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AnchorDesk

Stephan Somogyi
New Apple apps: The good, the bad, the stupid

Stephan Somogyi
Contributor, AnchorDesk
Monday, February 3, 2003
TalkBack!Add your opinion
Steve Jobs's Macworld Expo keynote this year (click here to watch the video) was noteworthy not only for the sheer quantity of product introductions, but also for their quality.

Empiricist that I am, I'll leave my thoughts on the 12- and 17-inch PowerBooks for another column, after I've had a chance to actually use them for a while. But Apple also released two brand-new applications that plug some significant gaps in Mac OS X's software lineup.

SAFARI, Apple's new browser, is clearly intended to supplant rather than simply complement Microsoft's Internet Explorer on the Mac. And Keynote, the professional presentation package putatively produced specifically for Steve himself, now provides the first real competition for PowerPoint on the Mac.

The Safari announcement threw many Apple users for a loop, even those who'd previously divined the presence of a browser development project inside the company. The real surprise was that the new browser didn't use Mozilla's Gecko HTML rendering engine--which beats at the heart of the well-regarded Chimera browser for Mac OS X. Instead, Jobs and Co. opted for the leaner KHTML engine. Gory technical details aside, Safari's stated goal is to be the fastest browser on OS X. In its current prerelease form, it looks like it has a very good shot at that title.

But, beta release that it is, Safari is still (understandably) incomplete. I've found several sites with which it has rendering problems--and promptly reported them via Safari's built-in bug reporting system. It's also lacking some features.

The most glaring omission is tabbed browsing. I became hooked on tabs while using Chimera on my 12-inch iBook. It both saves screen space and boosts productivity, because it lets me keep multiple pages open at the same time and flip between them with ease. I can also load a slew of pages (using a succession of Command-clicks on links) and then go back and view each one when it's finally fully open. Tabbed browsing is the first useful innovation in browser interfaces in a long time, and I sincerely hope it makes its way into Safari 1.0. I won't make Safari my main browser until it does.

Safari's got great potential. However, I think Apple must consider more than sheer speed if it's going to create a competitive browser. Fast is good, no doubt, but Apple must avoid the temptation to create another exclusively consumer-oriented iApp-style application. Safari must become a professional-grade, functionally state-of-the-art browser

Steve Jobs unveils Safari, which he claims is three times faster than Internet Explorer, at Macworld.

 Watch now
THE BEST EXAMPLE of an Apple app that I think is useless for all but the most casual consumer: iCal. Leaving aside for the moment the recent debacle in which iCal 1.0.1 users in time zones west of California had their appointments scrambled, what drives me nuts about iCal is its un-Mac-like way of dealing with time zones.

To me, Mac-like apps take into consideration the ways humans actually think and use computers; they don't take the simpler route of trying to force the user to adapt to the computer's way of doing things.

As regular readers might remember, my current job requires me to travel--and switch time zones--on a regular basis. So when I'm sitting in my office in California, planning meetings for the following week when I'll be in Central Europe, I should not have to perform all the time-zone arithmetic in my head. That's what computers are for. Alas, iCal's designers disagree.

Let's say I make an appointment in iCal for 8:00 a.m. next Wednesday in Hamburg. Upon my arrival in Germany, I change my system's clock to the new time zone. When I do so, that 8:00 a.m. appointment is automatically moved by iCal to 5:00 p.m. This behavior makes iCal both utterly useless and actively bad. I used to ridicule Windows users because Outlook did the same thing. Now, to my considerable chagrin, Apple has followed Microsoft's lead.

It boggles my mind that Apple, the company that insists it's all about attention to detail, would ship a scheduling app that behaves so stupidly. (I looked through the iCal prefs, the appointments inspector, and online help to see if there is a way to fix this problem--so far, I've found nary a hint.) As of iCal 1.0.2, the current version, there appears to be no way to make it behave sensibly. Either give me a way to attach a time zone to an appointment, or, even better, simply offer a checkbox so that 8:00 a.m., once defined, remains 8:00 a.m. That's the human-centric way to do things.

Safari holds great promise, as does Apple's new Keynote presentation app, which I'll write about more in a future column. And I'm keeping my fingers firmly crossed that Apple's development philosophy will adhere to the goal of offering high-quality, highly usable tools for pros and ordinary mortals alike, instead of following iCal's lowest common denominator approach.

By day, Stephan Somogyi is director of products at PGP Corporation. The opinions expressed in his columns are his, and his alone.

What do you think? Will Safari mount a serious challenge to IE? Will you ever use iCal? TalkBack to me! 

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