---
title: WWDC1997 Session 210
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc1997-210
---

# WWDC1997 Session 210

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en new operating system couple months ago based on a technology that has an interface and a user experience that is certainly not Mac OS the internet explodes in discussion comments debate I'd like to invite Kurt Piersall to join the stage talk about Rhapsody's user experience how we're moving short term long term and the exciting issues that are in front of us Kurt good morning everybody as you heard probably in the keynote speech for Rhapsody the stuff that you can see today is a work in progress and so I'm here to deliver the awful truth to you as many of you may have noticed Apple has been struggling for the last 13 years to try and make a business out of this whole graphical user interface thing and we've now come to the conclusion it's not really possible to do that of course so as one very perceptive person during the the QA at the core OS sessions asked they asked whether or not we were going to be delivering the curses library along with the rest of the nuclear underneath we decided to move to a completely ASCII art based interface using the Curtis library extensively so the next the next version of the interface builder tool that you've seen so much about it will of course be the VI text editor but you're free to leverage a large number of additional ascii-based tools available from a huge array of vendors so obviously this isn't the real truth about rhapsody human interface but I wanted to give you an idea just how horrible it could be so when we get to the Q&A session I could threaten you with something when we actually get to the stuff we're going to do so let's jump right into the real message that we're going to try and make in all of this which is the Rhapsody look and feel what we're aiming for is to give you the best of all worlds and first of all of course given it we're talking about the Macintosh human interface we're pretty darn close as it is so we're not about to just sort of go and say okay why don't we just blow off all of that years of experience with the Macintosh look and feel we're going to try and preserve as much of it as we can we're going to try and make it look and feel delightful to people who have used Mac ins options but at the same time there's a whole bunch of great new ideas and openstep and we want to make sure that we're also using the great new ideas we see from there and we even may look at a few other platforms the occasional other platform I won't leave anything in specific here of course does have the occasional extraordinarily rare good idea a human interface so we're going to take all of those things now because you know you've had a chance to see this I want to get rights to the demo stage so that you can you can get all excited before I have to go and give you the rest of the talk so I'd like to bring up one of the fellows who's been most involved with getting the specifics of the look and feel the look of the very funds up on the screen and his name is Arlo rose I really would you please come up everyone here has won a free one-year supply of human interface from Apple Computer Arlo tell them what they've won thank you you wander down to the far side of the stage here so what we're looking at right now is not a Macintosh it is actually open step or I'm sorry Rhapsody as you can see the windows look just like a Mac we've got the closed box in the right place we've got the zoom box over here that actually works resizes properly we have a collapse box not the little eye complication thing we have a menu bar that actually has layouts very similar to the way you'd be used to seeing them on a Mac the file menu the Edit menu depending on what kind of application you're in we may change the name of the file menu but this is all work in progress so who knows we're going to do put a little look who has yours remember the Archaea let me show you some of the other neat things that some the other interface element so if we go to the print menu soomi nothing horrible happens here you can see that we have the radio buttons behaving the way they behave on a Mac we have the tempo Mac OS 8 pop-up menu tab behavior we have the push buttons looking the way they're supposed to look system font isn't quite there yet but we're getting there let's take a look at interface builder real quick I can show you some of the other groovy controls we have we have sliders it's create a new document real quick get over there we have sliders and they just like they do on the Mac OS point in any direction you want them to and have tick marks although I'm not going to take the time to bring that up because I don't know where can those the mystic marks be any ASCII character they can they can be one they're going to be your eyes they could be lowercase elves step two the developer is going to be a theme through this whole thing just in case you didn't know that already checkboxes progress indicators another thanks character in the check box and it's actually alright so as you can see we're actually doing a pretty pretty good job of making this look and feel like a Mac let me also show you some of the other interesting things we can do here with window layering something that we're keeping if you open up the text edit path let's get this guy a little smaller what we're talking about how you resize that window just oh okay one of the nice things is as you'll notice there's no grow box anymore the grow box will be integrated or the grow regions will be integrated into the outside of the window and not only can you grow from the bottom right hand corner you can also grow from the top left or top right top left bottom left and will probably be either resizing or moving from all four sides as well so kind of a neat little thing there our scroll bars will see let's just hit the return character a few times as you can see that they're proportional do we have proportional thumbs what an idea and libels growing - and the window layering model is a little different than you're used to you're used to having your entire app switch forward when you click on one of the windows in this little scenario here you only get one of the windows unless I guess this is a floating palette kind of behavior thing here so you're going to get that floating to the front but as you can see I'm filling around here and only certain windows are coming to the front even though the entire application is active anything else nope I think that's about it except we might want to feel around with text editing just a little bit just so people can see there's kind of some new basic controls in the system for things like textiles and colors so we can select a piece of text go to font go to the font panel it's a global system font panel that should look and behave the same across all applications do some groovy stuff you can see the font you're fiddling with and set it and same concept with color I can remember where it actually colors there's a color candle to which you should should just be able to drag a chunk of text to and have a change color not quite used to this there we go and then those will go away if you click another layer or they'll stick around if you go back to layer you're fiddling with great thanks very much rollin sure hopefully what you all took away from this short little demo is the idea that what you're seeing is not something that's so radically different from the Mac OS that people going to oh my god oh my god lobby doesn't they know who we are we're marking close customers we need something good right we want people to have an experience that they find delightful that's that's the basic idea so the stuff that you saw there there are some things that are really kind of nice the scrolling is much improved over the way it currently works in Mac OS and we think people are going to be very excited about those capabilities the ability to live scroll the ability to get proportional thumbs add a lot of nice extra information in the interface that users will find very valuable you notice that we have the Macintosh menu bars we went and looked at the various kinds of menu solutions we saw out there we didn't look at just our platform we didn't look at even just the the