Monthly Archives: July 2011

Migration Assistant Leopard -> Lion

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Just an FYI, since apparently the Internet doesn’t know this yet.

You currently can not use Migration Assistant to export your setup from Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard) to OS X Lion (10.8),  as soon as the assistant on Lion makes contact with the one on Leopard it announces that “You need to update Migration Assistant on you other Mac.”    Meanwhile, back on Leopard, software update confidently reports that no updates are available.

Apple phone support finally reported that the Leopard update to Migration Assistant is TBD, and they are snail mailing me a Snow Leopard upgrade.

Risk

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Another for my collection of frameworks:

“After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: …”

  • exploring heights,
  • experiencing high speed,
  • handling dangerous tools,
  • being near dangerous elements (like water or fire),
  • rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and
  • wandering alone away from adult supervision.

What!  No mention of listening at keyholes?  Downloading from JStor?  Maybe that’s unique to American children.

Nice Lion

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I haven’t played with Mac OS X Lion yet, only read, John Siracusa’s lovely long review.  John suggested a while  ago that Apple had learned somethings from the iPhone/iPod/iPad, and that these things were likely to fundamentally change the way the Mac worked.  At the time my reaction was; “but of course,”  and I wondered: how aggressively can they manage to drive toward these goals.

Lion answers that question.  Fast and hard seems to be the answer.  I impressed!  And, good for them!

This will be very disconcerting for long time Mac users, a real culture shock.  They will complain, a lot.

Stewards of high tech platforms have to manage a balancing act.  If they don’t force the migration of their users into the future the platform dies.  Doing this runs counter to the cliche that you should listen to your users.  In this case your users don’t know diddly.

Usually when this happens the platform steward is chasing a future innovated by some upstart.  As Google is now doing with Facebook and Twitter.  As the voice telco industry has long been doing with the internet.  And in such cases the existing culture around the existing product is a nearly immovable object.  For Apple the upstart is in house.  I bet that’s an interesting story.  I wonder if you stand outside the Apple campus you can hear the shouting matches.

What’s unique about the Apple situation is that I suspect their primary source of new Mac OS X customers are users who already used the IPhone.  The discomfort those users feel when they encounter the Mac must be huge.  Sum that up and I bet is is much larger than the discomfort the Mac installed base is going to feel as Apple forces them into the new user experience.

But enough about the b-school view of what Apple is doing.  A few comments about the actual changes.

The mouse is pretty much dead, long live touch.  I can’t wait to experience how they designed all that.

Respect for screen real estate is back in a big way.  I’m delighted.  I’m very intrigued by what they did with scrolling, scroll bars, and window resizing.  It looks awesome.  Full screen apps are a no brainer.  If they werent’ so damn modal I’d have expected them much sooner.  It’s interesting to think about what it is that enables them to finally arrive now.

Applications now just are.  They don’t run, they are.  User experience guys have known for decades that this was the right model, so it’s nice to see that we are finally doing it.  The design looks sufficently elegant and complex.  Particularly the codependency on changes in how documents are managed.

I can wait to try this.  Really.  I think this maybe the first Mac OS release since the beginning that has called out to my fancy like this.

Post it all let the cloud sort it out

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I am bemused that I can’t figure out how to use Google circles.

I can’t quite figure out what’s what with the social gesture they call “share.” I think, they call it “post” as well.

Out in the real world if I share something with a mailing list or one or more email correspondents the gesture presumes that they will be interested. Hopefully they will be grateful. If they aren’t grateful, one hopes they will give a moment to the question – why did he share this? Sharing isn’t a gift. It has aspects of reciprocity, power, and selfishness embedded in it. At this point I’m reminded of the sarcastic cliche “thanks for sharing.”

All of this is entangled in the nature of the relationship you have with the audience.

When I post in my blog, or on twitter, or (rarely) on Facebook the nature of the gesture is entirely different than sending an email because I do not pick the audience. My audience has volunteered to listen to my mumblings. In this case the sharing moves closer to being a gift. I write and you all can pick and choose as you please. I don’t expect much. I don’t expect you to read. I don’t expect you to respond.

Newly minted blog authors often get this wrong, having started a blog they are harboring those expectations. They assume their subscribers have some responsibility to interact with them. And then, they are disappointed. If they continue in the practice they learn to let go of those presumptions. Subscribers get it wrong too. I have a friend with a blog and she has a few subscribers who respond to every posting. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that they maybe be confused about the nature of the relationship.

This helps to explain why I seem to cringe when people use the word “conversation” in the context of blogging etc. al. There are norms in conversation. For example, it is impolite to ignore your partner in a conversation. In blogging, twittering, etc. the norm is to ignore.

So back to Google+ circles. I have moved small portion of my contacts into the system and dutifully tagged them into appropriate circles. And now I have no idea which people to send the typical random update. Because the act of tagging a post with an audience instantly creates, for me, responsibilities.

Take for example a perfectly reasonable Twitter update like: “Cat is staking the gold finch outside the window and they both know it. #animalsatplay” In Google+ I am required to sort out which of my circles to send that update too. And honestly the answer turns out to be none!

Making such decisions is exhausting. I have to consider each individual. I can reduce this cost by deciding to write status updates targeted to a particular circle. This isn’t going to work.

What twitter, and facebook have in common is how minimally burdened with social entanglements posting is. Which is good for their owners; lowering the barrier to contributions is good. Blogging is very similar to those, except in so far as the blogger decides to target an audience and thus takes on responsibilities to that audience. IM, email, mailing lists, and forums are totally not like this. Since, with each interaction, you target a particular audience you own the responsibility to stay on topic and obey the whole suite of social norms implied by that.

So far Google+ and it’s circles feels like it’s in the 2nd camp.

This maybe a classic and fascinating case of the oft observed disconnect between what users say they want and what users actually do.