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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.
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....
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?
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
A moderator actually marked this as insightful.
I was a joke, you boob.
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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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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.
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,
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.
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."
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.
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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
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.
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
Being an alleged "Mac community" guy myself, I've observed that there are two "communities" over here on The Translucent Side:
;)
1) Those of us who use them because we love 'em (for good, easily articulated reasons). We're happy that the new stuff looks to be even better, and addresses all our misgivings about the current products. We don't care what anyone else uses, we only go on and on about Macs with each other, "geeking out" about them extensively. Your Linux- and BSD-running Mac guys are in this group.
2) The not-Windows crowd whose only real objections to Windows are its popularity and grey-and-blueness. 90+% of Evangelists fall into this catagory. They can't "geek out" about Macs, or tell you why might want to try one out; they just say they "rule." Like that embarrassing dipshit in Salon (who I think is also its editor--sad).
Same two camps the Linux crowd has. Or BSD guys. Or Pepsi freaks. Or Metallica fans.
And proprietary hardware is fine as long as it's good, and the company isn't about to go out of business. Again.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
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
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!
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.
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.
Display PostScript is actually rather limiting this day and age. Let me say that I don't know if PostScript level 3 fixed any of these issues, but so far as level 1 and 2 go:
PostScript couldn't support RGB images. That's good for printing, but lousy for screen displays.
PostScript couldn't layer objects. You can't just layer a 50% magenta square over a 50% cyan square and hope for a 50% red square. Whatever is on top takes precendence. Expensive trapping software would enable you to see the overprints, if you specified them, but by default, whatever is on top is what you are going to get.
PostScript also couldn't really handle bitmapped images that gracefully. There are so many headers that EPS's of bitmapped graphics are significantly larger than any other file format.
PostScript still rules for printing. It forces designers to pay for their mistakes (often directly out of their pockets!) when they try to accomplish effects that simply aren't feasible on an offset press.
Display PostScript has been extremely SLOW compared to other imaging models.
But looking to the future, Apple was quite smart to drop DPS for a PDF based model. More and more publishing is being done in an RGB format, so designers benefit. And since consumers using iMacs are also viewing those same documents on their screens, it makes little sense to adopt an imaging model that converts colors across several color spaces needlessly.
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.
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 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...
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.
> 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.
If by "'organic' shapes" you mean the jelly blobs of Aqua, I don't think they're intrinsically tied in any way to a "vector based GUI". In fact, the Ars Technica article says as much - it says of the gelatinous buttons, "On the other hand, nothing we've discussed so far can't be duplicated with a second generation display layer."
Well, I'm not sure what's "vector-based" about Display PDF; PDF is a PostScript-like language (not entirely surprising, considering who invented PDF...), so it might be "vector-based" in that a path might be made out of lines - but the PDF spec says that a "path object" is "an arbitrary shape made of straight lines, rectangles, and cubic curves", so it's more than just "vectors" (in the sense of "lines").
To put it bluntly, I would not, if I were you, hold my breath waiting for that to happen. I suspect it may be easier to make raster CRTs (you just have to make the beam scan left to right, and then scan the next line below it, and..., rather than being able to steer it arbitrarily), and the display on my desk isn't even a CRT - LCD displays (which, as far as I'm concerned, rule) are intrinsically digital monitors that display bitmaps.
I have the impression that, these days, rasterizing vectors is pretty much a solved problem.
The reason for a "vector-based" (or, as I might be inclined to say, "path-based") windowing system, at least as presented by Ars Technica's article, is that "vector" transformations (which, I suspect, are transformations on vectors representing points, i.e. the vector from the origin of the coordinate system to the point, not vectors representing lines from one arbitrary point to another) can be applied to the PDF description of something being drawn.
Much of the other advantages that article ascribes to a "vector-based" windowing system, such as the stuff Aqua does with transparency, have, I suspect, little if anything to do with PDF being "vector-based" (or "path-based").
Besides, I didn't see any mention of "vector-based graphics" on the Graphics page of Apple's stuff on MacOS X; "vector-based graphics" may have been Ars Technica's term - as suggested above, I'm not sure I'd use it, and that may be why Apple doesn't appear to be using it there, either.
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.
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.
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.