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Apple Delays Mac OS X
Mad Browser writes:"MacNN is reporting that Apple has delayed MacOS X again until January 2001. They are also reporting that a public beta of OS X will be available this summer.
Jobs also said that WebObjects deployment licenses would go from $50,000 to $700. " QuickTime 5 is also tentatively going to be out this summer, as well.
My guess is they're ADDING things instead of there being something messud up with it...
I see two features and no misfeatures.
:)
Some people see two misfeatures and no features.
Some people don't like or don't understand X.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'll be waiting eagerly for my DP4 CD in the mail. And if it turns out to be as disappointing as DP3 was, there'll soon be a cheapish G4 450MHz for sale. Expressions of interest are invited, I'm not that confident :-) And if it turns out that Apple really have pushed the real product back to 2001, I'll never touch an Apple product again.
Copeland, Raphsody, BeOS and X - it's like being a member of a cult that repeatedly predicts the coming of a saviour.
I take personal exception to this comment.
I am Ryan Meader, President of Black Light Media Inc. and I would like to point out that not only do we at Black Light Media Inc. get things right mots of the time, we also get them before anyone else.
Who was it that first reported that there would be Apple Country retaliers all over the country? Us - Black Light Media Inc. - that's who.
Who was it that told you about the cool new enclosures of Pismo... Piiiissssmooooo.. PPIIIIIISSSSSSSMOOOOOO AARRGGGHH!!!!!!!!! I'm CUMMMMMMMMMMINGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!
sorry. We at Black Light Media Inc. really like the Pismo and its cool new case design. In fact, we think its better than all of the prevoious Powerbook models.
In short, if you don't stop messing with me, I may be forced to send my girlfriend after you, and we both don't want that.
______
Black light Media is looking for some good advertisers!
Apparently when Steve Jobs got the job, he rounded up all the top marketing people and started asking questions -- "I'm student - which should Mac I buy, the 4400 or the 5300 or the 6500? Should a business user buy the 7300 or the 8600? How about any of these 39 clones? Which is faster - a 300Mhz 603 or a 200Mhz 604?" and so on.
The marketing guys all scratched their heads, and Apple has been down to a handful of models ever since.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I guess I meant "any terminal interface to UNIX is more intuitive". But I also could have said "a brick is more intuitive", or "a Chinese water torture device is more intuitive".
:)
(I mean, really, who would ever devise a system where folders can't have folders in them? That's just broken. It's like running DOS 1.0 with multiple disks...)
In any case, 'intuitive' is what you make it, since it's all based on past experience anyhow.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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Mediaplayer is more of a worm. It seems like anything i install wmp gets installed too. I happen to have 6 different ms mediplayers. I'm afraid to trash any because i'm afraid it'll break something
It isnt like wmp doesnt hijack files...actually this is a case where ms can be blamed -even when ms gets shafted by QT- if windows had a better way of associating files with applications it wouldnt happen (of course then ms couldn't hijack the files at their whim.)
thatmustbewhyyoudon'trunasuccessfulbusinesscuzyoud on'tunderstandhowitworks
NOT! \n\n OS X is built from bsd unix an OS where everything is essentially a text file, all you have to do to get it back is to remove the text file that controls the gui, leave nothing in it's place and it reverts itself, replace it with another one and the ui changes, at least that's how it was with dp3 I hope they don't remove that.....
Just beacuse your getting something done, dosn't mean your doing it in the most efficent manner. In the case of MacOS, you are not.
I am certan, that when MacOSX comes out with a command line, you'll use it a lot. Regardless of the quality of the GUI.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Apple's previous modern OS attempt, Copland, was killed in '96 because it was going to take too long to get it out the door. But you've gotta wonder if it really couldn't have beaten OSX by now.
Actualy, when talking about ethernet cards, a MAC is an address. I'm sure the 'A' stands for Address, and M probably for macine. C == 'code'?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/support
You can skip the forms and go directly to the downloads.
http://down load.info.apple.com/private/qt/us/win/QuickTimeIns taller.zip /download.info.apple.com/private/qt/us/mac/QuickTi me_Installer.smi.bin
http:/
I can point to a certain "romantic" worm that has made its way through the internet recently that will pointedly refute that statement.
From what I have heard, they got some negative feedback about the GUI, so they are making some changes. That's fine, If it comes out in september, I'd buy in september, If it comes out in January, I'll buy it then. No sweat, I have my BootX and LinuxPPC, I'm happy so far.
photosMy Photostream
>In any case, posters, don't waste bandwidth >spewing your vaporware crap. When
> an open source software is delayed you all say >it's because development is done the "right" way >and will be released when it's ready. When a >company delays software that isn't ready you all >scream vaporware.
Maybe because when a OpenSource project is released as stable it is and it doesn't have any bugs,or they're fixed in hours?.
And as for Apple they released in a year and a half about 6 revisons of MacOs8 and OS9 with no
huge improvements(well except the memory usage
which increased considerably from the 12 MB OS8.0 to 24MB OS9).Now this is something you can trust
in a OS.
Note:I don't have anything against the Apple Hardware,it's far more quallity than the PC one
at the same price but they still have to prove
that they cam make a good OS overall.
The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it. Alan Saporta
Disclaimer: I have really been waiting fomr MacOS X since the first QT-movies and screenshots were available at http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/ index.html and I use lynx everyday and I love it, but lynx for MacOS X !? Dis gotta be some sort of subtle joke!!! :-)
Thank you.
//Frisco
--
"At the end of the journey, all men think that their youth was Arcadia..." -Goethe
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
And there is a huge gap in the story in the film. It claims that MS gave DOS to IBM, when they first gave them OS/2, and then released DOS in competition.
What the FUCK!?!?!?
If you're going to complain about people getting there facts wrong, you should at least try to get the facts correct yourself.
IBM initially wanted to put the CP/M OS on there PC's, witch were going to compete with the Apple II, the first widely developed PC. They were going to put MS Basic on the system for a development environment. (Intergalactic) Digital Research, the company that made CP/M wasn't really that interested in licensing the OS to IBM (or something), so Microsoft bought QDOS (quick and dirty OS) renamed it DOS (Disk Operating System), and licensed it to IBM. IBM didn't get an exclusive license, and the rest is history
OS/2 was worked on by both MS and IBM as there 'high-end' OS, but M$ abandoned the project for Windows. IBM tried to support OS/2, but ultimately failed.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The WO price drop will be a boon to WO developers. We are currently developing on WebObjects and it is *sweet*, unfortunately, there are only about 4000 developers worldwide right now.
Hopefully this will get some more people developing on WO.
Still waiting for the O'Reilly WebObjects book though...
Here's a (not so brief) history of Apple's attempts at a modern operating system:
A Brief History of Apple
Pink, announced in 1989, was Apple's first public attempt at producing a modern operating system. After IBM joined the Pink project, it was renamed Taligent and spun off as a separate company. Taligent meandered aimlessly, and was killed in 1995. In 1993, before the final death of Taligent, word began to leak out of Apple that a new OS project, codenamed Copland, was underway.
In 1995, with the death of Taligent and the imminent arrival of Windows 95, Apple began hyping Copland and its successor, Gershwin. Apple demonstrated Copland at WWDC, and promised full preemptive multitasking and protected memory support in Gershwin, with partial support in Copland. As the estimated release date for Copland slipped from 1995 to 1996 to 1998, it became apparent that Copland had gone very wrong. Copland was killed in 1996, and replaced by a plan to gradually add many of its promised features to the Mac OS. Many of the UI changes and some of the other, more minor changes were indeed added with Mac OS 8. Unfortunately, the much-needed preemptive multitasking and protected memory features never made it into the Mac OS (even Mac OS 9 lacks these features). The Copland strategy underwent a few more twists, but none had a major impact besides generating rumors and wasting Apple's resources. There were also rumors that Apple would acquire Be and use its BeOS as the basis of the new Mac OS, but this possibility was soon discounted.
Apple acquired NeXT in December of 1996. NeXT, founded by Steve Jobs after his ousting from Apple in 1985, had a modern OS called NeXTSTEP with many of the technologies Apple needed. With NeXT came Steve Jobs, who soon regained control of Apple and his former position as CEO. Apple announced Rhapsody, which was to be a port of NeXTSTEP to the PowerPC, with a Mac-ified UI and the Blue Box for running classic Mac applications. Rhapsody was renamed Mac OS X Server (to distinguish it from Mac OS X), and was Apple's first attempt at a modern OS that actually shipped. Mac OS X Server targeted the small to medium server market, and did reasonably well. Although easy to set up and use by server standards (a few Linux distributions are getting very good, too), Mac OS X Server is not suitable for use as a consumer OS. Interestingly, some of the development releases of Mac OS X Server would run on Intel-based systems in addition to PowerPC-based machines.
When it became apparent that Adobe and other key software companies were not willing to spend years porting their software to Rhapsody, Apple was forced to make yet another attempt at producing a modern OS suitable for consumers. Called Mac OS X, it combines the modern features and architecture of Rhapsody/OS X Server with a new UI (Aqua) and an application environment called Carbon that simplifies porting current Mac applications to Mac OS X.
Mac OS X combines elements of the current Mac operating system (Carbon, QuickTime), components of NeXTSTEP which are themselves drawn from other operating systems (Mach, portions of BSD), and entirely new components, such as Aqua and Quartz.
4 32 bit floating point numbers
4 32 bit signed/unsigned integers
8 16 bit signed/unsigned integers
16 8 bit signed/unsigned integers
AltiVec provides extremely powerful SIMD instructions, and even special instructions targeted at graphics (convert between 16 bit and 32 bit pixels with one instruction).
AltiVec also provides a very cool vector permute unit/instruction.
I would critique your post point-by-point, but you've already gotten a good one. Sorry, I was out partying with my friends, not learning more about the UNIX CLI. :)
:)
:)
Maybe I should explain my background here. I started out on Apple ][e's and C64's. All we had was text. I learned to hunt-and-peck, and later to touch-type. I learned BASIC programs, and I saw Windows-like "graphical interfaces" like GEOS: all the functionality of Windows 2.0, with about 5% of the system requirements or less.
Later, I learned DOS. Ever since I tried to use 'fdisk' to format a disk in the beginning, and had to rebuild my system from scratch, (which isn't that hard if you have a System Disk, a DOS Disk, and know how to read the manual that came with software back then...) I developed a strict policy towards reading *all* the documentation for any new DOS commands I encountered.
Probably around Windows 3.0 and DOS 6.0, I noticed that there was a trend towards including less and less documentation and instructions on how to actually *use* the software. Since I used the "on-line help" in programs a lot, and played around a lot, I didn't really mind, but I guarantee you a lot of other users who didn't have the time or the energy to do this were short-changed in the process, and now we have users who don't get a manual, and apparently don't have time to read what is on the screen right in front of them.
I don't profess to understand this, because I learned from an early age, in MS-DOS, that if you don't understand what's going on, one day your hard drive will be nuked, and it will be all your fault. That's the lesson that Microsoft taught me about computers, and I think it is a good lesson that when combined with appropriate documentation can be a powerful teaching tool.
So... When Windows '95 came out, this disturbing lack-of-documentation trend continued, making Windows resemble nothing more than a Mac with a useless vestigal DOS box that didn't do anything really helpful. Don't get me wrong, I loved DOS, but I found myself writing useful commands in Pascal that I later found out were standard UNIX commands... So I switched to Linux.
First, I learned about SunOS, because my friend Simon was in charge of the Suns we had. They were mystical, and complex, and powerful. But all you really have to tell someone who wants to learn is a few simple commands, most notably 'man'. Once you learn the documentation system, there's really no excuse not to learn everything else.
