Slashdot Mirror
Users Hack Aqua to Make It More Usable
edibleplastic writes: "Wired is running an article about how many beta testers of Aqua are hacking the software in order to return it somewhat to its previous appearance. From the article: '"The most distressing part is feeling like a complete novice again." McIntyre said. "I've been using and programming Macs for ten years, and now I'm sitting in front of it going 'What? Huh? How do I launch an application? Where did my icons go?' Talk about disorientation."' Among the hacks are a desktop trash bin and the OpenStrip, an Open Source version of the Control Strip."
Yeah, but without it....
How the hell are you supposed to eject your floppy disks!!!!?????
:p
(that always bugged me...)
Blech. Signatures.
I for one am worried that such tinkering with the operating system will help Apple "see the light"©©© the wrong light© I like the way the Aqua UI works ¥I was mainly a Linux/BSD/MacOS 9©x user© I loved OpenSTEP© I like photorealistic icons©©© I like graphical eye-candy, and the fact that I can still use the CLI© There has been so much work done on making things look really polished, that I say shame on those who want to ¥and probably will force Apple to re-cartoonify the MacOS© Why is it that people have to be so selfish as to believe that the OS or any technology should adapt to the way "they" do work ¥notice how many theys exist out there and how different each and every one is©©© get over it people©©©adapt yourselves to your surroundings and you survive© It took me all of 2 minutes to adapt to the new UI©©© all of 2 minutes to adapt to the round mouse©©©¥I wouldn't give it up now
So what you're saying is that you can create perfect operating systems by copying other's ideas, and improve existing operating systems by copying other's ideas. And what's up with Netscape? When will this work like The Open Source Community says it does?
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
http://www.kaleidoscope.net/ *sigh* It seems strange to me that when /. readers hear something positive about Linux, they're full of joy and self-congratulations. Yet, when there's the slightest hint of critisism, they sulk and ball - because it cant posibly be true! Afterall, how can Linux be flawed?!?!
Over the last couple of days, I've read a LOT of comments about how X needs AA etc - Mac's have had this for years. Face it - OSX is what people want Linux to be (as far as desktop usage is concerned) so give it, and it's users, some frigging credit!
OSX is what Linux could be if people would open their eyes to the truth. We need to get rid of X, and bad elitist attitudes!
i wish i was but oh well
Puh-leeze.
I can see the fnords!
They were generally under typical use... Your point about GUIs being designed for the lowest common denominator is valid, but what about those who aren't the lowest common denomninator? Should we have to suffer with an interface that just doesn't work in a way we're comfortable with? Having the defaults target "the typical person" is fine, but if you don't provide options for more advanced users, you'll just wind up frustrating people.
-RickHunter
It's easy for Mac people to know where to turn it off at, but I remember trying to get the thing to go away as well when I first used a Mac. I still have problems figuring out what extensions I need, etc. just because the Mac paradigms are so different than other OSes.
I can understand why people who only use Macs feel like they are in an alien environment when they use Windows.
It may not be a joke, but you will have to back your statement up if you want anyone to believe you. Furthermore, it would be interesting to see how long people had to work in the environments being tested. I know that when I first start working with a program, I get things done quicker using the mouse, but once I've been using it for a while, keyboard shortcuts are much faster.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Okay... so there goes that argument about Mac users being stupid newbies...
We power users have it set to toggle visibility on an f-key...
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Check out his OsX reviews on Ars for the Gospel. Anyway, what's your problem with that quote?
Let's not forget to add:
No computer viruses, unless you count M$ macros.
The ability to change quickly- a one-generational transition to bring in USB, another for Firewire... both of which work great, neither of which is still globally supported on Wintel or Lintel.
Painless upgrades and driver installation.
True application portability (install on one machine, grab the parts and move them to another... no recompile, no registry)
It may be a small town, but a lot of us HAVE been to the "City"... which is why so very many Mac fans are willing to shoot you ignorant jerks on sight.
I grew up in the sticks. I took BASIC on a 386 network in 1996. The smalltown analogy does NOT apply. If anything, the so-called "Mac World" would be a wealthy suburb of a major city- the kind with a hardcore neighborhood watch.
And once you're there, memorize the toggle hotkey: Cmd-Shift-S.
I can see the fnords!
"OSX is the best!" vs. "Get rid of elitist attitudes!"
I would agree with you, but you're a hypocrite, so I'm going to find someone else with similar opinions to agree with.
This brings me to the MacOS/Aqua/Win9x and customisation discussion. Should the work that is being discussed here be considered customisation (such as those cars with the modified headers, nitrous, and bored-out engines sans chassis modification) or improvements to the design as a whole (a systematic investigation and group of improvements into the aspects of a designed system)?
Many people have mentioned that the customisability of UNIX is one of the reasons that it is a bit frightening to novices. Now that the customisation is available at the UI level, should we worry that the UI may become another space that is frightening to users? I realize that novices would be hard pressed to compile some of the early code releases that we are seeing, but there will come a day when the installation is easy enough. And at that point, does most of the original design work of the original engineers go out the window?
iCab is small, fast. and standards compliant.
