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OS X As "This Generation's Sgt. Pepper"
grossdog writes: "Feed Magazine has an article up by editor-in-chief Steven Johnson (author of Interface Culture) describing the OS X rollout as a cultural event -- the now manifestation of the same impulses that turned Sgt. Pepper and Exile on Main Street into touchstones. 'Seeing a brand new interface,' writes Johnson, 'is a little like seeing the new Audi TT, or the latest Alessi home appliance: You know you're going to be seeing these shapes and colors emulated for years to come.' In this sense OS X is an important milestone in OS development: Apple has set a new standard." This is a good piece. It talks about hype, media, and software. I don't think OSX is Sgt. Pepper. More like the Phantom Menace (technically amazing and very pretty, but will it have a plot,
or just suck?).
Bill Gates as the 'Angels and the rest of the world as Merideth Hunter???
ps: mod this up. You know funny when you see it, or you just too young?
"Given the lukewarm review on ArsTechnica..."
I wouldn't call those pieces lukewarm. The fact that John Siracusa went to the trouble to write 5 articles of considerable depth shows that he considers it a significant piece of work. Most of his (very cogent) critiques relate to GUI functionality that exists already in MacOS 9, but which seems to be missing in the new interface. You'd have to ask John, but the impression I get from the articles is that he, like me, is very excited about the OS, but is gravely concerned at some of the directions it seems to be taking in relation to the GUI.
Whoah! play that again, I think I heard it this time....
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Maybe the Velvet Undergound is a better analogy. While the Beatles/Stones axis certainly "defined" that generation, the VU's niche status during their heydey didn't prevent their monumental influence on everything from punk rock to the current "alternative" mode so popular with today's kids.
(With not some irony, Lou Reed is looked on as a sage of music while Mick and Keith are seen as dinosaurs who have outlived their era...)
Frankly, OS X may be pretty good - Apple may have done a fine job given the contraints they were operating under - keeping their old customers satisfied, keeping the QT crowd happy, while integrating a new microkernel/ UNIX substructure. Not a simple task.
But it's a bit early for Johnson to be calling OS X the new Sgt Pepper. His article is all hype about graphic design. Graphic design is an amusing diversion, but it doesn't get the job done. And sewing a dog's head onto a cat's body may be a remarkable feat, but that doesn't make it Sgt Pepper.
All of that aside, would you consider this to be the "Sgt. Pepper" of our generation? I wouldn't! Let's face facts. This is equivilent to me taking 4 wheels and attaching them to a board of wood in such a way as to allow them to rotate, and then calling it the next generation of skate boards. This is not anything spectacular. It is justification for some great open source projects, but that is it. Most of us could make Linux look like OSX any day. Who cares! It's just hype. Since when did the /. start falling for hype.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
...for buying IBM, as the saying goes.
Another adage applies:
"No one ever got fired for selling Apple short."
APPL has a long and dubious history both in the stock market and commercial press. You think everyone loves a success story? Look back over the years at every piece of doom-and-gloom that has been published about Apple. Analysts just eat that up! Nothing pulls 'em in like the rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Amazingly, nobody gives Compaq a second look.
As for the stock market, they have their own wisdom...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
The Audi TT was obviously influenced by the design of the new VW Beetle.
1 - Hold down C at startup
2 - can't use the mouse at all? Command-Option-W to close all windows and then type the first couple of letters of the disks name, then command-y.
3 - Never played with darwin. I'm guessing that there's a bootloader to be found in the control panels, else change the startup disk cp to point at the partition that hold darwin...
I actually can't wait to get a new mac... just holding off until OS X is here, at this point. Dual G4/450 + OS X... mmmmmmm...
I have a Mac, Linux and Widiws boxes..... Now if I could just get a life...
The problem as I see it, is that most of these development teams are too concerned with what happens behind the scene, rather than what works when learning how to use a computer. The framework behind KDE and Gnome is really quite phenominal and powerful, however it's the UI that still suffers from being still somewhat impractical or kludgy. The reason that Windows and MacOS are easy to use is that both have said point-blank, these are the user interface guidelines, USE THEM. Whereas X and the various desktop environments have often taken the position that you should write the program however you want, which usually ends up creating evolved user interfaces rather than designed user interfaces with certain features located in non-obvious places, etc.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
A solution for your power issue: plug an empty headphone connector into your headphone jack: No sound on startup.
You call that a solution? Where I come from that's called a work-around, and a pretty annoying one at that.(I really need my headphones for other purposes).
Besides, it's not really my power issue. I don't touch a Mac unless I have to...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
> "I don't think OSX is Sgt Pepper. More like the Phantom Menace (technically amazing and very pretty, but will it have a plot, or just suck?)."
D'ya suppose the OSX action figures will hit the stores before Christmas?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm glad that Apple didn't pursue BeOS, because if they had gone down that road we most likely would not have Darwin.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
The real point is that Apple are a hardware company and OS X sells their boxes - just as Solaris sells Suns hardware. Everyone has already forgotten Jobs first move at Apple - removing the rights of third parties to sell apple hardware, a move which would have made Apple a software business, pitching it head to head with Microsoft. Instead, Jobs turned apple around by selling new hardware - the iMac. In order to bring Mac applications up to date, Apple needs a "new" Operating System - but never forget: Apple are a Hardware company, first, second and last. The OS sells the hardware.
Can you imagine your reliable Apple with your professional graphics stuffs suddenly giving blue screens of deaths ?
Yes, I think I can imagine that, sounds pretty good at that, too. Get a real computer!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Bitch, you beat me to it :))
I think a tcsh prompt is a new interface for the Mac. You've got it in OSX.
Sounds like you have a gripe with GUIs in general, not just the Mac.
If OS X is this generations sgt pepper, then what do we consider Linux, our generations woodstock?
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Pretty widgets like fading menus and shadowy mice do not make a "bleeding edge interface." As for meaningful error messages, they're still errors, aren't they? I don't claim to know the first damn thing about interface design, but I know what works for me and what doesn't. Win2k doesn't.
Its amazing how you guys are treating OSX like the second coming of Christ even though most /.'s don't even use Macs.
However, I'd rather be waiting for the Radiohead CD.
:)
..."
.iMMersE
It was released on Tuesday in North America, been out since Monday in Europe. Some places, like Ireland and Japan, got in on the 27th September, and some places (Australia and that area) should have it, but are experiencing some distribution problems. Check your local store or CD Now or Amazon for example. Those crafty North Americans also get a limited edition CD with a hard back, children story style, book. If you wanna send one over to Ireland, let me know
"Karma whore, arrest this man, he talks off-topic, he buzzes like a fridge
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
How can the rollout of an OS that is so long overdue be a cultural event?
The new PowerPC OS rewritten from scratch was promised in 1994.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
I started my computing life as a mac user. I left the mac world for the PC world some 6 years ago and haven't much looked back. Why did I switch? My needs outpaced what the Macintosh could do, I wanted to work with the latest net technologies, run the newest applications and play the latest games, but most importantly, I wanted to figure out how these silly things ran. The mac has never, and even with OS X, still doesn't let me at the guts of the OS like Windows (errgghhh, I can't believe I'm praising Windows at all...) or Linux does.
One of the biggest points of praise the article had for OS X was its startup sequence and how it compared to the "ugly" startup of a PC. I've always prefered the PC startup to the Mac one. While it may not be as pretty, it's MUCH more informative. If something goes wrong with the startup of MacOS, you have no real idea what went wrong, you just have to restart and hope for the best.
From everything I've seen and read, OS X is just a new face on an old standard. Jobs and mac addicts the world over are looking at this and thinking this is what will help topple the PC industry, and bring everyone over to Apple. Keep dreaming. The mac has always been the computer of multimedia and publishing professionals, and computer novices (meaning it's newbie-friendly, not that mac users are idiots, many of my friends are mac users), not the computer of technical professionals. If you want to get to the guts of a computer and make it work the way YOU want it to work, a mac is not the way to go. If you want the latest flashy thing in GUI, then OSX is the OS for you.
Substance over appearance! Look at what it can actually do as opposed to how it looks doing it.
Amen to that. If you ask Joe Blow on the street what he thinks about OS X, odds are rather good that he won't know what you're talking about. Odds are he won't even care that Apple is coming out with a new OS with new whiz-bang features.
Remember the launch of Windows 95? That's about as close to a cultural phenomenon you're going to get over an OS release, and there was more controversy about the Rolling Stones allowing "Start Me Up" to be used in Microsoft's ad campaigns.
Cultural revolution? Bah. Cultural bump-in-the-road is more like it.
That's funny. When I install most standard hardware in Windows 2000 (like my USB Zip drive and a digital camera) the computer recognizes it immediately and loads up the proper drivers. They are already there in the OS.
Contrast that with installing the same drive on the Mac. The system does *not* have the drivers available. Heck, it doesn't even know the thing is a mountable volume.
Mac is more plug-and-play friendly, but *only* to its hardware. 3rd party hardware support is the same, if not worse, than on Wintel machines.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
NextStep has provided a good graphical user interface on top of a Unix variant for 11 years now. Apple bought Next, freshened it up, and added Mac compatibilty and eye candy. I fail to see how that gives them all the credit for it. :-)
Especially as they have broken some of the nice things in Next, like having both buttons on a scroll bar in the same place. Ok, so that's the only thing I know is missing so far, but I haven't even seen Mac OS X in action yet, only a few screenshots.
In america we take our good things for granted until something glitzy reinvents it.. They gave us a great analogy. Rock'n'roll .. great american art form.. ignored until a bunch of boring brits with stupid haircuts processed it, killed the art of the live performance with their un-reproducable recorded tracks (yeah the beatles started that lame trend) and spewed it back at us demanding all of our $$$ in exchange for their crap.
Now steve jobs does it again with his average products and over-active marketing morons.
"And how can this be? For he is the
I find this statement ironic in that WindowMaker (which I use both on my Linux box at home and my Solaris box at work) is based heavily (at least originally) on NextStep - a Steve Jobs, et. al invention. Aqua has a lot of roots in NextStep as well. Cut from the same cloth as far as I can see. I like WindowMaker a lot but no X UI has the consistency of a codified OS interface that's driven by one company vs. a merry band of hackers.
Each has it's plusses and minuses. I'm just happy that I can use Mac apps on my G3 and still have UNIX underneath (hey, I still like Photoslop better than The Gimp). Then I can use Linux/Windowmaker/X on my Intel box as well with its joys/quirks as well.
Gives the Apple-Mac-NeXT lines personality and flair. Steve's rollouts are first class, while Wintel rollouts are like tired college parties.
My personal favorite was the rollout of the NeXT cube. Unlike the new Mac, he keep that secret and a surprise.
radiohead.. hmmm
i think i remember one of their songs... it was about slashdot or something
im a geek...
im a whiner...
what the hell am i doing here?
i dont belong here
so why am i wasting my time compulsively reading these comments?
oh yeah, and back on topic.... fuck osx with a pointy stick. what the fuck is up with charging 30 bucks for a beta AND including a bunch of large-ass movie trailers w/ the mandantory quicktime install?
back to work.
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
uh...actually...uh...the revolution probably WILL be televised. And Regis will host. Silly.
> Sure, it's got a new skin, but the interface hasn't
> changed since 1984.
If only this were true about Mac OS X. Mac users are gung ho on the Unix guts, but the rewrite of the interface is not that popular.
What you said DOES apply beautifully to X-Windows, though, if you change the date to 1985 or 1986.