Now, at this point, all those "easy to use", "User Interface Zealots" who somehow think that MacOS 8.6 or the original release of Windows '98 were the first *real* Operating Systems ever are probably foaming at the mouth. "Documentation?", they say, "It should be easy to use!".
Well, of course it's easy to use. But sometimes you have to learn how. If you stuck me on a tricycle and gave me no directions, maybe I could learn how to ride it by myself. If you stuck me on a bicycle, and gave me no directions, I'd probably be clueless. But if you taught me how to use it, I'd be eternally grateful that now I have a fast, efficient, non-polluting form of transportation and exercise. And if it had multiple *speeds* that I learned how to use, well, I'd be in heaven.
Is learning how to use a complex tool in the first place so bad? Remember, you had to do this for any Operating System sometime.
Once, I didn't know how to type this:
LOAD "*",8,1
Or this:
[Control]-[Alt]-[Delete]
Or this:
[Control]-[Open-Apple]-[Delete]
(or [Control]-[Pound]-[Power] or whatever; Apple's keyboard commands are horribly inconsistent!)
For that matter, once I didn't know how to doubleclick.
Many users today do not know the difference between single-clicking, double-clicking, or right-clicking, and simply do them all until something "works". Just try to tell me they don't need some documentation! Maybe they never sat through the "Tutorial" that's buried somewhere in their Oh-So-Easy-To-Use GUI OS. It took me forever to find that thing under Windows, on a system *designed* for entry-level users! I had to look through their cryptic, badly-indexed help system, so it could tell me to find the CD and put it in! So the Tutorial could tell my Clueless User what a CD-ROM Drive was in the first place!!
Maybe a "Quick Reference" card might have been advisable in that situation. Or, God Forbid, a real Paper-And-Ink Printed Dead-Tree MANUAL!
So, yes, you can't get any work done until you've had someone walk you through using the thing for several hours. On *ANY* system, if you want to be able to use it decently.
And on a Mac or Windows, you might NEVER be able to do even moderately complex tasks. Or you might never know that it's possible, how you should go about doing it, what to do when "dragging things" doesn't meet your organizational needs, etc., etc. Usually the answer is, "find a shareware program that implements a tiny piece of useful functionality that's already built into UNIX but that I don't know about yet."
My classic example here is splitting and joining a file. In UNIX, there are a couple of powerful ways to do this. There's the split tool, which is made for this. But nothing split does couldn't be done by dd instead, possibly with some help from sh. Also, the regular, old cat command, which isn't much more powerful than the DOS type command except that it has wild-card support, and UNIX implements pipes properly, can be used to join files.
In DOS, there's one, cryptic command that is generally considered the right way to join files, no good way to split files, and the type command is castrated, and there's no indication of how you'd do any of this stuff in the first place, anyhow.
On the Macintosh, not only is there no notion of splitting and joining files, but there is no hint of even what a file really is besides a pretty picture, without being at least an intermediate Macintosh user. After that, the user is expected to find some third-party utility, and read the help and documentation on that program to figure out how to split a file. But if it's too confusing, don't worry, you can choose "Less Options" and all that clutter will go away. Just ask your friend who knows about computers...
Anyhow, you get the point, and I'll be happy to talk about these or other issues. But do you understand my perspective better, now?
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No, you can actually use the Metrowerks CodeWarrior compiler, which can make an earnest attempt at Altivec compilation. That is, if you set your target to an Altivec application.
Pretty cool. I know the renderer is available on Linux, and I have heard rumors of the whole shebang. You can have desktop machines running OS X and an farm of Linux boxes rendering. If only they had an alpha compile...
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Release of Mac OS X Beta to Developers: 90% Although sources have been unusually noncomittal about specific ship dates on Beta, the timing is right and the release is by all appearances very nearly ready to go.
According to announcements, they ARE close to releasing a Beta to developers. At least, if you consider developers a subset of the public. "This summer" is indeed pretty vague, but it's approximately similar to "real soon."
Also, at least some folks in the the developer program have had previews in various incremental states for some time now. Developer updates happen every so often. The announcment did not exclude the possibility of releasing new stuff to developers, soon, or even today. It just may not have been announced as the public "beta".
Your post smacks simply of rancor towards Apple and the Mac Rumors press.
Tweet, tweet.
> When a company delays software that isn't ready you all scream vaporware.
Uh, and I suppose you never want to hear about new software then? I think it's great when I read about stuff like this on slashdot, then I have a clue when it may be released. I also think that when software or drivers come out before they are ready, it sure makes the makers look incompitent or unprepared. Example: when ATI released their drivers for the ATI TV Wonder card I recently purchased, the install part of the software is far from working correctly. This is very dissapointing to me, and I would have preferred not even having the product until it actually works. But, that's just me I guess...
nice quip. Here's another one:
Linux UI reaches functionality of late-80's user interface!
Sunnyvale, CA - Linux has finally met the interface standards of the early 1980's. A proud crew of Linux developers stood inside their home-offices proclaiming the superiority of their latest efforts. "Our code stomps Windows 3.1!" one exclaimed over IRC. "Our interface is so good that those Windoze 3.1 users will be drooling with envy!"
"It's so good, that I only use the command line every 10 minutes!" gushed another. "In another 10 years, the command line will be obsolete!"
"The current release of Linux user interfaces is a great leap forward," said one unnamed developer. "However, there is still much work to be done. Our ten-button mouse driver still needs work, and we need some more donated hardware to finish off the teledildonics driver. Plus, the vast majority of users still can't figure out how to start up the desktop."
"On the other hand, progress is great! We just got some great work from a bunch of five-year-olds who took a Logo course at their kindergarten, and we're rolling a Logo-based UI engine into the next release. This'll allow kids to customize their user interface by using standard Logo primitives and turtle graphics. How cool is that?"
Industry analyists who cover the Linux market were overjoyed at the new GUIs. "The addition of a GUI that meets or exceeds Windows 3.1 is a fundamental value-add to the Linux solution offering, and makes Linux a strong contender in the low-end enterprise space" said Rob Towner, analyst at HypoMania securities. "And future plans call for one that meets or exceeds the 95 shell! That's amazing!"
Others were not so sanguine. "BFD. It's crap." posted one anonymous poster on slashdot. "The phrase 'Linux UI' is as much of an oxymoron as, well, it's just moronic. W1nd00z!"
> Even KDE and gnome don't give you either the interface consistency or the attention to detail of the Mac cerca 1990. For all their technical bells and whistles, KDE and Gnome are still ugly, clumsy, and poorly designed.
This looks like flamebait. In my brother's uni, all student-accessible computers are Macintoshes, and I get lots of complaint from him about the poor GUI of Mac, and their stupid 1-button mouse, etc. Talking about user consistency, have you take a look at latest Quick Time's interface: it broke lots of standard for application interface, misuse widgets, and is now on the Interface Hall of Shame!
>> Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it.
> Hmm... system wide, consistent cut and paste? A decent graphical file browser? Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands? multiple monitor support?
Multiple monitor support in 80's interface? in Win3.1? Ah! And for the "decent graphical file browser" stuff, existing ones on other platform weren't much handy at all.
> The fact is that most people don't have the time or the interest to learn the Unix CLI. Doing so is no small undertaking-- it takes days to become even basically functional, and months to master all its nuances. I can sit down in front of a Mac app I've never seen before, and start using effectively almost immediately. I can do that because Apple has worked hard to ensure that developers follow certain conventions in interface design, so that new apps work the same as my old ones. CLI's expect you to memorize an entirely new set of flags and options with every command.
I came to Linux with DOS experience, and didn't even need to learn basic command. The "entirely new set of flags of option" is what GNU long option fought. A brief look at `apps --help` is generally sufficient.
Moreover, Learning Unix CLI's subtle nuances is useful only for shell script porgrammers. Other just need to know the ls, cd, rm, cp, mv, mkdir and rmdir command.
> As for cutting and pasting, I'll take real cut-and-paste with a real clipboard any day. The standard X cut and paste is a nasty hack that should have died 10 years ago. I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally highlighting text before I've had time to paste copied text to its destination. And if Unix had a standard keyboard shortcut for "paste" you wouldn't lose more than a quarter-second in pasting.
That's why desktop environment like KDE and GNOME do have their own clipboard. And they do have standard keyboard shortcut: in KDE, Ctrl-X/C/V for cutting/copying/pasting. Only statically-linked motif apps like Netscape don't follow this scheme (use Alt instead of Ctrl). But Netscape is crap anyway, long live Konqueror.
> And forget it if you're planning on working with images, souds, video, spreadsheets, or even formatted text-- those are just too frivolous for our manly command line interface and our handy dandy middle-button paste.
if you want to display them while you're in runlevel 3, yes. But CLI's asset is it allow things complicated, boring and repetitive to be done by a script. Piping, extracting, redirecting output to input after modified it automatically by a Perl script. You can make pretty impressive stuff done this way, and it was how CLI was intended to be used. Of course, most things are easier to do with a GUI, but how can you ask for a GUI image viewer to display all images on a particuliar partition without some CLI tricks. I think all users use CLI in a terminal windows, and switch to it only when they need to.
Of course, some things may looks complicated to do with these tools. But these are things that are far more complicated to do in a Mac or Windows environment without these tools. If you don't like them, or don't know how to handle them, you can live without. There are these "ugly, clumsy and poorly designed" KDE and GNOME for user-friendly graphical computing. If only MacOS and Windows 98 were as "ugly, clumsy and poorly designed", they would be more useful.
sigmentation fault
The 80287 was only a math co-processor. It did not have any of the MMU and v86 features that made the prefered platform. A '286 to '386 upgrade required a new motherboard.
Possibly, you were thinking about the 487SX, which really had the full functionality of a 486DX (when a 487SX was present, it disabled the main 486SX). Or possibly you were thinking of certain early 80386 motherboards which were designed to allow an 80287 rather than the 80387 (which arrived much later than the '386)
Or possibly, you have know idea what you are talking about.
want an easy way around that? Set your clock forward a couple of years, then launch a quicktime movie, say "later" when it asks you to buy, then close the movie and set your clock back. werked for me until i bought the full version which is an excellent peice of software, at $30 i've seen shareware do less for that price.
Check the benchmarks and you'll see that the G4 500Mhz is toasting the 1Ghz Athlon in a great deal of tests.
For anyone that has played with any of the developer releases, it is obvious that OSX is not ready for the "plug and play" crowd. The look and feel of it are so radically different that the average mac user will vomit. Its a nice OS, it needs some more drivers for non-Apple hardware, but most of all it needs to provide the user with a look and feel that they are used to. The docking hooha is not a desktop and running os9 in a compatibility mode is a loser...
I think you'll find that backwards compatability on the Mac is considerably more than on Windoze.
Please learn spelling before you post in a public forum.
Its "It's perfect though, now that Apple's OS is starting not to suck, their hardware is 500Mhz in a new box?"
not this:
"It's perfict though, now that Apple's OS is starting not to suck, there hardware is 500Mhz in a new box."
There are plenty of fourteen-year olds on Slashdot already, contributing to the general level of ignorance and fanaticism. Please don't add to it.
Maybe Darwin + OPENSTEP + Quartz + Quicktime + a few random bits. Quartz replaced the DPS of OPENSTEP, and omitting it from the list minimizes its importance to OS-X
Unfortunately, display ghostscript isn't quite ready for prime time, and although GNUStep is making progress, it still has some work to go.
I suspect that you are measuring OS X against Linux. Your view of how good OS X depends on how good a Unix-line environment it is. And then everything un-Unix like gets discarded as irrelevant.
Sorry, I apologise. Obviously my source was wrong. I was told that Microsoft never released DOS to IBM until after they'd given them OS/2, which was disaster.
