WWDC1997 Session 100

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome senior vice president software engineering avi - Vania everybody long time no see so why aren't you all off coding to the yellow box we do them back here okay let's see I'm not going to add a lot of value to this session I think I said a lot this morning already and what I'd like to do right now is just kick off this session on Mac OS by basically saying what I said before which is Apple is totally committed to improving Mac OS in the long term we believe that Mac OS is important to our future we believe that Mac OS is important to your future and we are going to invest everything we need to into it to make sure that it continues to be excellent now one of the things that we did to accomplish that goal as part of our restructuring was to formally put in place a Mac OS engineering group this engineering group their sole mission is to make Mac OS as good as it can be and as I mentioned again this morning they are fully staffed doesn't mean they have all the people they need on board but they have open headcount at least and they will be able to get whatever resources they need to be successful but I'm not the person who's going to tell you all the great things about Mac OS what I would like to do is to introduce one of my colleagues Steve glass who's the vice president of Mac OS engineering he's going to tell you what the realities about Mac OS and I just want to say Steve is just a great guy to work with and he has over 15 years of experience at Apple he's seen it all he knows mac OS his team knows mac OS so please turn them out with that Steve thank you if you tell someone their 197 billion stars in our galaxy the chances are you'll be believed but if you tell software engineers that the paint on a park bench is wet they'll put their hand out and check it when developers get together it's our style to believe nothing and to check everything since last year there have been as you know some important OS strategy changes as well as some improvements in the Mac OS the plans are set for doing more in the years to come the pad statement is like telling you the paint on the bench is wet so we expect you to check it for yourself you're going to hear even more about the Mac OS than you already know and we're prepared for your cross-examinations we're expecting your questions we'll answer them in the breakout sessions we'll answer them in the feedback forums we'll answer them at the demo stations and compatibility labs we'll answer them when you corner us as we walk around the conference because we want you to leave here convinced and enthusiastic we want you to be convinced and I personally want you to be convinced that you can expect great things from the Mac OS consider first the popularity of 7.6 it was adopted by users more quickly than any other version of Mac OS and no wonder the product offers what users really want a need because it's faster and because it has features that really make a difference but most of all users want 7.6 because it's more stable something that just about every developer and every Macintosh user and been longing for and that's good news for you because customers who go into the stores to buy new versions of the OS are going in ready to buy other stuff so the OS continues to provide a clear opportunity one of the best possible chances for you to sell things to these same customers and we're ready to get these customers back in the stores again our beta testing shows that they're going to want Mac OS 8 even more than they want seven point six and OS eight will be our third on-time release customers will be hot after our further improvements in stability and performance will be hot after significant improvements to the finder and our full suite of Internet applications and from here it gets better and better we have a long list of things we want to do in upcoming releases in the next few minutes I'm going to share with you what we're doing differently the reasons we're doing things and how we're doing them when you've heard the details I think you'll share our conviction that the future is bright for Mac OS customers and developers you've heard a lot and you've read a lot about the switch and Apple OS strategy in the Copeland days the thought was that Copeland would take over no one would want to use the Mac OS anymore and any investment improving Mac OS would just be throwing money away so we put very little effort into the Mac OS in fact as recently as two years ago we had only six engineers working full-time all they could do was fix a few bugs now in that well that's changed big-time my Mac OS engineering organization has over a hundred people working full-time at improving Mac OS and other groups in software engineering have more than a hundred others doing the same thing our new dual OS strategy recognizes the need to continue improving Mac OS at the same time as we push the boundaries with Rhapsody in fact rhapsodies BlueBox runs most of Mac OS unchanged so every improvement we make to Mac OS improve the blue box Apple learned a long time ago that when we talk to you or we talk to customers you'll tell us what you think is important we asked when we asked there were two answers that kept coming up and I'll bet you know what they were that's right you wanted it more stable and faster and so did our customers Mac OS users so when the OS team is working on a new release they have two important marching orders make it more stable make it faster sure that's great but it's not everything you know well that stability and speed are necessary but by themselves they just aren't