From my home office, I can hear the pleased squeals and shrieks emanating from downstairs. A stampede of thumping knees across the floor, a high speed chase.
Two years ago, an infant came screaming into our lives.
One year ago, my daughter was born.
This morning, I walked out my front door — to cast a vote for her future.
The past year has been challenging and rewarding, both personally and professionally. As usual I read, wrote, listened, and played about 1% of everything I wanted to. Here’s some of what I did get to, and enjoyed enough to recommend to you1.
Books
Music
Apps (iOS)
Apps (Mac)
Games
As usual, all lists are ordered alphabetically.↩︎
The Touch Bar, the headline feature of Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops, is a mistake. It is a gimmick, a colorful whiz-bang toy “feature” designed to sell two-thousand dollar computers in Apple Stores. And it shouldn’t be the future of how we interact with macOS.
Apple’s marketing materials claim that it “revolutionizes the keyboard experience” and that it’s a “revolutionary new way to use your Mac.” Outside the reality distortion field, what they have created is an unholy amalgam1 of their (truly revolutionary) multi-touch keyboard and a traditional one. Simple, daily tasks like pausing a song or changing the screen brightness are transformed into a game of hide a seek, the sought after key constantly being moved out from under your fingers, hidden away in submenus accessed through inscrutable glyphs with tiny touch targets. The Touch Bar bastardizes the beauty of the touch interface — the naturalness of directly manipulating what is seen on the screen — by marrying it with the indirection of a keyboard, a device that we’re trained to not look at while we use.
In the rare case that the controls in the Touch Bar are more than visual representations of keyboard shortcuts, they tend to be interactions that are performed less clumsily with the trackpad. The icons themselves are like the shifting sands of the deserts, subject to the whims of the the Mac’s windowing system, making it impossible to commit any Touch Bar action to muscle memory. It is the most infuriating input device I’ve ever used.
If the Touch Bar isn’t the future of interaction on the Mac, what is? In the bad old days, when Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy and saddled with a legacy operating system it was Steve Jobs who rode in and saved the day with NeXTSTEP, a modern OS he had been building at NeXT. Unfortunately for Apple, the go-go operating system building days of the 1980s and 1990s have mostly passed, so the prospect of an outside acquisition showing the way forward is slim. Fortunately for Apple, they’re only a little over a decade removed from creating one of the most successful operating systems of all time.
macOS, despite the new name and fresh coat of paint is legacy software — iOS is now older than macOS was at the time iOS was introduced. It is an incredibly powerful, complex operating system with a lot of accumulated cruft. It has taken it’s particular vision of the traditional GUI as far as it can. If Apple believes in the long-term future of the Mac as a platform, they have to think differently about the underlying software.
Apple executives have spoken on the record multiple times over the past few years about having tried and ultimately dismissed the idea of touchscreen Macs. And with the operating system as it is designed today, it’s not hard to see where they’re coming from. It would be clumsy to interact with the nested menus and small controls of macOS by touch — they were designed for use with a much more precise pointing device, the mouse. But what if it wasn’t?
Apple should replace macOS with a new operating system built from the ground up to be touch-friendly. Not iOS2 with a clamshell keyboard, but something entirely new. An operating system that’s designed to be used with a touchscreen monitor and a physical keyboard. An operating system with the security and power efficiency of iOS, and the power and flexibility of the Mac. An operating system that is built from the ground up to integrate seamlessly with Apple’s cloud services. An operating system for the future of the Mac platform.
It’s the most coveted real estate in technology — that grid of colorful icons staring back at you whenever you wake up your phone. It’s where our most used and most loved apps live. Despite the chatter about the end of the app “boom”, my homescreen has resisted the entropy afflicting others. Out of the 28 total spots available, 9 have changed from last year. This is what my home screen looks like at the beginning of 2017.
I took 15 Uber rides this year.↩︎
Perfect Weather sadly hasn’t been updated since June of 2015.↩︎
In an iOS only vacuum, I think that Email is the best iOS email app.↩︎
Vesper is still available for download on the App Store but no longer has a sync service and is no longer being developed.↩︎
A horizontal feed is just harder to scan than a vertical one.↩︎
Happy New Year! After saying goodbye to 2*16, it seems especially sweet to have the promise of a new year sprawled out before us. Here are the music and games I’m looking forward to in 2017 — let’s go exploring1.
Music
Games
Lists are ordered alphabetically.↩︎