At least we're bright enough to understand the concept of more than one mouse button.
followed by:
I hate OS zealots; Linux, BSD, or Macintosh
Internal consistency error detected... post halted!
I am more interested in how you do your 3d modeling in text mode. I mean, sure the model can be described using text but how do you actually view it? Some sort of ASCII art system or is actually rendering your models not of interest to you?
Macs are good for plenty of things.
d .html
Here's one of the more interesting of them:
http://exodus.physics.ucla.edu/appleseed/applesee
- If you can't make use of a computer, it's due to your own lack of competency.
You can tell a college man, but you can't tell him much.
It is, but I've already posted in this thread. Besides, I don't moderate anymore as /. has idiots for metamoderators nowadays.
I resemble that remark! :-| You would've complained too if, aside from the occasional OS tweak, you were told (maybe in slightly more polite terms) to FOAD. Apple today seems to revel in making as much of its legacy equipment obsolete as possible. First it was Apple IIs. After that, 68K Macs. After that, people with tons of ADB and/or SCSI peripherals that wouldn't hook into the new Macs like they would hook into the old ones. There's no reason for that to have happened (especially the last bit about ADB and SCSI devices), other than that Steve Jobs seems to not be happy unless he can piss off as many people as possible. He's little more than a marketdroid. Woz was the genius who designed the machines that put Apple on the map. Jobs nearly destroyed the company before he was booted out. As for his current success...maybe he got lucky.
(Yes, I have a handful of Apple IIs (a "stealth IIGS," a IIe, and a II+. Lest you think I'm an inveterate Mac-basher, I snagged an old Quadra 610 recently, mainly for fooling around. They're supposed to make good Apple II peripherals. :-) It's also a different platform on which to play with Linux, though I might keep MacOS on it as well. With the changes Jobs likes to make seemingly at whim, I don't know if I'd want to fork over money for a current-model Mac, not knowing if whatever $$$ was sunk into add-ons for it would end up wasted in a couple years' time. At least x86 clones don't leave you beholden to one vendor, and you know going in that Apple's older stuff isn't in flux.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Exactly my point - critism, and how it can't posibly be true! I wasn't saying OSX is the best, I was saying it's better. /. readers (obviously jealous) find this hard to accept, and dont like it. I wonder, if Linux was the OS with high quality anti-aliasing and alpha blending, and it was OSX with XFree, would people switch to Macs? No! Because X is crap, and you know it.
i wish i was but oh well
Wasn't there a scene in The Wrath of Khan about why it's a Good Thing to know how/why things work? :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Hey man, I LOVED os8. I creamed in my pants at the pop-up folders and all of the other gooey goodness it had to offer. The application switcher in 8.5 was the last signifigant UI innovation, and the stability of nine is great.... But.
System 7 takes like four megs of RAM.
OS 8 takes ten....
8.5 takes 15-18 on old world systems, 25-30 on new world....
and 9 is taking up jsut under FORTY on my powerbook.
You can probably run DOS on your spankin' new AMD Athlon, can't you? Win3.1 for those of you sick enough to run it? GEOS?
I can't run anything LOWER than nine on my powerbook. It's my only option. MacOS is not forward compatable, though the applications certianly are. Nine, stripped, takes up around 100 megs... 150-225 with moderate functionality, 250-300 fully loaded and customized with a shitload of preferences and cache files counted, not to mention fonts.
I can live with that, even though I get miffed when I look at my OS 8 system folder and realize I can slap that- all of it- and Norton Utilities on a zip and boot from it.
But OSX has ONE install option- full - and eats EIGHT HUNDRED MEGS. So much for rescue disks and backups. Maybe some hacker will whack aqua and replace it with System 7, when collapable folder windows were amazingly sweet. That should lop a fw hundred megs off of the snud you need to run the damned thing.
What the hell? You sound like you have some very repressed anger, or at the very least are so terribly blinded by your own elitism that you fail to recognize that other people do things differently---and if it works perfectly well for their working style, it's a completely valid way of doing things.
Apple's Mac Products Guide should dispell that nasty, nasty myth of "there's no software for Macs"
Regarding benchmarks: Color prepress is not exactly an undemanding task on a system. Start playing around in Photoshop with 300 dpi CMYK images, multiple layers, alpha channels here and there, etc.---and let's play at 6x8 feet at resolution. You're talking some serious power for a desktop machine to be able to handle an image like that. I've personally pushed Photoshop files beyond 500MB and, on a G3 with enough RAM and SCSI-II, everything runs hunky dory.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Personally I find hotkeys, and keyboard commands more than 5 times faster than reaching for my mouse... So who cares how big your menu is, if you're mouse is a whole 9 inches from your hand...
No, he is simply applying the substitution to this one post. You cannot assume that he also means to apply it to all uses of the word ``functional.''