BS
Aqua is still second at most
> How much marketing has Transmeta done?
What, aside from marketing, has Transmeta done?
It's weird to piss on marketing and champion a company that hasn't shipped a product yet in the same breath.
My developer subscription was up for renewal and they had a special offer for the beta seeded level being $400 instead of $500. So I paid $200 extra to upgrade my subscription... and I don't have a G3 or G4 Mac yet. Even if I did, I hear this thing wants 128meg minimum. Even the first G3 iMacs didn't have that.
But yes, I'm getting the beta and I don't even have a machine that can run it. Yet.
At least I have a computer! I heard people were so hyped by the W95 release that they bought it when they didn't even have a computer at all!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Yeah, and I've always found OSs to lack plot and character development, so hopefully MacOS X will improve on this.
You want OS X with a MORE modern look? What would that look like? Quake?
While I realize that alot of /.'ers love to defame the Mac and tout Linux as the answer to all computing needs, there is at least one thing OSX will have that Linux and other Unix flavors lack: commercial applications!!!! Remember?
If Adobe and Macromedia port their grapics suites to Linux, I'll be using Linux. But in the meantime, OSX runs on BSD and will be getting xwindows, all sorts of unix apps, AND USB, Firewire, and the aforementioned commercial apps.
What could possibly be bad about that?
There is one small difference...A Volkswagen Beetle allows you to build in a Porsche engine...
Say something like, 1200Mhz G4?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Actually you can telnet into a win2k box but it just brings up a dos box.. -matt
Macs are in movies and TV because they often look better than other brands of computers, and because the people who make movies and TV shows overwhelmingly use Macs in their daily work. Half the time, if a person is using a PowerBook in a commercial, it actually belongs to somebody in the production process. You see them much more often with the logos obscured than with them showing.
... with the Apple logo blanked out, it's the default "generic notebook computer". It's a nice, curvy, plain, black machine that photographs well, is all.
The PowerBook, particularly
....Sympathy for the Devil?
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
So what you are saying is that this new flashy, OS-like thingy kicked all competition out of your computer? Sounds familiar...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I've used both BeOS and MacOS X.
Polish.
The first thing you'll notice about MacOS X is how beautiful it is. The anti-aliased text looks drop-dead gorgeous on any high-resolution monitor. The photorealistic icons looks fantastic. The magnification effect in the dock is slick. Everything just looks magnificent; kudos to detail-meister Jobs.
Be's buttons look strange, and there's something about the text that's not quite right compared to a MacOS or even Windows system.
Usability.
I'd probably give a slight edge to Be here. The tracker has both a list of running applications and a start menu like launcher. MacOS X relies on a combination of the Dock and applications directory for these things.
At the same time, both are not hard to find your way around. I'd give the edge to Be, but in the end, an impartial user would have a hard time not to be seduced by the beauty of X.
Web Browser Experience.
Both browsers (IE and OmniWeb) available for X crash with a giddy abandon. OmniWeb is worse than Netscape under Linux; IE is probably comparable. I've lost lots of text typing in IE under MacOS X, though; there's a strange bug in the test widget that, let us say, does not inspire confidence.
Be's web browser almost never crashes and runs more smoothly than either MacOS X offering. This would be a clear and dramatic win for Be if it weren't for its lack of JavaScript or CSS support. Nowadays, most pages have little bits of JavaScript in them, and NetPositive simply doesn't handle it. On the other hand, if you always leave JavaScript off in fear of tiresome security problems and such, NetPositive is the ideal browser for you.
Opera exists for BeOS; I tried the beta and it was crashy and didn't work well. One of these days, I'll have to see if they have a release version out.
Stability
I've managed to crash both MacOS Beta (mainly by trying to run the OmniWeb browser's Beta 5 - moving to Beta 6 seems to have fixed the problem) and BeOS. But in normal use, both of them are roughly equivalent.
Application Support.
The clear winner has to be MacOS X. You can run Photoshop, Illustrator and other Mac applications; native web browsers that view contemporary web sites without sacrifice are available, albiet buggy.
Conclusion
It's hard to resist the sheer beauty of X. Once they get the bugs squashed, I think it will be a real ground-breaker of an OS.
I like JLG personally - he responds to his emails and has been very nice - so it pains me to report that the legendary bad-tempered Jobs has won this comparison. But he has, fair and square.
D
----
> Yeah, and I've always found OSs to lack plot and character development, so hopefully MacOS X will improve on this.
Some are like thrillers: Will I make it to the end of my task? What surprise will it throw at me next?
Some are like horror movies: Listen to the screams of terror emanating from the cubicles all around me!
And some are indeed like TPM: All technoflash and special effects on the outside, but no substance underneath.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
>Apple actually has good industrial design
Well, not really as good as it can be.
The Japaneese 'Good Design Award' was issued for the 20th Annv. Mac.
The iMac was submitted for the same award, and lost. The biggest reason the iMac lost? They cited the extra toxicty of the plastic used. (BPA).
Laugh all you want about wood (or leather in the case of the TAM), but it is less toxic.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Yes! The Mac is still the best computer to use while high. This is a definite advantage when they are in so many art and music studios.
subject says all !
,Collect the whole set !
- Save The Whales
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
... and rowenta steam irons. Oh no, sorry, the steam irons were transparent and blue BEFORE the imac.
Right, the steam iron set off a design revolution.
I don't think any one is saying that Apple INVENTED translucent plastics. They just made them a crucial part of an otherwise very attractive package, which in turn, popularized the iMac, an popularized iMac design concepts.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
There is one small difference...A Volkswagen Beetle allows you to build in a Porsche engine...
Show me a Beetle with two engines installed.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
There is a lot of missing stuff, period. There is also a lot of stuff missing that's in Mac OS 9, and that is going to take priority. You can't tout voice passwords and built-in file encryption all day long in Mac OS 9 and not have it in Mac OS X.
I think a lot of this stuff is missing by design, right now. A lot of things that used to be bolted on to the kernel is Mac OS 9 are just applications in Mac OS X, and with its protected memory, you can add applications to OS X all day and not affect its stability. They can wait until the last minute to show off new applications, as long as they test them internally and through regular beta channels. There will probably be quite a difference between Public Beta and the final release.
not to make you seem like flamebait, but the Mac supports fairly skanky speech recognition and handwriting analysis ALL the way, way back to 1994, it also has had a screen reader for a hella long time one that can read any message in english or in spanish... But on the real side of what makes you bait on this is all of these modules are being reworked for Ten so that sometime in the not so distant future you may find yourself at a computer that is smaller than the cube, doesn't have a keyboard, opens folders and files by voice command, lets you write in your own handwriting recognizes your face instead of a pessword... who knows? Apple is a hardware company. Macintosh/Claris is a software platform. Mac users Love their machines not because they look candy*ss but because they do what a HOME computer is supposed to do. Make creativity easier. If it happens to run a Posix-Compliant Kernel even better if somone ports Aqua to x86 even mo'better. Macintosh & resedit... the command line was always there, you just didn't have anything it needed to hear
--Shaddup and support your local PBS station Plan for it
Exactly. Consider the stranglehold Apple puts on MacOS software/hardware makers. Gotta do this, gotta do that, conform to this standard, use that API, blah blah blah. Compare that to the idea of using a Free/Open operating system as a base and you've got a (potential) radical change.
There are lots of things apple does that are less than intelligent. There are also lots of things that Apple does that are not Free (Beer or Speech). They are a corporation, and they exist to make money.
Now, having said that, what developer in their right mind would ever get angry at a company for being too standards oriented?
You want an example of entities that give a little leeway on standards? Look at Microsoft. Look at Netscape. Look at AOL. Look, also, at a great deal of community code. How many nights have you spent fixing some moron's code because he/she decided that his/her way of doing things was "better" than the standards already laid out? How often have you pulled your hair out trying to install Company WhizzBang's product and had it fight with your system because it didn't comply with the standards?
MS and Netscape went lax on standards when developing their web browsers. Because of this, the web is a complete mess of kludges, tricks, feature exploits and highly non-portable code. "The page isn't displaying correctly on my browser" is the single most annoying thing a web developer can hear. "It's gotta work with the AOL browser" is a close second.
Apple is hard-assed about standards. Yes, this makes it harder initially for developers, since they need to code more carefully than they would otherwise. It keeps one from being able to build your own machine out of UncleBob's 3133tSpeed components, since UncleBob's doesn't have the time or resources to design and test their components in accordance with Apple standards.
But Apple does what every geek wants to see in a computer system, whether or not you like it. They enforce standards.
There is plenty one can attack Apple for. Their current OS is laughable, their track record is spotty, and yes, their computers look all wussy froo-froo. But in the name of all things geek, don't attack Apple for insisting on standards compliance. That's something they're doing right.
I'm still hopeful about Apple. OS X, in spite of it's faults, still looks like it'll be a good OS--certainly a force to recon with in the desktop and portable computing arenas. It has good infrastructure, good UI, and a truly impressive learning curve. This is the first OS I've seen that has managed to do all of this, and it's not even to it's first full release version yet! (Despite it's being OS "ten", it's pretty much a 1.0 release. Ever seen a 1.0 OS quite like OS X?) I have good, if guarded, hopes for it, and am quite excited to see what happens once it goes final...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
macs are in movies usually because apple paid for them to be there
.... no. The typical product placement is like this.
Very wrong indeed. Apple will provide equipment if asked (ie. Jurassic Park) but almost never actually puts cash on the table. That only happens when they want to do a major comarketing (ie. Mission Impossible, Independence Day) around the movie.
very, VERY rarely because the director wanted them to be or they were just randomly put there.
Errrr
DIRECTOR: "Computer! Get me a @W(#&%$@!! computer on the set!!"
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: "Hey you! Gimme that computer!"
... and the chances are about 80% that in a production environment the closest "that computer" will be a Mac of some sort.
I think Be has realised that the entry barrier into the desktop environment is very large. Over the last year they have refocused their focus (?!) and are pushing BeOS as the ideal OS for internet and multimedia appliances.
BeOS would have made a great OS X. It was designed from the ground up to be incredibly quick and robust. Although it is not a *nix technically, it runs very much like one underneath (has 90 some percent POSIX compatability). The UI is very clean; it lets you forget about the OS and concentrate on using your apps and getting your work done.
The two things that BeOS lacks right now that would bring its guts up to *nix quality are a multiuser environment and better networking support. The filesystem is geared for muliuser support (*nix file permissions settings are all in place) and it's been rumored that the OS would go multiuser in R6, but who knows. In the next month or two, the networking software will be completely replaced with a BSD-type networking structure. Oh, and OpenGL is coming up RSN.
I'm sure if Apple picked up BeOS back in 1996, everything I described above would have been in place by now.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
BS
Aqua is still second at most
You're missing the point. It isn't about aesthetics, it's about having a solid UI that's well integrated into a system and generally consistent across major applications. UNIX window managers look superficially polished, but they fall apart very quickly. There's more to a UI than appearance.
Is Apple as much about user interfaces as it once was?
From the looks of the reviews, they seem to be forgetting many of the fundamental principles of user interface design - Fitz's Law, muscle-memory, and user testing - and replacing them with things that merely seem like good ideas at the time.
I think the Dock, in particular, has failed user testing. I've not heard a single positive reaction to it. Maybe it can be fixed, but only if Apple reacts quickly, and _tests_ their ideas on people while physically watching them use the system (Public beta feedback forms are too indirect, and often people don't even realise what the things that are slowing them down are).
