I remember Microsoft’s first response to tabbed browsing. When they first got wind of it they were already busy running in the complete opposite direction. They had recently shipped Windows XP, which would collapse similar windows into the same item on the task bar, and they were convinced that this new organization was going to obsolete the need to keep the total number of windows in your workspace to a minimum. Instead of a new Word document, for example, opening in the same window, as had previously been the case, Office 2003 now always spawned new windows. Despite Microsoft’s best efforts, however, it was still a pain to have many windows open at the same time, and people like myself reveled in Firefox and Opera’s tabbed browsing.

Right about the time the whole world decided that tabbed browsing was the way to go, Apple came out with their browser and geeks jumped all over them to implement tabbed browsing. They eventually did it, and now, when IE 7 comes out, there will no longer be a mainstream browser that doesn’t support tabs. But Microsoft’s original point is still valid. Using tabs in a browser is really just making a new window and cramming it inside the current window. It’s needlessly complex and replicates functionality. It’s also difficult for users to understand and get used to. I tried to get my girlfriend to use tabs in Firefox a while ago and she still often closes the entire window rather then just the tab she’s currently looking at, loosing sessions she was not done using yet. So really, tabs are just a way to deal with an operating system that doesn’t let you manage the amount of windows that you need open at a time. Ah, but Safari doesn’t run on Windows, it runs on OS X. If you have 10 browser windows open in OS X, you still only have one icon in the dock and one options menu at the top of the screen. And seeing all of those windows at the same time is just a matter of hitting F10. If you want to see the content of all your tabs at the same time, the only option is to rebuild Exposè in the browser (which some are electing to do, by the way). But why? Apple already did it.

There is another benefit to tabbed browsing, however: it allows you to group related windows. Say you’re working on a research paper and also keeping up with the latest tech news. Some people may prefer to have two browsers open in this scenario, each with windows only related to a single task. While there is currently no way to replicate this without using tabs, the upcoming version of OS X will have virtual desktops (or “Spaces”) which will allow exactly this, but with any windows, not just web pages.

If you currently use a tabbed browser in OS X, try it for a while without. After all, people have been using Photoshop for years, long before even the benefits of Exposè, and it’s common to have tens of windows open in that application with nary a tab in sight. I stopped using tabbed browsing and find it much more intuitive and efficient. From now on I’m leaving window management where it belongs, in the window manager.

In a typical case of “Won’t somebody please think of the children!” the United States Department of Justice subpoenaed the search records of all the major search engines at the beginning of this year in an effort to prop up the Child Online Protection Act (or NAMBLA), which was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In yet another display of government technical competence, the DOJ asserted that privacy was not an issue since it was not requesting the identities of any of the searchers. Google was the only company to refuse the request, and after a trial, they won.

It seems that we now have some evidence to back up Google’s privacy concerns (although, to be fair, they had many more problems with the subpoena then just customer privacy). AOL has “accidentally” released all of its search records for an entire month and a New York Times journalist took a gander to see if he could garner the identity of one the “anonymous” searchers. Turns out, he could. I would just like to thank Mrs. Arnold for allowing that article to be written: for allowing her own searches and identity to be nationally exposed to help get some discussion rolling on what exactly it takes these days to really be anonymous.

I used Windows for a long time, but eventually became dissatisfied for reasons that I won’t go into here. I then moved to Linux, but just last week bought my first Apple computer: a white MacBook. Yes, there are a hundred of these articles out there already, but I don’t plan on repeating the obvious. And besides, when I was thinking about getting a Mac I read every little blog I could get my hands on and was always looking for more impressions of the system. Hopefully this writeup can help hold some other people over while they wait for their computer to arrive or their wives to relent.

The first thing I noticed when my new system booted was the “dock”, as Apple calls it. On first impression it looks like a useless toy: an overly-prominent application launcher maybe. Once you figure out how it works, however, you realize that it’s actually a very nice use of space. I, like most people I’m sure, only use several programs on a regular basis. When these applications are in the dock they can not only be launched with a single click, but while they are running they can always be brought to focus with the same ease. And since closing an application’s window will often not close the application, you usually end up at a point where all the programs you use often are already running and ready to pop up a new window instantly. This takes memory, of course, but that’s cheap these days and having firefox pop up the instant the mouse button is released is very nice.

Just as a side note, I noticed that it’s very convenient to have the dock on the right or left side of the screen with a widescreen display like the MacBook. While I never really felt cramped with it at the bottom, it’s the vertical resolution that’s really in demand and you do feel like you can stretch out a bit more with that little bit of extra space. I’l talk a little more about the screen some more later.

After I got done poking around in the dock, I started the software update program which began downloading updates not only for the operating system, but for other programs on the computer as well. This was nice to see since I had become accustomed to apt-get, yast and the like keeping my entire system up to date in the Linux word. After it was done I restarted and got a little startled. Long before I was expecting it I was staring at my desktop again. I restarted again and low and behold, it really was fast. About 20 seconds from powered off to boot, actually. I remember reading that in reviews, but when you actually experience it, it’s pretty amazing. OS X barely has time to show the loading progress bar before you’re staring at your desktop. And it’s a full boot. Windows likes to show you a desktop about a minute before your computer is actually usable, which really drives me nuts.