Anyway, I'll get to the bottom of the matter with a few entries in google.
amen to that. I can't stand the shared menu myself, as I think it's highly confusing. But since there are those who do like it, what they ought to do is what KDE does, & let the user choose.
There was a review of OS/X linked from slashdot awhile ago that discusses all the points I could think of. Another is that the mac needs to ship with a genuine 2-button mouse, out of the box.
The thing that bugs me about OS/X is the fact that they've made all the config files only configurable from a proprietary hierarchal database (similar to the M$ registry). I would rather be able to `vi` from telnet or ssh.
A few of my friends up at Purdue and I toyed with a beta we *found* and it was great, but it functioned very stabily (i.e. ran starcraft.) That was back in '98. Now we wait till 2001?
My mouse is usually gonna be in the window of the app I'm currently talking to, so having the menus in that window is good.
Not true. Because it's on the edge of the screen, I can hit the Mac menubar with a single flick of my wrist, no matter where the cursor is now. In fact, it generally takes *longer* to hit menu items in Windows than in Mac OS, even if the cursor is much closer to the Windows menu. Hitting a Mac OS menu is near-instantaneous once you get used to not having to slow down as you get near the menu.
Plus you save screen space by not having multiple menus.
Mac menus also have subtle details that make it work better: Go to a menu that has a submenu, and go down to the title of one of the submenus. Notice that if you move your pointer down and diagonally toward the submenu, that submenu stays open. (Assuming you don't go too fast) If you move your mouse in any other direction, that submenu pops closed. There are a lot of things like that: subtle details that Mac users take for granted to that the rest of the computing world hasn't bothered to implement right.
Also, closing the last window of an app doesn't kill the app. That really gets me, and I blame the shared menu for it.
This is a personal preference, but there are a couple of advantages to this. One, the application-centric (rather than window-centric) model prevents multiple copies of the same app from running. Second, command-Q kills off the whole app, whicl alt-F4 only kills one window. Thirdly, there are times when you want to close the current window and relaunch it. This is much easier if the menu bar stays in place. Fourth, it cuts down on the clutter in the application menu (task bar) I have five items in my application menu at the moment. I'd have 10-15 if every window were listed.
With that said, there are downsides-- it's an issue of personal taste. But it's hardly a basis on which to choose an OS.
I use PC hardware now. And I have a choice of Windows, Linux, BSD, Be, OS/2, QNX, etc.
I use MacOS hardware now. And I have a choice of MacOS, Linux, BSD, Be, OS X Server, OS X (soon), PlayStation (via VGS), Windows 95/98/NT/2000 (via VirtualPC), etc.
Read those same benchmarks and you'll see they are only comparing a few Photoshop plugins. Altivec is fine, I guess. But it is only a limited set of instructions (a la 3dnow! and SSE) and can only be programmed using ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE.
Apple would be better served if they went into the consumer settop internet box business. They have only a paper future in the PC world.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Well, you could always hack on OSX DP3 (or DP4, though I have heard it's out there, I haven't seen it yet)
Guess what.
Because DR4 is so stable Apple is calling it a Beta.
DR4 doesn't exist, it is now called MacOS X beta(*).
Which means that with any luck MacOS X will be released within half a year (which happened with all the previous versions).
500mhz, in a new box? I don't think so, not when a 1ghz Athlon costs like $300 or something.
Please read this article on The G4 vs. K7, then check your prices on the K7: $769 for the 950mhz (probably $1k for the 1Ghz?).
AFAIK, Microsoft has already carbonized IE and OE. From there, it isn't a far stretch to port it to Cocoa.
As for Office, Office 2001 is presumably carbonized as well. I don't think any major software development house isn't currently in the process of carbonizing their Macintosh apps (at least) I know that we are writing to the carbon API right now.
Yes, that was really annoying. I not long ago refused to use QT, especially now that M*dia Player supports movs.
Of course, now I feel justified in using W*ndows (please, no shouting) despite all of the M*c OS users going on about how much easier M*c OS is to use and how much better it is at detecting hardware and installing drivers etc. Well maybe it is but I've now got W*ndows set up just the way I like it and it hasn't crashed for ages so I'm ver<CONNECTION TERMINATED>
http://www.doublezero.uklinux.net/
Doublezero: like Slashdot, only less useful.
This really isn't that big of a departure from Apple's previous stategy.
Before, they were going to release a final beta now and ship sometime this summer. However, they weren't going to bundle the OS with their hardware until January of '01.
The only difference now is that they're re-labeling that initial 1.0 release a beta and stilling bundling it with their hardware in January '01. To be perfectly honest, to anyone who has seriously used OSX DP3, this makes perfect sense. The user interface had a long way to go before it'd make a decent successor to OS9. If they had released anything even remotely like DP3 as a final product, they'd have been filleted by the Mac press and userbase.
It seems they have taken the criticism to heart, and might be fixing some of the stupider elements (ie. the dock) which possibly providing a replacement for some of the gaping holes (ie. the lack of an Apple menu or something similar). As a bonus, they released another beta today and will release another sometime this summer.
This is a Good Thing, IMHO. No use making people buy something labeled a release when in all reality it's a beta. There's no way Apple was going to have something release-quality within 6-8 months of DP3...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Every time macs get mentioned on here, it always goes something like
Mac user: Mac's rule, linux sucks
Linux user: Mac users are just too stupid to use a real comuter
Mac user: Maybe they just aren't stupid enough to beat their heads on the wall to get things done
linux user: Yeah, go back to your gay ass traslucent fish tank looser
(repeat for 2.4 hours)
How about this, you're both idiots! The only people who ever bother to get into this stupid insult fest are the idiots who have nothing better to do and no desire to consider that everybody has a preference. Mac users aren't too stupid to use a real computer. Linux users aren't masochistic. Now everyone shut the fuck up.
Does it rum MacOS software? That's the real reason people need it. Like myself. There are too many Mac apps that I need to run (QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Freehand..etc.). Thanks but no thanks.
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
Up until QT4, you could download a copy and install it on multiple desktops. Now you have to connect every machine to the internet and download the thing 800 times. That's assuming you can even do it through a firewall (it usually bombs). I guess they really want you to pay for "Quicktime Pro" just to play damn movies. Losers.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I need to run emacs on my Macs, so that I can say to my friends, "I edited that file in emacs," and they could say, "You are an idiot."
Then I can say, "Aww, man, I thought it would make me cool." And then they'd say, "Shut up already."
Then I'd sit in my chair and just feel dumb until the Finder crashed, so I'd have something to do.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
OK, offtopic, but the 20th century began in 1901. The 21st century begins in 2001.
Jeff
stty erase ^H
OpenDoc was not cross-platform, but an object-based API. Apple's idea was to have applications that were completely moduled and interoperable.
The reason it flopped was because the press and endusers never really understood it.
As a Maya user (not much of an artist), I have JUST ONE WORD FOR THIS: UNFREAKINBELIEVABLE!
:-D
I had to check the HTML for includes links outside aliaswavefront.com... I thought they had been HACKED! LOL...
This is very good news for the Mac folks and MacOS X in general. It's also good news for ME. My company is SynaPix, and our software ties in with Maya over the LAN. This in all probability means we will be geting our first Mac
Heck, if all I ever needed was a few Windows applications, and the interface was good enough for me, I could run those too, either with Wine or VMWare, or with some Windows-esque window manager.
A window manager is not an interface. A lousy interface with a pretty face is still a lousy interface. An interface is measured by its consistency, it's simplicity, its elegance, and its power, not by where the buttons are and what color the title bar is. Window managers are amusing, but no matter how good they are, they can't overcome the inadequacies of bad applications and lousy OS-level GUI API's.
Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it.
Hmm... system wide, consistent cut and paste? A decent graphical file browser? Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands? multiple monitor support?
Granted, those aren't all specifically interface issues, but they are closely related. Linux *still* doesn't have a lot of the features that Mac users take for granted. Even KDE and gnome don't give you either the interface consistency or the attention to detail of the Mac cerca 1990. For all their technical bells and whistles, KDE and Gnome are still ugly, clumsy, and poorly designed.
My interface is so good, I use the command line all the time.
Good for you. And I bet you spent months learning it. And I'll also bet that when you get a new program, you have to read pages of documentation to figure out how to use it. And I'll further bet that you are in the top 5% on the geekiness scale in the general population.
The fact is that most people don't have the time or the interest to learn the Unix CLI. Doing so is no small undertaking-- it takes days to become even basically functional, and months to master all its nuances. I can sit down in front of a Mac app I've never seen before, and start using effectively almost immediately. I can do that because Apple has worked hard to ensure that developers follow certain conventions in interface design, so that new apps work the same as my old ones. CLI's expect you to memorize an entirely new set of flags and options with every command.
As for cutting and pasting, I'll take real cut-and-paste with a real clipboard any day. The standard X cut and paste is a nasty hack that should have died 10 years ago. I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally highlighting text before I've had time to paste copied text to its destination. And if Unix had a standard keyboard shortcut for "paste" you wouldn't lose more than a quarter-second in pasting.
And if I want to cut and paste something other than text, I'm just out of luck.
Of course, I'd rather get work done. I hate to break it to you, but that's what that "User Interface" is for: to get stuff done.
Correct. Which is why most X GUI's suck so much-- you can't get any work done until you've had someone walk you through using the thing for several hours, and it takes week before you're able to do even moderately complex tasks.
And forget it if you're planning on working with images, souds, video, spreadsheets, or even formatted text-- those are just too frivolous for our manly command line interface and our handy dandy middle-button paste.
If you would actually compare prices you would find that this is not the case. Sure it used to be true, but not any more.
Go to Dell and Apples web pages and put together a basic workstation (G4 400/PIII 600, 256MB RAM, 18GB SCSI is what I used to compare prices, since I consider that minum spec for a machine here at work). Now compare the price of the two, remember that you have to pay extra for DVD and firewire from Dell. Notice how similar the prices are?
Well, okay, but a move from July to January is then just as bad from the "upgrade the OS over the summer" front. Meanwhile, I was talking more about student purchases than departmental ones. Department/institutional purchases usually work around site-licensed software (i.e., Microsoft), and so the release date is also less relevant. But students are the ones who purchase the games and other products that come from smaller developers. Students are also the new "front line" of advocacy. Missing the student purchase window could be a pretty bad thing.
Babar
Will this public beta version expire (must set back system clock with OS 9 boot disk to boot the system again) when Mac OS 10 is scheduled to be released?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"There's a few rough edges but it's really looking good," he said. Jobs said OS X's designers were "shooting for a new level of fit and finish never seen in a user interface before." To illustrate his point, he showed off the operating system's fluid and good-looking user interface, which features animated menus, buttons and control bars, and an easy-to-use, browser-like file navigation system.
Uh... animated menus? buttons? browser-like file navagation? Didn't we see this in Windoze 95? Sure, maybe it's done better on Mac OS X. But it's deffinitly been seen before.
Bullshit.
Fact is, that the problem with Apple started when they throw everything on the Performa series.
After killing the Performa line and drop $ 800,000,000 of inventory.
Apple started to make computers with the PPC750 (better know as G3).
This "saved" Apple, because they had only $ 1,100,000,000 of cash left.
They sold so much G3 computers that there was enough money to develop the iMac.
The iMac is a succes like their G3bw and later G4 machines.
You have to wait between 2 weeks and 2 month's for a G3 powerbook.
Apple has problems with keeping up with demand.
The second thing is, that they switched to build on demand.
This means that if you order a Mac, it is build.
No more invetory.
The only exclusion is the iMac which is build for Apple by LG.
IN David Foster Wallace's 1996 classic, Infinite Jest , set in or about 2010, it describes Pink-2 as Microsoft's first Post Windows Operating System. I thought DFW was just making it up, but now I know where he got it from.
