In defense of LaunchPad...

LaunchPad icon

Lion. Mac App Store. LaunchPad—a new feature in Apple's latest OS upgrade for the Mac, offers users a grid view of all the applications on his or her system. It's Springboard from iOS, now harnessing your apps on the desktop. But a lot of folks have been disregarding this feature as very useful for the busy professional with tons of apps and no time for gestures. I say nay. The complaints: the gesture to access it is too confusing, apps get lost among mad app collections, and the whole idea seems pointless in the face of spotlight or other third party app-launching apps. I'm here to suggest why LaunchPad is an important and useful feature for both novice computer users and professionals alike.

Let's start with the one and only trackpad gesture to trigger LaunchPad. It's a four-fingered pinch. Up pops a iOS-looking grid with all your apps' icons. From here one can click something to launch it or move stuff around and categorize icons by putting them in folders. A click anywhere else that's not an icon will take you out of the LaunchPad, or you can reverse the gesture by spreading your fingers outward on the trackpad.

Now, the gesture itself might sound ridiculous in that it seems to require the utmost focus and human talent to execute, but it's easy as pie. Seriously. Only occasionally do I have to attempt the gesture twice to activate it. So, for those complaining. Just stop. By the way, you can setup a keyboard shortcut if you want. Just go to the keyboard preferences—it's the first option. And later on, I'm sure there will be some more options for LaunchPad, either by Apple or a third party.

Next, let's talk about these people with gobs and gobs of apps. Because some people have so many apps, they say LaunchPad is useless and confusing while having to sift through pages and pages of icons. Spotlight, they cite, is better at launching apps. It's true that Spotlight is a great tool for quickly launching apps, but it does require a click of that little magnifying glass in the corner and then a few pecks at the keyboard. If you're anything like me, I automatically reach two hands to the keyboard in search of those home keys every time I type something, all which takes time. But it's not all about the time it takes to launch apps either. The UI for LaunchPad is downright pretty. For novice users new to the Mac, I'm almost certain a large percentage of them would prefer the LaunchPad to almost anything else.

To those power users with a kazillion apps, let me suggest this. Organize only one page of icons to your liking, starting with only 10 to 15 apps. Don't' worry about throwing icons into folders and categorizing stuff and making a page full of folders all filled with crap. Let those bright and shiny 15 apps on your "home screen" be the category of "Most Used." There you go—LaunchPad is now cleaner and more useful. Let Spotlight or Quicksilver or whatever handle everything else.

Also, I don't know if you've actually used any of the fullscreen apps yet, but having to mouse-up for the menubar can be a pain, and that's just another step for you Spotlight launchers out there. In that situation, a four-finger pinch on the trackpad, and voila! Everything is at your fingertips.

Another reason I love the Mac: ahead of the curve

With the next major release of the Mac operating system, OS X Lion, on the brink of release, I can’t help but realize how much I appreciate the new features coming to my laptop within a few weeks. And I can’t help but notice how archaic and behind the curve Windows seems to be in the same features.

I love the notion of OS X’s new computing paradigms coming in Lion: modal-style, full-screen computing, Auto Save and Resume functions, and Versions (not to mention the beautiful new interface animations and cleanliness). All these things seem like obvious functions of a modern OS, and the idea that our powerful computers have yet to adopt them almost seems silly. Especially now that computers are used by everybody (I mean just about freaking everybody), and not just geeks, means that it’s about time we switch our thinking about what a personal computer is and can be. Why the nerdy notions of “saving," “backing up," and organizing a “filesystem,” not to mention being relegated to the “window” paradigm? Let my computer and applications do all the managing and organizing and backing up of files. It’s smart enough, so why should I have to do it? Besides, regular people hardly feel like learning all that stuff anyway.