openstep platform we went looked at all various peoples menu systems and we decided magnet does minions really are better than anybody else's happen for a long time but we did decide it would be great to have tariffs and do context menus so I'm glad to see some of you are awake as well as excited this morning so the second thing of course is the window behavior is much improved the layer model that you just saw in there is generally much less confusing so the typical user who takes a look at it the new resize capabilities where you can resize some era states this is one of those extraordinarily rare ideas from other platforms that we thought were particularly nice and the ability to live dragged Windows is also nice I hear a hit over there quiet remember curses you could have it so the basic elements of the system the things that that people see almost immediately are going to look very familiar to them so when someone sits down in front of the screen they're not just gonna go anything but that they're going to go see this feels a lot like a Macintosh which is usually the reaction we've done for most people who's seen the current look what you have seen really is a work in progress as you've been told before because the various controls I see some of you are pointing at the text in the window here enjoying a little dialogue back and forth to what people will see the various controls should all feel reasonably we'll see them so I'm not going to give you a demo of the new Rhapsody finder but we are in the process of building a new one the one that you saw there is really just a thing that we're delivering for developer release and it's a relatively small Delta from the current open step workspace but let me talk a little bit about what we're going to do with the finder what's going to be interesting about it as we move forward first of all like most of the things we're going to build something that's mostly the Mac OS finder we don't want to suddenly move to an entirely different paradigm I knew some of you would be pleased by this idea as well so you are going to have the sort of multiple window paradigm that you have today from the finder you are going to be able to drag to the desktop that's going to be just like it is today you are going to have an icon view it's not going to be just a next step browser it will have pixel level positioning we are going to give you 32 by 32 icons there have been people who suggested the current 48 by 48 icons are a bit immense as a person of substance I can't empathize with them but nonetheless a diet is probably in order for the icons you're a subtle crowd this is good uh-huh we're also going to do a list view like we have today with the twisty triangles but we're going to add some new features that people would ask me for for a long time including not only resizable but reorder herbal columns also a very nice feature and to add sort of the icing to this particular cake we're planning on making both of these views standard openstep use standard Rhapsody views that you'll be able to incorporate in your own things instead of having to rewrite stuff looks kind of like the stuff that's in the finder you'll be able to use the actual code base that does it so people will be able to build services that look very much like the current finder experience and there's a good reason for that and I'll get into that in just a second but the other thing is we are going to put in an open step style browser this is good I get to appeal to both sides now I can say how cool the open step browser is good because it really is cool if you've used it especially in a development environment it's really kind of a nice way to deal with when you have a whole bunch of files that you're trying to work with in groups you want to quickly browse back and forth into segments of it it's very nice and we're gonna build one much like today's open step browser with multiple panes the shelf the paths on it and that's going to be available probably as a menu item we haven't decided in specific yet exactly how it's going to look but basically a user who wants to use it will be able to go to a menu item say I'd like to use the browser that's the way I'd like to interact with my system as opposed to I'd like to use a sort of find your style you know navigate down through folders mechanism to get down what's there so we're trying to get people just as I said before the best of all worlds the best stuff that we can find from both platforms and put them together into something that people will find delightful more filling tastes great let's let Kent yeah more filling even better so the good reason I was talking about for making those controls available for you to use is because we're going to actually make the Rhapsody finder an extensible system so you'll be able to write new browsers to plug in to our environment so you don't have to sell for just the stuff that we provide you're going to be able to write your own blog in your own plugins for it and this is a feature we're planning on having available for the unified release we don't have a current schedule for a spec so I can't give you a date at which you'll be able to start doing this kind of stuff but I wanted to give you an idea that this was coming and it's going to be possible for these viewers to be separate applications the way we're building the finders we're building an infrastructure layer underneath they handle things like copies and moves so that you can just call those services to get those things done correctly and completely on the system so you will be concentrating on writing a look and experience that people can see without having to worry about how to get the copy algorithm just right so that everything works correctly in the system so you'll be able to run them either as a separate application or probably write in the same process space with the regular finder so this extensible replaceable feature I'll talk a little bit more as we go through some of the other slides to give you a basic idea so for developer and premiere the thing we're going to deliver for developer you've already seen much of it although it's it's even more Mac like in the current builds that are actually back at the shop in Cupertino it's going to be a relatively small Delta from the open step workspace and for premia there'll probably be some incremental changes views that look more like the current finder views some of the basics of what we're doing but not the whole infrastructure that lets you extend the finder and that's something that we're talking about doing for the unified release so that's the point rig you'll actually see that so that's a little ways off which is why I don't have a great demo to show you a wonderful cool with the things in it but the basics are already coming together but you should see at least does some improvement and things that are looking more and more Mac like even for the first two releases of the finder and developer in the premier release okay so let's talk a little bit about some of the other experience elements in the system this is kind of a little grab-bag section I'm going to talk about various areas and I'm going to try and keep these relatively short because we want to give a lot of time for you guys to give us questions later on so the traditional jehad level holy water issue whenever you get to wow that's great thunder and everything um file types and creators this is probably the single most contentious issue for people who are actually discussing what we ought to do with the new system and how we should go and the current plan for us is to retain the file type and creator experience from Macintosh users so people have gotten used to types and graders are still going to get same experience they get today but there are some file systems that simply cannot support this behavior if you're making a connection over a link to NFS I guarantee there is just no in hell you're going to get that stuff on an NFS so it's just not wherever you go there's some interesting little block that prevents you from finally getting to it so and the fact of the matter is when you're interoperating with the rest of the world file extensions are an important way of talking about the content of things for interoperability with the rest of the universe so our plan is to use file extensions