Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the stuff-to-drool-over dept.
firewort writes: "Someone sure got back from WWDCquick, and posted a review of Aqua, MacOSX DP4. Nice screenshots, too! " Fairly detailed overview of the UI changes. And with the BSD kernel, it looks like I may finally have an OS that my gf and I could agree on.
Hey guys, Justin Hilliard here from HolyMac.com... The problem was a little bit too much traffic and the server shut itself down. Everything is back up, and you can check it out now. Enjoy!! -Justin Hilliard jhilliard@holymac.com
Re:general mailaise, specific malaise
by
webmaven
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· Score: 3
Well, while I think that the article you link to has quite a few good points to make, those points deal exclusively with Apple hardware (specifically the RISC based PowerPC CPUs).
Both of the previous articles were written by Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini, who founded the Apple Human Interface Group, so his opinion should count for something.
I hope that these references are of use to anyone reviewing the UI changes that Apple is incorporating into Aqua and it's software, so as to avoid making the same mistakes WRT Linux GUI design. --
--
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
This is a Developer Release!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5
Before you start bashing DP4, remember this is an Alpha quality product meant for developers to tune their wares. Apple will be releasing a public beta during the summer to receive feedback from Joe Mac User on the user experience. But even with that, MacOS X looks like a winner already. It will finally put a consumer-based interface on top of a hard core UNIX engine. It looks like Steve Jobs is going to beat Linux to the consumer desktop!
Brag all you want with Linux and Intel, but once I get my 4MP G4 running MacOS X on Jan. 1, 2001, all I will see is GNU/Linux i386 in my rear-view mirror!
Im feeling pretty bummed out that Apple could be so misleading with their advertising.
Looks like they are over using a whole bunch of ppls goodwill to remember them as an idealistic company so not to question the assertions they make. I should welcome myself to reality or something.
Uh, excuse me, but Aqua is just the user experience. Aqua is a part of MacOS X. These screenshots are from MacOS X DP4 -- meaning Macintosh Operating System Ten Developer Preview Four. MacOS X DP4 has more enhancements than just Aqua. Many of the various parts of the operating system have been updated and about 95% of the APIs are now complete. This is a HUGE leap from DP3.
-- Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I'll start by saying that I'm not, and never was, a MacOS user. During the OS Wars, I was in the OS/2 camp. Nowadays, much like IBM, I'm OS-agnostic. I use NT, Linux, and Solaris.
I took a look at the screenshots. Wow, such eye candy! The screens are beautiful. The design looks fantastic.
But... don't people ever learn? Usability is more important than good-looks. In fact, one does not have to replace the other. But the designers of this OS made at lease one big mistake.
Recall Donald A. Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. He praised the Mac interface there -- back then, the prominent GUI in a world of Unix and DOS. But he also made (elsewhere in the book) an important distinction between knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world. The more a design relies on knowledge in the head, the less usable it is.
What turned the alarm lights for me where the four colored buttons on each window. One red, one yellow, one green and one grey. My guess is that one opens the system menu, one minimizes, onr maximizes, and one closes the application.
But which is which? You have no way to know except by experimenting; and you have to remember. Knowledge has to reside in the head. Bad.
Other OSes are not so great in this respect, mind you. In Windows (9x, NT 4 and 2000) the close button is obvious, the min/max buttons are fairly obvious, and the system menu button is obscure (the program's icon does not even look like a menu! Think about it -- most novice users would never consider clicking it.) OS/2 and Linux (KDE) are pretty much on the same level. In fact, the most intuitive buttons I've ever seen for these purposes are... the Windows 3.x buttons. Minimize is a down-arrow, maximize is an up-arrow, and the system menu looks (almost) like a button.
Just a point for thought. Looks should not damage usability. With those nifty-looking colored buttons, I'm afraid they do (for novices, in this case).
The mouseover states mean that you have to mouse over them to get that info. A UI that requires interaction to get basic information isn't doing its job.
The "traffic light" metaphor is not the best. What does it mean to "go" a window, or "yield" it, or "stop" it? The metaphor does not directly relate to the object in question here (the window). A traffic light has three states and the window has three actions. That's about the extent of the similarity.
Look at the widgets in MacOS 8/9. Close is a blank widget. No box, no window. Max/min toggle is two different sized boxes nexted. Signifies the two sizes you toggle between by clicking it. Windowshade (minimize) looks like a window with a title bar. Again it signifies the two states you toggle between.
