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MacOS X DP3
Rourke McNamara writes, "Some screenshots and my reactions after using Mac OS X DP3 for a few hours.
" Several interesting things: like seeing tcsh running top on MacOS. It's chock full of BSD goodness, but with that pretty interface on top. It'll definitely be interesting to see where this one heads.
Its slow, but is it pegging your CPU? If not, the speed is probably intentional (more dramatic, or something). Anyway, don't look for a speed boost in that area in the GM, but ResEdit 2000 (if such a thing happens to materialize) may offer some help.
Cocoa is like puberty. It makes wonderful things possible in the future.
So, you go grab Darwin, for free, and you add X, for free, and you go to it to your heart's content.
Did I mention that Darwin is designed to be CPU-agnostic? Yup, Intel too.
And, btw, the 'rest of the world' *still* doesn't have anything close to the NeXTSTEP application development frameworks.
=td=
Heh heh. It was probably Jobs that sued them, seeing how they ganked that panel directly from NeXTSTEP (along with most of the Win95 GUI).
> What do you think companies are more likely to support natively, OS X or LinuxPPC?
:)
:)
It depends on the company. If they are doing Mac stuff only, probably OS X.
If they are a Unix company they will port to Linux on Intel and probably screw both OS X and Linux PPC.
> but I bet it'll support USB and FireWire sooner than LinuxPPC does natively
Okay, LinuxPPC supports both now. OS X?
> and BSD appears (have to be careful here) to have an easier upgrade path
NeXT was built on BSD. So naturally it was easier for Apple to use it for OS X, since OS X is basically the evolution of NeXT.
> the Software Update feature of OS 9 took way too long to make it into the system
Automatic software updates have little to do with any particular operating system. The problems involved are pretty generic.
> LinuxPPC has been fairly critical of OS X and Darwin for some time now
Have they? Or are you just quoting that one guy?
The Kernel Extension SDK is going to be part of Darwin, along with IOKit, the driver framework.
And Darwin is, as you all know by now, open sourced.
Theoretically, yes. In reality, probably not... There are two fundamental problems. First, OSX uses a concept called nibs to create GUI's. You create interfaces in Interface Builder which is saved as a nib, it's kinda like a dynamically loadable interface component. Pretty much all Cocoa apps will be written using interface builder. So, to run apps on GNUstep, you'll have to do something about this. There is currently a program called Nib2Gmodel for GNUstep which converts the nib to something GNUstep can work with, but it is unfinished (but not bad...) The second thing you need to worry about are makefiles. OSX uses a different makefile format than GNUstepMake. OSX also uses a lot of property files (.plist) and project files that make sense to Project Builder. Hopefully Project Center on GNUstep will deal with these, and hopefully some tools will surface to convert OSX building files to GNUstep makefiles. The only other problem would be the fact that you're dealing with different compilers that are probably each going to have their own quirks... This could cause some headaches...
How much for a G4 system with 19" monitor ?
Nah, OpenGL was already accelerated for everyone else, Microsoft just did everything in their power to prevent it from being on the PC.
What drove the industry to produce a GeForce 256? Games! The SBLive? Games! Force Feedback? Games!
This technology was no more driven by Bill Gates than the Ferrari F1 team is driven by the CEO of a Tire Factory.
Direct3D was *purchased* from a 2-bit graphics company because Bill wanted ANYTHING but accelerated OpenGL 3D. Early D3D was so astoundingly poor that people used GLIDE (which was totally proprietary) rather than put up with it.
If you'd helped STOP Bill, you would have a GLPower 512, twice as good, chock full of game-related OGL extensions, and it would work in Windows, on Linux and on a Mac.
Don't believe the hype. Microsoft are not a fast-paced innovative company unless you're in the wrong industry.
The OS/2 analogy only holds so far: OS/2 PM Cocoa WinOS2 Classic -nothing- Carbon The transition API, Carbon, should give developers the ability to fully integrate into the OS/X environment without totally rewriting the app. Perhaps the old style window dressing is meant to be a kick in their pants (although you'd think that at least the title bars would be Aqua'ed.)
It's how goths stay so thin.
1) the dock. i thought this was going to be really lame, but the more i use it, the more i like it. the icon size on the dock is resizable according to your preference from relly tiny up to the full 128x128. the dock can disappear until you mouse-over the bottom of the screen, or it can always be present - your choice. the name of the file/app currently being moused over appears above its icon. magnification can be turned off, and the size of the magnified icons is adjustable.
2) resolution: i have a 17" monitor set to 1024x768, and it's fine. i did need to resize the desktop icons down a bit, as well as the dock, but i was able to get it to feel like my mac by getting them down to about 32x32 pixels.
3) transparency. there seems to be some confusion about this. things that are in the background are slightly transparent, not the foreground window. the transparent windows are just barely transparent - it's more a nice visual effect than anything. coupled with the subtle drop shadows, there's a nice three dimensionality to the whole thing. i have had several apps up and running at once, and not found it to be confusing or weird at all. much less confusing than when i'm running gnome on my YDL distro. if there's still too much clutter, windows can be minimized and maximized a la Windoze, so that they move to the dock or take over the whole screen, respectively. or you can click into single window mode which basically sends everything else into the dock leaving the topmost window available with the desktop in the background. i'm still not sure about this one, but we'll see.
i've been using macs for 15 years now, i'm a UI snob, and i thought i was going to hate this. but it's freaking cool. there are some inconsistencies and bugs in the developer release but for a first viewing of the new look and feel, i'm totally sold. plus the ability to move into classic mode is very cool. total backward compatibility with all my old apps.
this is gonna kill windoze.
I went to the screen shots page and got a bunch of MySQL errors. It seems like his MySQL server has crashed? slashdotted maybe?
Does the NDA allow posting of screenshots, or is this guy just an idiot for not submitting this anonymously?
grammar...hey look at that, another thought....
gnome uses corba - which means you can copy arbitrary objects ACROSS a NETWORK. transparently. look at ORBit.
There's some polish missing, but for even for a bit i started to get used to it. You start with two columns, with your drives (or homedir) on the left. If you single click an item its contents show up per screen (depending on screen size) and the rest scroll off to the left.
Um... It may be unwitting FUD on your part, but please note that QT 2.0 is DFSG-Free, and GPL compatible under european union law, at least - and note that QT is produced in Norway.
Now, we'd all rather it was LGPLed, but all it would take would be for *anyone* to buy out Troll Tech (are you listening Red Hat? Still stuck on Not-Invented-Here syndrome?), and QT becomes a GPL-compatible new-style BSD-like licensed library - i.e. everyone and his dog, even Microsoft, could use it. This is thanks to a rather long and convoluted legal arrangement worked out between troll tech and the QT steering committee
I'm not sure how i feel about about mixing the task bar also. If you click on the desktop. On the desktop. At first i didn't see that one.
having used a 25Mhz 040 next extensively, let me tell ya, they were WAY before their time. Hopefully now with 500Mhz G4s, it is time. we'll see.
post a story where the links work. fuckers.
It will only support G3/G4 systems.
niutil -appendrop -p . /groups/wheel users yourusername
Or substitute your netinfo domain for . if you're working with another domain. It will prompt you for the root password and walah. Netinfo is really cool, it's just different and takes getting used to.
- But that means that you actually have to move the mouse to the gadget/icon. UI No-No.
:-( Better if the gadgets go from ghosted to bright or monochrome to full-colour on mouseover, like IE5 button bar. Also, close gadget near to others is not usually a good thing, and one of the worst things about MS-Windows. I have my close gadget on right, iconify on left.
"Apps" is like the start menu on a windows machine in some ways: it appears that any carbon or cocoa application will install an alias there.- I also miss the zoom gadgets from AmigaOS - rather than just preserving maximise/minimise, you could warp between two arbitrary window orientations. I'd like to see this generalised to n arbitrary window orientations, perhaps with a "warp" drop-down menu preserving a window posion history.
There's nothing akin to an apple menu or a start menu, so the dock you'll need to open the file manager- Also, Enlightenment already does the icon-is-window-snapshot thing.
There are all sorts of stupid graphical apps for looking at the processes running, but are currently in the background. There's an orange bar below the currently active application. One odd thing is the macintosh equivalent of the icon the cursor is over, which is a multi-user operating system based on unix you need to log in at startup. Sort of. You can also adjust the max size of the icon the cursor is over, which is a very good thing. You can tell the os to automatically log in a particular user with a nice long list of errors that have occured since you started up your machine."MacOS X: It's chock-full of mutilated bastardized not-quite-BSD horror, but with that hideous dysfunctional interface on top! It'll be interesting to see how soon this gimmick fails."
If I want BSD, I'll get BSD. If I want an ugly useless interface, I'll get GNOME. If I want both, I'll run GNOME on X on BSD. Since I don't want an awful interface, I do want a command line, and I refuse to pollute my systems with something that's "almost" BSD, I'll continue running $UI on $OS, and enjoy (or not) BSD the way it was intended. MacOS X can suck it. The interface combines all the functionality and feature set of wm2 with all the visual appeal of Plan 9 and the speed and footprint of Enlightenment. Mac weenies and Mac weenie moderators can blow me. OS X, while an improvement on previous versions, is still 6 years behind the technology curve, and the interface assumes its users have the IQ of a rock. NeXT was a pioneer. NeXT was pretty. NeXT was 8 years ago. The rest of the world has built on what NeXT did; Apple has decided to warm it over and combine it with a crippling UI of its own. Apple. The connotations are enough; who needs to say more?
I've been using X for about five years now, and am quite familiar with the behaviour of the cliboard system. I thus feel entitled to say that it does, indeed, suck, and suck hard.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to copy formatted text (size, color, alignment, etc), and have the clipboard know when you paste whether the target environment can handle all those attributes, and include only the approriate ones?
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to copy some text and paste over it? The most common case for this is certainly the netscape location bar. But with the implicit copy model, you're SOL; you've just copied and repasted the same text, both failing to accomplish anything useful, and destroying the clipboard contents.
Don't you find it annoying every time that you click somewhere in a window and accidentally doubleclick, or drag your click a few millimeters, thus selecting something, and again destroying your clipboard contents?
Isn't it bothersomely inefficient to need to go to the mouse every time you want to paste? Given how much unix people whine about the mouse-centric nature of the mac, I'm always bemused by X's inability to perform this simple operation with the keyboard.
X's clipboard is a very poorly designed, minimalistic way to move plain text very slowly and erratically. I'd love to someday see a real cliboard implemented, but that seems sadly unlikely at this point.
many people prefer to code in C, for a variety of good reasons. QtC is a joke, and a bad one.
many apps have been written with GTK-- (check freshmeat). How many apps have you seen written with QtC? The language of the day changes. an API that we'll have to deal with for a while shouldn't tie us down.
NeXT had advantages over X that go far beyond simple flashiness. And really, X still is very rudimentary, in comparison. Clipboard, anyone?
What's strange to me is that people continue to try to kick life into the rotting carcass that is X.
Microsoft is awesomE I just installed windows 2000 and it kicks all holy asS You linux freaks had better be prepared to suck bill gateS
Actually, al least since DP2 (which came out last fall) OS X has been on top of Mach 3.0.
You make it sound as if there would be a difference but there really isn't any. Making your drivers build for Next x86 shouldn't be the big problem that you make it out to be. This is true especially now when there's so much commonality of hardware interfaces between PC's and Macs.
Simply put: if there is a bit of hardware that would be unsupported for some reason under MacOS 10 x86, it would also be unsupported under MacOS 10 PPC.
Apple seems to bother with PCI slots for a reason...
John Carmak(yes that one) has already ported X windows to Darwin, so running it on a full Mac OS X distro would be possible. The only hang up is; how the heck to you make Finder.app go bye-bye so you can use X windows?
As a matter of fact, 2) has already occurred - check out macthemes
Now, the appearance manager will doubtless have been modified in OS X, but it shouldn't take too much longer for the same people to revers-engineer the modifications...
From what i've read, the quicktime movies only continue to play if you have a G4(altivec), they don't play on a g3.
Why X? Because Apple gutted NXHosting, and a network that only allows you to run processes on the CPU you happen to be sitting in front of would be ridiculous.
do you think you can handle it?
Ok.. how about you try copying images... ore anything else than text for that matter?
Not intending to flame here, but I just don't get the supposed usability advantages of the Mac UI...really. Perhaps it is just a familiarity thing, I come from a windows and more recently an x background. The few times I have actually sat down in front of a Mac by myself w/o the assistance of an experienced user I was totally lost. The most frustrating thing was that the menus were located at the top of the screen and not on the application window! what in the hell is that for? All I could figure was it was a way to discourage the practice of opening multiple applications and stessing out the OS. Perhaps one of the Mac afficienados out there could explain the advantages of the UI--something more than the claim that studies have shown that the default Mac layout allows users to point and click there way aroung 20% faster than in the default Windows layout.
Apart from small details. Like using X instead of Apple's render engine. And the fact that the 'lickable' OS X interface looks very little like the NeXT interface. And the lack of OpenStep APIs and hence feel. No Display PDF technology.
But apart from that, practically identical!
Are you just so anal that you can't read that it will "look NeXT-ish and MacOS X-ish"? He never claimed it would exactly replicate Mac OS X' look. Superficially it will look the same regardless of what technology is used - Window Maker has a dock, so does Mac OS X - they're not exactly the same but they do look similar. All you've done is say that the technology behind them is different, not that they won't look similar.
