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Mac OS X Officially Previewed
bonaldi writes "Steve Jobs publicly announced the new face of Mac OS yesterday, the *nix based Mac OS X. The server-side system has been about for a while, but the client side has some nasty surprises. The worst could well be the all new too-bloody-big icons (which is a failing of a lot of *nix systems). I didn't buy a 21" screen so my icons could look like 640*480. " Check out the screenshot: I've got a challenge: How long before someone creates E and GTK themes that mimic this? It really does make me wish we had better support for anti-aliased support under X.
Isn't this the one that's supposed to be open sourced?
Just a small comment regarding icon sizes. During the keynote, Steve showed a control panel that allowed you to adjust the icon sizes. Apparently the application icon's are stored as 128x128 pixel images, and the OS will scale the icons to whatever size the user wants them to appear.
So if you want them smaller, all you need to do is adjust a slider. Neat huh?
My work NT box has icons that big, but only 'cos it won't change out of 640*480 and 16 colour
BSD with a Mac front end running on a G4. Yummy.
Does anyone else here think thiat there has been far too much effort put into making macs look pretty.
I always get the feeling that apple borrowed a lot of their styling and usability from Rowentas' irons for the iMac.
I don't think I'll be getting a mac.
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
If you want to see huge icons that go overboard, one word: WORKBENCH. I believe Workbench(for the amiga) let you have icons as big as you wanted, and its GUI was 10 times as uglier as X Windows.
I think that the new interface is beautiful. It's refreshing to see that Apple is giving the MacOS a GUI "makeover". I'm looking forward to getting a copy of MacOS X.
Read the copy in the OS-X articles, or catch the QT4 stream. The icons are EXTREMELY resizeable, as is the dock. Sheesh. Tom Dutton
Check out this little tidbit from the MacOS rumors coverage of SF2000
http://macosrumors.com/?powerexpress=mwsf2K
At the bottom they claim John Carmack said that
the next id software game will be exclusively for MacOS X!!!
I can't believe that would mean no Windows or Linux version??
Or does he mean that it will be developed on MacOS X as the primary dev platform? Quite likely as JohnC is a big fan of NeXTStep and there's still a lot of nextishness underneath MacOS X Doom was developed first under NeXTStep for example.
Must admit the user interface looks damn nice, lets hope they leave an accessable CLI in the consumer version.
I just got a one of Apple's beautiful flat screen digital displays for xmas (Mmmm Still waiting for the G4 to show up. Just ordered it the other day), but I can't wait to play around with OS X. I have been using OS X Server and I run a Darwin Beginners Guide and the new OS X looks incredible! A beautiful GUI on great hardware with a modern OS what more could you ask for
The only thing that I'm concerned about is the amount of 'chrome effects' (not the chrome look, just anything above and beyond functionality). As long as one can turn them off or design their own, I'd be happy with that interface.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I cannot in any sense of honesty say that I have ever liked the way Macs look. The iMac personally gives me nightmares. But this, these screenshots, are going to forever frighten me.
the most interesting thing about the situation is that steve jobs didn't speak 5 words of a CLI, or a Unix core (aside from a brief mention of darwin) during his keynote yesterday. It's almost like they're denying the fact that they're masking unix with a UI more user-friendly to new users than any UI on the planet--and the users won't even have a clue.
People can rant about Apple making a bad product... but I think delivering unix to the mainstream consumer is brilliant. I mean, when's the last time you could buy a completely-configured unix box at compusa? sign me up.
It's about time mac woke up to the world of protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking.
As crappy as M$ Win XX is, at least it has pre-emptive multi-tasking.
I am a dedicated [U/Li]n[i/u]x and Xwindows user, but would still rather use Win XXXX than deal with Mac's crappy co-operative multi-tasking.
Now maybe Macs will finally enter into the realm of serious computers and take advantage of all that yummy hardware.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
There was some talk on the Objective C newsgroups about Apple dropping ObjC for C++. I also heard that they had reversed this decision. Does anyone out there know how closely Mac OS X is tied to NeXTSTEP and the OpenSTEP API's?
Chris Wareham
I think he means that the only Apple platform that they will support will be OS X. Which makes sense because by the time the release their game the Transition to Mac OS X should have begun. So what support the old system that is being phased out?
Is MacOS gonna show us something new or just pump out stuff thats already more well tuned and advanced on today's systems?
Flip it on and let it sit on my desktop just looking pretty until I get myself a rowenta iron.
You could buy a decent video card for that money... :-)
Huh ? Methinks someone forgot to remove the warez from that screenshot.....
...but looking at that screenshot actually gets my interest...I actually considered buying a Mac for a second there. Seriously though, the UI does look nice (imo of course). Now the names they've chosen (Cocoa, Aqua, Carbom), those worry me. From what I hear the Darwin core is pretty nice, might actually be worth checking out...who knows maybe it'd make a nice client machine.
I'm basically rambling so that's about it...just some worthless random thoughts.
I know this may be considered flamebait and OS X hasn't been released but, as a Mac user, if OS X delivers on the features it promises, what incentive do I have for choosing Linux over OS X? On a related note, since they reportedly have OS X development running on par on an Intel box and if they release it, what's the incentive for Intel hardware users? Admittedly, I'm a casual Linux user and just want to know the opinions of those more experienced with Linux.
Note:
Long and short is that it may be quite appropriate to have antialiasing managed within application libraries as opposed to directly in X.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
So if your dock has tiny 4x4 icons, they'll zoom up to a readable size when you pass the mouse over -- I believe that this is the effect being shown in the screenshot.
I don't know how well that will actually work, but it'll be interesting to see how it all turns out . . .
I have no
I know i will get flamed for this, but...
I think that the Mac interface is proably the best GUI around (unless you count CLI as a GUI...)
It is neat, efficient, and has a paradigm that is only broken a few times by certain developers. In general, it is consistent and slick.
I think the reason people like Macs is not because they are faster or more stable or whatever, it is because Apple has always worried about its machine-human interfaces. MS just wants money, *nix just wants a good server running, but Mac has always been about interface.
So i think it is great that apple is trying new ideas (even if they really aren't that new) in their interface.
Use of color as a paradigm, use of transparency now that machine can handle it, use of sizable icons, the dock, several ways of using the finder, etc. etc.
However, there is one thing i DO NOT like about the Mac interface, and what i LOVE about GNOME/Enlightenment: G/E is TOTALLY configurable to my speciifications. As of yetr, there has been no setting that i wanted to change that i have been unable to change. Virtual Windows, mouse behavior, background colors/themes for easier vierwing, etc. etc
The problem with the Mac interface, now, is not going to be whether it is a GOOD interface, it is whether or not you can configure it to YOUR work environment. Most geeks don't like the mac interface because it follows ONE paradigm and they happen to not like that paradigm.
So if Apple were REALLY interested in human-machine interface instead of branding and marketing, they would make slick interfaces with the uber-configurability of G/E and beyond...
THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO DO IT!
Oh mail server is getting a good deal of spam this morning from some guy named Steve Jobs about an amazxing new product called iCards. It's originating from applenews.lists.apple.com. Anyone elese getting this unsolicited garbage?
Bish
"Slash one! Slash two! Three slashes and your done!"
Huh ? Methinks someone forgot to remove the warez from that screenshot.....
First of all, it's probably the trailer. Second of all, if it is the movie, it's not exactly warez, considering Steve Jobs is CEO of Pixar *smack*.
It's interesting to ponder about the (perceived) graphics performance in Mac OS X, something Steve made a big point about, versus the separation of kernel and user space code as is common in Unix OS design... What I'm saying is that if Mac OS has such great graphics performance, that should come at the same cost as it would in e.g. Linux. As everyone no doubt knows, graphics drivers are kept out of the kernel in Linux because of fears of lessened stability (among other things, no doubt, but that is a major thing). I wonder how the Apple people solved this.
One interesting, related, thing was that during the keynote, they should demo Quake 3 Arena running under Mac OS X, and it crashed... OK, no big deal, but then they just abandoned the demo instead of showing us how Mac OS recovers from a crashed full-screen OpenGL app. Makes we wonder...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
As far as multitasking, Mac OS X is based on Unix. Unix is a true multitasking environment. Thus, Mac OS X must also be true multitasking, if they've kept even a smidgen of the Unix source.
Desktop style - I like. It looks nice, seems cleaner than Windows (and definitely crisper), and has a much better layout. Personally, I -still- think RiscOS blows all other desktops away, but whether we'll ever see a "real" RiscOS-style front-end for anything other than a dying PC that Acorn murdered in cold blood is yet to be seen.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...which is the point. Apple isn't stupid enough to alienate their core users...
The GUI looks very nice. I particually like the translucent menus as they visually stress their temporal nature to the user.
I am not sure I agree with having four identically shaped buttons on the window's title bars. It seems like taking away shapes makes it much harder to remember what a button does and locks the position of the buttons on menu bar. The destroy button must always be the far right button for example.
Apple looks like the GUI to follow for the next few years.
Are those little colored lights in the toolbar color reactance indicators? If so, Linux GUI people better get on the stick...
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In the press release they said that Mac OS X is a Linux like OS. Things have really changed. Not long ago we said that Linux was a Unix-like os, but now it is changing at instead the Unix-based OS are Linux like :-) On the other hand I have problems seeing how Apple hopes to come out ahead with this. Having a nice GUI isn't a real competitive advantage for long, with the progress being made in GNOME and X-windows, the advantages of Mac OS X will not last many months. AFAIK anti-aliasing is beeing added as part of XFree 4.0 and is already part of the GNOME canvas. The scalable icons is also something planned for the next release of GNOME, and AFAIK it is already at least partially implemented in the CVS version.
I'm considering getting an Mac laptop, but only if it will run Linux (I hate MacOS). Does anyone know if LinuxPPC fully supports this?
Why a Mac laptop? Simple: Cost, Power, "Standard-ized" hardware.
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I'm not the greatest Apple fan (I have 3 running computers and only 1 runs MacOS), but seeing Apple take these steps is good for everyone, even if you don't own a Mac and never would because you don't know how to install your own floppy drive ;)
Thanks to Loki, Linux is getting some games support. To that I both say 'about time' *and' 'already??' (didn't YOU think it would take 2 more years?).
The Linux software suite and the MacOS software suite have a lot to offer, and a lot of people I think are like me and would like them both on the same OS. For all the talk, NT still does not achieve this and is only good for single-tasks, plus NT only resembles UNIX, with none of the openness, none of the legacy of fine-tuned applications and no freaking compiler of any kind.
Yes, the Mac has no floppy drive and yes it's a proprietary UNIX with some non-core technologies open sourced. So what. Apple COULD have rebuilt their next-gen OS on top of the NT kernel, which is what Bill Gates pressured Apple to select. And yes, M$ would have licensed it.
By selecting UNIX - and a well-respected kernel at that - Apple leapfrogs NT in technology, even if it will take years to convince the skeptics. Skeptics still don't support Linux, so screw 'em.
With the MacOS becoming an API on top of BSD, it's far more likely we will see great Mac applications ported to Linux because most of the code will have to be cleaned up for this anyhow. This means a few more games, and lots of applications SOME of us can't leave Windows/Mac for.
Ignoring the people who bitch that the QuickTime client isn't GPL'd or NPL'd or whatever, we'll probably get QT for Linux soon afterwards. Although it seems like APple doesn't listen, they do now, and it would be stupid of them to release QT/Linux BEFORE MacOS was out, and lose all that PR.
I'm very glad Apple's doing this. Everyone wants a version of Linux/UNIX that runs all the major applications - well here it is. AND, it runs on a 21st century CPU not some rickety Intel CPU that requires a 4"x4" heat sink cube with 3 fans.
(My G3 MacOS/LinuxPPC system has a tiny heat sink and no CPU fan)
Carmack offered to put off his wedding so he could be there for thei introduction of OS X. Jobs refused to let him, and suggested he make a video instead.
John said that if OS X lived up to its promise, he would adopt it as his primary OS for development and general use.
It appears it has. He is obviously very happy with it and the next id game will be written for the Cocca API and will only run under OS X with no backwards compatibility.
This is not a good thing for Windows, but great news for 'nix users and Mac gamers everywhere.
Open Source Development-Another First from Apple
Apple is the first major computer company to make open source development a key part of its ongoing software strategy. In 1999, Apple announced its participation in the open source community by releasing the source code to most of the core components of Mac OS X Server. The core OS was quickly followed by new components like the Darwin Streaming Server, OpenPlay, and NetSprockets. By participating in the open source community, Apple partners with external developers to create leading-edge products and technologies for our users.
