Scrolling in Mac OS Lion

Apple released the newest version of what they call "the most advanced operating system on the planet" on Wednesday, as expected, at 8:30 in the morning. It is the first operating system (by Apple) to be distributed solely by online digital means at launch and is highly encouraged to be installed without any use of optical discs, USB drives, etc. Supposedly, Apple will sell copies of OS X Lion in the coming months in their retail stores for $69 on a USB stick.

While $69 is still cheaper than your typical install of Windows, it is basically what you pay $29 on the Mac App Store on a USB drive. The USB drive would only need to be about 4GB in size (and you can buy these as low as $8 on Amazon) so a $30ish markup sends the customer one clear message from Apple: download this, don't buy a physical copy. When they released the Mac App Store not long ago they dropped the price of their photo editing software, Aperture, from $200 to $80. The price didn't drop on the copy with physical discs. If you went into an Apple store and bought Aperture you would pay $199. If you wised up, went home, and downloaded it online through the Mac App Store, you could install it on any machine you own as many times as you'd like for no more than $79. Apple is getting rid of optical media(DVDs) in a large way and is more or less pushing their customers into the future...like it or not.

This is all well and good, but if the download and install for Lion went horribly wrong (think MobileMe), Apple would have to answer for this seemingly hasty decision.

But it didn't.

It installed perfectly, without a single hitch, on both of our machines and seems to be running well. The rest of Apple customers seem to be saying the same thing. More than a million people downloaded Lion on day one and everything everyone has said has been more than positive about the download and install process.

I have had limited experience with it thus far as we have been traveling, but I really do like it. And to be able to install it on as many machines as you own for $29 is more than a good deal, it is a steal. To not upgrade to Lion seems absurd, unless $30 is really a huge strain on your wallet. If you through down the >$1000 on the computer to begin with, chances are that you can afford the $30 upgrade. If you're even considering it, and don't have a legitimate reason not to (some of the old PowerPC apps will not run anymore in Lion), it seems very dumb not to do it. You don't have to got to the store to buy a disc, you don't have to have it shipped. You simply pay $30 through your iTunes account and download. Within an hour and a half, you've got the brand new operating system.

Many, many things have changed in Lion. Almost 100% of these changes are easily seen as good, from the user's perspective, right from the start.

One, though, has been getting some backlash.

For years, you've been able to scroll on the Mac using either a scroll wheel on a non-Apple branded mouse, the Apple Magic Mouse, the Apple Magic Trackpad, or the trackpad on your laptop.

I assume that scrolling really evolved from the directional arrows that have sat on the side of our browsers and windows since the beginning. If more content went past what was currently visible on the screen, you clicked on the down arrow to move the page downward. You could also click on the scroll bar and move it toward the bottom.

Scrolling, without having to interact with the side scroll bar, developed from this idea. The most common way on a Mac has been with two-finger swipes on the trackpad. If you want to go down on the page, you swipe with two fingers downward. It makes sense, right? Not anymore.

One of the things Apple is starting to do with Mac OS X Lion is to bring some of the quality designs and decisions they made with iOS back to the Mac. One of the most immediately evident is...scrolling.

On an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, when a user wants to scroll through a web page (and much of what users do on these devices is completely through the browser), they take their finger (on an iOS device it is just one finger) and "push" the content on the screen around. This process is actually exactly opposite of the Mac's directions, but gives the user the sensation that they are physically manipulating the content on the page with their hands. Apple really debuted this concept with the outset of the iPhone with "pinch to zoom" multitouch but didn't speak at all about how scrolling worked on the iPhone. It just made sense.

The decision seems easy. The layer of abstraction is gone when a mouse and keyboard are gone, so why create another layer? The user knows there is more content they wish to view. So, like in the real world, they physically move the content in front of them, out of the way. You never have to explain to the four year old manipulating your iPad how to scroll a page, they just do it. Because it feels natural.

So on Mac OS Lion, Apple decided to reverse the scrolling. They decided to call this new scrolling "natural" because it feels more "natural". You can tell there was some internal conflict at Apple about this because the VERY first thing you see when you start up Lion is a welcome box that explains how scrolling works in Lion. They are very conscious that this is going to be very different and very frustrating at first to seasoned users. And, if you're reading this and thinking that this isn't good at all and is the sole reason not to update, have no fear, this can easily be changed by unchecking one box in System Preferences (another example of why, perhaps, everyone at Apple was not in total agreement).

The idea is simple. If we are going to interact with the content on our computer in the same way we interact with the information in physical form in our lives, the way we interact with it needs to feel more natural.

Which brings me to my plea: don't uncheck that box. Give yourself some time. Allow your brain to relearn how to interact with everything. Because, in general, this too is a good change. We want to feel as if we are directly manipulating content on a screen. And, in order to do that, we need to get rid of the layers of abstraction that have existed because we couldn't think of a better way when we all began.