It's from NeXTSTEP, and is much older than Win95.
> Well! This is it! Photoshop, Dreameaver, Flash, Illustrator... all on BSD!
No, actually, when/if these programs get ported they will be running on NeXT 2000, not BSD.
The BSD layer will only be used underneath the 'Yellow Box' libraries that programs are actually written with.
Active Server Pages (ASP) were created and developed by another company. I had thought that ASP was created by Microsoft in response to CGI and server side scripting on the Apache platform, and I think they propagate this view, because I can't find anything relating to ASP before Microsoft. However, in a brief stint there with the WebTV for Win98 group, I worked with Jim Laurel, who had been one the main founder of the company (whose name I never learned) that created ASP (he was the business end). I believe he is still there, working on ATVEF stuff.
Knowing that, I still can't find anything on the web about ASP being sold to MS. I'd be curious if anyone can. I'm guessing ASP just wasn't known at the time of the companies purchase, so no articles made a reference to it. Does anybody know the name of the company? Anyway, I've talked extensively with the man who founded the company that created ASP, so there is your firsthand source.
> Once MacOS X is released, this may spell the death of linuxppc
Not unless Apple is planning on making Mac OS X run on IBM RS6000 workstations, along with all those embedded PowerPC boards, not to mention PowerMacs older than the G3.
> and the sheepsaver port
As far as I know the sheepshaver port never materialized.
You can run Mac OS within Linux quite well on with Mac-on-Linux, which is free (unlike SheepShaver):
http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
> Why install linux when you have a free robust BSD to run your GNU tools on?
Depends on what you're doing. Again, Mac OS X will not run on any of the older Macs, so unless you are buying a new machine it's not going to be an option for you anyway.
hehe, I bet his server runs (err, ran) MaxOS X and it couldn't handle the 2 hits/minute.
I've got it up and running. I LOVE the fact that I can get a tcsh shell and do all the nice Unix stuff directly in MacOS and not have to reboot to LinuxPPC. However, the new Mac interface isnt all that great. I would much prefer the option to use an interface more like the current one. Im not sure if that is supposed to be something they will add by the final release or not. Unfortunatly it is very slow due to being compiled in debug mode. Ive read sources that say there should be up to a 75% improvement in speed when debug mode is removed, so I doubt that speed will be an issue.
My 2 cents.
PS: My appologies if I reiterated anything in the link above, I couldnt get it to load (slow network on my end it seems)
see, Apple did it. A powerful computer combined with ease of use. UNIX with a GUI that's easy to use. WHY cant linux do the same. This proves the ease of use vs. power argument is bogus. You can have a scalable interface with power and ease.
MacOS X isn't out yet. A developer preview is (and IIRC you're forbidden from putting those on the Internet), as is MacOS X Server, and both those are as stable as any other BSD Unix.
Specifically, MacOS X will have a Mach 3.0 kernel (OSF Mach 7.3). I don't know if OS X Server is running that version now; it was originally running a NeXT variant of Mach 2.5.
You miss hitting both buttons at the same time because your hands are gnarled and RSI-ridden from being forced to use crappy strain-your-fingers 3-button mice for much of your life in a windowing environment which requires you to use the mouse for almost everything, even changing window focus, and there are never any consistent keyboard shortcuts to help you out.
This select-does-a-copy is the shittiest thing about X windows, and my god it's got enough competition.
Back in the day, the dark days of Apple, they thought long and hard about what they could do to turn it back around. Most people think that jobs and nextstep were the ones that brought Apple to where it is today and this delicious gui. This is not the case. Folks like abbstract and cisco designed this delicous gui, with kennyken, [geo], godlike, and spudnuts working on the new APIS. This new OS is chock full of #rit goodness. And even constant bitching from Kron and pele, and a little humor thrown in from parker and sigma. Everything that has made apple what it is today, and OSX what it will be lies in #rit. And who would've thought IRC could be so powerful. core to da max.
Please please please please make sure your server is up to it before posting to Slashdot.
You may not think so, but it's mighty embarassing when your server gets slashdotted when the comments on the article are still in single-digits! Sad...
complex
LinuxPPC running MoL (Mac-on-Linux) ... akin to vmware from the Dark Side (although MoL is fully GPL'ed)
GNUstep won't make it easier to port X apps.
It's not about BSD or it being a spiffier NeXt. Sure these things are important, but it's not like people are waiting for BSD apps or Next apps to be ported so they can run them on PowerPC. It's all about Carbon. MacOS X is Carbon. It's that simple. 95% of all the old API's minus all the crap that stopped multitasking, memory protection, real vm, and multi-processing. I mean really, how many Mac Users are waiting for that port of that great Perl scripting environment?
Sure, the buttons throb to show they're highlighted, but can you tab from one button to the next?
Sure, the dock expands and shrinks accordin to how many items are in it, but can you mount a hard-drive to the desktop? And what is the use of the dock if there are no names shown there? If I have a dozen command-lines open, how the heck am I supposed to tell which gorgeous 128x128 pixel 'console' icon refers to which?
This all might be great if you a have a 34" monitor set at 3000x2400 pixels, but all those oversize icons, buttons, widgets &c. sure would eat up screen real estate. Have you yet seen any screenshots of people running 5 or 6 apps at once? My guess is no, because all you'd see would be a field of gigantic blue semitransparent widgets, with no room anywhere for the apps themselves. It's great UI unless you want to see what's going on in four different output windows... Don't get me wrong, I'm a mac user, enthusiast even, and I'm excited to see Mac is finally a BSD at heart. But I see essentially nothing but bad UI decisions here - seriously, I'm not sure whether to switch to OS X or to LinuxPPC, and I haven't owned a non-Apple computer since the Apple][e.
If you want to flame me, I actually am a member - scruffymark - just can't recall my password right now. Send righteous indignation to themark at visto dot com.
Or you could just say that it is a more modern and friendly nextstep since it is built upon a bsd base with a mach kernel...
Hrm, well, I seem to remember reading that Carmack was porting X windows to Darwin, so check his .plan or the Darwin developer's list if you're interested.
MacOS X's display system, nicknamed Quartz, is based on PDF to get around the Display Postscript licensing issues. There's a fat article at Ars Technica which details why this is a good thing. It's not clear to me that anything has been lost by dropping Postscript, other than a licensing headache.
Go check www.stepwise.com for the blurb.
IIRC, he's waiting for XFree86 4.0 to create patches to merge them back in.
Nice pictures... lots of pretty graphic elements. Unfortunately, useability seems to have taken a back-seat to prettiness. What do the color circles do? What is each of the completely textless icons at the bottom supposed to mean? Is it like the "mystery meat navigation" that Jakob Nielsen complains about so much at useit.com?
RISC is most likely the best architecture. x86 was based on RISC but just has more instructions and different registers/method. RISC > *
Does anyone have links to benchmarks which quantify the MacOS Mach performance penalty? Mach is notoriously slow, and with all the eye candy on top of it, MacOS X is terribly inefficient. The question is, "how much"? I would love to see the benchmarks. I note that Apple is quiet about performance, so the numbers must be pretty unfavorable.
BeOS is based on Unix?
OS X Server wasn't overly stable for me, but that's because I was using it as a desktop OS and it's meant to be a server OS. Using a hacked GUI interface never itended to run multiple intensive gui apps just didn't work. I had a lot of times when it would just freeze up trying to do something (okay, maybe not freeze, but I got tired of waiting for it to respond after a few minutes). Plus MacOS.app was a great way to bring the system to a halt when doing anything intense. OSX will defintely be much more stable, Server was quite a hack... MacOS8/9 have been extremely stable for me, which is impressive considering the number of funky entensions I have. Honetly, I typically only reboot after installing software (why apple, why?) or reconfiguring my extensions. OS7 was a horrible OS for stability, but 8/9 have been way more stable for me than any windows box I've used.
just goes to show that open source DOES NOT WORK :)
Yeah, whatever... I'd like to know why anyone'd complicate things by serving screenshots from a RDB instead of a filesystem. I didn't even try to look at the screenshots 'cause the URLs looked suspect
What a troll... Everybody knows that Microsoft SQL would have been dead in seconds instead of a 30 minutes of pounding that MySQL took.
This doesn't seem to make much sense for Apple to sanction this (if they have any way of stopping it). The whole point of the MacOS is the quality of its GUI -- while it's great to have a CLI in MacOS, the *real* value of the MacOS is the ease-of-use that the GUI provides. Why would anyone run X over OS X? Why not just use pure BSD/Linux/etc.? Why not just build a nice Intel platform and download a free OS, rather than buy a Mac and pay for a copy of OS X (barring ridiculous ideas of subverting the wintel market share)?
Apple makes their real money selling hardware.
So you're asking.... are they going to pour a lot of resources into allowing you to run their new stuff on your old hardware? ha
ha ha
hahahah
ha ha
Remember the original NeXT ran on 16MHz 6800's, or 33MHz if you were rich! LL
It is not very different from the timezine dialog currently used in the mac os. maybe it was apple that stopped ms from using the interface.
No! No! It's WINDOWS EVERYWHERE, DAMMIT! WIN2k IS THE FUTURE! GET WITH THE FNARKING PROGRAM, YOU CRYBABY MAC PEOPLE LIVING IN THE PAST! ;) =td=
Not a chance.. I think they learned with Openstep Intel what a mess that is...driver hell. If my only experience with Openstep had been on Intel rather than NeXT hardware, I would have thought it was a massive hunk of crap. Why should they waste their time making sure every last kludge PeeCee clone out there can run their OS when they could very simply just sell another fruity see-thru Mac? That's the beauty of Apple..it just works.
It's the IOKit, a framework for writing drivers and other things to be loaded into the Mach kernel space. The IOKit replaces the DriverKit, which was an Objective-C class framework for creating device drivers. It'll be part of Darwin, so it will therefore be open. Take your pills. It'll help with the paranoia.
> If you can make Darwin run, you'll be able to make OSX run.
Not if the binary-only parts of OSX are compiled with G3 specific optimizations...
Well... Let's just say I wouldn't mention gnumeric or anu consumer based apps as a reference for X... but for specialized engineering or professionnal apps having a X server is VERY relevant. As for the remote access to a graphical interface. NeXTSTEP used to be able to do it fine... but now it is sadly not the case... Apple more or less killed this feature for Quartz I think... So it remeains a comeling advantage for X... Why choose Excell or gnumerics when there are some much better and more robust spreadsheets applications available from the NeXT world?
Sheesh.
Shouldn't you be crossposting this tirade on an Urban Legend/Conspiracy site?
Lay off the "Microsoft stole the source, we are talking it back" revisionist history.
I've never heard anybody make source code seem more like a poor liddle homeless chile that the mean big company hurts so.
Not that any of this will sink in.
someone PLEASE moderate this down, as "Score: -1, Gross as hell" dont go there unless you want to be permanently disturbed
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
Sorry, I think I'll stick with NeXTSTEP 3.3 (Intel). (And when running Linux I'll use Windowmaker!)
Before you say GNOME has a crappy cut and paste system you should learn how it works. First you select text, then you put the mouse cursor somewhere where you want it and press the middle mouse button.
If you don't have three buttons (omg, i have no idea what you would do with 1 button) then emulate 3 buttons in the X configuration and press 1+2 at the same time.
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Warning: Please reply carefully. Otherwise, you just feed the troll ;)
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Did I get 208?
Warning: Please reply carefully. Otherwise, you just feed the troll ;)
Please stop posting links to sights that run inferior operating systems that cannot handle a Slashdot bombardment!
stick your fucking cock up your ass
I've been trying it out on a g4 for the past few days, and have been generally impressed.
First and best, it's pretty much just bsd in there. The first thing I did was compile ssh, followed by compiling a few other tools I like which hadn't been there. It usually requires a bit of Makefile-tweaking, as configure tends to not recognize the system, but I haven't yet found anything which I couldn't get to build.
As far as the ui goes, it's surprisingly beautiful. Very smooth, subtle drop shadows on all windows, nice and snappy solid window dragging, good use of transparency. I hadn't been all that excited by the screenshots of aqua, but using it is great.
Security:
On the good side, it defaults to (and recommends against) having all standard services running after install. Better than Redhat, there. On the down side, Apple specifically disclaims the security of this preview release, and recommends against installing it on an internet-accessible machine. Portscans show about fifty bizarre ports open, so I'm sure that they have some strange devel/debug stuff running. This doesn't speak to the security that the final product will have, but please don't trust this one yet.
My only other gripe: NetInfo. Sucks to not be able to just edit the standard unix text config files for many things. In fact, I still can't su, as I can't figure out how to add myself to the friggin wheel group.
When you miniaturize a window, a snapshot of the window is taken and placed in the dock. This is where the magnification feature is really handy. You can actually see which document the icon represents before you expand it.
I've spent a little time in front of OS X DP3 over the last few days, and this is the WORST thing Apple could have done.. It's nearly impossible to differentiate between a Sherlock and a finder window.. God help you if you have multiple Sherlock windows sitting in the DockBar.. Note: OS X will also throw minimixed snapshots of your terminal windows in the dockbar..
The biggest complaint I have is the fading of menus, windows, etc.. Everything pulses, magnifies, or fades out.. It's slow, sucks up extra CPU cycles on my little G3, and generally is unneeded.. Hopefully Apple will give us the option to turn this off.
