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Ars Technica on OSX/Aqua
Gilmoure writes "John Siracusa has written an excellent article on the technology (Quartz) behind Aqua and its possible impact on GUI industry. " The continued evolution of OS/X has been interesting, even simply from the marketing perspectives. John's take is a good one to read if you haven't followed OSX very much.
This story was on Ars for ages or so; and for those who have a slashdot-box with Ars it's long read and forgotten. I thought it made a lot of sense not to post stories from the boxes you know.
God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ --1Thes5:9
And soon, our desktops will really look like those fancy over-stylized desktops just like in the movies.
Alot of the Unix camp comes from the school of thought that says a GUI is only so we can display more xterms at the same time. There is also the people who either worship or despise the GUI itself. From whichever camp you follow you all know we will never go back to the console-line world when it comes to the 'home pc', granted - the evolution of the GUI has began to impress even me. However, I feel Gates' law beginning to creep up and take hold of even our beloved XFree86, I can remember when simplicity of design was law, and now I see the trend to copy and mimic GUIs like OS/X for their beauty, unfortunitly all that beauty is not free, it can cost us our grace.
The UNIX/Linux/BSD/Windows community has for too long dominated the computer industry, and we've all suffered for it. These obscurantists insist on using crude, primitive "techie" languages like C and C++, which naturally keeps them in their jobs and forces talented, imaginative people out of the software-development arena. Only a true nerd could love these languages. Nobody with the imagination to do great things could possibly have the patience to learn idiotic trivia like printf( ) format strings and virtual inheritance. Inheritance in general is just another techie boondoggle. It's a joke. They're just adding useless complexity for it's own sake. Programming languages must adapt to the user, not vice-versa, and BASIC is the only language that does that (aside from COBOL, but I'll not mention that one because a lot of Slashdotters seem intimidated by a language so powerful, versatile, and open). BASIC is clear and intuitive. It's the future of programming. The only tool any developer needs -- be he a kernel hacker or somebody working on multimedia technology -- is a pure visual advanced BASIC-like programming environment. Don't believe the hype about efficiency. Look at some C code, and look at some BASIC code that does the same thing: The C code is painful, long-winded, verbose, and obscure. They can call that "elegant" all they like, but any fool can see that it's anything but. They make the programmer work harder, and then they make the computer work harder. And why? Just to preserve their priesthood: Job-security through obscurity. It's all about intimidating non-technical people, the users who pay their bills and support the whole industry. This is wrong. Professional programmers can be done away with entirely, simply by putting the power to write code in the hands of the average user, who will use it much better than the obscure Lords of Pointers ever have with their silly rituals and gratuitous "hacks".
It's time for a change.
I have that problem quite a bit when staring at my monitor. It's a bugger cleaning the drool off the screen constantly.
Maybe they'll need to come up with some kind of chamois-like coating for the screen which soaks up any, uh, secretions....
I think I'd better stop this train of thought right now.
Seriously, though, this is fairly cool, especially as displays get more and more independent of 'pixels' as resolutions become finer and finer. Think in terms of where stuff like "electronic paper" displays are headed....
Aqua has a beautiful appearance. Is that beauty skin deep?
Unless the GUI overlays some real functionality then one has to question its usefulness. I certainly don't believe that "Presentation is everything, content is mere ephemera". (Can't find a reference to this quote, which is almost certainly by Oscar Wilde).
The Apple target audience consists of people who don't necessarly want to be technical. Graphic artists, writers, and desktop publishing people. These people may prefer the extra fluff whereas us technical folks will point and go "Ugh! Look at all the CPU cycles being wasted!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So why is Ars Technica on water? One likely reason is that Ars Technica is water skiing. So the new title becomes "Ars Technica water skies". But, this time of year, Northern Europe is rather cold. So if Ars Technica water skiied in his native land, he would probably freeze. But, if he were carrying the FreeBSD source code, he could freeze it. This seems unlikely, though, since a better way to freeze the FreeBSD code would be to just stick it in the freezer.
So more likely, he's water skiiing in a warmer climate, like California, which is wher Linus Torvalds currently lives. This coincidence is too great; therefore I conclude that "Ars Technica" is a pseudonym for "Linus Torvalds" - ie they are one and the same.
So the new title is "Linus Torvalds water skies". However, this is neither "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that Matters." Unless he were skipping work to water sky, and was fired.
So, therefore, it's a shame that Linus Torvalds skipped work to water sky & got fired. But, I'm sure he can get another job.
One of the things I hate about the Apple way of doing things is that they think the way to make things simpler is to take away options.
For instance, we are using CIPE-over-PPP-over-ATM to network ourselves over DSL to another network. It works really well, but it eats up about 60 bytes out of each TCP packet. This is no problem for places where MTU path discovery works, but many places block ICMP, and so MTU discovery doesn't work... in any case, the best solution is to set the max MTU size down to 1440 or so.
Under Linux, this is easy... ifconfig eth0 mtu 1440
Under Windows, there is a registry setting. Not the right way to do it in my opinion, but at least it can be done.
There is NO WAY to do this under MacOS that I could find. The only solution was some guy who hacked up the TCP/IP stack and wrote a little control panel where you could change the settings. That's not the way to do things.
Or the mouse. I know that Apple people say that one button is easier than 2 or 3, but my Mac friend told me the other day that one of the things I needed to do for something was option-click-click-and-hold. That's EASIER than right-click or middle-click?
Now, Apple has done some very good things in terms of user interfaces... it's a very uniform user interface. Back in 1984, it was an extremely modern way to do things. But over the last 15 years or so they've fallen behind in the technical arena. No preemptive multitasking (until now, more on that in a minute) is unacceptable. And how do they make up for it? FUD. Steve Jobs said that you couldn't buy a faster computer than a G3. Not only could you get a PII to run faster, but he completely neglected the Alpha, UltraSparc, PA-RISC, etc. These aren't typically home machines, sure, but he was trying to say that the G3 was some sort of Super Computer or something. We see this continued with the silly Army Tank / G4 commercial, which is not so much a testament to the speed of the G4 (Don't get me wrong, it's a nice chip, but it's not beating the Origin 2000 or Enterprise 4500 behind me any time soon) as it is backwards and outdated US laws.
Now we have OS X. I must say that I'm very happy that Apple is getting into the Modern OS Architecture arena. And they certainly chose some good technologies to support. I have high hopes that Apple can come up with a really excellent product... though I still see that they treat seperate partitions as seperate filesystem spaces. D'oh.
But I must say I'm not totally convinced that OS X is something that I want to run in the future. Apple has not been what I'd call a friendly company in the last few years. It used to be that Apple was the good guy and IBM was the bad guy. Now Microsoft is certainly the bad guy... but I'm not convinced that Apple is a good guy. If Steve Jobs and MacOS controlled 80% of the market share, would that really be better than it is now? Think about who controlls the industry and how they deal with specs and such. Is Apple any better? Worse?
I'd say that it'd be worse. You'd have to buy your hardware from Apple. Prices would be inflated without the competition. And your computer would have to be smurf-puke blue. :-)
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Yes, god forbid that anyone should make computers easier to use. Heaven forfend that someone should make a computer that you can just switch on and do stuff in a highly visual manner without having to use esoteric commands, long-winded and illogical keystrokes and the userfriendliness of a cobra on acid.
Yet there are people out there who think that the development of the interface between the computer and its user should have frozen in 1970.
You know these people. They post on Slashdot.
They are the luddites of the new generation. They must be rendered extinct, like the dinosaurs they are.
We need interfaces like Aqua. We need the interfaces that are to come. We want computers that are so user friendly and work in such a logical and obvious way that even people like my dad can use them, if they want to.
That is the future.
People who think that emacs is the be-all and end-all, are the past. They're obsolete.
A moderator actually marked this as insightful.
I was a joke, you boob.
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If you'd have actually READ the article before trolling, you'd know that it was talking about how Quartz is a "3rd generation" graphics system -- one with actual knowledge of all the objects on the screen after they've been drawn -- and all the wonderful things that you can do with that. This is why Display PS was so damn cool back then and why Quartz's Display PDF will be even cooler. There is a lot of neat functionality that Quartz allows, and I'm sure we'll see a lot of interesting tricks as developers start to figure out how to exploit the technology. The Quartz model of graphics holds far more power and flexibility than X11, Windows, and the old Quickdraw model.