The dock does not take advantage of the pinning effect that the edge of the screen has on the mouse. The fact that things like this have not been noticed by Apple seem to indicate that they either are not testing enough, or they just don't care any more (Why design a great user interface, when Windows with its merely good user interface is so successful, and Linux/X with its bad user interface is gaining ground?).
OSX seems to have a lot of good ideas, some of which work well in practice, others of which don't. There's still a way to go until final release, but is there any evidence that Apple is willing to abandon their good ideas when they're found to be not so good in practice?
I know, I might get in trouble for a comment like that.
I think more than 5% of the music listening population owned (or owns!) a Beatles album. Nice try to add to the hype. Why not make it Marshal Mathers LP meets Nevermind meets Sgt. Pepper meets Dark Side of the Moon? Show some ambition, for Jobs's sakes!
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Like it or not, Phantom Menace was designed to do something and do it very, very well. It raked money in hand over fist and milked every last nostalgic microgram out of every fan. (Anyone seen enough of Jar Jar yet??) OS X doesn't need a plot... it's going to do what it's designed to do very well. Some may not like it, others may masturbate with it (not for me to judge), but it'll do what it's supposed to. So the comparision is valid.
I reserve the right to feed Steve to a snowblower if I see any Mac OS X lunchboxes, however.
Mr. Ska
What a stupid article. As if the macosx release was some kind of huge cultural event. Something tells years from now, me people won't be asking me where I was when I saw macosx for the first time.
Give me a break.
The author's point wasn't that this OS will dominate the world. Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys dominate the "Top 40" music scene, but I doubt many /.ers would consider them to be the 'touchstone' of their musical preference. The author seems to be saying that this OS is (to some extent) unlike anything that came before it, and will (to some extent) influence what comes after it.
Then again, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper sounds were not all new. Many of the ideas were taken from Bob Dylan's Highway 61 (recorded in '65) and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. Then again, Sgt. Pepper took these items to a new level, twisted them, made them stranger, and progressed society in general.
Sgt. Pepper in actually wasn't a big seller compared to later albums (namely the Beatles' Abbey Road, which sold far more copies).
Mac OS X isn't totally new, but it's totally different, and has some innovative sounds and ideas, that will change a generation. Apple probably won't get most of the benifits, but other OS's like Linux and Windows. Mac OS X is too alternative to for the mainstream, but some of it's alternativeness will make it into mainstream culture.
it's just a new face to the standard Macintosh Operating System. [...] The mac has never, and even with OS X, still doesn't let me at the guts of the OS like Windows [...] or Linux does. [...] If something goes wrong with the startup of MacOS, you have no real idea what went wrong, you just have to restart and hope for the best. [...] From everything I've seen and read, OS X is just a new face on an old standard.
/System/Library/StartupItems/ (or thereabouts), which sends messages to the console which are displayed on the pretty startup screen. Furthermore, if you like, you can simply hold down "v" (verbose) during startup and see all the geeky debugging output about the startup process like you see in Linux.
You really are really remarkably uninformed.
Mac OS 9 and earlier were a completely different architecture. Mac OS X runs on top of Darwin, which is open source operating system based on the Mach kernel. Mac OS X has a BSD personality layer and comes with Apache, SSH, Perl, TCL and Java 2 -- all preinstalled. Non-essential services are disabled by default for security reasons.
The startup process is driven by the scripts in
See? Ease of use and power don't have to be mutually exclusive.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Don't get me wrong, I like most of what I see in OSX beta. It's just that I know that it'll grow a lot as it matures.
the ends and the intent are two different things. let's watch carefully based on intent, but let's judge based on the end result.
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
What it sadly is is another attempt by apple to exploit their users' ignorance.
And how, pray tell, are they exploiting users' ignorance by developing OSX?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
When it comes to the marriage of art and technology, I think Jobs and friends did an awesome job with MacOS X.
What do you think of the complaints Mac users have had with the new system - missing Apple menu and so on? It's interesting how peripheral their concerns feel compared to a marriage between art and technology - they are talking about the day to day details, not Truth and Beauty.
Is it possible that "thinking arty" has hurt Jobs in the pure usability stakes?
D
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You don't put two engines in the car. You take out the Volkswagon engine and replace it with a Porche engine. Oh yeah, huh? This is possible because I have seen a Volkswagon like this. Why anyone would want to waste their time/money on this is total mystery though.
OK, so far everyone's looking at this from a geek's perspective (there's nothing wrong with this of course). With this in mind lets look back to 1984. If you took the entire group of computer users then you'd find that over 90% of the users were geeks. Geeks like power, am I right? The Mac was not powerful at all and was a pain to use actually, that is if you wanted to poke around the system and peek into the OS (the older geeks will get the pun there). Not too many geeks took to the Mac. The other 10% did and brought many new people. Over time the ratio of geeks to non-geeks went to about 8:1 then 7:1 now its somewhere around 1:20. This is primarily due to the concepts expressed in the original Mac (and Alto etc) that was brought to the mainstream. Of course that ratio was not that same as the ratio of Macs to Windows. There was still a need for non-geeks to learn some geeky things to get stuff done so the middle of the ratio is kind of gray. The people who didn't want to learn anything geeky went to the Mac and the ones who capitulated went to Windows (many kicking a screaming)
Although Windows 95 through 2000 looks like a Mac its still a lot more powerful then a Mac. Many aspects of it are "techie". Windows has a good balance of ease of use and power. This is great for the geeks and the almost geeks of today's ratio. X and newer GUI's for *nix are now closing in on the balance of power and ease of use of Windows but are still a lot more powerful then easy to use which is why it's users are closer to the geek side. No other OS/GUI, including Eazel, is really moving to the targeted ease of use at the expense of power like the Mac OS..
Many people like pretty pictures. For an example of this, look at popular magazines like People, Time, etc. Compare those to the "more powerful" Economist, Scientific American etc.. You can get a whole lot more useful information from The Economist then Time but a whole lot more people like Time. Again, Time has a good balance of easy reading with useful information. Its all about pretty pictures and ease of use. With this in mind lets look at Max OS X. As the user ratio moves to 1:100, 1:1000 etc.power will be a lot less important then ease of use. Windows, X, Gnome etc are great for us geeks. We like power. OS X is great for everyone else. There's a lot of everyone else. I do believe that X is a watershed OS. Will it dominate? Probably not. But the concepts expressed in it will take hold and change the way many "normal" people see computing.
Not too many geeks took to the Mac. The other 10% did and brought many new people. Over time the ratio of geeks to non-geeks went to about 8:1 then 7:1 now its somewhere around 1:5. With this in mind lets look at the current situation with todays OS's. Altough Windows 95 on up looks like a Mac its still a more powerful then Mac. May aspects of it are "techie". X and newer GUI's for *nix are closing in on the balance of power and ease of use of Windows. None are really moving to the targeted ease of use at atI don't think speech recognition is the way to go. (see previous post)
That nothwithstanding, I think you've missed my point. I'm talking about the primary mode by which we interact with the software. Sure, there will be new methods of input, tailored for specific purposes (user authentication, etc.), but I don't know of anything coming down the pipe that will fundamentally change the way we interact with the computer. OS X certainly doesn't. It may have some slick new features, but it's essentially the same thing we've seen for the past 16 years.
Let me put it this way: How long do you think it will take the average user to adapt to OS X. I'm not talking about learning the specifics. I mean, how long would it take the average computer user to become familiar enough with the interface to begin to use OS X to the extent he/she has been using a previous operating system. Surf the Web, check email, type a letter, balance the checkbook, whatever? I'd say it would be second nature in about 30 seconds.
Browser? I barely know her!
I believe Apple and OSX ought to be judged on what THEY claim they're trying to do, instead of being bashed for something this group THINKS they're doing.
Same goes for Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
Jobs doesn't make a secret of his core message about the company: "Apple is all about exploring the intersection of art and technology," he said at Macworld in New York. "It's in our DNA." Read that again. ..... Does it say anywhere that they're trying to build the fastest servers in the world, or hope to run spreadsheets better than anyone else? Hell, no. Someday they might do both, now that they're launching a new OS with some serious strengths, but that's not what their first priority is. "Exploring the intersection between art and technology" is what they care about most. For anyone who thinks that's stupid, stop reading now, because this is not the company for you. Fine. Good luck in your chosen work.
For those of you are still reading, try thinking about what he said on it's own terms. It seems to be a consistent and honest statement of his beliefs. I'm assuming that normally intelligent people who need an enterprise server will pick Linux, all else being equal, as most people know that it's stupid to try to drive a nail with a wrench.
Similarly, it seems patently unfair to judge Apple and OSX on claims the company never made. If, for instance, Apple rolled out OSX today and said: "We're going to take on NT and Linux in the enterprise server market with this baby," then it would be fair to take this claim apart on that basis. But they didn't say this, and won't.
Maybe there are a lot of tech-oriented people who've never thought about how technology and design ought to be pulled together, but does that mean we shouldn't ever consider it? Their uncles were the same ones who ridiculed the GUI in the first place, 25 years ago. Then processor speed caught up, RAM got cheap, as did bigger hard drives, and the efficiency arguments didn't mean as much any more. Won't improvments in hardware keep trying to catch up to what software writers can think up? There's always this back and forth, with advances in one area forcing improvements in others.
Another point is that Jobs has called OSX "the future of the Macintosh." Judge it on that basis, not on how much the old OS sucks, would you? This is the first rollout of a completely new (if you don't count the BSD layer) consumer operating system for a long time. How well has the rollout gone so far? What does the OS offer in the way of improvements over the old, and is that going to be enough? Did you read the careful review over at Ars Technica?
If you don't care what happens over in Cupertino and with Macs, you are, of course, free to ignore the thread and move on.
If OSX fails to live up to it's own promises, that may be sad for some of us, but in the grand scheme of things, that's tough luck, isn't it? Call it Digital Darwinism. Only the successful code survives.
A direct port of old-school NeXTStep to the Apple would have been quick and robust, considering that it was surprisingly usable on a 25mhz 68040. Anything less than a Turbo Slab was too painful to even consider then, especially when compared to an Amiga with a slower CPU - Which is what I was comparing it to, back in the day. However, Apple didn't just port NeXTStep, they had to throw all that MacOS nonsense on top of it.
NeXT bought Apple? Interesting, All this time I thought it was the other way around.
Apple certainly did need that time to add a lot of crap on to NeXTStep. Too bad they added all that crap on, they could have had a nice, fast, clean operating system.
BeOS is pretty close to being finished. With Apple's programmer backing it could have been finished before now. Yes, I've used it. In fact, I've ported to it, though in a very mild kind of way, and not since DR3. Had to rewrite strsep().
BeOS is small (unlike OSX), fast (apparently unlike OSX - Hell, it can play six QT streams at once, and OSX can't handle two?) and has good POSIX compliance (better now than back in the DR3 days, I guess.)
Pink was doomed to fail from the start. Too many chefs. Copland was timed wrong; Now is the time that Apple absolutely has to come up with an operating system that Doesn't Suck(tm). MacOS (Legacy) is just too legacy. Putting it in its own process is a useful compromise compared to just throwing it away. When MICROS~1 announced Windows 2000, Apple had to act, because in theory, Windows 2000 was going to subsume Windows 9x. Instead, we got Windows ME, which is a nice try folks, but there's no cigar here. I do run it at home since it supports my modern hardware a little better.
