MacResearch

Author: Drew McCormack
Web Sites: www.maccoremac.com, www.macanics.net

In the beginning there was the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines). The HIG was a document designed to help developers give their applications a consistent look-and-feel by telling them which widgets were available, where they should be placed, how they should be aligned, and so forth. But when Apple began developing consumer applications like the iLife suite, they started to stray from the HIG. Third party developers, like Delicious Monster, saw this as a license to innovate in their own user interfaces, and the ‘Delicious Generation’ of application developers was born. These days, if your app isn’t Delicious, you aren’t really serious — Delicious is the new mainstream.

Over the last few years we have started to see a second wave of Delicious, in the realm of scientific software.
Scientific software has tended to be pretty awful on the Mac, with a few notable exceptions. Most either runs in X11, or via some cross platform framework like Java, Tcl/Tk, or Qt. While these solutions ‘get the job done’, they don’t lend themselves to ground breaking user interface design, since they must — almost by definition — adhere to the platform that is the lowest common denominator (and we all know what that is). You won’t find cool new technologies like Core Animation or Core Data in these frameworks, because they are Apple exclusives, and thus not available on other platforms.

This all started to change when Papers was introduced. I think it’s fair to say that Papers was the first Delicious scientific application. It is not only powerful, but looks great, and is a pleasure to work with. It leverages many of Apple’s newest technologies, from PDF Kit to Core Image, and would be very difficult to emulate in any cross platform framework. Papers deservedly won the Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Scientific Solution in its first year (2007).

If that were the end of the story, you could be mistaken for thinking that Papers was an aberration; the result of a very talented Mac developer, Alexander Griekspoor, with too much spare time. But that is not the end of the tale, because this year, another scientific app — Macnification — took home a design award, and this time it was in a non-scientific category: Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience. Orbicule, developers of Macnification, is a two man team based in Belgium. They developed Macnification in a little over a year, and beat the rest of the Mac developer community in a category focussed on user interface. Best reiterate that one more time: Macnification is a scientific app that won in an open category for having the best user interface. It’s unprecedented.

There will undoubtedly be those that say that interface is not important in the scientific arena, that it’s all just eye candy. But that would be to do an injustice to the ‘Papers generation’ of scientific apps. Sure, you could get by without some of the interface niceties, but it would make you less effective, and make using your tools less pleasurable. See, as elucidated in The Pragmatic Programmer, the software we use is not unlike the tools used by a carpenter: you can carve a table leg with a cheap set, but it is far more pleasurable, and you can do it far more efficiently, with a beautifully crafted set of tools.

The same applies in software: where traditional tools do little more than duplicate the internal structure of the data you are working with, a well-thought out interface concentrates on the task at hand, dynamically adapting as you go. Instead of simply presenting your data in a tree structure, you are offered powerful means of searching and navigating, or drag-and-drop interfaces to perform common tasks. It’s intuitive and efficient, and optimized for the task at hand, not the toolkit of widgets available.

So why is all of this happening now? It’s a payoff on a bet Apple made around 10 years ago, when they decided to purchase NeXT and move to Mac OS X. The Cocoa development frameworks that came with the OS make it possible for solitary developers, or small teams, to build a breathtaking application in around a year. And with each release of Mac OS X, Apple takes over more and more of the hard lifting. For example, the introduction of Core Animation in Leopard means that it is now practically trivial for every Mac developer to build highly dynamic and innovative user interfaces. In the past, if you wanted that degree of dynamicism in your app, you would have to develop a complete animation framework yourself.

All of this is particularly beneficial in Science, where sales volumes are low. The less overhead, the better. Whereas previously it was very difficult for a scientist to develop software for a living outside of a big company, it is now within reach. Even a relatively ‘small’ platform like Mac OS X can now support a developer working in a niche like Science, and as the platform grows, we should see many more small scientific outfits developing cool Mac-only software packages.