Look at the widgets in Win3.1 Close is a minus sign. Pretty obvious to any 6-y.o. Maximize is an up arrow. Makes the window bigger. Minimize is a down arrow. Makes the window smaller.
Look at the widgets in Win95/98, even though their placement so close together is bad. I've misclicked too many times. Close is an X, which is pretty intuitive, too! Minimize looks like a button in the task bar, very small. Full-screen/multi-window toggle button is the least intuitive until you try it, just as bad as the OS X color coded buttons.
Give users a picture, don't expect them to remember the associations of which color does what. Pictures are best. If you want to color code in addition to that, fine, but don't make it the primary distinguishing feature.
Re:Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed mayb
by
Halo1
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· Score: 4
While I'm sure the author of the article has some points, keep in mind that none of the benchmarks (except maybe the memory bandwidth one) take AltiVec into acount. And before you shout "there are almost no apps that take advantage of it anyway!", think about it that Apple is integrating AltiVec optimizations in about every component of MacOS X: QuickTime, OpenGL, Quartz, sound manager, memory manager etc., which means that every app will benefit of it.
And if you are shocked that Apple's commercials are misleading, it's indeed time to wake up. You didn't really believe that if you drink Fanta(tm), everything suddely becomes fun, right? Apple's claims are no lies (it is quite possible to get 2GFlops of sustained performance), but they're not necessarily relevant to you either (how often do you have to do tons of single precision FPU calculations with an AltiVec optimized application?) As usual, the thruth lies somewhere in the middle...
And personnally, I think that when you buy a Mac, you not only buy it for the raw performance, but because of (and some of the following may or may not apply to you) the OS, the GUI, the casing, Steve Jobs' showmaker capabilities, the fact that most people have a PC, the fact that you want to run most "common/known" software titles without needing Windows (well, there's always WINE under Linux of course),... Whatever.
Re:Darwin _is_ open-source software.
by
mysticbob
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· Score: 3
Darwin, the kernel of Mac OS X, is open-source software, but RMS doesn't think it's free enough.
... and esr/opensource.org think it i>is free enough. (reference -- the apple darwin faq)
imagine that - two sides to this debate.
What the hell are you talking about?
by
Millennium
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· Score: 5
However, with the availability of Photoshop, Lightwave/3D Studio (which do not run on Macs), etc. for the PC has rendered (no pun intended) the Mac inferior.
Strange. Very strange indeed. I know where I can get all of these for MacOS.
With the selection of PC 3D cards being far superior to that of Mac cards, I do not see the Mac regaining much market share in the professional graphics market.
You know nothing about graphics, apparently. 3D cards have absolutely nothing to do with professional 3D graphics. Professional 3D graphics use raytracing renderers, which deliver the best quality you can get but are very slow. 3D cards use scanline renderers, which are much faster but give lesser quality (however, the quality is still easily enough for games). But because that's not used in professional 3D graphics, the fastest 3D card in the world makes no difference at all for pro stuff.
By building an Intel/AMD machine out of used/new parts that I can buy on Ebay, I can build a dual PIII Xeon for a fraction of what the high end Macs are selling for.
And you'll get what you pay for: questionable hardware reliability and zero support. Building one's own computer is a very effective cost-cutting measure, but there are things that really are better left to the pros even if they are doable by amateurs.
The fact is that the performance of a comparably priced Intel/AMD machine will almost always be superior to that of the Mac.
Not true in the least. To get the performance of a high-end Mac, you need a high-end PC. Further, the things you'll require as add-ons, and let's not forget the added costs in time when it comes to setup, render them much more expensive in the end. You don't see the cost right away, of course, because the "sticker price" is lower.
It should also be noted that the average useful life of a Mac is four years (and personally, most of the Macs I've seen tend to last seven). The average useful life of a PC is only two. So in the time you use a single Mac, you'll have on average bought two, and often three, PC's. Macs may be more expensive, but they aren't that much more so.
That is the benefit of having an open system architecture.