On the other hand, I'm curious just how games and other things that need direct screen access with intermix with such a graphics model.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I wouldn't be too hard on apple or aqua just yet. The whole display of aqua at the last expo was a last minute decision, done because the hardware that they hoped to introduce wasn't ready to go. There's still plenty of time for apple to fix issues and address opinion. So by all means, give your opinion, but all this "apple sucks, look what they're trying to force everyone into now!" is a bit premature.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Just so you know my bias... normally I absolutely detest Apple the company. They have performed far more monopolistic practices than Microsoft ever dreamed of (they were just incompetent at executing them). I despise MacOS, which is the most primitive operating system sold today. I think their hardware is way overrated, and I hate their dumbing down of computers with no way to escape the prison. And the most galling thing was their unbelievable arrogance that they still sat on the industry pedastal (gag).
All this having been said (:)), I have to admit the Aqua interface looks really cool. It's actually not a bad idea to use PDF as your drawing primitive. Traditionally Apple's implementation of ideas has been really poor, so it will be interesting to see if they've managed to pull it off in a reasonable way.
The big question is whether they allow escape from the prison for advanced users? Jobs is notorious for not allowing anything that he personally doesn't find useful and damn everyone else (floppies anyone?).
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And not written english. Pidgin English is just the ticket. After all, emphasis on grammar, spelling etc keep hundreds of talented people from contributing the software, and serve the only purpose of preserving the fat paychecks of obscurantist English fetishist programmers. Just you wait. Microsoft will soon come out with Visual English, which will allow one to write an entire database application with just one line of code. And all you linux nuts will get screwed. So there.
Hari.
For instance, we are using CIPE-over-PPP-over-ATM to network ourselves over DSL to another network. It works really well, but it eats up about 60 bytes out of each TCP packet. This is no problem for places where MTU path discovery works, but many places block ICMP, and so MTU discovery doesn't work... in any case, the best solution is to set the max MTU size down to 1440 or so.
(sirens blaring),
Internet license and registration please. Do you know how many acronyms you were doing back there? I'm going to cite you for that violation, and and another for the John Katz-length of that post. Buckle up, and have a nice day.
Use the right language for the right problem, num-nuts.
And just how many people need to do this on their personal computer? 50? 75? Maybe the next MacOS should ship on 3 CD-ROMs, just to accommodate all of the possibilities.
Steve Jobs said that you couldn't buy a faster computer than a G3. Not only could you get a PII to run faster, but he completely neglected the Alpha, UltraSparc, PA-RISC, etc.
Steve said you couldn't by a faster personal computer. Higher clock speed !== faster execution.
How many Alpha, UltraSparc, etc. are being wasted on e-mails to Grandma and on tomorrow's Economics homework?
Or the mouse. I know that Apple people say that one button is easier than 2 or 3, but my Mac friend told me the other day that one of the things I needed to do for something was option-click-click-and-hold. That's EASIER than right-click or middle-click?
There is no Option-doubleclick-and-hold. At least not one that does anything special. Nice little anecdote, though.
Is this a complaint? If it is, I fail to see the problem.
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Apart from all the gui's-suck comments, quartz (the technology itself) is a brilliant piece of work! A built-in 2d renderer with support for PDF with all that entails. Yes, Aqua is glitzy and flashy and probably not as intuitive as the old interface, but the technology underneath it is what calls my attention.
*That* I consider innovation. I wish we had more of that in Linux...
I suppose someone will now announce a Open-Source project to *copy* Quartz'z functions...
...
Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,
I seem to remember that computer graphics were originally vector-based rather than raster (other than light bulbs on the front of the EDSAC II)... and back then, it was completely vector -- even the CRT display was vector. Now it's just vector -> raster.
Hmmm.
I really like the idea of a vector based GUI. I think that looking at more "organic" shapes is easier on the eyes than looking at all those squares and blocks. but right now I say "why?"
Why use a vector based windowing system on a monitor that can only display squares and blocks efficiently. The moment a vector based windowing system becomes usefull even unavoidable is when we have "analog" monitors as in "monitors that can actually display vectors" as opposed to the current "monitors that diplay bitmaps" IMHO this vector based windowing system is just a marketing buzz-word induced waste of cpu-time. Now that the competition is already ahead on all the current words (preemptive multitasking, multi-user, journaling file system,.....) they just invented a new one.
- feel sorry for you
- assume you work for Microsoft
If you wanted to implement a 3D interface on Linux, what kind of task is that (excluding the obvious definition... "huge")? And is that something that would require a replacement for X, or does X have the capability to have a 3D environment on top of it?
I have a strong feeling that peope are going to start emulating the Aqua-style interface in X windows. I think if Linux were to have a real advantage (and not simply be copy-catting at an ever proficient pace), it should focus on the next step that the commercial vendors haven't arrived at yet.
Supposedly if you order your Mac "built to order" you can get a relatively full BSD layer installed, so you can kill the OSX _process_ and do whatever you want that is available at the BSD level.
...).
I'm a physicist, not a programmer, and I know that for serious all day use writing small applications, moderate number crunching, checking your e-mail the old NextStep was king of the hill--which is why you have AfterStep and GnuStep emulations of it. I currently like a well configured Enlightenment GUI. I think the antialiasing of the Quartz environment will make OSX a real pleasure to work with (I like E desktop once set up, but it seems that AfterStep was easier to look at for hours on end--but maybe I need new glasses,
My only concerns about OSX are things like a sufficient number of buttons on the mice and ease of access to the command line. Oh, and ability to change colors , etc., at will, in the course of reconfiguring.
My own read on recent changes at Apple is that they've gotten rid of the techno-ignoramuses who were the "world class management" chosen to grow Apple from a small niche company to a major player. Apple spent a lot of years pissing the wole world off under their leadership, even the Apple faithful. They make first rate hardware (try comparing performance of non-MS apps between PPC and Intel products, and the PPC is easily 15% to 30% faster, clock for clock). Now they are letting the user have more access to the lower levels of the OS. I think it all bodes well, and lead to more competition and greater number of options for us users.
By the way, I just want to say that I fully expect this post to be moderated down by Mac people ("Finally, we have the power to eliminate ALL negative viewpoints of Apple!")
I await the execution. For my last meal I will take a Porterhouse steak, medium-rare. Thank you.
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I agree that they do seem to be opening up things a lot. While there are still some Apple-isms that crop up ("It's over TWICE AS FAST", scream the ads), the fact that it is based on a Unix kernel bodes well.
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When I bought my PC, it came with a 2 button mouse, but I wanted a 3 button so I could use the middle button in netscape to open links in a new window. So I bought a 3 button mouse.
When I bought my Mac, it came with a 1 button mouse, but I wanted a 3 button mouse so I could use the right button to bring up contextual menu panels and program the middle button to do other cool tricks. So I bought a 3 button mouse.
Ok everyone is griping about how this interface is wasting thier CPU usage. Well fire up your monitor and see how much CPU you are actually using.
Now unless you have something in the background that is chewing up your CPU, then I reckon it is hovering near 1 or 2 percent right now.
We interact with our machines in a way that makes them site idle for most of the time, so why not use that idle CPU power to make the GUI nice and sexy.
Now of course you want to be able to turn some fluff off if you want to use those cycles for something else, and you don't want it to chew the application CPU time too much when your app is running especially a game for example.
I think it is a great idea and looks really nice, and having a nice area to work and play in is a good thing.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
2000-01-17 18:30:47 News on Mac OS X GUI (articles,apple) (rejected)
/.'s "trained squirrels" gets the submission? Looks like it does.
See this? It was kinda fresh back then. But now it is already old news.
I see this kind of problems all the time. Does it matter which of the
Of course, this thread would not be complete without a comment about 1 button mice and floppies.
Hello? You can get a floppy for your Mac. It's called "optional". Get used to it. The last time I used a floppy on my mac was 9 months ago. I don't own any software that I use which comes on floppies. Why make something standard that 90% of the users don't need? You don't, you make it an option for those who need it. Geez, it's not hard to understand...
Since the kernel is based on BSD, will OS/X use a relatively standard Unix filesystem? In the past MacOS had that wacky system of a "data fork" and a "resource fork". Does anyone know how that will be bolted into a Unix environment?
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Quartz is Neat Stuff. Aqua is a little more icky in my personal opinion. Tog had some very interesting comments on the Aqua user interface that should be forwarded along with this article to the GNOME/KDE people with a small footnote appended saying: learn from this
I agree with the Ars Technica article about this vector based technology being the third generation. The idea isn't new, it came from NeXT, but its being incorporated in a mainstream OS. The Microsoft camp is going to have to start thinking up their own version of this now, if they want to keep up. Apple has once more raised the bar on them in terms of innovation.