There are still a lot of bugs to be worked out, but I think Apple's on the right track with OS X.. It's a little slow to launch applications on a G3/300, but the GUI seems much smoother than the last version of GNOME or KDE I tried on LinuxPPC (that was a little while ago)..
1) Drivers
Hunh? You mean for peripherals? Try IOKit, due out this week to developers. Drop dead easy driver development in embeddedC++. (Okay, so that part's a bit suspect, but the scuttlebutt is that the vast majority of USB/FireWire/ATA/SCSI devices should Just Work, and modifying an existing driver for vendor specific features (or bugs) is about as trivial as it gets.) Don't forget, this is a Developer Preview, NOT a finished product. Jeez.
2) Seamless integration
One word: Services. As a long time (since 1984) Mac user, I've totally fallen in love with the idea of these... the implementation could be improved (contextual menu, for instance), but the idea is superb.
Another word: AppleScript. Still there, still kicking.
3)Ports to Carbon.
Talk to the developers that are whining. Sorry, I've looked over the Carbon APIs, and the only things that are missing are problems, errors, and bad programming practices. Anyone griping about the new technique (as opposed to lost APIs such as QuickDraw GX), needs to get out of software development. These are *nice*, and short little hop away from full-blown OO, without making all the developers jump in with both feet. Guess what... they built in a transition ramp to OO as well. Nice touch.
4) UI
From what I've seen, Aqua provides a vastly simplified and *intelligently* simplified UI. It takes all the various pseudo-similar ideas from the MacOS UI, distills what's similar, and makes it into a unified interface element. Eg: the Dock. *IF* the dock elements support drag and drop ala tabbed windows (which is the rumor), then you have a single element that incorporates: the Application Menu, the Apple Menu, tabbed windows, control strip. New users have *one* thing to learn, not four. I think they've done an outstanding job of taking that simple idea and enhancing it to make it powerful at the same time (magnification, tooltip type names, window snapshot minimization, etc). There are still a couple of points I want clarified (the current line under an app's icon to indicate running status is iffy), but 90% of it is wonderfully improved.
Apple is directly on the right track, IMNSHO.
Get the darwin source from http://www.apple.com/publicsource. Darwin is a standalone OS that is also the core of OSX, they are a little out of sync right now, but it will show you how it works internally. For the most part it is BSD (I don't know what version DP3 is based on..) with a mach kernel (again, don't know what version of mach DP3 uses). Throw in a bunch of frameworks and a windowing system, and you got OSX.
...when you can have this?
The MySQL server that hosts the pictures went down immediately after the link got posted
If they had been using Microsoft SQL Server running under Windows 2000, then this would not have happened. This whole incident just goes to show that open source DOES NOT WORK and DOES NOT BELONG in any self-respecting software shop. As a result, I've ordered my network guys to hunt down and eradicate all Linux machines at the office. Back to Windows for them. They had their chance to run an experiment, but as this proves, open source is a miserable failure.
Not as much as you might think...
no vertical menu - the horizontal menu wastes space, doesn't provide a text title for the current app and can't be moved or hidden---nor easily configured for use with multiple monitors
No argument there.
no top-level print, hide or quit
Now there is. :)
no built-in faxing and file saving at the print panel - under OPENSTEP I never have to waste time picking printers from the chooser or control strip, or going in to page setup to set the destination to file
MacOS X Server has the file saving at the print panel... faxing was lost somewhere along the way.
no rich set of clients for Services, no Webster.app for definitions, nor Oxfords.app for quotations
What do you mean by this? There are plenty of Service under MacOS X Server. This is just FUD.
In addition, Webster.app and Oxfords.app, etc, have been replaced and made much nicer by the good folks at Omnigroup.com... and it's free.
no Shelf - having this would address most of the complaints regarding the awkwardness of copying
I'm holding out judgement until I get to use the UI. I haven't had any problems under MacOS X Server
no icon headers at the top of the Browser columns---these make excellent drag and drop targets.
Even better targets are the folders themselves, ala MacOS. I've never understood why the icon headers were necessary... they're incredibly limited in comparison.
no desktop as void into which UI elements are dropped to remove them---no manual deletion of aliases in NeXT/OPENstep
Again, not sure what you're alluding to here... if you mean to cancel a drag n drop, the menu bar offers that purpose.
no pre-licensed PostScript or Pantone color libraries---the latter was especially nice since all NeXT apps use the same color panel and have access to Pantone swatches, moreover, one only has to pay for them once.
I'm not suprised by the lack of Pantone... that's a rather high-end feature in most folks' eyes, and MacOS X is being targeted at the consumer.
Not sure about system-wide address book or spell-checking....
Services. See above.
save status in window close button---the greyed out proxies don't show up in a torn-off window menu
Dimpled close for unsaved changes would be nice.
and that's just off the top of my head.
As are my answers. :)
Apple uses FreeBSD. Combine that with WindowMaker and it will look NeXT-ish, and by extension, Mac OS X ish.
Apart from small details. Like using X instead of Apple's render engine. And the fact that the 'lickable' OS X interface looks very little like the NeXT interface. And the lack of OpenStep APIs and hence feel. No Display PDF technology.
But apart from that, practically identical!
<flamebait>Is this some wort of measure of how desperate FreeBSD advocates have gotten to try and get people using FreeBSD, or is this guy just thick?</flamebait>
In small part, I agree. As a 14-year Mac user, it seems the designers of OS X don't quite grok some basic interface concepts that Mac users take for granted. Reading various NeXT users' posts on mailing lists, it appears that a lot of really cool NeXT features were broken by designers who didn't understand them either.
So, I wonder, if the designers have little Mac experience, and little NeXT experience, no wonder OS X is so confused!
I haven't used OS X DP3, I'm not under NDA for that; what I have used is Mac OS X Server, and Mac OS 8/9.
So, to respond:
no top-level print, hide or quit
no built-in faxing and file saving at the print panel - under OPENSTEP I never have to waste time picking printers from the chooser or control strip, or going in to page setup to set the destination to file no rich set of clients for Services no Shelf Pantone color libraries---the latter was especially nice since all NeXT apps use the same color panel save status in window close button---the greyed out proxies don't show up in a torn-off window menu Anyway, I really hope all the stuff in DP3 gets cleaned up - right now the interface looks like they just assigned a whole lot of people to port whatever was there to OS X, and not really do any designing or rethinking. They seem to have kept the Network control panel exactly as is in OS X Server - a bad design if I've ever seen one.Here's hoping...
--
The MySQL server that hosts the pictures went down immediately after the link got posted - the /. effect was quicker than ever :-)
Did anybody mirror the pictures while they were available?
So yeah, there are some differences in the user base -- there's some weeding out and some reseeding -- but it's still a vastly different situation than what Win developers asked to move to OS/2 experienced.
--Matthew
--Matthew
So Apple are punishing users for the non-action of developers? An interesting theory, and given Apple's history not totally inconceivable.
I think you underestimate Mac users. How are they being punished because some widgets won't be as pretty as others? And I think it's a very safe bet that the best way to get action out of developers is to turn the wrath of the Mac community on them.
Case in point: MS Word 6 for the Mac was severely vilified, because MS used their own libraries instead of the Mac libraries, and Word 6 had the "look and feel" of Word for Windows. Microsoft touted this as an advantage ("works the same on both platforms!") but the Mac users would have nothing to do with it. Word 6 was destroyed in reviews, and sales of Word 6 stunk. People either stayed with Word 5 or switched to WordPerfect.
Microsoft "got it" and the next version of Word used the Mac look and feel, and got a cover on Macworld (or was it MacUser) that shouted "Microsoft Repents!"
Don't underestimate the power of the marketplace to get the attention of developers, even the almighty Microsoft. Mac users are a picky bunch, and vote with their wallets. If Mac OS X catches on, developers will port their code to Carbon. Bet on it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
IIRC, the NeWS people did this first --- they were using the precursor to display postscript, which made display-into-icon near trivial.
John
John_Chalisque
Try IOKit, due out this week to developers...Don't forget, this is a Developer Preview, NOT a finished product.
This thing hits store shelves in less than 6 months. Six months for all the major peripheral vendors to get their ducks in a row, and less than a year before there is no other choice. Apple's been dragging their ass on this since X Server hit the scene. Just another example of Apple's inability to put development support behind X.
<em>One word: Services.</em>
One word. Control Panels. No longer there...everything from third party font management tools to aftermarket graphic card controls are gone. Mac users will either have to do without, or not upgrade.
Another phrase. Plug and play. Gone, daddy, gone. Apple expects you to learn shell programming. Write yourself a script to kill -hup inet.d, because the built in tools ain't bright enough to do it on their own. Serious. The way it stands, you need to reboot. Less than six months until this puppy is on store shelves, and they aren't even near "Cross the t's and dot the i's". This is supposed to be for the Mac user? Fuck that noise, man...Unix in all it's dot-file glory is lurking just beneath the surface.
<em>Sorry, I've looked over the Carbon APIs, and the only things that are missing are problems, errors, and bad programming practices. Anyone griping about the new technique (as opposed to lost APIs such as QuickDraw GX), needs to get out of software development.</em>
You mean shops like Microsoft, Adobe, Qualcom and Macromedia? I'll pass the word along. I'm sure they'd love for us Mac users to wither and die so they can bask in the glory of wintel. Bleah. You aren't a developer in a major shop, are you? Bet you've never even seen more than five macs in one place. Come back when you are ready to rejoin the real world, where people are expected to get work accomplished with their tools.
<em>Then you have a single element that incorporates: the Application Menu, the Apple Menu, tabbed windows, control strip.</em>
It does indeed...but it's an unusable mess by all accounts. It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! It's a taksbar! You can't tell what is there because it's open, becuase you put a shortcut there, or even which file is which if you have more than one open. You have to mouse around, play hide and seek to guess which is what, and hope to god you haven't lost something you really need when all you wanted to do was close an extra file. The window controls break fifteen years of user familiarity...for a leap -backwards- in usability. Destructive "go away" box on the left, non-destructive resize or hide controls on the right. Now we got an arrangement like Windows...and as any Mac user who has used windows before, we are going to hide when we want to close, close when we want to zoom, and zoom when we were just mousing over the controls to find out what the hell each one does again...
<em>New users have *one* thing to learn, not four.</em>
Yeah! All they need to do is jump into differential calculus...no wasting time with addition, subtraction, multiplication -and- division!
Complete geek think, and utterly counterproductive to people who need to get real work done.
SoupIsGood Food
Most of the long-time Mac fanatic s who have gotten their mitts on x DP3 are in a screaming panic. Whatever the hell this thing is, it's not a Mac...It's all gone. All of it. All of the ease of use, GUI conventions, and stone simple user-centric systems administration that allowed the Mac to hang in there while other systems have come and gone...no more. We have a lickable interface that is, for all intents and purposes, a quantum leap backward over MacOS 9 in terms of usability.
Where the hell are the drivers? Where the hell is the seamelss integration of previous tools and applications? Where the hell are all the ports to carbon? Most of the big development shops have found carbon to be all but unusable, incorporating only a laughably simplified subset of the Mac APIs. Managers of large sites are planning on locking in 9.x as the 3 year standard until they need to migrate...and WindowsNT looks a hell of a cheaper in terms of manpower and money than X. I know a major developer who's trying to arganize a "Boo-down" at the Jobs keynote.
Apple axed everything that was great about the Mac for buzzword compliance. Bad, bad mojo.
The only people happy with this are the NeXT and Unix folks...but Apple ain't selling technical workstations, now are they?
Apple's gone off the rails. It's a damn shame after they almost seemed to have pulled off a complete turnaround.
SoupIsGood Food
SCO Unix had minimized live windows years ago!
In all honesty I still am not very enthused about the UI. It's way too sugar coated and they still have that damn annoying-always-there tool bar at the top of the screen. I want my application toolbars in their OWN windows, not using some shared one! It wastes space that would otherwise be spent better on having another window situated behind a primary one (I tend to cascade my windows so I have instant access to them without having to alt-tab and remember which is which).
The application rest bar, while allowing live windows, seems less useful than the ones found in Windows NT 4/98/95/2000 or KDE. I generally keep my Windows "start bar" at 4-5 rows deep and always have plenty of room to see what application is what. I also generally know them by order.
Apple seems to just be going for more eye candy than it's competitors. I'm sure a lot of people will buy into it but it just seems more a waste in memory and CPU power than anything truly useful. How many people are going to realize that their little mac's shrunken windows are actually live mini versions? Better yet, is grandma (whom several users love to mention as being able to use this with ease) with her 17in screen setup for 800x600 because her sight is going) going to even be able to really see anything going on? Moreover is she even the least bit interested in running more than 1 or 2 apps at a time?
Lastly you still run into the same problem you always have with Mac's. Software availability. Can't get Roller Coaster Tycoon for Mac's. All that at a cost higher than that of a PC. Sure the g4's are fast but does "grandma" need a Mac that can run Quake III at 1280x1024x30fps with no slow down?
I use Linux. When I need to I use NT. Mac's don't even register.
Some people might want a standard OS for all their server hardware, from NetWinder to Alpha. Unless Mac OS X has this flexibility, LinuxPPC will likely survive to allow this goal to be realized.
(Not that there aren't other good reasons for LinuxPPC to survive.)