as a fallback position as well so if you download a file onto your system and it comes from somewhere that doesn't have types and craters if we can't figure out what it is and it has a sort of a you know questions-- questions-- questions-- questions-- in the type field or any of the other similarly not particularly useful type or creative values we're gonna actually look at the extension and map the applications that way as well so people will get a good experience out of it a better experience when you get on Mac OS or next today so that all the power of types and creators but when they're interoperating with the rest of the world extensions are going to work and they're going to be able to use all the various disk formats that people use in other parts of the world that don't have types and creators so we should have limited support for this in premier and full support for it by unifying okay the help system in health system we've decided to take a radical new approach to help system authoring by using an actual standard data type that other people in the rest of the world use that being HTML so yes we haven't finished all the details about how HTML is going to be plugged into the system but one thing that we can tell you now is if you build help files as a set of HTML files with relative references that can all be plugged together into a folder that it is going to work with our help system so the basics of doing this will allow you to base it use any HTML editor if you like you know go out and grab yourself a copy of Clara's home page go out and grab a copy of Paige mill and start building HTML based health content now a lot of people like some of the capabilities that you get from Apple guide and you know the ability to do coach marking the ability to help do things these are great features we don't want these things to disappear in the system but we don't want to have to have a whole special data format to do them so our current plan is to provide sort of incremental additions to the system new kinds of HTML types that you can add to get things coach marked to start doing more kinds of active assistance in your help files so as time progresses we'll add more and more of these tags to get you back to the same kind of stuff that you were doing with Apple guide today but using HTML as your basic content model underneath so the new help model for the system is going to be able to go out across the net because it's HTML based and we're going to be able to follow links out of the help system so you can link back onto your server if you need you know extended help on something it will be integrated with the network HTML based I think it will be a much better experience for a lot of people and we're not going to give up two great things that we were doing with Apple guide we're just going to put them more into the internet world the world of trying to interoperate with the rest of the computing universe ok so let's talk a little bit about internet and Internet integration you remember this wonderful extensible finder architecture I was telling you about one of the big reasons for doing that is so that we can get superb internet internet integration into the system so we plan to make sure that anybody who's building browsers can use those same facilities for having desktop URL files for using the extensible finder architecture to run browsers right in place inside Finder windows if they want so that you'll have an integrated browsing experience that goes from your local disk all the way out through the internet internets and lands and we're going to have Internet data types of the first class citizens in it for instance of something that probably most of you don't know yet is that the text object the basic text system inside the racketing platform is going to handle HTML so you're going to be able to actually use HTML stuff directly just using the text system and get HTML in and out of that so you'll have a lot more capability for dealing with HTML browsers and kind of things just by using the basic text editing services of the system so you should see the first instances of this kind of stuff by premiere the first instances of this kind of integration happening is to get better and better as we get the full extensible architecture in place the installation model is also something that's kind of nice probably most of you haven't installed anything on an open step system and if you have you probably realize they haven't installer that's much like our current install and we're planning on actually taking some of the technology for our own installer and some from the current open step installer merging them into a new installation model but a lot of the great things that they have in there is a built-in uninstall model when you install something on a system it puts a receipt on the system that you can double click and take the stuff back off and that's just a basic part of the installation experience so we're trying to get all of those capabilities into the installation model for the system and there's an upgrade or capability as well and you'll be able to take advantage of all of these things there'll be a standard system install experience that you can use ok now we get to the hard part of this talk this is the one that I think it's probably going to be the most interesting and contentious issue of any of things that we have to do with the Rhapsody human experience so I'm looking forward to getting very toasty when if we actually get around to having questions here's the big picture about how the Mac OS compatibility layer and Rhapsody the yellow box are going to interoperate on the system and the answer is they're going to be almost completely separate so when you're actually in the blue box environment there's two computers in there you're going to think of the blue box environment as a separate computer we have argued about this quite extensively internally so my guess is those of you who really don't like this decision will come up with many of the same arguments that people internally an applehead about this we don't think there's an ideal solution here I'm going to describe to you some of the thinking that we went through and coming to the current decision so you can get an idea exactly they're doing but basically it comes down to having to make a tough call about what probably is a better experience for users in the long run so let's talk a little bit about that right now okay those of you who've studied human interface over the years or looked at know that rule number one the golden rule the rule Edge tunes oan when it comes to doing interface design is avoiding hidden modes alright the last thing you want the user to be in is a mode where the rules of behavior on his system have changed but he doesn't know it he hasn't figured it out you don't want it to suddenly sort of you know and this was sort of the traditional thing that tended to happen a lot in sort of typical sort of command-line interfaces that people were building you know way back when was that you would get into these modes right you would forget that you were in the middle of the text editor and you start typing what you thought was a command and all you get was some extra text on the bottom in fact there was a text editor that I used to use once upon a time it was really great if you would sit down in front of it and you they had little sort of command things and if you were in the wrong mode and you type the word edit thinking you were going to go into edit mode another thing what it did was it would do II meant select everything delete was the second thing that was the day I met insert and then you were in insert mode and you got a T so you know it was a really keen way to turn an entire file into a T just by typing the word it very nice you know that's the kind of thing you really really don't want to have people do and that was the thing that made us really really worried about trying to get a mode where the windows and the menus and very things of the blue box and the yellow box were mixed together the rule is if you can't provide seamless integration try and make the mode switch obvious let me give you a couple of examples just so you get kind of a clear idea what's going on imagine that we had mixed the blue boxes and yellow boxes together so people