enough as the world changes features need to be added that our customers need how do we improve stability and performance and add features let's start with stability and performance some of what we do is just common sense the first thing we look at is memory use because memory problems are the major reason that systems crash and slow down in 7.6 we scrubbed the system to improve our use of memory we eliminated dead code we eliminated code that was only needed to support old 68,000 machines and we made it possible for parts of the system heap to be paged out so system features that aren't being used won't take up as much space in RAM in 76 they only come in as needed this is a good example a space where performance and stability are related these changes would not have been valuable if we had not been able to improve the stability and performance of virtual memory the faster more stable VM combined with a page will system he makes more real RAM available the last point here is that our organization is now staffed to the level where we can make applause winning advances we have people looking at performance problems and looking at the code we have people at work on pieces of code that haven't been touched in years code that was written in a time when memory was scarce when profiling tools were not available or when other limitations prevented us from truly making things better and there's another way we work these issues well a way that relies on important feedback that comes from our developer base through a very successful seed program every OS release whether a full release or an update is ceded to developers well in advance of the release so that you can make sure your products work and that we haven't screwed something out currently tempo downloads average 1000 per build 1000 of you are taking your time to check out our latest work your participation in this program makes our releases better and prepares you for what your customers will see in advance of the release incidentally if you're not part of this program I highly recommend that you look into it with today's ever shorter ramp times the head start you can get by starting your testing early can be critical to sign up you'll find everything you need at the dev world website as we choose what to put in the OS from the years ahead the focus will be on providing value for customers there's no sense in haphazardly introducing thousands of new api's that don't bring benefits to users until you the developers have time to adopt them on the other hand we're definitely in favor providing new api's in areas that can make significant differences for customers but how do you know we'll make the right choices let's look at our recent history in 7.6 the first feature area that we chose to address was the install experience we learned when we shipped the 75 3 update that releasing an improved OS doesn't get very enthusiastic responses if it's hard to install correctly the lesson was painful before we ship 753 we seeded the release to thousands of developers and customers the feedback was unanimous it was a great improvement over 752 so when we released the update we were surprised by the number of customers with problems when we isolated the cause we found that most of the problems were related to installation our test sites had become experts in installing the update correctly on release we had a new crop of users who were to put it gently not so well-trained so in 76 we added a front end to the saw expirience that put the main read me where nobody could miss it the front end also encourages users to update their disk drivers and only install the software after first checking the disk for corruption the result is that seven six is the easiest OS to install in the world and we're making Mac OS 8 even easier we've gone a step further from our research we know that once you've installed the O's OS there's a lot of new setup to do so we've added setup assistance to make this much more straightforward another place we've learned by talking to customers is extension management many customers and developers have complained over the years that it's too hard to manage extensions it's hard to tell which ones go together which ones do what and what can safely be turned off the extension manager in 7.6 makes that much better and has been very popular with our customers and we finally address some of the biggest limitations in the finder in Mac OS 8 you'll find a new native finder the ability to do file copying in the background a smarter look with the new Platinum appearance you saw some of this in the opening keynote Pete will be back to share even more with you in a few minutes that's some of the recent decision-making and there's another compelling reason that we're going to make the right decisions about what goes into the Mac OS let me tell you about the people working on Mac OS from engineering to marketing to the QA department every person really cares about making the OS better most of them are like me longtime Apple veterans many who've been with the company more than 10 years and a few who've been at Apple longer than my 15 years in the core and the core release engineering team 25% of the engineers and 40% of the managers have worked in support they know the impact of a bad decision on customers and on developers they'll be all over me in a second if we're heading down the wrong road a final point about our philosophy for mac OS we believe in incremental improvements this is based on something I learned early in my career at Apple my second boss said apples had a saying perfect software never ships he was right if you wait until