If you can get it switched to OSX in general, then use Darwin; it's close enough to what you're looking for that it should work nicely.
Umm, yes. Keep in mind that OS X is not really a new version of the same OS as 8/9.
Not really. As a matter of marketting, OS X is the successor to OS 9, but as a matter of code history, it's not really related to MacOS at all. It would be better named NeXTStep 6.0 than MacOS X.
Think of it this way: forget MacOS. OS X is NeXTStep using a BSD kernel instead of a Mach kernel.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Amen brother. I'm just astonished at how good my NeXT was and how long ago it was produced. There are still features in NEXTSTEP that I have yet to see on any other systems I have used.
Apple engineers have stated that Aqua is implemented as a Mac OS Appearance Manager theme. This means that it will be replacable under Carbon as well as Aqua, provided that either 1) Apple releases the format for theme description files, or 2) somebody reverse engineers said format, or 3) the developers of Kaleidoscope successfully port it to Mac OS X/Carbon. I believe that 3) is likely, 1) and 2) less so.
Folks like Apple and Be already have solved the UI problem resonably well, imho. Due to the abundance of choice in Linux, and the backlash that will be generated if the choices are whittled down to 1, I think there'll be room for all of us. After all, the only "Human Interface Guideline" a given user has to follow is that of their own preference. Too bad it's not nearly as simple for the developer, who is charged with making the best choice.
--
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Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
If Apple was happy with its market share, it would market only to existing Mac users, but that's beside my point. The "Perfect OS" won't be enough, and I fear that we'll be standing graveside one day, sniffing about how the market killed a superior product once again.
Personally, I'd like to see Apple gain market share and influence so that Good Things like this are more widespread. But, their single-supplier strategy puts them at a disadvantage against the commodity-hardware world of Windows and Linux.
-dwd-
Perhaps, but a perfect OS that works its perfection on hardware available from a single supplier has the odds stacked against it from the start.
-dwd-
To support X-based applications on the local LAN, silly.
My job for example involves using ClearCase. Sometimes I'd like to access it when dialing in from home, including its graphical front-end (from a 56K modem -- yep, I'd have to be pretty desparate). Running an X server will let me do that from OS X.
I hope the Darwin developers will slap in FreeBSD's Linux executable handling capabilities. Then I can have my choice of, say, Microsoft Excel for Mac or the GNOME gnumeric-spreadsheet for PowerPC Linux. Pardon me while I have a seizure during this wave of techno-lust (drool)....
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".sig,
The original NeXTSTEP GUI blows both the original MacOS interface and the Aqua interface out of the water. It's simple, and it's clean. Need I say more?
Dude, go get a 400MHz G3 CPU from one of the many sites that sell them. I got mine via http://www.macselect.com. The G3/300MHz only has 512k worth of cache, compared to 1M on the 350s, 400s, etc. Trust me, it makes a big difference.
--- [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:systemAdministrator selector:@selector(disableUserAccount:) na
BeOS is fundamentally unix-like except for being single-user. Then again, I've seen single-user implementations of Linux (mostly for embedded systems), so that's not as weird as it sounds.
_Deirdre
The point of having GnuStep was so that there would be a way of writing a GnuStep app that would also conform to the NeXT/Openstep library calls.
In other words, you'd get a 2-for-1.
You're right as far as you go: it won't make it easier to port X apps. But the concept was to give a common set of GUI libraries.
_Deirdre
You forgot SuSE
They would have killed Microsoft in its cradle. That might have server us all well.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
To put it terms that you might understan'...
:-)
Apple sell major hardware, d00d. Like, a 500mHz G4 is not a wheezy, rinky-dink Panty-um.
But lets not quibble over details here. Todays benchmark benchpresser is tomorrow's print server...
OS X is the answer to the question: How do you move some major hardware? OS X will allow your granny and mine to use some major hardware with a solid OS (BSD is not crap d00d. Its the real thing!).
Linux is not for your granny. Linux is barely for MIS shops where they hire graduates from schools where they give MCSE certification...
So before you run down some people who are poised to do some damage to M$ and let you keep some money for even more awesome hardware, you might want to check your opinions first.
Quit bitchin' and help
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The Microsoft Hall Of Innovationh tml
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.s
"Most people take it on faith that a high technology company as wildly successful as Microsoft must have invented something of consequence. After all, this industry is built on invention, isn't it?"
"Certainly, Microsoft holds scores of patents and copyrights -- but we'd like to know which products or basic technologies we use can be credited to the big brains in Redmond. This is a prime opportunity for Microsoft defenders to provide some evidence for the company's original contributions to the industry, because frankly, we're at a loss to think of any."
The (Nearly) Whole Microsoft Catalog
t alog.shtml
"A compendium of Microsoft's amazing history of software and corporate purchases, joint ventures and equity investments. Each acquisition should properly be seen in two ways: first, as an effort on the part of the company to purchase that which it apparently could not invent on its own; and second, as subtracting one from the number of companies which will be permitted to follow its own course, to enrich our technological world, and dare we say it, to compete with Microsoft."
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/catalog/yrca
People are going to upgrade their apps anyway - especially since Apple have gotten into the habit of reminding users of new versions every time you start an app.
Maybe my point wasn't clear. The OS9/"blue box" compatibility environment is going to be transparent. Apple probably could make it where when you launch an OS 9 app that it behaves more or less like an OS X app with Aqua. Of course, it wouldn't inherit the new features like multitasking and protected memory unless the app was carbonized. Here's a scenario.
1. User opens an app, only to find it's the old OS 9 style.
2. User realizes they are running an old, non-updated app.
3. User emails/calls the developer of said app and encourages them to either Carbonize the app or do a complete port to OS X (Cocoa-ize).
4. More developers get OS X ready versions of their apps out the door faster.
If the OS 9 apps didn't look different from OS X apps, then most users probably wouldn't notice that they were running old outdated versions and wouldn't bother to encourage the developers to update their apps. Therefore, Apple makes the OS 9 compatibility environment stand out with the old interface, in hopes of encouraging developers to update their apps asap. Who wants to deal with the shame of having their app be (ugly) OS 9-only when OS X comes out?
I think that is a likely explanation and I'm sticking to it.
Ben
No... it's not, to my knowledge. True, I believe it has some sort of POSIX compatibility, and it comes with loads of tools from UNIX (such as gcc, BASH, etc.) but under the hood, where it counts, it's not UNIX.
The most obvious sign of this is that BeOS (up to 4.5, at least) is single user.
Which just goes to show, if you're going to make a blanket statement, you'd best be nigh omniscient about what you're talking about.
For that matter, is QNX based on UNIX? It may not be (you might not consider it a consumer OS, however). We also have the Palm OS, which is not UNIX based...
This is just my opinion of how it looks, not how it runs. I am not advocating one GUI over another, just posting my observations about Aqua.
Not meant to be a flame, but you seem to be basing your complaints about Aqua on one application. What does QT Player's problems have to do with Aqua?
And speaking of, what version of the QT player are you looking at? This screenshot over at X Appeal shows OS X's QT player; the buttons are high-contrast and Aqua-like, while the volume "thumbwheel" has been replaced with a slider. There's no way to tell from the shot, but the OS X issue of MacAddict claims the "Favorites" drawer is gone as well.
Jay (=
Probably. It's known already that Apple will be working on expanding hardware support after OSX goes Golden on the G3's and G4's. The narrow hardware support at the start is just to simplify the task of getting it up and running.
I didn't know that. I thought Appel was still being non-committal about older hardware.
Also, remember that OSX is Darwin-plus-goodies (just a lot more goodies than you get with the free version of Darwin). If you can make Darwin run, you'll be able to make OSX run.
Right; what I meant was "Can I go buy a copy of Mac OS X that will run on my Power Mac 7300/180, or do I have to build it myself once someone has gotten it to run on older machines?"
Jay (=
Soemone else posted a web site, X Appeal, which is apparently put together by a person or people banging away on a Mac OS X dveloper release.
On their hardware page, the list the 7300/180 (my Mac) as successfully running Mac OS X Server -- hopefully Mac OS X Client will work, since they're basically the same OS with different desktops and utilities, right?
It lists other models and their success (or lack thereof) as well.
Jay (=
I'm sure you can have a .bashrc and a .exrc, if you want. MacOS X should handle .dotfiles the same way as Unix: by leaving them to individual programs to use and manage. When you get right down to it, the only built-in support for .dotfiles in Unix is that `ls' doesn't list them by default.
Anyhoo, check out their filesystem layout doc at the MacOS X developer site.
Since BSD-lite is 10 years old and unmaintained, using a modern variant only makes sense.
Obviously, there is BSD code in the Mac kernel -- it wouldn't be able to do the BSD "personality".
However, the point is that there is no Mach in the classic monolithic unix *BSD kernels. Therefore Mac OS X is a very different beast than the BSDs, although it will be API compatible.
The original poster is essentially correct. His post is to counteract the numerous incorrect Slashdot posts which argue "Since it's based on BSD, you can port such-n-such driver.", or "Since it's based on BSD, Apache performance will be similar."
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Personally, I see no problem paying more money for apples hardware. It's just that much better... Never having to deal with things like a BIOS, IRQ's, having to tell the computer if it's OS is plug and play or not... Not to mention that Apple's motheboards and internals in general are laid out to be so much more accomodating to people who have to get inside the cases.
I've been hearing that OS X consumer will probably support many more machines than OSX Server did. Seems they wanted to only have to support a few machines with the intial release. Mach runs on all powermacs so it isn't inconceivable. This might be apples attempt to get into the software bsiness for real. If it runs on enough of the older macs they'll stand to gain a LOT of sales.
I doubt that any OS X apps will run through X. You may be able to run X apps in addition to OSX, but the OSX interaface will always be what you deal with when using OS X apps,.
OS X Server has been long known to be a dead end of an operating system . Apple released it to make everyone happy that they did have some progress going on. But it's been a long stated fact that once OSX Consumer ships, OS X server (as it is) is going away. There may be a new "server" bundle, but it will be the same exact piece of technology as the consumer edition with added services, rather than Microsofts attempts at driving 2 code bases forwards...
Is this going to be compatable with X windows? will i be able to land X apps on a mac os
X desktop and vise versa? I have a strong feeling that it wont but I can hope right?
Arsonsmith
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
> I think they pulled the Map in OS8.
They didn't. They just moved it.
The map is still in the "apple extras" folder of every mac os 8 and 9 installation.
Many apps (ok, not many, but a couple) still use the information from the Map control panel to figure out exact geographical location.
the map never shadowed timezones, though, btw.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
If you like to play with things like most of us all do :) thn OS X is not the system you want to be running. The mach kernel is not all that pretty to play with in the first place, and Apple does some really wierd things for the GUI...
I'll stick with Xfree86 (comon 4.0!) and LinuxPPC
You can switch to the classic Finder view if you want.
Not for me. I plan on using both. I like LinuxPPC, I like the tools available. If those tools are available in OSX, I might change my mind.
I will stay with Linux because Linux (MkLinux) was there for us Mac users when things looked bleak. It gave us hope that we would not be forced to use Windows. I am a loyal Mac user, but I am also a Loyal Linux user.
photosMy Photostream
I knew a lot of BSD kernel code was being used, but I didn't know that they had kept it in kernel space after the NeXT split. Do you know whether Apple has done much cleanup for OS X? Does the old BSD being stuff have an impact on multiprocessing scalability?
After seeing the screenshots and the quicktime movies I was, well, doubtful. I installed DP3 expecting to be surprised and in fact it is far worse than I would have ever imagined. really. when (attempting to) work with it, the true idiocy of this UI really, er, shines.
adrien
Point and Grunt
I work on my computer. I work on the Mac because for years it's interface (now known as Platinum) has been the best around. The Mac owes it's greatness to simplicity, thoughtful design, and and understated elegance - simple beauty.
Aqua, unfortunately, does not share in this history. It is extravagant, not elegant. It is sexy, cool, adorned with attention getting translucency, drop shadows, saturated colors, animation and blinking lights.
This all my get Apple a lot of attention and press and send chills down audiences spines - but this environment is none in which to get work done.
I do not want my UI to be sexy, amusing, animated, and definitely not 'cool'. I want a quiet, neutral, flat, grey space in which I can concentrate on what i am doing. Any extravagant animation, blinking translucent gel and whatnot is simply a distraction.
I want my UI to be boring. Dull. Uneventful. I need my UI to recede into the background and go unnoticed. I want to focus on what I am doing. Attention is at a premium, if I notice my UI, then it is in the way.
For years Apple has succeeded in providing me that most critical element of my work environment, my UI. Now, it seems that the priorities have changed. Short term amusement and cheap thrills have become a goal. Aqua promises to turn the Mac into a circus.
Quicktime 4, Sherlock, the round mouse, and now Aqua: Apple's new trend of trendy glitz over usability, gimmicks over thoughtfulness, and a complete lack of concern for serious professionals is a travesty.
The professional media market: desktop publishing, multimedia, photography, video, and web design have been and will continue to be an important part of the Mac community and cheezy glitz has no place on our desktops. If no simple solution is available to us, the option of a quiet, nuetral, flat, grey and peaceful envirnment free of distractions; Apple will quickly loose this market.
Attention getting gimmicks will definately sell lots of iMacs and software, but in the long term this will de detrimental to users and thus eventually to Apple. It is wrong to force these cheap marketing tricks onto our desktop and into our lives.