really couldn't tell which kind of windows were coming from which kind of application it all felt like they were just sort of one space and you go out and you grab your favorite utility that patches your Mac OS today my favorite in this particular case is something like pop care pop here's a really neat little utility you know you plug it in there puts up a little thing that puts up a key caps kind of thing it sits up in the menu bar and imagine if you actually did just go to wrap you system install the thing it's wonderful now you get pop care on about half your menu bars because obviously the paps that's happening to the Mac OS level the system isn't going to be applied to the yellow box part of the system but I guess we could try to apply the patch but I don't think the results would be terribly wonderful and would be very unlikely to be stable in that particular case and this one happens again and again that's the kind of stuff that goes on all the time in Mac OS people make patches they do basic things to the basic system and it wouldn't apply across all of your applications and you as an end-user would probably have no idea what was going on right so you could you could try another solution you could say okay so what we'll do is we'll make those you know blue box based windows look different than yellow box based windows right that way users could always tell what was going on by looking at the window title bar now speaking it personally as a geek you know I could probably handle this right you know I said oh I see this window is subtly different therefore this application is running in a cooperatively scheduled shared memory model on the system right and anybody sitting nearby me would probably be saying something there Oh Damon tomorrow we get another infestation of geeks here I'll go get the shot and clean the damn things out all I do is leave around old bottles adult colon Szechuan food droppings everywhere totally right people just don't think in that subtle of terms when they're looking at their system and we don't want to confuse them are having all sorts of subtle changes let me give you some other examples let's some you know one of the things that's different about rhapsodies this window layering model right you can bring individual windows to the front in the yellow box but you can't really do that in the blue box Mac OS Springs windows together in layers so you're a user now you get to say I click on this window it comes to the front I click on this window five windows come to the front I like this system it's sort of those experience in stimulating surprises every time all right let's imagine a tap crashes in the Makah left side of the world what happens then the user sits there and goes huh you know sometimes when app crashes takes 2 or 3 with it sometimes it doesn't I don't know what the hell's going on this thing Howard right and the really exciting one the one that I really love user Scott bunch of blue box applications up and working doing this mac OS stop running file-sharing background app over in the blue box side one of the apps crashes now file-sharing has gone away because the blue box has vanished right did the user have any idea that some of the server's we're running in the blue box some of them are running in the yellow box some them crash when some of the visible apps go some them crash on their own when they don't sometimes one of those things crashes it brings out some of the visual ops the point of all of this is this is a very confusing experience for a user they would sit down in front of a system like this and they go you know sometimes things crash and a lot of stuff happens I don't know why it's all very subtle sometimes the windows work the way I expected to a lot of time they don't a lot of times I can patch stuff in the system and sometimes it kind of works this is not the experience I think we want for our end users and this is the reason we've decided especially for the time being to try and keep the two worlds as separate as possible so you can explain to a user that when the Mac OS part of the system goes down did anything he was running in their feed a server an application went down with it you can explain why that happened and they'll understand there are things in this part of the world and they kind of they aren't as stable but they work together and I've got a lot of software that works there and if it crashes I have to restart the thing but at least I know what's happening where and what's going wrong my system and why it's doing what it's doing and that's what we wanted people to get out of the experience so basic rules for integration when we have these kind of systems up where we're trying to keep you know two worlds and we're trying to keep them separate first of all don't change modes unexpectedly on users so we're going to try and make sure that if you double click on a document somewhere it doesn't automatically decide to launch the entire blue box environment and swap you into it we're probably going to give you a little bit more warning than that in the environment so you understand what's happening to you second thing is trying not to hide differences that make a difference and so that's the kind of stuff I was talking about with things like the window layering models or weather service crash and so on and the last thing is don't make the user guess what changed when you did what and this is something a little more subtle we'll talk about this more in a second so there are a bunch of shared system elements and a bunch of things that aren't gonna be shared so first of all let's talk about what can be shared to some extent between blue box and yellow box the file system is going to be shared but not entirely because you probably don't want your average you know user sitting in Mac OS to go wandering off down into the midst of the slash bin slash whatever folder and start you know editing files with you know Microsoft Word which is perfect we have to open any file you pointed out I'm probably not the ideal experience now we don't to prevent people from seeing these files but we also don't want people to just have these files in their face all the time with you know dangerous things that they might possibly do with them so we're going to try and segregate the file system into things that are mostly glue based and things are mostly yellow based not to keep people from getting to them but to keep them from having to be confused by the difference most of the time we are going to share the clipboard between the two parts of the system because people really do like to transfer data back and forth and they probably get really annoyed with this the screen is going to be partially shared we talked a little bit about this in the blue box session sometimes it'll be full screen sometimes it'll only be a part of the screen we're probably going to share the fonts for the simple reason then you get to countries in Asia you often have fonts that 40 megabytes apiece so just getting an extra copy of those just so you can run them in the blue box as well as the yellow box even with today's wonderful modern disk technology 40 megabytes apiece does begin to add up sort of like in a million here a million there adds up to real money eventually famous some you know megabyte here megabyte there I had that experience recently by the way I was installing onto a system and it wouldn't install with more than a four gig drive on it and this this drive had a 4.0 for gigs it's just a smidge above four gigs right then I realized that's 40 megabytes at what point in my life did 40 megabytes become a smidge so uh one thing that isn't going to be shared as the finder we're going to talk about that at length in a second just so you understand a little bit more there but so for filesystem sharing the math class is going to see a series of volumes just like it does today start with Mac OS it's going to see a series of volumes those volumes there is you're going to come from shared parts of the yellow filesystem or disk images or partition in the shared case each of the two environments is going to be able to see all the files in all the shared directories and you're going to be able to share any directory you'd like so you can go actually and share the slash directory at the top of the the yellow box world