Although I think the idea of M$ dropping Windows for an Apple related OS is about as likely as gigantic packs of mutant hamsters overrunning New England.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
It's still full of debug code ... how it eventually performs remains to be seen.
and then spend $500 on photoshop for windows
Are you saying The GIMP isn't advanced enough yet? It runs just fine for me on Sindows 98.
x11(which generally is much too ugly for a mac user to stand
Or the Aqua themes for GTK and Sawmill that look so not ugly, Apple is suing?
lets see is it "#start x", "#start x windows", hmmmmm how about
How about gdm? 100% GUI from startup to shutdown.
# tell application "X" to open
Interesting... I wonder why nobody has made a CLI shell for Mac OS yet, based on AppleScript and the Open Scripting Architecture.
Will I retire or break 10K?
But seriously, I like WMP. ASF format is actually pretty cool. It plays every major audio format, Divx;), all the common video formats (except the newest proprietary RM and QT formats), does not beg you constantly to buy the full version, and is much, much faster than either Real's or Apple's player. I don't see anything on Linux with that kind of support. If it had skin support, and actual playlist support, it might just be my default player.
They'll release a public beta "in the summer". So hack away!
http://devworld.apple.com/tec hpubs/macosx/macosx.html
Click on the Objective-C framework reference. I think the three-language API will be just fine... at least Apple's finally lost the Pascal version APIs... hopefully...
They have a good PDF tutorial on ObjC as well.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
features and misfeatures of X. (running graphical programs on other machines on the network, no integration of graphics into the kernel, etc.)
I saw two features and no misfeatures. Aren't buggy video drivers running in kernelspace one of the problems that make Windows NT Workstation (and Windows 2000 Professional) so unstable?
Will I retire or break 10K?
That was clever, except that it was completely untrue. KDE 1.1 already bests current interfaces (including MacOS and Windows), and running the KDE devel tree out of CVS is giving me the distinct impression that KDE 2.0 will kick the living shit out of available GUIs.
What I really enjoyed was your implication that the commandline is an arcane and obsolete interface, despite the fact that the command line is where many tasks can be completed most efficiently, and where remote system interaction is most feasible.
I'm running MacOS 9 on my iMac, and its interface is frankly none too impressive. The lack of a task display of some sort (like a taskbar or icon row), the use of that single fucking shared menu, the use of a separate control panel for every little aspect of the interface... these things leave me unimpressed.
I have a question about webobjects. You say that it is "sweet", which I have heard numerous times before yet recently a co-worker has taken to web objects as if it was a religion due to its promise of 'ease-of-use'. (you know the part where they say that you can build a full featured web application with virtually a click of a button).
So my question is this: My co-worker is a failed linux hack (could not understand where he was to type 'man tar' in order to get the manpage), has never written a line of code anywhere in his life, has no concept of logic, etc ..etc.. etc. but thinks that he is (and is currently gettting seed money for a project) going to be able to write a massive application that runs against a mySQL database using web objects with no experience whatsoever... Or no effort.
Is web object so sweet that it can work this magic? If so have I wasted my time learning PHP, Perl, C, etc.. (just kidding)
Thanks a bunch...
This:
was posted on the site fifteen minutes after the story went up at Slashdot. I guess they've never heard of the Slashdot Effect!!!! Ha!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled banter.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Slashdot had reported on this before regarding MacOS X beta and G4 MPs coming out at WWDC based on reporting from rumor sites (last week I think). That is why I was pointing this out. MacNN is a great news source. Unfortunately, it has jumped into the rumors business via its AppleInsider website.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I got sick of waiting and developed a component object model for web application development in Java. It's called Tapestry and will be released as open source on SourceForge as soon as I can my damn company to open a port for ssh in our firewall!
... my first attempt wasn't good enough).
... but this is just one example of how Apple has screwed up; they've let thier best, most marketable technologies languish. They also have a habit of screwing thier supposed partners. Our shop is very, very happy to be able to do WebObjects style development without having to deal with Apple.
We're using it for development of customer web applications already and we like it. Don't have a good Object Relational bridge yet (to do it as right as EOF is very, very, very hard
You can find out more at:
http://tapestry.primix.com/tapestry
Off topic? Of course
What are you complaining about? WO is deployable *NOW* on Mac OS X Server and Solaris (probably others too).
I feel a lot of you linux guys who have relatively little experience with MacOS are missing the point here. The person who originally posted the critique of the Linux GUI experience was obviously someone with reasonable experience of both Linux & Mac OS (as am I). To someone who has this experience, it is blindingly obvious that the Linux GUI is significantly inferior to the current Mac OS interface. This does not make me a Macintosh zealot. Note I have both the Mac OS and Linux installed on my machine. I recognise Linux for its strengths, it has far, far more stability than the current Mac OS. But this does not equate to being a system that a graphic designer - who is not a computer scientist - can be productive on.
And please don't try and tell me that your average joe is going to have no trouble learning to use the Unix CLI. I mean, that is seriously laughable. You need to understand that people who post on slashdot!=general public. There is a big difference. You're not even trying to understand the mentality of the non-technical majority of the population.
Ok, end of rant - but can we tone down the FUD?P>
Well Apple is using Apache for personal web sharing. A little tweaking and I'm sure you won't be needing those IIS boxes anymore. Picture a graphic design business that also hosts websites using load-balancing and people's desktop Macs as servers... :)
Where did you read that? URLs please!
and I agreee.. that's about time!
- Henrik
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Go fuck yourself, and tell the goats I said hello.
On the Mac, you use AppleScript for a lot of the things that you'd use a CLI for on other OS's, so there won't be some CLI awakening amongst Mac users. The non-GUI tasks you're thinking of are easily scripted, and scripts can even be created by recording your actions. It's a pretty good method for enabling non-programmers to automate repetitive tasks or control applications.
In short, you can use mouse actions and text input in Mac OS, just like in any other OS.
Oh yeah, I'M a freakin zealot?!?
Fuck off, you don't know me and don't pretend to asshole.
You think that because you see my mis-typed words on this piece of shit messageboard like thing, you know who I am??
Buddy, I got pieces of guys like you in my stool!
If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows.
Don't hold your breath on this fantasy. Apple makes most of it's money selling hardware. For them to do what you suggest would be suicide.
The problem with SoftMac is that they are VASTLY overstating their software compatability. Almost all current versions of Mac programs are PowerMac only, which SoftMac doesn't support. This makes it useless except for use with software that any Mac user would consider long ago obsolete.
The claim of 80% of the speed of a 68040 on an Althon K7 is pretty poor, too. The 68040 topped out at 33 MHz! Given the architecture advantages of newer CPUs, this means the emulation is running at an effective 1/200th or so of the native CPU speed. This would CRAWL with anything like modern software. It would be like running Windows 98 on a 486-33 PC.
Not all work is done best/fastest from a cli.
And not all work is done best/fastest in a GUI ether. Witch is why people like to have CLI's with there GUI's. I hate to setup a server from the GUI, I wouldn't want to use photoshop from a CLI. MacOS dosn't have a CLI, but when it does, I think you'll probably find yourself using it a lot.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
the PUBLIC RELEASE is occuring late this summer (as previously scheduled) as a "public beta" rather than a 1.0, ala W2K
But will this beta expire? "This public beta version of Mac OS X has expired. To start your computer, purchase and install the official release version. It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Will I retire or break 10K?
That sentance is broken. Either you mean "a terminal is more intuitive than windows 3.1" which I suspect you dont :-)
OR, you should have written "dtterm is much more intuitive"
There's not a lot intuitive about xterm.
Plonk a newbie in front of an xterm, and say "change the font size". See how long it takes you to give up and scream "CONTROL RIGHT CLICK!!"
Now put them in front of dtterm and ask the same thing. Hmm. 15 seconds, or 30 seconds if they have parkinsons.
Nope, those rumours only come around when it looks like Micros**t isn't going to do another Office for Mac.
OS whatever for Intel was a reality until MS threatened to stop developing Office. Things got 'straightened' out between Jobs and Gates at the time of the Micros**t $150 million Apple stock investment.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
It's still a single-button mouse. It just has 4 "convenient" fixed-function macro keys.
X Windows runnings on top of Darwin
So they have an X server on OS 10. Does this mean "OS X" is no longer false advertising, specially in the "Mac OS X Server" department?
Now all XFree86.org needs to do is get its server running on OS 10 (if it works on iMac and G4 under netbsd-ppc it'll be no sweat); then it'll really be OS X.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, Apple already released a fully-modern OS that was unix based...it's called A/UX and rocked the block on the MacIIfx, with it's "Phenomenally fast" 50mhz '030. It had a full-bore Mac interface, too. It's sadly been out of comission since the early nineties, mostly because backwards compatibility and ease-of-administration are the big Macintosh selling points.
SoupIsGood Food
>Having used Mac OS DP3, I can see significant
>promise, but that was the case with Copland,
>too...
You clearly never got a chance to play around with a build of Copland, then. It may have looked good on paper, but the implementation was a bit... lacking. And that's putting it kindly. To give you an idea of how bad it was, the release I once had an opportunity to play with was a "Driver Developer Kit" build intended for third party driver writers (Apple never actually did a seed build for applications developers that I know of). This build could not even boot without using a remote debugger communicating to the Copland machine via a serial cable. As Copland booted you'd get several serious kernel errors or warnings, which would stop the boot, and you'd have to use the remote debugger to tell it to ignore the problem and continue. Once it finally made it to the desktop, you could barely do anything without causing a crash, and it was all horribly, agonizingly slow.
As far as I know, Apple never managed to get Copland much better than the DDK build.
As you probably discovered when playing around with DP3, OS X is quite close to a shippable product (from the perspective of core OS code quality, not user interface experience).
"Congratulations, you've managed to attach emotional significance to a closed-source OS, and it corporate parents." Is it only wrong to attach emotional significance to a closed source OS, or all (and any) OS's? What if I get emotionally attached to Darwin? What about Linux? What is Red Hat trading for today? Is the product of a single corporate parent household less likely to go to college? What other things can qualify someone for the title of "Sad"? Can you post a .pdf of the rules? If a tree falls on the sacred Kernal in the forrest and no one is around to hear it, is it still open source?
How cheap?
Gawd damn! NOT AGAIN! Pleez tell me I don't have to wait ANOTHER six months for a proper OS!
dp4 will be released to developers today after the keynote
as reported on macnn and other sites
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
Even the "rumor" that the Lisa was named after his first daughter is disputed. Other people on the original team said it was named after a lead programmer's relation (whoever).
And, maybe Steve's attempts at enlightenment were simply reparations for wrongdoing against others? Who knows except him...
Or who cares, really...
- MacOS X is technically on time for the 21st century, and
- they got the wrong century
I hope everyone is laughing for the right reason!quicktime is much more than just a media player. while it may try to play you're avi's for you after installing, it will also give you incredible authoring capabilites.
Carbonizing an app doesn't make it any closer to Cocoa. Cocoa evolved from the very different Openstep API. Carbon evolved from the old Toolbox API. The two are almost totally unrelated.
;-)
However, I've heard lots of developers on the net rant about how great the Openstep API were and how easy it is to develop - some non-programmer journalist wrote an article a few years back about supposedly being able to go from, not knowing how to program, to writing a full-featured word processor program in something like 2 hours, using Openstep. So basically, it should take Microsoft about 6 hours to develop MS Office for OS X. (2 for word, 2 for excel, 2 for talking paperclip). The fact that MS has not done this, and the fact that the MSIE team has been disbanded and moved over to WebTV, means that MS is abandoning the Mac platform, probably in some lame attempt to blame the DOJ for their troubles.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
How many times has this been said in other Apple related stories???