Richard Feynman said: "For a sucessful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled".
Aqua, with enticing eye candy, and sexy animations may indeed fool many many people into buying Apple products. If short term profit is all Apple wants, this may be the best strategy. But eventually, if the UI is a distraction, if it makes us unproductive, however amused we may be by the dancing candy animations, we will be unhappy. Unsatisfied, frustrated. You cannot fool us. Unhappy customers leave.
An interface should be boring. This simple fact contradicts what I see as the basic visual foundation of Aqua. An interface that gets my attention is counter productive. It will sell many copies, but once the novelty wears off, we will go elsewhere.
There is only one solution for Apple - to fragment it's OS market along similar lines as it has its hardware. The split should be along the line of apperance and performance. OS X consumer with Aqua - cute, attention grabbing and wholly unusable like most home stereos; and OS X Professional (now known as Server) with an advanced Platinum interface, quiet, boring and very productive environment with lots os horsepower. Like professional recording equipment...
If OS X ships with ony a cheap gimmick for an interface it cannot be taken seriously by professionals.
A failure to recognise the needs of serious design and imaging professionals who need a neutral workspace and to (continue to) insult our intelligence with cheap gimmicks like drop shadows and animation (which subtract, not add functionality) will hurt Apple in the long run.
just my 2 cents...
adrien cater
Point and Grunt
"Lets hope Apple comes to its senses and sets the APIs free (those that aren't already, what with Darwin, [read BSD,] OpenGL, the data management infrestructure etcetera,) to put a severe kink in the strategies of Redmond."
:)
I believe it's a definate possibility. Look at it like this, back then (84ish) the industry was pretty much in it's infancy. Apple made what it thought were smart business moves (by keeping everything close to its vest, as you say), but in hindsight we can easily say "Hey, you guys really screwed up a good thing". Now that open source is finally beginning to be accepted or at least regarded my the "mainstream" industry as a smart way of doing business, I see Apple trying to right a wrong that they made many years ago.
Who knows? Now that's Steve Jobs is back at the helm, it's an even better chance that he remembers personally the follys he made in the past.
Or, perhaps I'm giving them too much credit.
DP2 can boot off either HFS+ or UFS, which doesn't have any of the HFS+ stuff in it. Supposedly they're gonna keep it that way.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
I wouldn't make any judgments about speed yet. Chances are the OS contains quite a large amount of debug code.
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no Shelf
The Mac OS X desktop functions the same way the NeXT Shelf did.
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There wouldn't be much more than the GUI (which couldn't be difficult since it should be architechture independent) to port.
:-)
MacOS was based on (and originally was) NeXT Step, which was a BSD based OS running on x86 hardware.
The first couple of Developers Releases for MacOS X (Rhapsody) came in both PowerPC and x86 flavors (I have the x86 flavor on CD, so it is real
I'm actually doing a study of Mac OS X Server for my OS design course (assigned just this week). Does anyone have any pointers for gut level info on this OS? Or can I just use info I find on BSD4.4 - iow, is it true blue Unix underneath, as far as handling memory, processes, i/o, etc.?
Thnaks!
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
How can you comment on the usability of it when you haven't even used it yet?
Job's keynote at the San Fran MacWorld Expo seemed to focus about half on usability and half on appearance.
From what I hear and have seen, but don't have personal experience with, is that the dock is magnitudes better than the task bar in Windoze and the one copied by Gnome/KDE.
Instant cure for the /. effect: pull your page right off the web.
Hands in my pocket
So, Aqua is pretty. The transparency and the real-time rendering are awesome. But what I'm wondering is what nobody seems to mention... at what cost? How much processor power do these GUI tricks require? Are they required? I know this is for their newer systems, but is there any hope for present Mac users who don't have screaming machines?
http://www.talknerdy.org
I just installed OS X DP3 on my 8500. I think most PCI PowerMacs work with the unsupported install (i.e. Apple won't give support for pre G3/G4 systems at this point.)
My guess is that they are focusing their QA efforts on G3/G4 boxes right now. But as far as I can tell it works fine on my 8500.
The server is down hard too.....doesn't even answer to pings...
I would seriously like to denounce you for saying that Microsoft has led the the perpetual reinvention of the wheel. Sure on /. its the phat thing to say, but it is a lie. MS HAS innovated. They have put out a lot of crappy products, but the HAVE innovated. Take Direct3D for example. If they hadn't brought Direct3D to the market, everyone would be using Glide and 3Dfx would be a monopoly and the great nVidia cards wouldn't exist. That was innovation. That was good for the industry. However, later, when OpenGL started getting accelerated, instead of killing of D3D, they played all these tricks to get D3D have bigger support. Yes, that was bad for the industry, but much less than if D3D had never been written. They also invented the rest of DirectX. DirectSound 3D is the reason that today you can buy any 3D sound card on the market and not worry about it being compatible with your games. If Direct Sound had never been invented, we would have Aureal as the monopoly in sound. Same thing with force feed back and iForce. When I was shopping for a computer in 1996, I knew what I had to get. A Voodoo and the Monster Sound A3D. There wasn't any choice, because everyone used Glide and A3D. I didn't like the Monster Sound because it didn't have good MIDI, but I had no other choices. When MS came in and innovated, the consumer got the huge range of products available today. Sure they have made an assload of bad desicions and bad products, but they still don't overshadow everything thay have done for the computer industry. You may not like them, you may not like Bill Gates, you may not like Windows, but I sure bet that you're happy that you're sitting there with you Sound Blaster Live! running you're GeForce 256 with your force feedback joystick humming away. They all wouldn't exist without MS.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Are you deaf? I know GL was designed for acceleration. My point was that it never would have been accelerated on the PC unless MS had introduced Direct3D, pushing developers to use hardware acceleration.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, but you neglect the point that if D3D hadn't gotten as competitive with GLIDE, we would still be using 3Dfx cards! Yes it was a mistake to not push OpenGL 3D for PC, but you must remember, this was before open source open gl, and writing an ICD took a long time.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually, DirectDraw evolved from an Intel technology. I do know that the core DirectX services were made in-house, DirectDraw, DirectInput, DirectSound. Some of the newer ones might have been acquired, like DirectMusic or DirectAnimation, but even then, they would have had to go through a major overhaul to have the same API as the rest of DirectX. There is nothing else like the DirectX API (mostly for good reasons, it is a bitch to program, but a dream once you get it running.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Apple used to have this in their Map control panel. You set your location by clicking on a region or typing in a city name and it would locate it on the map. Your timezone and a few other things depended on where you set you location. I think they pulled the Map in OS8.
The NeXT/OpenStep timezone selection has always worked this way as well.
I don't imagine there will be any legal ramifications.
c.r.
This may be a stupid question, but what are the changes of Apple, or the possibilities of someone else porting this to i386?
This does sound like an almost perfect OS, but I'm not read to move to Mac just yet.
- I like pudding.
FWIW, we're using it to serve streaming videos (no, not pron), and it works very well. No downtime as of yet, no hiccups, and a _lot_ of capacity.
It wasn't a legal issue. MS in their first release of W95 accidently left India out of the timezone drawings. This raised enough of a stink in India that the (Indian) government was on the verge of banning the sale of W95. Rather than fix it, MS apparently decided to play it safe and not draw timezones for anybody.
How are these releases seeded and to which developers? I get the impression that these releases are held tightly. What sort of NDAs do you have to jump through to be on the short list?
Hey, leave comments about my mother out of this!
There are people working on porting X Windows to OS X so you will be able to pick your own interface AFAIK.
As far as speed goes, OS X should be significantly faster than OS 8/9.
DB
I can't count the number of times that I've met developers who don't *want* Unix to be easy to use. When strain of thinking that says 'real men use CLI' dies out among Linux contributors then maybe Linux will have a shot at creating a seamless, easy to use user experience. I'm not holding my breath. Unlike at Apple, there is no mandatory Human Interface Guidelines for Linux and I don't see one coming up anytime soon. When the linux user community starts mocking programmers who put out bad interfaces (as Mac users are famous for doing) there will be serious progress.
DB
> but a perfect OS that works its perfection on
> hardware available from a single supplier has
> the odds stacked against it from the start.
Stacked against it doing what? Taking over the world? Only Windows and Linux want to do that. Apple is happy. Apple users are happy. What's the problem?
I like Mac OS X. Or I should say, I would like to. A friendly face, a solid OS, and a super CPU.
But I notice references on the developer website to things like the Kernel Extension SDK. What's this?
On the one hand, I hear Apple singing the praise of open source, POSIX, etc. But forgive me if I cynically wonder if perhaps they're only attract talented programmers into their honeypot, only then to reveal they must use proprietary hooks to run their applications efficiently on the Mac OS.
It's a slipperly slope. Why be open and free? It's so much easier to cheat just a little. Then Apple, and only Apple, will benefit from your work.
Disabuse me, please.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
although no one will probably read this as its long gone, this picture is absolutely a fake, where as many claim to be running dp3 i actually am, ive yet to see the "new" menu bar (white with stripes) show up in the blue box, b. i've yet to see the dock show up in the blue box (though beer as feigned my memory on this one) but C. which i do know for a fact, yellow box aps (grab.app etc etc) do _not_ show up in the applicaiton menu of the blue box, and it doesnt exist in the yellow box
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
no they havn't, it doesn't in dp3, however Jobs did mention this would be something that would be implemented by the release version
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
Does anyone know what the legal issues associated with this are? I mean, does anyone really care that much about what a map of the world with each timezone highlited looks like?
Seems strange to me.
Lawyers...
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Being able to, say, write completely featured styled text editors with 13 lines of code is completely counterproductive. Having to go to one place to get your tasks done instead of all over the screen is counterproductive. Having a full-fledged API to write extensions and control panels instead of having to implement some hooks, and, often, weird programming practices is counterproductive.
-drstatgeek (close enough, at least
OS X seems great - I like the screenshots I've seen, and the idea of BSD behind it is good too. On the other hand, is OS X supposed to be more stable than OS 8/9? My friend had both 8 & 9 on his system at one time or another, and they crashed frequently (read: at least 3 times/day). So, is X supposed to be less like Windoze and more like BSD, or just a Mac OS with a BSD base or something? Basically my question is - will it rival Linux for uptime?
Eruantalon
Eruantalon
The Annals of Middle-earth
I heard that it was political, rather than legal, issues that caused them to remove that feature. Like, two countries arguing about who owns some disputed territory, and therefore both claiming it should be in their time zone. I can't remember any specifics, though.
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Sorry, but putting images for this purpose in a database is plain stupid IMHO.
Store them as normal files, accessible throuh
"normal" static and *cacheable* URLs and put the filenames into the database.
Excuse me for not reading carefully enough.
Sorry, sorry, sorry and thousend more sorries.
(Damn, what idiot I am!)
Maybe, but think how godawful S-L-O-W it would be on anything other than a 604e. Even without the insane amounts of chrome, the OS will probably hog double the CPU and RAM of current MacOS.
There is an Advocacy group that is trying to get Apple to see thelight on this issue.
It's the Rhapsody on Intel group and they have an automated petition as well as a couple of articles arguing the Open Source/Free Software business case for Apple's releasing a bundle of source, BTW they point out that much of what's in mac OS X is already available, just in pieces.
Which brings up an important point, GNU/Hurd is based on the same microkernel and wouldn't it be rather a kick to have a fully free environment that was source/compatible with Yellowbox frameworks?
If GNUStep hits v1.0 would all the apps written for cocoa be able to run on linux with GNUStep?
I'm dying to have something like this on my desktop but don't want to go anywhere near apple's hardware for the same reason I can't get rid of windoze... GAMES!!!! oh and price... hehe
If any of u API gurus can answer me... thx in advance!!!
cheers~
...
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# exoduz : escape while you can.
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# I have no brain
Apple above all is a hardware company. And honestly, how many people would pay for the more expensive apple hardware if the same stuff runs on cheaper pc hardware. Regardless of how much better the apple machines were, they'd lose sales, and that's just not something apple needs.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
So when is Apple going to start porting MacOSX to the x86 architecture? Since MacOS X runs on top of the Mach microkernel, it seems like it could be done in a relatively short period of time
In the X setup you can change the time. I think it is around 150ms default and you could probably raise it if you have trouble with it. Of course, it is nice to have a three button mouse too.
Well, they do have OS X Server which is certainly a different beast to Mac OS X Consumer which we're talking about here. They've just drawn the line between their two OS products in a different place.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
From Mac OS Rumors:
The goal as it stands today is to release OS X on time, at almost any cost; this will most likely result in Consumer supporting all Apple-branded Macs that shipped with a G3/G4 processor (the jury appears to still be out on the 3400/G3) and a smattering of previous-generation machines (7500/7600/7300, 8500/8600, 9500/9600). Earlier machines than that, although Apple does hope to support them, are rumored to be first in line as casualties of approaching deadlines.
Shortly thereafter (near the end of the third or beginning of the fourth quarter), Apple engineers and Darwin developers will likely work together to bring Consumer to all PCI PowerMacs, including most clones -- probably in time for Apple's stated "this time next year" deadline to bundle Consumer with all new Macs.
Pre-PCI Macs have always been outside the scope of Mac OS X, and it is unlikely that Apple will take on the tremendous task of attempting to support NuBus and the very different motherboard chipsets that those generations of Macs used. There is always hope, of course, that the Darwin project may take on this task if there is sufficient demand.