Ah, but there are many disadvantages also. Hardware is very different from software; openness doesn't have the same benefits and drawbacks as it does with software. Point one: the multiplicity of useless drivers. If I want to use a video card in a Mac, I plug it in and it works. Ditto for projectors, input devices, et cetera, even when made by many different companies. You can't do that in any other OS I know. USB was a step in the right direction, but it's still not enough. This is the disadvantage from having a too-open platform, one where no standards were ever defined.
Yes, having an open hardware platform has its advantages. But there are some very severe disadvantages also, ones which I don't believe the advantages outweigh, as they do for software. Just think, for a moment, at the Linux Kernel. The source download not tops twelve megabytes, most of it drivers. With only a little standards support, the driver set could have been streamlined, probably cutting the sive of the download by at least a third if not by half, with all the variety of devices we see today.
And let's not even go into IRQ's and such. That was simply an idea gone wrong, which Apple fixed in their PCI implementation.
You know, you're right. Macs' sticker prices are higher than those of PC's. But the fact is, they're better hardware, and they're worth more. I'd be willing to bet that well over 95% of the people who gripe over the Macs' price point have never even owned one, and it's probably closer to 99%. Once you've owned one, you understand. It really is worth the money.
Re:Looks like apple got it right
by
nagora
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· Score: 4
Some dude at Ars Technica put 3000 items in the Dock and they were so small they all but disappeared.
I'd say that was a glitch in the user.
TWW
-- "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Re:Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed mayb
by
cybercuzco
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· Score: 3
Ive read the article you link to, and It says nothing about multiprocessing. The future of computers is not necesarily faster individual chips, but more of them. How many supercomputers run on a single chip? Apple is in a perfect position to exploit the MP market. At WWDC they did a demo with a prototype two processor job, and got something like 95 % increase in speed over a single processor, the best intel can do is a 75% inclrease, and how optimised is windows for MP anyways? OS X is practically designed for MP, as well as for altivec enhancement (mmmmmm 128 bit wide data paths ) Ultimately in the speed wars, Apple can throw more processors at it, and get a bigger improvement than intel can throwing the same amount of processors at a task. Not to mention that PPC chips are incredible power efficient compared to intel, hell the imac doesnt even need a fan for cooling! Try doing that with your PIII behemoth.
--
Apple building advertisements into the OS?
by
Zico
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· Score: 3
Checking out the Sherlock picture, I was surprised to see the advertisement built into it. So, if there's someone out there who can field these questions, please do:
Is the ad really part of Sherlock, or did someone just add it to the screenshot?
If so, have ads always been a part of Sherlock, or is a new development?
Is Sherlock the standard search/find utility for it, or is there just a simple local search, with Sherlock being like the advanced option?
If you have to go through Sherlock to perform any system searches, I'd find the presence of ads to be fairly troubling, but if it's not the OS's standard search utility, I don't think that it's too big a deal.
Cheers, ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Mac OS X =! Threat to Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3
So just chill. OK? Nobody is going to take away your silly command line OS, so just turn down the hostility level towards someone who is doing something *different* than what you're used to. I guess innovation isn't something the linux camp can wrap their heads around. Grok this: The Mac is the choice of designers because Photoshop screams on it vs Intel, they don't have to constantly reinstall the OS, and service bureaus don't have problems outputting Mac Quark files. Duh? If any of you actually did any print design you would immediately see that windows is a pain for this particular task. It may be good for certain other things -- that's OK. Linux may even be a better choice. That's great. But don't slam the Mac because Apple is innovating again. Monoculture is bad, diversity is good. Isn't that what the Linux camp has been saying all along?
Several people have (rightly) pointed out that DP4 != Aqua. Nevertheless, as the screenshots indicatre, Aqua is coming along nicely. The use of transparency and global antialiasing is delightful - even if some of the widgets are excessively gaudy.
Now that Darwin has been ported to Intel with support for X11, there has been much talk about if/when any of Aqua's tasty goodness will be available in that context. It has been suggested that this will never happen b/c Apple is unlikely to give away as important a crown jewel as its much ballyhooed GUI.
It is important to remember that Aqua is essentially just a widget set - the real power behind the interface is Quartz, the new PDF based rendering engine. If you refer to Wilfredo Sanchez's diary he indicates the possibility of a port of X11 to Quartz! The addition of Quartz's advanced features to X11 could be quite a treat. Although this is mentioned as a means of supporting X11 apps on MacOS X, it is possible that some support of this type might pave the way to supporting graphical Cocoa apps on Intel (it is unlikely that Classic or even Carbon apps will ever be supported on Intel but Cocoa is a whole 'nother kettle of fish).