Now, I am not saying that I support his views.
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
...of what is arguably the best and what people like simply because they are used to it.
Keeps happening.
This paid my last vacation, it mi
Aqua is the name of the interface. People may be hacking Aqua, but they're beta testing MacOS X. You'd think that somebody who understood and knew the difference between Linux, GNU, X11, bash, etc. would be able to tell those two apart.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Keyboard shortcuts are your friend...they're even faster to get at than having to grab the mouse and point it at some part of the screen (even if that part of the screen is along the top). MacOS (at least the versions I've used, which are a bit old) doesn't provide a consistent way to open and browse menus with the keyboard. Some shortcuts are consistent across applications (Open-Apple-C to copy, for instance), but to do something as basic as shut the machine down, you need to hit the mouse (or the power switch, but that's a Bad Idea). By comparison, I can get around in Win9x/NT/2K almost entirely without a mouse. KDE comes close, though it's still too dependent on the mouse.
(The really weird thing is that GS/OS, the MacOS-derived operating system for the Apple IIGS, has more keyboard shortcuts than MacOS. It's been around for about 12 years; the last version was released maybe 7 years ago. MacOS has borrowed some things that were introduced in GS/OS (like installable filesystems), but it hasn't picked up on keyboard shortcuts.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Ah, okay. I misunderstood. Many apologies to everyone.
Hey, I resemble the remark too. Still have my ][e.
But, the pairing down of legacy stuff is a bit of a double bind, and unfair to bash. When Mac appeared, Apple (and al vendors) experimented with ways to connect peripherals (ADB, PS2, Serial, Parallel, etc.) While the clonemakers eventually settled on a standard spec, Apple kept their propietary standards. Now I am not bashing their design decisions. They were great. ADB rocks. BUT, in the effort to make the lives of HW developers easier, and promote firms to make Mac compatible equipment, Apple had to move to industry standard ports (usb, fw).
Yes, we got screwed. yes, we now need adapters that sometimes do not work.
BUT I will keep my faith. People have been telling me my Macs (I now have 3 powerbooks, 6 Macs and the ][2) have no future for 15 years. This is FUD.
We do not doubt the solvency of Gateway...why doubt that of Apple. They gross the same amount of cash a year. Though Apple Nets more!
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Have you seen InterfaceBuilder? ResEdit lets you modify an app's appearance, InterfaceBuilder lets you modify appearance and behavior. For example, you can open OmniWeb (web browser) in InterfaceBuilder, add a button to the button bar, and wire it up to the same action as the "View Source" menu item. Then when you run OmniWeb you have a brand new view source button that just works.
I am totally in favor of hacking this sucker for useability. I've tried a few of the add-ons, but I really don't like the idea of having to boot my apple menu after I boot my OS. I'm not digging tacking an extra 64 megs onto RAM useage in order to boot Photoshop.
You can make the apple menu app a startup item so it will automatically come up. (I do agree that it should be built into OS X though). And since OS X is Unix, memory management is vastly better than OS 8/9...the manual memory allocation is probably the least defensible part of the classic Mac OS.
Between the Cubes and MacOSX, it looks like NeXT shall rise again... rather the present Mac user base likes it or not. Mac OS X is definitely not NeXT. There are some NeXT concepts, but a lot of the cooler features were removed (like tear-off menus and a "real" dock).
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Well, you got the first part right and the second part totally wrong!
DTP was around *many, many* years before the PPC chips came out. Explain that.
DTP came about specifically because of the Macintosh: there was true WYSIWYG thanks to PostScript printers and apps like Quark and PageMaker. That was before the 68030!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Because of Apple's stranglehold over the Mac look and Feel before OS X, this kind of customization wouldn't have been possible. Remember how all the Mac users used to gush over Apple's consistant "look and feel?" Now they'll be gushing over "how insanely customizable" their Macs are! Mac users, in general, are quick to spout the party line of Apple and the Mac press. Oh well! I'll be running OS X on my laptop soon.
OKay, since that's cleared up... I guess it was just in the beginning of multimonitor support that Windows needed two of the same type card, both PCI versions, even though AGP was out, correct? They've fixed that then...
Now, my next question, which is based on something i witnessed once in my life. When you maximize a window on a Windows machine with two displays, does it still spread itself across both of the displays? Or does it behave more mac like and just maximize it across the diplay where it's currently located?
I stand corrected on the adding of aliases. Mispoke about Mac before apple menu. Mac OS 1 has it...but not configureable. Configuration came in 4. adding aliases in 7. hierarchical spring loaded folders in 8.
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
No way of knowing what would happen, of course. Apple Computer is the single most unpredictable force on earth.
No. You're confusing Apple with a tornado.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
You can shut down/sleep/restart Macs by hitting the power key on teh keyboard. This brings up a dialogue in which these options appear. You can then hit [Return] for shut down (since it's the default choice), [S] sleep, or [R] restart.
I'm a bomb regardless
...to make it more profitable, they'd really have something going!