So there you have it, if you trust Mac OS Rumors.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
...And for not taking the mickey out of me too bad.
Your answers sure made me pleased - now I'm a bit more excited to get the GM this summer.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I should make a point here that might just sound a chord with the Linux crowd.
We all know that Linux is great for servers. And we all know that Linux is great for development. This is all just fine, but what Linux really lacks, and what a lot of people have been clamoring for, is desktop penetration. It seems to me that making Linux more palatable to desktop computer users is pretty much the entire goal behind GNOME, KDE, et. al.
And over here on the other hand, we have Apple. Despite the legendary fading of their desktop dominance at the hands of the Redmond crowd, they have successfully tapped into the consumer market with their hardware. Sure, it's tangerine. Or lime, even. The point is that consumers like it. Hell, I'd go so far as to say they love it. Apple's making a mint by moving tangerine hardware.
Now here's the thing. Apple has the consumer market. Linux wants to play in that space. Am I the only one who sees vast opportunity in Apple's choice of BSD as the underlying foundation for their new, super-duper OS? What sort of wonders could a bit of extra evangelization and a few months of focused work do in this regard? Putting Linux apps on the desktop is part of it. But the other part is appealing to all those folks who have windows, want OS X, but don't want to buy a Mac, perhaps *because* it's tangerine.
You with me so far? This is Linux's big opportunity. By positioning ourselves as the next best thing to OS X, at least as far as the Wintel space goes, Linux is positioned to make a BIG move onto the desktop. It's going to require some integration, and some smartening up on the interface side. But it's very, VERY possible. And it would be A Good Thing for all concerned.
Sure, their hardware's fruity. But they have what we want. Let's see if we can't leverage this whole OS X business, hmm?
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
My opinions are my own, and nobody else's.
Chris Tembreull
"My karma just ran over your dogma."
http://www.xappeal.org/archive/dp3.shtml this sucker still works unlike a certain other link.. Brought to you by the true news pimps of www.geeknews.com
-X- webmaster@xgeneration.net
...With a rod of iron! Bye bye suckers, off you trot to copyright slavery. My God - slashdotters why are you so keen to sell out to Apple. Don't give up your freedom for a mess of eye candy.
I think the problem lies more with the website owner who doesn't prepare to be slashdotted.
Can someone fix the MySQL problems? :) I'm anxious to see this!
Holy crap, that's pretty. Does anyone have a copy of the Aqua theme from themez.org left over? No wonder Mac didn't want them posting it!
Make Seven
Username taken, please choose another one.
OS X Server will most probably disappear when OS X (consumer) is released. At that time, Apple will probably release a Server add-on package (with WebObjects and the such).
So everyone in the end will be running the same OS.
First off I like MAC's. I believe the hardware is good, and would like to see apple grow beyond M$.
The following statement are in reguards to the Look of Aqua, and it's use from a visual perspective. They have nothing to do with the underling code. Which, I'm sure, is hunky-dory.
When a button has gray letters and the back ground is gray, it will be difficult for older users to distinguish them.
In QT it seems to adjust the volume you have to click on the button controll and try to spin it, just like a real world thumb control. The maouse is not a thumb, a simple spinner control where just clicking adjust the volume would be alot easier. I done know if they use that "thumb" control anywhere but QT, I certianly hope not.
Putting artificial glare on the buttons will also make it harder to read the buttons, again as people age, they begin to lose the ability to easaly distinguish between similiar shades of color. The "sliding drawer" analogy isn't put into use very well. Frankly, I don't believe that it can be put into use well.
I know at first glance the pretty factor goes the roof, But if you real think about how this will appeal to the mass market, it's not very good.
This is just my opinion of how it looks, not how it runs. I am not advocating one GUI over another, just posting my observations about Aqua.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually we do know what we are missing. Not all people started on linux, and there is enough feedback from the application developer community to create better API's. Where do you think gtk+ came from? From application developers needs. Enhanced API's are coming as there is application developers needs for it. GNOME is pretty young, and UNIX/X doesn't inforce interoperability between apps. But it will happen.
In anycase, as you've noted, you use a unix desktop everyday. It suits your needs now, and tomorrow (No one can copyright a good idea).
The iMac is an amazing industry accomplishment. They've completely moved from an old industry architecture to a new one. Do you have any legacy components left?
And they are price competative.
There are only a few "one stop shops" left...sun/apple/console market but there value is strong. I don't see their ability to innovate increased if they had licensed out their rom. ken
Well, It needs some work. Not only does the display look funny, but configuring networking is a bit of a pain...especially if you are using an Airport card in an iBook (you take what you can get). It eventually worked, but it was an adventure.
/system/applications folder.
We found that classic support worked better if you launched the classic enviornment manually using "macos.app" instead of "classic.app" from the
oh well, this is slightly off topic, but oh well.
I'll say this though, it is most definately the coolest desktop environment I've played with. Granted a number of features need the bugs ironed out, but we're still months away from a final version and apple is typically behind schedule with operating system releases, so we've got a way to go.
You say: "Admittedly, Linux would have fared better against the
Generally when i hear about Linux/FreeBSD and their speed FreeBSD people say that it is faster than Linux, is OpenBSD a little bit slower than both FreeBSD and Linux because they did concentrate on security, or in other word, do you think FreeBSD would have fared better against the
Just curious
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
I love this sentence ;) but can you say GnuStep??? and it should be multiplatform too (different Unix and even WinNT).
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
In addition to the the other API's, JAVA is supported nativly.
All you who are claiming that Mac OS X is just the old Next or BSD4.4 or something... How about doing some research at the source?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html
I am really amazed that noone has mentioned this yet.
"The system's kernel, which does the heavy lifting to support all those rich applications, is based on Mach 3.0 from Carnegie-Mellon University and FreeBSD 3.2 (derived from the University of California at Berkeley's BSD 4.4-Lite), the most highly regarded core technologies from two of the most widely acclaimed OS projects of the modern era."
There you have it. MacOS X is based on Mach and FreeBSD 3.2. I'll admit as much that Next also used Mach but it certainly did not use FreeBSD and I wonder if it really used Mach 3.0...
ok i know is NOT /. fault, but am the only ONE getting tired of getting dead, or messed up links on this place??? i mean nothing seems to work lately. Guys if the link to the news is not working very well, i guess its better not to post it all!! unless like u know really relevant! i dunno just a thought!
Istigkeit -"is-ness" being and becoming & i'dfiying it with the mathematical abstraction of the idea
Actually, this isn't quite true. It's not a snapshot of the window -- the miniaturized window is actually live (Apple has demoed Quicktime movies that were still running minaturized)
First of, I think it's a bit much to call this "punishment". So some windows will look a little differently than others. Big deal.
More importantly, there is a perfectly fine and non-sinister reason for "classic" apps to look distinctly different from native "Carbon" or "Cocoa" applications.
All "Classic" apps will run inside of a single unix process. While that unix process will enjoy memory-protection from other unix processes (and visa-versa), all Classic apps inside that process will have no memory protection from each other. Thus, a bug in any ONE classic application can cause ALL classic applications to crash. They could all disappear at the same time, in a case where the "bluebox" process has to reboot itself to fix a problem.
Now, consider the user. They have just bought into this great new operating system because it is supposed to be so much more reliable. Then, in the middle of doing something, half of the applications that they have running may suddenly disappear. There is a major advantage -- to the user -- to realize that all of those applications were classic applications. Ie, all the modern applications are just fine, it's only the never-updated applications which happened to disappear all at once.
Yes, this (in turn) will put pressure on users to upgrade to modern applications. That in turn puts pressure on developers to update their applications to at least the Carbon level. Maybe everyone is annoyed with being "forced", but everyone also benefits. Developers know that users can readily tell a Carbon app from a Classic app, so chances are they can make money on an upgrade which does NOTHING but carbon-ize the app. Users then get applications which ARE memory-protected from each other. The classic application which had the bug in it might very well still have the bug in it after it is carbon-ized, but now only THAT application will crash, and a bug in that application should not be able to bring down any other applications on the machine.
All-in-all, I think this is a very clever and NON-PAINFUL way to encourage everyone to persue and obtain the biggest advantage of going to MacOS 10, which is to say, increased reliability. The people who don't get that reliability will at least see why they are not getting it. Also, the people handling user-support calls will have a trivial way to distinguish one whole class of support problems.
Of course it's not a fake. If you think that's a fake then you would also have to think that all the other pictures are a fake. And you certainly can't say that! Why would they doctor one picture when all it takes is a real screenshot that they could get (as ThinkSecret has proven with their other pictures.)
Furthermoe (regarding the icon), I have the EXACT same one on my computer. It came from an icon pack called "3D Application Icons" I think.
And lasty but most importanty I can verfiy that that's not a fake. I run OS X DP3 with IE 5 as well and I'll tell you that there are plenty of little interface glitches where you mind find white rectangle spots or things that would otherwise indicate a fake.
- C
- Carson www.holymac.com
Go to www.monkeyse.cx to view 16 screenshots of OS X
That has nothing to do with OSX, it looks the same under OS8 and OS9. MS did some wierd funk in the IE5 interface on mac... The only widgets for OS8/9 you see there is the window dressing, which is the corrent widget for classic.
no vertical menu - the horizontal menu wastes space, doesn't provide a text title for the current app and can't be moved or hidden---nor easily configured for use with multiple monitors
no top-level print, hide or quit
no built-in faxing and file saving at the print panel - under OPENSTEP I never have to waste time picking printers from the chooser or control strip, or going in to page setup to set the destination to file
no rich set of clients for Services, no Webster.app for definitions, nor Oxfords.app for quotations
no Shelf - having this would address most of the complaints regarding the awkwardness of copying
no icon headers at the top of the Browser columns---these make excellent drag and drop targets.
no desktop as void into which UI elements are dropped to remove them---no manual deletion of aliases in NeXT/OPENstep
no pre-licensed PostScript or Pantone color libraries---the latter was especially nice since all NeXT apps use the same color panel and have access to Pantone swatches, moreover, one only has to pay for them once.
Not sure about system-wide address book or spell-checking....
save status in window close button---the greyed out proxies don't show up in a torn-off window menu
and that's just off the top of my head.
William
This (he says, in Netscape, from a system that returned to the brandname days of Netscape and Eudora and Fetch with splashscreens galore) is the problem. In MacOS, things are convenient and one basically gets by comfortably if you have a clue, but although it's 'your space' more than a Windows box, you still don't get to control it completely- if The Mothership decides You Will Run IE for instance, and makes new OS pieces check for it and not install unless they install it, then you lose- either you jump through lots of hoops to maintain your own choices, or you cave and do things their way. And though they mostly behave *grumble about Cyberdog*, there is ALWAYS the possibility that someday they'll go somewhere that I just won't follow.
That's why I have LinuxPPC installed. It's my safety valve. I learn about it and grow to accept it for what it is, because it can be mine in a way impossible for corporate closed source OSes. It is dreadfully lacking in some ways, but then I feel that the Netscape and Eudora I use now are dreadfully lacking in some ways compared to Cyberdog, and that got taken away from me. Linux can't ever be taken away from me, so I won't ever forget it's there. It's important.
Will I be able to use other filesystems, such as FFS or ext2, jfs, etc, on OS-X? I guess what I'm asking is this: is any functionality of OS-X tied to features of HFS+ (e.g., does it depend on case insensitivity?).
thanks.
nick
Timezone screenshot for MacOS X DP3
Are we going to see a repeat here? As far as I know, Microsoft got into some hot water for having something like this.
NJV
Uh, as I recall:
(a) OpenGL was designed for hardware acceleration,
(b) it's been around longer than D3D
(c) Microsoft still pushes D3D over OpenGL (not surprising, since GL is (somewhat) cross-platform while D3D is Windows-specific) and only grudgingly includes GL support in Windows. (not that I've used Windows recently, so this may have changed)
I haven't used either API extensively, so I can't compare their functionality, but saying that OpenGL only got hardware acceleration after D3D had been around is a blatant falsehood -- had Microsoft put the effort into OpenGL that they had into D3D..well, actually, Windows would be in much more trouble now than it is, due to programs being written to portable specifications. [1] Hmm, maybe that's why they didn't do it?
Daniel
PS - I don't have a SBLive, I don't have a force-feedback joystick, I don't have a GeForce; I just have an AWE32 and an old Number 9 video card, and I'm perfectly happy that way, thank you.
[1] Actually, in an environment that encourages people to use types like DWORD and assume they're 32 bits, this might not be something to worry about..
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
But...
If you look at these screenshots: http://www.xappeal.org/ archive/dp3-2/classicappearance1.jpg and http://www.xappeal.org/ archive/dp3-2/classicappearance2.jpg, you'll see the good ole MacOS appearance manager allowing the user to switch b/w Apple Platinum (normal MacOS) and ClassicX (appears to have Aqua Style menus).
So perhaps there will be some ability to get Classic to look like Aqua.
my blog: good times, man, good times
It's not quite the MacOS 8/9 look and feel is it? And it isn't as pretty as Aqua. More like the bastard child of both of them.
Why not go the whole hog and make Classic use the Aqua L&F? If that can't be done, why mess with the locations of the zoom and collapse buttons?
