iBooks

It’s a bit embarrassing that Apple’s iBookstore has existed for three years without a way to read the books purchased there on a Mac. It’s probably true that most people prefer to read e-books on an iOS device, but Amazon has had a Kindle reader for the Mac available for years.

The Mac finally gets its due in Mavericks, which ships with Apple’s first version of iBooks for OS X. At any time in the past, say, two or three years, the next thing to appear in this review would surely be a screenshot of an exquisitely drawn application window designed to look like a paper book. Today’s Apple has other ideas.

That wasn’t so hard, was it? We don’t need drawings of leather covers or lighting effects reproducing the shadows that fall on paper pages as they curve downward into a spine. We just need the text, nicely displayed, and that’s what iBooks provides.

The reading window has a small toolbar that fades in when the cursor hovers over the top of the window, providing access to the table of contents, highlights and notes, appearance options, search, and bookmarks.

There are limited but reasonable appearance options: three color themes, seven fonts in a dozen sizes, single- and double-page display modes, and full-screen support. Blessedly, there’s also an option to turn off full justification and a separate option to disable automatic hyphenation.

Unlike in Kindle Reader for the Mac, the iBookstore is accessible directly from within the application. Unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like every other Apple media store; this isn’t a bad thing.

iBooks can read DRM-free EPUB books in addition to books purchased from the iBookstore. It can also import and organize PDFs, but reading one launches OS X’s Preview application.

This is definitely a version 1.0 product. The pre-release versions suffered from the expected crop of cosmetic and functional bugs. The network-resident store-that’s-not-really-a-webpage is a bit clunky, often feeling strangely slower on the Mac than it does in iOS. And as with the Mac App Store, there’s no equivalent of browser tabs or multiple windows to make browsing the store a bit more flexible.

Apple got the important part right: iBooks provides a pleasant, uncluttered way to read iBookstore purchases on a Mac. It’s about time.

Maps

Part of the reason that Apple abandoned Google Maps in iOS 6 was that it was falling behind the Web and Android incarnations of Google Maps. The divorce was messy to say the least. Apple has been scrambling to overcome a terrible launch and restore faith in its new mapping service.

Should Mac users have felt slighted that only iOS devices had access to Apple maps during this past year? Perhaps not, but it doesn’t matter now because Mavericks lets Mac users join the ranks of Apple maps users. The predictably named Maps application should be familiar to anyone who has used Apple maps in iOS 6, right down to the graphics and icons.

Sharing directions or map locations ranges from seamless to awkward. Send directions to someone on a device running iOS 6 or later and the recipient will be sent right into the iOS maps application. Map locations are e-mailed as a map image and a vCard attachment with the address. E-mail directions and the lucky recipient will get a PDF(!) showing the route and turn-by-turn directions.

These are all a far cry from the simplicity of a link to maps.google.com. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a maps.apple.com website providing maps access to anyone with a Web browser? In fact, there is such a site, and sharing a location or directions from the OS X Maps application will include a link to it that looks something like this:

http://maps.apple.com/?q=40.911852,-73.254653&sspn=0.010284,0.023626&sll=40.911844,-73.254653

But don’t expect to see a Google-Maps-like Web interface at maps.apple.com; it merely redirects to the “best” available location: the Apple Maps app in iOS, the Maps application in Mavericks, and (embarrassingly) the Google Maps website if you’re running a non-Apple OS or an older version of OS X.

It’s a testament to Google’s Web expertise that using Apple’s native Maps application doesn’t feel appreciably more powerful or responsive than using Google Maps in a modern Web browser. And Google Maps has features like Street View for which Apple still has no answer.

I’m glad OS X has reached feature parity with iOS in yet another area. The OS X Maps application is perfectly adequate, even if it doesn’t dazzle; we’ve seen these features before in iOS 6, after all. But Apple really needs to step up its mapping game if it ever wants to catch up to Google.