I personally think Apple would have been better off with BeOS. NeXTStep has baggage; So does BeOS, admittedly, but that's just because of the legacy API support (IE, POSIX, OpenGL, TCP/IP.) Obviously you have to have TCP. POSIX is probably necessary, and it's probably the cheapest way to get a bunch of old code to be easily portable. OpenGL may or may not be on its way out, but it's making an effort. Hopefully they'll find ways to spruce it up and get it on the same footing that Direct3D now has in the game market, but I'm doubtful.
What does NeXTStep actually offer a user that BeOS doesn't? Not bloody much, if anything. That face could have gone on BeOS as easily as on NeXTStep, probably easier. Not that I think much of the functionality of Apple's new interface after reading the Ars Technica review. But it sure does look pretty, don't it? Maybe that's all that's really required here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your entire comment is really some flamebait/ material for the books, but let's focus on one point:
the biggest problem that people have with your new 'supercomputer' is that there are cracks in the cheapass translucent case
It's isn't "cheapass." It isn't as if they took a G4 and tossed it in a rubermaid container and put it on store shelves. This was a technically challenging machine and case to make. Like the iMac, Apple had develop new processes to produce these things in mass quantity. Nobody has actually tried to make a computer like this before (especially without a fan!). It's largely experimental. As a result, it's hard to blame Apple for some problems only becoming apparent after wide distribution. It's like security holes in software -- they only show up after wide use.
What Apple can be blamed for is they way they are dealing with the issue. They could be doing it much more gracefully. I don't have a Cube, so I'm not going to make any judgement about whether those are cracks or mold lines showing up in the casing. You know how human mentality is -- one person finds what they think are cracks and suddenly everybody thinks they have cracks.
Also note that many other Macs with translucent plastics do have actual bonafied mold lines, such as my PowerBook.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Willie : Boy! You read me mind! You've got the shinnin'!
Bart : Don't you mean shining?
Willie : Quiet! Ya wanna get sued?
I don't like fish. Reverse the fish to e-mail.
You can easily telnet into a Win2k box by default.
You just have to set up the telnet server. Yes, that's even the case with Win2k Pro. The only problem with that is that all you get is
C:\
so it's not that helpful.
Bzzzt! Would you care to try again?
I've got a USB Zip drive plugged into my Mac right now, with no Iomega drivers. Apple's USB support includes any device which supports the Mass Storage standard for USB (like the USB Zip). Iomega's Mac drivers are universally acknowledged to be awful and are thrown away by virtually everyone in favor of the built-in Mac OS driver.
Mac is more plug-and-play friendly, but *only* to its hardware. 3rd party hardware support is the same, if not worse, than on Wintel machines.
Well, let's see. I've got a USB Zip, PDA Adapter, two-button scroll mouse, GamePad Pro USB, USB Printer, a digital camera with a USB connection, and a USB hub to hook all this stuff up to my iMac (along with the Apple-supplied keyboard).
The hub, Zip, mouse and GamePad Pro work with the built-in Mac OS support (with the shareware USB Overdrive providing some EXCELLENT features for the mouse and gamepad to address some limitations in the Mac OS). The printer, PDA adapter, and camera came with the drivers to make them work.
If you plug an unrecognized USB device into a Mac running OS 9, it tells you, and prompts you to go online to download the correct driver. So Apple is just putting the drivers on-line rather than putting them on the CD. BFD, in this Internet-delivered age.
Gee, sounds like no 3rd-party support for my poor, isolated iMac. When I get my FireWire CD-RW, I'll probably just be hallucinating that it works as soon as I install Toast and plug in the drive.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
What ever happened to reading the blessed old Book at bedtime? No wonder some kids wake up screaming with nightmares!
/.ers would agree with me that some of the wildest kids in school were the preacher's kids. I can't think of a single child raised in a 'good christian environment' that wasn't this way. Of course most of them give that holier than thou snotty attitude a strong run, but get them away from their peers, and they're just as bad as the 'heathens (sp?)'
Sheesh! Stories with happy endings are too evil for little kids. Let's tell them stories about deceit,devils,damnation,suffering....yeah, these are much better!
The main danger of these books is that the media is recruiting children into Satan?s army. At a young age, children cannot understand a lot of things, but they can understand this witchcraft story because it is "fun." It is just like giving a child a cigarette, then getting him hooked on pot, then taking him to crack cocaine, then on to heroine. These books are just the starting place for evil.
Of course children can't understand a lot of things, but is keeping them in a 'plastic bubble' gonna help? There is a big difference in being told something is wrong, and studying it, pondering it, and then making your own decisions. What's the first thing a kid does when mommy or daddy say no? They do it of course! Instead of sheltering your child and warping their view of what the world really is, why not let them experience reality and guide them to make intelligent decisions about what is right and what is wrong?
Your analogy is a bit warped here. Unless you think that is how drug escalation works. In each step, you speak as if you are forcing your child to do these things. A person who can make their own decisions about right/wrong is less likely to ever do these things, than someone who has just been told, don't do that. I think the majority of
A normal child does not take a weapon to school and dress the way some of these murderers have dressed.
Weapons aside, what murderers are you speaking of here? That columbine media circus??? In all the hubbub about this shooting, I saw lots of pictures of these kids, and I would assume that these were 'normal' kids, so I don't see what you're getting at here. If we're gonna talk wearing all black, don't forget those weirdo priests (deviants!). I've seen all the same crap news on these shootings as anyone else, and don't recall a single kid that I wouldn't consider normal, if not nerdish in appearance.
Bottom line is, Harry Potter is not the dawn of a great apocalypse. Pokemon, no matter how annoying and how much is read into it, is not the work of any devil. Black shirts/coats etc. are not signs of satanic worship. Kids are just that, kids. They thirst for anything new to them. Telling them no, without a tangible reason, is adding fuel to the fire. And most importantly, people need to be able to make their own decisions in life. Encourage children to read/watch/experience the world around them. While religion may not be a bad thing, the world does not revolve around it.
When I think religion, I think HolyWars, and the raw evilness of it all sickens me.
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Here's the difference.
If my memory serves, menus in Windows 2000 fade in and then pop away. This creates an irritating delay between the time you request a menu and the time you can use it.
Menus in MacOS X pop in and fade away. No irritating delay, and the fade serves as a way of highlighting the selection you made in the menu.
That kind of thoughtful detail is the difference between Windows and MacOS X. It may seem tiny to you, but it makes users happy, fantatically loyal, even.
Despite the shadow and fading, Windows 2000 is insignificatly different in look and feel from Windows 95. The same old start menu, the same old dull grey everywhere, the same old dialogue boxes with 100 tabs on them.
MacOS X is the same radical change to MacOS that WIndows 95 was to Windows. And I find it a lot more appealing than Windows 95.
It's beautiful, for one thing. Never underestimate the power of beauty. It's sold one heck of a lot of iMacs.
D
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Sgt. Pepper didn't have any impact whatsoever on my parents, only on people my age at the time. The parallel with only Geeks caring about an OS rollout is apt, in that both events are aimed at a targeted demographic, not the entire population of th world. And that's enough.
It'll be twenty months from today
Till OSX sees the light of day
People wait and drool and stare
But it may still be vapourware
So let me introduce to you
The one and only Stevie Jobs!
Apple Computer's buggy OS X!!!!
hehehe
Ben
I think that's probably the real breakthru here. Mac OS X brings UNIX to the _masses_. The other stuff--preemptive multi-tasking, Quartz, Aqua, etc.--is nowhere as important. Within a year, about 10% of the non-technical users out there will have UNIX running on their desktop/ laptop and will like it.
I thought I knew a little about the history of Mac design, but I have no idea what you refer to. Please write some more on this.
Look, if I make a pen that can write in any color imagineable and never runs out of ink, can I call it a "new pen"? Or are you going to knock me and complain that it still gives you writer's cramp, and what you'd really like is to have words appear on a page through the sheer force of your will?
if you judge an OS GUI by it's swishy toolbar, and 32 bit analog clocks.
You can laugh without eating a sandwhich, but you can do both if bring one.
I'm not even a mac guy anymore, but I gotta say this. My favorite thing to do as a freelance graphic artist was that I had my startup drive as an external SCSI. That way, when I outputted my stuff at a service bureau or the newspaper where I worked, I could walk up to ANY mac, plug it in to the scsi chain, tell the OS to use it as the boot device, and there was my OS, with my apps, my fonts, my desktop, everything. No problem. Did I mention that I had a "universal system folder" install of my os that could start any mac ever made (except very, very early ones). It doesn't get much easier than that....
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
You can call it new pen, but I doubt you'd market it as a new kind of writing implement.
Browser? I barely know her!
TV displays, OS displays, and game displays seem to be converging. Sports, financial, and news shows now look like video games. A system for naive users could reasonably look like that.
The magnifying cursor isn't original with Apple; I saw that at Xerox PARC around 1987. Now everybody has enough memory and MIPS to do it.
VW AG owns Audi which is VW's largest division. Porsche is Porsche but occasionally the two companies get together for a project (like the old Audi RS2). VW, btw, owns Audi, Lamborghini, SEAT, Bentley, Cosworth among others that I can't think of right now.
I have to admit it's getting better...
or a new way to write.
Browser? I barely know her!
That is long, rambling, and tangential. I wish *I* got paid by the word.
However, he does have a point or two--this is a big deal, because we'll finally get to leave MacOS behind. Say what you will about MacOS X, whether you like the new graphical interface, or cringe at the thought of taking a perfectly good UNIX and ripping stuff out of it and putting a Mac emulation layer into it instead... It still has to be better than MacOS.
However, I'd rather be waiting for the Radiohead CD.
Also, I think Siggy was right about Steve Jobs being able to get people excited--I wish BeOS could have generated this much interest, considering how cool it is, and how much earlier it was released...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Comparisons to a sports car are interesting - the batmobile is more like it (you see, it must be shot undercranked for it is very slow). Sgt. Pepper... given initial reports, OSX reminds me more of Daikitanna
I think Apple will take market share from Windows due to OSX, but sadly I doubt that dominance is in the cards - Apple hardware is simply too expensive, and Jobs knows he can't make a viable business model out of cloning.
I'd like to see a reinvigourated Apple at 10-15% market share when OS X is successfully released and native software becomes available. That's good enough to be a tremendous turnaround for the company.
D
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But the iMac certainly was a "cultural phenomenon". Now you can get translucent fruity routers and mice, and chairs. Heck, it's even spread to other devices, such as phones. What else in the computer world has been so imitated, even *outside* the computer world?
Plus, for many people, the iMac actually became their first computer. These are largely people that were intimidated by computers before, but that saw the iMac as "friendly" enough, and thus it was their introduction to computing. No doubt the iMac will have a special place in those people's lives.
The iMac will definitely go down as a cultural icon. In 30 years, directors will throw iMacs into movies to get people all sentimental about the past. Just watch and see...
--Lenny
This is one of the sillier things I've seen posted on Slashdot. Face it, there isn't any cultural significance to software release cycles... even if it's for a very different version or what have you. Despite the involvement of everyone money could buy, the Windows 95 launch wasn't a cultural event. Despite Steve Jobs' involvement, the Mac OS X release isn't a cultural event.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
You can talk shit about linux, about my country and about my mother. But never ever talk anything bad about Beatles. You really doesn't know anything about beatles does you?
If you don't have nothing good to say just shut up. This is not to try to be offensive but you should really think before posting.
