these features being slow to come to large programs like Microsoft Office — if they come at all. Sadly, Office is the perfect candidate for an auto-save feature.

Final Thoughts

While Apple is touting Lion as “iPad meets Mac,” the melding isn’t as complete as it would seem. Most of the features outlined today are more cosmetic than functional.

However, Lion opens the floodgates when it comes to conversations of Apple more deeply combining iOS and Mac OS X. I think that Lion is just the start of that process, leaving some uneasy.

That said, Apple is a smart company. It knows that there are things that work well on mobile devices that simply don’t make sense on the desktop. Hopefully Apple keeps that in mind as Mac OS X continues to age, and the lines between the desktop and mobile devices continue to blur.

Well, it’s happened. The Mac App Store is coming to the Mac in the next 90 days:

The Mac App Store is just like the App Store for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. So it’s as easy to find and download Mac apps as it is to add your favorite magazine to iPad or a new game to iPod touch. You can browse Mac apps by category, such as games, productivity, music, and more. Or do a quick search for something specific. Read developer descriptions and user reviews. Flip through screenshots. When you find an app you like, click to buy it.

Sound familiar? It should, as Apple is basically bringing one of the keystones of iOS to the desktop.

On the Mac Developer webpage, Apple outlines the benefits for developers of selling software in the App Store:

• You pick the price
• You get 70% of sales revenue
• Receive checks monthly
• No charge for free apps
• No credit card fees
• No hosting fees
• No marketing fees

Sound familiar? It should, as these benefits are the same one Apple uses to sell developers on using the iOS App Store.

I think that most Mac developers — especially the smaller ones — will greatly benefit from an App Store. Getting in front of millions of users is something most developers simply can’t do on their own. Plus, with Apple handling the hosting, credit card processing and marketing, developers can spend more resources on what counts — building applications.

Customers will benefit, too. This will greatly simplify the app installation process for Mac users. I bet most average Mac users run Firefox and Skype from disk images because they don’t understand how DMGs work.

Additionally, by tying purchases to iTunes accounts, it makes for an easy, simple way to spend money. The function of re-downloading apps will make it easier to move to a new computer as well, if a migration isn’t possible.

However, the same fears that surround the iOS App Store will surround the Mac App Store. Will Apple reject Mac apps for silly reasons? Can Apple’s already slow approval process handle an influx of Mac apps? Will Apple post rules for developers? Will Apple accept apps built with XCode only? Isn’t this another example of DRM creeping into things?

While most of these answers remain unknown, I think the biggest fear is that Apple won’t allow users to install non-approved applications.

The key difference between the two platforms is that the on iOS devices, the App Store is the only way to get apps. On the Mac that is not the case. Users will still be able to download apps from the Internet and install them. While some people are jumping up and down that this is the beginning of the end of OS X as a flexible, “open” platform, I’m not convinced it is. Yes, the Mac App Store raises questions and some concerns, but I just don’t see Apple stopping users from installing their own programs.

For one, I don’t think Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office will ever be on the Mac App Store. Period. Adobe uses the iOS App Store because it’s the only option — they aren’t going to jump into a Mac App Store after doing things a certain way on the desktop for two decades. If the only way to a Mac is the App Store, the Mac will starve from the lack of high-end programs.

Secondly, since Apple more than likely won’t accept programs like torrent clients, there will always be an desire from the Mac user base to keep side-loading an option.

Yes, most people will probably get most of their apps from the App Store eventually.

But most and all are very, very different words.

Earlier today, Ben Brooks and I had a conversation on Twitter:

This whole thing of a small Mac raises an interesting set of questions. Do people need a smaller Mac OS X device, as I suggested to Ben? Can a small Mac survive in an iPad world?

One problem that has always plagued the MacBook Air is that it can’t really serve as a stand-alone computer for most Mac customers. I think most people use an iMac or a MacBook Pro as their machine machines — and for good reasons. These machines are powerful, with large amounts of storage available for photos, music and more.

The MacBook Air, however, tops out at 256GB of storage, with 64GB being the base option for the smaller MacBook Air. Many people have iTunes libraries bigger than 64GB. It’s clear that the Air isn’t designed to be a main machine for most people. It packs less horsepower, less RAM and less storage than any other Mac.

The upside of the Air — the very reason it exists — of course is size. Still razor-thin, the new smaller Air takes up even less space in a bag or on a desk as before, which is a good thing for some people.

It’s more in line with the iPad, spec-wise and size-wise, than any other member of the Mac line.

In fact, the MacBook Air’s biggest competition is the iPad. Both can be used as a standalone product, but really shine when used as a secondary device. Both have great battery life and are thin and light. The smaller Air is even close to the size of the iPad.

The difference of course is all about software.¹ For some people, iOS just doesn’t meet their needs.² The new 11.6" MacBook Air offers all of the features of Mac OS X in the smallest package ever. For people who need a full-blown computer³ that can go just about anywhere, the Air is an obvious choice. For everyone else, though, the iPad is really, really hard to ignore.

Update #1: Giles Turnbull at Cult of Mac sums it up nicely:

It looks like a beautiful product but I don’t think I’ll be buying one. If I want a lightweight portable computer, I’ll buy an iPad, which offers better battery life and is far, far cheaper. Even if I splash out on a wireless keyboard to go with it.

Update #2: Ben Brooks weighs in:

Back when the 12” PowerBook was the kingpin you had the option of 12”, 15” or 17” PowerBooks. There was no iPad, or iPhone. That is what made the 12” so damned good – there was nothing more portable and more powerful than the 12” PowerBook. Now though that is not the case, many people just travel with an iPhone and have no problems.

That is the very reason I don’t think the 11.6” MacBook Air is the heir to the 12” PowerBook – there are far better portable options. The 13” though is not the direct heir, but pairing it with an iPad and you should have all you really need.

Update #3: Marco votes in favor of the Air:

If forced to choose between bringing an Air and an iPad on a trip, to a meeting, on a train, on a plane, or pretty much anywhere, I’d choose the Air. (Even the 11”.)

Most of what I do on computing devices either can’t be done or would take much longer on an iPad, and I’m impatient and demanding with my hardware.

If you can say the same about yourself, an iPad probably won’t replace a laptop for you.

Check out the fine print.