Seems like everytime Apple is mentioned on Slashdot, SOMEONE will start b*tching about this.
FACT: Apple does NOT own *all* of the code in Quicktime.
Portions of QT are licensed from other vendors. In particular, the Sorenson codec, which is responsible for live QT streaming, is NOT Apple's intellectual property. No Sorenson, no streaming QT... No Sorenson, no super-high-quality QT like the Star Wars trailers.
A handful of other components are licensed technology, but Sorenson is the biggie. Without the Sorenson codec, you might as well be using Quicktime Three, rathar than four or five.
Now, since Apple does not own the code; do you think they are going to open-source it and intentionally expose themselves to the resulting lawsuits?
For all the mistakes that Apple has made over the years, I don't think giving away someone else's copyrighted code will be one of them... not anytime soon anyway.
And that's why there is no Quicktime for Linux. And that's why there WILL NOT be Quicktime for Linux anytime soon.
Wanna complain to someone? Go to Sorenson and convince them to open-source their codec. If you are sucessful (I doubt it), you will have made a big step (perhaps the biggest) towards a Linux version of Quicktime.
john
Imagine all the people...
>Carbonizing an app doesn't make it any closer to Cocoa. Cocoa evolved from the very different Openstep API. Carbon evolved from the old Toolbox API. The two are almost totally unrelated. That's the whole point. It still is OS X Native, even though it is not cocoa. This is the beauty of OS X vs. Rhapsody. Developers do not need to rewrite their code to gain the benifits of OS X. They just need to make it conform to carbon specs. As for newly written apps, they should be in cocoa. >However, I've heard lots of developers on the net rant about how great the Openstep API were and how easy it is to develop - some non-programmer journalist wrote an article a few years back about supposedly being able to go from, not knowing how to program, to writing a full-featured word processor program in something like 2 hours, using Openstep. Actually, their word processor was as full featured as, say, word 2.0. Which IS full featured compared to simpletext. I'm sure Office will be much longer to move to carbon. OpenStep is great. Objective - C rules! In fact you can develop with Obj C and use the GCC compiler. There is even a project called GNUStep that is open source (although not complete) version of the Openstep (cocoa) libraries.
While this seems like yet another major delay, on reading the news (I read it at MacCentral, not the one at MacNN) I discovered that it's not so different from what I was expecting. In fact, it even seems like it might be a better idea.
The earlier plan was to release an "initial consumer release" of OS X at MacWorld this summer, but not begin shipping it on new machines until the full final release at MacWorld SF next winter. Now, instead of having an initial release and a final release, they have a public beta instead.
It seems to me like that works out well for everyone. First, since there are sure to be some issues with the initial release, it means that they don't take a hammering for releasing an imperfect product. It's a Beta Release! Only for people who know what a Beta Release is, and really want it! We know it still has bugs! Second, unless they're absolutely nuts, they won't even think of charging money for a Beta release (I'm not gonna say anything _definite_, since I can't know, but I'd be surprised), so people who want to adopt early get a nice free copy of the spiffiest OS to hit the street since the original MacOS.
And with such a large test base, if even a small fragment of users report bugs, then they'll catch a lot of problems, and when they do release the final version at MWSF, everyone will be happy _again_.
Now let's just hope that I'm right about all this. *grin*
"Apple Puts Off Joining 20th Century Until 2001."
Do you mean the 21st Century? The 20th Century refers to the 1900s.
Mike van Lammeren
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
And this is very bad UI design. The user should not have to interact with the interface in order to figure out how to interact with the interface! It should be obvious just by looking at it from the start.
The same thing could be said of the Dock. If you get too much stuff in it and the icons are small, you need to "scrub" it to see what they are. BAD! Apple should get rid of the Dock and go back to having three separate tried-and-true features (Apple menu, Application menu, Control Strip) that perform their functions well. Throwing them all together is a disastrous idea.
And give us back a real desktop. The Windows desktop isn't a real desktop, and I don't want something that works like that.
Constitutionally Correct
Trust me on this, WMP will only play Quicktime 2 and older. something which is pretty much worthless now. Apple really didn't change the standards from Quicktime 3 and 4. Actually Quicktime 3 can play most of Quicktime 4 files, But it will sometimes miss either the video portion, or the Audio portion of the file. If it will play both, it will run at a higher CPU usage. but thats another thread. WMP is a great program, but its heading for bloatville too when you look at the 7 beta. and when you think about it, most of what WMP uses is already running, so thats why it will always load up quicker, just like IE.
>The fact that Apple didn't gut the MacOS and
>replace it with something modern
Such as a DOS based operating system? I know UNIX might be considered 'more modern' because of superior multitasking, but my mom does not give a toss about such things, and neither does the average iMac *CUSTOMER*.
>back in the 80's
In the 80s MacOS was modern, and way ahead of anything on a DOS box in terms of multimedia support - and certainly light years ahead of any kind of user-friendly GUI released until 1995. It was certainly a very suitable OS for the *CUSTOMER*.
>At this point in time, the only people buying
>Macs are luddite print designers and people with
>a fetish for colored plastic. Hell, the Mac even
>lost the web designer market by failing to have
>a CSS browser that doesn't crash every three
>minutes.
Mac sales are increasing in 'Luddite' areas such as first time buyer *CUSTOMERS*, the 'normal joes'. You may not think such people deserve a computer, but at least Apple is catering for them with something they want - in a *CUSTOMER* focused appliance with all the traits they will ever need or want.
>The killer for the Mac is that in 2000 it still
>doesn't have a stable web browser.
Netscape crashes less on my Mac box than IE does on my DOS machine. Admittedly Windows does have the march in this area, since MS has control of the entire front to back integration between the OS, applications and web browser, but it is only bad web designers that ignore Mac users and lower end browsers.
It's annoying that 99% of web developers dont seem to realise that the majority of *PEOPLE* on windows machines are still running the same crappy browser that came with their machine in 1996/7.
There is no reason why the Mac cannot survive. I think in the end it will, because Apple is at last getting the marketing right. Marketing = listening to CUSTOMERS and giving them what they want. In an area where hardware and software is getting more and more homogenized, that's todays killer app.
Also, unrelated.. Why does the new OS X GUI not support the X-Windows System? Its great that they have a BSD backend, but you'd think they would support X so they could take advantage of the multitude of cross-platform applications developed for UNIX and X so many years.
Granted, those applications probably don't meet Apple's idea of UI design, but it would be good if the users had the option to run those apps.
Also, will the BSD backend allow you to not run the Apple GUI and instead run an X server? ie, does it have framebuffer or whatever support?
This is not intended to be flamebait or incendiary material. I just don't know too much about Apple's rationale behind OS X and the new GUI.
Thanks.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
One thing I've never understood was why the '030 ran at higher clock speeds than the '040! I'd love to get my old Centris up to 50 MHz instead of only 25. With a larger hard drive it could still be a usable Linux box, with a speed bump like that it would make me a very happy guy.
I've read of a hack to get the '040 up to 40 MHz. If I get to the point of feeling comfortable soldering my mobo I'll give it a shot.
Constitutionally Correct
My interface is so good, I use the command line all the time. Wouldn't a good interface make it so that you don't have to use the command line all the time?
Au contraire! Microsoft Office will run in the Classic environment (code-named Blue Box), which is essentially an emulator running Mac OS 9 that runs transparently on Mac OS X. No nifty UNIX features, but it'll run.
Remember when Apple transitioned from m68k to PowerPC? They wrote a 68040 emulator and built it into the OS so 68k apps would still run (MUCH more slowly than PPC-native apps, and slower than on 68040 boxes), and everybody was happy - most people never knew the difference. how many people realized that a 68040 has more in common with a Pentium than a PowerPC? To the user, the PowerPC was just an upgrade. Mac OS X will be the same way, and if anybody can pull it off, Apple's the one.
Micro$oft has said, I believe, that MS Office 2001 will not be Carbon-compliant, although I can't imagine why. I suspect they'll change their mind. Porting from the traditional Mac OS Toolbox to Carbon is supposed to be easy; that's the whole point of Carbon.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Altivec is not limited you can use it to perform 2 single precision FP calculations or 4 integer calculations and you do not have to program for it in assembly. Apple and Motorola recognized the X86 SMID assembly only programming as a problem and created several C libraries for Altivec.
You can "tear-off" the application menu to get a floating taskbar window
That's probably just one of those religious issues; I've gotten used to moving for the specific menu I want when I use windows/u*ix, but I like being able to "slam" the mouse up against the top of the screen to hit the menubar.
Neither DPS nor Quartz provide any real services beyond what X with something like Display GhostScript
I don't think you've really read up much on Quartz. It provides Photoshop/Illustrator-level graphic capabilities to everyone from the lowly freeware/open source/shareware author to Adobe and Macromedia themselves. No other platform even comes close to this.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
It amazes me that anyone ever trusted these people- certainly one can't depend on Office either, much less IE. They would cheerfully do just the same thing to their own Windows users if they wanted to sell 'em W2K apps all over again. Given the opportunity they'd jack prices up to boot.
There won't be Carbon Office- there won't be _any_ further Mac IE much less Carbon- MS has gone into 'crazed frothing madman mode' and will do as much damage as it can before being 'killed' (as it considers a breakup/regulation to be). This is not a slam to the many good developers and decent people who happen to work for MS. They're no doubt fine people- but the Mac IE team is still history- good people _cannot_ set the tone for a monopoly, they are merely allowing it to persist in its behavior by colluding with it.
Death of the Mac predicted: film at 11, every six months for the last 15 years ;) this, too, shall pass...
The iMac saved Apple, and everyone knows Jobs had nothing to do with the original iMac, but took all the credit.
Ummmm, Jonathan Ives (head of industrial design) was ready to leave the company before Jobs came in. And do you think there's any chance the iMac would have been marketed properly without Jobs there? Do you remember ANY Apple ads airing between 1995 and 1997?
the pundits said that buying NeXT was better than buying Be since NeXTSTEP was "finished"
Correct, and you can use that technology today in either Mac OS X Server, or Darwin. People don't really seem to remember that before Jobs took over, Rhapsody was supposed to be the future of the company. Rhapsody is exactly what exists today Mac OS X Server, except it is marketed different. Amelio wanted companies like Adobe to rewrite their apps from the ground up in Objective-C to get them to run on Rhapsody. Thankfully, Jobs realized this was pure insanity, and charted a course for Mac OS X.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Yes, Apple will release a public beta this summer (probably Macworld NY in July), and it will probably be free.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
From what I've seen at the time of DP3 and comparing that progress to the expected release date, I'd say give them the extra time and MacOSX will be that much better. It will also give the Darwin Open Source project more time, which means nothing but a more stable, feature rich OS. Besides, after buying MacOS9, I'd be kind of upset at it being obsolete after 6 months.
The Mac is good, but it could still use the work to be adequate for the future.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
like having colored buttons for close, restore, minimize. instead of graphical icons.
Symbols (+ -) appear when you mouse over the buttons.
To make a "cool" looking interface for marketing reasons. Instead of practical reasons.
Marketing reasons is an odd way to put it. Perhaps reasons that people that hack around in gdb all day don't really care about. People like cool looking interfaces. There is a small, vocal group of people that think the OS should forever stay like Mac OS 9, but watching Aqua in action is an amazing experience. It makes Enlightenment look 10 years old.
Someone mentioned that there might be a Mac OS X for Intel
I can't see how this would make any sense right now. People just took way too much license with Darwin running on Intel.
If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows.
How in the world would this work? That's no different than expecting Linux to run from within Windows.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
(Score: 0)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
how many times is someone going to bitch about having install over the internet, and how many times is someone going to have to point out this URL.../
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/support
A friend of mine at the Alias|Wavefront offices here in Toronto told me about today's announcement of Maya for OS X...sounds pretty tasty!