into blue although chances are it's a wildly uninteresting activity for you but we are going to try and tend to hide inappropriate files separate directories for the things in different environments so the system folder is not going to be mixed in with the /fc folder in some fashion or some similarly praised notion and the other directories directories that are sort of you know standard directories that yellow box uses to keep up and run are going to be made less obvious to people and that's really the goal we're trying to reach in all this to keep people from being unnecessarily confused on the system and there are some special compatibility modes things like mac OS partitions and disk images those files aren't going to be shared with the rest of Rhapsody in general but these things are more compatible and you've got a blue application that's talking directly to discussing manager and it wants to do stuff to you know a disk format that's entirely different than a volume you're going to need these special modes to actually work so for really high end users these features are going to be interesting but they're not going to be the default experience for most people there's going to be a setup panel that will let people sort of configure this any of you played with PC compatibility on Macintosh as I've seen a similar kind of a panel there we can sort of say which kind of volumes are going to appear as the drives in the PC side of the world it's a very similar kind of experience we're probably gonna do here so screen sharing we have two modes one where the Mac OS takes over the screen one where there's hotkey switching what's going on I excuse me that's taking over the screen so you can switch back and forth with hotkeys and they'll probably be one or more wrapped to the entries on the process menu and switching is never going to be a side effect users action we always wanted to be something the user decides to do not something that the system sort of imposes on them because something happened right you can just imagine you know fascinating things where I you know a time program wakes up and desire excellent time to switch the user in the blue like a music goes I know what happened probably right in between keystrokes if he's really lucky uh-hum having to mechanize take over the screen it's going to be by far the most compatible mode and the fastest mode that you can run it in when blue has access to do the whole screen it doesn't have to double buffer or whole series of things that work better in this mode now it's probably going to be fine for most reasonably well behaved applications to run into Mac OS in a box mode but for some things like games they're going to want to take over the full screen - and so Mac OS in a box means really a window it's going to be a Rhapsody window that has a little Macintosh screen in there it's going to have little knots off edges just as if it were a screen there's going to be a little menu bar up at the top of it and in fact if you resize the screen the macro life stuff is going to think that you just change the resolution on the monitor and it's going to relay itself out to kind of fit the new screen size and one of the things that is currently going to be the case and it's probably not my favorite feature of the system is the fact that dragging is going to stop at the box boundary so this is something that right now currently the blue box implementation team isn't sure that they can deliver so you don't want to promise it to people yet but certainly high in my list of things that we'd rather have working a different way there are going to be a few other shared elements generally as few as possible we talked about fonts in the clipboard a little bit but one in the system time we decided it would probably be a bad idea to have users think of the system as sort of yet another thing kind of like all those VCRs and clocks and stuff they keep around the house when the power goes out all the power went off I have to reset the clock on both sides that would be really obnoxious I already hate it with the rest of my equipment the last thing I need is in my computer I still have to set multiple clocks to it would be very unfortunate we are also going to have two finders and this is the usual thing because if you actually go and talk to somebody you say hey how'd you like to have a system with two finders in it they go oh no no I wouldn't like that at all then you go okay that's great would it be all right if Fong you know all the Apple scripts you were doing for workflow stopped working well no of course not that would be terrible okay well how about if all those things that you know kind of get all these neat little extensions and stuff that make the finder do some extra things for you okay if they'll stop working too well no I like all that software it all works and pretty soon you have this little conversation for a little island people going maybe to find written all in bed I kind of like being able to do the stuff I do in my current system on here so the real trade-off for us is one of can we make it compatible and stable and still have a single finder and we don't think there's any way to do that and when you talk to people they want the stable environment they want high compatibility with their existing software and they want great smooth integration it's like you know huh you can have any two of these but not all three so the Mac OS finder is going to be there so that the things that depend on the Mac OS finder and there are applications there are extensions there are scripts that all depend on are going to be able to run on this system it's going to be highly compatible but of course you know the Mac OS finder is vulnerable to other programs mistakes so if we try to make it the only de macorís finder that was launching all the wraps the applications then basically you'd have to relaunch gravity whenever the blue finder crashed which we all know it does from time to time very rarely of course but nonetheless people wouldn't want to give up that level of stability and so the last thing is we're talking about the separated model so people understand that there are two machines in there and they have different characteristics and different kinds of stability and different sorts of behavior and having two finders let's let's people understand there are two computers in there and helps them to understand which mode they're operating in at any given time so we think having two finders is the best we can do for the time being if we can solve some of these problems it's going to take us time because we're going to have to get some help from you to stop doing some of the sort of amazing things that applications do if you want to get stuff that's going to give a smoother integration I'll give an example there's at least one program I know of which no because it hasn't called wait next event yet it's safe to go walk the window list get all the reasons out of the windows take them out of whatever it's doing and then circ writing gets directly into the frame bunker which is absolutely true on the Mac OS because if you haven't given up like next event nothing in the universe could have moved those windows underneath you on rhapsody between any two instructions something could have moved one of those windows underneath you and this is the kind of sort of you know I'm sorry said this is pathological behavior that will cause weird screen artifacts to occur if we're trying to get these these window systems to interleave they're a whole series and things like this and so it's going to take us time to move the system towards more integration because we're going to have to sort of move people relatively slowly and get enough software that works the right way so that people can continue doing their work and still be able to use the system and that's not going to be something we can do right away so haven't gone through this long thing I hope some of you understand more why we're making this particular decision about the human experience because it's not because we think it's the ideal I mean the ideal would be everything would work smoothly and perfectly and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference and it would all be great but that's probably not achievable given the current state of the real world so this