I have no sig and I want to scream
Sgt Pepper was the first rock album to include a lyric sheet. This was pissed on and derided by "serious" musicians and music lovers as some kind of lame rock hubris. Like rock lyrics could be worth reading! The idea that a fluffy, for-the-masses rock 'n' roll album would have something in it for the thinking man? Outrageous!
I think the article is right on with the analogy of Mac OS X and Sgt Pepper's. A lot of the criticism of Mac OS X from Slashdotters is of the same variety as the criticism of Sgt Peppers when it came out. "A good GUI does not an OS make." spake one Slashdotter. Well, you just described Mac OS 9, not Mac OS X. Apple is no longer happy with pretty graphics and common key shortcuts, they also want bulletproof reliability, and the BSD terminal and Apache Web server built-in. They want an OS that looks good and plays well for the iMac user, and kicks ass and takes names for the beard-and-suspenders crowd. Same way that the Beatles were no longer happy singing "she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah". They still wanted to write good melodies, but they had other things to express as well, and the balls to take a risk and express them, instead of dishing out more of the same.
Remember, the Beatles are respected as musicians now, but they were not so respected then. They were the Fab Five ... they were thought of as candy by the "true music lovers" of the day who were listening to "serious" music, and couldn't see that the fact that Sgt Pepper was good-tasting candy didn't mean it wasn't also "serious" music. The analogy is pretty good.
Then again, that could be because I'm too poor to buy shiny new software, or even lunch.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I don't know where your comment came from, but I laughed so damned hard I spit out my pepsi and started crying.
People in the office are a little concerned about me.
But that's OK. God bless you, madd wood master!
Bite my yammer.
Could it be that Steve Jobs is going to manage to make the OSX launch as big a media event as Win95 was? Since Win9x we haven't had any real take-up by the general media for a software launch (98, NT4 and 2000 all had much lower key launches in public in your face terms). We all know that OSX is different, and we all know that Jobs is an incredibly good salesman but the question is....
I am sure the general mass media are ready to hype a software launch again (they always need more stories) but will they ignore this whole thing because only a few people have machines that can run it?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Note that the shortcuts in #2 above are user definable, add the option key to hide the app you are switching away from.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
A tcsh prompt, while new to the Mac, is not a new interface.
I don't have a gripe about GUI's. I just take issue with all the hype OS X gets about having a new interface.
The interface is the way in which the user & software can come together and have an effect on each other. There's nothing new in OS X. There hasn't been anything new since the original Mac.
I realize somebody's probably going to chime in about voice recognition, but that's just not a viable solution, even if the technology delivers. While it may prove useful working in tandem with other methods, it will never be the main route of interaction. Have you ever tried to walk somebody through even the simplest operation on a computer? I don't mean tech support, I mean telling your girlfriend how to change the printer settings. If you just grab the mouse/keyboard, you can accomplish in fifteen seconds what would have taken five minutes to explain.
I envision an interface driven by gestural input. I'm not sure exactly what I mean by that - yet. Any takers?
How about an eye-tracking system like fighter pilots have in their helmets & those used by the disabled?
Why are we still working in two dimensions?
What about biofeedback?
I certainly don't claim to have the answers. I don't even think I'm asking the right questions. I do know, however, that there's something better out there.
Browser? I barely know her!
"NextStep has provided a good graphical user interface on top of a Unix variant for 11 years now. Apple bought Next, freshened it up, and added Mac compatibilty and eye candy. I fail to see how that gives them all the credit for it."
How can you deny them credit for this? Apple is really as much NeXT as it is Apple. It has the same CEO as NeXT, and the same person in charge of software, Avie Tevanian. As you can read in his bio, Tevanian was also a principal developer of Mach at Carnegie-Mellon.
This is not the same as Microsoft buying some guys out of their garage because they had developed some widget Bill wanted to assimilate or bury (Apple do this too, of course). The acquisition of NeXT has totally transformed Apple, and not just because of Steve Jobs' return. Five out of Apple's eight-strong senior management team are ex-NeXT.
Many of the people who brought you NeXTSTEP are developing it into OS X. Why should they be denied the credit? Also, if you think the developments are merely cosmetic, you should check out John Siracusa's articles on Ars Technica
"Especially as they have broken some of the nice things in Next, like having both buttons on a scroll bar in the same place."
That's a fair point - you can have this under the current MacOS, so I doubt it will be long before it is grafted back onto OS X, together with a bunch of other useful stuff from both MacOS and NeXTSTEP which is absent from the Public Beta.
> BeOS would have made a great OS X. It was designed from the ground up to be incredibly quick and robust.
:-) )
Mmm. NeXTstep was designed from the ground up to be (somewhat) quick and robust.
BeOS, is very inferior to NeXTstep, and pretty late in the game (I used both, and developed on both. Please, take time to comment if you tried both of them)
BeOS strong point was the multiprocessor design from the ground up (which gave him excellent multitasking possibilities). But on almost all aspects, it is techincally very poor compared to NeXTstep (C++ interfaces, Huge 'NIH' syndrom, lack of most basic utilities)
NeXT bought Apple in december 1996 for -400M$ (fell free to change the order of the words and the sign of the price for the official version), but it took them *4* years to get to OSX beta. And they probably took their fastest path.
> I'm sure if Apple picked up BeOS back in 1996, everything I described above would have been in place by now.
I don't see why you think it would have taken less time than doing it from NeXTstep. (Well, I suspect it is because you lack clues of the involved work and the respective level of NeXTstep and BeOS. But I would not say this
My bet, is that it would never have seen the day. Never. It would have been a Copland/Pink project again. (ie: Coolest thing going to get out of the door real soon now. Wait, it'll kick ass. Oh, you will not beleive it. It is going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Oops, cancelled.)
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Oh, believe me, I've RTFM. I've used OF. I've held down every godforsaken key on this damned keyboard when booting. Trying to boot from the OS9 partition (either using OF or holding the option key) gets me the 'Disk Question' icon. I've tried reinstalling OS9 with no luck. The only thing I can do is start up w/ OSX.
NeXT bought Apple in december 1996 for -400M$ (fell free to change the order of the words and the sign of the price for the official version), but it took them *4* years to get to OSX beta. And they probably took their fastest path.
NeXT bought Apple? Interesting, All this time I thought it was the other way around.
You missed his subtle "-" in front of the "400M$". Nominally, Apple bought NeXT; however, the upper levels of executives in the combined entity are dominated by NeXT personnel.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Ironic? How? Let's be fair. How many people have tried, outside of Apple, to improve Mac OS proper? Besides, UNIX isn't an entity, it's a set of technologies that are open for implementation by whoever is smart enough to do so, as Apple (in the form of NEXT) have been doing for over a decade now.
In comparison, how many desktop attempts have there been for UNIX? How many match Mac OS in terms of simplicity and usability? Face it, Apple has done it better than anyone else yet, and there are still people who can't deal with that fact alone.
Regarding your comment of Linux catching up in usability before the next 17 years are over, which is available now? A Linux desktop your grandma can appreciate, or a simplified computer (Mac) that runs traditional Mac OS alongside BSD on Mach, with all the benefits thereof? As much as I love open-source, UNIX-based OSes, this smacks of denial. Linux -- later, but better?
I'll get modded down to the core of the earth for ranting like this (if there actually are any vigilant moderators who read stories as old as this one), but Apple honestly deserves our accolades for at least attempting what they're doing with UNIX. They've gone a step beyond that...they've done a good job.
Or maybe I've gotten your points all wrong. Maybe you don't mind that Apple has handily achieved the Holy Grail of UNIX in the home. In that case, the beer's on me. (Sorry mate! Zealotry...that's where I'm a viking.)
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
Didn't anybody else notice the wholesale adoption of Macs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Except that in last night's Angel episode, the iBook had a sticky-note strategically placed over the Apple logo. I wonder what that was all about?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The Unix layer is a way cool bonus and gives the power user something that would separate him from the basic user. Sure it CAN be candy colored, but it can also be sleek and inobtrusive (I love the graphite mode). This is a big step for macs in terms of bringing them up to speed with the rest of the world so they can compete with NT and Linux. Now if we could just get some good processors...
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
yeah, OSs in general tend to have no plot.- -----------
Also, I'd just like to point out that the TT (mentioned in the article) is a designing cluster-fuck. Or I should qualify that and say the production vehicle. It and the BMW Z8 have such amazing potential, their prototypes were amazing, but then to cut costs and vaguely hint at safety they have to change little things and apparently they don't bother asking the designers when they do this. They both now are amazing if you glance at them, but under any real scrutiny have huge flws - funciton follows form - and each have huge blind spots (with he top up), horrible ergonomics, and are designed for midgets (although less so in respect to the Z8).
fucking midgets.
I refuse to use Mac for the same reasons - it has such enormous potential and could be so cool - and even the boxes look so cool (the cube is cool) - but then they go and do the dumbest shit so that they are slow as fuck and ergonomically retarded (the keyboard sucks and nobody can argue with that - as does any one button mouse regardles of its shape). even if theior processor does claim to be a supercomputer, the OS is still slow - on a linux box, I can click on something and I can get instantaneous reaction (as well as on my win boxen), but in Macs you get this phantom lag time in so many things that make the speed of the comptuer irrelavent if it is going to have little annoyances built right into the OS.
their stock is tanking and it is fine by me b/c I will never invest in them, never buy one of their products (unless it is a cube to put BeOS on), andI will always hate them with a passion I would otherwise reserve for religion.
--------------------------------------
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
How about our feet? Do you have any problems driving a car with a manual trasmission?
Browser? I barely know her!
In this case, Apple has a special team of well-connected people who are in charge of product placement. They're the ones who have blitzed every TV show with Apple products in the past two years.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Believe it or not, Cocoa will eventually catch on, and be emulated. Expect .NET to be not just a Java competitor, but a Cocoa-like layer - Microsoft knows their API is outdated and needs replacing. That's what Jobs means with his statement - OSX has the right combination of (r)evolutionary ideas that will be emulated in things like Microsoft .NET.
I believe in self-flagellation. In fact, everybody should have a flagellum.
Read all of the apple forums, all the Mac users are BITCHING about the UI. (Ars Technica for that matter!).
I say that Apple has FAILED to put a decent GUI on top of Unix. Apple apparently no longer is about user interfaces. If you think so, read that Ars Technica review again.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
How much marketing has Transmeta done?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
all? no a minority are making a lot of noise, in many cases they don't even sound like they've actually used the system for more than a few minutes if at all. most ppl are waiting for the final one.
Forget Phones, I saw an orange translucent Microwave the other day. The Imac-ization of America is thoroughly frightening!!!!
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
I play legit MP3's in my store from my G4, cause I can put together a 6 hour playlist of whatever I want and edt it frequently... If I reboot, it's embarrassing........ How's that for a good reason... ...
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
heres one now : the dock is very nice and useful. when i am in OS9 i miss it
>Windows has been the dominant OS and GUI during the last 5 years, where more >people have gotten involved in computing than have used them previously. The sub >$1000 system almost universally has Windows on it, and thus it defines how >computing is supposed to work for a lot of people. What? The gui that most of the people you refer to in the first sentence really know and love is AOL And the second one about the "sub $1000" computer market is just silly. Most of those sub $1000 companies are out of business and in the sub $1500, Apple is kicking a$$ and taking names with their Imacs. >OSX may be cool and innovative i don't know what you'd call it, but all ye Linux faithful consider: Be spring next year apple will be shipping a *nix os with a pretty shine to the masses (and on a large number of multi proc machines!). All those drivers and programs you always wished you could run will be there or forthcoming . It's an os you can have on the family computer that can be as powerful as you want and as easy to use as is needed by your less computer friendly family members. But who knows. Maybe the public will not receive it. Then I guess you could call it "Pet Sounds", a commercial failure, but influencing generations of musicians after it.
e x p e c t d e l a y . c o m
Directors throw iMacs into movies and television shows now! No doubt they'll do it in the future, too. In my opinion, the iMac, and possibly OS X are more like the the VW beetle.