Hmmmm. Don't you love marketspeak?
URL: http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside2.html
OS X will have a CLI via Terminal.app, offering a plethora of shells to choose from. It might be a optional install however, but who cares?
My first impression is that it looks like Apple finished the Berlin project. (Just had to say that. ;)
:-)
Regarding anti-aliased fonts: There's actually a simple way to do that, but it eats RAM like a wumpus. The simple way is not to use fonts at all, but instead to create pixmaps (e.g. XPM format) that have anti-aliased text. This would only be useful on a system with lots(lots) of RAM and then only useful for largely static content like menus, dialogs etc.
Regaring themes: (By Jove, I'm getting sick of that word!) There's more involved in emulating the Mac interface than drawing pretty pictures, even if you manage to get the translucency. One of the best features of the Mac is its respect of screen real-estate. For starters, you'd have to code an app to place it's menubar at the top of the screen, but then the inconsistency across various apps would defeat this.
Themes look nice, but there's more to a GUI than looks. (Beauty is only skin deep, eh? Why do I feel compelled to say this to geeks? Geeks my age (I won't say) certainly appreciated that. Maybe the difference is that 'geekness' is now the 'cool' thing, whereas it used to be the 'right' thing?)
Well, I've got a library to write; "Next workspace!"
Easy to spot the linux folk. Note that you will objec to the idea that one mouse button is all you need because you most likely use an OS whose interface is designed to work well with 3 buttons. MacOS, on the other hand, was designed to work with one button, and it does so fine. It's quite silly to think that because you need three buttons under one OS you will also under others. If you run linux on a mac, however, getting a three button mouse is a good idea...
M$ simply copied the taskbar idea from NeXT, which is owned by Apple! Another M$ "innovation".
Direct from that screen shot page is the text: Apple reasserts its leadership in operating systems with the next-generation OS for the Macintosh platform. This is what I want to know...WHAT leadership in OS?
RELEASE DATE?!
To be honest, I have just one big problem with Apple's Open-source policy... They have this quicktime standard, which is being embraced by everyone, but I think it would explode within the Linux and Free software community if they would release source to a quicktime client.
Even if they would release a couple of unix QT clients, it would really make my day.
If they have it running under MacOSX, std MacOS, and windows, I would imagine it wouldn't be too terribly hard to make other unix ports.
As far as open-sourcing the whole thing -- there may be code in there (i.e. the particular codecs) that they can't open up due to copyrights, and/or perhaps couldn't truly be free because of patents, but if they at least gave us the unencumbered parts, perhaps arrangements could be made, a-la xanim, to incorporate binary "plugins" for the encumbered parts.
Two things immediately come to mind after reading reports of the keynote speech yesterday.
1. I like most of the interface changes and eye candy in OS X, as long as the operating system is fast enough to implement them smoothly. From what I hear, this is the first Apple product to fully take advatange of the PowerPC chips inside almost all Macintoshes so that shouldn't be a problem.
But what happens if we're all overexposed to the "make everything translucent and multicolored" fad during the next few years? Will Aqua (Apple's name for the new interface style) suddenly seem dated or too cute? I sincerely hope Apple has added some hooks to Aqua's API to make the style customizable.
2. What a shrewd move Apple made by giving all Mac users 20MB of web space on their servers. (See http://itools.mac.com/itoolsmainpc.html or http://itools.mac.com/itoolsmain.html if you're on a Mac.) Suddenly, the iMac's galling lack of external storage doesn't seem as important anymore. I still need a way to make backups, but some people may be happy with the small amount of public space that lets them store and share stuff.
Mike
Isn't this BSD love-affair that Steve Jobs seems to have gone through a blow against our hopes and dreams of the world domination of Linux? Here we are trying to make small inroads with vendors like Dell to let a few people get Linux pre-installed, and here comes Jobs blowing us away by making sure that BSD comes on every single Mac. It's not like we're going to have a choice of BSD or Linux. We know that Bill Gates will never encourage the shipment of computers with Linux on them, so we can't hope to recoup our losses there. Why did Jobs do this? Is he buddy-buddy with Bill Joy? Did they drop acid together on the Berkeley campus? We've spent so much energy emulating Windows in our new desktop systems, and now this hits us like a bolt out of the blue. Were we going the wrong way? Will the KDE/Linux systems look like poor cousins to the BSD/Mac systems? I never thought of BSD as a competitor. After all, they were just some dumb twenty-year-old Unix system that nobody used and nobody cared about. Now this. How many times must the Penguin slay the daemon Phoenix before it just stays dead?
If its *nix based, does that mean we get quicktime 4 like the screen shot shows?
The "big icons" people are complaining about at the bottom of the screen are the Dock, a Launcher/Task bar type desktop enhancement. Nothing I've seen yet actually showed any icons floating around on the desktop in true MacOS fashion.
woof!
I've got a challenge: How long before someone creates E and GTK themes that mimic this?
Mimic is the right word, X Window environments tend to adopt the look of a particular OS without coming close to the functionality. This one will be hard to beat. I give 'em about 15 years!
(Seriously, the PDF, antialiasing and media support along with the required consistancy in the interface would be hard as hell to engineer)
Jobs demonstrated the "Bomb" app which attempts to crash the OS. He started it up and went on with the demonstration.
It never managed to bring it down.
I got it today, but on only the email account I have subscribed to the eNews mailing list. Apple sends out newsletters once or twice a month. I hope you've noticed them coming through *before*...
If you look at any of the slides they showed at macworld, it is clearly obvious that the graphics code is _not_ in the kernel space. The kernel level is called Darwin, and consists of Mach+BSD. On top of that sit Quartz (their pdf-based 2D graphics libraries), OpenGL, and Quicktime.
(By the way, that quake3 demo made me wonder the same thing, but I'm guessing the guy doing the demo just didn't think about it - he didn't seem as slick as steve jobs)
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Any one else able to recognise all the features of NeXTSTEP they still have? Especially the Finder.
:)
It's like they took NeXTSTEP and added a really cool theme to it. I personally really liked a lot of things about the UI of the old NeXT computers we used to have in college.
Sure brings back memories of better days when I never had to set my fingers on a Windows machine.
--Dan
Hmmm...they mention BSD and the Mach kernel (as
they should), but not one word about NeXT. Methinks Steve Jobs is still a bit burned over how that all turned out. Pity, too - they were nice machines.
But the legend lives on in the 'column view' of the new Finder, and the 'dock' with all your useful stuff.
read my freakin post before you flame me.
I was saying "thank god mac will FINALLY have pre-emptive multitasking!"
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
Did anyone else notice that at the bottom of the page, under Developer Pledge Support, it says:
Not surprisingly, Mac OS X debuts with public pledges of support from more than 100 developers, including Adobe Systems, Microsoft, Quark, Macromedia, Palm Computing, id Software and many others. Together, we're taking everything you love about the Mac and making it better.
does this mean that those companies are going to be making software for the MacOSX? and as it is a unix based system, would those then be portable to the other unix based systems? could we finally be seeing support from these major companies in software design for non-windows/mac based machines?
-freakinPsycho
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"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
Actually, there are some rather major departures from current Mac interface in OS X. The most notable are the single window file manager (though it can be made to spawn multiple windows like the Mac's current file manager) and the lack of drive icons on the desktop; they've been moved to a window. The the dock is also something totally new, and even the window widgets have been rearanged and changed. The control panels folder is gone, replaced with a single app to set system such system options, and the Mac OS System Folder is gone, replaced with a more NeXTStep like system tree (which is hidden be default, because the OS is designed to the user doesn't have to mess with it).
About the only thing in the Mac OS X interface that's similar to the existing Mac OS interface is the menu bar. I've been watching the Mac newsgroups though, and so far the response is very positive, which I can't say I was expecting (though I certainly like the changes).
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
Now I'm wondering if someone will put together a reasonably-priced X server for this system. With the BSD core and CLI, this system already has a lot more geek appeal than previous Macs. The ability to run X apps would round out the package nicely.
I am, to say the least, extremely intrigued by the new system, and may in fact pick up a lower-end mac so that I can play with it.
Look a little closer at the 'trail of innovations'. Where did Microsoft get their taskbar? Could it be NeXT?
Yep. Thing is, Microsoft's implementation isn't exactly usable once you start pushing a dozen open items...
So does someone want to tell me how to change the menus in Enlightenment? Or sawmill, for that matter. Seems I can change just about everything else...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
John said that if OS X lived up to its promise, he would adopt it as his primary OS for development and general use.
It appears it has. He is obviously very happy with it and the next id game will be written for the Cocca API and will only run under OS X with no backwards compatibility.
This is not a good thing for Windows, but great news for 'nix users and Mac gamers everywhere.
Actually, the deal is that the future id games will still support Windows, Linux, etc. The difference is that the only *Mac* operating system that will be supported is OS X (so OS8/9 users would have to upgrade to run the next id game).
Think about it: id isn't going to throw away its primary source of revenues - Windows games.
I realize things will be different at the interface level, but does Apple's use of a BSD-like kernel mean that the meat of device drivers for Mac OS X will be similar enough to the needs of Linux/BSD/Unices that porting drivers between them will be fairly easy? Anyone have any idea?
At work we do a Mac/Windows application, and I've got to say, OS X has me tempted to switch from doing most of my work in Windows...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Even if a shell is not distributed initially, it certianly will be possible to add tcsh, bsh, or any particular shell you care for.
As we all know, OS X Server already had several shells included by default. No reason whatsoever that the same shells wouldn't work in OS X Consumer.
Now, what Apple MIGHT do, is not include them in the default installation, but perhaps have them available on the CD, or as a free download. Or perhaps make you enable them through a control panel.
Apple has done things like this before, they have a history of hiding advanced tools from the novice user. A perfect example of this is ResEdit. ResEdit is a very powerful tool for the advanced user who knows what he's doing, but a novice could seriously fsck his system if he did something wrong. ResEdit is, therefore, not included in the default installations of MacOS, but is available as a free ftp download, as are quite a few other advanced tools. Apple might treat tcsh, bash, or other UNIX shells the same way.
You might also consider that it's possile to write a CLI shell for ANY GUI OS. I've even seen CLI's for PalmOS. There have, in the past, been various CLI interfaces written for MacOS by third parties, some made to look like DOS, some to look like Unix. None, to my knowledge, ever caught on.
Oh, and one last thing many people don't know about the traditional Macintosh. It comes with TWO CLI's already. You just have to know what you're doing to access or use them.
With a push of the programmers switch, you can put a Mac into debugger mode. This freezes the GUI and opens a large text window. From here, you can directly access the system's memory, usually for debugging and programming purposes. You also use this to do firmware updates and the like.
And speaking of firmware.... If you reboot with command-option-o-f, you boot not into MacOS, but into openfirmware. Basically a FROTH intrepeter, this lets you add or delete devices, and (it's most common use, so far as I can tell) set the default boot partition (say, for booting into Linux PPC without using BootX).
The whole point of Macintosh is not to create a non-complex system. That's impossible with the nature of today's advances computers. The point is to hide that complexity from the AVERAGE, and NOVICE users. Advanced users can still access the full complexity(subject to the limitations of any closed-source OS that is) of the system though, if they want to.
john
Imagine all the people...
I'm sorry too,
I shouldn't have used insulting language.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
Wait, I can't stop giggling:
;)
like protected memory for crash-resistant computing and pre-emptive multitasking for a more responsive system....
WheeeHeeehee! Remember the old "Windows 95 = Mac '87" joke? I guess "Mac 2000 = Windows 95" now. Don't get me started on how long *other* operating systems have done this....
And for the future, we've included Cocoa, an advanced object-oriented programming environment. Cocoa gives developers an attractive inducement--a whole new toolbox for building the best next-generation applications.
I've been testing this for a little while now, except the version I have is called BeOS.
As I see it, they've finally brought the guts of the system up to where the rest of the computing world is by reusing a lot of BSD code. Put some slick eye-candy on there and call it "innovative". Great.
Sorry, this is not the Apple I used to know (circa 1980, admittedly). That company really was original. I'm glad to see them improving their software, of course, but don't make changes you should have made 5 years ago and try to market it as a great leap forward. It's makes me recall a certain naked emperor.
Kindof time to change your sig, don't you think? I mean, right now, it looks as if you AGREE with him!
I wonder when I will see a Mac styled by Jean Paul Gautier, Donna Karan, Karl Lagefeld or Kenzo. :-)
Maybe one that smells nice too.. :-)
Here's how OS X handles multitasking, as compared to the "classic" MacOS:
OS X is, as we all know, Mach/BSD based. Applications that are written to the OS X API will premptively multitask. Life is good.