is what we think is the best thing to do so one last little bit of stuff about the network this is the last sort of area each environments going to prevent present its own view of the network for a variety of different reasons and this is not all bad by the way Rhapsody it's not going to have a chooser we have decided that the chooser is not the optimal human experience for network browsing so the rhapsodies wouldn't have that but not all the network protocols will necessarily be there on both sides so you know you may not have something that knows how to read some particular protocol in the yellow box side of the world or something in the blue box side of the world so we need to allow both of those environments to operate somewhat independently just so people will understand what's going on again so in summary before we get to our questions and answers we have a new advanced look and feel for accessing we're trying to combine the best of all ways we want it to be stable we want it to be extensible we want it to be high-performance we also want to have great Mac OS compatibility and we want to have it be so compatible that people get basically all the software they care about to run on it in very short order and to do that we're going to make it distinctly separate so at this point I'm going to open up the floor to questions and answers and some of my compatriots from the H I team and the marketing group are going to come up here and help me answer these questions so an barrestin is going to be up here Arlo is going to get up on stage Ricardo Gonzales who's the marketing manager for Rapp see Tim McCallum who's one of the leaves on the H I caiman I don't know Cordell do want to get up here I see you out in the middle of the audience you're hiding not that I blame you of course so I'll go over here and okay why don't we start on the left-hand side here hi crystal from Wolf Square and all the information systems I have a bunch of questions I'll try to restrict myself to a couple to dive right into the pipe creator debate have you considered that on a multi-user system opening a default application based on a creator code stored in the file may not be the best idea because different users on the system are going to want to open the same file in different applications by default and do you have any plans for allowing that to be tuned on a per user basis so I can answer that if you look at the current environment of people who work today with pipes and graders on Apple share systems they basically have the same thing write a particular user has set the particular creator code for that application in general they it hasn't been a big problem for us so we're pretty convinced it's not going to be a big problem in the new world either you know it does cause the occasional annoyance but it hasn't been something that we think merits actually sort of you know moving an entirely different model of of how we could launch files because we think users are used to it they kind of like it okay any chance that we'll still see some form of pop-up-menu supported by the system global next style no definitely it means like the two different types of pop-up and pulldown menus that currently exist open step no I'm referring more to the use of right mouse button to get rather than having to move all the way to the top of the screen and I hope so it's one of the things that I am trying to figure out how we can integrate into the whole menu like our connector thank you I give someone else a chance for now go to the center place does your new help system handle balloons or are you planning on handling something like balloons there's there's currently some things that do the same kind of stuff in the current app kit for putting up the basically tooltip kind of things with various kinds of controls we're planning on moving those things forward I don't think we're going to go to the same model of balloon help that we all know and love on the Mac OS but we do want some of that same kind of capabilities and are some things in the app kit so you'll see some of that kind of stuff but it won't be the same model that we have currently on Mac OS ok I'm on next they currently do all their installs into like an ACCI folder it is that going to change or be perceived different I yeah we plan to let people put applications anywhere they want just like they do today on the Mac OS we think that's important part of the experience on the right-hand side Alvers burner motorola i was wondering if you give us your thoughts on multiple monitor support and how that whole thing fits into the picture for multiple display I think you'll be very pleased actually one of the things that we looked at when we were actually evaluating various operating system technologies at the end of last year was you know what could we do with multiple monitor support and you know the open sepsis was the only one that actually had multiple monitor support the way we would think of it on the system so we plan to carry that ahead into the new system we'll definitely want to do multiple monitors and you'll feel much like they do today okay back here on the left giving Locke Island graphics corporation yes I'm going to bring out the blue box questions okay so you decided to go separate which is fine and you brought out some very compelling arguments why you want to do that I can think of one very compelling argument about having an integrated environment and that is let's say if the user has Photoshop installed where is it is in the blue box is in the yellow box where is it going to find it and you know you not only do you have to maintain a dual mentality that you have your two machines in there which is okay right but the thing is that you don't know where things are you need to keep track of oh I have XY and Z in blue box I have ABC and yellow okay let it be a big problem let me address that we're saying we aren't planning on hiding you know the blue applications when you're over in the yellow side of the world in in the new system so if you actually go to a blue application and double-click on it we probably will put up with dialog boxes you know you're not running in blue right now would you like me to switch you there but we will definitely switch you into the environment and let's you start using it so you're not going to have to sort of you know sit around go hey I wonder where I put that application did I leave it in the blue world or in the yellow world we don't want that experience so that particular issue I think we're going to give a pretty good solution for but I agree with you this is this is going to be more difficult in the new system than it was with just a straight Mac OS any any other guys want to comment no no none of them with a government I hope you all are you implying that when I'm sitting in front of the in the yellow screen I can actually double click on some icon that will launch means with blue box app absolutely ok and the other way around someone else what about the other way around the answer is yet you're working both records can you can you provide some other arguments on the other side um now that you're gonna have me right there ask me to argue with myself well I've been killed in presence of half the arguments here I would like to see what the users are going to be experiencing what the problems they are going to be running into right I think the primary issue that people are going to have with the new system to argue with myself about those because we've gone through this back and forth it is going to be that they have to understand that there are two worlds and there is a separation and sometimes that's going to introduce some inconvenience and now they have to do things and we're entirely aware of all these things we went through them in sort of unpleasantly gory detail we went through there but this was exactly the example I mean this was a judgement call which was going to be worse not understanding what was going to go on on your system for all of your basic operations in a pretty continuous fashion or having to keep a little bit of extra memory around about where things were and we decided that it would be better to have the basic operation seems smooth and a none confusing and that was purely a judgment call and a rational person could disagree with us and one of the