something is perfect you'll never finish you know this from your own experience there's always ways to make something better there's always a new customer problem to deal with so it's our job to make releases very very good ship them and then immediately start working with customers and developers to make them better we need to understand what's causing problems and to deal with these problems we've planned updates where we can fix bugs and add additional features keeping both customers in you our loyal developers happy most of you already know what the general roadmap looks like for our releases mac OS 8 this summer Allegro next year so not of the year after with more to come after that and just because we haven't settled on a code name yet don't expect Sanada to be the last one in between the big releases we'll have updates to fix them certain bugs add key features and support new hardware the end result is that the Mac OS is a safe investment because we'll continue to improve the base and add features that customers need in order to operate easily in our increasingly connected world although these roadmaps of relief vehicles are interesting they don't convey much detail will tell you a lot more about Mac OS 8 in a minute but I want to share with you some of the things that we're thinking about for future OS releases none of these decisions is locked down yet to the point where I can tell you which release vehicle particulars will appear in some of the items I'm going to mention will disappear others not on the list will be added along the way but this should give you a good idea of the areas we think are important and that we're investing in there four of these areas first and foremost is stability and performance and related to this is system complexity but complexity issues can lead to stability and performance problems if the setup procedure isn't perfectly clear it may not be done right we believe that the system as a whole is way too complicated for example why should a user have to choose how much RAM an application should use if there's room why can't an application just have what it needs I don't want users running out of RAM anymore in other areas we're working on i/o performance boot time and we'll finally overcome the current block allocation problem and file size problem that plagues us today [Applause] other items on our list included attacking bottlenecks like we did with virtual memory and 755 and 76 for example text drawing is high on our list we think we can make a significant improvement here the second area will stress is user experience there are a lot of improvements we know we can achieve in this area we want to make the Mac OS even easier to configure and manage there are some very useful finder features that weren't completed in time for Mac OS 8 especially in the area finder and Internet integration the information you have on your drive and on the Internet will be easier to access with improved navigation and search tools we want Mac your Mac to really be your Mac which means allowing you to customize it in new ways that also means a better toolbox to present a consistent user interface even with the easiest to use system we can still improve how you access help and get information about your system we'll also continue to make our system the best multilingual platform on the market we've added Unicode conversion services that allow you to interchange Mac OS data with Windows and the Internet and we'll be putting Unicode support into more parts of the system in the coming years the user experience sessions this afternoon will detail what we're doing in tempo and what we're planning for the future and of course will support new technologies as they come to market we're looking at DVD UDF Universal Serial bus firewire and networking improvements that are appropriate and affordable let me say a little bit about Java in this context we're big believers in Java in fact the mrj team is part of my organization because we believe Java support should be a core system service the team is working hard five high quality Java Runtime our VM is recognized as one of the most stable on any platform our JIT is being seated now in benchmarks very well and our work to support jdk 1.1 is well underway for full details on Java and the Mac OS look for the mrj session on friday we'll continue to make improvements we need and to include Java as a part of the o F strategy and our OS releases finally one of the new exciting areas that we're working on is yellow box on Mac OS we think that providing a good subset of yellow box on Mac OS will go a long way toward improving your proposition for new development for both Mac OS and Rhapsody so here are the main points I want to leave you with Mac OS 8 is a key part of Apple's dual OS strategy customers appreciate our current product but we haven't let that make us complacent we can tell you with assurance the customers will really love what we've got coming so the future can be brighter for Apple and for developers

• thank you

