Last year, we started hearing about the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Google. The two companies were poaching talent from each other, and reportedly, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt got increasingly confrontational with each other on a personal level. Historically, the two companies both operated in the shadow of and against Microsoft, but with Microsoft sliding into irrelevance, they now appear to be competing with each other instead.

Apple commands tremendous respect, and enormous excitement surrounds its product launches, such as the ones of the iPhone and the iPad. Jokingly, one could almost describe Apple products and shops as a micro-religion, and maybe there is a grain of truth to this joke.

What Apple does so well is to create and project values that surround their products. For the purposes of this blog entry, let us forget about the usual drab meaning of the phrase “project values” as it is used by marketing people and PR consultants. Let us try to have in mind a philosophical meaning of the word value – and why not understand it as Nietzsche did, as a necessary way of relating to reality, a necessary epistemological bias? Apple has a vision for what life with digital products should be like, and the vision has no clear boundaries: its edges are carefully concealed, the vision overflows, spills over into every aspect of the customer’s life. Something that there is a definite dearth of today has been supplied. But this vision cannot easily be imitated or supplied by other companies. It is effective simply because everyone can perceive that Apple and Steve Jobs are so firmly behind it, that there is almost nothing in the way of hypocrisy in how the product is marketed. These people firmly and deeply believe what they say.

In contrast, products developed by Google are to a larger extent designed and developed through deductive reasoning. Even though Google as a company has an image as being progressive and modern, in the sense that they publicly do not want to be evil, and want to make the world’s information maximally available, their deep commitment to pure deduction and logic prevent the products from truly occupying the spiritual territory that Apple has staked out for itself. (Their approach may, however, have other benefits – this text is not a statement about product quality.)

If we establish a scale from creativity-driven production to deduction-driven production, Apple would be on the far left, Google somewhat to the left of the middle, and the likes of IBM and Microsoft on the far right. The latter two are only minimally concerned with changing consumers’ lives; in fact, it sometimes appears as if these institutions would like to be culturally invisible and project as little as possible. Their products strive to be value transparent.

The role that Steve Jobs and his team occupy, then, is something of what philosophers could be. They are, or appear to be, creators and projectors of values, which include aspects of morality and ethics. And such firmly felt values are in fact what society really wants. Apple goes some way towards filling the gap created by cultural nihilism.

Sometimes, though, the generalizers get it right. These are often moments of exceptional and lasting innovation. One example of such a system is the fabulously influential (but today, not that widely used) programming language Smalltalk. Invented by the former jazz guitarist and subsequent Turing award winner Alan Kay, Smalltalk was released as one of the first true object-oriented programming languages in 1980. It is probably still ahead of its time. It runs on a virtual machine, it has reflection, everything is an object, and the separation between applications is blurred in favour of a big object box. On running Squeak, a popular Smalltalk implementation, with its default system image today, users discover that all the objects on the screen, including the IDE to develop and debug objects, appear to follow the same rules. No objects seem to have special privileges.

Another such system is an application that used to be shipped on Mac computers in the distant past, Hypercard. Hypercard enabled ordinary users to create highly customized software using the idea of filing cards in a drawer as the underlying model, blurring the line between end users and developers through its accessibility. I haven’t had the privilege to use it myself, but it seems like this was as powerful as it was because it served up a homogenous and familiar model, where everything was a card, and yet the cards had considerable scope for modification and special features. Even though, in some ways, this system appears to be a database, the cards didn’t need to have the same format, for instance. (Are we seeing this particular idea being recycled in a more enterprisey form in CouchDB?)

There are more examples of successful highly general design: the Unix file system, TCP/IP sockets and so on. They all have in common that they are easy to think about as a mental model, since a universal set of rules apply to all objects, they scale well in different directions when used for different purposes, and they give the user a satisfying sense of empowerment, blurring the line between work and play to draw on the user’s natural creativity. Successful general systems are the ones that can be easily applied in quite varied situations without tearing in the seams.

While not widely used by industrial programmers today, Smalltalk was incredibly influential. In 1981 Objective-C was created by Brad Cox and Tom Love, directly inspired by what the Smalltalk designers had done. Objective-C was subsequently used as the language of choice for NeXTStep, and later for Apple’s MacOS X when Apple bought NeXT. Today it’s seeing a big surge in popularity thanks to devices like the iPhone, on which it is also used. In 1995 Java was introduced, owing a great deal of its design to Objective-C, but also introducing features such as a universal virtual machine and garbage collection, which Objective-C didn’t have at the time. In some sense, both Objective-C and Java are blends of the C-family languages and Smalltalk. Tongue in cheek, we might say that it seems evolution in industrial programming these days consists of finding blends that contain less of the C model and more of smalltalk or functional programming.

I thought I’d make a list of software I consider absolutely essential on any new computer, and it became longer than I thought.

General use:

NetNewsWire for news reading

DropBox for file syncing

OmniFocus as a task organizer (the GTD methodology actually works — it has liberated me from reciting a long list of things to do in my head all day long)

CircusPonies Notebook for note taking

iStat Pro for system monitoring

If I want to develop software:

Eclipse

Fink and MacPorts so I can get various unix tools (I can’t settle for one or the other, since some tools are in one of them only, but normally Fink is nicer since the packages are precompiled)

Apple’s developer tools

If I want to read and write papers:

TeXShop

Mendeley Desktop

So these are the “absolute essentials”. Of course web apps like gmail count too, but they require no installation. Anything I’ve missed?

One thing I do not install, but perhaps should, is Apple’s MobileMe. Considering how fruity my environment is, there ought to be some benefit. But between Dropbox, my own DAV server for calendars, and built-in syncing of apps like OmniFocus, I can make things stay in sync anyway, so MobileMe is probably not worth the cost… I think.