I actually think Apple having a non-profitable quarter (first in ~11 quarters, BTW), is good thing for consumers. It will force them to drop the complacence act. This is a company that always provides better output as the underdog.
In the conference call, Jobs opening admitted that Apple botched a lot of things, which was refreshing to hear. Step one is realizing you have a problem...
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
It also works in the "Classic" MacOS. Just create a file titled "hosts" and place it in your System Folder. Then go to the TCPIP control panel and point it to your host file. Works great!!
Willy
One of the frustrating things about the article, and about the Aqua controversy in general, is that the Nextstep/Openstep users were ignored. [...] IMO, users would have been better off if Apple had adopted Workspace.app, and junked the aging MacOS interface
Consider the ratio of Mac users to NeXT users.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
check here (for KDE). I am yet to find evidence of this functionality in GNOME, but some user said it might be coming soon, which would be good as long as it's customizable. I think that users should have as many options as possible (with minimal performance drag) and all should be customizable.
-----
# cd /
It is a little of both. My main gripe is the desktop implementation and the Dock. The new finder is pretty cool as I am getting used to it and figuring out its new powers. The Dev tools are kick butt and I hope certain dev apps are free or cheap when the final version comes out.
OS X Dock Summary = move mouse pointer to bottom of screen -- move mouse pointer to top of screen -- move mouse pointer to bottom of screen -- move mouse pointer to top of screen -- you will repeat until blue in the face or what may become known as the BFOD (Blue Face of Death). Maybe there is an easier way, I will try and find it. But I miss the app switcher.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
I've been using and programming Macs for ten years, and now I'm sitting in front of it going 'What? Huh? How do I launch an application? Where did my icons go?' Talk about disorientation.
/Applications, which is accessible from the Go menu, or by hitting Command-4.
This is silly. You launch applications by double-clicking then. They're all stored in
- scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
You, sir, rock. Don't let the morons bring you down.
This is nothing. Wait until people are rewriting the hardware abstraction bits of the Mach microkernel to add support for non-standard hardware and then creating unauthorized ports. You can do that, you know-- i've talked to people who have recompiled their darwin kernels and installed them under os x and had it work perfectly. So once people start using this to make os x work on non-apple or non-supported hardware... ooh, that should be interesting to watch.
Which isn't to say apple doesn't secretly want that. Apple has a pretty firm history of denouncing such activity, then turning the blind eye of "unsupported" to a hell of a lot of things you'd think they'd be reacting against. Or writing in things to make such activity easier and then refusing to document them.
No way of knowing what would happen, of course. Apple Computer is the single most unpredictable force on earth.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's a Haqua-ble interface. 1337 h4kkwarz unite!
Mr. Ska
I don't believe in the "legacy" argument. Apple was right to go with a graphical interface with the original Macintosh, rather than cater to its entrenched Apple II users.
OS X represented a great opportunity to remove the cruft that had grown in the Mac, goofs like dragging a disk to the Trash in order to eject it, inconsistent use of control vs. shift click for non-contiguous region selection, and shifting APIs in both Pascal, C and C++. They blew it by caving in to legacy software companies by wasting resources on Carbon, and by destroying a good interface and replacing it with Aqua.
The idea of doing a defaults write to restore the UI is a joke, as this only works for ObjC apps, and the newer Apple apps are in Java or Carbon. (this is why System Preferences ran so sloowly in DP3 and DP4). In PB, this renders my system unusable, because it changes the Open panel into a Save panel. It doesn't bring back a Dock with available apps, or a browser with a path of file proxies to easily copy or move files. It doesn't bring back the old Projectbuilder, which wasn't cluttered with shifting panels.
I've been using os x pb for a while now as my primary OS. I've also been a mac user since before they were shipping to customers, and a linux user since kernel 2.0. What I have to say about reaction to the gui is it depends on what kind of user you are. I won't go back to the old GUI...even though I love it so....I get things done so much faster, smoother, and I find that i actually enjoy computing a whole lot more with aqua...i call it the "whistle while you work" factor. The thing is that it takes a few weeks to hit your stride with the interface, and a lot of people are willing to deride and hack at it before they get a rtrue feeling for what it does for them.
/etc does nothing? Neat ssh and sshd are installed alraedy"
../ what happens if I nmap this box?"
There are three types of os X PB user.
first week of usage:
Unix guy: "Hey, the filesystem looks all funky, how come editing half the stuff in
Mac - Linux guy: "Where's the chooser? Where am I? screw it...cd
Mac guy: "Where's my damned tabbed folder...where's the chooser?"