Then there's the "bridge" API, Carbon. Carbon is essentially the bulk of the old Mac Toolbox calls, cleaned up and rebuilt to allow reentrant code and to be clean in a preemptive environment. Carbonized apps have had the old, icky Mac code cleaned out and can run on the old Mac OS (OS 9 now, I think OS 8.5 and 8.6 later) through a CarbonLib shared library that allows the app to run. Carbonized applications are kind of a "best of both worlds" solution, and Carbonizing an application is supposedly very easy in most cases.
Finally, there's "classic" Mac applications, which run in a compatibility environment. Basically, OS X spawns a full Mac OS 9 VM as a subtask, and applications run in it without the ability to access hardware directly (it's walled off by OS X). The classic environment can crash just like a Mac today, but if it does it doesn't take down the whole machine.
Classic Mac OS (OS 9.x and below) only supports a very limited form of preemptive multitasking, using the Thread Manager. And the mouse will interrupt the whole system while it is depressed - only a handful of background tasks can continue to function, and then only if they use Thread Manager. The classic Mac multitasking model has always been a cooperative one, like Win16 apps. This is not a problem on OS X, though the OS 9 subsystem will have the same limitations that MacOS has today, only within that subsystem. A depressed mousebutton in the classic environment will still halt processing in classic without affecting the rest of OS X.
In Windows 9X, only 32-bit applications can be preemptive. Win16 apps still can run amok and take over the system - there's no compatibility "sandbox". The good point of this is that almost all 16-bit applications work with Windows 9X - the bad news is that Win16 apps and drivers probably cause more Windows crashes than any other single cause (crappy software aside). Since Windows NT and Win2K keep Win16 apps isolated, a lot of Win16 software doesn't run under NT systems but the system is far more stable as a result. The model NT uses (kind of a Win16 VM emulation deal) is somewhat similar to Apple's, though Apple has the advantage of running on a Mach/BSD kernel instead of the Windows cruft.
I am a crappy coder, and haven't even tried to seriously write an app in years, so I may be a little off (and I tried on purpose to over-simplify, too), so don't kick me too hard, but that's my general picture of things.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
ok... i was waiting for this comment! i knew, as soon as apple announced what the new interface was going to look like... all the windows droids would be accuse apple of coping somthing from the win95 GUI! well, as far as the task bar gos... MS did not invent (or innovate) the taskbar theme! they obviously borrowed the task bar idea from Nextstep! remember the dock? oh jez... thats what apple is calling it?!?!? hum... interesting hhu! before any one get the bright idea that MS innovates... please review history! MS copies everything they bring to market.... everything!
My guess is:
- red - close window
- yellow - close to windowshade
- green - expand from windowshade
- purple - zoom in/out
I'll admit I'm still using MacOS 7.6, but I don't remember hearing about the multiple buttons in 8.0, so I'm assuming it's new to MacOSX.Thanks,
Anonymous Kev
Peckerhead is a term of great respect in some Asian countries. It has to do with old fertility rites and that sort of thing.
In particular, I'd heard that they do occasional snapshot builds on Intel hardware to make sure that they haven't broken anything too seriously.
In addition, some website (possibly Ars Technica?) reported finding evidence of x86 build capability inside OS X Server (I think it was the DP2 build).
Again, it could all be nothing more than wishful thinking. Heck, it could just be a rogue engineer inside Apple doing his own thing. But at the very least there is still a *glimmer* of hope regarding x86 and OSX . . .
I have no
What strikes me most about OS X is not so much the new underpinnings (Darwin is just a BSD *nix sitting on top of a Mach kernel), but rather the graphics technologies. The graphics subsystem in Mac OS X is based on PDF, which among other things will allow graphics designers and content creators unprecedented accuracy and control. It reflects the Mac focus on graphics and content-creation, and should cement their predominance in this area for years to come. As far as the "Aqua" interface goes: some will like it, some will hate it, but I think it's a good step forward in the GUI paradigm. The use of color, transparency, and control animation are logical extensions (both GNOME and KDE have experimented with these ideas, but they are constrained by X's crappy rendering and lack of hardware acceleration). It's not revolutionary, but it is a solid step forward, and I look forward to it. Apple does not mean the Mac platform to appeal to techies (at least, not *primarily*). Quite clearly, it is intended to appeal to *consumers*, who have already responded to the bright colors and simple form-factor of the iMac. People who bitch about the iMac's lack of a floppy, lack of expansion slots, etc. are completely missing the point. Jobs wants the legions of computer newbies out there to buy Macs, and by and large he is succeeding in his vision. Steve Jobs wasn't kidding when he said he wanted Apple to emulate Sony. It is clear that Apple intends to become a consumer electronics company rather than a "computer company", and these latest initiatives underscore that fact. Apple has always traded on the perception that they are a hip, cutting-edge, revolutionary company; and while the company lost its way for a while, Jobs has reinvigorated Apple and made it truly cool again. A PowerMac G4 and 21" LCD display? Gimme!!
You know what I really dislike? Those three traffic light type buttons in the upper left hand corner. They're close, minimize, and maximize. The fact that they're on the left bugs me. The fact that they're only differentiated by color and don't have any graphic or symbol to indicate their function REALLY bugs me.
And dead wrong.
NT has nearly nothing to do with Unix, more's the pity. NT is a unholy crossbred mongrel parented by Mach (for slowness), some VMS chromosones,& lotsa WIn32 jism to reel in the marks and make sure the whole thing stays stuck in limbo between multiuser and singleuser.
They may be your "favorite" (god what an appropriately infantile choice of words)but I'll thank you to keep it to y'self, 'kay?
hey, Apple hasn't spent too much time making it look pretty. please don't forget that Apple isn't targeting the *nix geeks with OS X Client. this is going to eventually replace OS 9. ...the big icon "new" interface is for the "dummmy"... the Mac is meant to be easy, simple and pretty. *nix is meant to be everything else. Apple does have a lot to learn - but the BSD elements have the potential to finally make the Mac a solid choice for *nix administrators while still appeasing and serving the needs of everyone else... like the Advertising guys etc. ...Apple ain't there yet... but damn this is better than WIndows. OS X Client is for the User. it's good. X server isn't Linux... won't ever be, we know that... but it's damn good if you need *nix control over those pretty iMacs in your school or companies lab/offices...
All in all, it seemed pretty neat. I just hope that it'll remain as consistent as MacOS is today.
I'd love to have MacOS X Consumer, especially if the BSD command line is available. ( MacOSRumors showed a screen shot of a cmd line window running top; wierd to see it on a Mac, but very cool.)
However, my older 604e/PCI box (upgraded to a G3) will probably NOT see a version of MacOS X ported to its architecture. This is a crying shame, since the box can handle Unix like a champ (it also runs LinuxPPC, and ran MkLinux for a while).
So, if you're an Apple engineer, please read this next paragraph carefully:
Yo! I want to give my money to your company someday! But I won't buy a new box just to run the latest and greatest OS, okay!! Tell your manager about this, 'cuz I sure as hell am not alone on this score!
Thank you. I feel better now..
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".sig,
I doubt it will be long before we get an E theme. They seem to be in abundance. All one needs is several screen shots in order to make a fairly decent theme. (And an idea of what they're doing concerning the programming/scripting aspect.)
CAIMLAS (Blast, what the heck was that password! I gots too many.)
Isin't there something in the Bible about people appolgising on /. after flaming eachother...and after makine Apple related comments?
I think it's the sign of the 2nd seal being broken, the 3rd seal is people not flaming eachother in a KDE vs Gnome debate.
Note - I've got that danged Sydney Flu real bad...am on inhalers and vikadan cough syrup, please moderate this down to...oh a -6
That's ok... I didn't even notice till you apologized for it. :)
Myddrin
Ok, so from what I hear OS X is, at its core, based heavily upon FreeBSD internals. Jobs emphasized a great similarity to Linux, too (probably just marketing... now isn't THAT funny? Corporate OS lending credibility to itself by stating similarity to Linux!). What bearing might this have on the possibility of a @#$!#$%! QuickTime Player for Linux?
The reason unix/linux window managers look like shit (when they aren't stealing a look and feel from someone else) and will remain looking like shit is because unix people have no aesthetic sensibility, hence that stupid fucking penguin.
the sinister mister earache.
How many times have you heard a Macintosh zealot give Windows users a hard time because nearly every Windows user-interface feature appeared in MacOS first? It is just me, or does the new Finder look a lot like the hideously-slow Microsoft "Active Desktop"? Everything's contained in one window (that looks strangely like a web browser). Big, hideous buttons/icons for everything. Lots of extraneous eye candy. As an ex-Mac user, I always loved the way Apple kept their UI clean. Things were kept simple (IE: fast and well thought-out) yet elegant. Even the idea of "exploding" windows was a great UI clue to the user to answer "What made that pop up?". But this? Have they any idea how many long-time Mac users they will alienate by tearing up the user interface that was even present on the old Lisa and Apple (not Mac) IIgs? The site mentions extending the "one window" metaphor to the entire operating system because "you can only interact with one application at a time". Doesn't this sound a lot like the days before the Multifinder? Wasn't one of System 7's greatest achievements the ability to multitask visually? The idea of BSD running behind it all sounds excellent, as Apple's OS has had a lot of holes in its design (seeming inability to use the hardware MMUs correctly, for one thing). However, they've taken what seems to be an obvious leap backwards in UI design by eliminating the clarity of pupose that every visible item in the Mac UI used to have. As a user, and as someone who has to provide support for users, I certainly hope there's an "Old Finder Look-and-Feel" option in "General Controls". I mean, come on. Apple's incarnation of the "Desktop" metaphor has propogated to OS/2, Windows, and who-knows-how-many window managers. Isn't tossing all this out the window just "thinking" a bit "too different"?
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
He'll just multiply :)
Glibc of course has to do a tiny bit of emulation of pthreads. To what degree does Mac OS X have to do this? Obviously it has support for processes, so what is there to emulate to get threads going?
The blurb about OSX is wrong all icons can be globally resized. The reviewer must have had the deafult settings. RTFM.
The Keynote yesterday was extreemly cool. And the User interface for mac os X will set standards.
- ------------------------------
the coolness ocares when you minimze and maxime windows.. the window just liquifies and funnels it self into the icon doc window smoothly when being minimized you simply have to see this happening to fathom the whole coolness of the UI..
checkout the real Video stream here (start from about 1/3 into the stream to see the UI demo)
It really is extreemly cool.
This perticular story submision pisses me off. I hate it when cluless people write FUD about stuff they know nothing about whether it's about apple, linux, or what ever.
It's obvious that the guy who wrote the submission to slashdot did NOT see the keynote and does not understand the importance of what Jobs showed yesturday.
And the Icons size can be resized, they can be extreemly small, and then you can magnify them.. that magnification thing is also total coolness.
**********************************************
watch that realvideo stream, it's damn cool! **********************************************
-
Well, a lot of these things are optional. For example, the icon size and window style issues are all options. The dock is admittedly new, though.
The way the new control panel functions is actually a throwback to old-school MacOS, where the control panel actually was a single app with a list of items in it.
I'd personally like to see the Apple menu come back. It is so heavily ingrained in the Mac user psyche, it should stick.
As for the drive icons on the desktop, I believe that's going to be 'fixed' in the final. I kind of hope so, in this case. It fits the desktop metaphor much better.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Just a couple of notes that I can see as problems from looking at this screenshot:
1. Window buttons are specified merely by location and color. This is completely unintuitive. What does a green button do?
2. There seems to be a complete lack of window framing. This is not a good thing. This is the biggest issue that I have with NeXt and the MacOS. They insist on placing controllers at corners of the window, leaving the rest of the window frame non-functional at best.
You should be able to raise, lower, iconify, move, resize, and access a window-operation menu from all sides of the window. There is no need to make the user travel 500+ pixels just to seek a too-small button for window ops.
3. Transparency is nice...but what is it doing? In other words, what functionality is it adding? To me the slight view of what is under the menu is a bit distracting, and keep in mind this is a controlled screenshot setup. You get a computer with normal usage and you have windows and text all over the place, such a transparent menu would get additionally garbled. I am not a big fan of adding lots of glitz to distract from a lack of functionality. MetaCreations' interfaces are a good example of this. They have some of the worst interfaces, but very glitzy.
4. I can't quite tell what is at the bottom of the screen, but it looks somewhat like a NeXtish wharf? If this is the case, what is the point of multiple sized icons? Why are they so big? This is wasting an awefull lot of screen space, and I have a feeling, underneath, alot of RAM to handle those huge 24bpp icons.