Given the well known limitations of X11, esp. wrt to antialiasing, opening Quartz would be a much greater gift to the community than Aqua which is just another, albeit pretty, set of interface elements. I suspect that the real roadblock in opening Quartz is not Apple but, rather, Adobe which maintains a pretty tight leash on PostScript (for good reason).
I implore everyone who's been crying out for more open source code from Apple to focus their efforts on Quartz and to extend their cajoling to Adobe. Out of all of MacOS X's new goodies, I think Quartz is the pick of the litter - not Aqua.
Re:Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed mayb
by
JohnZed
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· Score: 3
Hmm... sorry, you need to double-check a few of those facts.
1) "OS X" is practically designed for MP.. Well, it's true that OS X is designed "to support MP", but that support is largely untested and untuned. SMP is a relatively low priority for Apple when they have things to worry about, like, say, making sure the OS is ready to ship by its new deadline. SMP takes many, many years to develop, both in terms of hardware and software support. Applications need to be written to take advantage of multithreading, and new chipsets need to mature.
2) "How optimised is windows for MP anyways?" Well, 95/95 has no support for SMP at all. But Win NT/2000's support is very strong, much stronger, in fact, than Linux's support (much as I love Linux, we do have to admit this). With 8-way systems, they do extremely well on real, intense benchmarks like TPC. Windows 2000 Datacenter will theoretically support 32-processor systems, although its performance beyond 8-processors remains to be seen.
Basically, though, out of all the major OS families you can think of (Mac, Windows, Linux, commercial Unix), the Mac platform has the LEAST support for multiple processors (out of the *BSD family, you'll have to go to FreeBSD or BSDi if you want SMP). Anyone can throw together an artificial demo with dual-proc-tuned applications that will get a performance boost. The question is how well the system performs in the real world.
Whaddya mean Adobe has nothing to do with Quartz? Who do you think designed it?
Long ago Apple came out with these neat machines called the "Lisa" and it's little cousin "Macintosh". To go with them Apple licensed this new lisp-derived language called "Postscript" from these guys called "Adobe". It was a hit and the one-two punch of a bitmapped display and a cheap high(ish) quality laserprinter running "Postscript" made Macs a hit in the graphics community. (Interestingly the most powerful computer Apple sold for a while was the CPU in it's Laserwriter.)
Later on Steve Jobs founded NeXT and having seen the popularity of Postscript and also the problems of having two rendering-models decided to equip his boxes with Postscript all of the way through. So he paid Adobe a pretty penny to develop "Display Postscript" for him which he then licensed. Jobs went on to use this single-rendering-model and to also ship a cheap printer who's brains were actually your system's CPU running D-PS. Adobe took the skills it had developed in the project and rolled them back into faster and more sophisticated Postscript engines such as commonly found in Postscript level II products.
In the meantime the world went on and Adobe started to realize that there were some inherent limitations on having an entirely stream-based file-format (eg it's pretty difficult to pull a single part out of it for seperate manipulation) and that there was a coming need for a cross-platform device-independant rich-content documuments. So Adobe developed Postscript level III which is a fairly object-oriented architecture and then went all out and turned it into Portable Document File (PDF) technology.
In the meantime Apple buys Next and looks to renogiate the Postscript license. Adobe isn't interested in this but decides to go back to the well and convinces Apple to underwrite the development of a Display PDF (hmm - sounds like we've been here before..) Apple agrees and thus begins the process that produces "Quartz" - a joint Adobe/Apple rendering layer implementing Adobe's PDF technologies on Apple's shiny rebuilt OS.
So who "owns" Quartz? Well, they both did the work on it and although Adobe owns the basic file-formats and technologies it's Apple's implementations of them.
There'll probably be some small (smaller then for Display Postscript at least) licensing fee going from Apple to Adobe for every copy of MacOS X sold but Adobe of course also now has a bunch of paid-for engineering, retained a critical position with one of it's most influential customers and assured adoption of it's next-gen product. They've also killed any chance of Apple's own GX technologies ever surfacing or any futher development of the Apple/Microsoft TrueType threat. Finally Apple of course now has the most advanced rendering technology out there, one that can assure cross-platform fidelity and complete integration into every serious graphics application in the forseeable future.