Hey APPLE. WAKE UP. There is a New Kid in Town and he is Tromping all over The Windows And Mac OS's His Name is TUX. REAL Player has been Ported to Linux, WHERE IS MY QT4!!!! Are you gonna Release a Linux QT5? Please? Please?
By being as Stubborn as you are about this Quick Time Codec thing and Not giving us a Port. It sure keeps me beliving that you really do "THINK DIFFERENT"
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Does this mean VOB playback even in the 'evaluation copy'? Or does VOB contain anything beyond 'pure' MPEG-2?
Highlights of the new version include MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 codec support, both encoding and decoding, as well as support for both local and streaming playback of those formats.
Does anyone here already have an evaluation copy of the Java 2 SDK? Any benchmarks? Opinions?!
There is some truth in what you say: stable is certainly a very noble goal. But the problem with the revised release schedule timing is that Mac OS X now misses two key purchasing deadlines.
The first key deadline is the start of the academic school year, when Apple has traditionally run specials and tried to get new and returning students to buy that Mac. Now those Macs won't be running Mac OS X.
The second key deadline is the Christmas shopping season, which is also over before January 1. I do expect Apple to ship a ton of Macs for next Christmas. (My guess is that the next rev of the iMac will come with a DVD ROM/CD-RW drive that will cure the "no floppy, no back-up" problem.) But now none of those Macs will be running Mac OS X, either.
Now, the reason why this is a problem is that if those Macs were shipping with OS X, then people would be asking for and buying the new applications that were written for the Cocoa environment. But if they've just shelled out for the Mac and the available, probably Classic apps, I'm not sure they'll upgrade very quickly to Mac OS X or Mac OS X apps. And if I were a smaller Mac OS X developer, that would make me feel pretty skittish.
And, if I were a hardware buyer not totally sold on the Mac anyway, I'd probably have less incentive to buy one rather than some random Win2K box. I'm not sure that shipping late is a move that Apple can really afford right now.
Babar
Only one or two of the video codecs and audio codecs is actually owned by Apple. The others are either already open or are proprietary. I wish people would keep that in mind. Quicktime is cool because it can handle so many media types and mix and match them with ease. Asking Apple to open it is impossible, so maybe our efforts would be better spend just petitioning for a Linux version.
Here's something fun. New movies of Mac OS X in action.
Totally slick - and definitely better than before.
I apologise for the previous post, I forgot to change it to "plain old text"
>Carbonizing an app doesn't make it any closer to Cocoa. Cocoa evolved from the very different Openstep API. Carbon evolved from the old Toolbox API. The two are almost totally unrelated.
That's the whole point. It still is OS X Native, even though it is not cocoa. This is the beauty of OS X vs. Rhapsody. Developers do not need to rewrite their code to gain the benifits of OS X. They just need to make it conform to carbon specs.
As for newly written apps, they should be in cocoa.
>However, I've heard lots of developers on the net rant about how great the Openstep API were and how easy it is to develop - some non-programmer journalist wrote an article a few years back about supposedly being able to go from, not knowing how to program, to writing a full-featured word processor program in something like 2 hours, using Openstep.
Actually, their word processor was as full featured as, say, word 2.0. Which IS full featured compared to simpletext. I'm sure Office will be much longer to move to carbon.
OpenStep is great. Objective - C rules! In fact you can develop with Obj C and use the GCC compiler.
There is even a project called GNUStep that is open source (although not complete) version of the Openstep (cocoa) libraries.
That movie, the Pirates of Silicon Valley, is a fscking disaster. Overacted and with bad dialogue. Also, it twists the facts around like hell...f.e. Steve Jobs never ignored any daughter or mistreated any former spouse, although Apple's first computer Lisa was named after his daughter.
And there is a huge gap in the story in the film. It claims that MS gave DOS to IBM, when they first gave them OS/2, and then released DOS in competition.
And, hell, even Steve Jobs isn't as evil as that. The guy went to India in search of spiritual enlightenment....anyone with a such a chilled perspective of things can't be all bad.
Make that millions. Our bread and butter is earned on Macs. With out them we would be out of business. NT could maybe do the job but the retraining, new software, etc, needed would cost us a fortune. And our artists like MacOS.
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
"When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
I don't understand why anyone thinks shipping software before Christmas is such a huge deal. January 2001 is after Christmas 2000 but still before Christmas 2001. Until the end of civilization there will be a continuous succession of holidays and school openings. Do what's right for the software, ignore the calendar.
I think that people will be pleasantly surprised when they see the final product. DP3, and even DP4, are not really finished products at all. The user interface elements that have generated so much discussion are relatively easy things to change the behavior of, from Apple's perspective, compared to the underlying code, APIs, etc. The flashy GUI stuff that we have all seen has been released precisely for this reason: to generate a lot of discussion. The look of the close buttons, for instance, could be changed 30 minutes before GM. By getting these wacky ideas in front of the public so far in advance, they have a great opportunity to guage the public's feeling on a lot of random interface ideas they have had, a lesson the may have learned with the Quicktime 4 interface. I am sure that if they had shown the interface to the public before release, the response would have compelled them to change it and we would all be slightly happier today, or at least have one less thing to bitch about.
e ymon.html
All in all, even if none of these interface elements make it into the final product, they have served their purpose; they have generated interest and attention for Apple, allowed user feedback and innovation to be incorporated into the final product from the outset (not tacked on afterwards, like SuperClock for instance), and most importantly, highlighted for the public that Apple is actually committed to this product, development is taking place, and sometime in the future it will be released, something that Apple customers have really lost faith in over the last few years.
Donkeymon: http://home.earthlink.net/~seymourlavey/hate/donk
"There's one born every minute." - Steve Case
Mind you, I fully expect that linux hackers will eventually put just as good a subtractive color model into the GIMP (to equal photoshop it would have to be doing internal calculations and conversions in LAB color which has a greater gamut than either CMYK or RGB), but in order to do that, they need to understand what is actually involved :) you think there weren't scarily smart geeks involved in coming up with Photoshop? Hint: Photoshop originated in _Industrial Light & Magic_, not MS or Corel. Photoshop _is_ GFX geekness concentrated into one program. In order to beat it you have to take it seriously, not scoff at it.
I look forward to eventually hearing about GIMP hackers (or whoever) getting really GFX-geeky with all sorts of different color models and LAB as a base for conversions- I don't think any of that fundamental technology is patented, because LAB didn't come out of Silicon Valley, nor did ink and printing presses ;) it'd be a little harder to get Pantone colors (and all the other color houses) in there, as I'm sure you have to pay Pantone to be allowed to refer to specific Pantone colors. But on the whole, it is possible. But no fscking way are you going to be able to do prepress on an additive color model with a hacked-up grey channel. *g* the very concept, to a GFX geek, sounds like what Linux hackers would think of a 'dozer saying "You can get Windows 95 to multitask better than unix, because it is preemptive!" Uh, no no no ;)
Is releasing a public beta standard for apple? Will it be freely downloadable? Is this a first post?
Where are my GPFs? I WANT MY GPFS!!
Apple Puts Off Joining 20th Century Until 2001.
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Why is it that Slashdot either posts stuff that isn't even news yet (beta releases, keynote addresses that are still in progress) or they post crap that is months old and often already posted on slashdot.
In any case, posters, don't waste bandwidth spewing your vaporware crap. When an open source software is delayed you all say it's because development is done the "right" way and will be released when it's ready. When a company delays software that isn't ready you all scream vaporware.
Slashdot and it's posters are all so predictable.
OS X will be shipped... when it's ready. I have no doubt a beta will be available this summer.
good afternoon.
Uh... animated menus? buttons? browser-like file navagation? Didn't we see this in Windoze 95? Sure, maybe it's done better on Mac OS X. But it's deffinitly been seen before.
I'll grant you the browser-like navigation bit, but in terms of breaking new ground in UI, Windows 95/98/NT/2K are not even in the least bit comprable to Aqua.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I would make more sence to say, maybe, have the icons there, and have the color change from grey to green (or red etc..) when the mouse is over it. That way. The user knows what it is. And they get feedback when they hover over it. Instead of the user having to "check" each one untill they find the right button.
and how do you suppose color-blind people know whether to stop or go at stoplights? because the red light is ALWAYS on top and the green light is ALWAYS on the bottom.
i predict that by the end of my first hour of using Aqua i will have learned that the close button is ALWAYS on the far left and the minimize button is ALWAYS on the far right (or whatever the convention ends up being), and so i will never again have to check which is which.
this is why consistency in UI, and standards such as the Human Interface Guidelines, are a Good Thing.
personally, i'm glad Apple is moving away from icons with Aqua. the whole new look will be a real kick in the arse even for lifelong Mac users, a way to bid goodbye to the tired old interface. i'm looking forward to it - one of the reasons i use a Mac is because i like using a system that feels different from the one the majority uses.
-steve
--- "We also were guided by the unlikelihood that anyone would face supernatural evil armed only with technology."
Copland actually made it to an early developer release, and there's an excellent Apple Press book, MacOS 8 Revealed, which describes Copland in detail. (Amusingly, Amazon.com is still selling this book, resulting in some strange reader comments.) Copland was supposedly killed because it ran old MacOS apps in a compatibility box with its own window. That was a killer limitation at the time, because Microsoft was threatening not to upgrade Office for the Mac to use the new API. MacOS X isn't really much better in this area, but Apple now has a deal with Microsoft, so Office will supposedly be upgraded if and when Apple ever gets a new OS out the door. I'm not holding my breath.
Apple had three other major false starts in the application API area:
- Bedrock This Apple/Symantec effort was supposed to provide a cross-platform API (Mac and Windows). Killed by Symantec, which decided that fighting MFC was hopeless. I still have a Bedrock CD.
- OpenDoc This Apple effort was supposed to provide a cross-platform API (Mac and Windows). Killed by Steve Jobs. OpenDoc got to the point that applications using it shipped.
- A/UX Apple's UNIX port. Ran Mac apps in a protected partition, slowly. Release 1 sucked, but 2 wasn't all that bad. Apple's first "server capable OS". 68K; never really made it to the PowerPC.
The end result of these debacles was far fewer Mac developers and, today, about 4% market share. Apple is profitable only because of major cutbacks; their market share is way below mid-90s levels.I actually liked the dialog boxes (totally Mac-like) that helped novice users using Unix commands. Every common Unix command had its own dialog box with all the options available (for find, it took several dialogs to cover everything).
Even better, one of the fields contained the actual command-line that was built according to user's choices. This way, it was not only simple to use arcane commands with many options, but it also allowed users to *learn* the syntax, and then to be able to use the commands without assistance.
If I remember correctly, it was possible to invoke commando from the shell (cmd-k?), and from commando to send the resulting command back to the shell.
It was very nice, and I'm sure such a system could help *a lot* novice Linux users (coming from Windows, Mac, or with no previous experience with computers).
If something similar, and as polished, exist for Linux, please let everyone know...
Non solum sed etiam
As loath as I am to admit it here, I like Apple. I prefer their hardware, and for some situations, I prefer their OS. My home machines are dual boot Mac/Linux PPC boxen. Which means I am looking forward to getting my claws on a BSD based MacOS.
As much as I'm drooling, however, from the angle of Apple's future, this delay is probably a very good thing. Rushing out the release before the OS (or the apps for it) are ready gives the press opportunities to slam it into the ground. The longer developers have to polish it, the better it will be when the wrappers come off. The more apps developers support it (with Carbon or Cocoa apps), the better the package feels to the end user. And, probably, the better the reviews come off.