Here's where I think Apple went wrong though: Why even refer to it as scrolling? When Phil Schiller introduced it, he described it as "pushing the content" but he stilled called it "scrolling". They shouldn't have stuck with that name. "Pushing" is much, much better. Instead of a welcome screen titled "Scrolling in Lion" it should have read "Pushing in Lion". Because really, we aren't scrolling anymore. We are manipulating. And when we need to move from top to bottom, scrolling seems silly, we are pushing. In that sense, it wouldn't appear as if Apple simply reversed the way it used to work, they just came up with a new plan, a new concept, a new paradigm of thinking. Imagine Apple saying, "scrolling is out. We don't need it anymore. Now, we just push. So from now on, we call it 'Pushing'. Welcome to the new "Pushing" in Lion, it is more natural, revolutionary, and...magical." It would have brought the house down.

Give it a shot. Don't uncheck that box. It took me only a couple of hours to get used to it. It was very, very strange at first, but as we move more into the world of touch screens and manipulated content, "pushing" is the future, not scrolling.

Apple has always been a company to make big sweeping decisions and force customers into the future. They put the computer in one box and gave it a mouse and new user interface (but what about our command lines?). They took the floppy out of the iMac (how absurd!). They took the CD out of music (it's a shame that didn't work out). They took the keyboard off a smart phone (that's been totally unpopular and never was copied). They took the keyboard off of the tablet(gosh, if only 28.6 million of those hadn't been sold). They ended scrolling on a screen (if only they had marketed it that way). In every instance, it has been met with much positive approval and has led to a complete paradigm shift of thinking in the computer industry.

Stick with it. It'll get better.

-B

Final Cut Pro X = iOS

Apple released the new version of their professional video editing software Final Cut Pro. The older version is Final Cut Pro 7, the new version is a huge step forward...X. Within hours of the release, the critics came out in droves. They have been not only negative, but they've also used this to pass judgment on Apple as a company and the decisions they've chosen to make.

I need to make a few things clear before I move on:

• I do not own Final Cut Pro X (I don't have the extra income to make a $300 purchase, especially for software I don't use on a regular basis)
• I have read extensively on the new product (when Apple releases a "dud," it is always intriguing) and have considerable experience with Final Cut Pro 7 (though I am in now way, form, or fashion, a "professional" at Final Cut Pro).
• Apple is a 90-90 company. Apple makes decisions based off of what 90% of the people want/need to do 90% of the time (I didn't come up with this myself, I stole it from Alex Lindsay, founder of the Pixel Corp).

Because of these things above, I've come to one basic conclusion: most who are criticizing the product (no matter their prestige in the video editing world) do not understand Apple as a company.  After all, Apple makes some seemingly-crazy decisions on a regular basis. They seem, under Steve's leadership, to be doing ok.

It is my goal here to draw comparisons between Final Cut Pro X and iOS, as Apple has made strategic decisions with both of the products.  I do, in fact, think that iOS is indicative of the direction and market Apple is pursuing. I think these decisions parallel, in many ways, the decision that Apple has made with Final Cut Pro.  It's not a clean analogy by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it has some ring of truth to it.

It's hard to remember the first iPhone now. But, not too hard.  There were no direct competitors.  Today is the four year anniversary of the launch of the original iPhone. Let's compare some features that we take for granted now, shall we?

The original iPhone had:

• no multitasking (this is true of the original iPad as well, when it first released)
• no third-party applications
• no home screen backgrounds
• no Microsoft Exchange support
• no front-facing camera (the original iPad didn't have any cameras)
• no 3G support or coverage
• an audio jack that required an adapter for a regular headphone set
• no intelligent way to deal with notifications
• no push notifications
• no user-replaceable battery (still true today)

Slowly, thanks to adequate competition from Android, Apple has added a majority of these over the past four years. Slowly, but surely, Apple has redesigned some of the most basic features in Mac OS X to work in ways that are best suited for the mobile environment.  Many argue whether these are the best strategies or not, but no one argues whether or not they are working...they are.

Because here is what happened with iOS: Apple wanted to make a mobile phone (Steve has discussed on stage that this actually started with the pursuit of a tablet device). It was important that this device be radically different than anything within the market.  Because the original idea came from a tablet form factor, a big candy-bar shaped piece of glass seemed like the best idea. If they could implement a worthwhile digital keyboard (and they did), then the full glass front would prove to be a great solution.  Apple had a leg up on the competition for two reasons:

• they saw a new phone not as a mobile phone, but rather as a mobile computer.
• they already had a phenomenal proprietary operating system.

