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2002

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A Q&A with Spring creator Robb Beal

Following the release of the innovative Spring 1.0 software last week, UserCreations president and Spring creator Robb Beal agreed to do an exclusive question-and-answer interview with Mac Net Journal.

Spring is billed on its Web site in the following manner:

" Imagine that you don't have to go to five different applications to communicate with the same person. Imagine that booking a flight or train is as simple as opening a canvas with a map and dragging between the two cities. Imagine inviting someone to a favorite place is as simple dragging a line between the person and place."

Priced at $21.95, Spring 1.0 is just the start of the development of a new way to interact with your friends, your family, and your data. And even though this is the initial commercial release of Spring, it already claims a number of innovations: A concept-centric design, 1-drag actions, drag and drop icon management, folderless groups, drag, drop, and act Web integration, and much more. All of these features are easy to use with either a control-click action on an icon or by simply click-dragging between icons to see how they can interact.

This is just the beginning. I opened this Q&A interview questioning what led to the development of Spring and where Beal sees the application going. The topics branched out from there to include comments on the state of independent software development on the Mac and much more:

MNJ: What motivated your initial development of Spring?

Beal: The conception of Spring dates back to early 1998. I was doing metadata work for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). While reading about what's now become the Resource Description Framework (RDF), I had an idea for an app that would allow you to create named relations between things by dragging a line between them and choosing a contextual menu of predefined relations.

Over the next couple of years, the idea gestated. Doing environmental informatics work, I always found myself frustrated that you couldn't work with the data in a more human, less machine-like way. The data after all wasn't _about_ machines it was about people, places, and products.

The opportunity to prototype the idea presented itself in December of 2001. Working with a developer of a mature diagramming tool, we had a compelling prototype, called iLife, by late February 2002.

I teamed up with Dan Wood to do Watson product management in January. iLife was an insurance policy against having Apple bundle a competitive product with the OS. With much regret, I cashed in the policy in May and decided to commercialize iLife as Spring.

An example of a Spring Desktop Portal

MNJ: With the release of Spring 1.0, where do you see the application going?

Beal: As the UserCreations name suggests, we see consumer-level software development as a collaboration with our customers. So, customers will have a strong influence on Spring's direction.

That said, we've previewed one-drag textual web pages in v1. Expect to see an elaboration on that idea. Once we complete work on iteration in Spring's templating, you'll see RSS Headline Objects and Visual Bookmark Collection Objects. We're also extremely excited about building bridges between other desktop apps.

Longer term (remembering that we operate on Web time), Spring's drag between gesture is a perfect fit for creating named relations between things. Direct canvas-to-canvas trading is an obvious next step as well. Of course, surprising people with the unexpected gives us great satisfaction, so we'll leave room for that too.

Finally, we're totally open to other people taking Spring in directions we haven't imagined!

MNJ: Do you have some innovative ideas for how to use Spring that you are willing to share?

Beal: With the examples in Spring 1.0 we grabbed some of the lowest hanging fruit. But, as we said in our initial press release, Spring is only limited by user and developer imagination. Food, wine, health, sex, music, movies, etc., are among the most obvious!

MNJ: What do you see when you think of the personal computer?

Beal: We emphatically don't see files, folders, and apps. We see a hyper-visual rendition of our lifes. Names play a much lesser role. Textual searching supplements visual recall, not conversely.

We think of actions (i.e., verbs) like buy, sell, invite, introduce, subscribe, and attend not just move, copy, delete, open.

MNJ: How long before the distinction between desktop Web apps and browser-based apps becomes mostly irrelevant?

Beal: It will come much faster than you might think, maybe 6-12 months.

MNJ: What role should the independent Mac developer community play in the Mac ecosystem? What role should Apple play? And Microsoft?

Beal: From our perspective, the indie Mac developer community is the lifeblood of the Mac. It's where the innovation occurs because it's the only part of the market where its safe to run high-risk software experiments. For example, Macromedia didn't create Director or Flash, they popularized them. (Marc Canter and Jonathan Gay respectively created them.)

We envision an indie Mac developer culture with much greater collaboration and overall vitality than it currently has and one that takes Apple to task when it attempts to take over markets we've cultivated, sometimes for years, with so-called "free" products.

MNJ: How about Apple's role?

Beal: Apple's had a serious failure of imagination in dealing with indie developers. It seems odd to us because Apple hasn't had this same failure of imagination with other aspects of its business (For example, its products).