As for the Linux camp, I think that this is something that definitely needs to be worked into the libraries. I want to see a user interface that has the cool vector-based effects of Quartz coupled to a redefinable interface like what GNOME or KDE supports. That becomes the ultimate in coolness, even if it chews up a lot of CPU power to pull off.
Part of the GNUstep project has a Display Postscript reimplementation, which isn't that different. Someone here posted in the last OSX article that DPDF is better because it doesn't need as advanced a rendering system to work (as PDF lacks the Turing-completeness of PS).
What I'm wondering, however, is if DPDF/Quartz can be (efficiently) made network-transparent. At least with DPS this is possible, and the flexibility of the protocol lets you do some neat things in that vein....
iSKUNK!
Ex-Apple human interface guru Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini took a thorough look at Apple's new Aqua interface for OSX. But instead of looking at it from a technical standpoint, he examines it from a human interface designer's perspective.
h tml
http://www.asktog.com/columns/034OSX-FirstLook.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Did you consider actally *shudder* reading the article? The technology is completely different than anything MacOS or any other OS has done before. That's what's so revolutionary.
Actually quite a few people need to set the MTU on their machines. In windows the default MTU is huge because ethernet LANs have low packet loss. But that sucks for the internet where a 1400 something MTU will kill mutliplayer. Thats why there are all these utilities (Win98 SE includes it in the control panel) to change the MTU. And shut up about faster clock!= faster execution. The G3 sucked at floating point and everybody and their uncle knows it. Sure it whooped in integer, but if people actually NEEDED high-perf integer performance, everyone would have bought K6-3s instead of PIIs givin the option. The G4 is supposedly much better, but even theoretically, its max performance at 450MHz is about comparable to the performance of a 700MHz Athlon. Quite a feat for the arch no doubt, but still, the Athlon costs less.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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Also, the Aqua GUI really really sucks. All eye-candy with lesser and lesser functionality in the trends of QT 4.
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Weird. You've received DP3 already? Or are you basing this off of a few screenshots of an alpha of OSX?
If you'll notice, some of the more annoying features in QT4 seem to have been fixed in the QuickTime player for MacOS X.
The current DVD player is just that, current. I personally don't think it's that bad (not compared to QT4 Player at least).
As for red/yellow/green, that could very well be customizable. I don't know, and neither do you. It's far too early to be making such firm statements for or against Aqua.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
People like these on Slashdot simply discourage real innovators from doing anything. Let this troll burn in hell.
This is veering off-topic. Please don't mark down.
What Slashdot readers should be given the ability to do is read through article submissions. Slashdot fancies itself as a censorship-free society, but truly, whenever you have people selecting which information the group can read, you are making decisions that censor. I don't have an Ars box and I don't read Ars regularly, so I would never have known about this article, yet it's the most informative, well-written piece I've seen linked in a long time. Thank God that someone reposted it. When that Slashdot squirrel denied the post, he basically made a decision that said, "This isn't worthy of the general populace," which, to me, is an opinion-based decision that censored.
I'm sure Taco or Hemos could very quickly implement the functionality to read through the posts. They could even put it in a Slashbox. Basically, if the article has a URL, pull it out and check it (perl has this functionality via modules; it's very easy). If there's not already an article with that URL in the system, add it to a database, if that URL isn't already in the database. If the article is posted, mark it as posted. If it is rejected, mark it as rejected and make it available for viewing. If it is offensive for some reason (one of the reasons that the FAQ gives for not having such a list), just delete it altogether. The squirrels go through each and every article anyway, so this management must take place anyway. All they have to do is mark it. The database can store simply the subject and the URL (if they don't have a URL, tough luck), and then present a list of link titles that take people to various articles. Don't give people commenting rights on these posts. Only store rejects for, say, two weeks, to keep the database file small. I'm sure some of this functionality is already in (they have to store information for the squirrels in some manner), so implementing this on top shouldn't be too hard.
Maybe I should mail this to Rob. Eh, maybe not. He's a busy man.
Steve said you couldn't by a faster personal computer. Higher clock speed !== faster execution.
No, but lower clock speed != faster execution either. Are you trying to tell me that a Athlon 800 is slower than a G4 450? Sorry, but it isn't. The Athlon would have better support for high-performance peripherals too (3d accelerators, faster memory, hard disks, etc...)
"Bernoulli was wrong. X proves that you can fill a vacuum, yet still it sucks." - Dennis Ritchie
aeonek: "Well shucks, 800 is more than 450,huuhh? Thar Ath-ee-lon gots more of them mega-hurts"
I also just finished a Salon piece by a Mac user who is upset that their previously "exclusive" mac club is now being infiltrated by newbies. No user group is more emotionally invested then the mac community. How else could the company have survived the blunders and missteps that would have devastated any other company?
Blind loyalty has no place in a technological market, leave that to your favorite beers and recording artitsts. Inclusive-exclusive, come on, keep an open mind and enough HDD space for all your OS's. Unless of course you've bought proprietary hardware and let big brother dictate how you use your device.
On a different aspect of Apple GUI design, I was interested to read this on the Darwin-Development list this morning:
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 18:13:17 -0600
From: johnc@idsoftware.com (John Carmack)
Subject: debugging
.
.
.
BTW, the current status is that everything is compiling (all client apps work with remote X servers) with minimal porting work, and I have a building X server for OS-X using interceptor. The X server doesn't actually WORK yet (hence the debugging), but I don't think it will be too
long.
After I get the OS-X server version tested, I will just need to rewrite one file to hook into the darwin device drivers.
I'll leave it up to someone else to get gnome or kde ported.
John Carmack
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Reading through your post, I am having a hard time finding where the arrogance comes from. Reading Slashdot, I find a lot of Linux arrogance (Setting the max MTU packet size is easy under Linux, just edit the correct text file with a command that EVERYONE should know).
/.)
No, the MacOS is not for everyone. Windows is not for everyone. Linux is not for everyone (just look at the *BSD vs. Linux that crops up on
Belittling an OS because it is not *your* OS of choice and then sticking it to Steve Jobs (a man I am not fond of at all) for making *his* OS the OS for everyone is just hypocritical.
Don't just read about Mac OS X/Aqua, insult it, and then just move on. The OSS community has a lot to learn from Apple - simplicity and ease of use being two main ones. OSS has a lot to learn from Microsoft, as well (as much as you might not like to admit it)
Until the OSS community realizes that, for most consumers out there, ease of use is as important as features (and stability and speed), OSS is not going to catch on as you want it to. MacOS and Windows have one thing in common over Linux - ease of use. This is not just coincidence that these two OSes are still more popular than Linux.
...and I have not used my floppy drive in about 1.5 years.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
The Athlon is faster than the G4. Not only because it has nearly twice the clock speed, but it also has a better branchpredictor, which is important because it has a very deep pipeline. G4, on the other hand only has a 4-stage pipeline. That's why it won't ramp beyond 500 Mhz.
It also has more execution units and is capable of issuing 6 ops (Athlons internal RISC-like ops) per cycle whereas the G4 can issue 2 + one branch op. It has twice the L1 cache, although it's only 2-way associative where the G4 is 8-way. The Athlon has twice the bus speed. Etc, etc... Satisfied?
"Bernoulli was wrong. X proves that you can fill a vacuum, yet still it sucks." - Dennis Ritchie
http://www.doxpara.com/minbars.html
X needs a HUGE overhaul in order for this to happen. Its probably best to chuck X and start from scrath, getting rid of all that baggage, but that will never happen.
> so much for innovation in linux.
I think the focus is building a stable platform with familiar tools to the exclusion of trying something new. (Enlightment being the notable exception.)
Cheers
Nonetheless, kudos to Ars for a great article. If only this standard of writing was more common on the web...
'red' 'green' and 'yellow' for 'stop' 'go' and 'slow' are not universal. it is going to be familiar to only people who live in countries where the lights are like that. what does aqua hold for blind users? it looks like candy to me without any real stuff inside of it, there is alot more to a 'user interface' than the color of the scrollbar or how the buttons look when you press them... like what the buttons actually are for.. what their labels are.. in what language.. are they too small for visually impaired people to see, are they lacking keyboard shortcuts, do they talk, output to braille.. etc? as far as i can tell Aqua is for making money from people who like to masturbate to gel caps not for real improvement in user interface design.
There is no Option-doubleclick-and-hold. At least not one that does anything special. Nice little anecdote, though.
