Apple picker Czech columnist Patrick Zandl published a book this month discussing the transformation of the business from personal computers to mobile phones and the following era, which has lasted for five years, during which Apple became the most valuable company in the world. You will read in detail everything behind the great revolution in mobile phones and how it then helped to create a completely new tablet market. Here are the first samples from the book.
How the operating system for iPhone OS X - iOS was created
The operating system was also decisive for the success of the upcoming Apple mobile phone. This was a belief that was not entirely common in 2005, "smartphones" were not the best sellers, on the contrary, phones with single-purpose firmware sold like hot cakes. But Jobs needed from his phone a considerable possibility of future expansion, flexibility in development and thus the ability to respond to emerging trends. And also, if possible, the best possible compatibility with the Mac platform, because he was afraid that the company would be overwhelmed by the development of another operating system. Software development, as we have shown, has not been one of Apple's strongest points for a long time.
The decision came in February 2005 shortly after a secret meeting with representatives of Cingular Wireless, to which Motorola was not invited. Jobs was able to convince Cingular that Apple would get a share of the revenue generated on his own phone and convince Cingular to get serious about building a cellular network. Even at the time, Jobs was promoting the idea of downloading music from the mobile network, but Cingular representatives were pessimistic about the increase in load that Internet downloading could generate. They argued the experience of downloading ringtones and websites and, as the future will show, they underestimated the hype that Jobs was able to generate with his device. Which soon backfires on them.
This is how the project starts Purple 2, with which Jobs wants to move beyond the horizons of the unsatisfactory cooperation with Motorola. The goal: a mobile phone of its own based on technologies that Apple has acquired by now or will quickly develop, a number of them (such as FingerWorks) that Jobs had planned to use for the construction of the tablet he wanted to launch. But he had to choose: either he will quickly launch a mobile phone with a combined iPod and thus save the approaching crisis of iPod sales, or fulfill his dream and launch a tablet. He won't be able to have both, because cooperation with Motorola won't provide him with an iPod in his mobile phone, it was already quite obvious at that point, although it will take another half a year before the Motorola ROKR hits the market. In the end, perhaps surprisingly, but very rationally, Jobs bet on saving the music market, postponed the launch of the tablet and shifted all resources to the Purple 2 project, the goal of which was to construct a touchscreen phone with an iPod.
The decision to adapt the company's Mac OS X operating system for mobile phones was not only due to the fact that there were not many other options, but also the possibility of later device convergence. The increasing computing power and memory capacity of mobile devices convinced Jobs that in the future it would be possible to offer applications on the phone similar to those used on desktops and that it would be advantageous to rely on a single operating system core.
In order to speed up development, it was also decided that two independent teams would be created. The hardware team will have the task of quickly constructing the mobile phone itself, the other team will focus on adapting the OS X operating system.
Mac OS X, OS X and iOS
There is a bit of confusion at Apple with the labeling of operating system versions. The original version of the operating system for the iPhone does not actually have a name - Apple uses the laconic designation "iPhone runs a version of OS X" in its marketing materials. It later starts using "iPhone OS" to refer to the phone's operating system. With the release of its fourth version in 2010, Apple began to systematically use the name iOS. In February 2012, the desktop operating system "Mac OS X" will be renamed to just "OS X", which may be confusing. For example, in the title of this chapter, where I try to take into account the fact that iOS at its core comes from OS X.
Darwin in the background
Here we need to make another detour towards the Darwin operating system. When Apple bought Jobs' company NeXT in 1997, the NeXTSTEP operating system and its variant created in cooperation with Sun Microsystems and called OpenSTEP became part of the transaction. The NeXTSTEP operating system was also to become the basis of Apple's new computer operating system, after all, this was one of the reasons why Apple bought Jobs' NeXT. An attractive and at the time perhaps underappreciated charm of NeXTSTEP was its multi-platform nature, this system could be operated both on the Intel x86 platform and on the Motorola 68K, PA-RISC and SPARC, i.e. practically on all processors used by desktop platforms at the time. And it was possible to create distribution files containing binary versions of the program for all processor platforms, so-called fat binaries.
NeXT's legacy thus served as the basis for the development of a new operating system called Rhapsody, which Apple first presented at a developer's conference in 1997. This system brought a number of changes compared to previous versions of Mac OS, from our point of view, these are mainly the following:
- the kernel and related subsystems were based on Mach and BSD
- a subsystem for compatibility with the previous Mac OS (Blue Box) - later better known as the Classic interface
- extended implementation of OpenStep API (Yellow Box) - later evolved into Cocoa.
- Java virtual machine
- a windowing system based on Displa PostScript
- an interface based on Mac OS but combined with OpenSTEP
Apple planned to transfer to Rhapsody most software structures (frameworks) from Mac OS, such as QuickTime, QuickDraw 3D, QuickDraw GX or ColorSync, as well as file systems from the original Apple computers Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), HFS, UFS and others. But it soon became clear that this was not an easy task at all. The first developer release (DR1) in September 1997 was followed by a second DR2 in May 1998, but there was still much work to be done. The first developer preview (Developer Preview 1) came only a year later, in May 1999, and the system was already called Mac OS X, a month before that Apple split off the server version Mac OS X Server 1 from it, which it officially released and also open-source version of Darwin, thereby meeting the (much contested and debated) part of the condition of releasing the source codes of a system that uses other open source parts requiring this and which Apple included in its system when it was based on the Mach and BSD kernels.
