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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.
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?
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:
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.
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 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!
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 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)
While much of the "new" interface is evolutionary - a refinement and consolidation of many ideas from past iterations of the Mac OS - there are some indications of what the future GUI will look like. IMHO this is one of them... while this will unsettle many people who have grown used to static screens, dynamically changing depending on context - what you're pointing at (and in the future, what you're looking at) - will be the way to go.
BTW Netscape's buttons that stay flat while you're not pointing at them were a preview of that, although personally I consider them a good idea badly executed.
The three colored buttons which grow indicators may not be that great, since there are many color-blind folks out there - there should be an option to keep the indicators permanently. Large icons are great, as long as the user can scale them down. It's been getting progressively harder to design distinctive and good-looking icons - now we can go into detail and color, which was just not possible with 32x32 and 14-color icons (yes, I know lately 32-bit color icons have been possible).
Using animations, sounds, translucency and so forth will also be a hit, although of course the CLI set will hate wasting cycles on that sort of thing... and also, amateur interface designers will be able to shoot themselves in both feet very easily. Just call it evolution in action :-)
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
Easy to spot the linux folk
Not necessarily...I for one am not convinced that the AC is a Linux user (he/she very well may be, but not necessarily). I know longtime Mac users (read, MacOS, who don't run linux because they don't like the UI) who bitch about the sole mouse button thing. The reason being this:
Sure, MacOS will work with just one mouse button. It was designed such that one mouse button is all that is *necessary*. But for contextual menus, this requires the pressing of a key while clicking. This is the sort of thing *better* done with a second mouse button, rather than requiring the user to reach for the keyboard and perform two tasks at once. That way, ppl with one button can still do it the old way, but those with two buttons don't have to.
So, yes, you only *need* one button, but two makes life (or at least, MacOS) a little easier.
As a bonus, two buttons make it a little easier on converts from Windows or other multi-button environments. However, this is just a bonus, not the reason for thinking Macs should come with a second mouse button.
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...
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."
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.
The Keynote yesterday was extreemly cool. And the User interface for mac os X will set standards.
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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.
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watch that realvideo stream, it's damn cool! **********************************************
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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!
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
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.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
- uid == 0b00: "root"
- uid == 0b01: "daemon"
- uid == 0b10: "luser"
- uid == 0b11: "nobody"
The humor-impaired should please insert smileys. I'm not arguing with anybody, just applying levity.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.