Week 3:
Unix guy: "Cool...NetInfo does all the etc stuff...not to self, do not give anyone UID 500"
Mac - Linux guy "Sweet...got X-windows apps running in aqua, screw classic environment to run pshop...I've got gimp. Macos 9 gui is butt ugly compared to aqua"
Mac guy: "Ok...I can put an alias on the desktop, that'll be kinda like tabbed folders. I can get to the fileserver through the go menu. Internet Explorer is a piece of crap that doesn't know how to save files...classic is slow"
Week 5:
Unix guy "holy crap...if I type >console at login, I get a console....sweet"
mac - linux guy "cool, I can customize the desktop and GUI to my liking at the prompt....this is WAY better than ResEdit...I can get all the things I mis....wait, I don't miss the finder at all"
mac guy "I think I can work with this"
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
one thing that *does* take advantage of this is the "X", or close button, in the upper right of a maximized window. thank god.
the hockey puck sucks. pry off the colored plastic insets on it and it becomes ovoid and easy to use again by an adult.
If you're gentle removing the plastic crap you can even snap it back on if you sell the mouse.
After reading your post, I noticed that with a little practice, I can do the same thing, and it is indeed faster.
Thanks!
I do not mean to come off pro-linux, anti-mac. I am anti-linux, anti-mac. Linux is a great hobby system that is approaching true maturity, and within a few years will be more of a threat to microsoft then apple ever was. Macs are for people that need bibs to keep their tapioca pudding from running down their chins and onto their one button mice. What benchmarks does mac do well on? Only some fruity ass grapics ones. Lets see you play counter-strike on a mac? Oh, thats right. Lets see the massive array of software available for it. Macs are for idiots and artists. AND XEROX INVENTED THE GUI NOT APPLE.
actually, it OSX supports the wheel button (at least on my MS optical mouse) as well without tweaks.
BUT.....
It only works in Cocoa apps. Carbon & Classic ignore everything but the left button.
As I look around my desktop, I think to myself: what am I missing? What didn't my parents teach me as a child? Was it to play nicely with other kids my age? Well, there was the time I stuffed my kindergarten buddy's pencil set down the garbage disposal, but no, that's not it. Was it to respect my elders? Well, there was the time I taught myself Swahili just to confuse my addled next-door neighbor when I came selling girl-scout cookies, but no, that's not it.
And then it struck me: what was missing from my life was discipline. I was never taught to take out the trash when my father finished filling the bin with his empty bottles of schnapps. Is it too late for me to learn? Am I to be cast onto the trash heap of tomorrow like so many wads of spent tissues and baby oil?
Apple would have it so. I praise hackers every day for saving me from that fate. This one's for you, ESR!
> Mozilla is a prime candidate for this
Thanks. Please point me to native mozilla for Mac OS X Server. Thanks you very much.
> It's not slashcode, it's you. Now SHUT UP!
It is slashcode that don't make the text boxes wide enough, making impossible to input long urls with most of the browsers out there.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
>BUT I will keep my faith. People have been >telling me my Macs (I now have 3 powerbooks, 6 >Macs and the ][2) have no future for 15 years. >This is FUD. Keep your macs. They not only have the future, they are the future. Almost every step of the way, the industry has dragged their heels over implementing lots of new stuff, stuff that would make computers easier and better to use, because they wanted to be conservative and stick with old legacy stuff. The industry didn't kick their mainframe-only addiction till apple pushed the PC. The industry didn't take one step to implement GUI's until after apple did it. The industry didn't make laptops wide enough to rest your hands on until apple did it (with the PowerBook). The industry hardly supported usb and firewire and stuck with serial and parallel--it wasn't until apple burned the bridge and went totally usb/1394 that the suddenly there were all these usb and firewire devices. The industry (with the exceptional oddball like acer and their black machines) didn't dream of making multi-colored computers until apple did it with the imac. In some odd, symbiotic relationship, apple advances the the computer industry in bold, daring moves that the rest of the computer industry is too scared to make, and the industry makes just enough hardware for Apple that Steve Jobs et al can keep the lights on and can plan up the next daring move.
> I remember the first time I used a Mac with one > of those bloody control strips. I spent an hour > trying to switch it off. I defies use. Like the > Windows Start menu and the Gnome/KDE strips it > take up space and is a half-arsed replacement > for a decent file/application manager. You do realise that the control strip is NOT a file/application manager? Yes, you can turn it into a lightweight one with one of the many third party plug ins for it, but its primary purpose is to give easy access to various system bits and pieces - volume, cd playing, file sharing, status indicators, remote access, location manager etc. ck
I don't know any Mac-user who doesn't first install an extension on a freshly installed MacOS. Everyone has their own wishes.
A lot of these extensions have been integrated into the OS by Apple. It's a natural evolution of an OS. Apple is trying to create a better OS with MacOS X. They are dumping some good stuff without good reasons, they'll repent. I can wait until MacOS X 1.2 for a perfectly useable OS.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
every one of your comments regarding the windows start menu is completely or partially incorrect...
1) they reserve the top level for, basically advertisements. (AIM launcher, Netscape SmartUpdate, New Office Document - why the hell can't I put my own things there?
you can put your own things there. the same way you put things anywhere else in your start menu. and if you want, youcan deleteall of the advertisements too.