Now it was time to find out exactly how Unix (to coin that word as an adjective) OS X was. I had a comma-serperated list of passwords from my old password manager that I wanted to import into my new manager that I had just installed. This new one, however, wanted a tab-delimited file and a couple of the fields from the old program where no longer relevant. This just screamed “perl script” to me (or awk to others, but I go to what’s familiar), so that’s exactly what I did. I hammered out a quick file that did some line by line pattern matching, opened up a terminal, ran it, and I was good to go. Then it was time to create another user account. My girlfriend usually uses my computer because it’s the fastest, so I like to set her up with her own account so that bookmarks, cookies, passwords and the like are preserved and she doesn’t mess up mine. And there’s also the paranoia aspect, of course. I’d prefer it if my computer were not infested with MySpace video spyware. So, I went to the “Accounts” section of the “System Preferences” application and created a new account. After optionally taking her picture with the iSight camera she was all set up with a normal user Unix account. She can now do anything she likes, even install applications (only in her home directory, of course), and I know that the rest of my system will remain pristine. There’s something very reassuring about having Unix just below that pretty Aqua surface (pun intended).

Speaking of installing applications, there isn’t much mentioned about OS X application management, but I really like it. With my Mac, applications are all self contained. Everything the program needs is in it’s folder and that folder is presented to the user as a single file. So installation is just a matter of dragging the file to the Applications directory (or anywhere else you’d like to put it) and removal is as simple as dragging that file to the trash. Sure you may be wasting some space by duplicating files, but I think we’ve long passed the point where avoiding a couple copies of a 400k library is really worth the hassle of maintaining all those dependencies. And yes, the problem is just about solved with programs like Aptitude or Yast in Linux, but this way the problem doesn’t even exist.

Let’s talk about the screen for a bit. This was my biggest worry since I was planning on replacing my main desktop machine with a laptop. Would I be able to abandon my old 20-inch Dell monitor in favor of a tiny 13-inch laptop LCD? It’s certainly a change, but I find myself not really caring about the size of the screen. In fact, I’ve found that I prefer my MacBook’s screen to my big old Dell. Maybe I’ve just gotten so used to it in these past weeks, but I like the widescreen. It just seems more comfortable to look at a screen that’s a bit wider then it is high. My guess is that our eyes are more used to panning left and right then they are up and down, but that really is just a guess. I also think that OS X has a lot to do with how comfortable I am with this tiny screen realestate. I don’t mind having 10 windows open and piled on top of each other. WIth the tap of a button I can get them to get out of my way and show me the desktop, or shrink and flatten out so that I can find the one I want. At work I have two 20-inch monitors, and it is nice to have documentation or a database browser on one screen and code on the other, but for non-work activities (photo editing, word processing, web browsing, etc) it’s really no problem to just pile up windows like cordwood. Expose is a great safety net there; I never get apprehensive about having a mass of windows cluttering my desktop.

I have also tried out the support for external keyboards, mice, and monitors and have found it to be quite good. After buying a $20 mini-DVI to DVI connector I was able to hook up my 20-inch LCD plus a keyboard and mouse while keeping the MacBook closed and safely in a drawer under my desk. Apart from not being able to actually turn on the laptop (the lid needs to be opened to read the power button) you’d never know you weren’t working from a desktop machine. Of course, if this is all you plan on doing, the Mini will be more your style, by I appreciate the mobility option of a laptop.

I know this has been a lot of glowing praise so far, but there is one sore spot: the keyboard. I don’t have a problem with the feel, I actually like that. The problem is that there are some keys on it that have the ability to be pressed down, yet not actually type the character. Odd I know, but my quote key in particular will not actually type a quote unless you give it a real nice smack. This is something you get used to, of course. You kind of start holing your hands a bit over the keyboard so that your fingers really come down with a bit of force, but it’s a shame that I have to do this. And even with that retraining, I find myself hammering the backspace key very often to add that apostrophe that just didn’t quite get in there. Arg.

I think this new notebook can shortly be described as “It’s pretty and it just works.” That can easily be taken to mean, “It’s got useless eye candy and you can’t customize it” but I think that’s really missing the point. First off, human beings really do appreciate beauty. Little touches like drop shadows on windows, strict adherence to Apple’s human interface guidelines by almost every application, and visual effects like Expose and and the Dashboard, really do make it more enjoyable to work. And most importantly, having a desktop machine Just Work is extremely important. Even if you can solve every little problem with your computer, or install every app from source, don’t you have better things to do with your time? I can see how you’d want these things on a server, or even a workstation, and I still have Linux on my server box with no plans to use anything else, but I think I’m seeing the value in easy-to-use, pretty, desktops. I don’t want to work through problems, or even be given too many configuration options,.I just want to sit down and get something done as quickly and easily as possible. OS X lets me do exactly that.

That there is Visual Studio auto-completing a CSS property that Internet Explorer does not now, and probably never will, support. Every real browser has supported minimum and maximum dimensions for ages now, of course. By suggesting I write code that won’t ever work in IE, is the Visual Studio team suggesting that I use a browser other then IE?

Here’s the email address that Flickr wanted me to use: