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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?).
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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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
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.
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.
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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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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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."