The enabled them to start the iPhone OS with a strong foundation: Mac OS X.  This was, in fact, one of the points in Steve's original keynote when he introduced the iPhone. Here was the problem though: no one was going to use a mouse to navigate the iPhone's screen. Because Apple makes decisions often based on minimalism or simplicity, they also threw out the idea of using a stylus. Steve has said it before: When you throw out the stylus, you have to use your finger. Mac OS X was built so that someone could have the precision of the tip of a cursor.  Without a stylus, you don't have that precision. You have a finger tip, which is much, much cruder.

Apple, taking the foundational elements of Mac OS X, designed a completely new interface to the iPhone's operating system. It is important to understand this distinction. When Windows 7 went "touch-enabled" Microsoft did little more than make it a bit easier for a hardware manufacturer to add a touch screen. A touch experience on Windows 7 today is more than painful (try it and you'll see). Apple took a different approach. The rewrote EVERYTHING so that it would work with the point of a finger. iOS (originally called, iPhone OS) required Apple to, more or less, start over.

And start over they did.  If you look at the history of iOS, it becomes obvious that people at Apple sat down in a room and said, "If we were going to reinvent computing, what would we do different?"  You can imagine that they thought of things like malware, spam, viruses, ease of writing, finding, and downloading apps, battery life, the file system, price, etc. Little by little, with their own unique approach, Apple has fought each of these things. If there are features that people want/desire on an iPad or iPhone that their computer has, Apple slowly implements those features in a way that suits the device that they're running on.  It hasn't been perfect, but it is hard to argue that it hasn't worked.

So, how does this relate to Final Cut Pro?

Final Cut Pro 7 (the older version, just replaced with FCPX) was a 32-bit application. Apple has migrated most of their apps to 64-bit over time. Final Cut Pro was one of the last. And Final Cut Pro was on old product. Somewhere along the line, I imagine that it was decided that to take FCP to 64-bit, a significant amount of re-coding was going to need to have been done. Here is a big change, and it needs to be re-written to work well (sound familiar?).

One must imagine that at some point someone working on this re-coding said, "If we're going to re-write this anyway, why don't we just start over?" as if to say, "If we were going to reinvent movie editing, what would we do differently?"

And so they did. They did this a while back with iMovie. Now it was time for Final Cut Pro. So, they re-wrote it, from the ground up.

We can make a strong argument that Apple is willing to enrage 5,000 high-end professional users in order to satisfy 2 million new users.  That argument would be valid.  We can argue that they lowered the price to entice new users to come.  That argument would be valid.  We can argue that most of Hollywood is already using AVID and is unlikely to switch (editors get very quick and comfortable with editing environments that they know and love).  That argument would be valid.

But my argument is that they're starting over.

There are a lot of things that they've done well this time:

• Distribution and licensing is much easier as it is handled through the App Store.
• Stepping up from iMovie is much, much easier with the new FCPX.
• Many of the extra features that used to exist in stand-alone applications are now well-integrated into the Final Cut Pro experience.
• Magnetic timelines have made it so that non-educated or non-experienced users can easily perform tasks that used to be a burden.
• The user interface resembles iMovie so that all of their products have a seamless workflow to them.
• Rendering is done in the background so that the editor doesn't have to worry with telling the computer to re-render every video edit.
• Final Cut Pro works works much better with Motion (so much so that using Motion to create FCP Title templates is much, much easier) than it ever did.
• Everything is 64-bit.
• Final Cut Pro renders footage more useful now that it has facial recognition built into its logging of clips.
• Many, many more new features.

The two biggest complaints from the high-end professional world have been:

• The interface is too foreign (unchangeable and too much like iMovie Pro)
• It doesn't import old timelines and projects.

Apple has said that the second one is simply impossible. Many might ask, why would Apple go forward with a project that wasn't compatible with the old one? The answer is easy: when there is something better in the future (and for Apple, this is much better) a few sacrifices sometimes need to be made. Remember when the iMac released without a floppy disk drive? Yeah, that didn't work for them at all...

iOS was a complete re-write, leaving out key features until they could add them in a way that made sense.  Final Cut Pro X is a complete re-write, until they can add the features users want in a way that makes sense.  It's a compromise that Apple made to please tons and tons of amateur video editors at a low cost, knowing good and well that the high-high end market may react because it is...different.

It's almost like asking a computer programmer to write an app on the original iPhone.  They'd probably laugh.  When you asked why they were laughing, they'd say, "It doesn't have the right tools."  To which you would reply, "yet."

Does this hurt their growth in the high-end professional market? Probably.

Does it help their growth in the low-end amateur market?  Without a doubt.

The high-end market is tiny.  The low-end market is huge.

Can you really blame a company for making any different of a decision?

People really seem to like their iPhones and iPads.

-B