So how to get Display PDF onto some other platform? Well you can try and do a Ghostscript-type re-engineering but as folks have learnt this is some very sophisticated, very patented, very specialized material. The existing code is a good starting point but it's going to be a lot of work to re-apply and who knows what obstacles there are.
Adobe themselves might come out with it for other platforms in the future depending on their contracts and licensing with Apple (Apple might get a two year lead on anything for instance.) This will likely be closed-source and probably fairly expensive. I could see graphics-folks wanting it on NT for instance but MS is gung-ho about their own technologies and this would be both competition and an additionial layer of abstraction for applications to deal with.
Adobe could concievably be convinced that it's in their best interest to release it for a next-gen X-type product. Unfortunatly I doubt they'd let out anything like a complete implementation but rather something that couldn't be used to compete with their own products.
So - Quartz on abother platform? Not unless Apple and Adobe see a profit in this. Display PDF on another platform? Not unless Adobe (and possibly Apple) see a profit in this. Unauthorized ports? Possible but unlikely due to the sophisitication required.
-- Michael
*I couldn't be bothered to keep all of the biCapitalizations straight - deal.
-- I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Re:What the hell are you talking about?
by
HeghmoH
·
· Score: 3
Carbon and classic are similar APIs, but extroardinarily different implementations. Classic runs regular ol' MacOS 9 in a little box tucked away in a corner. This falls under the category of ugly-hack-that-work-fairly-well. Carbon is the MacOS 9 API with the old cruft removed. The API isn't as modern as it could be, but programs written to use it will run native and happy. Cocoa is the fully object-oriented API that MacOS X inherented from OpenStep. It's supposedly far superior for writing programs with, but to the user it won't make much difference.
-- Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Slashdot Mirror
Hey guys, Justin Hilliard here from HolyMac.com... The problem was a little bit too much traffic and the server shut itself down. Everything is back up, and you can check it out now. Enjoy!! -Justin Hilliard jhilliard@holymac.com
Well, while I think that the article you link to has quite a few good points to make, those points deal exclusively with Apple hardware (specifically the RISC based PowerPC CPUs).
Here is a more relevant article about the shortcomings of the Aqua interface, and another article about the improvements that Apple should be making.
Both of the previous articles were written by Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini, who founded the Apple Human Interface Group, so his opinion should count for something.
Another article, that is slightly less relevant, dissects the UI of the new QuickTime player. It isn't kind.
I hope that these references are of use to anyone reviewing the UI changes that Apple is incorporating into Aqua and it's software, so as to avoid making the same mistakes WRT Linux GUI design.
--
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Before you start bashing DP4, remember this is an Alpha quality product meant for developers to tune their wares. Apple will be releasing a public beta during the summer to receive feedback from Joe Mac User on the user experience. But even with that, MacOS X looks like a winner already. It will finally put a consumer-based interface on top of a hard core UNIX engine. It looks like Steve Jobs is going to beat Linux to the consumer desktop!
Brag all you want with Linux and Intel, but once I get my 4MP G4 running MacOS X on Jan. 1, 2001, all I will see is GNU/Linux i386 in my rear-view mirror!
In case they get slashdotted, i put up a mirror of the screenshots here ... :)
Im looking forward to playing with this gui...
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
I have beeen real close recently to shellingout for a shiny new G4, thinking hard how much I want my hands on OSX.
Then yeasterday I read this analysis of G4 / mot performance and im starting to think all over again.
Im feeling pretty bummed out that Apple could be so misleading with their advertising.
Looks like they are over using a whole bunch of ppls goodwill to remember them as an idealistic company so not to question the assertions they make. I should welcome myself to reality or something.
Uh, excuse me, but Aqua is just the user experience. Aqua is a part of MacOS X. These screenshots are from MacOS X DP4 -- meaning Macintosh Operating System Ten Developer Preview Four. MacOS X DP4 has more enhancements than just Aqua. Many of the various parts of the operating system have been updated and about 95% of the APIs are now complete. This is a HUGE leap from DP3.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I'll start by saying that I'm not, and never was, a MacOS user. During the OS Wars, I was in the OS/2 camp. Nowadays, much like IBM, I'm OS-agnostic. I use NT, Linux, and Solaris.
