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Expose Yourself

It'll be interesting to hear what the original Mac OS purists have to say about Exposé, the new window management technology announced today as part of Apple's forthcoming OS 10.3. Just from the demo alone, it looks to me to be one of the most useful and innovative interface enhancements to come out in quite a long time. And one that seems true to the original principles of the Mac interface: it looks genuinely useful, intuitive, and cool all at the same time.

As I type this post, I have about twenty separate windows stacked open on my monitor: five or six in the finder, a dozen email messages, three web pages, a MS Word document, the iTunes browser. But I can see only a small fraction of them. I'd like to be more organized about closing or hiding windows that I'm no longer using, but after fifteen years with my Mac, I've learned that this is just not who I am. The idea behind Exposé is basically that you can let the screen get as cluttered as you want, and with one keystroke the OS will give you a big picture view that puts everything into perspective. Once you've found the window you're looking for, the screen switches back to the old cluttered view, with the desired window now front and center.

Exposé is one of those interface elements that's better to see in action than hear described, but basically what it does is zap all active windows down to smaller, but still legible versions of themselves, distributed across the screen so that none of them overlap -- not unlike a contact sheet of photos. (Another keystroke highlights only the active windows for a specific application, graying out all the windows belonging to other applications.) It's a great visual effect, and unlike some of the other OS X design elements, it harnesses our visual memory in ways reminiscent of the original Mac interface. Most of the time, I have a general memory of the shape and coloring of the window I'm looking for; I just can't see the window because there are fifteen other ones stacked on top of it. Because Exposé preserves the relative shapes of each window, and includes shrunken versions of their contents, picking out the window I'm looking for should be a breeze.

I say "should be" because you never really know with these things until you actually start using them. Some interface tools sound incredible, but you never end up adopting them in any regular way. But I'd wager that I'll use Exposé dozens of times a day, and be thrilled with it every time. Maybe that will be some consolation for having to put up with that irritating brushed metal look that 10.3 is apparently adopting across the board...

Father's Day Surprise

Sorry this is a little late, but it's been a slightly crazy week. Our son, Rowan Hazard Johnson, was born on Sunday morning at 9:03 AM, after a smooth five-hour labor. (In other words, I didn't have to deliver the baby myself in a cab on the FDR Drive.) Ro and his mother are doing just great, and his older brother seems to be adjusting about as well as you would imagine. The first day he was pretty sweet to the new arrival, but on the second day, he seemed to be saying, "What's he still doing here?" They're only 21 months apart -- two boys in diapers, god help us -- so in the long run they should have a lot of fun together. But in the short run...

Behind The Music

For the past few weeks, as our house renovation draws to its agonizing close, I've been assembling a little home theater setup in our living room: plasma screen, surround speakers in the ceiling, new progressive-scan DVD player, digital surround receiver, and as of last week, an HDTV-compatible cable box, courtesy of Time-Warner cable. So my late nights have been spent mostly sampling all these new A/V formats: HDTV and progressive scan visuals, DTS surround sound, etc. It's always an interesting process, the eyes and ears adjusting to a new kind of stimulus, and inevitably altering your perception of older formats along the way.

I'll have more to say about the HDTV experience later, but today I'm thinking more about the Super Audio CD (SACD) format, which I've also been test-driving. It's a higher-resolution format, but to my ears at least, the most important difference is that SACD disks can be mixed in full six-channel surround sound. Unfortunately, it's very hard to track down true surround disks of music that I actually like -- it seems like there are only about 100 SACD disks released thus far, and many of them only have two-channel mixes on them.

But this past weekend I managed to get my hands on a six-channel SACD of Beck's lovely Sea Change, which was already on heavy rotation in my house in its two-channel presentation. Apparently, the mix was done by surround legend Elliot Scheiner, and it's certainly an aggressive approach. Some surround mixes keep most of the instruments and vocals up front, and just use the rear speakers for ambient noise and reverb, etc. Scheiner's remix of Sea Change spreads the instruments around you: a clavinet behind your right ear, a bank of strings hovering in the middle of the room, a hammond organ swirling around the entire space. Hearing an album you've enjoyed for a while in stereo remixed this boldly is a revelation: you hear all the little details with an astonishing clarity. There's a little riff in the open track ("The Golden Age") where an electric guitar and an electric piano play roughly the same line. On the stereo mix, I'd never really noticed that guitar lurking behind the piano, but on the SACD version, they were coming from opposite sides of the room. You couldn't not hear them as separate sounds.