The Auto Save, Resume, and Versions features in Lion have much larger implications on personal computing than I think most people realize. And another reason I love the Mac is that Apple is the first to truly implement that stuff across the OS now, giving developers APIs to do the same thing in their apps. But this is not actually new for Apple. The iLife suite that comes on every Mac has been doing this for the past couple of years now, and obviously common productivity apps like iCal and Address Book never required the user to save changes.

But I wonder now, how long will it be until Windows follows suit? I see this simple idea being widely accepted very quickly. And the idea of having to save consistently and duplicate files to have different versions will seem archaic within a few years. Microsoft will probably adopt similar functions in applications sometime in the future.

But right now, they seem really focused on shoehorning Windows onto tablets to care about implementing that stuff. They might surprise me though. It’s happened before.

How to touch a Lion: OS X

To be quite honest, I'm a little worried about Apple's position on touch in their desktop platform, OS X.

Currently, touch on OS X is employed using Apple's proprietary blend of gesture-based devices: the Magic TrackPad, Magic Mouse, and of course the MacBook trackpad. That's all great, but, looking toward the future, the point-and-click method of input, while effective at its job, is beginning to look a little antiquated in the face of touch-based devices like the iPad. I'd only hope that when the next thing comes around -- when we do figure out what the paradigm shift would be in desktop computing -- that Apple will be on top of it.

In the October 2010 keynote, Steve Jobs spoke a little about Apple's position on touch interfaces in the desktop/notebook category. He said basically that those vertical display orientations don't work well with extended use. "It gives great demo," Jobs claimed. But he then went on to describe the problems concerning arm fatigue and extended use problems associated with that design. "It's ergonomically terrible," he said.

That all makes sense, and I admire Apple's ability to deny the status-quo in desktop touch interfaces, and that's not what worries me. Instead, I'm curious about the integrity of their current interfaces for touch on OS X. The MacBook trackpad, Magic TrackPad and Magic Mouse are great devices, but they are in no way comparable to interacting with the touchscreen on the iPhone or iPad. Apple says the best way they've found to get touch on the Mac is not through the display, all which orient vertically, but rather through those horizontal devices they already ship.

I wanna touch me some OS X

While the trackpads and the Magic Mouse that Apple ship do make use of "gestures," they are not "touch" interfaces like touchscreen displays. The software in OS X is still based on a point-and-click mechanism of interaction. So, I guess the argument should be whether Apple should rewrite the desktop OS for fingers. Well, if you look at the recently previewed OS X Lion, they are already taking steps in that direction. With the LaunchPad, which uses the entire screen to display app icons, its use of folders like iOS 4, and also the introduction of more intuitive fullscreen apps (doing away with windows and the tiny toolbar controls), the desktop OS is gradually gaining the user interface necessary for finger-to-display interaction.

I wonder if the desktop OS, in its current form, will ever use touch as efficiently as any of the iOS or Android handsets on the market now. For example, straight from the horses mouth, check out this patent from Apple describing an iMac that has the capability to flip down horizontally, presumably to solve the whole "vertical orientation" problem.

My, how we've grown

Also, while always pondering the next best thing, I simply wonder when the traditional point-and-click style of desktop navigation will eventually go away. First there was command-line interfaces which included nothing but a black screen and a prompt. You would then enter commands to navigate and launch programs. From there, the paradigm shift in computing came with graphical user interfaces, or GUI. Xerox had initially invented GUI, but it wasn't until the Apple Lisa computer was released that it had made its way to the mass-market. From there, the Macintosh perfected the modern desktop operating system, and every other OS and software manufacturer, like Microsoft, jumped on the bandwagon.

More than thirty years later, we've since grown into our modern OS's and coincidentally seemingly grown too used to the same interfaces we use to interact with our data. It didn't take long to realize that command prompts were antiquated, but now we're slowly realizing that touch, along with wireless mobility, is the way of the future.

And in that aspect, the future is already here. With the introduction of the iPhone, we witnessed touch, wireless and mobile culminate with a product that not only revolutionized the cellular industry, but also energized new ideas and catalyzed a new category of mobile devices like the iPad. Tablet computing is the new rage, and we may see that form-factor take as the reigning personal device after the PC.

