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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?).
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...)
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.
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.
Uh, don't most PC's go "beep" on startup? In fact, I've yet to meet one that didn't (well, I've met several that haven't but they had dead components). Of course, someone is probably going to tell me how to turn those off? :) (No points for the "disconnect the speaker answer") I don't see how the PC beep is better than the Mac chime.
I suppose on the PC the sound off the sound card is different than the sound off the mobo so you can seperate the two.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
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
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> 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!
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
And precisely what reason would they have to do that? Microsoft Office for the Mac is one of their most profitable lines of software. They make a killing on it. No question.
That's weak. Really weak. For something as simple as a startup sound, the user really should be able to set a preference if they don't want it. This is just another example of the arrogance of the MacOS team and shows the same general disregard for customers that was APPL's trademark until they came out with candy colored computers.
Arrogance? Not quite. It's part of the Mac OS, you turn it on, it creates a tone to say "yes, my hardware is at least partially functional". I'd be more worried if my computer didn't even acknowledge my presence when I turned it on (kinda like a woman...er...wait...) Apple didn't have a general disregard for customers, I know, I've been one since 1984.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
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.
It's a very pretty interface, though.
:)
And even if most of us don't have Macs, we can still simulate it with a combination of Stardock's products.
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.
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
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
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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The answer is yes.
There's this big myth that Apple went to tour PARC, not knowing what they'd see. But this is total bullshit.
The big man AFAIK who started the GUI push at Apple was Jef Raskin. His PhD thesis in the sixties was on GUIs. Some of the stuff they did at PARC was based on his work, and he had interacted with them during the 70s once they opened up.
When he joined up with Apple in 78, he ended up in charge of a low end product that was basically a console. (well, Woz invented Breakout in spite of Steve Jobs, and a lot of the Apple II was designed so that he could play Breakout on that, so it's not too far-fetched) But he gets the project changed to be a radically new machine, which he codenames Macintosh. (meanwhile the Apple II+ just came out, and work is being done on the III and the Lisa, which hasn't got a GUI planned yet) He wants it to be a $500 machine.
His proposals involving GUIs are not well recieved by Jobs or the Woz (the former I suspect because he's an asshole of royal proportions, but I don't like him anyway. I'm more charitable to the Woz, he's probably just more familiar with character mode)
However, the Lisa group is more receptive, and the Lisa is regeared to use a GUI. Raskin steals a couple of guys from other projects as well, since they're good programmers and see the light, as it were.
Finally, in an attempt to avoid interference from Jobs, they haul him, and a couple of other people to PARC, to show him an example of a working GUI system, laser printer, ethernet, smalltalk, etc.
There are two visits to PARC, paid for with a transfer of pre IPO stock to Xerox, and a number of people are hired from PARC for the Lisa and Macintosh projects.
Jobs goes on to oust Raskin, take over the Macintosh project, the III and the Lisa bomb, and the Mac still ends up overpriced and underpowered, but you know the rest.
What's important is that EVERYONE at Apple who was working on this stuff was already extremely familiar with PARC. The entire point of the exercise was to sell the idea to the executives. PARC employees were in fact very suspicious, because the Apple guys were generally not at all surprised and were asking _exactly_ the right kinds of questions to get as much information as possible.
Unfortunately, Jobs seems to have been too impressed with the Alto's UI (which was missing a lot of stuff that the Mac ended up with - overlapping windows was a big one; so was icons as nouns instead of verbs) to notice the other really important stuff.
But the entire thing was a sham from beginning to end. Apple didn't have to steal any ideas during the PARC tours. Just present the illusion that they were to the boss.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I 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.
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
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.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
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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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'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
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.
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.
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
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.
I've got just the one...
I think the point he was trying to make is that Alessi stuff is always pretty much on the cutting edge of design.
And you have to admit, Apple is too. Regardles sof what you may think about Apple's decisions for hardware and software, much of what they've done has gone on to make deep impressions in the way industrial and computer design has gone. Since the introduction of the iMac, I've seen more products appear that are translucent and brightly colored than I could've imagined...everything from pens to power strips to lamps.
And let's face it...would MS have come up with windows, or at least windows as we now know it, if the MacUI hadn't existed? Okay, I'm not saying that it's a *good* thing per se, but it is indicative of the influence Apple has had on pop culture and the evolution of design.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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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.
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.
The issue is not that most people do not have Macs. This issue is that OS X is taking proven technologies founf in 'NIXs and incorporating them into a mainstream and easy to use interface. Even everyone does not have OS X on their machine, the techniques used to bring it to life will be used for years to bring other great technologies (see Linux) into more houses and to make people see that Windows really is antiquated.
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.
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.
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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!
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...
...but will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64-bit?
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.
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--
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.
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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.
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"A fool does not delight in understanding, but only in revealing his own mind."
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.
Do you know what a paradigm is??
The price of a pack of wrigley's spearmint, minus about 5 cents.
And how many of those shares include votes? Nary a one.
A solution for your power issue: plug an empty headphone connector into your headphone jack: No sound on startup.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.