There actually is an option-doubliclick-and-hold -- it's the default action for invoking Apple's silly spring-loaded-folder navigation. You can set a flag somewhere to get rid of the option part, but nevertheless it still exists and the original poster's comment is still valid.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Is anyone working on a vector-based system for Linux?
Does KDE like the sound of vector-based icons?
Does GNOME like the idea of having vector-based commands for their canvas project?
Do those other GUI systems, Berlin and GGI have any thoughts on a vector-based system?
Although I don't like many of the things that Mac OS X has, I do think ArsTechnica is right that a vector-based GUI is a step above what we have currently.
What does everyone here think?
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
customizability - the ability of the user to modify the interface to the device for his or her own special needs functional obedience - the ability of the user to perform any applicable function at any time you said someone was able to perform this function but they had to write their own program to do it. i think this is an example of extreme non-customizability. a case can also be made that it is extreme functional disobedience.. such that an extreme amount of effort had to be made to perform an applicable function
This is a valuable post. Someone should moderate it up.
Matt
My G$ cruncehs through a SETI block in under six hours without a nix OS undernieth it and without ALTIVEC! YOu athalon can do it in 7 if it's fast?
I'm kinda dissapointed that a G$ didn't kill the athalon on photoshop but it's still faster (hey hte athalon came so close without 3Dnow acceleration I really have to respect it)
Now that support for other things Athalong actually have some AGP problems in there diffrent MB implimentations and I do not care about the MEmory technology of the moment but MACS always have had support for increadible SCSI technologies and actually leave a lot of other things in the dust (Not that you couldn't add 10K Ultra 160M SCSI Raids to an athalon it's just that I would hate to have to set those up on anythig x86)
No, I'm not satisfied. The Athlon has a huge, hot branch predictor because it has such a large pipeline. It's not that the Athlon has a better branch predictor than a G4, it's that the G4 doesn't need a very sophisticated branch predictor because it has a short pipeline. This allows it to run much more efficiently than that behemoth of a space heater you call a processor.
You are lucky. Alot of people, including me, were pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to install drivers on these things where the drivers needed a floppy disk to install. If you have a network, and you still have an older Mac hooked up to it, then you can at least write disk images and transfer the images to the blue/white. That is very clumsy and not excusable. Not only that, have you ever tried installing ODBC on a blue/white? Have fun, it requires a multiple floppy install. Unfortunatly the USB drivers don't allow for multiple disk installs, and mounted disk images do not recognize this as well. Go figure.
Hey, I understand the floppy drive is a dying medium. For most businesses it is hardly useful, however alot of home users and software installation still require the use of floppies. It was awfully premature for Apple to just rip support for floppies, making users have to go out and purchase additional hardware just to get their Mac going. I use floppy disks all the time. They are useful and cheap for moving small things around, expecially to computers that are not networked. Contrary to popular belief the entire world is not networked yet.
V
The article says:
"PDF is also is a free and open standard, which saves Apple from paying Postscript licensing fees."
Is this true?
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
This is getting old:
:)
"I find a lot of Linux arrogance (Setting the max MTU packet size is easy under Linux, just edit the correct text file with a command that EVERYONE should know)."
It's not one command, it's your favorite editor.
The point was that it not only possible and easy, it's well documented and not hidden at all. Linux is a '68 volkswagon bug with its engine hanging out. Macs and WinXX machines are akin to highly computerized and proprietary cars ('98 bug?) which do anything they can to hide the workings of the machinery and keep the owner from fixing their own machine.
Just because the Linux config files don't have pretty pictures on them doesn't make them hard to work with. No matter how you use your computer, the point about the MTU still holds its value. If your NetAdmin needs to change the MTU on your machine, it will be easy (for him) on your Linux workstation, moderately challenging on your Windows machine, and darn near impossible on your Mac.
That Mac may be easy for you to use, but if you ever try to do anything Apple doesn't want you to do or didn't think of, you're out of luck.
The best solution is to run a Mac emulator on Linux.
I wonder when the last time your NetAdmin used your floppy drive was?
"The Athlon is faster than the G4. Not only because it has nearly twice the clock speed"
Sorry, this is just not true. if you get a 68000 processor runing at twice the MHz as a G4, it will not run faster. Your argument, while it may be correct anyway, is fundamentally flawed.
"but it also has a better branchpredictor, which is important because it has a very deep pipeline. G4, on the other hand only has a 4-stage pipeline."
Again, this is flawed. why does the better branch predictor on the Athalon matter if the G4 has a pipeline, less than a quarter the size. The Athalon has to be at least 4 times as efficient to make up for the depth of the pipeline.
"That's why it won't ramp beyond 500 Mhz"
No, it just makes it more dificult to ramp beyond 500MHz, not impossible.
I am not saying that the G4 is faster than the Athalon. If you want to argue that, then use some real arguments that might actually be relevant, rather than spewing off some facts, and declaring them to be supportive of your argumnt.
What do M$'s screwed-up defaults have to do with it? Maybe Apple got it right (strange concept, I know) for 99.9% of their users.
And shut up about faster clock!= faster execution. The G3 sucked at floating point and everybody and their uncle knows it.
Yeah, yeah, my dick's bigger than yours, too.
Sheesh.
(BTW, I've seen RC5 benchmarks ( Scroll down to G4/450 RC5 Results Verified - Faster than 1GHz Athlon and scroll down to More on G4 vs... ) that place the G4 slightly higher than the 1GHz Athlon. Not that that matters, I'm sure.)
Your mileage may vary
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A truly masterful post, AC. You have my respect. Thanks for keeping things interesting.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
It would??
Damn, then I wasted my money on the Voodoo3, all the PC100 RAM, and that 10,000 RPM hard drive for my G3/233 (that I overclocked to 292MHz with a simple jumper change.)
No wonder I get those sucky 28fps average framerates in UT at 1280x1024.
^_^
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"Keyboards are out" -- let me make a note of that on my Palm IIIx.
I like the fact that Apple appears to be trying to reduce clutter and differentiate between controls using color (though that should _never_ be the only way to tell buttons apart, of course--I don't think "showing the symbols on mouse-over" is gonna cut it).
But why has there been a trend lately of making buttons "jump up" under the mouse cursor? Admittedly, in Aqua it's clear all along that they're buttons, but what about so-called "coolbars" in recent Win32 apps? Why do we have to guess what is or isn't a button and then waste time moving the mouse over it to see if it pops up? Maybe a graphics designer won a bet and the interface designer had to give in and make these braindead contraptions....
I want to see _new_ ideas in GUI, not just a rearrangement of the buttons!
How 'bout a dialog box that shows, in subtle grayscale or red/yellow/green shades, which controls still need data to be entered? The dialog could allow the user to submit the data anyway, depending on him to fill in the blanks later.
Move status information to a modeless, slightly bigger status bar! Make the detail level customizable!
These may be terrible ideas! They may be fantastic! Who's got some better ones? Post! Write software! Make money!
[end desperate plea]
unDees
"I call a baby goat a 'goatse.'" -- my non-Internet-savvy 6-year-old stepdaughter
I couldn't find the Wilde quote either, but I wonder if M. McLuhan wasn't getting at the same or similiar idea.
If my memory serves me correctly, you'd be the lawyer you likes to post as AC in order to "swear like a thug". Right?
No apple could not have gotten it right for 99.9% of users. That would require 99.9% of users to use either a modem OR a LAN. If you used a modem, and the setting was for ethernet, you got screwed. If you used ethernet, but the setting was suitable for modem, you go screwed. DID YOU NOT EVEN BOTHER TO READ ANY OF THE WORDS AFTER "WINDOWS"? it says that it is huge BECAUSE IT SUITS ETHERNET. BUT PEOPLE WHO USE MODEMS NEED TO BE ABLE TO CHANGE IT. In MacOS you CANNOT DO THAT, SO IF WHAT YOU USE DOES NOT MATCH WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO USE, YOU'RE OUT OF LUCK. Second, who said anything about G4 sucking at floating point? I said the G3 sucked at floating point. Next, consider this. In cracking RC5, a 450MHz G4 is about the same as a 1 GHz Athlon. RC5 is very biased toward G4 because AltiVec is MADE for that kind of processing. It's almost a best case scenario. In a more general case, such as 3D or imaging, does it not make sense that AltiVec would perform at say 70% efficiency, putting it in line with a 700MHz Athlon? Sure, Athlon has 3DNow!, but AltiVec blows it away, no doubt. But in cases where AltiVec is not used at 100% (like most games, 3D apps, photoshop, and UNLIKE best cases such as RC5) The sheer clockspeed of the Athlon ties the game.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Here is some more intelligent commentary on Aqua's interface features, both good and bad. I hope someone at Apple reads Every's take on the Aqua's Dock in part three.
m l t ml m l h tml
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekmon.ht
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeektues.h
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekwed.ht
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekthurs.