5. Look closely at the scrollbar. Bad tiling effect, wouldn't a simple pixel stretch be a much better solution than a graphic block that tiles? It would be much more memory efficient and accurate.
6. As long as you can make that toolbar on the finder text only, or small buttons that is fine. Huge buttons are a mistake otherwise.
7. It is too bad that it doesn't look like they are going to be using the root-menu concept. This is much more efficient than having to travel all the way to the corner of your screen to access launcher menus. Also I am a bit dissapointed to see that they are sticking with the 'seperated-menu' idea that has been apart of the MacOS for so long. It is completely innefficient to have a menu bar way up in the corner, expecially if it is for a small little app in the lower right of your screen. The argument for this is screen space? Well if that is such an issue incorporate multiple desktops. There is no reason to travel thousands of pixels to access a un-hotkeyed menu function (bad concept in itself).
All in all, it looks snazzy, that doesn't make it good, just snazzy. I'd like to see how it performs on anything less than a blue/white. If it can't even work decently, well, then...that -is- why people are switching to Linux. Modern misconception "Create fancy looking real world metaphore interfaces to make a good UI" Bad mistake, a computer is a computer, not a hand held walkman or DVD viewer. The volume control does not need to be a little spinny thing that is impossible to determine what the current volume setting is at. It looks like they fixed that with this newer version at least. But the concept remains true, you cannot replace efficiency and functionality with jazzy graphics. Of course I can't really say much until I've actually used it. Maybe it is efficient to use, but from what I see: I see the same old mistakes, and some new ones, being done.
Click here for a good page on the Dos and Don'ts of user interfaces.
V
That progress may be steady, but it's also unpredictable and - as history seems to prove - not very targeted, i.e. we don't really know what to expect or when to expect something specific, like a stable version of anything that won't break with future gtk/glib/gnome versions or versions of other programs. As it goes, it can take decades until we reach that point.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I noticed in one of the screenshots that they've slightly revised the QuickTime player; at least they seem to have gotten rid of that dumb "thumbwheel" volume control and replaced it with a slider.
yea right.... more like multi-crashing! windows95 multitasking is an illusion! and win protected memory? where? NT maybe, but 95? maybe we should'nt always blieve what the product boxes tell us!
It does look very attractive. I think this is Linux's first real competition. My only question/concern is that if Cocoa and Carbon respect the POSIX standard? That is to say, can I run LinuxPPC apps on it? And vice-versa?
Also, is the underlying graphical server X11? Some derivation thereof? Or is it completely different? If so, will Apple be releasing the libraries?
Bravo to Apple! They truly have a vision for the future.
I suppose that any console based applications / daemons .. servers would be fairly portable because of the BSD Kernel, but what about the interface? Is it going to be possible to port (easily) X-apps?
:)
Maybe this is the reason that Apple has delayed (or Sun?) a Jdk 2. Hopefully they will have it for OS-X.
If the UI is anything close to X, hopefully this will mean that with industry efforts in porting software to the Mac, it will be no big deal to port it to Linux.
I am just happy to have more choices!
Those bloody big icons are supposed to like how M$ puts their running apps right on the taskbar. It is a very *nix or perhaps more correctly Next/Open Step thing to re-implement icons onto the desktop as running apps.
Time for the real question. Does this new version have a real maximize button? I never really liked Apple's way of maximizing things, I always ended up just resizing apps by hand to take up the whole screen.
Hey Taco, it is about time that you check out Sawmill.
Huh? I thought BSD had/has a compatibility layer for Linux executables anyway. If decent free development tools are out there for OS X Consumer, what diff does it make? License-oriented BS, perhaps?
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".sig,
I have from a pretty good source that the Apperance Manager's Themes support (from Mac OS 8.5+) will make it for Mac OS X. At least for Carbon (I'm not sure if that means it won't be global). Unfurtunatly the files used have not been officially documented.
From the Apple web site "The core OS--called Darwin, because it represents the next generation in the evolution of modern operating systems--was built using open standards, and the open source software community contributed to its development. "
Apple not only gives credit to the community, but has returned the favor by licensing Darwin under the APSL. The APSL, which Apple has already revised once in response to community concerns, is in my view much more in line with the spirit of GPL than the spirit of BSD. If you agree with that interpretation Apple has given "Darwin" more freedom than it had under it's original license, or alternatively restricted it more to free redistribution.
"Darwin" has been refined over 14 years as the core of NeXTStep/OpenStep/Rhapsody/MacOS x. It has been ported to three architectures that I know of (M68K, Intel and PowerPC), and draws upon the insite of the best academic and industry research. If provides a complete BSD system (based on FreeBSD) on top of a microkernel (based on Mach 3.0), and as the core of Apple's OS will continue to be refined. In short Apple has responded to the many critics of Mac OS with a truly state of the art OS.
Apple will presumably continue to have difficulty developing a Darwin community outside of the walls of Apple, but they have invited anyone in.
Man this is cool. From flamefest to lovefest in just a few posts. :>
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
You can boot into OSX Server without the gui. I don't remember the command, but you type something for the username field in the login dialog and it drops you down to just a shell.
I don't see how that can be much of a problem. You just always use positioning instead of colours. Does you friend drive?
:)
Same problem, same solution. It's all a case of just getting used to hitting the right location. Think about all those god-awful Kaleidoscope themes out there! Some change the location and colour of the grow and close boxes, so again it's a case of position, not colour.
PS about new hardware, don't forget there's supposed to be an Apple Days thing in February(?)
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Suddenly, the iMac's galling lack of external storage doesn't seem as important anymore. I'm sorry, but I'm getting tired of people repeating this over and over again. OK, people, the new Macs do not have floppies. Get over it! If you need external storage, get a USB drive. There are several nice ones on the market. I have one and I hardly ever use it. The fact is, there are very few reasons that most users need floppies. Most users use their Macs for games, email, web browsing, and word processing. Non of these activities require floppy drives. Besides, many of us have second Macs, and so you can just hook up an ethernet crossover cable and transfer the files over in a matter of second. So please stop bringing this up. The lack of floppies doesn't seem to have deterred too many customers, and it probably saved Apple some money and brought the price down a bit. Floppies are on their way out anyway, and Apple is just ahead of the curve.
On osOpinion... OS X on x86.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Very nice this pdf and opengl stuff...
When is linux going to have good graphic capabilities? I'm not talking about making gifs, but about postscripts, pdfs, metafile-like or pict-like graphics. Not only being able to display these formats but also being able to edit them.
I'm just tired and frustrated of having to transfer files to mac/windows to edit the pictures, or having the files scatered around different machines, in different formats.
the performance penalty for having pre-emptive multitasking is so small as to be unnoticeable if you are only doing one thing at a time.
for instance if you are in photoshop, working on a picture, and you have no other programs running, the penalty is probably under 1%.
the thing is, what if, while you are waiting for that filter to finish, you could be doing other productive work? pre-emptive tasking allows that.
as an example, say you are surfing the web, and you would like to do something else while waiting for a big web page to load over a slow modem. with the co-op mac scheduling, the computer often won't even respond until the page load is complete ( in my experience ).
with pre-emptive tasking, I can click on that link to a big page, then get back to some serious work while waiting for the star wars trailer to load.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
I went to highlight the text and ended up deleting the first, more complete version of it. I guess I rushed the rewrite.
> I think this is Linux's first real competition
Check out Be OS. It's VERY SWEET.
Dam thing boots in a few seconds !
Each version is getter faster then the last one, something you don't see too much these days.
Cheers
Although the Apple taskbar clearly grew out of NeXTStep, the Windows '9x taskbar seems to have more in common with that used in Acorn's RISC OS (see screenshot).
For a company that decided not to realease their design specs to third party OS developers they seem to have borrowed a lot from them. I see features that have been clearly taken from Squeak, Beos, and FreeBsd.
I have never been more proud to have lived my entire life in the city Apple calls World Headquarters I was considering buying and iBook and putting LinuxPPC on it... however with the severe beta stage of the kernel and support for things I need i.e. ethernet, modem... I don't think it'll happen. But this OS X.... wow... BSD Core, damn schweet GUI, definatly going to run that on my iBook now if only they could put a little more power in that cool package Dave
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
The destroy button show always be far LEFT.
(although MACOS X is BSD based and linux binaries will run in BSD, oh well... don't expect them to compile easily.)
People compile BSD apps on OS X Server all the time. It is a downplayed aspect of the OS, but it is there. Apple would need to break BSD to prevent it, and they have no intention of doing so.
Firstly, icons in the dock can be re-arranged on the fly- they can be simply dragged from one spot to another and if you drag them off the dock, they maxamize. As you add more icons to the dock, the size of the icons shrinks. This at first disturbed me because the icons can get pretty small and Jobs mentioned something about the dock handling 128 icons. Then he showed the magnify feature and stunned everyone. Yes, it works and yes, it is really slick. I think you have to see it in action to appreciate it.
Another slick feature that nobody has mentioned yet (I think) is the system wide "genie" effect. I'm not sure if I can explain this, but I'll try: Basically, when a window is mazimized or minimized, you don't just see the outline of the window move. Rather, the window looks like it is being sucked into a smaller size by a black hole (at least to me :). It looks very liquid and very slick. Steve actually demonstrated this with a playing quicktime movie and it didn't miss a beat! I am sure that this type of effect (and the systemwide transparency too) is only possible because of openGL.
2^5
I want to know what this will mean for LinuxPPC.
If MacOSX has access to a shell, and if it's possible to port *nix and X apps to it, then I no longer need to dual boot MacOS/LinuxPPC.
If MacOSX isn't that close to a real *nix, then will I still be able to dual boot into Linux?
Anybody actually played with it that cna answer my questions?
my comments regarding winXX were only regarding pre-emptive scheduling.
their memory protection in general is not much better than mac's.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
> At 128*128*32bpp, each icon would be half a meg
a rt2/
128*128*32bpp = 524288 BITS / 8 BitsPerByte = 65536 BYTES = 64K
Add in (isotrophic) MIP mapping which increases storage by 33%, so each icon requires ~ 87162 BYTES = 85K
Note: Isotrophic MIP mapping downsamples the images (both width and height) by 1/2 until the image is 1x1.
More info on MIP mapping can be found here:
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/3dguide/p
Cheers
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
What intrigues me is the way it does desktop rendering. You'll notice that on the larger screenshot the menus are transparent to the windows beneath them, which is no big deal if its part of the application (this is in the quick time window and the image window) and the finder menu is semi-transparent to the desktop. But what is cool is that where the finder menu comes down and bonks on the quick time window.
This means that they must do rendering in layers. So why does this matter. IIRC, people were saying that it would be far to inefficient to render a desktop in layers, well obviously it isn't. However, how this works over X is still up in the air because X has the network export option and all.
Hmm...I only wish I was up to X11 hacking.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Gessh, who do you think you are bursting into someone else thread like that! You must be some kind of low-down yellow-bellied narc!
Oh man, I'm sorry I was outta line. Your post was really funny.
Hey, you know I really respect, you, your views and the size of your gloves.
RobK
PS: That was meant to be funny. If I failed, please don't shoot me.
Myddrin
Uh... not sure about your taste there pard'ner. Those gum-drop buttons look a little childish to me. I mean we're computing we're not playing with little beads here. I think the OS looks rediculous... and I always loved the look of the old macs. Shame.
I'm not kidding either. The 128x128 icons? The new look of the File Manager? The flashy windows? The extra buttons on the titlebars? huh. Looks like a huge kludge, but hey, at least the code they lifted was kinda stable to begin with. More than we can say for NT or heaven forbid, 9x...
I watched the keynote speech and was not impressed. Jobs went on showing features that are already in Windows 98 and NT 4. The Mac file finder will finally catch up to Windows Explorer. It was also funny to hear him say the kernel is Linux-like. As if the audience cares about such facts. I doubt anyone is thinking "Linux-like? Wow, isn't that the exciting new OS thats free." Come on Steve, skip the eye candy and lets see the new OS doing something that has not beed done before.
They've updates the developer site since the last time I looked at it. The excellent Objective C docment that dates from the NeXTSTEP era is included under the Cocoa section, whereas last time I looked I'm sure it was under the 'Legacy' section. That bodes really well for the future. It's a shame that Apple don't either:
1) GPL the OpenSTEP API so more apps are written in a cross platform manner (imagine stripping down MacOSX and installing WindowMaker).
2) Help the GNUstep guys to acheive the same things as outlined in point one.