A September release would be premature. As a developer, I know that without question... but I really wish I had the opportunity to hack with it a while before the release...
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Mac OS Rumors is a rumor site. They don't pretend to have all the facts; quite the contrary. In this particular case, what MOSR had been calling a beta, actually turned out to be DP4. What was expected to be the 1.0 release will now be called the initial public beta (which makes me very happy, considering the current state of development, application support, etc.).
If you're counting on sites like MOSR and AppleInsider to bring you the latest accurate news reports, perhaps you should have your head examined. For those of us who like to keep up on the latest unconfirmed hearsay, MOSR has consistently been an excellent resource for several years, and I applaud their efforts.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Shipping before Christmas 2000, (which is a high retail sales period)
enables a company to have greater potential revenue during that quarter.
Which leads to a higher performance report in the next fiscal quarter,
which can lead to a better market position during the slower sales
periods (late spring, early summer). It also gives the company
more capital to work with in ramping up for the next big sales
period by producing more machines, making deals for retail shelf
space, creating advertising, and making future sales projections
based on the results of the last sales season.
Falling short on one cycle means they have lost opportunities to
get ahead in both this year and the next. And keep in mind that
the rest of the industry (Linux, Be, MS, et al.) are not going
to stand still and wait for Apple to catch up.
Not sure about your point, perhaps I am stupid.
PPC750 was mainly developed by Motorola and IBM due to competetive demands by the consumer for faster computers, and the development of the Pentium that threatened the 680x0. Apple had an input too since it was the most significant platform based on the 68000 technology, but another annoying misconception is that Apple invented the PowerPC processor.
Their 'supercomputer' ads reinforce this illusion. Okay I know it was an engineer that decided to put that chip in there, but I do not think marketing tried to stop this. If they did then they were dumb.
My point is that marketing doesn't obstruct innovation as far as the customer is concerned, as long as it is done properly. Bad engineering also produces suboptimal outcomes - but then Marketing people are subsequently forced to come up with some ways of turning this into a feature so that they can get back the R&D cost, and then get the blame for the sloppy product.
Is it Marketing's fault the engineering was bad? Perhaps, if they forced something out the door prematurely, or they set the wrong objectives for development.
But that argument invalidates the view that Marketing holds up the release of OS X, since surely a buggier/crappier version would come out sooner if marketing ruled the roost.
Also, the Performa concept was not marketing focused, but engineering/product focused, in that the company would cream more money by producing a range of intentionally crap computers based upon existing models (by stripping out features and NuBus slots) so they could be sold at low prices, rather than finding out exactly what the customer wanted and making it.
Guess what, they didn't sell too well, and the proliferation of marginal difference models confused everyone. Was there a sign of a strategy there? That's not proper marketing, thats just an accounting idea dressed up as a sales pitch.
As for eliminating inventory by build on demand, a large % of Apple's core market does not have access to the internet before buying the computer, and is not technically oriented. (Engineering focus ignores this since such people are losers and dont deserve computers) They are unlikely to build on demand until the technology is more accessible.
Also, I doubt Apple could maintain volume on build on demand unless it invested billions in large scale flexible production plants. Again, this is a minor problem not of concern to engineering focus.
I've been out there on the front line and the conflict between marketing and engineering in most US tech firms is sad and counterproductive. Yeah you want to make cool stuff, but people have to want to buy it. Otherwise you should be an academic, which is much cooler and lets you have more freedom.
The synergy between marketing and engineering in Japanese firms is why they consistently roll out amazingly successful and technologically cool stuff, whereas a large proportion of good US projects get cancelled due to conflict, or the launch ends up a turkey.
Both the marketing people and the engineering people need to love one another, hold hands and skip through the park singing and dancing, then you get the best of both worlds!
Um, photoshop does those little preview icons in windows.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Where does this conception come from that Macs are super expensive boxes that only the l337 can afford. If you ever take a gander at the scores the G4s get compared to Intel and AMD's chips they manage to keep up the pace with chips that have twice the clock speed. Why the hell would you want an OS to run inside an OS? There's only a small handful of instances where it would make sense. You sure are uninformed.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So far all the information have been able to gather on Cocoa has left me sketchy on whether or not it is even needed. Granted, I haven't looked into it very much....although I did open the ol' browser to get some Apple tech notes...Gotta change my home location to something besides slashdot ;-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
AppleShouldSpendMoreTimeWorkingOnTheCodeAndLessMon eyOnMarketing.com
*cough* *cough* Slashdot ripoff! *cough*
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
"At WWDC today, Apple demonstrated a version of X Windows runnings on top of Darwin 1.0, Apple's open-source, operating system core for Mac OS X. The significance of this is that bringing X Windows/Linux applications to Mac OS X should be a far easier task now."
'Bout time!
just my blog and pix
I've been a Mac user since 1984, and a Linux user for a couple of years. What I've really been looking forward to in OS X is the foundation, flexibility and power of UNIX with the ease of use of a mac. Quartz makes X windows look like an etch-a-sketch. Also, OS X's use of XML in config files is just inspired.
No matter how you feel about the above, you have to admit...a mainsteam consumer OS that you can make contribs to is fucking cool.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Actually, I recently discovered that there can be a CLI on MacOS. I was messing around a little in my new ($10 at a swapmeet) SE/30 (getting comfortable with the hardware before wiping out MacOS to install NetBSD), when I decided to install GNU Emacs on it.
I figured I would try the Shell just for kicks.
[META]-x-shell
voila! A command prompt on a Macintosh (within an Emacs buffer). All it had were the bare shell commands that Emacs afforded (ls, cd, a few others) but it was sort of fun to tool around in the directories of a Mac hard drive at the command line.
Of course now the little SE/30 has NetBSD on it. Still trying to round up an SE Ethernet card.
I'm no programmer, but if there's one area where Apple hasn't screwed up then it's WebObjects. They put a lot of work into it - it's definately not languishing - and they are still pushing it. The languising thing hasn't happened at Apple for a while now. They've changed. And most of the NeXT guys who worked on WebObjects are now at Apple, still working on that and Mac OS 10.
--- Just make it crash, I want to see.
OSX Server, NT, Solaris, HP-UX. WebObjects was amazing software at $50,000. At $700 it's unreal especially considering that WebLogic, WebSphere, etc. are largely imitations. The only problem is that when you think "enterprise software" you don't think of "apple". if i were in apple's marketing department, i would play up the NeXT angle of WO. ---matt
Stop trippin' over the fact that the OS isn't going to be shipped pre-installed as 1.0 until 2001. In fact that was the original rollout schedule outlined in January. The only thing that has changed (as mentioned at the WWDC) is that the PUBLIC RELEASE is occuring late this summer (as previously scheduled) as a "public beta" rather than a 1.0, ala W2K. So basically nothing has been delayed; rather the naming convention has changed. All Macs will have OS X pre-installed by Jan 2001 (as version 1.0). Boy, you rabid anti-Apple trolls have to control your flame-reflexes and analyze the context of news, rather than jump wildly after reading one headline.
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Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
You would have been just as screwed buying a 286 in 1989 -- within a couple years all software was targeted for a Windows 386 mode.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
'Why would you use an Apple product?'
Ehm..ehm...maybe because both Gnome and KDE are fucking ugly and uncouth, even when compared to Windoze?
Maybe because the hardware rocks, the OS is comfortable, as in contrast with Linux(PPC)?
Maybe because everyone uses Windows?
Maybe because I like Apple, for they have always been at the spearhead of innovation and originality in the computer industry, whatever anti-UI, command-line dinosaurs like yourself may think, with your mainstream hardware, using fscking Windoze when nobody's looking, like I suspect most of Slashdot is doing.
Maybe because there are plenty of people like you, and that I enjoy pissing them off.
Maybe because I like translucent plastics?
(OK, I didn't really mean that last one....)
The KDE project is working on a set of human interface guidelines, I think Windows has had some for quite a while.
The KDE user interface guidelines can be found here. They aren't quite as impressive or extensive as Apple's guidelines, but they are quite complete now, and are quite well designed (it's apparent that they have worked hard to weed out bad interfaces).
And yes, I have to agree that Apple seems to be putting way to many technologies on hold for too long. However by the time they are released, they are robust and well designed. My favorite example of this is Sherlock, while the interface was poorly designed, the searching is very speed, and the search through any text file on the drive quickly is definatly unique.
Uhmm....I use a 5 button mouse with my Mac. How's that for single button mice?
I don't think most OS X users will notice the BSD core except for increased stability & shit like that. Apple will do a fine job of hiding the complex stuff from people who don't want to see it... which in itself is a good thing, as long as it doesn't restrict more advanced users' access to it.
Bashing Open-Source was stupid of him, but getting grossly offensive and posting as AC is no way to proceed with logical debates.
Funny, the only thing that's interested me has been the rumors...mmmm, mp g4's running os X...
why not imagine the g4's are running at 1 ghz...
I'm in heaven...
I'm pretty sure it has happened.
i would say one of the main reasons the Mac was a relative failure compared to windows was that Apple spent too much time dicking around with crazy pet projects, and too little time on any serious business or marketing strategy.
Lots of funky technologies were breeding in the R&D labs, and some of them actually became quite useful (working at apple in the day would have kicked ass), but the majority of ideas like the Pippin were just frankly stupid and ignorant of what customers (who pay the bills at the end of the day) really wanted.
Now the reverse is true and it seems apple is nothing BUT slick marketing. Well, swings and roundabouts, eh? But remember, Apple has never been very good at getting an OS out on time. System 7 was in vapour for quite a while, and as for Copland, well, erm... So comparing the 'crap era' versus 'good era' marketing days, it seems that nothing really changes in Cupertino.
The only reason Apple is alive today is because of the iMac, which is basically a customer driven marketing tool. I bloody hate it when coders say that marketing gets in the way of 'good product'.
yes, it gets in the way of elegant and efficient software/hardware (what is important to engineers of course, for good reason) but the 99% of people buying iMacs do so because of the marketing, especially since MacOSes are pretty underspecced in terms of geek features compared to, say, Linux, and the hardware pricier than a bog standard PC.
Anyway, I know it was just a wee joke but I felt compelled to swim against the tide again.
Moof!
The GUI sucks. There's nothing more to be said about that.
In regards to your comment about a text editor: BBEdit. I can't stress this enough. BBEdit is the best text editor I've ever used.
Face it, Linux isn't hurting Apple's bottom line at all. The strengths of the Mac OS are all of Linux's weaknesses. The large number of first time computer users and Windows converts buying new iMacs FAR outweighs the numbers that they might be losing to Linux.
Let's not forget too that most Mac users that might get interested in Linux dual boot instead of abandoning the Mac totally. Linux only helps sell Macs because of the small PPC Linux following.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm intersted by the huge drop in price for WebObjects. What little I've heard about it is positive. It also appears to be very similar to Cocoa, the MacOS X api. Is this an attempt to get developers familiar with the new api?
I don't know how this will be accepted by the community, but I can tell you where a rough version of QT3, or maybe QT2 is located. A pretty savvy linux geek has ported all of the *Apple open* code to Linux and created his version of "Quicktime for Linux" What this means is that *NO* you still can not play the really cool streaming Sorenson codec based QT files, like your Star Wars trailer videos. But you *CAN* write your own QT movies that can not only be played under QT for Linux, but QT for Mac and QT for Windows as well. Also, if you happen to run across any of the pre-sorenson QT files on the Internet, you can play those as well. The URL is http://heroine.linuxave.net/ then click on the Penguin with the QT logo on his chest. While you're there, check out the other video software for linux while you're there.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
I harken back to the days of Quicktime 2 and 3. There were tons of apps that used Quicktime (all different versions) that could never figure out you already had it installed. It seems like every game you bought before 1996 came with Quicktime. Those were the days!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Both Taligent and OpenDoc were industry efforts that included IBM... OpenDoc was poised to fight it out with COM as "the" component model, but when it became clear that OS/2 wasn't going anywhere in market share, developer support languished. The release of JavaBeans caused IBM's support to disappear.. what's Apple supposed to do?