Alot of people, including me, were pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to install drivers on these things where the drivers needed a floppy disk to install.
It was awfully premature for Apple to just rip support for floppies,
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Floppies were already dead a couple years before the iMac came out, sans floppy. I can't think of any Mac software put out in the last four years that has not come on CD (exept for morons like Intuit and Quark).
Maybe its different in the business world, but I don't want to pay for extra hardware that I'm never going to use.
I've noticed that on the Mac, memory usage tends to scale with the actual amount of memory in the machine. I had a 9600 with 64 MB. 8.6 memory usage was around 25 MB. One of the 32 meg dimms went bad, and it was awhile before I could replace it. As soon as I yanked the bad one, memory usage dropped down to around 18 MB. 15 isn't that unbelieveable on an optimized 32 meg system. You people with 50 meg systems probably have at least 128 megs of ram installed, right? By the way, I'm not talking about disk cache usage (even though its default also increases based on physical memory present).
The use of transparency in the UI isn't new either, not even in a commercial product. Even Windows 2000 uses transparency for its menues.
Altogether, from what I have seen, Aqua is an evolutionary enhancement to the UI. It will appeal visually to a lot of people and that's why it will receive some enthusiastic reviews. But I don't think it changes interaction with the computer in any fundamental or important way.
No apple could not have gotten it right for 99.9% of users. That would require 99.9% of users to use either a modem OR a LAN. If you used a modem, and the setting was for ethernet, you got screwed. If you used ethernet, but the setting was suitable for modem, you go screwed.
What's to say that Apple didn't set it up to use different settings depending on whether you're using PPP or Ethernet?
For those who don't know yet, you CAN use 2 or 3 or even 4 buttons mice on a Mac even with a wheel mouse... So, the one button mouse is not a problem. Go and buy a Logitech and be happy if you like multi buttons. I think one button is cool for iMac, but not for G4. They should keep one button on consumers machines and put 3 buttons on pro machines...
Well, IIRC, "Asteroids" and a number of other classic arcade games were done with vector graphics displays. In that case, the display contributed to the design of the game, as there were more interesting angles and a sort of circular-ness to the whole game, vs. the up-and-down-ness of Space Invaders and its ilk.
Also, as my college was run almost exclusively on donated hardware(I was using Sun 3/60s in 1996), we at one point inherited a greenie (text-terminal) that used vector graphics. For me, the ghostly nature of the text was not as strange as the fact that it had separate and buttons. (I'm young, and it reminded me of my mom's old manual typewriter).
However, in this case, the vectors we're talking about are purely software. Most hard-core graphics manipulation (scaling, rotation, perspective) is done with vector math. Keeping everything as a vector saves some time in the creation of vectors from points/lines (although I can't see how that would be too computationally intensive.)
The only worry I have is that people will go bonkers with graphics transformations, which are inherently rather large and slow. I think the UI is pretty cool, and I definitely ooh-ed out loud when I saw the window morph up from inside the dock. But I've been waiting for OS-X for a while. All the beauty and simplicity of the MacOS with all the flexiblity and power of BSD command-line.
Share and Enjoy!
Well, IIRC, "Asteroids" and a number of other classic arcade games were done with vector graphics displays. In that case, the display contributed to the design of the game, as there were more interesting angles and a sort of circular-ness to the whole game, vs. the up-and-down-ness of Space Invaders and its ilk.
Also, as my college was run almost exclusively on donated hardware(I was using Sun 3/60s in 1996), we at one point inherited a greenie (text-terminal) that used vector graphics. For me, the ghostly nature of the text was not as strange as the fact that it had separate CR and LF buttons. (I'm young, and it reminded me of my mom's old manual typewriter).
However, in this case, the vectors we're talking about are purely software. Most hard-core graphics manipulation (scaling, rotation, perspective) is done with vector math. Keeping everything as a vector saves some time in the creation of vectors from points/lines (although I can't see how that would be too computationally intensive.)
The only worry I have is that people will go bonkers with graphics transformations, which are inherently rather large and slow. I think the UI is pretty cool, and I definitely ooh-ed out loud when I saw the window morph up from inside the dock. But I've been waiting for OS-X for a while. All the beauty and simplicity of the MacOS with all the flexiblity and power of BSD command-line.
Share and Enjoy!
Because of the way any OpenStep derived system works, if you don't like the way the default windows draw, code your own "theme engine" using the Aqua PDF primitives, make it into a bundle, and make the bundle initialiser function call [MyThemeWidget poseAs:someRandomSytemWidget];
Then, log in as root, drag the bundle into the relevant place for system extensions. Reboot the OS. Your theme bundle loads after the system stuff, swaps your classes into place.
Cuteness solved.
...by including the option to get to a CLI for those tasks that truly benefit from it.
Case in point: A bank that I know had an "archaic" computer system for their tellers to record transactions on -- each teller had a vt100 terminal and text menus to select from using a "hotkey" approach. The system wasn't pretty, but (after each new teller navigated the not-too-steep learning curve) the tellers had no trouble processing transactions at a decent pace....but then a salesdroid convinced the branch manager to go to a window-based solution because it was more modern and would (supposedly) improve ease of use and efficiency. It had the opposite effect -- not only did the tellers face the exact same learnign curve to navigate the (now graphical) menus, their hands were constantly leaving the keyboard to find their mice, click through the menus, then back to type in the desired data, then back to the mouse to change fields, etc. Their average time to complete a transaction nearly tripled as a result of "modernizing" their user interface, and they are thoroughly regretting the change.
The same holds true for the CLI for certain tasks, including almost all things related to system administration and maintenance. Ever tried to configure Apache under *nix, then compare to configuring IIS in Windows? The Apache config takes less time because all you have to do is pop into vi and edit a file -- it's a flat process that requires no navigation, leaving all the pertinent information in one easy to find and easy to edit place, versus digging through layers of menus to gain access to one click box buried under fifteen layers of menus...
In short, GUI and CLI both have their uses, and we'd all do well to consider which is appropriate for whatever task is at hand before we commit it to code and force our users into an inefficient way of doing things.
-- WhiskeyJack
(Sorry about the offtopic rant...)
Likewise for the shrinking/expanding icons in the dock... which brings up another problem: What about desktop space? People are getting more and more used to having $LARGENUM applications open all the time, and switching among them and/or grouping them logically can be a royal pain in both the standard WinXX and MacOS desktops as of now. Most WMs for Un*x do the Right Thing and have virtual desktops, so why doesn't Apple get with the program? Sure, Macs have huge monitors available and can run multiple monitors easily... but Joe User buying his first iMac probably can't afford that.
Apple could even get nasty and say, "This new, totally unavailable-anywhere-else 'Virtual Super SwitchDesk' functionality is almost as good as having 2 or more monitors connected to your iMac. " New checklist feature + increased hardware sales, eh?
Apple shot themselves in the foot when they made floppies an add-on. There are a freaking TON of older computers out there where the best and quickest means of data sharing is via 3.5" floppies. Maybe everything around your home and office has 10/100baseT, but that's definitely not how it is everywhere. Floppies will be around for another 3-4 years if not longer... remember, the IBM PC and its progeny are still around because A) it was easy to port old CP/M stuff to the PC B) all the new iterations of the PC are fully backwards-combatible. (sic)
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
UInconsistent, clunky, ugly GUI. Even such nice toolkits as Qt can not make it a looker mostly because nobody will ever standartize on it or any other. Do not even tell me about GNUStep - it is doomed. Development of GUI for Linux is driven by retrogrades. We will all burn in hell. Give mem my PDF desktop.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I agree with you, cuz I submitted this Ars Technica article over a week ago, and it was rejected. If there was a system where everyone could see the rejects, interesting articles might not slip through.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
... that you should stop hyperventilating over some company's practices... if you can't get your sh*t done in macos, then get a linux box (you could even make a *beowulf* cluster!!). Everyone... even you, I assume, knows the macos was/is a _consumer_ os, not a techie os.
runs like a piece of shit and crashes like a piece of shit, it is a piece of shit. Fuck Apple, and Fuck this "new technology" which is actually just the dregs of crap that's been floating around for the past decade, that Apple has taken and repackaged in less useful form.