This is all too WinOS2ish for my liking. Different window widgets for different apps is ugly. Poo.
my blog: good times, man, good times
Think about it. If OS 9 apps are so blatant when running OS X, won't you be more inclined to bug the developer into developing a Carbon or Cocoa (OS X) version of the app so that you'll get all the new features?
Of course.
I was thinking more in terms of usability and general lickability of the UI, but since you bring it up:
Well, Win3.x windows look like Win95 windows when running under Win95 and millions of people still upgraded their apps. WinOS/2 apps looked nothing like OS/2 apps and nobody upgraded to the OS/2 apps.
People are going to upgrade their apps anyway - especially since Apple have gotten into the habit of reminding users of new versions every time you start an app. Damn QT4 drives me insane!
I can't guarantee that the screenshot I linked to was genuine since I didn't make it, but it seemed to be a trustworthy and they were pretty positive about OSX, why bother making an ugly fake?
my blog: good times, man, good times
Carmack's first release was last week, MacOS X Server only. The Darwin-only version is in progress, since there're some Objective-C runtime issues. Heh. Dual monitors, one with Aqua, one with X, simple mouse movement between the two. *wipes drool off chin*
--
The Future: Some assembly required; batteries not included.
Not if the binary-only parts of OSX are compiled with G3 specific optimizations...
Apple can't do that, though, or they lose the G4 installed base. They might optimize the OS for the G3, but there's a difference between optimizing something for a processor and using processor-specific instructions.
John Carmack already has a very basic XFree port working. I think the patches are in the snapshot XFree released today. The original plan was to get it working on bare Darwin, but that hasn't worked out just yet (Carmack says he'll try again with XFree 4.0 final, with its cleaned-up codebase).
Either way, once this is done X apps will be far easier to port over. Given time, it may even be possible to run it rootless. Now that would rock.
Not quite the same userbase. I know several people who still have old 68k-based macs which they try to keep using, mostly because they don't want to go to x86 but they don't want to spend too much money on a modern Mac (or because of other circumstances, like my housemate who doesn't want to upgrade from his old and dying '040-based Performa because after this semester he's going to have to sell everything since he's going on an outreach program where he needs to be very mobile).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Aqua is a UI designers nightmare. Some serious hoop-jumping is necessary to avoid your app looking like the aftermath of a goo factory explosion (take a look at the calculator). Even then it's an interface you'd want to look at for a few hours and say "whoah!" at, then turn it right off and get on with using the machine for real tasks.
Luckily, the Cocoa (OpenStep) interface is nice enough that a simple swap-out replacement can be made, with or without Apples say-so. Unluckily, aqua is probably hard wired into Carbon, the code-portability environment.
When I first saw Rhapsody DR2 (as the developer releases for MacOS X Server were called), I knew I wanted THAT integrated with the MacOS. As I've said before, it's what made me a Unix fan.
I really really hope that it lives up to its promise.
The one downside is that X applications will not readily port, though I'm sure there will be various libraries to make this easier (thus the GNUstep project).
The really interesting upside to this is that, after MacOS X ships, all shipping consumer OSes except Windows (and OS/2, which I don't really count as it's no longer being developed) will be based on Unix.
_Deirdre
You guys don't get the point!
The "classic" environment looks different so that you intentionally know that you're running a non-OSX app. Think about it. If OS 9 apps are so blatant when running OS X, won't you be more inclined to bug the developer into developing a Carbon or Cocoa (OS X) version of the app so that you'll get all the new features?
Of course.
The only thing Apple changed was to move all three window widgets to the left, like in Aqua. That makes sense, so that you'll get used to it.
I don't expect Apple to change this in the final release of OS X. Having old "classic" apps look different is good move.
By the way, I think that screenshot of IE 5 running in OS X is faked. It doesn't look right. For one thing, the IE 5 icon is wrong. The real Mac IE 5 icon looks just like the old one only it's 32 bit color and looks polished. It looks realllllly sweet when you use the new Aqua finder and view the icon at 128pix.
However, I have run IE 5 under the classic environment on OS X so it does work. Apparently Microsoft is working on a "carbon" version of IE 5 as well. I haven't got my hands on it yet but that seems to be the version that Steve showed off at Macworld (I was there) since it had the aqua-fied windows.
Ben
Well, this would be a reasonable contention, but I've had mixed success with it in reality. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes I just don't have the coordination to press the buttons as described :-(.
D
----
...will Mac OS X run on non-G3/G4 Power Macs?
I'm not talking about Darwin-plus-goodies, I mean the commercial, shrinkwrapped-by-Apple stuff.
I'm sticking with Mac OS 8.6 right now on my Mac, and the answer to this will determine if I eventually reformat to put Mac OS X on it or some PPC-based Linux.
On the plus side, I do have three choices! Yellow Dog Linux, LinuxPPC, or Debian's PPC port...
Jay (=
Mac OS X is not going to be free, so it does not exactly occupy the same space as LinuxPPC. If current pricing remains the same, it should be at around $99 or so, which is about the same, or a little more than a well stocked/supported Linux distro.
Once MacOS X is released, this may spell the death of linuxppc and the sheepsaver port. Why install linux when you have a free robust BSD to run your GNU tools on?
Hasdi
This is an interview with Steve Jobs, but the formatting is lost so it's hard to tell who's the asker and who's the answerer sometimes.
This one is jsut about Jobs and Apple's new direction in general.
They are both from Fortune/Northernlight, It took me about an hour and a half to find them because I thought I had seen them on forbes.com... ugh.
_________________
rooooar
Is Apple beginning to see that, by holding the software close to its vest back in 84, it practically created the M$ behemoth we all know and loathe?
Steve Jobs has said on several occasions that the Mac OS is Apple's Crown Jewel, and despite the hardware, they're really a software company. While they make more money off the hardware, the OS is Apple. I still think it is crazy to expect any "traditional" company to open source its most valuable asset. Especially when so much of the Mac OS is based on QuickTime, a technology Apple will do anything to protect from Microsoft.
Apple has made great strides in Open Source, far more than most traditional closed-source software companies have, but I think it will be a cold day in hell, or at least 5 or 10 years, before Apple Open Sources the MacOS. And I don't think that's really such a bad thing. Why SHOULDN'T they protect their investment?
_________________
rooooar
MS HAS innovated. They have put out a lot of crappy products, but the HAVE innovated. Take Direct3D for example.
:-|
From what I understood, some of the APIs in the "Direct family" were actually created by companies which Microsoft subsequently acquired. Same with Active Server Pages (ASP). Unfortunately, I don't have a firsthand source..
cpeterso
The really nice thing about this is not whether os x is better than our other unix variants, blah blah blah... but whether existing mac users like it.
If the existing mac user base switches to OS/X.... they will probably discover the wonders of unix sitting underneath it.
Operating systems are converging..
As far as I know, IE does *not* use Aqua natively. MS has produced their own Aqua-ish IE.
Or have I misunderstood you?
emd
As you point out, OS X isn't using the "pure" 4.4BSD-lite code, it's using FreeBSD. Which, incidentally, is derived from 4.4BSD-lite.
/.-like of me, now would it? Of course, admitting a mistake wouldn't be, either... :-)
Anyway, I should have done my fact checking a little more thoroughly, rather than relying on recollection. Of course, that wouldn't be very
http://www.macopz.com/rumors/DP3/
http://www.thinksecret.com/
Earlier today, I wrote how, if Photoshop and Macromedia ported their programs (even older ones) to Linux, then I'd finally have the excuse I was looking for...
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Well! This is it! Photoshop, Dreameaver, Flash, Illustrator... all on BSD! I guess you can even run MS Office (which many of us do, if we admit it!).
Ladies and Gentlemen. I firmly belive that this is going to be something close to the Holy Grail... the perfect OS. I'd heard rumors, now they appear to be confirmed.
Come August, with bugs fixed, and wishlist instated... That was when I was planning on buying a new desktop... Well, guess what I (hope) I'll be getting?
Oh, the MySQL worked fine for me... I did wonder why it was done this way, it was only a handfull of pics... But they looked great!
Yeah, this is it.
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
That's what the 'single window view' is for. Just click on the button in the top right of the window (where the resize button used to be) and only one window will show at a time. Click on another app/window in the taskbar, and the current window will drop to the taskbar as the other pops open.
The root user is currently called "root", but root's home directory is "Users/Administrator" and the documentation refers to the "Administrative" user. Please, Apple, don't change root to Administrator.
Well, most end-users won't know what 'root' means, but Administrator is easy to figure out. Owner would be even better, but doesn't make as much sense in a corporate environment. Besides, those in the know will still call it root amongst themselves anyway. ;)
There are three view modes: by icon, as list, or in columns. In the icon view I couldn't find a way to set the DEFAULT icon size, which drove me nuts. The default icon size is WAY too big. The list view worked very well, but I couldn't find a way to set the defaults for this view either (why does Apple think that modification date is more important than file size?).
Most users don't even look at the file size of their documents unless there's some specific reason. Most of the time people leave their windows in Icon mode, which doesn't show either of those things. I keep my documents in List view, but turn off everything but the filename. And I'm sure you'll be able to at least turn off certain info you don't need, and hopefully be able to rearrange the columns as you want.
____________________
Tension, apprehension
And dissension have begun
JUST a NeXT with real pretty graphics? dont you mean "WOW!?!?!!! this is a Next WITH REAL PRETTY GRAPHICS!?!$!!!!$ and an insanely fast chip! and prospects for future refinements and developments!"
nexts rule. if I could get a 500 MhZ next, I would, and that's why I'm considering a g4 now.
The Ad Critic is running the original "1984" ad that was run during the '84 Superbowl.
I have to admit, it was an incredibly cool commercial. It's worth watching if you haven't seen it.
--
Okay, I gotta bite. NeXTSTEP *is* a branch of
Mach. However, while Mach played with all sorts
of ukernel-type things before Mach3, there was a
ton of BSD stuff in the Mach kernel. They took
4.2 (and updated to 4.3) BSD, and replaced it
piece by piece as they went. But they only
replaced part of it; there's still a lot of BSD
code in there. It wasn't until Mach 3, after the
NeXT branch, that the BSD code was moved out of
the kernel to make the microkernel Mach we all
know and love. So there is most of a 4.3BSD
kernel in there.
Figure 1.
-----------------------------------
Accent UNIX
| |
| BSD
Mach-----------------(4.2BSD)
(Mach 2)--------------(4.3BSD)
| |
+------------+ (...)
| |
Mach 3 NeXT
(BSD moved
to user-
land)
-----------------------------------
When you miniaturize a window, a snapshot of the window is taken and placed in the dock. This is where the magnification feature is really handy. You can actually see which document the icon represents before you expand it.
Hey - I do that with enlightenment! It seems that Mac OS X has a whole bunch of cool ideas from other GUI's combined into one gigantically cool one.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
Damn - and I just bought an upgrade to my Intel box :) - I can't wait to see this in person. My take on this is it's gonna be like using the BeOS - incredibly stable, flashy, but deep inside there's a UNIX waiting to get out. My question - Where is $HOME, and will I see a .bashrc, a .exrc, etc. lying around there? How will it handle dotfiles, anyway?
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
I already have it...
MacPerl
nope, it isn't, the way the classic.app is set up, it just lets you kind of see through to the mac os x desktop and there are currently some problems with this, such as when you drag a window, there is a weird frame around it if you move it over one of the windows in classic.app. I'm posting this from msie 5.0b30 running in classic.app, and I can assure you it looks the same :)
This is according to Ars Technica:
It seems as though upon boot-up, the user is presented with a logon window not dissimilar to that in NT, xdm, etc.). As it turns out, if you press Ctrl-Alt-Del, a message pops up saying:
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
The BSD part will not be vanilla BSD 4.4-lite. It will be FreeBSD 3.2.
I think I trust this source more than I trust you:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html
It looks great. I am really looking forward to getting OS X. The one thing I want is my 'clasic' finder. The Unix, the gui, it all looks great. But I will not buy it if I don't have the option of a classic Finder over the NeXT-ish FileViewer.
-- "It is my sacred and holy duty to see those guys suffer."
Do I.Q.s drop sharply whenever people comment on Apple?
Apple is not stupid. It would be stupid for Apple to make icons 128x128. It would be stupid for Apple to make the icons tiff images that use a 512k of RAM for each image. It would be stupid for Apple to write an OS that only their most powerful machine with 256 megs of RAM can barely run.
It is a good thing that Apple is not doing any of those things.
How can people look at an OS and comment it on it without ever looking at anything past the superficial UI.
The icons are RESIZEABLE! Jesus CHRIST! If I read another moron commenting how stupid it is to have huge icons I will have to shoot a windows user.
The UI does not take a 'snapshot' of the window before it is minimized. When anything is minimized it will either show the icon of it or will show the live app in a small winodw.
The entire UI is built on PDF. Everything. From translucency to drop shadows to the genie effect. This UI is not bitmapped based like everything else. This UI is VECTOR BASED! So all of those resource intensive tricks that windows, x-windows, and the macintosh have to do are built into PDF. And are now trivial.
The bitmap UI is now obsolete.
//off subject
UNIX people amaze me. They think running 6 terminal windows on X windows is progress from running one text based terminal.
Probably. It's known already that Apple will be working on expanding hardware support after OSX goes Golden on the G3's and G4's. The narrow hardware support at the start is just to simplify the task of getting it up and running.
Also, remember that OSX is Darwin-plus-goodies (just a lot more goodies than you get with the free version of Darwin). If you can make Darwin run, you'll be able to make OSX run.