Chris Wareham
Nice interface but the coloured buttons left me wondering, isn't relying on colour cues a very bad policy in terms of interface? With the considering growing awareness of disabled persons what are colour blind people supposed to do? Also there is not inherentmeaning in coloured buttons, red means close, green minimize? Is this an improvment over button that have visual cues to their meaning, e.g. maximize/minimize in windows? The only cue other then colour is position, and although this works for something ubiquitous like stop lights I can't help but feel it would confuse the hell out of computer users. -SheildWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Bad: the OS-X window controls, which put these buttons all beside each other.
Everyone who's encountered this crammed-together style has suffered data loss by accidently clicking the wrong button... not by way of momentary braindeath, but because the mouse overshot the button that was supposed to be clicked.
Here's a call to action: the default GUIs for Linux should be designed by Human-Computer Interface experts. Go find a friendly grad student or six, and convince them that they should contribute to the open community through a donation of their expert interface design skills.
The GUI can be done better! Emphasize lower error rates and higher throughput, and it'll be a superior product. Otherwise, it's just an also-ran, a clone of poor ideas and useless glitz.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I really have to say that that is the most dis-tasteful and childish looking GUI that I've ever seen on a computer screen. I mean, what's with the little glass bead buttons? Are we little kids? Maybe someone's daughter might like that but I can't imagine looking at all that chrome and glass day-in day-out. Give me a break. Very disappointing, Apple. I always was a fan of the MacOS, but this is a step in the absolute wrong direction.
You want to know how come kernelspace drivers don't decrease OSX's stability? The answer is actually simple. They're done right.
That's what Linux and company are afraid of. Buggy drivers in kernelspace can totally trash a system. Currently, the Linux community doesn't seem to have the resources to produce video drivers of the same quality as you get from the company that makes the cards. This is mainly the fault of the corporations, mind you; they don't provide the documentation that the Linux community needs.
I do hope that when KGI becomes stable enough (and it will, given enough time) it is incorporated into the kernel. Speed isn't the only issue with kernelspace drivers, after all; there's security issues too (any program that has to directly access hardware, such as X, has to run as root under the current system, because there's no kernelspace video functionallity). This both leads to potential exploits and puts the system at risk stability-wise, since a root process can still take down the whole system in the event of a crash.
What I want to say is that it is achievable. Apple's MacOS X proves it (well, if you agree that MacOS is more user friendly than Windows).
;-)
So why don't the major Linux distibutors form a Linux consortium, pool their resources together and hire many developers and artists to work on Gnome and KDE? IMO, the desktop market is very important because it influence the size of Linux user base and mind share. It is worth while for them to help Linux penetration into desktop.
For a start, lets create a set of 128x128 richly colored icons!
It seems a lot of them are initially going to port to the "carbon" api. My understanding is this api is a cleaned up tricked out version of the the current mac api that will work with both macos 9.x and osX.
I hope the fact that when apple said that they will be going over to os X on all machines by jan 2001 (consumer and professional) will push developers to use the native os X api (cocoa) which is similar with objective c.
I'm not sure how easy it would be to port these titles to linux. Although I think it would be easier the interface api is the big questionmark.. Games that use openGL would be lots easier for sure.
I think the GNUstep project is working on porting the NEXTSTEP (cocoa) api to linux, and that would defenetely help bringing native osX compatability to linux..
just my 2Cents
Just what I've always wanted! Transparent dialog boxes so I can clutter my screen up with windows in front of *and* behind what I'm working on! Great! Clearly a giant stride forwards in technology and interface design!
This does answer one question, though. When the G4 was released, I wondered: "Well, Apple has an incredibly powerful CPU, and they're working on an operating system that can actually use it (instead of blocking everything to poll the network card, for example). Now, it would be un-Apple to actually make this available to the user. Wonder how they'll burn all those extra cycles? Chrome, I bet." And I was right!
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I must respectfully disagree...from a usability standpoint, the new interface is almost as bad, if not worse, than the god-awful Quicktime 4.0 interface. The worst of the lot are those new window controls-what the hell do those three different colored balls represent? There's no obvious function to 'em until they're moused over, at which point they show little plus and minus signs and the like, which are still somewhat meaningless. It's disappointing to see a company that helped pioneer human-computer interfacing devolve into shameless eye-candy while sacrificing usability at the same time.
-- Deputy Dan will find us no matter how far away we go.
All this chatter about the shortcomings of OS X, and how many of you have done more than just browse at the pretty pictures and actually read up on OS X? Above that, how many of you have even used OS X Server, much less been in the same room as an OS X Consumer machine? Reading your posts on /., I get the feeling that the answer to both questions is "very few".
The preview of OS X on wednesday was a fleeting glimpse at what OS X has in store. It wasn't a detailed, fine-tuned, in-depth demo, nor was it a finished product being shown. The incessent bitching about the GUI shows that very few of you know enough about Apple in general, nor OS X specifically, to know that "flexibility" is one of the things they're touting in the new OS... Virtually everything you've seen comes with enough options to (hopefully) make just about everyone happy.
As for Open Sourcing key parts of the OS... those of you that want all of this Open Sourced want it so that you can port it to Linux, not so that you can support Apple. What incentive is there for Apple (or Microsoft, or any number of other software giants) to Open Source their work, if the Open Source community isn't interested in working to better the project on the intended platform? Honestly... how many Open Source developers do you know that will get their hands on something like the Quicktime source and develop something for the MacOS? The long answer is "none".
woof!
If you want to turn off the 3-blink thing, just go to General Controls and set "Menu Blinking" to Off.
.25 seconds it takes for the menus to blink makes. Then again, I also use keyboard shortcuts when possible.
Personally, I don't see what difference the
The positioning is the primary problem, IMO. One of the big gripes (among many) I have with Windows is that all the window-control widgets are on the same side! It's far too easy hit one you didn't mean to.
I hope there's some way to configure that. If not, the next version of Kaleidoscope will surely see schemes exactly like MacOS X with the exception of the widgets being placed as they currently are...with the close button far away from the others.
Constitutionally Correct
Anyone notice exactly how much the new Finder resembles IE/Explorer 5 ? Look at the new finder in the mirror, so the picture, file size, and date show up on the other side, as do the 3 buttons at the top left, and one button at the top right. In the mirror suddenly you have your picture and file stats on the right, one button on the top left, 3 buttons on the top right, and a row of big buttons/icons across the top. That's very original of Apple to switch them all bass ackwards before copying the IE format. Kinda like when you'd copy someone else's code but change the names of the functions and varibles in programming class. :)
Anyone notice exactly how much the new Finder resembles IE/Explorer 5 ? Look at the new finder in the mirror, so the picture, file size, and date show up on the other side, as do the 3 buttons at the top left, and one button at the top right. In the mirror suddenly you have your picture and file stats on the right, one button on the top left, 3 buttons on the top right, and a row of big buttons/icons across the top. They even copied the new IE method of changing the current window to the new folder, rather than respawning another window for each new folder. How shameless. That's very original of Apple to switch them all bass ackwards before copying the IE format. Kinda like when you'd copy someone else's code but change the names of the functions and varibles in programming class. :)
As for the commercial Unices, they are of course more developed towards their particular architectures and offer a few more features, but they cost around $10,000! Besides, unless you haven't been paying attention, you well know that all the RISC hardware vendors are busy porting Linux to their architectures..
Applications? No MS Office? No AOL? No Photoshop? What, do you live in a Windows-ONLY CAGE?!?
Have you heard of StarOffice? Do you know about Corel Office? The only thing MS Office has and they don't is WORD MACRO VIRUSES!
Professional quality commercial graphics development is done almost EXCLUSIVELY on commercial Unix workstations.
And AOL? Well, of course I can see your concern here because if you don't have AOL, how would you EVER get on the Internet?
The natural order of things has always been that Unix was powerful, but not very easy to use; Macintosh is extremely user friendly and easy to use, but has never been very powerful. Linux was making inroads to the Macintosh market with KDE and Gnome, but Apple completely trumped Linux with MacOS X which provides the ease of use of a Macintosh, with the power of a Unix core.
I always liked 'WOFTAM' - Waste Of Fucking Time And Money. ie, "This project is a total WOFTAM".
Darwin (aka NeXTSTEP and others) is based on BSD 4.4 not FreeBSD. However many enhancments from FreeBSD and the other modern BSDs have made found their way into the Darwin package... I think the mislabeling comes from the fact that no one knows anymore that there was a BSD 4.2 and 4.4 standard and instead assumes everything is from Net or FreeBSD.
F /...
And to be even more nitpicky, Darwin is OPENSTEP based and not NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP is BSD 4.2; OPENSTEP is BSD 4.4.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
I never really liked Macs, but I do like the fact that Apple has the balls to do something different.
I wonder if we'll see any themes which closely resemble Mac OS X look and feel. Cetainly they'll be made and uploaded, but the last time Themes.org carried a theme which seriously looked and acted like a Mac certain 'requests' were made by 'a big fruit' and ended in the removal of said theme (a KDE theme, if memory serves) from the database. I suppose it's understandable, the last time someone stole their GUI, they got run into the ground.
Greg Sanders - kfc@themes.org - Colonel_KFC
Greg Sanders - kfc@themes.org - ElCoronel
'Moral' high ground? WTF?!
It's fucking CODE, people. Don't think you're freeing any slaves or anything. Christ...
was just at MacWorld Expo yesterday and saw the
demo of it... The icons can be scaled
realtime with the drag of the mouse... It
was kinda nifty... I believe the big versions
were used to make it easily viewable when doing
the demos on the super wall sized screens...
Another nifty feature was a back button like on
your browser as you traverse the directory
structure.... that one I liked...
On a funny note, the demo-dude was showing how
M$ IE worked on MacOS X. Looked fairly good
for what it's worth, but the real point was
that he was demonstrating how the separate
processes won't crash when one goes bad. IE
was the process that crashed - and the rest of
the OS kept on chugging along... it was
kinda ironic considering M$ booth is not
that far away from Apple's...
Oh, the coolest thing was Apple's Cinema display.
22" viewable area and it's sharp... I really
wnat one of these!
And what's the deal with pushing the V-Mail crap?
If you look at the demo (on tv) and what not,
the resolution and stuff sucks... sigh...
peace. JOe...
Andy Armstrong
re: "I don't think I'll be getting a mac" yeah, as if you were at all thinking of getting one before. Silly comments like these really bring down the quality of the boards by inserting melodrama.
Go find some screenshots of NeXT, you'll see that it looks almost exactly like the NeXT file browser cleaned up. If it looks like IE5, then perhaps MS stole it from NeXT, who had it long before...
Lord Stallman is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lay down ownership of mine own code; he leadeth me beside still pleasures of the software collective.
He restoreth my dole: He leadeth me in the paths of overrighteousness for His name's sake.
Yea, verily, though I should walk through the valley of the shadow of profit, I shall reap no reward-- for Thou, O Richard, art with me; Thy rants and Thy virus, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a licence before me in the presence of my shareholders; thou anointest my head with burnt ashes of defeat; thy dribble runneth over.
Surely poverty and bitterness shall follow me all the days of my life: and I shall dwell in the house of the FSF forever--for I could never afford the rent anywhere else! :-)
Anonymous
What's the advantage of KGI over fbcon?
I can't wait for a non-suid-root X server...
This is all conjecture, just like what everybody else is spouting about performance, etc. I've been watching OS X in all it's various incarnations for four years now and I think I have a pretty good idea of whats going on... or not.
While OS X's interface is absolutely beutiful and it has all of the lower level halmarks of a modern operating system, it may not be ideal for server systems or as a serious workstation. All those pretty little interface widgets don't work by magic, they take processor time and memory space. Thus, a command line only Linux or Unix box *might*(this is a big unknown) outperform for such uses.
There is however a real chance that Apple has done something really amazing to the kernel and other parts of darwin. It is after all a Unix to begin with, and I for one will not deny the possibility that they have significantly improved it. It wouldn't be the first time. Not only that, but their new graphics layer appears to be absolutely incredible. I watched Steve do things on stage in what appeared to be the OS X version of SimpleText that would require a photoshop plugin and a few minutes of waiting. And it all happened instantly and with no noticable lag! This is *not* a small thing. Apple has produced something which allowes them to do intensely graphics intensive processes in real time, no other OS I have ever seen or heard of is capable of what Steve did with a beta(four years in the making) of OS X.
