Exploded Clown

Tim Bray isn’t so sure he likes Tiger. And I’d agree, but with enough caveats that I thought a blog post would be worthwhile.

OS X has gone through five major revisions since I’ve been using it. It had more before, but since I didn’t use them I don’t really know about them, and won’t comment about them here.

The first release was Public Beta. This was a developer’s release: it was slow and had some bugs and everyone knew that it wasn’t a finished product. That was part of the name.

Release two was Mac OS X 10.0, which was the real deal. It was the ‘come and get it release’ that was supposed to signal that normal, everyday people could now run UNIX on their desktop and it would be pretty and they wouldn’t have to use UNIX just to use UNIX. This was UNIX for the rest of us: this was an end-user release.

Next came 10.1, which was for everybody, because the one feature in 10.1 was speed. If you’re keeping track at home, you can almost declare this as a non-release: this is what 10.0 was supposed to be, but for reasons of compiler– and press– release cycles couldn’t be.

Then we move into the big cats and get Jaguar, 10.2. This was a release for the developers again: we got Quartz Extreme APIs and Rendezvous Bonjour and a significant update to most of the internals. There was much rejoicing on the mailing lists, and there was the beginning of a Renascence in the Mac Shareware world. Jaguar contained little for the end-user, but it contained a lot of springboards that the developers could launch off of and bring amazing new things to the end user.

Panther (aka 10.3) was the result of Apple using all of those springboards and launching everything in the OS up a notch. Panther was targeting at the end user again: the foundations didn’t shake much (we did get Bindings), but the world shifted: the bar moved up because it was just expected that every app would pull out all the tricks: after all, everything in the system did.

And that brings us to 10.4, Tiger, which with CoreData and CoreAudio and CoreVideo and CoreNameYourComponentHere is to my eye quite definitely a developer release. Apple is shoving more tools in the toolbox, and seeing what the community can do with them. When it’s obvious which ones are the good ideas, Apple will take them and run with it: persistent SQL stores backing the iApps? Let’s hope.

What Apple is doing is alternating between the releases for the devs and the releases for everybody. But you can’t just give the devs special builds, because the interesting part of the experiment is what gets built, and in our networked world the interesting apps are the ones that rely on the network effect of having lots of installations. Quote the Cluetrain, “Markets are Conversations,” and the conversation is more interesting the more voices speak.

I’ll also note that this theory is made even better by the fact that it cannot be proven: if Apple started admitting that every other release was developer-oriented, then non-developers would stop buying those releases, and the whole house of cards falls down.

As long as it stays up, though, it’s a neat trick. It pulls the platform forward in leaps and bounds, and it does a pretty nice job of growing the third-party developer scene: every other release, Apple is providing lots of new areas to create new apps, to make new waves, and to ride those into the sunset (which may or may not be the next major release).

But I think the best part is that it dovetails wonderfully with the quick revision cycle they’ve been peddling: Apple never appears to be behind the curve, but the developers and the platform always seem to be on the leading edge. And that’s where all the alpha geeks want to be.

I finally finished Final Fantasy X. It’s been a year or so, maybe more, but when you only play occasionally and don’t play at all for months on end, that kind of stuff can happen.

All in all, I think it was a pretty good game, but it could have been better. The story was great; it was detailed and surprising and interesting and all of the things that I have come to expect from the franchise. The characters were neat, and offered a good range of choices (I used Tidus/Auron/Wakka most of the time, with some major Yuna influences and Rikku when I could). I really liked the weapon customization system, but the ingredients were a little hard to come by, and the interface was a little clunky.

My biggest complaint, though, was that the last half of my game was leaps and bounds better than the first half of the game, because you have the airship, and that makes all the difference. Note that when I say ‘half’ there, I mean the time I played. The storyline is the first half of the game; the second half was running around and being awesome: getting the celestial weapons, learning Holy, and generally enjoying the world that Final Fantasy is so good at creating and populating. I was disappointed that your opportunity to do all of this stuff came so late: in most Final Fantasy games the running-around-and-exploring-sidequests is a much more integral part of the experience, and it is interwoven with the story progression. Not in FFX: if I wanted to go back to the first city, I had to walk.

As such, I can understand why my brother Josh, whose only real Final Fantasy experience is watching his wife play FFX, seems to dislike the whole series because they’re too linear. FFX is admittedly linear. Play FFVII, or even go back to FFII or FFIII and it’s a different story.

However, having said that, I definitely enjoyed my time with the game, and I am looking forward to Final Fantasy 12 when it comes out next year. In the meantime? The Sequel is coming.

I have this problem with MSN Virtual Earth. It looks like this:

Apparently, the borg have landed in Costa Mesa, and their ship is resting at the corner of Mesa Verde and Baker.

But it’s more pervasive than that. They seem to be everywhere I look. They seem to have invaded our world quite thoroughly; everywhere from New York to Phoenix. Resistance truly is futile.

Oh, wait: maybe it’s just this:

Oh, they just can’t get everything to load right. I would have thought that was an important thing to check before releasing. I guess that’s why they’re the biggest software company in the world and I’m just a smartass.