I took a look at the screenshots. Wow, such eye candy! The screens are beautiful. The design looks fantastic.
But... don't people ever learn? Usability is more important than good-looks. In fact, one does not have to replace the other. But the designers of this OS made at lease one big mistake.
Recall Donald A. Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. He praised the Mac interface there -- back then, the prominent GUI in a world of Unix and DOS. But he also made (elsewhere in the book) an important distinction between knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world. The more a design relies on knowledge in the head, the less usable it is.
What turned the alarm lights for me where the four colored buttons on each window. One red, one yellow, one green and one grey. My guess is that one opens the system menu, one minimizes, onr maximizes, and one closes the application.
But which is which? You have no way to know except by experimenting; and you have to remember. Knowledge has to reside in the head. Bad.
Other OSes are not so great in this respect, mind you. In Windows (9x, NT 4 and 2000) the close button is obvious, the min/max buttons are fairly obvious, and the system menu button is obscure (the program's icon does not even look like a menu! Think about it -- most novice users would never consider clicking it.) OS/2 and Linux (KDE) are pretty much on the same level. In fact, the most intuitive buttons I've ever seen for these purposes are... the Windows 3.x buttons. Minimize is a down-arrow, maximize is an up-arrow, and the system menu looks (almost) like a button.
Just a point for thought. Looks should not damage usability. With those nifty-looking colored buttons, I'm afraid they do (for novices, in this case).
- Tal Cohen
And if you are shocked that Apple's commercials are misleading, it's indeed time to wake up. You didn't really believe that if you drink Fanta(tm), everything suddely becomes fun, right? Apple's claims are no lies (it is quite possible to get 2GFlops of sustained performance), but they're not necessarily relevant to you either (how often do you have to do tons of single precision FPU calculations with an AltiVec optimized application?) As usual, the thruth lies somewhere in the middle...
And personnally, I think that when you buy a Mac, you not only buy it for the raw performance, but because of (and some of the following may or may not apply to you) the OS, the GUI, the casing, Steve Jobs' showmaker capabilities, the fact that most people have a PC, the fact that you want to run most "common/known" software titles without needing Windows (well, there's always WINE under Linux of course), ... Whatever.
--
Donate free food here
imagine that - two sides to this debate.
However, with the availability of Photoshop, Lightwave/3D Studio (which do not run on Macs), etc. for the PC has rendered (no pun intended) the Mac inferior.
Strange. Very strange indeed. I know where I can get all of these for MacOS.
With the selection of PC 3D cards being far superior to that of Mac cards, I do not see the Mac regaining much market share in the professional graphics market.
You know nothing about graphics, apparently. 3D cards have absolutely nothing to do with professional 3D graphics. Professional 3D graphics use raytracing renderers, which deliver the best quality you can get but are very slow. 3D cards use scanline renderers, which are much faster but give lesser quality (however, the quality is still easily enough for games). But because that's not used in professional 3D graphics, the fastest 3D card in the world makes no difference at all for pro stuff.
By building an Intel/AMD machine out of used/new parts that I can buy on Ebay, I can build a dual PIII Xeon for a fraction of what the high end Macs are selling for.
And you'll get what you pay for: questionable hardware reliability and zero support. Building one's own computer is a very effective cost-cutting measure, but there are things that really are better left to the pros even if they are doable by amateurs.
The fact is that the performance of a comparably priced Intel/AMD machine will almost always be superior to that of the Mac.
Not true in the least. To get the performance of a high-end Mac, you need a high-end PC. Further, the things you'll require as add-ons, and let's not forget the added costs in time when it comes to setup, render them much more expensive in the end. You don't see the cost right away, of course, because the "sticker price" is lower.
It should also be noted that the average useful life of a Mac is four years (and personally, most of the Macs I've seen tend to last seven). The average useful life of a PC is only two. So in the time you use a single Mac, you'll have on average bought two, and often three, PC's. Macs may be more expensive, but they aren't that much more so.
That is the benefit of having an open system architecture.
Ah, but there are many disadvantages also. Hardware is very different from software; openness doesn't have the same benefits and drawbacks as it does with software. Point one: the multiplicity of useless drivers. If I want to use a video card in a Mac, I plug it in and it works. Ditto for projectors, input devices, et cetera, even when made by many different companies. You can't do that in any other OS I know. USB was a step in the right direction, but it's still not enough. This is the disadvantage from having a too-open platform, one where no standards were ever defined.