-Stu
Man, what can take them so long, I mean MacOS was cool in 1984 but now it really start to stink.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Taligent was a project hijacked by good intentions. Its developers felt C++ was the "language of the gods" and could effectively write everything as a composibile framework. Taligent CommonPoint 1.0 was actually releaed in 1995 and was visionary, useful, but also bloated and way ahead of its time. It was also released at the same time Win95 was... that sealed their fate.
Take a look at the 1996 Orfali/Harkey/Edwards book "Distributed Objects Survival Guide" for screen shots and descriptions of what Taligent offered. Its "people/places/things" metaphor is still a useful paradigm.
-Stu
It is amazing how often Slashdot gets burned by the Mac Rumor Web Sites. From now on, I would suggest that Slashdot completely ignore the ignorant and always inaccurate MacOSRumors web site. The fool that runs the site was been missing the mark nearly 100% on the release of MacOS X and is causing untold damage to Apple by firing everyone up for a non-event such as the WWDC release of MacOS X beta. The only thing notable about MacOSRumors is when it actually gets something right!
What Apple did release was MacOS X DP4 which MacOS Rumors falsely claimed had already been released to "select developers".
Here is the actual text from MacOS Rumors saying that MacOS X Beta was going to be released today, er, um 90% chance it would be released today.
From MacOS Rumors:
Release of Mac OS X Beta to Developers: 90% Although sources have been unusually noncomittal about specific ship dates on Beta, the timing is right and the release is by all appearances very nearly ready to go.
Slashdot: Stick to the facts and please ignore the rumor web sites. They are an absolute waste of electrons!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
So when they say the new version of WebObjects will be "100% Java based," does that mean that you can no longer write WO apps in Objective-C? Seems like that was a popular feature with all those NeXT people...
MacNN is now also reporting that Maya will be available for OS X.
Maya is Alias|Wavefront's modeling program used for lots of movies, commercials, etc..
It's a pretty big deal!
--hunter
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
They wouldn't need to rewrite GIMP just to hack in CMYK. They'd just figure out a way to link a grayscale (K) channel to an RGB (aka [1 1 1]^T - CMY) channel. And if you want prepress, that's why there's something called "plugins." It would be really cool if some fella made a plugin adapter (Lesser GPL) that let WinPhotoshop plugins run in WinGIMP. Any takers?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hmmm... Maybe this is targetted at a different audience? There *are* people who don't want to build a box and some of us out there have to support hundreds (even thousands) of them. Wouldn't it be nice to have a stable Unix based computer that could go out of the box?
Linux can be tweaked to achieve this but Apple gives a rich user experience that Linux just hasn't gotten yet.
DB
I need to ask for my new machine rather quickly. I *must* have *nix. If OS X works, and has a good fortran compiler, I'm tempted to go that way. If it doesn't, it's x86 and FreeBSD. (Either one will irk the computer folks where I'm going :)
BUt what does "public beta" mean? Sign up, and maybe they send it? Anyone can download? A spare CD hidden in the computer case?
Meanwhile the Mac Office team is currently working on Office 2001, and has said that while the initial release will not be Carbon-compliant, they do intend to Carbonize it sometime within the next year or so (although a change in plans wouldn't greatly surprise me).
*sigh* You know, if Microsoft were smart, they'd realize that if the DOJ breakup goes through, their best option is to capitalize on the markets they have left after Windows is pulled away: Office and IE. Instead, they're scrambling to ensure that a breakup will hurt them as much as it possibly could, so their customers will be upset and they can simply blame the government.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
If they release it as final this summer, and everyone hates the GUI, they have to apologise when they fix the UI.
If they release it as beta, and everyone complains, they can say that they were listening to their beta testers when they fix the interface in v1.0.
This lets them save face.
Also, if we look at recent rumors...
Microsoft isn't making Office OS X Native until they finish OE & IE.
It would be a deathwish to release OS X without Office, since it is aimed at people that already have Macs, and want the ease of use of a major Office suite.
Well, I dont' know where your getting ur prices from, But i can hardely afford to upgrade my current 233 at the moment, let taking a loan out for a G4.
Don't look at those apple charts too much. The results are differnt when you actually use the computer for every day tasks (still favoring the mac though).
I do design, print and web. Mac has better software for print. But I have yet to find one text editor like the one i use, for mac. Not to mention all the other little things. Restarting the computer all the time would be a major pain in the ass.
As a general rule, Apple puts a great deal of work into the little details that make their computers (hardware and software) so 'insanely' great.
God knows how hard it must be to actually pull off the concept of Mac OS X - unix core on legacy equipement with a user friendly UI, Java 2 support built in, advanced graphics layer, historical app support etc etc etc. I look forward to seeing Mac OS X. I think it will be excellent (and ready for release) by the time we all get our hands on it.
But why would you be loathed to admit that you like a company that gives people an alternative? That I don't understand...
Leden Corp. - Mind Games our speciality... -
...but that's not a fair comparison - people _like_ using the etch-a-sketch.
ok , so lets drop say sixteen hundred on a good intel or amd box(or more because it has to do photohop _really_ well because your liveley hood depends on it) and then spend $500 on photoshop for windows and another 500 on Quark and another $500 on Freehand.(you werent naive enogh to think any of those ship on hybrid cds were you?)And just throw out every other software youve bought and you lose all you tiny custom photoshop icons(which beleive it or not are very useful) (and after you realize win98 is too unstable spend $200+ on winNT)
;^)
...see if it fixes the problem if not put it back and try a different one) and replace it with editing the windows registry and rearranging dlls and eventually hosing it all(hey i've done that) and having to spend an hour or 7 reinstalling EVERYTHING(ive done that too) OR with linux editing text files to toy around with preferences and when the newbie linux-nee-mac user accidently oops shuts off x11(which generally is much too ugly for a mac user to stand-and eventually a mac user will do it because of their mac knowledge that if they screw something really really bad the can spend 20 minutes doing a clean install of the system and then just drag files from one system folder to the new one) and lets see is it "#start x", "#start x windows", hmmmmm how about "#open x windows" or maybe some applescript syntax "#tell application "Xwindows to open", umm maybe "#win"?
apple has probably noticed this too
And many designers enjoy using MacOS because it is a very visual oriented system. They enjoy using it.(they enjoy using it in spite of it)
then you have to contend with the rest of the migration... resource forks, converting your files, reformating all your disks (& reburning CDs)and putting your head through the monitor because random windows annoyances(not including crashing)
Oh and lets not forget tossing the knowledge you have of troubleshoting extension conflicts(remove file from ext folder
like i said a lot of mac users use it because they enjoy using it.
A few years back, before Jobs fired anyone who might possibly leak classified stuff, Mac OS Rumors was the best informed place around. They had good sources inside Apple, and they were usually the place you first read about exciting news.
These days, it seems they just don't have any good inside info anymore, so they just print whatever they happen to hear from whoever.
Well, I don't know about QuarkXPress, but I know for sure that both Photoshop and Freehand are available in win32 format. You could run these in VM ware or possibly even WINE. Or you could just get win2k witch also supports AppleTalk. I'd be very surprised if Quark isn't available on windows, not many companies are willing to tie there software to the once sinking ship of MacOS
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The 'environment' for Mac apps was actually just MacOS (for the most part) running as an A/UX process.
There were also choices for running X11R4 or plain 'console' which was a fun little text only mode.
I'm quite glad Apple dropped A/UX. It's the worst unix I've ever dealt with. NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, is the nicest unix-like OS that I've ever used.
it's a 3 month delay people....it was "tentatively" supposed to be released in september and they were scheduled to start shipping it on new machines in jan of 2001 anyway. How can you expect an OS built that incorprates native BSD application support, built in NeXTStep, build in backward compatibilty MacOS (albeit in an unprotected memory space) to _NOT_ have have at least one delay? How many times was windows NT 5 delayed before it was eventually renamed to to windows 2000? 3 years? it took approx. 5 years to build? and windows mellenium _still_ isn't finished I actually think it's a good thing cuz A lot of developers weren't ready anyway. I say go apple, for once build a modern OS that kicks some major ass. I have been reading a lot of rumors lately, and if apple actually releases a dual g4, i'm all over it!
I hope they arn't doing what I think they're doing, That is: To make a "cool" looking interface for marketing reasons. Instead of practical reasons.
Linux just dosn't have the apps I need at the moment. And Apple is lagging a bit too behide (and too expensive) for me. Which is why I'm stuck with win98 Until someone wakes up.
Which brings me to another issue. Someone mentioned that there might be a Mac OS X for Intel.
I really hope apple go ahead with this, as I think it would be a big help to them. One of the main resons I don't use a Mac instead of my wintel box is 'cause Macs are so damn expensive. Sure, they're high quality. But I'm not that rich. For the price of a G4, at the very lest, I could get a 1gighz Athlon (i hope i'm right there, but of not, u get the drift).
And I'm sure I'm not the only who's been put off a Mac because of the price.
If they do make an intel version. I really hope that thay also have the brains to make it possable to run it from within windows. If that happened... My problems would be solved.
BTW, Emulators.com Have SoftMac, which can emulate up to a Mac Quadra with Mac OS 8.1
The clame that they can get ~50-60% clock speed on a pentium or celeron. And ~80-90% on a Athlon k7 And up to a gig of RAM. And It can run in a window, or full screen.
They also talk about possable linux versions, and a PowerMac emulator.
Oh... did he insult your precious Crappy OS?
Congratulations, you've managed to attach emotional significance to a closed-source OS, and it corporate parents. So much, in fact that you feel the need to lash out at people who insult it. This officially qualifies you for the title of "Sad"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
They haven't given any more details. I'd guess it's a free download, plus possibly you could order the CD for a nominal cost. They've done stuff like that before.
:-)
But it's just a guess by me. For all we know, they might even charge for it. But calling it "public" must at least mean that anyone can get it.
Judging from reports, OS X is in pretty good shape already, and will only get better. Don't know about the Fortran compiler
if by ripoff you mean site with an egotistical admin who deletes post, and a site that has almost zero comments (and the ones that are there are usually 1 line long), then yes, they are a ripoff.
Apple has been trying to develop a modern OS (i.e., pre-emptive multitasking, buzzword-compliant, doesn't crash almost as much as Windows) since 1989, and has suffered delay after delay. I personally have been waiting since 1995, when I read about Copland in MacUser.
For the record, I use both MacOS and Linux, and am a Mac software developer and a comp sci student.
Having used Mac OS DP3, I can see significant promise, but that was the case with Copland, too... I'm sick of waiting... I guess I'll just spend more time in Linux (I have a dual boot iMac). As good as Gnome and KDE are (no religious wars/flames about those, please), IMHO, Apple has always had the best GUI. It's cleaner and more consistent than the alternatives. How many other GUIs have published Human Interface Guidelines? Unfortunately, the underlying technology has serious problems. Mac OS X will fix that, if it ever ships.
Apple is really losing credibility by doing this, even though it may be the Right Thing to do. I guess I'm just sick of waiting...
I hope they don't make Quicktime 5 a virus like QT4 was. When you install it, it takes it upon itself to 'attatch' itself to all audio & video formats. Uninstalling won't help. Everytime you want to use it, you get a nag screen asking you to buy it. The evil empire's Media Player doesn't do that!
Quicktime is just as bad as real player IMO. Quicktime and Realplayer should be apart of the antivirus software detection scehemes.