now with that here's Pete Lowe product manager of Mac OS 8 to take you through more of the Mac OS 8 features in the world of marketing we know from customer research and sales experience that if you add blue dots to a laundry detergent your customers will get excited and you'll sell more product however this is only true if your product really cleans better than the competition Mac OS 8 has a lot of blue dots and it really does get your clothes whiter and brighter with Mac OS 8 Apple is widening the chasm in user experience leadership in the personal computer industry by providing features that ensure the user is always in control and that they have the exact capabilities they need Mac OS 8 also includes a complete suite of internet services for our customers whether they're connecting to the internet for the very first time from their home or from their business or whether there are very experienced web professional now at this point I think I'm going to forget the slides and go demo nice little sunset there you like that obviously we gave you a very quick preview of the features of Mac OS 8 in the keynote this morning what I'd like to do is go into a little bit more depth and also show you some things we weren't able to share in the limited time we had this morning I mentioned the ability to very directly control the user experience to navigate your system it's something we call spring loaded folders I'm showing it you again here again I just want to highlight that the user is always in complete control if I go down the path that I decide isn't where I want to go all I have to do is drag out of that window and the window will automatically close up for me I can drag anywhere throughout my system as I did this morning and when I get to my destination and I drop that icon notice that all of the intermediate windows closed get out of the way to reduce the desktop clutter as much as possible you know another thing I'm going to do just while I have the chance here is I'm going to start a duplicate I'm going to duplicate the entire system installation no I'm not I guess all right that's fine I'm going to duplicate a subset of the entire system installation there we go simply because I can of course now we want to have some copies going while we continue to work the system I show pop-up windows a little while ago again always making sure the user has all the information has all the documents they work with on a regular basis always at their disposal I want to show you that we're also providing more rich information to our users throughout the user experience we've enhanced the ListView significantly I think you'll notice that the new Platinum appearance that Steve mentioned is now throughout the interface we've taken advantage of some grayscale use of colors and some 3d elements to really make this system much richer in its aesthetic appearance but this new appearance is very functional as well in large ListView windows for example you can see exactly which items correspond with which sizes and dates which is important on a 21 inch monitor we also know that many of our novice users don't even realize that you can sort these list views so by highlighting the sorted column darker gray we're able to accentuate the user interface and make it more responsive and with buttons at the top of each column it's mind-numbing ly obvious that you can sort now these different columns very easily we've also provided some additional nuances to the user interface you notice here that we're employing relative dating to highlight when a document was modified or created obviously it doesn't do me much good to tell me if that folder was modified on Tuesday May 13th if I don't know that today is Tuesday May 13th so we've improved that experience by excuse me by including relative dates we also know that a very popular feature among experienced users that has been very difficult to find for novice users is the fact that in the special menu today you have this cleanup command with certain key combinations you click cleanup by name and date etc etc again a very popular feature but not many people know about it so we've made that feature much more easily accessible through the new arrange command so with the arrange command I can very quickly and easily sort by any criteria I would choose but to make it even more useful we've made it possible to make the arrange command persistent for a given folder or window so I can specify that I want this folder always arranged by name and when I do so if items are automatically sorted for me and no matter how I manipulate this window the items are reflow to keep the sort order that I've specified this is handy if you always go into your extensions folder you always want to alphabetize things you can see that if I add an item to the list it automatically appears where you'd expect use after the tease for example and if I rename an item an item that is I don't type quite as well as John did this morning that item again automatically reflows in the list to appear in the appropriate spot now when we use some of these some of these features together they work very nicely and very powerfully and I'll give you an example of that in a moment but first I'd like to highlight some of the scalability features that we've provided as part of Mac OS you can see that we've rationalize some of the finder commands and added some popular requests that would have been coming from the community for a while we finally have a move to trash with a keyboard shortcut I'm sure why not we now have the ability to find the original associated with an alias without having to go into the get info window right but we also want to ensure that we don't overwhelm novice users with a lot of features that perhaps they don't need so we're also supporting something called the simple finder and with the simple finder you can see that the commands available to the user are much more direct they're only the very basic commands a user needs to work the system they're not overwhelmed with commands like file sharing preferences or making aliases or the ability to accidentally erase a hard drive for example on those commands just aren't available to them we've also taken some of the very popular features