So it took me all of 20 seconds to find this at www.be.com. here's an excerpt:
"No, the BeOS is not compatible with Apple's "G3" systems. We have requested from Apple the detailed technical specifications we would need to provide support for these systems, and Apple has declined our requests.
This information, concerning the design of the logicboard (including information about address spaces, custom logic chips, etc.), is available only from Apple. It is available only under non-disclosure, and only to "Mac OS licensees.""
Whenever the issue of Macs and floppy drives comes up, I just kind of shake my head and sigh. I think the reason they got rid of floppies is much simpler than people suspect: money.
From the very beginning, Apple used a 3.5" floppy drive with an eject motor. Floppies were ejected in software, by dragging the icon to the trash can or choosing to "put away" the floppy from a menu.
Back in 1984 this was pretty big stuff. Sony was the only company making the 3.5" drive at that point and they were happy to modify the design to include an eject motor since Apple was going to use them in every machine they built.
Fast forward a few years, and the situation had changed. PCs had abandoned the 5.25" floppy in favor of a 3.5" drive with an eject button. The price difference between the two units was staggering. Go to your local Fred's PC Hut and buy a bare floppy drive, and it's probably about $20. A replacement floppy drive for a Mac is about $200. Because the UI was so tied to a graphical way of representing mounted and unmounted filesystems, there was no good way to switch to a floppy drive with an eject button.
So, for many years, Mac loyalists held their noses, and ponied up 10x more for a floppy drive. At least we got to brag that a Mac never got an abort, retry, fail error.
When Steve Jobs was working on the iMac, the focus was on delivering a consumer machine. I suspect they did some polling and a lot of focus groups and came up with a magic number for the maximum price. The goal was to make the iMac affordable as an impulse purchase like a new TV or home appliance, not as a major capital outlay.
Bringing the original iMac to market for $1500 was hard enough already. The floppy drive alone would have been 13.3% of the total price of the computer! Compare that to a $20 PC floppy drive being 1% of the cost of a $2,000 PC.
Clearly, if they were going to meet the price target, the floppy drive had to go. Once it was out for financial reasons, it was possible to flaunt its absence. It became a design statement, and prompted a lot of chest thumping about forward looking technology.
All of that may or may not be true, but the reason it was a non starter in the iMac was because of cost, not ideology.
Once the decision was made, extending it across the prodict line was natural. In the powerbooks, floppy drives added weight, complexity, and mechanical parts that were likely to break. In the Pro models, how useful is a 1.44MB storage medium to someone who produces huge illustrations or digital photos? These people have used much higher capacity removable media since the days of the 44MB Syquest cartridge.
Of course, it helps tremendously that all standard CD players have a software eject feature so that Apple can use drives from any manufacturer, and users can replace broken ones with the same cheap drives that go in a PC.
At this point, it wouldn't be any faster. A modern PC-class machine spends the bulk of its time waiting for the user, the network, or maybe some secondary storage device.
--80md
From Tognazzini's article:
Is this really a good thing? Over at Web Pages That Suck they call it Mystery Meat Navigation[1]: Interesting how things go around: Somebody invents a "cool" idea that reduces usability, then somebody else borrows it for another application... just as the original users start denouncing it. Or maybe it's not as important a consideration in an OS, where once learned it's always the same thing? Any thoughts?[1]BTW, turn on your java before visiting, or you'll miss most of the fun.
I am also working on the concepts of a networked vector-based user interface system, where the graphics is based on SVG. The project would become much more than just vector graphics. Very early stage, no webpage. Mail me if you are interested in participating.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I've toyed with the idea of writing a simple GUI system using Macromedia's Flash standard.
This is openly available, and would allow some reasonably sophisticated behaviours, including transparency, antialiasing etc.
The Flash plugin isn't huge, yet delivers some nice multimedia functionality.. vector rendering, sound and animation facilities, along with freeform behaviours for widgets etc.
It does lack a lot of back-end and interactive functionality especially where native GUI widgets would normally be used, but i imagine a Flash renderer running on top of something like GNOME would provide a pretty amazing GUI.
Flash is also designed to be streamed over internet connections, and can be viewed inside web browsers on pretty much any platform.
Any thoughts?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
What if you're using DSL with PPOE? Thats point to point over ethernet. (What a lot of DSL and broadband companies use.) My point was that Apple can't possible account for all of these and just putting a little applet that says (what is you connection speed?) would be better than assuming it knew everything about the users machine and did not need any user input.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
[1]Turn on java for best results.
Have you done and Xlib programming? X is a bloated best!!!
To compare, on the Amiga GUI message passing was neatly handled by a small number of primitives:
PutMsg
GetMsg
ReplyMsg
WaitMsg
To boot, these were also used for I/O, and most other inter-processes communication.
On X, there are something like 10 functions and macros to duplicate many (but not all) combinations of these primitives. I was hurt when I first started writing X windows programs.
Also, it isn't immediately obvious how X's message passing ties in with the rest of the system. There were more than a few X programmers who were surprised to hear they could get a file handle for the X message stream.
And I haven't even started talking about fonts, stored bitmaps or (ugh) colour-management.
If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if display PDF provided a much much cleaner interface than X.
You are absolutely correct.
Since you are "screwed," allow me to help:
Someday you'll notice that 99.9% of the lusers on all platforms combined don't give a damn about MTU and doesn't know what MTU stands for. They just want to use their "damn computer."
Unless you are looking to charge them $90/hour to set their machine to Ethernet, because there is no obvious way for them to do it. In that case, I can see why Apple pisses you off. Ghod forbid the users gain the power to set that themselves, without at least donating a few hundred dollars to O'Reilly.
DID YOU NOT EVEN BOTHER TO READ ANY OF THE WORDS AFTER "WINDOWS"?
Yes, and my hearing aid works fine. Thank you for your concern.
Second, who said anything about G4 sucking at floating point? I said the G3 sucked at floating point.
Oop, ya got me with that one. I should have recognized that we were comparing 2.5 year old technology (G3) to 0.8 year old technology (Athlon)
So, about that GUI argument. ^_^
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Also, Apple has done something like this before. Does anyone remember Quicktime GX? I do. Quicktime GX was supposed to Apple's Postscript killer (according to Bob Cringely at least.) Quickdraw GX too was based on "objects", vector and otherwise, rather than plain pixels. It was incredibly fast, and you could do really cool AQUA like things with GX. But the Quickdraw GX API was also incredibly difficult to write to (objects without an object oriented interface). Steep learning curve. Apple itself had problems mastering the GX technology, (providing bug free printer drivers and apps,) and they eventually killed it. I wonder if anyone has actually tried to code to the AQUA API. I wonder if it's anymore developer friendly.
I think that a lot of people who are critisizing Quartz really don't understand what it's made for. The whole point of putting Quartz into the GUI was not the cool effects, (Though I presonally think they are kinda nifty) but the advantages that the underlying technology provides to users and developers. By basing the GUI on quartz, you gain quite a few things.
A. You keep with the cool oh ah thing Jobs is going for.
B. You get the user used to Quartz apps, so when future apps use Quartz, it will fit in with the rest of the applications, and the GUI. Other people have done PS before, but nothing as integrated as this.
C. You demo our some of the effects Quartz can do. By making users aware of it, you're more likely to get developers to develop for it.
D. You get a good GUI that is resolution independant, and has a good foundation. True, some of the asthetic and user interface points need work, but this is a first attempt to base a GUI on a page discription language. They can tweek that part in future releases, but you can't substantially change the GUI foundation in future releases. If they want vector GUIs to succeed, they have to put it into OSX along with all the other new stuff. The user interface can be refined, the foundation cannot.
E. Developers get an excellent tool that is well integrated with the rest of the OS.
I don't exactly see many people critizing X just because Athena and Motif look ugly. So yes, Quartz is a major step foreward, and the OS X GUI is pretty revolutionary. The stuff on top IS just candy, and should be treated as such when judging the merits of the GUI.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Reading about this "vector-based" UI made me think about an experience I had with an original Asteroids arcade game. Back then, there were no bitmapped graphics, and the drawing was done on the screen by moving the electron beam around the screen in the pattern you wanted the shapes to take. (As opposed to scanning across repeatedly and switching the beam on and off.)
The effect was no flicker and infinite resolution. Incredibly beautiful to look at. But it was monochrome.
So I started thinkin' - how could we make a vector based monitor that is color? If you bent the beam between the mask and the phosphor, could you cause it to selectively hit r/g/b phosphors in phase? The mask could be indefinitely fine, allowing for virtual infinite resolution. Bitmaps, if you needed them (I'm thinking of a super-ergonomic work computer), could be "emulated"?