things we're going to do of course is when we actually get the thing up and running we're going to test the hell out of this because we know it's a big deal if I can add something to that we actually have been through this before with macintosh' application environment and as we were going through the design of that we've started running into these same issues where you know we really like the way things work on the Macintosh side and we wanted to carry over some of the interface elements into the x windows world and we started going down that path and we soon found that it really became confused because you could switch between these two worlds but the rules for how things acted between those two worlds were change and we did go through usability testing with that and found that users also liked the model of even though they had to deal with two different worlds when they were in one world all the normal rules of laws of physics applied when they're in another world the world they've the rules for that world applied to and from the usability testing that we did there we found that was the right decision we could go to the middle place either I'm a long time math developer but recently I've had to spend a significant amount of time developing under Windows NT 4.0 and I'm troubled by how much of the new Mac look and feel is already in Windows NT and how Apple is going to distinguish their look and feel in the marketplace from from that and I just want to throw that out as a sort of a cautionary note to Apple that we do need to distinguish our look and feel from a lot of stuff that already is in Windows and one could argue about who developed these innovations in the first place and it probably wasn't Microsoft but on the other hand they are there in the marketplace and Apple does need to distinguish that but on a more practical level I'm really troubled by the windowing model under Windows NT of Windows being intermingled from applications and how that interacts with the taskbar I find that incredible Cluj and I hope Apple will doesn't fall into sort of that same mire and at least have the windowing moddable model switchable so you could get a standard mac OS layered approach and or the intermingled approach depending on what you like and also I mean look at how Windows NT you know forget we're going to be a path name based operating system all of a sudden which is troubling on a Macintosh how Windows NT basically fails that you know how the yeah incorporating path name information both into the title bars of Windows and into the taskbar information and you know see some usability testing on this is I guess is what I'm saying so first I want to say all your points are very well taken I think we'd basically agree with all of the things that you had to say to us and we're very worried about those particulars issues there is one particular thing I want to point out about the window model in specific which isn't immediately obvious so most people who sit down in front of a Rhapsody system which is that there is a very simple way it's very easy to build reflexes up to get applications to switch all of their windows to the front which is basically just going and double-clicking on the app icon and all the windows will come together as a group and we plan to have a mechanism that lets you bring any individual window or any application you know set of windows together forward as a group so that people will be able to sort of choose whichever mode they want and sort of build their own reflex for which way they like to switch between apps so I think that will work very well for fuel I certainly found it as soon as I understood that there was this extra feature in there I certainly was much happier because I felt I had gotten pretty much the best of both worlds in them okay on the right hand side Jeff Johnson Web TV networks I'm interested in specifically how the file mapping between files that do not use the file and type creators will work specifically I'm interested in is the setting or how the the files extension is mapped an application global or does it separate between Rhapsody of robots so for example if you have fractal painter on one side and Photoshop on the other you want to open a TIFF file with one on raster day and one with blue box run that scenario by me one more time well let's say you have a tiff file in the extension gif and you want to open that file by default with fractal painter on blue box and Photoshop on Rhapsody is that possible or is it mapped to a single type of application what we're currently planning is to be able to have both a blue and a yellow application associated with any particular file type so that if you're running in the yellow it's going to try to launch the yellow application with that file first if there's not a corresponding yellow application then what you will do is it'll lock it'll come up with selection saying we don't have this we although there is a blue application that's associated with this file you want to make the switch over to blue at that point super one weather quick question are you planning on making it possible for the browser then the next step browser to be used in any window as opposed to having a single browser yes we're currently looking at trying to associate browsers with individual windows individual folders or files so that you can actually swap switch browsers depending upon the context if you have an application environment or folders associated with your application development you may want to use the next-step browser with those particular folders you may want to use the Mac OS or you may want to use some third-party browser to look at other sections of your hard disk or the network or whatever browser you choose to look at you can associate those with whatever context you choose to believe that's the plan right super hope you do that Thanks okay here on the Left Mike's cool or curling I have a question about the Finder window code that we're going to be able to use in our apps because we heard that the advance look and feel won't be there for apps running under windows will that code be there with a Windows look and feel or will that be something we have to differentiate in a portable application the answer is we could probably do it either way so we should talk about what your business requirements are and see if we can come to some agreement about what the right way is to do it you know just give us feedback tell us what kind of stuff you need and we can talk about which stuff is going to be available in which parts of the world I mean you know one of the things about the way open stuff works is it's a series of frameworks so you can deliver it you know parts of it in various places without delivering the whole thing so we have to go through a process of deciding you know which frameworks are cross-platform and which ones aren't and your feedback will help us get the right stuff in there okay I I'm guessing that people want to go cross-platform are going to want you know more of the framework to go but of course they want the windows look and feel on Windows you know be a credible windows out when they're there right currently actually that it does open step does that right now and we plan on keeping that I assume you're just simply talking about the visual appearance not necessarily the entire framework thing but yeah right now if you run an open step app then you know compiled for both open step on NT and open step for mock or whatever in our case it will be Rhapsody you will have the exact same look and feel experience per platform so if you run a Rhapsody app on Mac OS it will have the Mac OS look and feel if you run it on on mock on a PowerPC or on Intel it will have whatever the default Rhapsody look and feel will be and if you run it on into your Windows 95 that will look like Windows NT and Windows 95 it'll do the right thing as well as the menus as well there's separate files inside each of the apps it says okay I'm on a Mac app I'm going to display Mac like windows under the Windows environment I'm going to display windows from those menus okay the other question I had was about compound document architecture is Apple going to provide some leadership to bring developers together on a single standard open doc Khan was a little too a little too late well