42
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
At $9K, it got delivered by an Apple Tech who would ALSO teach you how to use the machine.
A leather case for you pen and pencil set, leather CD holder, and a remote control.
12000 were made, 11601 sold. the rest are spare parts.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Sure the rollout of Mac OS X is going to be as much about hype and image as it is going to be about the product, but that's no different from any other product being launched into a competitive market today. The only strange phenomenon would be if there was no hype about it, no fans endlessly discussing the minutiae and no "What A New Koncept!" technology to be pushed as the next best thing.
As the article says, it's the same in other market areas, especially in the music and film industries. I don't see that it's a bad thing, it's really sort of inevitable given the lack of differentiation amongst many of these products or services. Whenever you have a class of products or services that differ in only minor ways, you're going to get an overdose of hype and branding, and Apple are all too aware of that.
Underneath the hype it's just another operating system, and not vastly revolutionary at that. Sure, for a Mac OS it's revolutionary, but BSD has been around for a while, and whilst the GUI is something different, it's not a radical departure from current paradigms. But if you can put the right spin on it, it can begin to look like something that has never been seen before. And Apple, when they get it right, are damn good at this.
It's not ONLY too expensive. Motorola has Apple trapped in a time-warp where CPU's are at the level they were a year and a half ago, as far as performance goes.
I got myself all worked up and exited about the potential of the PPC platform with a kick butt OS, back in 1994, as the savior of all things that compute. But it remains an empty promise, and we're still bound by the shackles of Microsoft and Intel. Our only true hope these days seems to be AMD and Linux.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
After all the moaning about the Mac in Linux forums, it's ironic that Apple has managed to put a decent face on UNIX before anyone else. That's always been the sort point about UNIX on the desktop, and has been going back to the early days of X in the 1980s. But with all the yammering about the Open Source revolution and millions of eyes, many people expected one of the various attempts at a Linux desktop to make OS X look like a sad afterthought. It hasn't happened. KDE, et al, still look like poor attempts to clone interfaces that the authors never used. If OS X is the Sgt. Pepper for some users, then it's a wake-up call for a generation for others, as was the ill-fated Stones concert at Altamont Speedway.
People comparing OS X to Linux, just chill. OS X isn't aiming at the same people that Linux is. Linux is mostly for hackerish type people, or at least people who know the arcane arts of computing. OS X is a consumer OS. Just remember that there's always Darwin. Personally, I don't think that Linux as it is currently administrated will ever become competitive in a consumer setting, nor will OSX really compete with Linux for users. Different markets.
OSX is cool though... Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with OS X. The UI is slow, the MacOS compatibility layer takes forever and a day to start, hardware support isn't too good, etc. But there are a lot of good things like the kickass interface, well-built underlying OS (stability and all that), and large existing base of compatible (or mostly compatible) software (Apache, emacs, MS Office, 'most everything from UNIX and MacOS).
Keep in mind, however, that this is still a pre-release product. Most of the negative points are the types of things that get fixed just before release (fine-tuning).
I've used the beta, and it's actually quite impressive. The interface has a very slick feel, things that don't need to be opaque aren't, it's quite usable even at very high resolutions (color widgets and zooming dock help, among others), and it integrates existing MacOS software quite well.
Anyway...
z
Don't feed him to a snowblower. It'll probably just jam. Stuff him into a woodchipper or something designed to rip up dense material. Or one of those road chewing machines. That would do it.
Masturbate with it? So that's what that hole in the cd is for, huh?
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
you can resize the dock by grabbing the vertical line betwen the trash can (or minimized apps) and the rest of the icons and pulling up to make it bigger or down to make it smaller. You can also resize it in one of the control panels (i forgot which, im not in X now)
cristiana
E is really just another face on top of X. Don't get me wrong, I love it, its the only WM I use, but one WM is much like another functionally (hmmm...instant flamebait?). I really don't think Raster is trying to put a super user-happy face on top of Linux. The point of E has always been about giving the user control to customize as much stuff as possible inside the GUI. E will never be the magic egg the Linux community is looking for (a GUI that your average iMac owner would have no trouble with ...), because its philosophy runs counter to this.
And I really don't think the E-Team is after desktop domination anyway. They want to make cool, useful toys that other like-minded geeks will have fun with.
One-ton tomato
True - but even with a small dock, I felt the incursion of space was not going to look good for low-res screens.
When I got my machine, I resized the dock to about half its original size, and upped resolution from 1152x864 to 1024x768. I found that produced an excellent result.
D
----
Arrgh. Hellooo?!?? it's just an OS. It runs your computer. How about going outside? Talking to real people? Stop praying to the almighty X!!
Now, is it pretty? Hell yeah. Love seeing a native tcsh shell with antialiased fonts and all. And running ifconfing on a Mac gives some strange satisfaction. I applaud AppleCo 10x for biting the bullet and jumping a couple of evolutions, but I'm simultaneously kicking myself for swallowing it.
It was 26 years ago today
Steve Jobs brought the mac in play
It's been going in and out of style
But it's guaranteed to raise a smile
So may I introduce to you
The same machine you've known for all these years
Steve Jobs' gui apple corp maaaac
the Simpsons did. They started the trend of recording a tv show in the studio instead of performing it live. Of course, a live performance of the Simpsons might put a terrible strain on the animators' wrists.
Actually, as a completely off topic aside, I noticed the lack of product placements in Dark Angel.
It struck me when Max bought a soda and the machine just had a generic "cold beverage logo". The soda she purchased was an unrecognizable brand. I started looking after that and it looks like they purposefully avoided product placements.
--GnrcMan--
This is so because the OS9+ compatibility libs suck a lot of memory and speed.
ALso, the user interface takes up too much screen real estate, making the iMac line unusable combared to OS9+.
Apple's OSX only runs on Apple computers. Not the best use of money, especially for the business world.
All in all, I believe OS X will pave the way for more Linux on the desktop. I wonder is anybody is developing an open-sourced Carbon lib for UNIX?
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Does anyone have any comments on how MacOS X compares to BeOS (one of the alternative OS's that tried for OS X's spot)? I have yet to try OS X but it sounds a lot like BeOS. IMO BeOS is a great OS but unless opensourced will never have a chance of becoming more than a niche player. OS X may be able to do more since it has Apple behind it but they are also a couple years behind BeOS in real-world despazzing. I'll stick to Linux probably. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
> 5% market share means that it won't be a
> Touchstone. The Beatle's weren't some little
> secret band that only a handful of people had
> heard about, that was recommended by word of
> mouth. "Sgt Pepper's" was mass-market
> domination, when every damn tune on the album
> would end up being a single.
Granted, I wasn't around in the late 60's to witness the release of "Sgt. Pepper." But I have had it described to me as "seeing a new color for the first time." The music was so original, and so good, that it totally reshaped the music scene for years to come. All the tracks chained together to create a coherent "concert experience." Each and every song made use of synthesizer effects in some way. These and many other concepts were quite innovative for those days.
This, I believe, was the purpose of the analogy. OS X is supposed to be a great innovation that it will change the computer scene for years to come. Market share has nothing to do with it.
The music of The Beatles isn't nearly as prevalent today as it was 30 years ago. But before you stop to question the analogy, flip on a television and watch a Phillips commercial. Or The Wonder Years. Or thousands of other artists and producers who were entertained, inspired, and changed by four lads with bad hair from Liverpool.
Alakaboo
What a breath of fresh air... someone who doesnt assuem that their oppinion is law. Thankyou for a bit o sanity
...clean on the outside, catchy as hell in parts, irritating in others, maybe a bit too long and complicated for its own good,but definitely unlike anything that's come before it and on the whole, a Good Thing to have a copy of.
;)
And more fun when stoned
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
of SHITE, especially since I had to look up Exile on Main Street to know that it was a Stones album. I'd say OS X is more like Spiceworld -- I remember a time when the "experts" said The Spice Girls would be here to stay...
--
"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire
-Elendale
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
- left hand scrollers (the Miller-Browser doesn't work nicely with them on the right)
- no save or fax buttons in the print panel
- pop-up printer list instead of informative scrolling one
- Webster, Oxford's, Digital Librarian/Shakespeare (this should become Digital Gutenberg)
- Display PostScript - no on-the-fly rendering of ps code for dimension lines in apps which don't support them, etc.
- tear-off menus - no instantly customizable UI
- top-level print, hide, quit
- movable main menu
just off the top of my head.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
http://members.aol.com/willadams
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I agree with all your points. I'm running EFM-cvs and it is really cool right now. My point is not that it is the most user friendly. Nor do I think Rasterman is trying to dominate the desktop space. My point is that for the sake of credibility in innovation, E is the only one which fits. The others are trying to act like windows; where E is trying to act like something new.
My other point is that if some smart programmers would use the example of the manner in which E behaves and apply it to other apps, like PDF/Postscript viewers and other common applications and tools, there would be a Linux environment that would even make the OS X people jealous from both a form and function perspective.
My final point (none of my points are clearly stated except for now), is that Linux has a very narrow window of opportunity in which to make a cultural impact like Windows and Mac has. E and EFM could be it. I encourage everyone to give E and EFM as much attention as Mozilla and other popular projects. In terms of achieving critical acclaim for good form and function (i.e., what more apple-like users expect), E will be it. GNOME and KDE will be what the Windows-like users crave, that and office-suites.
Office suites are so goddamn boring for chrissakes. Damn who cares! I work in an office and use them all the friggin time. I don't happy about them. If you work in an office you already use one, and if you use linux, you already bought one, or downloaded one. Sure KOffice will be cool as far as office-suites can become cool. But for the 'ooh-ahh' effect; Give Rasterman a hand!
I just woke up to something very fascinating. It only works well on Linux (I'm a huge FreeBSD nut by the way), and it's arguably the most innovative thing going in computer interfaces at this moment. It's not ready yet, but when it is; people are gonna say "goddamn!"
It's Enlightenment and EFM. It's a very different experience using computers. And it's the most innovative thing going. I'm not exaggerating this enough.
First, Enlightenment itself is very unusual, but it's useful. The snaps of virtual desktops, and running apps minimized in the icon box are very much the kinds of innovations that are going on in the new MacOS.
Second, EFM changes the way we work with our computers. Just begin typing stuff like "http://www.yahoo.com" and watch your characters appear antialiased in the middle of your screen and EFM reads the MIME type and starts Netscape pointing to that URL. Type 'su' pops up Eterm with a prompt for your passwd.
Third, icons in EFM can be snaps of the documents contained in folders. Thumbs of your pr0n, and potentially of your other documents will be there. Judging by the way the system works now, one would mouse over the document to see the full snap, like in an embedded PDF viewer. I'm embellishing here, but the example is given by installing the ee2 app that gives thumbs of pics in an EFM window. Imagine documents and objects with contents fully visible at all times, by mousing over, or [alt][tab]ing over. Opening them in edit mode would be a mere click, or just start typing in it. Add voice and maybe a touchscreen or a stylus, and all my peoples say 'Whoa!'
