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.
This is a Developer Release!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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!
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).
Re:Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed mayb
by
Halo1
·
· 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.
What the hell are you talking about?
by
Millennium
·
· 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
·
· 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"
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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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"
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.
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.