For what it's worth, I do have a G3, but I haven't been able to make Darwin run on it. I do hope I'll be able to rectify that before OSX's release.
Dear Foaf,
The screenshot that you showed was actually a doctored screenshot (aka fake). You would notice this if you look closely at the doc and other areas around the edges where the IE imagne has been stamped over the aqua interface.
Enjoy.
--
I'll be one of the first to admit it...I've been ripping on Apple and the Mac for as long as I can remember. I'm a UNIX boy at heart, but I would always rather use BeOS or even Windows before I'd lower myself to using a Mac.
But lately, Apple has been redeeming themselves in my eyes. If I can disregard the whole "Tangerine Computer" thing for a moment, Apple is developing and releasing quality hardware, and finally has the quality operating system to run on it. I'm looking forward to purchasing a G4 when MacOS X is fully released and taking the baby for my own test drive, because everything I've seen on it so far has left me breathless. Its interface looks incredibly slick, and hell, it's got BSD Unix at its core.
Anyway, if Apple can successfully keep its old school flock faithful, and at the same time draw in a UNIX techie like myself, then they deserve some credit.
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
It's a mistake to conclude that once you have something that looks like NEXTSTEP (or some other OS), you will have something that is like NEXTSTEP (or some other OS).
Sure, it's lots of fun to play with The Gimp and make some skins. But there are plenty of things beneath the surface that aren't glamorous but have a huge impact on usability. The imaging models that are integrated into NEXTSTEP and Mac OS X make a huge difference for developers, making it easy to develop applications that can produce high quality printed output as well as excellent screen output. Similarly, having a pasteboard that can handle images, mail messages, line art, and so on -- seamlessly -- makes life easier for users and developers alike.
Most people who think it's easy to imitate NEXTSTEP have never actually used the system for any length of time, and have never taken a look at the `under the hood' complexities the GNUStep project is tackling in their attempt to bring some of the underlying functionality of NEXTSTEP to other OSs.
Finally, just because the concepts embodied in NEXTSTEP (like its imaging model) are several years old doesn't make them outdated, irrelevant, or easily imitated today. On my desk I have two machines: a cool dual processor PC running RedHat 6.1, and a 25Mhz NeXTstation that's about nine years old. I do most of my work sitting at the NeXTstation. I think that speaks volumes.
Apple's Mac OS X is based on a solid, secure and dependable implementation of Unix (like Linux no? :-) and they are putting good usable hardware products out the door.
Now, remember, like VA, they make their money on the hardware. The OS income is almost chump change to them except that without an OS they're dead in the water. Apple will continue to make their money from their hardware.
Is Apple beginning to see that, by holding the software close to its vest back in 84, it practically created the M$ behemoth we all know and loathe?
If Apple had loosed the ROM APIs and licensed the ROM to the extremely competitive Intel world this would be very different planet.
Instead the fate the economy rests in the hands of people whose greed has not shown any sign of abating since Gates whined in Byte magazine that people were ripping off his MITS/ Altair 8080 BASIC interpreter and changed an open source world into a hermetic, failure prone process where a business plan now often reads "Get big enough to be noticed by M$ and sell out!"
Lets hope Apple comes to its senses and sets the APIs free (those that aren't already, what with Darwin, [read BSD,] OpenGL, the data management infrestructure etcetera,) to put a severe kink in the strategies of Redmond.
With luck we'll stop the cash hemmorhage that's made M$ a stomping ground for millionnaires, billionnaires and the richest man that has ever lived.
Apple, OS X and Intel/AMD, Linux have a chance to stop the incredible waste that the Microsoft approach has wrought upon the world.
We have lost or lost access to uncountable lines of code because too many consider them proprietary, secret and their own property. Projects die for many reasons and the code disappears forever regardless of whether it was good or useful and could be so again.
The Microsoft approach has led to the perpetual reinvention of the wheel. Unlike Newton who saw far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, we are perpetually rooting around the sty like nearsighted pigs, wallowing in a shallow mire because we are kept there by people who's greed exceeds their sense of history and they believe that they can coopt the information revolution to enrich themselves.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm still mixed on OS X. Now, first things first, I'm seriously glad that someone commercial has released a desktop OS that's built on something stable like BSD. Apple isn't doing this stupid crap like MS, seperating 'workstation' from 'home user.' And I hope this OS succeeds. Apple deserves a good shot at the market, despite my own opinions on the cost of buying into the Apple name (Apple is a hardware company, you buy their hardware and then get to run their OS).
:-)
But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics. A NeXT that can run old MacOS stuff and has an extra-pretty accelerated GUI. Honestly, things like slightly transparent windows/menus, animated buttons, neato entrance effects for status windows.. In the end, it's mostly glitz. It does actually add to the UI, however. Feedback to the user as to what button is highlited, what window a status popup came from, those all mean something.
So how hard *IS* it to do most of that stuff? In March we'll have an XFree that incorporates hardware acceleration standard. GNOME already has libraries in it that do transparency/animated buttons (gdk-pixbuf).. Who's to bet we couldn't do all this, at a minimun cost to CPU?
After all, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery
But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics.
No, it's more integrated than that...a compatability environment for a Windowsesque range of software for end users, a second compatability environment that lets those apps use some of the *nix features, and then the native BSD/NeXT with a thoroughly integrated GUI AND device drivers.
The comparison between my install of Red Hat 5.2 on an old Dell and installing Mac OS X Server (less guified than OS X) is enlightening. It took me the better part of a day to get everything working except networking on the Dell--the networking never worked. Then screwing around as root (which you Shoult Not Do) messed up the system.
For fun, I tried the same thing on the Mac. It was installed and running in 20 minutes flat. This includes having networking and Apache configured and running. There was zero configuration of device drivers, and very little that you wouldn't do setting up a Windows 9x installation.
In short, this was Unix that an end user could conceivably install. Screwing around as root didn't break things. Basically, what will piss off most Linux/BSD enthusiasts is what will be its strength: it doesn't let you screw yourself too badly. Its saving grace is that you can in fact RTFM and get it to do everything your BSD box does. I could do everything through the GUI, too, though sometimes it was more efficient to use the command line.
OK, is this a slam on Linux/BSD/etc? No, because they have a harder job: support a range of hardware that Apple doesn't. Apple's strength and ease of use has always been because they could control both the hardware and the software, and then they made the system usable (theoretically) by grandma. That's going to be too limiting for almost any distro of Linux/FreeBSD.
However, that's going to keep them from taking over NT's market. They can't install on the current hardware, and few companies are willing to replace client and server hardware and software simultaneously, as much as it might deliver on the promises made by NT. An eventual Linux/thin client combo might, though, if it can be easy enough for the secretary to use.
Linux is great for what it is. Linux is a swiss army knife. It is most things to most people. There's nothing it wont do if you're willing to put forth the effort to use what's there. In itself that's a wonderful design philosophy. I've been using Linux for a long time and it amazes me what it can do when people put their minds to it. Gearheads love this sort of OS, and love to demonstrate it's ability to perform any function no matter how arcane or bizarre the procedure to get there is. The people who build Linux are pragmatists. Soured by years of lofty goals, but failed implementations, they work to make a system that solves all the problems, even if they have to compromise usability, simplicity, or advanced design. Efficiency is stressed at the system level. I've never encountered a general purpose computing task that could not be solved by Linux.
:-)
NeXT (and MacOS X I hope) on the other hand is more like a perfectly ergonomic, intuitivley simple yet surprisingly flexible single bladed knife. It doesn't have a corkscrew or scissors, But the handle grip doubles as a file and it is perfectly balanced along every axis. Ninjas use it for throwing, Butchers use it for cutting meat. Carpenters use it to score material and Master chefs use it to prepare dishes, but you wont be able to open a wine bottle, it wont loosen most phillips screws and you'll just make a mess if you try to open a can of peas or bottle of beer with it. It also wont fit in your pocket. However, if there was ever a knife that was a perfect balance of asthetics, utility, and well executed engineering, this is it. Again, a wonderful design philosophy. Programmers, bankers, artists, secretaries, they all have their fond memories of how great NeXT was. The people who built NeXT had only the highest standards in terms of design and executed them to the limits of technology, but no amount of good design can make an OS that is useful for everything, there's some things it just cant do. This is becasue efficiency is adddressed at the UI level. I've never used a system as elegant as NeXT.
It's no coincidence that alot of people who have used both try to make Linux look like NeXT and make NeXT as flexible as Linux.
-Rich
Let's not get sloppy here. The kernel which OS X and NextStep run on is the Mach kernel, written at Carnegie Mellon. It bears little or no resemblance to the BSD kernel.
In a microkernel, what we'd traditionally think of as a "kernel" is reduced to code supporting a set of abstractions for tasks, threads, memory objects, messages, and ports. Things like file systems, networking code, etc... are all implemented in user space using formal message passing to communicate with the "kernel". As a rule of thumb, if it can be implemented in a platform-independent manner, it's not in kernel space.
Mach is actually "OS Neutral". However, rather than having to port all of the system libraries of an OS to use this new, extremely different kernel interface, it's usually easier to write code which implements a the kernel API of another OS. Here's the BSD tie-in: BSD is one of the OS "personalities" available for Mach. Someone has done the work for a Linux personality too (MkLinux). In this sense, OS X is not BSD at all- the kernel code is completely different. On the other hand, it will include a full BSD 4.4lite environment of system programs and utilities, and uses much of the BSD kernel code to implment filesystem, networking, etc... that is "outside" the kernel.
What I don't know is what API the bulk of OS X is based on. Perhaps the different run time environments / programming models used by OS X (Carbon, Cocoa, etc...) are using diffent base kernel APIs. I'm guessing they didn't port all the old MacOS stuff to the BSD personality- it would make more sense to write a MacOS personality for Mach. How about Cocoa- does anyone know if the new / NextSteppish stuff has the BSD kernel API under it?
http://www.xappeal.org/archive/dp3.shtml
Take a look at this, for instance, it's the Text System Overview for OS-X. Read that and then come back and tell me that OS-X/Aqua/Cocoa is nothing special, and with the proper skins GNOME provides the exact same thing to developers.
That is just the beginning. There is EOF, which is the most advanced, high level, database independent access framework available. It's so far beyond ODBC, JDBC, and the frameworks available in commercial appservers like Dynamo and WebLogic that it really isn't even funny.
After 11 years, InterfaceBuilder is still without peer. It doesn't generate code. Nobody else seems to get it.
The fact is, Mac OS-X has the most powerful object-oriented API that has been under development and constant refinement for over 12 years. It has been shipping since 1989. It's been through four major revisions since then.
You may be able to make GNOME look something like Aqua, but it's still going to be a pain in the ass to write applications with a decent UI for it. I use GNOME every day and even the cut and paste support totally sucks. It's been 16 years since the Mac came out, you'd think that every GNOME app would have real cut and paste. I use Navigator, GNOME Terminal, and XChat every day. Only Navigator actually has "cut" in the menu. A quick survey of other GNOME apps that come with my system reveals that only a few have cut and paste support (GEdit comes to mind). Of course, Navigator's clipboard only works within Navigator. The others apps use something that vaguely resembles cut and past but isn't even close (middle clicking causing pasting of the selection does NOT count as real cut and paste). You guys really have no idea what you're missing here....
Burris
Some comments:
tcsh isn't running on MacOS. Remember that Mac OS-X is essentially OpenStep 6.0 (the NeXT operating system). Rhapsody was akin to OpenStep 5.0. It really is a NeXT, with Mac compatibility (Carbon and Classic) and Java.
Most BSD source will port pretty easily. The biggest gotcha I've found is that the HFS+ filesystem isn't case sensitive. Like NTFS, it preserves case but you cannot have two files with the same name differing only in case (i.e. you can't have "README" and "readme" and "ReaDMe" in the same directory). Prepare to hack some makefiles.
When you miniaturize a window, a snapshot of the window is taken and placed in the dock. This is where the magnification feature is really handy. You can actually see which document the icon represents before you expand it.
The "sheets" functionality is way cool. Modal dialogs like save panels are attached to specific document windows and do not affect other documents. They scroll down from the title bar and cover part of the window. However, they are translucent so you can still see some of the document behind it.
Another new thing are "drawers" which are sub-windows that scroll out when you activate a control. For instance, in the Mail application, hitting the "Mailboxes" menu item causes a "drawer" containing your list of mailboxes to slide out from the side of your mail reading window.
The finder has plug-in support for document previewing... I was quite surprised to select WAV and AIFF sound files and find that I could play them from within the finder. Writing your own plugins is not that difficult.
Mac OS-X really is going to be the coolest operating system around. I've been waiting years for it...
Burris
I don't have DP3, I used on someone else's machine. I never signed an NDA. But I'm still not sure what the legal ramifications are of posting information about it, so I took down those links. OS X is truly amazing and I can't wait until the release. Then I'll be able to talk about it all I want without worrying about legal issues.
The server is not MacOS X, but OpenBSD on a PIII 450. Admittedly, Linux would have fared better against the /. effect. However, the server never crashed, it just became very slow and the mysql server started to fail.
The images were stored in the file system, but the pages that show them in a "slide show" were generated via php3. This is becuase I just took the uploaded screenshots and ran the same program against them that I use for my other pictures. I had not idea how crushing the ./ effect could be. Again, I apologize.