OS-wide scripting support

If you are a professional, you probably use things like templates and well-honed workflows and lots of hotkeys to save time. But scripting goes beyond those things to make you an efficiently working beast. Before Photoshop had its Actions scripts, we would use a plugin that much the same thing, and on OS less-than-X, many applications supported AppleScript to get expanded functionality. It is still used widely in desktop publishing.

Let me first start by saying that I have always hated AppleScript. I hate its goofy syntax that tries to be uncomplicated and friendly but ends up, for me at least, adding needless, cutesy padding to simple logic. But AppleScript started a trend in graphics apps in the older Mac OS that was greatly improved on in OS X with Automator. Automator added a more flexible scripting layer that let you use a combination of GUI tools with almost any scripting language you'd want to use. I have a pretty basic knowledge of C and a terrible understanding of Python, yet I still managed to use Automator to make a multithreaded image converter that is way faster than any application I've ever used:

The Automator setup is amazingly simple thanks to Python 3.2's thread-pooling:

I can batch convert a bunch of lines of plain text to encapsulate them in Web code when doing this article in the CMS, right within Chrome. Want a calculator in your text editor? Easy. Grab all images from a portfolio website in the days before browser extensions? Done. With Automator, InDesign suddenly gets type formatting features within its dialogs:

This is the power of a ton of built-in UNIX command line tools meeting the OS' GUI scripting frameworks. There is nothing like this on any other OS, and third-party efforts to emulate Automator fall flat due to the lack of OS-wide support and frameworks. For all the work that Microsoft has done on improving Powershell, there is zero exposure of these tools to use it in a GUI context. And while I'm sure Powershell's syntax is quite modern, Microsoft isn't going to suddenly replace years worth of well-honed (and included) UNIX programs that work together with a simple pipe to create a scripter's dream. Tacking on these tools with something like Cygwin just limits their reach.

In OS X, Apple has added tons of command line equivalents for things usually done from a GUI: you can pipe a file path to sips and embed a color profile, for example. Or you can parse a system log for a Maya crash and pipe the saved crash file path to "open," OS X's double-click command line app. Send awk or grep output directly to pbcopy, the clipboard-bridge binary. If it looks like I'm fawning over Automator, that's because I am. It is the "teach a man to fish" of OS features.

While Linux obviously has many of the same command line apps as OS X, even with some clones like "gnome-open" acting as similar bridges to the GUI as in OS X, Windows is still the weakest for OS-wide scripting. People are right to point out that you can install Python in Windows but part of the point of having OS-level support for a scripting language is to build tools that can be shared easily. You can't always expect that a user will be allowed by their IT department to install X software on their machine. Microsoft needs to take its newfound love of HTML5 and open standards, apply that thinking to support things like Python, and build those frameworks into the GUI.

The only thing that ÜberCreate OS would add to an Automator clone would be to somehow miraculously add its reach to every program, regardless of the IDE used to develop them. For now, sadly, there are many programs that Automator can't reach because it relies on the use of certain Cocoa APIs.

Downtime reduction tools: Flexible ghosting and backup

While I'm not really a huge fan of Apple's auto-save versioning since it assumes you want to save a document on close (a nightmare), Time Machine—or to put it a more platform-agnostic way, a backup system that is tied to the OS—is crucial to reducing down time. Sure, Apple's interface for looking through time is novel...

...but the real ingenuity of Time Machine was just putting backup front and center in the OS and making it easy. Since there are things only the host OS developer knows about the way the system works, they are best able to make backup and restore both flexible and stable. In the enterprise Linux world, the solution to this problem is to put the system and the user data in separate partitions so you can reinstall the OS without wiping the user data. Windows has both Windows 7 Backup and Restore and Windows 8 File History, but neither option does system file backups. Windows 8 has a "Refresh your PC" option that does something similar, but if you are on a deadline and have to reinstall a system, more flexible system restores are key to not losing a whole day. ÜberCreate OS would have a hard time improving on the existing backup and restore features in OS X.

Concerns for each operating system going forward

It's unlikely that ÜberCreate OS will ever become a reality—my grep skills won't get us a new kernel, unfortunately—so we're forced to look to the existing platforms in the hopes that they'll improve to bring us closer to becoming that OS for us. Let's examine the direction each is taking and how that applies to us beret-wearing types.