I'm a mere enthusiast, and am not a programmer. But mark my words. The Enlightenment team is doing the only thing truly original, useful, and exciting that's going on in the Linux/BSD world. GNOME and KDE are like training wheels for Windows and Mac people. Face it folks, the Office suite that most works like Office, is as boring as an office. MacOS X maybe become the ideal, but Enlightenment is very soon going to be the ideal environment for experienced computer fans who want it to look cool, act cool and prove itself to be the most innovative. This is not innovation for the sake of coolness, either. This is a truly 'object oriented' (in the common sense meanings of the words) approach to programming. This is not symbolic iconic representations, this is viewing and working with the documents and objects as they really appear!
Heed. Experienced smart programmers should start chipping in their time and effort to get Enlightenment and EFM off the ground as fast as humanly possible. Big money companies should be using E as a basis to surpass everything else out there and make Linux/BSD the real 'Gold Standard.' I know they already have a team of Enlightened programmers. But if these guys could get their system, with some added utils to do the kinds of things that I just described, i.e, embedded PDF/Postscript viewer, advanced document formatting and PDF publishing; embedded video/audio players, and web publishing tools, etc., the world of Linux would be a new and amazing penguin paradise. We need apps that act like what Enlightenment does.
Separate the view of the document from the document editor. Embedded viewers, autosensing editors that pop up when we start editing, exports from every conceivable format to every conceivable format, gnutella/napster file sharing in a private environment....
Combine that with the internals already in Linux/BSD, Apache-webdav, and we will have a world where we do the ideal with computers. We will be creating and sharing content with each in the way we already know, by passing around documents and objects, the computer/server being our surrogate self.
The current problem is that people don't know what to do with Linux. Once we all understand that we all want to be creating and sharing content and nothing else, we will realise that the pc/server must run something like UNIX (Apple knows this); and it must make calling up and creating documents as easy as pointing and saying 'that,' and sharing as easy as saying 'here.' To make it that easy requires a lot of work on computer internals in terms of speed, stability and clarity of graphical representations. E is doing it; it needs the other tools that work like E does.
The whole concept of full document views at all times is where it's at. Yeah it will take a powerful computer; this is the future were talking folks. XFce or Blackbox are cool for your P100; what are you going to do with that 2Ghz box with 2G of RAM, and 128M of Video RAM? You're gonna do E!
I have two words for knee-jerks that desparage OS X: try it. I didn't like OS X dp4 for a number of reasons (largely the same as those brought up by Ars Technica.) I do, however, love OS X pb because it works brilliantly. I haven't had so much fun on my Mac since the day (way back in the 80's) when I discovered resEdit.
Most FUD-offenders that take aim against OS X probably don't know how to use Macs to begin with. Their fundamental mistake is assuming that because the MacOS is a consumer-oriented OS, that it should make itself obvious to them. If you came over to my house talking all this crap about OS X, i'd just sit you down and run you through the following tests: (1) i'd put a cd in my PBG3 and i'd tell you to boot off it, (ii) then i'd make you eject an external zip disk without using the mouse, and then (iii) i'd fire up my OS X partitition and ask you to launch the non-Aqua Darwin. If you passed my rather easy test, then you could bitch and moan about misplaced widgets and candy-colored immaturity. If not, then you could STFU and die.
Those of us that use Macs seriously know every tweak, every key combo, every workaround, every jerry-rig that's never been documented -- just like Linux geeks. We're psyched to get a chance to upgrade our OS. I don't see OS X as late -- I see it as better than it would have been in 1994. I'm not the kind of loser that depends on promises from marketing people like Steve Jobs. I just work on my f'ing machines and I work with whatever comes along. The FUD-police are always trying to persecute Macs, but those of use who use them know the real story.
Reality check! You think you'll ever see a corporation filled with Macs? Of the 80 applications key to my companies engineering group, 1 (ms office) will run on the Mac. Heck, we'd stand a better chance getting this stuff running on DOSEMU/Wine than the Mac.
I agree with Taco in that this is more like Phantom Menace.
The interface, to some, is revolutionary. Bah. I think it needs a bit more time to set in and more apps to exxagerate its nooks and cranies. But then again I use linux and I happen to like my own personal take on things. Which is, of course, more suited to multiple desktops and large numbers of xterms than it is a single desktop with IE, a file manager, Word, Quicken, etc. But to apple's credit the visual effects are stunning. (Why those people who think it revolutionary, do so is beyond me. Perhaps the laws of relativity could play some role. coughcoughstuckinmacosfortoolongcoughcough)
What would have been revolutionary was if Apple introduced an OS based on the concept of little modular userland tools instead of the Big Bloated Monster-like things that have been the standard since (probably) the first Mac.
That, my friends, is what putting MacOS (Apple's UI team) on top of UNIX means to me.
I'm with you buddy. Whats limiting modern interfaces today is not the way it is conveyed on the screen, but the input methods that are slowing us down. You can operate a mouse with one finger. Doesn't that seem like a damn waste. Why aren't we looking into virtual input methods, tracking of all the finger tips in a 3 dimensional space. The use of a little monochrome lcd display to use as virtual keyboard, slide controls, buttons, whatever. The possibilities are endless we are kicking ourselves in the ass by sticking with these old archaic input methods.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
tracking of all the finger tips in a 3 dimensional space
Ahh... There you go.
As I mentioned earlier, I think the next step lies in, for lack of a better term, gestural input. I'm probably demonstrating my ignorance on the subject, so if anybody has a better label, please let me know.
Browser? I barely know her!
Paul is DEAD == Jobs is DEAD????
just a question...
... before you make any comments. A quick skim of these comments shows that about 50% of the people ranting here haven't actually used the public beta at all. Many of the things they say are just plain wrong. I suggest they try it before venting.
Windows is shit.
OS X is suppose to be pronounced 'Oh Es Ten', but it sounds so much better when it is pronounced 'Ohhh Sex'.
Sure, it's got a new skin, but the interface hasn't changed since 1984.
.
We're still bound to the mouse & keyboard. We still point & click. There are no new ways for the user to interact with the software.
The cultural revolution to which the article alludes will occur when we are presented with a new method with which the user and the software meet and act upon or communicate with each other
Browser? I barely know her!
the keyboard sucks and nobody can argue with that - as does any one button mouse regardles of its shape
Well, looks like they finally heard your complaints about one-button mice...
and decided to remove that offending button on the new mice!
I just love marketing ideas...
Join KWSN - The coolest SETI team!
Ni!
Rumours are that it will have some fairly adult content (well a bit anyway (X))...
Vote devolution! http://www.devolution.co.uk
that's not to say hype doesn't help. welcome to the real world of irrational people. you are one of them, despite your seeming hope otherwise.
The guy that does the pirate broadcasts obviously uses Macs, he has a 22" LCD cinema display on his desk...
yes you see them fairly often with the logo obscured or removed, but actually if you go look at movies, most of the time the brand of computer is shown, because they can get some computer company (usually apple) to pay for the placement.
you fucking mac zealots are all alike: stupid.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
ha haa haa - I was just talking with one of my friends about that. they alway have to be different - I can just see them "well, let's see... two buttons... done... three? done. hmmm, how about none?"- ---------
although technically it is still a one button, just the whole thing is now that button.
----------------------------------------
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Yup, Mac OS X is just like Sgt. Pepper's...
...except that nobody was saying that St. Pepper's would become a "touchstone" six months before it came out (probably because an unfinished pre-release wasn't sold for $30 then).
Life,
Rademir
ourpla.net is your planet
A good example of doublethink, my friend.
Did I miss something here, or does this guy think Apple developed unix? Great, pretty new colors and shapes for the user, but a GUI does not an operating system make.
Kindof funny how all the posts on here are reminiscent of the old "Mac vs. PC" debate..
Let us not forget that OSX is, on the back-end, BSD. It comes with Apache. It comes with SSH. If you don't like the jolly candy-like interface, (and I most certainly didn't) you can open up a terminal window running tcsh and get some real work done. Or if you *really* hate it, you can drop down to X and run whatever you like..
I am by no means a Mac fan, but they would've had to fuck up pretty badly for me to not at least respect this effort. As it turns out, after seeing the Beta, they finally made an OS worth using, and more importantly, one that showed those win32 OS'es their ass.. I actually like it. My next computer may just be a Mac after all..
you stupid shithead, you haven't got a fucking clue what you are talking about.
:) and no matter what you would like to believe, the way I presented it above is the the way that things go on set more often than not. The director wants something, it's the PA's job to get that thing. What label is on it is utterly irrelevant next to getting the fucking shot in the can so everybody can go home.
ANY TIME YOU CAN READ THE LABEL OF A PRODUCT IN A MOVIE OR TELEVISION SHOW, MONEY WAS PAID FOR THE PRODUCT'S APPEARANCE.
*heh*
Sorry to burst your bubble, but my girlfriend IS a PA (Just got promoted to PA2, actually
Hang out on a set sometime when you're three hours over and everybody's hungry and tired. Nobody cares whether a label is showing or not. Nobody NOTICES whether a label is showing or not.
I won't stoop to your level of labelling other people 'stupid', but I will observe that you are most demonstratedly ignorant whereof you speak...
Of course, if people (other than you) considered it crap, they wouldn't have paid for it. Also, demanding $ for crap general doesn't result in sales. If it did, getting rich would be rather trivial.
Forget electronic devices of all kinds. I saw a translucent _office chair_ in this week's Office Depot flyer. Available in five fruit colours. (I don't remember which ones though)
Intolerant people should be shot.
You don't know anything about beatles, that you already proved. But don't try to start talking about communism...
as I said before, if you don't have anything good to say shut up.
I have no sig and I want to scream
> Running Linux might make you a geek but it doesn't make you smart...
;)
where do you think the collective Slashdot ego came from
***Newsflash***. Everyone but geeks already thinks it is.
some of it takes some trickery, etc. but my point was it can ALL be reproduced live.
the guy is an ignorant fuck and i couldn't just let him make an idiotic statement like that and get away with it
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
'nuff said.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
And I forgot about it already !!!!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Someone wondered why this was looking like the second coming and what all the
Two big things are happening:
The best UI is being added to a unix base system.
The best system software (unix) is getting the Macintosh interface.
Sure, it's the "You got your penut butter in my chocolate... you got your chocolate in my penut butter" kinda thing, but it gets both sides excited because it's exactly what both sides have so badly needed.
So, music that you can't reproduce on stage is "crap"?
What a lame yardstick. By that standard, an OS that you couldn't type up in ten minutes must be crap as well.
Did you see how long it took to paint that Cistine Chapel? It totally ruined the street-painter's live performance.
Some things take time.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
"Yeah, but it's just a stupid Mac!"
o/~ Join us now and share the software
It is important to note that despite it's growth, the segment of society that waxes so poetic over the release of an operating system is still quite small. Being on Slashdot (or the web in general) all day seems to give one the impression that geeks are the world. The truth is that an event such as the release if OS X will not even scratch the surface of greater social consciousness in the US and around the world. Music, such as that on Sgt. Pepper's, is something that touches everyone, it speaks to their soul. Operating systems are a tool. Therefore they will only inspire the craftsmen that use/design them. Everyone has an appreciation for music, regardless of their profession, but I sincerely doubt that in the future large segments of society will be deeply moved by operating system releases. I hope that folks start seeking meaning for their life in places other than computers. Don't put the machines in a place they don't belong. I'm going to close my browser and listen to some music now...hmmm...let's see, how about Sgt. Peppers?!