So this brings me to my final point. Remember all those pretty little widgets that are supposed to take up all that processor time and memory space? Well maybe they don't! Perhaps OS X can compete(performance wise) with command line only servers or workstations. Not only that, but OS X is going to be enhanced to take advantage of the G4 altivec/velocity engine libraries, significantly boosting graphics and networking functions. In other words, if you rule out OS X as a server too soon, you may end up looking like a fool.
In MacOS X Apple is going with their own imaging system (to call it a Window manager is simply not adequate), the 2D portion of which is called Quartz. Quartz uses a PDF-sytle system, and this creates a lot of great benifits:
Every object drawn to the screen through this method can have transparency values (as in a percentage), everything can be anti-aliased (PDF is resolution/dpi independant, so an inch is an inch whether you are at 72 dpi or 1600dpi.. wonderfull for printing things..). Rather than aproching the screen from the perspctive of pixels, now everything is a location in a floating point sence.. a revolutionary idea if you ask me...
The simple answers that you want to know are: This is Apples propritory work, the famimily jewls, there is NO good reason for them to open source this (and give people like MS the gun to kill them with)! Someone will probably write a way to get X11 emulated into Quartz, but because this system add so much new to the whole idea of imaging that I don't see someone writing a open way of getting this onto X11...
They're not going to port over to a bsd/x-windows system but to the carbon API which is basicaly OS9's cleaned up and much improved. A few are even porting to cocoa (kinda openstep plus)but the system call are (very much) specific to OS X.
And you can bet that good ol' Stevie ain't gona give us the source to *those*.
...
Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,
The Apple menu is still there in MacOS X (at least, it was in MacOS X Server), and it is still in the upper-right-hand corner. I believe it has changed it's icon to the "MacOS" happy face, looking at the screenshot.
"It's a shame that Apple had to discountinue OpenDoc, it would have fit in nicely with everything else."
Check out the "Services" functionality in OS X. It is the best "shared services" architecture ever made. It is actually a holdover from NeXT and comes along as part of the Cocoa framework.
By the way, I almost cried when I saw Aqua yesterday because it is so beautiful. My brother commented that Apple is once again making software that is on par with the hardware it engineers.
Tell that to Bob Young and all the IPO millionaires. No reward, indeed. Now who's bitter and impoverished?
Watching demo it occured to me that they might be using PDF for the icons instead of a bitmap. This gains you several things: you can scale them, rotate, make transparent, anything you want with no loss of resolution. Also, take a close look, on one of the screens during the demo Steve minimized a web page and the icon was a minature version of the web page. I figured that since Quartz is PDF based, the web page was probably being converted into PDF format (by making calls to the normal ToolBox routines like DrawText, etc.) and this PDF was probably being retained, it would be pretty simple to scale that to the right size for the icon. I image that simply issuing some sort of scale command and attaching a pointer to the PDF would be enough. All that is left is optimizing the engine that draws the PDF to the screen, which I'm sure they've done already anyway.
Of course, this is only my humble guess, I could be completely wrong.
First some context, then opinions: I have used OpenStep 4.2 Developer for Mach quite a bit and also developed some small apps for myself and went through the tutorials. I have done some BeOS programming - nothing too advanced but I wrote the UK keyboard driver that comes with BeOS and also one of my apps comes on the CD with the official "Be Advanced Topics" book Opinions: The OpenStep tools are FAR more advanced than anything on BeOS. They both have object orientated programming architectures organised into kits - that's pretty much where it ends. BeOS comes with BeIDE and the GnuPro tool chain which includes C and C++ support. The IDE is owned by Be but was developed and originally a seperate package based on the Metrowerks Codewarrior applications. The problem with this is that you really get a text editor with compiler - there are no OO tools not even a class browser although the IDE does support add-ons. The BeOS kits are well organised with a preference for speed over all else. Especially weak areas are database support and printing functionality. The interface kit feels a bit lite only providing basic functionality with no reuse of elements between them that OpenStep offers. The OpenStep kits on the other hand are those developed by NeXT for it's own NeXTStep OS based on Mach and then also ported to Windows NT/Solaris/Mac OS X Server. The kits were written in and for Objective C because of the run-time casting support etc. NeXT added the Objective C support to GCC and also made the OpenStep object orientated architecure's specification freely available. The GNUStep is an open source project to write these kits in Objective C again with the following tools also being written open-source with different names but similar functionality. The OpenStep kit was, I believe, the inspiration for the Java foundation classes. Some of the kits were demoted out such as the 3DKit which is now obviously OpenGL and also some comms stuff. Some of this plus third party stuff is available as MiscKit - check GNUStep site for links. The NeXT development tools are incredible. Project Builder provides the central IDE with source editing and project management. Interface builder provides an entirely visual RAD way to link not just the interface but methods of responders (like VB events) to each other as well as designing your interface. This keeps your interface entirely seperate from the business logic which is how it should be done so you can provide alternative interfaces (Apple's WebObjects is OpenStep with additional web-interface, state management, load balancing etc). The Enterprise Objects Framework kits provide the much-needed database connectivity. In my view neither Be or any third party on BeOS support the power of the OpenStep tools. To be honest I'm developing with Microsoft VisualStudio 6 development tools most of the time and despite them claiming to be a "language" company they don't have a patch on OpenStep either. Be really have a problem now I believe - their GUI won't cut it against this. I'm not taking about the look but the power. Be's display mechanism is much like windows with canvases and a basic drawing mechanisms. Apple have taken the NeXTStep idea of using Adobe Display Postscript one stage futher to develop the Quartz Adobe PDF display system. This should provide applications with an incredibly rich set of drawing tools and true WYSIWYG (it's back ;-) Whew! And this was only going to be a quickie. [)amien damien@envytech.co.uk
First some context, then opinions:
;-)
I have used OpenStep 4.2 Developer for Mach quite a bit and also developed some small apps for myself and went through the tutorials.
I have done some BeOS programming - nothing too advanced but I wrote the UK keyboard driver that comes with BeOS and also one of my apps comes on the CD with the official "Be Advanced Topics" book
Opinions:
The OpenStep tools are FAR more advanced than anything on BeOS. They both have object orientated programming architectures organised into kits - that's pretty much where it ends.
BeOS comes with BeIDE and the GnuPro tool chain which includes C and C++ support. The IDE is owned by Be but was developed and originally a seperate package based on the Metrowerks Codewarrior applications.
The problem with this is that you really get a text editor with compiler - there are no OO tools not even a class browser although the IDE does support add-ons.
The BeOS kits are well organised with a preference for speed over all else. Especially weak areas are database support and printing functionality. The interface kit feels a bit lite only providing basic functionality with no reuse of elements between them that OpenStep offers.
The OpenStep kits on the other hand are those developed by NeXT for it's own NeXTStep OS based on Mach and then also ported to Windows NT/Solaris/Mac OS X Server. The kits were written in and for Objective C because of the run-time casting support etc.
NeXT added the Objective C support to GCC and also made the OpenStep object orientated architecure's specification freely available.
The GNUStep is an open source project to write these kits in Objective C again with the following tools also being written open-source with different names but similar functionality.
The OpenStep kit was, I believe, the inspiration for the Java foundation classes.
Some of the kits were demoted out such as the 3DKit which is now obviously OpenGL and also some comms stuff. Some of this plus third party stuff is available as MiscKit - check GNUStep site for links.
The NeXT development tools are incredible. Project Builder provides the central IDE with source editing and project management. Interface builder provides an entirely visual RAD way to link not just the interface but methods of responders (like VB events) to each other as well as designing your interface.
This keeps your interface entirely seperate from the business logic which is how it should be done so you can provide alternative interfaces (Apple's WebObjects is OpenStep with additional web-interface, state management, load balancing etc). The Enterprise Objects Framework kits provide the much-needed database connectivity.
In my view neither Be or any third party on BeOS support the power of the OpenStep tools. To be honest I'm developing with Microsoft VisualStudio 6 development tools most of the time and despite them claiming to be a "language" company they don't have a patch on OpenStep either.
Be really have a problem now I believe - their GUI won't cut it against this. I'm not taking about the look but the power. Be's display mechanism is much like windows with canvases and a basic drawing mechanisms. Apple have taken the NeXTStep idea of using Adobe Display Postscript one stage futher to develop the Quartz Adobe PDF display system. This should provide applications with an incredibly rich set of drawing tools and true WYSIWYG (it's back
Whew! And this was only going to be a quickie.
[)amien
damien@envytech.co.uk
Well, they got rid of the ridiculous thumb wheel, but the player still sports acres of simulated brushed alumninum. The idea that people want to see sythetic textures is passé. Would a Ferrari look better if they bolted on some simulated "wood grain" paneling? Better to exploit the natural aesthetic properties of your medium.
It seems to me Apple is moving further away from a sophisticated aesthetic sense based on authenticity and function with every new bit of software, and towards a kind of cheesiness. Whe will they figure out that sometimes less is more? Why do people love the Palm Pilot? I recently flabbergasted a graphic artist friend of mine by pointing out what is in retrospect totally obvious: the Palm Pilot is in effect a handheld Mac Plus with twice the memory.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One point: you can change the interface right back to the old MacOS one. So don't use Aqua if you don't want to.
I recently installed Mac OSX (server) on a blue and white G3, and as a long time Mac and Unix user, it was not the long hoped for uniting of my left and right brain hemispheres. The GUI stuff didn't feel right -- it looked kind of Mac-ish, but it felt a bit off -- not quite right, like watching a movie that was dubbed badly.
Of course the Carbon system will mean that true Mac binaries will run under the workstation, which will be very cool; maybe that will be the ticket. In any case, I found the server OSX to be a disappointment.
The server management was irritating; it didn't support either mode of finding things out that I usually use (hunting through the UI on the Mac and hunting through the Man pages or source code on Unix). To top it off, the GUI applications you were suppose to use to manage the thing crashed frequently. After a day of futzing around, I hunted up a copy of yellowdoglinux and was off and running in an hour or so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For removing OpenGL support from W2K. On the other hand Apple has done everything he wanted them too... they've kept Game sprockets alive, added and enhanced OpenGL support, made the Carbon API so apps won't have to be (totally) re-done for OS X... and what has MS done? Pushed their own API while trying to wipe out everyones favourite... besides... Apple might've made a little "investment" to ensure future id games on the Mac. ;) -Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I could be wrong, but I was pretty sure that NT was based on OS/2. -x1r0k3wl
The three-blink menu option and "liquid funneling warping cool thing" are more than just wasteful eyecandy. For someone new to computers (or just new to a mouse) the three-blink menu option lets them know, for sure, what they just told the computer to do. For anyone who has tried to teach an overzealous student who continually misses icons or menus, this is obviously useful. Similairly, the funneling minimize animation provides a clear explaination to the question "where did that window go?" and goes a huge distance to help new users get a clear grasp on minimizing. Remember, Mac's are designed for user friendliness and visualization really does help.
On they other hand, I would be greatly disappointed in Apple if they didn't allow you to turn these features off.
-x1r0k3wl
I flip pages on the right of the text... why not put a graphical scrollbar in the same location?
For me, a scrollbar on the left (xterm default, for example) induces nausea- it's like writing on the back of the page in a spiral notebook.
Hands in my pocket
I have always hated MacOS, even the way it looked, but oh baby does that look sweet! The drop shadows behind the windows look so supah-dupah-fly! I demand that someone work on this for X now! =P
The GPL was never intended to stop this. The GPL is about ensuring that source code remains forever free. The BSDL is about ensuring that programmers are completely free to do as they please with the source. Each has its proper place. If you want to ensure that nobody, nowhere, can ever profit by your code, perhaps you're better off not releasing it at all.
Don't get me wrong, I like UNIX. But that's where it ends, UNIX technology is nice. But its NOT the future. The real system design we should all be aspiring to is one that is receiving a lot less hype than it should be - EROS-OS. That is the design of the future. This is the design new OS creators should be having in mind. A system building a system around EROS would succeed a lot more.
Oh, if you just stuck around for a quick explanation, everything would be clear. Interfaces need not be self explanatory, that just dumbs them down. But these buttons use one of the best interface ideas this century: traffic lights. Red close, yellow minimize, and green maximize.
capiche?
-o
What does this mean? It means that Apple is going to be selling blue pills. And you know, it's probably a good business strategy.
You know, instead of "Red Hat Linux" and now "Red Flag Linux" (unless it's a hoax), someone should make "Red Pill Linux". :-)
Cryptnotic
On Cebit 1998 in Hannover the Apple folks inofficially demonstrated Rhapsody (which has now turned into MacOS X) running X-Apps. Perhaps they will ship something similiar with their new OS...
life would be much easier if you could have a look at the sourcecode
Mac OS X looks good to me. Kinda like the finder appearance as it is now but I can adapt. But hey! What about iTools?! I got 'slashdot@mac.com'!!!