Darwin is actually Mac OS X without a graphical interface and without a number of proprietary libraries such as FairPlay music file security. You can download it, since later only source files are available, not binary versions, you can compile and run them as an operating system on a wide range of processor platforms. Going forward, Darwin will serve two roles at Apple: he will be a constant reminder that porting Mac OS X to another processor platform will not be so difficult as to be impossible. And it will be an answer to the objections that Apple's software is closed, proprietary, which is an impression that Apple will later create, especially in Europe. In America, where it is more widespread in education and Darwin is commonly used here on a number of school servers, the awareness of openness and the use of standard components within Apple software is much greater. Darwin is still the core of every Mac OS X system today, and has a fairly broad group of contributors to its open source development, with that development feeding back into the core of Mac OS X as well.
The first release of Mac OS X 10.0, dubbed Cheetah, is released in March 2001, four years after Rhapsody began development, which was thought to be easy to flip for use on Apple's platform. An irony that created a number of problems for the company, because for those four years it forced its users on an unsatisfactory and unpromising Mac OS platform.
Darwin thus became the basis for the operating system under Project Purple 2. At a time when it was uncertain whether Apple would decide to use ARM processors, in which it had a design stake, or Intel, which was just beginning to be used in desktops, it was a very prudent choice , because it made it possible to change the processor platform without much pain, just as Apple did with PowerPC and Intel. Moreover, it was a compact and proven system to which an interface (API) needed to be added - in this case Cocoa Touch, a touch-optimized OpenSTEP API with a mobile phone library.
Finally, a design was created that divided the system into four abstraction layers:
- the kernel layer of the system
- kernel services layer
- media layer
- the Cocoa Touch touch interface layer
Why was it important and is it worth noting? Jobs believed that the mobile phone must respond perfectly to the user's requirements. If the user presses a button, the phone must respond. It must obviously acknowledge that it has accepted the user's input, and this is best done by performing the desired function. One of the developers demonstrated this approach to Jobs on a Nokia phone with the Symbian system, where the phone responded too late to pressing the dial. The user swiped a name in the list and accidentally called another name. This was frustrating for Jobs and he didn't want to see something like that on his mobile. The operating system had to process the user's choice as a priority, the Cocoa Touch touch interface had the highest priority in the system. Only after him did the other layers of the system have priority. If the user made a choice or input, something had to happen to reassure the user that everything was proceeding smoothly. Another argument for this approach was the "jumping icons" in desktop Mac OS X. If the user launched a program from the system dock, usually nothing visibly happened for a while until the program was fully loaded from the disk into the computer's RAM. Users would keep clicking on the icon because they wouldn't know that the program is already being loaded into memory. The developers then solved it by making the icon bounce around until the entire program was loaded into memory. In the mobile version, the system needed to respond to any user input similarly immediately.
This approach has subsequently become so ingrained in the mobile system that even individual functions within Cocoa Touch are processed in the system with different priority classes so that the user has the best possible appearance of smooth phone operation.
At this time, Apple was not serious about running third-party apps on the phone. It was not even desirable at this time. Of course, the upcoming operating system fully supported preemptive multitasking, memory protection and other advanced features of modern operating systems, which was in contrast to other operating systems at the time that struggled with memory protection (Symbian), multitasking (Palm OS) or alternately with both ( Windows CE). But Jobs considered the upcoming mobile primarily as a device that will be used to consume music supplied by Apple. Third-party applications would only delay, and Jobs realized that a number of details would have to be solved around them, such as the distribution system, so although mobile OS X supported the ability to run additional applications in the background natively, Apple artificially limited this possibility. When the iPhone came out, only "jailbroken" phones without this protection could install emerging third-party apps. Long after the launch of the iPhone in January 2007, Jobs assumed that developers would create web-only apps and that only Apple would create native apps.
Even in the summer of 2006, however, the development of the mobile version of OS X was in a completely unsatisfactory state. Although the basic porting of the system took place in a record-breaking time with a team of only two engineers, the interconnectedness and coordination of the individual elements of the mobile phone interface was desperate. Calls dropped, software crashed frequently, battery life was unreasonably low. While 2005 people were working on the project in September 200, the number quickly grew to XNUMX in two parallel teams, but it was still not enough. A serious disadvantage was the secrecy in which Apple worked: new people could not be found by public recruitment, but by recommendation, often through intermediaries. For example, the testing part of the software team was largely virtual, prototyping and testing took place with people who communicated with each other mainly by email and for a long time did not even know they were working for Apple. Until such a level of secrecy has reached.
You can find more information about the book at Patrick Zandl's website. The book can be purchased in print in bookstores Neoluxor a Cosmos, an electronic version is being prepared.
there is already too much
A book by W.Walter Isaacson and Jay Elliot was enough.
I've read both of them, and basically the first gave me the most.
It's too much...everyone is writing about Steve now and just wants to make money.
Maybe a lot, but this book approaches it quite differently, it doesn't make Jobs a "god", but everything is put into context here.
Don't bash Patrik's work!
This look just won't be here and wasn't.
Maybe even abroad :-)