Yes, having an open hardware platform has its advantages. But there are some very severe disadvantages also, ones which I don't believe the advantages outweigh, as they do for software. Just think, for a moment, at the Linux Kernel. The source download not tops twelve megabytes, most of it drivers. With only a little standards support, the driver set could have been streamlined, probably cutting the sive of the download by at least a third if not by half, with all the variety of devices we see today.
And let's not even go into IRQ's and such. That was simply an idea gone wrong, which Apple fixed in their PCI implementation.
You know, you're right. Macs' sticker prices are higher than those of PC's. But the fact is, they're better hardware, and they're worth more. I'd be willing to bet that well over 95% of the people who gripe over the Macs' price point have never even owned one, and it's probably closer to 99%. Once you've owned one, you understand. It really is worth the money.
I'd say that was a glitch in the user.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Checking out the Sherlock picture, I was surprised to see the advertisement built into it. So, if there's someone out there who can field these questions, please do:
If you have to go through Sherlock to perform any system searches, I'd find the presence of ads to be fairly troubling, but if it's not the OS's standard search utility, I don't think that it's too big a deal.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
So just chill. OK? Nobody is going to take away your silly command line OS, so just turn down the hostility level towards someone who is doing something *different* than what you're used to. I guess innovation isn't something the linux camp can wrap their heads around. Grok this: The Mac is the choice of designers because Photoshop screams on it vs Intel, they don't have to constantly reinstall the OS, and service bureaus don't have problems outputting Mac Quark files. Duh? If any of you actually did any print design you would immediately see that windows is a pain for this particular task. It may be good for certain other things -- that's OK. Linux may even be a better choice. That's great. But don't slam the Mac because Apple is innovating again. Monoculture is bad, diversity is good. Isn't that what the Linux camp has been saying all along?
Several people have (rightly) pointed out that DP4 != Aqua. Nevertheless, as the screenshots indicatre, Aqua is coming along nicely. The use of transparency and global antialiasing is delightful - even if some of the widgets are excessively gaudy.
Now that Darwin has been ported to Intel with support for X11, there has been much talk about if/when any of Aqua's tasty goodness will be available in that context. It has been suggested that this will never happen b/c Apple is unlikely to give away as important a crown jewel as its much ballyhooed GUI.
It is important to remember that Aqua is essentially just a widget set - the real power behind the interface is Quartz, the new PDF based rendering engine. If you refer to Wilfredo Sanchez's diary he indicates the possibility of a port of X11 to Quartz! The addition of Quartz's advanced features to X11 could be quite a treat. Although this is mentioned as a means of supporting X11 apps on MacOS X, it is possible that some support of this type might pave the way to supporting graphical Cocoa apps on Intel (it is unlikely that Classic or even Carbon apps will ever be supported on Intel but Cocoa is a whole 'nother kettle of fish).
Given the well known limitations of X11, esp. wrt to antialiasing, opening Quartz would be a much greater gift to the community than Aqua which is just another, albeit pretty, set of interface elements. I suspect that the real roadblock in opening Quartz is not Apple but, rather, Adobe which maintains a pretty tight leash on PostScript (for good reason).
I implore everyone who's been crying out for more open source code from Apple to focus their efforts on Quartz and to extend their cajoling to Adobe. Out of all of MacOS X's new goodies, I think Quartz is the pick of the litter - not Aqua.
Hmm... sorry, you need to double-check a few of those facts.
1) "OS X" is practically designed for MP..
Well, it's true that OS X is designed "to support MP", but that support is largely untested and untuned. SMP is a relatively low priority for Apple when they have things to worry about, like, say, making sure the OS is ready to ship by its new deadline. SMP takes many, many years to develop, both in terms of hardware and software support. Applications need to be written to take advantage of multithreading, and new chipsets need to mature.
2) "How optimised is windows for MP anyways?"
Well, 95/95 has no support for SMP at all. But Win NT/2000's support is very strong, much stronger, in fact, than Linux's support (much as I love Linux, we do have to admit this). With 8-way systems, they do extremely well on real, intense benchmarks like TPC. Windows 2000 Datacenter will theoretically support 32-processor systems, although its performance beyond 8-processors remains to be seen.