There's a trade-off here, I suppose. Maybe I'm just getting accustomed to it, but I've found it harder to hear the song's overall gestalt in the surround mix. Having everything so sharply defined made my ears lock in on the individual parts, rather than the whole. This may just be a matter of training: listen to enough surround mixes, and you develop an ear for them. But listening to Sea Change did make me think something that had never occurred to me during all those times that I'd read rapturous prose about surround mixes "putting you right in the middle of the band." Unless you're a musician, there really aren't any normal circumstances in which you'd listen to music seated in the middle of the instruments. When you see a live concert, you're hearing the music bouncing off the walls of the space surround-style, but the instruments are all up on stage in a traditional left-to-right configuration. So in a strange way, listening to an aggressive sound mix sounds less realistic, less "faithful" than a stereo mix. Even if you've got the best seats in the house, there's never a clavinet player sitting right behind you. But perhaps we'd be better off if there were one.

Today is your birthday! We're gonna have a good time!

That's right -- I'm 35 today. I've been thinking about the milestones a little this morning: I graduated from high school basically half my lifetime ago. Got my first computer a little more than two decades ago. First started messing around with online communications (ECHO, eWorld, Compuserve) about ten years ago. It's been a solid six years since I published the first book.

In a funny way, all the numbers seem about right to me, though they're a little crazy to contemplate. It doesn't seem like yesterday that I graduated from high school -- it seems, well, like about seventeen years. It's a little scarier to think that I'm approaching the halfway point to my life expectancy. That is, if you don't count the cryogenics plan.

There continues to be an outside chance that I will share this birthday with our new son -- my wife is due in about two weeks, though the rate of contractions makes us both feel like the little guy is going to arrive before then. I'll try to post -- with pictures of course -- when there's news on that front....

In the meantime, why doesn't everyone celebrate my birthday by purchasing copies of Emergence for their friends, and driving my Amazon ranking up for the day!

What do you have to do to be called a terrorist in this town?

My latest Googleshare experiment: Google reports that a full 25% of all web pages that mention the name Bin Laden also use the word terrorist. But only 2% of the pages that mention Eric Robert Rudolph include the word terrorist. So Google is giving us a very revealing glimpse of the global brain here: we're ten times more likely to think of Bin Laden as a terrorist than Rudolph, despite the fact that Rudolph has allegedly orchestrated more attacks on US soil than Bin Laden has, with a clear political agenda. If setting off bombs in public places -- and especially during major global sporting events -- in the name of a radical cause isn't terrorism, then the word is meaningless. Shouldn't Ashcroft and Ridge be out in front of this story, making it clear that they're just as concerned about right-wing terrorism as they are militant Islamic terrorism?

There have been five major U.S.-based terror attacks over the past decade: the Unabomber's campaign; the original WTC attack; Oklahoma City; the Olympic pipe-bomb; and finally 9/11. So if you measure by number of high-profile attacks, and not by body count, it's basically a draw right now: two attacks by right-wing nuts, two by Islamic nuts, and one by a radical Luddite. If two attacks is enough to throw hundreds of innocent civilians with suspicious-sounding names into jail for months, what are Ashcroft and Ridge planning for the far right? Fundraisers perhaps?

The Plume

One of the most interesting things that I stumbled across researching my Wired piece last year on radiation sensors is this idea of the "plume." We naturally think about potential attacks in terms of their site of detonation. But many of the major WMD threats that Homeland Security is scrambling to deal with ultimately have as much to do with the air currents that subsequently spread the radiation or anthrax (or whatever) through a wider area. (In a sense, those terrifying, visible-from-space plumes of smoke and ash trailing out to sea from Ground Zero were the beginning of all this.) You're much more vulnerable two miles downwind of a dirty bomb blast than you are half a mile upwind, because the plumes of the radiation are following the wind patterns.

The thing is, we don't know all that much about micro patters of air movements in cities, because we've never needed to know. How consistent are they? Do they change seasonally? In a crisis the state of plumage may well be the most important piece of data for implementing evacuations and other real-time management issues. Which is why it's no surprise to see the Washington Post report that a comprehensive study of DC wind currents is under way. It'll be interesting to see if they end up sharing their results with the general public. Perhaps in a few years we'll see real estate listings saying: "Lovely floorthrough 2 bedroom in Dupont Circle, good light, near subways, far from White House plume."