If anybody who knows CRT's can help me, I'd be interested to know. It'd just be so easy on the eyes to have a decent sharp, smooth display...
Where is my mind?
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
How is it pronounced? OS "ex" or OS Ten?
Considering personal computers are used mostly for games (you know its true:), setting up the mtu and mru are really important for getting nice performance in multiplayer games. That is why there are special gui tools made for windows and I guess mac to handle that. (pretty much repeating what that guy said)
I'd say at least (out of my ass)25% of lusers would set the mru and mtu manually. And yes, I am ignoring most of you comment, sorry, i don't know about macs, or g4's.
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
We interact with our machines in a way that makes them site idle for most of the time, so why not use that idle CPU power to make the GUI nice and sexy.
Well, I agree in principle, but I don't think that CPU time is the issue. Personally, waiting for computers is the bane of my existence; probably a lot of other folks feel this way too. I'm frequently in a hurry when I use my computer, and not just when I'm playing games. I find it really irritating when a UI element does some kind of fancy cakewalk to try to grab my attention for 400-500 msecs, especially when I have a long sequence of operations to perform. Too much of this kind of thing and a user interface feel slow and clunky. I want menus to pop into existence and then instantly disappear when I'm done. When I dismiss a window, I wan't it gone -- I don't want it to linger around for entertainment value.
When you take a fast and simple process and make it slower and more complex, there ought to be a good reason other than getting an intial wow. At best it seems this kind of malarkey just fades into the background so you don't notice it anymore. I'm not dissing Aqua -- nobdoy has seen it yet. Maybe Apple's avoided this, but this kind of thing makes a UI feel slower to me. What happened to the idea that GUIS shoould be responsive?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How ironic that an article on user interface design should appear as white text on a black background :-(
Apparantly, you have never come across a blind user before. There are plenty of blind computer users that use GUIs. Many GUIs have some sort of support for alternate names of buttons and other ways of making life easier for the voice synthesizer many of them use. Of course, there are also blind people with hearing disabilities and, from what I gather, they don't like GUIs much... ;-)
> Is this really a good thing? Over at Web
> Pages That Suck they call it Mystery Meat
> Navigation
What makes sense on a Web page where almost everybody will be first time, transient users isn't necessarily the same for an OS GUI, and vice versa. You don't necessarily want to stare at + - etc. in every window you use, day in and day out. On a Web page, you're most often hiding the symbols from people who don't know what the buttons mean, because they just showed up from a million other Web sites with different navigation. On an OS, you're usually hiding them from people who do know what they mean because they've used the system before, and revealing them for the benefit of new users.
A cool feature of these hover buttons in Aqua is that when you hover over the widgets on a background window, the buttons sort of come forward on their own, so that you can close a background window without bringing it forward. That alone is worth using the rollover effect for.
So why there is LinuxPPC and YellowDog linux ?? .. Did they license MacOS in order to port linux to PPC ??
.. Oh yes .. there is some other more attractive offering in other places.....
Apple is not the only company that can make PPC computer, why don't they continue with their BeBox?? they probably will be the second PPC Personal computer company on earth, if BeOS (so called media OS) is so important and so superior plus their own hardware, maybe apple/MacOS is now dead already.
I don't see any reason why they not continue support or develope PPC Version of BeOS , but
So please don't blame other company for their change of decision, and betrayal of their supporters.
hey sparky, they could keep the rollover effect for background windows, but make the symbols permanent...
No, it's not a good thing. Tooltips are the single most atrocious UI invention of the 20th century. No wonder the Microsoft knuckledraggers use them religiously.
There's no reason why you can't operate a conventional color CRT in vector-drive mode, IIRC there's some specialized Federal Aviation Administration traffic-control gear that uses vector drive.
However, it's important to realize that most of the sharpness problems of color CRTs result from way the CRT works: You need different color phosphors to produce the diffrent colors. So while a monochrome CRT has a single phosphor deposited on the image area, a color CRT has to have more than one. The most practical way of accomplishing this on a mass-production basis is to use either triplets of phosphor dots (most tubes) or some other pattern (Sony's Trinitron, for example, uses vertical stripes). Then you use a shadow mask or wire grid along with multiple electron guns to produce beams that each strike only phosphors of a particular color. An important limitation of the possible sharpness is how small you can make the phosphor pattern (smaller is better, just like the dots in color printing), but as the dots get smaller image brightness drops (more electrons blocked by the mask), and some mechanical problems are introduced (the mask tends to warp due to electron heating).
Which leads to the problem of the accuracy of electron beam placement. This is affected by the mechanical precision of the shadow mask, and the accuracy of the beam placement and focus (both mechanical: deflection coils and the like, and electrical: drive circuitry). And remember, this isn't with just a single beam, it's the conicidence of the three separate ones.
With the monochrome CRT, you get rid of much of this complexity, which makes achieving high sharpness much easier. You have only a single electron beam. There is only a single phosphor, so you don't have to worry about masking parts of the screen off. And you have higher efficiency overall: With monochrome phosphors you can pick the "brightest" one available, for color tubes they have to be relatively balanced.
There have been some experiments using photographic techniques where the phosphor dots on the image surface are surrounded by a conductive grid which provides steering feedback for a single electron gun. This eliminates the shadow mask problem while increasing the deflection accuracy, but so far there haven't been any results that would be practical for mass production of tubes the size we're accustomed to having on our desks.
This is not a good sign...anyone remember Pink?
Do this don't do that Can't you redesign.
Berlin will be vector-based, as near as I can tell according to their Berlin Tutorial. They aim for complete resolution independence, as I understand it, which is something I have been wanting for a long time, which I also don't think even MacOS X can do.
Actually they say that "In order to place pixels on the screen, a graphic can request a path, a glyph, or a raster is drawn." They define the terms on the sited article above as follows. "A path is a sequence of vectors, optionally accompanied by a sequence of scalars specifying the knot vector of the path if it represents a NURBS object. If the path has no knot vector, it is interpreted as a polygon."
A glyph is basically a piece of text that usually represents a single character, but may be several combined characters.
And about rasters "In some cases, it is not appropriate to draw using vector paths. In such cases, we have a facility for loading PNG rasters into the display server, and then assigning them to scene graph nodes. Such redrawing can be done very efficiently because the raster can live in the display server, and is appropriate for objects such as icons, mouse pointer images, or pixel data loaded from an external source."
It seems to me that Berlin is very much ahead of the game, even ahead of MacOS X and Win2000 while GNOME and KDE continue to compete with Windows as it is now. I am not dismissing either desktops because I currently use one for my desktop. That is the point. They are here now and provide applications that make GNU/Linux viable for the desktop now. But I see Berlin in GNU/Linux's future when X Windows System itself becomes obsolete, which may not be for a while yet. But if/when Berlin becomes standard and viable, it would be nice to see the competing operating systems catching up to GNU/Linux instead of it being the other way around. And, alas, Berlin proves that Free Software is innovative and the implementations are done right!
Now that a think about it, the Ars Technica article defines three generations of display software: the second generation being most current GUIs with still relatively pixel-based drawing, and the third being Quartz that is largely vector-based with some added capabilities. With this system, Berlin is definitely at least fourth generation with instead of drawing to pixels like the second generation or drawing to vectors like the third generation, Berlin draws to much more abstract drawing primitives on top GGI. So that the user may specialize the interface to any number of mediums like a character-based one or to the printer or a hand-held. Each medium requires a new server and the Berlin server itself (not all servers, just the one they are implementing now) specializes to the traditional GUI. But the same application should be able to run on all mediums, as long as the medium supports what the application requires. There is little possibility of a graphics editor to run on a character-terminal based servor but a file manager should certainly be able to run.
I know of no other GUI that has this kind of possibility. Think of a future where Berlin servors are like Window Managers today, based on user preference. Perhaps the Berlin servor for the more traditional GUI. But imagine an Enlightenment server, without any of the restraints of X Windows System.
The future looks really really bright for GNU/Linux.
Under Linux, this is easy... ifconfig eth0 mtu 1440
Under Windows, there is a registry setting. Not the right way to do it in my opinion, but at least it can be done.
There is NO WAY to do this under MacOS that I could find. The only solution was some guy who hacked up the TCP/IP stack and wrote a little control panel where you could change the settings. That's not the way to do things.