If you're looking for a barometer for when the Mac is going to begin to grow marketshare, look for press releases, ads, and magazine covers that talk about innovative Mac developers, how much money is being invested in them, and how much product they're _selling_, not giving away.

What UserCreations wants most from Apple is a) fast machines with elegant industrial designs and b) a high performance, rock-solid OS. And get this, we'd like them to support some of the things that we and our colleagues are doing.

We have huge fears that Apple is headed down the same path (to FTC complaints and antitrust remedies) as Microsoft. The situation with Apple is unprecedented in our minds in that the OS is tied to hardware and apps are being tied to the OS (to say nothing of the Apple Retail Stores).

Finally, we often wonder whether the people on the Sherlock 3, iCal, iPhoto, etc., teams think about the people and companies whose products have been affected and whether the executives at Apple appreciate that their existence is due in large part to the indie Mac developer community keeping the Mac viable during the worst of times (eg., 1996).

MNJ: What about Microsoft?

Beal: We'd like to see Microsoft be a meta-platform vendor on OS X, delivering significant APIs, XML schemas, etc., for indie developers to build atop as well as supporting the things we are and our colleagues are doing.

More importantly, we'd like to see Microsoft make investments in indie Mac developers like it did in the mid-90s.

MNJ: What do you think of the Open Source movement?

Beal: We personally wouldn't call it a movement. Sharing source is a very practical thing to do. Customers tell you they want source and you react by sharing source in a way that works for both of you.

As with Apple and Microsoft's bundling (of apps with the OS), calling software "free" (as in beer) strikes us as pure gimmick. There's nothing more honest (and admirable) than directly negotiating a fair price for your work with the market.

We respect the Free Software Foundation for taking a strong stance on software freedom, though we don't share their philosophy.

There's nothing more perjorative than calling a commercial software company or its products _proprietary_!

MNJ: Who are some of your strongest influences in personal computing?

Beal: David McCusker, who I met while a grad student while he was working on OpenDoc at Apple, has been a big influence. While he works at the most geeky levels of the software stack, he has great user experience instincts and writes elegantly about software. Of all the people I've met, he's the first I considered nominating for a MacArthur fellowship.

I've been reading Dave Winer's DaveNet's for a looooooong time. He helped define the indie Mac culture. I wouldn't be a Mac developer if it weren't for people like him, Chuck Shotton (of MacHTTP fame), and Cabel and Steve (of Panic).

Guy Kawasaki's Macintosh Way flamed my Macintosh passions early on. True story. I wanted to get into the Mac software business out of undergrad in college, so I sent Guy a note asking whether I could watch his portables (i.e., his kids) while I broke into the business. He sent a handwritten note on beautiful stationery respectfully declining my offer! I find it fascinating that Guy (and Greg Galanos and Heidi Roizen) have funded only one Mac-based company since becoming venture capiltalists. (FWIW, Joel Spolsky reminds me a lot of Guy Kawasaki.)

Kai Krause and others at Metacreations blew my mind with their radical rethinking of user interfaces. The breaking up of Metacreations was a huge loss for the Mac platform.

MNJ: What sets Mac software apart from other software?

Beal: Primarily how little money there is to be made :-) Seriously, the strong visual aesthetic, what Brent Simmons calls the quietness of the UI.

MNJ: What's your advice to budding Mac software designers?

Beal: Apprentice with an existing designer. Take in the indie Mac culture so you can pass it on. Take some big risks, not necessarily in terms of project scale, but in terms of surprising people with imaginative user experiences. Try not to blow too much hot air. Let your work speak for you. Compliment other software designers that you respect in public, often. Leave the derivative apps for a later time when you manage, not create!

MNJ: Are there any software companies of recent that have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

Beal: Be. They had all the right technology (witness Apple's hiring of key Be staff to ostensibly implement Be technology on OS X), but didn't know how to productize it, to make it user-relevant. They had zero zig to Microsoft and Apple's OS zag. Where was the vision for making personal computers more human? With an investment of a couple hundred thousand in a few software designers with strong visions for desktop web apps, JLG might be leading a revitalized PC industry. Instead, we got wars with Microsoft and PC appliances.

Rob McNair-Huff is a longtime Mac user and writer from the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing about the Mac, and running this Web site, Mac Net Journal, he is the author of two books - Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula and Mountain Bike America: Washington - and he is working with his wife Natalie to write a third book this year called Birding Washington. If you have a need for Mac consulting, writing, Web design or photography help, check out Rob's business site: White Rabbit Publishing.

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