that have appealed to our consumer customers and extended them throughout the Mac OS interface so for people who like a DS or the launcher because of its button interface we've now extended that through the finder as well so our novice users don't have to master the complexities of double-clicking now if I could come back just for a moment to some of those aspects of control you saw some copying copies happening and you know you can only you can only demo a multi-threaded finder so often what we've done though is we've really done some subtle implementations of the threading capability as well so for example window updating is now completely threaded you can see as I open this 4,000 item folder I have a little progress indicator to show that it's working I'd like to highlight I did not cache this window before booting so it is taking a while and as I said it's got a lot of items in it and I was able to control to continue to use the system while that window was updating and there was lots of user feedback as well again to show how some of these features work together very very nicely let me just turn off the simple finder because I can't use it we I'll give you a quick highlight of how you can use many of these features together for example if I set my recent applications folder that's always been available since Mackel at 7.5 if I set that let's say to button and we've already got it set to small button let's say keep it arranged by date modified or date created and we also now have the ability to display and sort by date created which we haven't supported in the past and let's narrow this window a little bit so we get a column a ver file of our applications and we drag it to the bottom to make it a pop-up window and all of a sudden we have a nice little application pallet single click to launch applications and of course you can drag and drop on top of it as well what are some of the other things I'd like to highlight I mentioned the canoe contextual menus that allow you to select any item in the finder and you get just the specific commands that are appropriate to that item this is also extensible by you our loyal developers on so you can add contextual menu plugins that know how to deal with certain data types and can extend this menu based on the user selection you'll see that the contextual menu obviously does is contextual when I click in a window I get the appropriate viewing commands associated with that window again we have also integrated a variety of new internet services into the enter into Mac OS 8 we're actually going to be highlighting those this afternoon are later on today in the 400 session the internet overview session so please make sure you come back to that and we'll share some of those capabilities with you as well I think the last thing I want to highlight is actually something that I don't think we're quite ready to disclose so I'm going to have to ask you all to keep this to yourselves don't share this with anyone but we want to again make the interface as scalable as possible but that doesn't just mean making the entire interface simpler for novice users it means making the interface more powerful for everyone so when we first came out with you know with the color picking models for the Mac OS they were pretty innovative and they really sort of set the mark for how you would select colors but it still sort of requires an optical physicist to figure out CMYK models and things of that nature so with Mac OS 8 again we're implementing a significantly simpler mechanism for selecting colors in the Mac OS yeah and a little one of those power user features to make sure you're aware of if you click the option key anytime you have a color picker open in any application you get a dropper which works anywhere on the screen and you can pick up any color from the interface yeah pretty cool so again that was a quick demo of some of the features in Mac OS 8 they just click to advance here I really really hope that you'll join us in the hands-on lab and you know what I think I'd be it's really only only appropriate for me to mention that you know yes we have shown some of these features at the odd developer conference in the past so one or two of them I think you've seen before and you might ask Peter you know what's different this year well what's different is we're shifting in July and we're on track for that now just before I close I'd like to share with you some of our plans for ensuring that Mac OS 8 will attract the attention of all Mac OS customers and the computer industry at large Mac OS 8 will be the product of the summer for Apple Computer all areas of the company are working together and we will exploit all methods of communications to ensure every potential customer understands why they should upgrade their Mac OS computer to Mac OS 8 or why they should buy a new computer with Mac OS 8 throughout the rest of the spring we'll be providing more and more information about what Mac OS 8 has to offer beyond what you're seeing at the Worldwide Developer Conference this will include some upcoming partnership announcements interactive web previews and feature articles in a number of the industry's major publications all of these activities will culminate with a major introduction of Mac OS 8 in July with software on retail shelves and boston mac world in august is going to be a fantastic showcase for mac OS 8 and all of apple's breakthrough products planning has already started and we want to work with the entire Mac OS community to ensure that Mac world is a great party to celebrate the success of Mac OS 8 so you can keep pace with what's happening both