Bad: the OS-X window controls, which put these buttons all beside each other.
Everyone who's encountered this crammed-together style has suffered data loss by accidently clicking the wrong button...
This is a non-issue. As you can glean from the Sheets quicktime movie, an accidental window closure will create a (Don't Save|Cancel|Save) window before it disappears. Naturally, "Save" is the default choice.
Union Yes! Member of Technical Workers' Local 101010
(oops, i'm a moron; my last post had no whitespace; moderators please mark the previous post as redundant if you must; not this one!)
LinuxPPC works just fine on the new powerbooks. I bought one for the same reason... I didn't want to hassle with video drivers/sound/modem probs on bleeding edge PC laptops. LinuxPPC is built around RedHat; gnome and kde come preinstalled and other than commercial apps (e.g. Oracle), everything's available as rpm or buildable on ppc.
My laptop is a 333MHz Lombard (i.e. the current G3 model, also referred to as bronze G3 because of the keyboard). Oh, the other advantage is that Mac laptops just look cooler than their box-shaped counterparts.
You might also be interested to look at http://www.ibrium.se/linux/ as well for info on Mac-on-Linux (MOL) that lets you run MacOS on top of Linux. Kinda like VMWare, except this is GPL (and it works great and keeps getting better!). Only current limitation is that ethernet isn't supported yet by MOL on the g3. VirtualPC is the only app I've found that doesn't run under MOL.
So I currently run MacOS, Linux, and NT (via VirtualPC which runs great for non-games; I use it for MS Project) all on the same machine. And in another few months I'll get NeXTStep 4.0 (aka MacOS X) too. How cool is that?
- Someone who forgot his password and is too lazy to retrieve it in order to post this...
The BSDL does that. Source released under the BSDL is forever free. So does the LGPL. Same thing. The GPL is different. The GPL also manages to infect other code. That's it's real purpose, because otherwise you'd use the more reasonable LGPL.
Oh well, perhaps this will bring abot an Open Sourced BeOS faster...
I'm sure that Apple will leave the Platinum appearance as an option in OS X. What happens if you end up using several Classic Apps? Those apps won't be using the new features and I'm assuming won't be able to use Aqua unless it is an Appearance Theme. So it would be sensible to be able to switch back to platinum in order to keep consistency.
I also don't like the new button configuration. Not only are they scrunched together like Windows, but the traffic light analogy just doesn't work for me. The buttons should be able to show up uniquely in monochrome. I know these are new, fancy color computers, but there are reasons for not tying your OS to a color interface.
"I have a cunning plan..."
My first box was a ][e, and I have long held a soft spot for Apple, but I didn't think they could give me what I need... A desktop machine that has the strengths of UNIX without it's greatest weakness - crappy environment. MacOS is comfortable, user-friendly, and stunning. I used to follow that comment with the common gripes about MacOS - bad process management, bad filesystem, no preemptive multitasking, no strong network technology, etc etc... But all of these things have been "fixed" in MacOSX, and if it can do what it claims it can do, then I will be it's biggest supporter. I will still run true UNIX for my servers, and I will be an Open Source programmer until I die, but it would be nice to finally look back on Windows and laugh. The question is... can MacOS go from being the world's most aggravating popular OS to the world's smoothest? I have my doubts and my hopes all balled up in a question that may be even more important - WHEN DO WE GET TO TRY IT OUT?
Paper Pusher
What blows my mind, if I'm reading things right, is that it is *display PDF*. Like NextStep had display PS (right?). That, if it is true, is incredible. That puts the Mac OS UI into the next generation. That window and those buttons are PDF objects that can be warped, made transparent, can drop shadows, and all that. Think of the possibilities! Wow. That's what I want on my Unix box.
What are the "natural aesthetic properties" of my monitor?
Well not to be picky, I'm not talking about your montitor, but the UI as an aesthetic medium. And, it clearly has natural aesthetic properties. Examples:
Balance - an interface should to draw the eye were it needs to.
Manifestness - things which are functional should clearly be functional, things that are decorative should clearly be just decorations.
Deference - this covers several kinds of things, but generally is an attitude that the user is in charge and has important things to do other than to enjoy the cleverness of the designer.
(1) Elements in the UI that draw attention to themselves should be functional controls; and those should do so only to the degree necessary to identify their existence and function. A UI shouldnot produce effects like moire patterns that scream for the user's attention but provide no functionality.
(2) A program should not presume that it is the only thing, or even the most important thing the user works on. Visually, programs that violate this pop up dialogs while the user is working in other programs, litter the screen with ways to launch themselves or their web sites (e.g. Netscape putting a link at the top level of the Windows start menu to their update web site).
Apple, more than anyone else, is able to follow Frank Loyd Wright and let form follow function.
That's more legacy right now than anything else. Their recent software tends to be as bad as anyone's. The Quicktime player is just the worst offender.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Perhaps you'd like to read a little before going off half cocked? http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html > (second paragraph of the "Mac OS X is Unix-savvy" section) clearly states that the Mac OS X kernel "is based on Mach 3.0 from Carnegie-Mellon University and FreeBSD 3.2 (derived from the University of California at Berkeley's BSD 4.4-Lite), the most highly regarded core technologies from two of the most widely acclaimed OS projects of the modern era."
Sounds an awful lot like FreeBSD to me.
- A.P. (I find them extremely confusing too, for what it's worth. Disappointing.)
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
MacOS already has this. Unless it disappeared when I wasn't looking, Apple has shipped a screen magnification utility for vision impaired users as a standard part of MacOS for longer than I can remember; 10 years, at least.
Quite frankly, Quicktime is stupid. Now, I know that sounds like a troll or something, but it does. Apple keeps proclaiming that it's the "ultimate multimedia standard technology" or some junk. But really, it's just a file format. Not a particularly special one at that. The technology is in the compression codecs, and that can be put in all kinds of file formats (even crappy AVI or whatever). Quicktime's not anything special, and isn't worth proclaiming as some great OS advancement. I hate it when I run in to some quicktime crap on the web. Usually I just ignore it and move on because Apple's Quicktime software for [insert your favorite OS] is so absolutely horrible, or worse, non-existant. Probably it would be good if it were open sourced. The only problem is that lots of jerks out there have patented/whatever the various compression schemes which make everything suck.
Rant mode off.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
The icon under the mouse is the largest and the icons on either side of that one get progressively smaller with distance from the mouse.
So the icons grow and shrink when the mouse is over them? Combined with the configurable icon sizes, this is pretty neat, eh?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
So, friends, what have we? MacOS X is not exactly going to be the end-all be-all, but what it does/will do is put our stuff to shame.
:)
:(). And then thereÕs the matter of programming to (one of, let alone both of) those interfaces (if their API specifications ever last more than 1 point release), which brings me to...
GNOME and KDE are progress, but they just aren't near MacOS X...
a. Graphics: PDF, trans, anti-aliasing, not X
b. User Interface: the MacOS of today is good, but OS X will be beautiful and integrated like no other. Compare that to GNOME or KDE: hundreds of half-finished apps with ill-conceived interfaces that barely integrate. Yeah, I know, Bonobo and KRASH are coming, but they canÕt solve poor design, and weÕll wait and see if they can solve integration (which is as subject to design just as much as UI
c. Application Development: as much as I love programming in C with calls such as foo_box_border_resize_set ( 1, NULL, FOO(myfoobox)), I prefer the Cocoa AKA NeXTStep APIÕs over that any day. I havenÕt heard much mentioned of this, but itÕs probably the single most important part of the new Mac OS. These libraries have been hailed as productivity godsends and design masterpieces since way back in the days of the NeXT cube. GNU knows it too; check out gnustep.org for more.
So hereÕs my ÒmessageÓ if you will:
Finally, after 20 years of screwing around with the WIMP-on-top-of-stable-OS concept, somebody (Apple/Jobs) is getting it right, and sending it mainstream.
ÒWe,Ó (GNU/opensrc developers/users), as the most dynamic and potentially important (IMHO) body of developers in the world, need to stop and do some retrospection: CAN WE DO BETTER? than a windows clone? than a unix clone? than BeOS, Win2K, and MacOS X? than WIMP?
Personally, I think so. BUT, itÕs not going to happen if we donÕt have a foundation which we can all start and build from. If we copy current projects in order to satisfy the immediate need and appeal to the Òfree/openÓ ideal, we slow our progress to a crawl: the userbase of the world will use whatever works best, and when capitalist companies are producing software that competes with unfunded software developed by enthusiasts, the enthusiasts are not going to win (because of a,b,c above) unless they have something better, and I mean BETTER as in Òsubvert the fscking dominant paradigm,Ó not as in ÒitÕs like windows, but without crashes.Ó (Actually, I'll be happy when we even get *that* far.)
LetÕs keep coding, but letÕs start thinking about this too.
Just my $.02.
Ermac
Even if you bought a low end Mac and got an upgrade card, it is unknown as of if the cards will work with OS X.
that a microkernel is required if you want to retain compatibility with older (not so old, and even some newer) Macs, which Apple of course does. Varying technology, like NuBus, Open Firmware in some but not others, etc., was previously hidden beneath a hardware abstraction layer (as was a heck of a lot of other stuff) buried within the System. To run anything like a BSD kernel on such a mish-mash of hardwares smoothly and without hardware-compatibility ickiness seeping up to the kernel developer / modifier or even user a microkernel is necessary. (note that Linux developers have to deal with a lot of hardware compatability ickiness, but they did it quite well) Don't think that it's bad; I think it's quite likely that Darwin could run Linux. In fact, the Mach microkernel currently does, for Apple's MkLinux.
Microkernels hide the hardware specific details from the programmer. Good thing.
I know everyone prides themselves in knowing a bit about a company, but after working for both NeXT and Apple and going to WWDC for the past 3 years, with 2 years of it working I can clarify several issues. 1. Quartz is PDF primitives written in Objective-C and C and C++ with the best of QuickDraw concepts to access hardware acceleration and moreso. It is extremely once more forward thinking but this time it is smarter than DPS in the sense it is based on PDF with anti-aliasing built-in amongst other goodies. I like the fact that MacOS X will be the first OS to have a basic foundation file type on XML. Interface Builder NIB files are XML based in Cocoa amongst other goodies. 2. Go to WWDC 2000 to answer these overkill questions. 3. Having Icons scale at the User's leisure from 32x32 up to 128x128 kicks ass. That should satisfy end users with extremely clear eye sight to extremely poor eye sight. 4. POSIX compliancy? Well that is up to Engineering if they want to submit there system for Government certification. NeXTSTEP was and I will say if necessary (meaning if the market for Government work on MacOS X is there) then MacOS X will be as well. 5. Running on Intel, SPARC, AMD, etc. is a good question. MacOS X was originally brought up in parallel on Intel with PPC. So what do you think? Its not about Porting capabilities. It is about Business scope and market focus. This is not about showing the world a prettier and smoother and all around better LINUX experience on all types of Hardware. Its about providing a superior solution technologically in the most simplistic yet aesthetically pleasing ever developed and on hardware that combined conveys to the consumer interested in purchasing a solution that Apple offers the greatest return on investment in the Market, period. WindowServer is good lord not based on X11. Never will and I being an ex-NeXT personnel in SQA and other areas are ecstatic and confident that Apple with its Engineering Staff and Industrial Design team will give Steve nothing but "Insanely Great Solutions"
Excuse my lack of grammar checking and run on sentences.
Message #439 got it most right. Brilliant ideas.
It is not a non-issue. The dialog box is not a solution to a poorly designed interface. Saving is the best choice only if you intended to exit; otherwise, you lose your Undo history. Cancelling is the best choice only if you didn't intend to click the close button; otherwise, it's just a PITA when you do want to exit.
Having the close button near the min/max buttons is, I repeat, a serious UI design flaw. It makes it too easy to ruin one's work, either by exitting without saving or saving the wrong information.
You , as an experienced user, don't have to have a better UI. If you're willing to risk the accidental close because you figure the time/speed saving is worth having the buttons right beside each other, then you can make the changes to your UI to make it so.
The default UI should be designed as the best possible UI in terms of ensuring that accidents are difficult, correct actions are easy, and efficiency is maximized.
This means that the menubar is fixed to the top of the screen, so that the cursor can't overshoot it. UI studies have demonstrated that top-aligned menus are significantly faster and less error-prone. The close button must be seperated from the min/max buttons, so that accidents are difficult (and #439's comments are well worth considering)... in fact, I'll go so far as to say there should be exactly three ways to exit: the File>Exit menu choice, the CTRL-key equivalent, and the KILL command.