Basically, though, out of all the major OS families you can think of (Mac, Windows, Linux, commercial Unix), the Mac platform has the LEAST support for multiple processors (out of the *BSD family, you'll have to go to FreeBSD or BSDi if you want SMP). Anyone can throw together an artificial demo with dual-proc-tuned applications that will get a performance boost. The question is how well the system performs in the real world.
Long ago Apple came out with these neat machines called the "Lisa" and it's little cousin "Macintosh". To go with them Apple licensed this new lisp-derived language called "Postscript" from these guys called "Adobe". It was a hit and the one-two punch of a bitmapped display and a cheap high(ish) quality laserprinter running "Postscript" made Macs a hit in the graphics community. (Interestingly the most powerful computer Apple sold for a while was the CPU in it's Laserwriter.)
Later on Steve Jobs founded NeXT and having seen the popularity of Postscript and also the problems of having two rendering-models decided to equip his boxes with Postscript all of the way through. So he paid Adobe a pretty penny to develop "Display Postscript" for him which he then licensed. Jobs went on to use this single-rendering-model and to also ship a cheap printer who's brains were actually your system's CPU running D-PS. Adobe took the skills it had developed in the project and rolled them back into faster and more sophisticated Postscript engines such as commonly found in Postscript level II products.
In the meantime the world went on and Adobe started to realize that there were some inherent limitations on having an entirely stream-based file-format (eg it's pretty difficult to pull a single part out of it for seperate manipulation) and that there was a coming need for a cross-platform device-independant rich-content documuments. So Adobe developed Postscript level III which is a fairly object-oriented architecture and then went all out and turned it into Portable Document File (PDF) technology.
In the meantime Apple buys Next and looks to renogiate the Postscript license. Adobe isn't interested in this but decides to go back to the well and convinces Apple to underwrite the development of a Display PDF (hmm - sounds like we've been here before..) Apple agrees and thus begins the process that produces "Quartz" - a joint Adobe/Apple rendering layer implementing Adobe's PDF technologies on Apple's shiny rebuilt OS.
So who "owns" Quartz? Well, they both did the work on it and although Adobe owns the basic file-formats and technologies it's Apple's implementations of them.
There'll probably be some small (smaller then for Display Postscript at least) licensing fee going from Apple to Adobe for every copy of MacOS X sold but Adobe of course also now has a bunch of paid-for engineering, retained a critical position with one of it's most influential customers and assured adoption of it's next-gen product. They've also killed any chance of Apple's own GX technologies ever surfacing or any futher development of the Apple/Microsoft TrueType threat. Finally Apple of course now has the most advanced rendering technology out there, one that can assure cross-platform fidelity and complete integration into every serious graphics application in the forseeable future.
So how to get Display PDF onto some other platform? Well you can try and do a Ghostscript-type re-engineering but as folks have learnt this is some very sophisticated, very patented, very specialized material. The existing code is a good starting point but it's going to be a lot of work to re-apply and who knows what obstacles there are.
Adobe themselves might come out with it for other platforms in the future depending on their contracts and licensing with Apple (Apple might get a two year lead on anything for instance.) This will likely be closed-source and probably fairly expensive. I could see graphics-folks wanting it on NT for instance but MS is gung-ho about their own technologies and this would be both competition and an additionial layer of abstraction for applications to deal with.
Adobe could concievably be convinced that it's in their best interest to release it for a next-gen X-type product. Unfortunatly I doubt they'd let out anything like a complete implementation but rather something that couldn't be used to compete with their own products.
So - Quartz on abother platform? Not unless Apple and Adobe see a profit in this. Display PDF on another platform? Not unless Adobe (and possibly Apple) see a profit in this. Unauthorized ports? Possible but unlikely due to the sophisitication required.
-- Michael
*I couldn't be bothered to keep all of the biCapitalizations straight - deal.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Carbon and classic are similar APIs, but extroardinarily different implementations. Classic runs regular ol' MacOS 9 in a little box tucked away in a corner. This falls under the category of ugly-hack-that-work-fairly-well. Carbon is the MacOS 9 API with the old cruft removed. The API isn't as modern as it could be, but programs written to use it will run native and happy. Cocoa is the fully object-oriented API that MacOS X inherented from OpenStep. It's supposedly far superior for writing programs with, but to the user it won't make much difference.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!