Given the lukewarm review on ArsTechnica, it just seems that OS X is a frankenstein monster that gained some technical features that the unix crowd have been using for decades while whimsically throwing out a few decades of ui design wisdom that Mac users, and WIMP users in general have become accustomed to. OS X is hardly a Sgt. Pepper (I was around then, but that article does seem a lot like a graphics nut getting gushing over something new and pretty), and it remains to be seen if it will live up to its hype. Personally I hope Apple fixes the problems outlined in the ArsTechnica article. Otherwise it will be just an attention-grabber, but not much to swoon over.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Windows has been the dominant OS and GUI during the last 5 years, where more people have gotten involved in computing than have used them previously. The sub $1000 system almost universally has Windows on it, and thus it defines how computing is supposed to work for a lot of people.
OS X may be cool, and innovative, but Apple's 5% market share means that it won't be a Touchstone. The Beatle's weren't some little secret band that only a handful of people had heard about, that was recommended by word of mouth. "Sgt Pepper's" was mass-market domination, when every damn tune on the album would end up being a single.
So, like it or not, the Touchstone is here, and has already happened. And no matter how much Steve doesn't like it, nothing can change the fact that it is Bill and not him.
--sugarman--
I reckon Apple has postioned the Mac to survive well into the future. With servers to be commodity based Linux, doesnt the unix layer make them integrate better? The desktop will be Mac, the server linux in the future. M$ out of the picture.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Something that I try to keep in mind whenever thinking about Apples supposedly cutting edge design and artistic approach to computing, GE designed the look of the cube, iMac and possibly even the G4. It seems that Apple is as it always was, really good at taking credit for other people's work.
a) it's not 'this generations' sgt. pepper, it would be 'technology's sgt. pepper' because 'this generation's sgt. pepper' would be some cd or another (and that would be a debate not suited to
b) i would say it's 'technology's 'hangin' tough''.. (new kids on the block)...
a 'cultural phenominon' is not necessarily a good thing.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
I'm not a Mac fan, but In apple's defense, I think it's very important for apple to ask vendors to be uniform in hardware and software. The reason is, it's DAMN EASY to write/configure software if you know exactly what hardware you are dealing with. After all, Apple is for people who don't wanna get a clue about thier graphics chipset.
What happened to Apple, The Terrible Website-Shutter-Downer. Now, Slashdot worships them. Why? I don't know. They aren't Microsoft? Go non-Microsoft product! Go!
---
GetSystemMetrics(SM_SECURE) == FALSE
This is also the first Operating system released by an established company that has a large market share (yes, yes, I use Linux as well as Mac and Windows and I am aware of it's market share, etc. etc.) that can be picked up by someone who has just bought a computer and someone who is a high end system op who wants to pull up a bash prompt and go nuts.
My personal joy of playing with DP3 was that a Developer Preview was more stable than a final release of OS 9. Of course, legacy OS code of 17 years doesn't add to stability.
I'm just glad I've got my BSD back end
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
Thank you ebbv! Your implicit confirmation of my thesis makes my day, however sad that is..
Does this mean the coders were on LSD while making it?
I'm one of those weird people who consider a fancy interface with no engine nothing more than eye-candy. Although Mac-OS X is a decent under the hood, I can't help but fear that developers will now target their products towards monkeys who like shinny objects.
The iMac
Sure you're stuck with a small monitor, limited expandability, and it only benchmarks well on benchmarks specifically designed for it, but just see how pretty it is!
The Cube
Sure it's overpriced and has cracks in it, and doesn't live up to the "supercomputer" label we gave it, but just see how pretty it is!
OS X
blah blah blah slow, blah blah blah stable, but just see how pretty it is!
When a company's advertising compaign is totally focused on the fact that their products are wrapped in pretty packages, I find it hard to take them seriously. And despite the fact that Apple has always praised their interface as the simplest to use, I've always found it awkward, difficult to use, and not intuitive.
Apple had a solid market niche back in the 80's with machines that were ahead of their time. Maybe Steve Jobs will wake up someday and realize it's not 1985 anymore.
Gotta do this, gotta do that, conform to this standard, use that API, blah blah blah.
And this is bad? The very fact that API's were actually standardized is why the Mac hardware works so well. The standards Apple set has allowed Apple to avoid the major headaches of Wintel-based hardware, while still allowing for a great deal of third-party freedom.
Compare that to the idea of using a Free/Open operating system as a base and you've got a (potential) radical change.
And not for the better. This is why there's no Plug and Play on the Wintel platform; because the various companies never got around to standardizing even the simplest of hardware operations (well, except maybe the BIOS and processor instruction set, and even the instruction set isn't fully standardized anymore with MMX and KNI and 3DNow! and God only knows how many others), you're trapped in Driver Hell, without which nothing works. Contrast this with Mac hardware, where you can get at least basic functionality out of almost any device without the drivers (printers notwithstanding, but that's for another rant), but you can get drivers for the more extended stuff.
Getting at the guts of the OS is a Good Thing, and you can do this with OSX. But it's not worth sacrificing the functionality that comes with interoperable standards, such as the ones Apple set up (before you go into a rant, I mean interoperable across peripherals; they're certainly not interoperable across platforms but this is not Apple's fault). Otherwise, you get the mess that is the Wintel platform, where installing most new hardware puts you into Setup Hell for hours as you work to get everything harmonious again. It's all about balance; nothing is good when taken to extremes. Even freedom, when taken to extremes, degenerates into anarchy, which is what we see on the Wintel platform and is a large part of why it doesn't work as well.
By the way, these standards do exist in Linux too, but the only ones that ever get followed are low-level ones (such as, say, glibc's and X's own API's, and to a lesser extent video4linux). This is unfortunate; even a set of human interface standards that actually got followed by everyone would help Linux's acceptance in the workplace. I love Linux too (use it quite often, actually), but it really needs work in this area. Not "standard implementations," just standard API's.
----------
Apple's insistance on developers following their guidelines is exactly why the MacOS is regarded by so many as the most user friendly system for _new users_. One of Apple's recent failings is that they themselves have strayed from some of these key guidelines in products like QT and it has made the Mac more complicated. By the way don't bother with the obligitory comments on *nix/command line useability. The *nix command line may be far more powerful than MacOS but it takes a long time to learn how to put that power to use. All that power is wasted on new users.
yes and the Might Might Bosstones sound even better live than they do off their cds - what's your point? you can't universally recreate the sound - Rush can kick ass playing their own music - but if they want to recreate Sgt Pepper's or Achillies Last stand, they will suck ass with the rest of the people that try. :)- ----
and what does this have to do again with Macs... other than they suck and so does this thread?
---------------------------------------------
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
While Apple has certainly made their mistakes in computer case design, I'd wager that their introduction of machines like the Blue and White G3, the iMac, the iBook, the new Cube, and their Studio Displays have strongly influenced the direction that computer case and peripheral design will take in the future. In the early years, automobiles were basically a functional carriage on a chassis with a motor instead of a horse. By the 1930s, auto makers began to add styling and color to their products. The end result is that now automobiles are often sold on the basis of their styling in addition to other more pragmatic factors such as the technology underneath the vehicle and reliability over time, etc. I'm sure few people would argue now that we should approach automotive design from a purely functional standpoint. However, function is still an important issue in the development of automobiles.
Computers, IMHO, will more than likely begin to proceed in the same direction. I look at the proliferation of colors and translucent plastic as the equivalent of the introduction of different color paint jobs and aerodynamic styling in the automotive world. Just because radical styling has been introduced into the world of computer design doesn't mean that reliability and functionality are going to go away. Any computer manufacturer that ignores these and focuses on styling will quickly find themselves in the same position as American auto manufacturers did in the 80s, when other companies that are willing to build reliable, functional computers at competitive prices start popping up.
----
"A fool does not delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own mind."
How on earth is a product going to generate it's own attention without any sort of marketing? Say I've made the best computer in the world, it's available for sale if you ring me up, but I haven't advertised anywhere, I've done no press-releases, how are you going to hear about it?
Just interested.
I live near Apple HQ, and I'm sick and tired of the Apple cultists. They're as bad as any other religous cult.
--- Speaking only for myself,
I'll agree that the article does some unnecessary capering and twirling at the feet of OS X.
/.ers seems to be, "If it's Apple, it must be bad." And for THIS attitude, posters get moderated up.
/. will ridicule them again, etc.) UIs will get fancier for a while until someone gets the idea to strip off all the eye-candy and create something totally utilitarian as a fashion statement.
Steven Johnson is essentially drooling over eye candy. He mentions the guts a few times, but otherwise he reviews the UI in such excruciating detail that he might as well be critiquing the curtains hanging on the window near his desk.
His attitude in the article seems to be, "If it looks nifty, it must be good." And for this attitude, the link gets posted here.
However, the attitude of most
Wake up and smell that gunk in your keyboards, people! What he's talking about is the front-end of the operating system! It does none of the work of the actual operating system, it just provides you with a way to communicate with it. And under OS X, it's not even the only way to do so.
All the OS's UI is supposed to do is give you access to those things you need to adjust, hide those things you don't need to know about, and let you know in a timely fashion what's going on. Even with argument on philosophical points (what things in the environment should and shouldn't be tweaked, how buttons and icons should react when rolled over, etc.), that's what it tries to do. If you don't like it, there are tools available -- change it!
As for the core, remember, it's running that BSD-compatible Mach kernel. Given all the complaints of Mac OSses is fawning new-age drek?
(You don't suppose just seeing the word 'APPLE' in the briefing has anything to do with it?)
But anyway, getting back to the task at hand...
Cultural revolution? Not immediately, anyway. Hobbyists who aren't predisposed against it enough not to try it may be amused by it, but those people working on computers in offices daily won't be fazed; they'll just keep working on whatever they're handed. Those people whose systems this changes will notice that the horse has a new face, but all that matters is what goes on under the hood. (And that won't be many since most of them are running some flavor of Windows anyway.)
Some people will look at this, be utterly tickled by its artistry, and copy elements of the design on top of whatever front end they'll be using. (Apple will sue them if they get too close,
The UI is the fashion through which the function of the guts underneath is filtered. It serves an important role in that context, but it is still fashion, and comes and goes at whim.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
I appreciate good design (heck, I own a NeXTstation) but some of the arguments made here about how Apple makes UNIX pretty are really pointless. On the other hand, where design really should count, Apple has done a poor job at the UI design of OS X-it appears few, if any human factors issues were considered in trade for an interface "one would want to lick".
Technically, OS X is a big achievement: They managed to migrate an application base to a new platform, while doing it better than other UNIX vendors. Culturally though, this is equivalent to release of a new Backstreet Boys album.
Calum
Computer should be getting smaller in the future and in the end merge with other household appliances. A cool design would be to have a desk with a computer hidden somewhere in it but still easily accessible for repairs/upgrades etc. and a couple of, say, Firewire connections here and there to hook up things. I don't want no flashy, space-eating cubes on my desk, I want the desk to be the cool cube.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Oh no, sorry, the steam irons were transparent and blue BEFORE the imac.
http://www.nilex.co.uk/~nick/fi les /imac-iron.jpg
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
Plenty of people have developed apps for DOS, Windows, BeOS, and the Mac OS without needing to "get at the guts of the OS"... Otherwise, why would their be so many more DOS/Windows apps than just about any other platform out there?
And past that, if you don't want to conform to Apple's standards, frankly, Apple and most Mac users don't really need you then. The entire reason that the mac is the mac is that all of the programs function in similar manners, where applicable. Take that away, and you have Windows or yet another Unix....