with the software and with our communications please visit the Mac OS 8 website which will be growing over the coming weeks and regularly visit dev world where you can always get the latest build also while you're here this week as we said earlier please visit the Mac OS 8 hands-on lab downstairs not only can you play with the software but you'll leave with a CD with our latest release beta 3 which was just finished NYX last week and thanks to Sony for getting a dupe so quickly for those of you who are already excuse me for those of you who have already been working with Mac OS 8 and providing feedback on behalf of the entire Mac OS 8 team I'd like to thank you for your support for everyone else get your hands on the software and get ready for the best experience yet now to guide us through the whole Mac OS track at the conference here is user experience evangelist from Mackel Gordan garb [Applause] somehow I believe that this guy Murphy must have been a developer he sure understood the complicated world you developers live in even your conference gets more complicated than others with breakout sessions feedback forums hands-on labs and special events what are they and how can they help you and how can this complicated list of things to do simplify your life as developers you live in a world of endless and constant decision-making so coming here is more of what you do very well you make up your mind but let's see if I can help Benjamin Disraeli said it's much easier to be critical than to be correct don't worry we provide plenty of opportunity for you to be critical but these breakout sessions are about making sure you have all the updated and correct information about the Mac OS please notice session 108 somehow mysteriously escaped from the printed program grids that you have it'll be in room a to wednesday from 550 to 650 please don't miss it all of these sessions are designed for any audience whether you're new to Mac OS or you're an experienced Mac OS programmer you can find out more about the contextual menus that Dave just showed you and also Apple data defectors in sessions 102 and then session 103 if you don't recognize the name ihe that's because we used to call it by its codename v-twin apples still committed to the games market session 107 we'll fill you in on all of that and in each of these sessions not only do you get the chance to listen to us and hear what we have to say but we've set aside 15 minutes at the end for Q&A to listen to you for even more feedback the feedback forums give you a perfect chance to be critical or creative just tell us what you want and we'll be taking notes the new aspect is this year will be do more than just listening and not pleasantly from now on and we mean business your input will get put into our action plans and if you think that comes with pressure from the top you're right that's not the promise that will do everything you tell us to but we will discuss it at our planning sessions and give it the respectful consideration it is always deserved think of these feedback forums as Q&A in Reverse you could also learn something just by listening to the feedback forums you don't have to come there only if you have something to say also you'll hear about what happens to your feedback keep an eye on dev world and we'll be posting updates as time goes by this year's general feedback forum is different with previous years it will be staffed by executives the engineers will be there as observers only if you can make it the only one feedback forum this is the one not every session about Mac OS fit into this one track there are two sessions on the blue box in Rhapsody you should check out what many Java and web related topics are in the internet track checking your show guide for more details in the Space Age the most important space is between the ears and that's what the labs are all about close-up hands-on getting to know everything much better there's a limit to the number of people who can attend each hands-on lab so sign up and sign up early again as Dave mentioned you can qualify for drawing to win a 20th anniversary Mac by going to the lab and checking it out a clinic is kind of like a lab but if the Apple script terminology clinic it's a place for everyone interested in working with Apple script to get together and work together on hashing out differences in Apple script terminology and coming up with a better way of doing things moving forward at Apple we believe that if you have a conference without fun you don't have a conference so we've got several special events Fred Hudson for the sixth time has gathered a stellar list of luminaries to answer tough questions and for you to try to outwit and stump the experts if you've never been there it's kind of like the computer Bowl it's kind of not they'll be a ton of people up on stage it's not being televised it's not being webcast you have to be their lives to experience it the human interface design Excellence Awards being given to the second time this year recognized excellence in human interface recognized innovation recognized elegance they'll be awarded tonight Guy Kawasaki is the master of ceremonies they are surprised two people winning them please join us later tonight and salute the winners we're in this together to win together and feel great about what we're doing this conference is about coming to grips with what it takes to win big time to succeed and to enjoy everything about it my assignment is to help you spend your os time profitably so find me here at the conference and let me help one-to-one okay thanks have a great conference [Applause] [Music] whether you grab