Mac OS X

This piece may at times read like a Mac OS X love-fest, but I'm just giving credit where it's due. Maybe it's unfair to ask that all OSes be as capable as the Mac for creative users, since this has always been Apple's market and Windows has a much broader user base. I guess now you know why I'm sticking with it for my 3D work despite the limited choices surrounding the coming Mac Pro.

But I have some serious concerns for OS X's direction for creative professionals, and most of that has to do with two things. The first: Apple is increasingly appealing to consumers, and that has contributed to a demise of powerful technologies such as X-Grid and the lagging updates to Aperture (and its OS-level camera support).

The second thing that worries me is the very marketing-driven and overnight change to iOS 7's interface. An OS for work should be a well-honed thing that isn't subject to trends, but Apple's newfound love for minimalism and the complete scrapping of iOS' previous GUI terrifies me that they'll try something like that for OS X just for the sake of consistency. I pray that Helvetica Neue, by all accounts a novice choice for the interface fonts in iOS, stays the hell away from OS X. This type of poster-design-meets-interface is amateurish, and it hurts usability. Apple has already started this trend in OS X by stripping out color icons from the sidebar—and it just made things harder to find.

This is what some have fittingly referred to as "Apple's war on color." Jony Ive's minimalist aesthetic may look great for the profile of a phone, but a wash of grey doesn't help distinguish one UI element from the other. Stop with the IKEA-ization of OS X, Jony.

Windows

While the pen tablet in the Surface Pro has great creative potential, Microsoft's unified tablet/desktop approach is moving Redmond's OS away from a manager of media to a passive consumer of media. What's worse is that Metro isolates applications completely. That may seem good for a slideshow, but it effectively nullifies drag-and-drop and inter-application work. The Desktop and Metro environments in Windows 8 are still a mishmash:

A document is shown to you as if it's media being consumed on a tablet, not as if it's a window to be worked with among other applications. The good news is that non-Metro applications still run the same in Windows 8, but the bad news is that Microsoft cares less about the future of that desktop environment because that's not where the growth is. By merging the tablet and desktop environments, it limits Microsoft's choices to offer the best desktop experience. Drag-and-drop with a finger on a tablet is an awkward experience, so it makes sense to offer less drag-and-drop. But that doesn't make Windows 8 better for a desktop computer that manages media. It's safe to assume that unless Microsoft splits Windows back into desktop and tablet variants, future workflows in Windows will assume the same limitation.

So if you think of Windows 9 as an upgrade that has to appeal equally to tablet users and makers, what are the odds that Microsoft will introduce a scripting engine or robust support for EXR images? This is what is most problematic about Windows' future as a creative power user's OS.

Linux

Linux is obviously a trickier one to tackle. There isn't one Linux—a RedHat user is assumed to be someone completely different from an Ubuntu user. The other problem is that many of the creative-dependent things missing from Linux are frequently missing due to licensing, take TrueType kerning for example. Apple and Microsoft license many technologies that simply can't exist in Linux without a complete change of direction from strictly open source technologies. That's not going to happen, and it shouldn't.

Aside from the other things mentioned, like a lack of good metadata searching built into the OS, Linux still needs many things that are crucial to creative work. Unified color profile handling and built-in calibration tools, things that Windows and Mac users have had for years, are still a chore to deal with in Linux. And commence the rolling of eyes for Linux die-hards—that old familiar mantra, "fragmentation," is the main threat to Linux's progression into a great creative OS. Things that are coming in Ubuntu are meaningless to me because all the programs I use that have Linux versions require RHEL-based distros. With Ubuntu throwing an entirely new window manager into the fray, you can't even assume users are going to be on X-Windows anymore. This is Linux's usability paradox: it needs bold things done, but those further split the ground under its users' feet. Nevertheless, there are inspiring examples of open source conquering longstanding usability issues, most notably with blender's recent interface overhaul. It can be done, but it's not going to be easy.

It will be interesting to see, as the bridge between professional and pro-sumer demands narrows, what OSes will bring to the table to deal with creative media. I just hope they don't do it in Helvetica Neue.