While we're on this topic, I might as well share my fustrating unix story. I've just had the immense displeasure of spending more than an hour trying to coax a non-postscript printer into printing a postscript file, from a Unix (HP-UX to be specific) machine.
I first tried sending the postscript file to the printer using lpr. Garbage out. Ok, the printer doesn't support postscript, what do I do now? Search the web for the solution. Read something about using GS device settings. Try this. Spend the better half of an hour, but get no results.
Call me an idiot if you want to, but this is ridiculous. Printing should be as simple as choosing the printer you want to print with from within your application, then having the system do "The Right Thing(tm)" - none of this lpr, postscript file or not nonsense. Anything else is absurd.
Unix still has a long way to go in terms of usability. Sure, you can get everything to work if you know what the magic incantation is ("ifconfig eth0 mtu 1440"), but it is far away from being usable by the anyone who hasn't been accepted into the order of unix priests.
There is some utilites for mac to change the MTU in open transport. Sustworks makes a product called OT advanced tuner and there is also tools from apple called OT tuner and OT extra that can do this.
Apple has written a very cool interface. But you can't theme it. It's very limiting. You can even theme windows 98 to a degree. Is apple behind windows??? The interface is not customizable. Apple assumes everyone while diffrent people do have diffrent needs and diffrent styles of work. One needs to customize the computer to work for them and not the other way around.
The other thing that bothers me about apple is their one button mice. They are crap. While windows is moving to 3 buttons and a wheel linux also being able to use 3 buttons and wheel apple is sitting there with their thumbs in their asses saying how much supperior their lame mouse is.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Apple has written a very cool interface. But you can't theme it. It's very limiting. You can even theme windows 98 to a degree. Is apple behind windows??? The interface is not customizable. Apple assumes everyone while diffrent people do have diffrent needs and diffrent styles of work. One needs to customize the computer to work for them and not the other way around.
The other thing that bothers me about apple is their one button mice. They are crap. While windows is moving to 3 buttons and a wheel linux also being able to use 3 buttons and wheel apple is sitting there with their thumbs in their asses saying how much supperior their lame mouse is.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
about the vector animations of windows and such and then I remembered what systems OS X would work on, the G3s. Well I surmise (hope) that the vectors will be handled by the graphic subsystem on said Mac. This would be really efficient considering the graphic subsystems on most computers are idle unless you're doing 3D work. Maybe that is why Quartz is grouped together with Quicktime and OpenGL in the layers diagram. Using the video card seems like a really good idea to me since you wouldn't be wasting CPU cycles on vector translations. IIRC all G3 models have a 3D graphics card but previous 604e models didn't necassarily have them. This also might explain why Apple had said OS X simply will not work on pre-G3 systems. Someone who knows of a 604e based system (the 9600s maybe?) with a dedicated graphics board can correct me.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Dude - if the first machine is on a network, and you plug the new machine into that network also, why not just copy the files from machine to machine over the network? why bother with floppy disks at all? if your network is novell or something where you need to install drivers onto a machine to access the network - why not just create the "worlds smallest appletalk lan" for the few seconds it takes to do the machine to machine transfer?
Myself, I think floppy drives have long out lived their useful life! My PC (custom built) doesnt even have a floppy drive! You can install NT and most UNIX from the CDROM - why fuss with a floppy drive? For sneaker net, use a ZIP drive - everything I do these days seems to involve huge files. I can barely remember a time when I could move files by floppy - hell, even when I owned an Amiga system we had this split/join utility to break files into floppy sized chunk - what a pain in the ass. If you have some ancient Mac wares on floppy, copy them to a ZIP or something or burn a CD.
The one legitimate gripe someone might have is an application with a floppy based "key disk" - in that case, the manufacturer of said production should be taken out and shot. Stupid copy protection install authorization disks are the worst - especially when you consider how "reliable" floppy disks are! And of course that corrupt key disk was put out buy a company that has sense gone out of business, proving my point that this whole thing was a stupid idea.
The FreeBSD book has some useful knowledge on the subject: "I don't like floppy disks. UNIX doesn't like floppy disks. Probably you don't like floppy disks either..." (and at that point the author strays off course and tries to make some justification as to why it is ever acceptable to use the floppy drive - which it never is IMO
I read the Tog article on Aqua (heh, sounds like I was on drugs or something while reading the article.) Anyway, he seems to think the dock, or something like it, should be on the side of the screen instead of the bottom. That how it was done on the NeXT systems. However, I don't think I agree. I think the OS "stuff" should use up a minimal amount of the display - and I also like symmetry. The Mac already has the menu bar across the top - seems to me that if a second OS aspect is needed, the bottom of the screen is as logical a place as any. To have it auto hide and expand from the center is nice - as I said, symmetry is cool - bar on top, bar on bottom and the bottom bar even grows outward from center - nice. Also, a lot of apps (say Photoshop) already make good use of the screen edges by default for tool box type dialogs. I think this is the thing to do - let the apps make use of those edges. OS tool strips down the edges of the screen just makes me think of the Microsoft Office Shortcut bar - ICK.
How about a projection screen with three separate tubes, red blue and green?
Better inter-application communication would actually be useful. Maybe something XML-based. Then you could cut and paste (and drag and drop) structured data. You ought to be able, say, to drag anything that looks like a name and address to anything that wants a name and address and have the right thing happen. Linux land needs something like this; application integration under Linux sucks.
But hey, Apple's in the entertainment biz. Look how much mileage they got out of colored cases that look like an Lear-Seigler ADM-3A Dumb Terminal, circa 1974.
He was not talking about software, he was talking about drivers. Did you even bother to read the post?
Did you even bother to think about mine? Drivers ARE software!
Second, oh come ON! I would rather have a floppy. (Say I write a paper and need to take it to school cuz my printers broken. You're not telling me that is a rare occurance?
I happen to work in the labs in my school, and here is a common occurence for you: student saves work to disk. Student loses five hours of work when his disk gets currupted. Thats progress for you.
You merely control click on any selected piece of text and if it's an email address then relevant actions for email addresses show up in a pop-up menu, etc. It's called "Data Detectors".
Ars Technica did a "real world" review of the G3 and it sucked against Intel in Mac's own domain; Photoshop. Their reasoning is that the OS is a performance killer. In light of this what is it going to take to Run OS X? Quad G4's a a gig of RAM?
I bought a G3 400 last year and am totally disappointed with it's performance. Not to mention that I think that Steve Jobs should be forced at gunpoint to type the complete works of Shakespeare and the Encyclopedia Brittanica using that crappy mini-keyboard that they give you. Bastards. What I don't get is why they can screw over people like they did last fall, shrug their shoulders and bask in the blind worship of all these users? Did I not get a pod with my unit to turn me into "one of them". I hate Apple and will never buy from them again. Of course I realize that I coulda, shoulda gone Linux and am going there now, so I share the blame for my folly.
I find the Apple OS to be as buggy and weird as any Micro$oft product. I can hardly wait to see the messes that Aqua will give to users since every Mac magazine that I see announces the latest patches to OS 9 screwups.
Apple? Rotten to the motherfscking core.
Where's my abacus?
Hey, you think your house is cool?
I've heard the criticism of coolbars (the flat buttons that raise when you move your mouse over them) several times, and the only time I've ever heard the criticism is from geeks.
I've never seen a novice user wonder whether that little icon is an icon or a decoration. And I think it's partly because it's become (relatively) standard on Windows apps to put the toolbar buttons under the menu bar, so little-pictures-under-menu-bar = stuff-to-click-on; and partly because at least some of the little buttons have words under or next to them to indicate what action will be performed (does an arrow pointing to the left with the word 'back' underneath really leave any ambiguity?).
Unlike the buttons on the Mac OS X titlebar, no information is hidden before mousing over. And actually, by appearing raised in a mouseover or popping into color (IE, Outlook Express), the user is given a visual cue that they are clicking on the button that they want to click on.
And a row of buttons which all appear raised adds unnecessary visual clutter - if you've ever seen Word 95's ludicrously huge toolbar compared with Word 97's ludicrously huge toolbar, you'll see what I mean.
Yes, but when you change the MTU for the modem, it really does make a difference in speed. And there is a reason I compared G3 to Athlon. The leap in spead between G3 and G4 is one of a 2x magnitude at the same clock speed. The same is not true of PII to Athlon. So fine, compare it to PII, which is more than 2.5 years old. The PII is still faster at floating point. And a 700 MHz athlon in the general case is faster than a G4.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
But weren't tooltips an adaptation of the original Mac bubbly tips that came up in thought clouds?
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?