2) Then the lower levels, are not easily accessible, unless you open Expolorer, separately, and drill down through obscure hierarchies to where your profile's menu folder is.
right click onyou start button and hit explore. you will suddenly be taken to "where your profile's menu folder is" . while you're there, drop an app or two in the top level of your start folder.
3) And you cannot control sorting (as you CAN in Apple Menu). while this is a valid criticism of windows 95, that is not true inany more recent version of windows (that i've used anyway. they fixed this in 98, i don't see why they would revert to an unsorted menu in later versions)
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Thanks for your interest.
Grossly inferior. You can't label the icons in the dock. They move and shift and shrink depending on what else is on the dock. How am I going to distinguish seperate alias folders? How are other people using the computer supposed to know what they are, and where to find them?
The only reason that I am required to put up with these inferiorities is Apple Marketing. I resent that. The reason I chose a Mac in the first place was the superior utility and efficiency of its UI. Now that's being taken away by a bleeding marketing department? Not without hearing me complain it isn't. All the years of expertise and experience that went into the Macintosh UI Guidelines were chucked out the window because some salesmen wanted gumdrops and modernism? And they're trying to sell it to me as an "advance?" Isn't that what Microsoft is continually ridiculed for? The only advantage Apple had over the Wintel monolith was its superior engineering, and they're about to throw that away like an old pair of shoes. Total raging idiocy I tell you. God, I'm this far from going totally Kinnison...
And if Apple's marketing department continues to make UI decisions, it's going to take more than another 16 years of experience and tweaking for Aqua to become as streamlined as the one that it replaces. Bah! I might as well switch full time to WinME - at least its poor copy of the Mac UI is better than that of Aqua.
I can see the fnords!
A lot of it is Open Source? Maybe under the APL, but I won't get started on that...
Anyway, from what I've read, all of the GUI systems, the graphics layers, and everything else that goes between the user and the kernel, aside from standard GNU and Unix utilities, is proprietary.
-RickHunter
Superclock! I still use it.
Just because he's been using and programming Macs for ten years doesn't mean he's not an idiot.
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
I have been using Mac OS X for over three months now. First of all as much as people complain about it being defferent from OS 9 it really isnt that different. My girlfriend and her friend are both hard core mac users (they are both graphic designers) they were reluctant to use OS X on my laptop but eventually they fiddled around with it and set up their own accounts and everything. they customized the look of the commputer and figured their way around all in less than 10 minutes. OS X is very very easy to use and install. It is trully a mix of power and ease. If you install the developers tools you are set. The only problem right now is that there is no office app, no photoshop, and some drivers are missing. Other than that I think it is ready. Sure it can be buggy at times but then with that logic Win 95 and Red Hat Linux 7 would have never been released :-). The most confusing thin g about OS X is that windows don't collapse they minimize into the dock. I wish both features were available since they are useful in different situations.
Yes, but it also depends on what the user's used to. I use the keyboard for a lot of menu access anyway, and I tend to only use the mouse for stuff the interface won't let me do with the keyboard. Or when web browsing. As for Macs, I know two or three people who have timed themselves, and actually have good enough fine motor control that it is faster for them to go for a menu at the top of a window than to ram the mouse to the top of the screen, then adjust its position and find what they want.
-RickHunter
In case anyone's interested, the Terminator Strip has a feature that will show or hide the strip when the mouse pointer is moved to any of the four desktop corners. Works great for me, as I love my desktop area and can't stand that little collapse nub.
--- Submission is feudal.
On the Mac, yes. On the others I mentioned they are mainly that. Either way I dislike anything which uses screen space without giving me a choice in the matter. The minimised version is like a thin hair hanging down in front of your face; just enough to irritate.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
sorry, I was having a really bad day. I just got through being yelled at by professors for writing a paper in defense of hacking instead of against it. I just needed to let off some steam, and unfortunatly, slashdot ended up being the target.
you suck ;-)
Has anyone heard of ProTools? How much of music that is recorded in this day and age is recorded/mixed with ProTools?
The fact is, that it has just come over to Wintel (it still isn't as good/stable IMO).
Digital video editing? and we are not just talking people making home movies here....
And of course the design/layout of a lot of magazines/newspapers is done on Mac...
Can you play Counter-Strike....? Since when was gaming the be all and end all of computer systems...?
----- One piece short of Legoland
The public beta isn't the last beta before the final release. Updated versions between the PB and Release are being sent to seed testers. Not all of the changes between versions are bug fixes.
One interesting thing is that lots of Mac users who are running the PB have gotten interested in *nix. Many of the messages on the Seed message boards are of the "Where do I go to learn more about Unix?" flavor.
A lot of people seem to really LIKE the idea of having a shiny new car with a big-ass engine under the hood.
One-ton tomato
'stacked file systems' um..don't you mean mounted file systems or, maybe, groups of symlinks?