Bring it 'Back to the Mac'

I have to agree with Jobs on the iPad. There is something "magical" about it. The iPad brings a degree of intimacy with the internet and your digital content that other devices simply don't quite offer yet, all of which is because of the touch interface, its simplicity, design and ease of use. So, how do you bring some of that intimacy to the Mac? Laptops, in their current form, definitely don't work for vertical touch, because the displays are too flimsy and have no support for the pressure required someone to press against it. Hmmmm...

However, with the new MacBook Air, they've taken design cues from the iPad hardware, so I guess that's a good first step. It's easier to, say, just throw in flash storage rather than a hard drive, giving your laptop a new "instant on" feature resembling the iPad. But it's much more to try and reinvent the OS. Although OS X Lion seems to promote a more app-friendly, iPad-like experience with the new Mac App Store, the LaunchPad and fullscreen apps, in the meantime we're stuck with the Magic Mouse to provide our desktop "touch" experience.

We'll have to wait and see what the industry will make of this, because I certainly don't have the answers.

Yay! Apple holding a Mac event Oct. 20!

Alright! I get excited about new Apple events. Especially when they have to do with the Mac.

For a while now, folks in the Mac community have been upset about all the attention and focus on iOS, as Apple seemed to neglect their firstborn, the Mac, for the past year. But it made sense, however, because iOS devices now make up the largest portion of Apple's revenue. Either way, being a Mac evangelist -- it was my first love -- its great to finally hear something out of Cupertino, that they haven't forgotten us.

Apple event is scheduled for Oct. 20, and the tagline reads, "Back to the Mac." A graphic promoting the event depicts a 3D Apple logo with tiny sliver of a lion on the back of the Apple. So, I surmise they will be discussing the next version of the Mac OS operating system, 10.7.

The current Macintosh operating system, called Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, was released Sept. 2009. And Apple generally releases a new version of the OS at least every other year. I would guess the event might make some announcements about their Mac business, provide some updates and details on the sales and landscape of the desktop operating system, describe some new features planned on in the next release, and if we're lucky, might even announce a few hardware updates.

As it stands in the current lineup, the Mac most neglected would be the MacBook Air. Never considered a supreme player among laptop elites, its price tag and lack of features make it, while an extraordinary design, not fit for most of the laptop-toting market. However, those that find a place for the MacBook Air in their lives, say like a college student or traveling businessman, generally love the device for the sleekness, slimness, and the ability to carry around the capabilities of Mac OS X in such a tiny package.

As far as other updates, I'm really hoping on the announcement of a new version of iLife, which now that I think about it, must come along with some type of hardware announcements, seeing as how iLife is considered a free software for new Macs (that makes sense, right?). Of course you can purchase iLife as a standalone product for older machines, but that doesn't seem like Apple's style to make newer software not also available with newer hardware. Or maybe I'm just crazy...

Some people have pondered on the possibility of seeing some iPhone stuff, like even the notion that we might hear something about a Verizon iPhone. But usually, when Apple and Steve Jobs say their keynotes will cover a specific topic, they rarely go off course, declining to mention really anything else in their product lineup. Look at the past couple of keynotes: iPad was all about iPad and nothing else, iPhone 4 was all about iPhone 4 and nothing else new, and the September keynote was, as usual, all about iPods and Apple TV, and nothing else. So, Macs will prevail at this upcoming event, I believe, as it should, given the fact that other than quietly updating their Macintosh products, we haven't heard much out of Cupertino about their plans for Mac.

What features will the new OS contain? There's not much a Mac user can complain about, at least nothing I can think of off hand. I only see good things coming, so keep your eyes and ears open for whats next...

It's like my Mac is a baby, and Apple is the school system, and all I want is to send my Mac off to school so it can grow up big and strong and learn a whole bunch of new tricks. Come on, OS X Lion!