Czech Miss 2011 – Why Dominka Opplová should have won

Our friend and a model Dominika Opplová was a finalist at Czech Miss 2011. As number 6, she faced the wall of blondes and brunettes as the one and only redhead.

But even with our support and our certainty they didn’t let her win. And we all know she should have won. Do you really think only blondes or brunettes are the ideal of beauty? And that the Miss (in general) should be harmless giggling bimbo speaking about world peace? Well we don’t say the winner or the other girls are stupid or ugly, but Dominika was truly the only interesting candidate and well… the most beautiful one. If you have a different opinion, unleash your fury on our FACEBOOK page. 

Watch the photoshoot video with Dominika.

Is task management a thing of the past?

There is still an outcry about the way iOS 4 handles multitasking, especially the fact that the “drawer” that allows fast app switching  doesn’t give user any clues as to which apps are suspended and which ones are actually running. Now, Apple seems to push that idea in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, too. I gave this a deeper thought and there seems to be a pattern in Apple’ s design solutions.

 
Apple wants to make launching apps a thing of the past.
 
Say what? That sounds ridiculous. But actually, it is not, not really. The whole concept of launching applications to be able to work with them stems from fundamental design limitations that plague computers from their very inception in late 1930s. The most severe of them is the sole concept of long-term and short-term memory.

In personal computers, RAM (Random Access Memory) is akin to human short-term memory, whereas hard drives work like long-term memory. You know from your own experience that it takes some time to remember stuff that you don’t need to process daily (even if the times to remember vary greatly). The same goes for applications and data - before they can be processed, they need to be read from some kind of long-term memory device (such as hard drive of flash disk) to RAM, or directly to registers in CPU (which are extremely fast and extremely small units of memory). This process of transferring from one kind of memory to another takes its sweet time - and your nerves. Wouldn’t it be great if there was just a short-term memory of unlimited capacity?

If your computer had, say, a terabyte of non-volatile (kept without power) RAM, there would be no need for a hard drive. That sounds like science fiction, but frankly - you probably have more RAM now than was the size of your hard drive 10 years ago. With unlimited RAM, everything can be run at the same time, because there’s no need to shut down programs to free up memory. Old game consoles (think NES or MegaDrive) tackled the same issue from opposing end: they had very little RAM (in order of kilobytes), but loading times were non-existent, as programs were executed directly from fast ROM memory in cartridges. That’s similar to what SSDs aim for.

If you think about it, applications are just interfaces between an user and his or her data. In the purest sense, you don’t want to run Photoshop. You want to manipulate images. You have no need for iTunes or web browser - you want to listen to music and browse the web.

Apps are interfaces. It makes little sense other than a habit to doubleclick an icon called “Word” to be able to write a letter, or even a little compass labelled “Safari” to access web. User shouldn’t worry about launching apps. Some users don’t even now - my girlfriend keeps everything running up to a point where her quadcore laptop (faster than what I use for editing HD) chokes and stalls. She shouldn’t have to micromanage the OS. The OS should do that.

With approach taken by Apple, we are closer to that. (edit: in Lion, we’re WAY closer to that)

Look at your Dock. There’s probably a bunch of icons, some with tiny white dots near them.

Those dots are the sole indicator of a running application. This dot is smaller and less significant in Leopard and 10.6 than in the previous versions of OSX, because, well, they represent a less significant paradigm now, with users having boatloads of free memory. You don’t need to worry if you run twenty apps simultaneouosly, if you have enough RAM - therefore, you don’t need to micromanage running apps.

In iOS 4 and now with 10.7, Apple goes even further. Disregarding some obvious differences between mobile and desktop computing and usage patterns of their users, running programs is the same for both of them. In the multitasking drawer, accessed by doubleclicking the home button, users get a bunch of last-used apps with no indication of which ones are running whatsoever. I don’t need to worry about that, I don’t even NEED that. The apps are just there. Granted, there are times I’d prefer app management from classic GUIs - I wouldn’t be too happy if running Notes closes Skype outright, because there’s no more free RAM. But Apple’s design philosophy is 80/20 - do what’s important for 80 per cent of use cases and don’t worry too much about the last 20. On iOS devices, my usage patterns largely fit into those 80 per cent, and with RAM ever increasing, it will fit soon on desktop, too.