maybe a little too much little too late are we going to get something that's enough early enough this time you're a cruel man like this probably isn't the right forum for for me to answer that question the truth of the matter is for the time being we aren't doing stuff for opened on Rhapsody and we haven't finalized anything focus on the yellow box I mean I really think this falls under user experience that that to the user what open doc provided was you know that developers could come together on a single way to interoperate in documents I'm not asking to bring open dark forward I'm asking Apple to provide some leadership somehow that will bring developers together you know not after we have like two generations of applications on Rhapsody but maybe the first generation we could we could already have leadership from Apple to get that inner about interoperability going from the beginning and I think that's that's very good feedback I think something that we need to be clear going back to open dog anyway open dog is going to be on the blue box not in yellow however all the experience that and all the technology that well their doors also think that we're going to be looking anyway because as we said the UI right now is working progress will be evolving it and if we think that there are things that we can bring from other type of experiences and technologies who look at how to incorporate that so it's it's give all the feedback we will look at that and be sure that the user experience will continue to evolve and what we want to do is to bring the user to new levels with the most advanced Yui for all patterns so we will be looking at that okay in the middle place of course I Kurt agree with these remarks and a quick shot but it would certainly solve the application layering versus window based layering discussion we just had about five minutes ago to have a document based layering I think this is an excellent time just just here is sort of a ceremonial act here to get down on the knees take the microphone sorry about that anyway but my the reason I came up here to make a remark was independent of what you think of the HTML file format please don't even dream that you can do help in the current browsers using HTML yeah the plan is not to be using you know something like Netscape as your help system any of it or any sort of browsers I mean I whether hTML is up to up to it as a file format but using you know having thousands of files spread out on a folder and expect to do some reasonable help for developers say is I think absurd right so I I think we'd agree with you on that we're not planning on doing it as a browser style environment but hTML is the format that we're planning on using to get the content into the system on the right hand side place oh no microphone in terms of the security issues on the file system what you ID will the blue box be running under the answer is the UID will be the same UID that the user logged in to yellow with so that's what blue box will run as if it were that user thank you back to the left when Rhapsody is running on top of the Mac OS will it also be a separate window or will it take over the whole machine and it's something similar going to happen when Rhapsody is running on Windows 95 or MS NT okay we should be clear it isn't going to be Rhapsody that's running on the system's it's going to be the yellow box api's so when you see the yellow box api's on Windows 95 or Windows NT they used the 95 or NT student experience they used their version of the finder they use their version of controls the same thing is going to be true about Mac OS when you run a yellow box based application on Mac OS it'll look and feel like a Mac OS based application okay thank you in the middle then yeah just just clarify something there's something that is important is that for the user who's running an applications on the Windows environment it shouldn't be apparent for him that he's running any yellow box or whatever so he's running any application as it's at his facts to run any normal Windows application today and that should be the same experience in the in the Mac OS side and let me just add one more thing because it will be designed by Macintosh developers it will work that much better than any other Windows application question in the middle place ah yes I wanted to ask the question that UNIX is a multi-user environment thus are you going to preserve the concept that the users desktop as a use individual user logs into their machine that their desktop appears from their home directory which might be out on the network somewhere you know from a system administration standpoint one of the largest things that you get with the open step environment on MOC is that you can tell the user that you can scribble on your local hard drive is completely controlled from the system and standpoint and you get a lot more stability that way then most users are used to with the operating systems that are out there today so the feature you're talking about we we tend to call virtual desktops the idea that you log in on one machine wherever it is on the network and your desktop comes up with your preferences and so on and we plan to continue that in wraps tick that's certainly the planet I don't know that we'll have quite the same you know for small work groups we may not have sort of the centralized server model of where the home directory lives it may be more peer-to-peer in those cases but those are people who don't have the same kind of security concerns so I want to make sure you understand that it's not entirely necessarily exactly the same experience but but the core parts will probably still be there if we're running short on time but we'll take two more questions start here on the the right so I I get Rhapsody I install application a and it installs the shared library user expectation manager version 4.0 means and it doesn't understand version 3.0 version 5.0 then I install application B and application B requires user expectation manager version 5.0 will application a still work then when I D install application B will application a still work so I believe the answer to both of your questions is yes the application will still work those are two separate libraries and the process decides which one it's going to load when it starts up so that they could both be on machine at the same time and you know they can be D installed separately from our own so either so is the whole concept of shared code among applications being discarded oh not at all I mean they could they could be sharing code but if they're if they're interested in two different versions of the library then they aren't sharing code anymore right right is there any way that application a could be made to take advantage of the new additional features of shared love the second shared library probably not not without recompiling application a in some way this probably won't won't do the same thing cool say excellently yeah yeah this gently is the question I think that's better served in the runtime group talking about the actual runtime model of system there will be some feedback sessions that that session itself may actually be repeated later today we could take the last question here on the the left hand side it's going to be looking at the contents of file is going to be more like a get info or inspector kind of experience under the new UI I think the experience will be much like the current inspector model is a next step sort of a selection driven non-modal dialogue but there probably call it get info and it's going to be like context-sensitive and down 50 windows right definitely yeah one of the things we were planning on doing with Copeland and I hope to move to the Mac OS at some point and we get with with Rhapsody is the ability to have an extensible get info method so if you know you want to add the ability to view you know macro mind director files with your get info thing to see what the animation is you could certainly add that kind of plugin ability to your inspector okay thank you very much for your attention we'll stick around at the front of the stage here also there is a feedback form talking about the advanced user experience for Rhapsody right around tonight just after lunch today thank you very much 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