What's this Submit thingy do?
get a clue then come back
I think most Mac users (certainly most I know) wanted some of the features they are getting with "Mac OS X" (it's really Openstep ver. something, at the very least they should drop the damn X and call it Mac OS 10... but I ramble) - they want the power and stability of it, some of them even care about having the underlying command line, though others dont, and even though the Mach kernel is a slow dog (why didn't they use a true BSD kernel? anyone have a clue?) the new Macs are so fast very few will even care about that.
But the one thing you won't see Mac users asking for is a new and totally unfamiliar interface. Aqua is an incredibly stupid move for Apple, given their customer base. It's pretty eye candy, but a very poor UI, and certainly not the one that Mac fans adore and expect. Sure, it impresses Windows (and Enlightenment) users, but to the stalwarts of Apples user base it can hardly be less than sacrilige.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Yeah, or maybe it's because once you grok the subtlety, depth, and coherency of the "Classic" Mac UI, everything else is a clumsy, hackish, inconsistent mess. Maybe we put up with crappy memory mgt and such because of the UI, not because of familiarity... The poster at the top of this thread got it exactly right.
> 2. Apple is not going to care if these folks hack their OS this way. The folks with the beta now are either developers (not Apples real target market), or pirates (not Apples real target market).
Uh...Did you notice that Apple is selling the betas to anyone with $30? I'm certainly not an Apple developer, but I used my copy of OSX until I had some real work to do. 9 is just much faster - in the get-out-of-my-way-I-have-shit-to-do sense of "faster".
When I talked to the Apple developers at the BSDCon they said they were expecting the UI criticisms they got, and gave me the impression that they were trying to fix things, but then Apple has a LONG history of ignoring user feedback, and letting the shareware community fix their problem parts
- H
ah yes, you are correct: it's partly a function of having to relearn everything. but it's also because the classic mac OS (god love it) is so damn simple. it was easy for me, as a production/design person all by myself, to crank out three magazines a month with no IT help whatsoever. we had an eight-mac network set up, all with personal filesharing (cheap company) and it worked just fine.
there is no mystery to using a mac. they just work. installation and removal of apps? simple. where are fonts stored and how do they work with ATM? easy as pie.
this, i think, is why macs are so dominant in this industry. it's because the people using them just want to get their work done. windows, for all its other advantages, still can't touch the classic mac OS in this.
Mindy: "Well...desserts aren't always right." Homer: "But they're so sweet!"
i used macs on and off for several years and i hardly used the apple menu
who cares
btw.. its not coming back
get over it
Here use the superclock as your example. In ages past there was a CDEV by Steve Christensen called "SuperClock" which did one thing: Put a clock in the menubar. It was so popular that Apple bought all rights to it, and now it's a standard part of the System. "WindowShade" has much the same story.
--------
get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
1. The current set of mac users are the folks who are most resistent to change. Otherwise they would have left the platform long ago for a 'real OS' (or at least one that pretends to have protected memory, real multitasking, etc
That is an insult. The MacOS is in my opinion a far superior OS to any other out there right now. It is so good in fact, that I have never felt a need for "real OS" features like protected memory and preemptive multitasking, because the OS's current abilities perform well enough to handle my needs.
The only people who are really impressed by an OS which boasts those features are the same people who bought Windows 98 beacuse "its 10% faster over the internet". A real measure of an operating system is how effeciently a user can get thing done.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
I dunno, man.
I know a lot of people who did go totally kinnison when Apple introduced the Mac. I am also sad to see the Human Interface guidelines go. Tog ranks higher for me all but Woz. BUT, there are apps coming out by the bucketfull. I am 100% sure popup windows will reappear. I am also positive Apple itself will reintroduce the apple menu.
Aqua is a beta of a version one. I am hopeful that they will pull their head out of their asses on this.
As for Win98 being more maclike than win 98, I think we can not see the forest through the trees. we still can turn off all the animation. we still have infinite height menubars.
The dock needs work, true. and it does not totally replace the popup win. BUT changing the background color of each individual window (so, say, internet apps appears as a red window, music apps as a green window, etc) is a great visual cue. This is done for individual finder views in View>>Options. Turn off the default. You can now make all your finder views color coded. The changes stick.
Pretty handy hack. Yes, you only get the name by mouse scrubbing, so i rely on color for quick ref.
I am not saying not to complain. Above, i encouraged all of us to complain TO APPLE. These press peices by know nothing pundits are not the way to do it. Use the beta, inform Apple where the fsck up.
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
it's funny what mac users consider "hacking" such as: "Altering the system's defaults via the command-line interface" here is a fancy trick I learned at hacker school for all you mac lovers. double-click on your "command line interface" so it pops open, then type: shutdown -r now if your computer reboots you must have typed it wrong. no worry, just try it again. trust me its worth it if you want to be a hacker!!!
After reading this post, I began to notice that the way I access the menu under Windows is I thurst the mouse to the top and then my wrist "knows" how much to move down so I end up in the menu region. This also happens for the close button on the upper right. I also looked around (I am in a computer lab at school now) and noticed that a lot of other people do it the same way. I am not arguing that it may be slower. I'm just amazed at how many things we do unconciously.
