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Do you have any general thoughts about the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh?

All I can say is, I think the Mac reinvented the personal-computer industry in the eighties, and Microsoft copied it in the nineties — and that’s been a big success for them, too. We finally got out ahead again with Mac OS X, and I think you’ll see Microsoft copying that in the future.

Can you draw any parallels between what Apple was doing in creating the Mac back in 1984 and what you’re doing today with the iPod and iTunes?

I feel Apple’s in a really wonderful, innovative stage right now, where we’re innovating in a lot of areas. I mean, I think Mac OS X is huge. I think that you’re seeing us, with the Power Mac G5, being the most powerful personal computer out there. And we’ve got a lot more where that came from. We’ve got the best portables out there. And we have the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. And we have our iLife applications. We declared that we thought the next big thing for the personal computer was the digital hub three years ago, right?

Right. And now you see Microsoft, HP, and the rest—

Oh, everybody’s copying it now. And we’re quite a ways ahead of everybody. So I think Apple has had a good hand in setting the direction for the whole industry now, again. And that’s where we like to be.

Apple’s coverage in the mass media tends to focus on iTunes and the iPod, and of course they run on Windows as well. But the bulk of Apple’s business is the Mac. And the Mac is still a major part of where Apple is going in the future.

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Of course.

Do you have any other thoughts about where your competitors are taking their strategies? For example, Windows Media PCs are computers attached to TV sets.

Well, we’ve always been very clear on that. We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

Are there some complementary aspects to it?

Well, they want to link sometimes. Like, when you make a movie, you burn a DVD and you take it to your DVD player. Someday that could happen over AirPort, so you don’t have to burn a DVD — you can just watch it right off your computer on your television set. But most of these products that have said, “Let’s combine the television and the computer!” have failed. All of them have failed.

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I don’t understand why you’d want to mouse around on your TV set.

The problem is, when you’re using your computer you’re a foot away from it, you know? When you’re using your television you want to be ten feet away from it. So they’re really different animals.

Over the years, the media and analysts have always focused on market share. But although Mac market share is relatively small, Apple is profitable and is making products that affect the entire industry.

Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

So you’re very comfortable with Apple as it is today.

I think we’re having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we’re always trying to do better. But I think we’re leading the industry and we’re having a good time.

…And Then

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This essay by Steve Jobs originally appeared on page 135 of the premier issue of Macworld, in 1984. The Apple cofounder was one of numerous Apple employees to contribute to the first issue.

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. I can’t spend enough time here, unfortunately, because I have other responsibilities. But every spare moment I have, I dash back because this is the most fun place in the world.

This is the neatest group of people I’ve ever worked with. They’re all exceptionally bright, but more importantly they share a quality about the way they look at life, which is that the journey is the reward. They really want to see this product out in the world. It’s more important than their personal lives right now.

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The Apple II had a magical feel about it. You couldn’t quantify it, but you could tell. The Macintosh is the second thing in my life that’s ever felt that way. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. You know somehow that it’s the start of something great. So everyone wants it to be perfect and works really hard on it. Everyone feels a personal responsibility for the product.

Floaty

The Macintosh is the future of Apple Computer. And it’s being done by a bunch of people who are incredibly talented but who in most organizations would be working three levels below the impact of the decisions they’re making in the organization. It’s one of those things that you know won’t last forever. The group might stay together maybe for one more iteration of the product, and then they’ll go their separate ways. For a very special moment, all of us have come together to make this new product. We feel this may be the best thing we’ll ever do with our lives.

Also see what seven Mac visionaries think about 20 years of the Mac.

Having returned from an archeological dig into the dark history of Mac OS X, I’ve unearthed a feature that could change the way you interact with your applications, enabling you to focus on one or two more easily than in the past.

Back in 1999, when Steve Jobs first showed off the new Finder in Mac OS X, it ran in a single-application mode, where switching from one application to another caused the first application to minimize (this was the original demo of the Genie effect). This was intended to be the default behavior, but it was so widely reviled that Apple quickly changed the default to the familiar multi-application mode that shows multiple applications on the screen at the same time.