Accidents should be difficult. Correct actions should be easy.
Linux GUIs can do better than the rest! Get the HCI guys to contribute their fact-based knowledge of good GUI design. You can still have your goofy, artsy, error-prone designs... just don't foist them on the newbies!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If you have ever used a SGI Indy running Irix paired with that amazingly *ahem* interesting 4DWM desktop windowing environment the dynamic resizing of icons should be familiar to you.
I used to have access to one back in the mid 90's... whoa... that sounds cool.
I know when I took people by the lab to see it they would immediately go "COOL!!!" when they saw the scrolly thingie make the folder icons look bigger then smaller then bigger then... you get the idea.
It's no wonder SGI's never caught on... it must have been the amazing easy to install no issues approach to software they have always used. I know I am not alone in feeling this way.
Latra, Jay
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/
http://fudge.org
I've been using BeOS on and off, trying to acquire a taste for it. However, it has some real flaws:
1. The network driver architecture can't support multiple cards of the same type. Therefore, I can't install BeOS on my main machine which has my internet connection and serves as a print & file server and gateway to my home network.
2. There is no decent browser available for BeOS. Despite all of the problems with Netscape on Linux, at least it is available on Linux.
3. BeOS suffers from an *extreme* lack of configurability & customizability, even compared to Windows.
4. BeOS only makes use of one mouse button, and doesn't offer context sensitive menus with an alternate mouse button. Most X apps have had that support practically forever, and even Windows has since Win95. Because of this, and a few other things, I find the BeOS UI to be quite clunky and inefficient.
That said, there are definately some things I really like about BeOS. Primarily, it's speed is unmatched and it is very stable.
Leave it to Apple to come up with an amazing look and feel. I *love* those drop shadows. I'm suprised that we've yet to see that in any X11-based window manager...or have we?
Looking forward to the Windowmaker themes...
There is no "right" way to design UI controls. HCI experts are just like art critics, and UI preferences are like sphincters (everybody has one). What seems to obviously right to you may seem equally wrong to others.
The goal of a GUI system should be to make the appearance and placement of controls as configurable as possible, so everybody can use the system in the most efficient manner they can.
In some ways, it is better (e.g. support for transparency and anti-aliasing) and in some ways it is worse (less flexible and programmable).
It does not run X-Windows at all. It runs a unrefined NEXTish GUI. One of example of underefinment would be the HUGH icons in it's rather confusing filemanager (sorta like Windows Explorer but with the panes and slidebars in really odd places). As far as I know, there is no purely text shell like we get on BSD and Linux systems when X is not installed. One can, however run bash, tcsh and one other shell environment (name escapes me) in an Xterm-like windows. There are some ports of common free Unix utilities like Samba and dhcp (no, it doesn't come with it!) at www.darwinlinux.com. They may be out of date with current releases, though.
It does do a very good job of running Samba. I put this server up last September and it has been up continously since. It has been particularly useful to me. I am the hardware tech for a medium sized school district. Since OS X server comes with Appletalk server capabilites, the addition of Samba makes a handy place to store drivers for both Windows and Macs. I can mount my home directory from any networked machine in the district whether it is a Windows box or a Mac and it is reliably there.
It also has the ability to run regular Mac apps in a virtual machine. The virtual OS 8.5 takes up the entire screen. A keyboard combination or a special option in the Special menu changes screens back to the OS X interface. The machine runs with reasonable speed but it doesn't "feel" as fast as 8.5 running natively on a Blue and White G3. The Unix side runs quite well even with the virtual machine process running.
Overall, I found it to be a solid server OS but the interface is clearly in a very beta state in this release. If I had been the one spending the money, I would have installed NetBSD or LinuxPPC and got a much more mature and complete OS (things like dhcp missing). It seems reliable enough but it is incomplete in many ways and very expensive. Not only do NetBSD and Linux provide more complete UNIX toolsets. They provide much more mature interfaces and we are talking about Apple!!
I DO realize that the full consumer release will be much different.
Wow... did anyone else think that some of the graphic features of this system resembled imlib2?
http://www.rasterman.com/imlib.html
Of course I don't think you can do alpha blending between different X drawables without some serious hacks (witness transparent Eterm). But very similar effects.
Its for single window mode. If it is active you can only have open window open at a time. Opening a new window will close the current one.
The window attribute icons are only color reactive for background windows. Background windows have their buttons greyed until moused over. Then they color and grow.
The foreground buttons will expand slightly and have the following symbols appear on them "x - +"
There is no "right" way to design UI controls. HCI experts are just like art critics, and UI preferences are like sphincters
(everybody has one). What seems to obviously right to you may seem equally wrong to others.
Not true. Usability can be measured. It is a hard science. You let people do operations and measure how fast they do them, and how many errors they do.
The goal of a GUI system should be to make the appearance and placement of controls as configurable as possible, so everybody can use the system in the most efficient manner they can.
I think that is just an abandonment of responsibility. The designer refuses to design the product, and lets the poor user finish his design work for him. Guess what, the user is even less of a UI designer, and will end up with some incoherent crap most of the time, plus waste a lot of effort experimenting.
The entire os x graphics engine is pdf based. thats why they can do all this visual stuff and not completely drag down the system.
Go ahead and moderate this down. I just need to rant at the cluelessness of Slashdotters who think that all Mac users are idiots. For your information, there do exist many Mac Powerusers who know how to fully utilize the OS. In addition, it is laughable how little knowledge of MacOS many of you so-called sophisticated computer users actually possess. Maybe you should actually spend a few minutes investigating the control panels to find out what capabilities the OS really has instead of spouting out like ignorant fools.
a prophet on the burning shore
i agree that, yes, sliders are definately superior for use on a computer, but being a pro audio guy i'd also argue that they're better than dials in every way except for size for dealing with analog signals; there are some neat things you can do with dials controlling digital signals that you can't with sliders for obvious reasons. in fact, you'll be hard presssed to find any decent board, except for maybe a little 8x2 or something, that doesn't use sliders instead of dials for the main control.
miskam evets
Oh, in the list of applications Raphsody had things like xterm. I don't remember whether or not things like gcc were included. Then again, who's to say that once this thing is out that Debian won't release a CD chock full of GNU like things to make the system feel like a Linux box???
Think of how neat it would be to run The Gimp side-by-side with Photoshop? The thing has ftp and telnet daemons built in to it along with Apache. If anything, this might steal away some thunder from Linux being that it's going to have many of the upsides of Linux and its ilk yet also have the full support of a mainstream platform.
Also, think of how handy it would be if Mac applications developed for OS X could easily be ported over to Linux, xBSD, Hurd, Solaris and whatever with ./compile ; make ; make install????
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
In an above thread, someone mentioned that the server beta would run on an x86. How can I get this beta, and does it run out-of-the-box on an x86 or does it need to be recompiled?
Does anyone know if Mac OS X can support multiple workspaces like *nix? I have been dying for this particular feature on a mac for years! Thanks.
I disagree about the close box; at least in the Mac OS the finder has so many windows that you end up using the close box an awful lot. :) (Yeah, I know -- that's why they're updating the finder! Still, some people like having lots of windows.)
On the issue of the left-side stuff -- have you ever used a NeXT/OpenStep machine? You'll note that the scroll bars were on the left! Although it might be a bit disconcerting at first, it's a definite advantage when in Miller Column mode -- you can move continuously accross columns, selecting and scrolling, without having to backtrack with the mouse. There was a forum post at appleinsider a few weeks ago in which the poster had a number of screenshots of the NeXTStep GUI. Here's the link: http://forum.appleinsider .com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000725.html The pictures are about halfway down the page. That GUI was a work of ART and I'm glad the MacOS X GUI maintains the level of gorgeousity, even though the two are of distinctly different styles. (Dark, industrial-looking grey and black vs. candy-coated robitussin liqui-gels!)
License Manager.
Just like every commercial Unix I've ever managed, I'm sure Apple will institute some sort of license manager...
So Linux or Free/Open/NetBSD still remains a *very* viable choice in the post-OS X release world.
~AC
Well, if you exit without saving, you lose your undo history anyway, right? Unless history is saved in the document, although in photoshop et al. I can see why it isn't! (30 GB files, anyone?) Also, most applications only ask you if you want to save if you have any unsaved changes. So it isn't a PITA at all.
Although unix has been (one of) the best OSes for a long time, it has always been too complicated for Joe User to setup and use. Really, how many of you unix geeks can say that you would set up a 'nix box for your grandma? I've often wished for something in between, where power users have their 'nix functionality while novices can easily use their systems. With the SAME OS so everyone can share binaries.
If someone were to have told me years ago that Apple would make their next Mac OS based off of Unix I would have told them they're on crack. Macs have always been marketed as the easiest to use. I would have said theres no way Apple would give unix to all their mac customers.
I think I need to play around with one of these babies. It sounds kick ass, but how far is it from standard unix due to ease of use? How do they keep Joe User from getting confused with a multi-user system, and do they make him be super user at all for configuration? Or did they strip out things multiple users and process control? Macs always seemed too simplistic to me (too simple to be worthwhile) and I have trouble believing that there is now true, raw, unix power behind them.
I have doubts about the functionality of the user interface. In the history of the Mac it always seemed to cripple you. And can simple Xwindow apps compile without any/much modification? Maybe a Gnome or KDE could replace their GUI someday if it wasn't all that great.
... the Next file thingamabob (can't remember the name).
Microsoft mentioned, when Win95 was introduced, that the explorer was based on (among others) the very same Next file manager. Remember that OS X is suposed to be based on Next's OS.
...
Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,
Yeah right... and then I see myself siiting in front of a G4 playing Q3A with just ONE mouse button? Not in my life. greetz
Win/X11 gets distance right, but that's not important. MacOS beats the hell out of it on size, because the MacOS menu bar is infinitely big.
"But, Mr. Coward, it's only twenty pixels! That's not infinite!" True. But that twenty pixels is at the top of the screen, and you can't shove the mouse pointer above it. Thus, finding a menu on Win/X11 is a three-step process:
On the Mac, it's two steps:
This is one of those cases where it's more important to be right than correct. "Proper window to menu" means you spend time navigating for the veritcally narrow strip of space that's the menu bar. "Mac style" means you shove the mouse, and it Just Works. Worse is better, Apple style.
Are we going to be actually able to develop applications for the desktop side of OSX, cause I thought the graphical shell is still closed-source.
And more important are they including the C(++) as standard, which was not true for the version I tested at Apple's helpdesk where I have been working.
For me it seems more like a new widget set for X, with the primarly exception that it won't run your old X programs.
It's not that difficult put graphical shell around a *nix, we are doing it all the time. Apple just wants to make money with our efforts to the core of OSX and keeping its windowing system closed-source.
Should we embrace this effort? Not imho, Apple is still holding on to its right to produce the mainboard and its components as long as that monopoly exists (which resembles microsoft monopoly on the software market. The main part of OS-X is closed source and thus not interesting. It looks nice, but with some effort we can do the same thing - even better.
A G4 is as fast as an Athlon (is it?), and does not come near to an Alpha.
What we really need is a mac made by architects
Imagine sitting in front a of a Bauhaus imac - or better yet, a gothic quad processor g4
And the replacements for the hockey puck mouse we might see...
There are three Objective C compilers I know of. The GCC frontend resulted from work by NeXTSTEP to add ObjC support. Stepstone had the original compiler, (Brad Cox, the creator of Objective C, owned Stepstone). Finally, there is the portable objective compiler (POC), which many on comp.lang.objective-c seem to use. I haven't used Stepstone's compiler, but the POC seems to stick to Brad Cox's book on Objective C more closely than GCC's Objc frontend.
Chris Wareham
Gee, It seems like all of you are marketing genius. It's clear that the first thing you realize is that this is notting more than a constantly ongoing egocentric warfare. Why not help each other and refer to documents and online material that you get all this shit from. Blissful Ignorant Duds
Many of the controls look almost as if they were rendered in a 3D package! Creating hilights, shadows and shapes that are consistant with Aqua isn't going to easy. With the release of OS X, could Apple be the first to include 3D objects and scenes in their HI guidelines?
Win 1.0 - I think that would classfiy as minimized icaons on the desktop. Sure, you may not have been able to cover them up. But I seem to remember that NO windows could partially cover other windows.
However, the OSX buttons are spaced out further than the 'doze ones... and it's easier to miss in 'doze 'cos of the lack of cursor ballistics.