Mac OS X’s multi-application mode differed from how previous versions of the Mac OS worked in that it interleaved all open windows without regard to which application they belonged to, a feature that annoyed a lot of long-time Mac users.

In Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has made significant improvements to the Dock, including improved Expose integration and minimizing windows invisibly, among much else. As a result, people who are starting to use the Dock seriously for the first time are discovering that clicking an icon in the Dock brings all its windows to the foreground. This interface behavior isn’t new in Snow Leopard, of course, but it’s an example of how Apple has never really given up the desire to make users focus on a single application at a time.

Single-application mode is how the iPhone works, of course, and on the Mac, almost all Apple applications – think about Mail, iTunes, and iPhoto – rely on a single window that can easily take over the entire screen. When an application needs a second window, such as for keywords or editing in iPhoto, it is generally a palette that disappears when the application is not in the foreground.

But it goes further. Lurking in the scary bowels of Mac OS X for all these years has been this little command, which brings back single-application mode. (Go ahead and try it – it’s easily reversed.)

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true

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For single-application mode to take effect, you have to relaunch the Dock with this second command.

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killall Dock

That’s right, the original single-application mode in pre-release versions of Mac OS X is still with us. Although it was always intended as a simple option for people who are not computer experts, it turns out to be an interesting option for the power user.

The most important fact to realize is that single-application mode is tied exclusively to the Dock. This means that if you click an application’s icon in the Dock, it immediately hides all the other applications, including the Finder.

However, if you switch applications through any other method, including clicking another visible application’s window and the Command-Tab application switcher, Mac OS X’s normal multi-application approach remains in effect, and nothing will be hidden.

You can thus combine methods of switching between applications. Click Mail in the Dock, then use Command-Tab to switch to Safari, and you’ll end up with both Mail and Safari on screen, and nothing else. If you later want to hide Safari again, click Mail’s Dock icon (or just Option-click on Mail’s window).

If you think about this for a minute, you’ll start to see the possibilities. Enabling single-application mode means that you can quickly and easily build a custom list of visible applications, and that list is dynamic. In other words, you can achieve a lot of what you might use Spaces for, without having to switch between spaces or manage which applications show in which spaces.

The main advantage to this single-application mode is that clicking an application in the Dock has always, as I mentioned earlier, brought all that application’s windows to the foreground. So, when I click Terminal’s icon in the Dock, not only do all other applications immediately disappear from view, I see the window for my local shells, the window for the remote shells on my mail server, and the window for the remote shells on my primary DNS server. These windows are exactly where I want them on the screen and there are no other windows cluttering up the view. However, if I need to reference a Web page at the same time, I simply use Command-Tab to bring up Safari, giving me its window and Terminal’s windows all on onescreen.

With Spaces, I kept all my Web browser windows in one space, but that meant a lot of swapping back and forth, or moving a browser window to another space temporarily. With single-application mode I always have the applications I want in the foreground visible and everything else is hidden from view.

The primary downside is that single-application mode doesn’t play nicely with Expose. When you activate Expose, it shows only windows for visible applications. I was hoping that it would treat the hidden applications’ windows as minimized windows, but that was not the case.

For me there is also an issue with full-screen video. If I am watching something with VLC or QuickTime Player on my second monitor and I click an icon in the Dock, the video is hidden from view. That’s not surprising, but it’s not what I want since I think that a full-screen video should stay full-screen no matter what. It’s something to be aware of if you tend to watch video while doing other work, as I do.

There may be other issues I haven’t encountered in the few days I’ve been using single-application mode, but getting back to the normal multi-application mode is easy. Just paste this first command into Terminal and then restart the Dock with the second command.

defaults delete com.apple.dock single-app
killall Dock

In the end, the main thing that I’ve noticed in the last few days is that it is much easier for me to concentrate on a single task when I can quickly hide all unrelated applications and show just the one or two that I need right now. I’m finding that this method works better for me than Spaces, and I am a big fan of Spaces.

[Lewis Butler is a longtime Unix system admin, postmaster and Mac geek. He is a frequent contributor to a large number of mailing lists under his “LuKreme” alias.]