I forgot line breaks and it didn't make sense so I am submitting this again because it is important for the developement of our fine society:
it's funny what mac users consider "hacking" such as:
"Altering the system's defaults via the command-line interface"
here is a fancy trick I learned at hacker school for all you mac lovers. double-click on your "command line interface" so it pops open, then type:
shutdown -r now
if your computer reboots you must have typed it wrong.
no worry, just try it again. trust me its worth it if you want to be a hacker!!!
Damn straight. The most bone-chilling comment on Aqua that I've read so far came from Bruce Tognazzini, usability guru and founder of the Apple Human Interface Group -- the main guy responsible for the stuff you love/hate about the Mac GUI. His quote:
Tog was probably gone by the time OS 8 added tabbed windows, but I definitely would have a bad time using a Mac without them. And FinderPop.
In my comment, I never said how keyboard control should be handled. It is a totally separate issue from where the menu is located. I believe that all functions should be available through the keyboard, but that shouldn't be considered the primary way access them. They should be shortcuts for advanced users.
In the case of your friends, they may indeed have the motor control required. However, the typical person doesn't and that's who is (and should be) targeted by this user-interface decision. Also, are you sure that they timed themselves under typical use? Or did they prepare themselves for the timing test? It could easily make a big difference in the results.
That is one reason. But an earlier development of Apple's that created a great demand for Macs as DTP machines was the ability to use more than one monitor simultaneously (and I don't mean mirroring). To my knowledge, windows and/or linux still cannot do this plug and play. (Maybe Win2K or WinME can, I haven't played around with them.)
hey! i know you!
:)
ur one of them apple-huggin hippies that got lost in the 70's.
lose the yellow pants
radical! dude!
yes it did
fuckwit
get ur facts straight
There are some definite mixed messages in this article. While some of the apps being written can be seen as restoring a past functionality (such as the process menu), I really question whether this isn't just a bad way of not learning where the new equivalent is.
It would be interesting to hear about differences from the perspective of key shortcuts or the like, since this article seems to concentrate mostly on visual aesthetics.
BTW, is it just me, or did the Ars Technica guy come out of this sounding like an asshole? The actual quote that was stated sounded normal, but the intro was horrible:
"John Siracusa, a programmer who has written reviews of Mac OS X for Ars Technica , said that while the new system is more powerful, no one uses the Mac for technical reasons, they use it because of the interface."
1337 H4x0R 57YL3
Might scare them to see people tweaking the OS on their machines....
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
It is nice that I will be able to do more than just write nice little AppleScripts.
Almost, but not quite. Yank down and left and then after it gets there move the mouse up and right just a bit. The little border MS puts in causes the button to be slower to use. The OS X dock also has this little problem. I hope they fix it before the final release...
Just like when Windows 95 users ran progman.exe to get their old folders and icons back, and those who run X just to have multiple X terms... some eventually change, and others just stay for whatever reasons: ease of use, no desire to learn new ways, or just to get things done without having to worry about changing the way you work.
----
Maybe I'm way off here, but I am a converted Win user that loves macs, and it hurts to see macs getting their asses kicked in sales and user percentages so, I say, a new look (hello iMac) or new interfaces is welcome. If it gets more people on the mac wagon, lets get it goin'. I love the old look as much as anybody, but technology changes and people have to change with it or macs will always be a minority. So suck it up and learn how to use/program it or you will always be a niche market programmer.
Mac's do it fine with any video card you lay your hands on. Since most between the II, IIx, IIfx and the G3's, G4's and 9500 all had built in video, adding a video card meant you could either add a monitor or use the video card instead. And for mac's that didn't have expansion slots, you could run a display off the SCSI port thanks to a little adapter.
The point being you don't need to worry about the cards or anything. Just plug it in, it goes. (Most) Windows display cards that can do multiple monitor support cost MUCH more than just buying two run of the mill cards.
I had a friend who was also compelled to hack his mac. Tho' slightly more literally. He uses it as snow in home-made snow globes now.
Don't kid yourself into thinking it's some cabal of marketroids in Apple.
The Human Interface group was gutted by Steve, and most of Aqua's ideas are strictly Steve. The things that have changed are things that had very good irrefutable reasons; the monochrome scheme was to prevent losing the graphic designers, etc.
Stuff like useability of the Dock, and loss of good features like Apple Menua and spring loaded folders, just isn't going to fly with Steve, especially when it's at the expense of his baby "The Dock". (actually, I preferred the old NeXT dock, myself).
I'm personally not very hopeful that Apple is going to make any changes to OS X PB. Especially when I hear brain-dead comments like "most of the people who don't like it are just a very vocal minority". That's total bullshit, and if you've been on any public message board about OS X in the past three months, you'd know that. But nobody who likes their job at Apple questions Steve. At least we'll have our hacks and 3rd Party Tweaks.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What he probabaly meant is that VFS has amazing properties. I'm not completly up on my technical details, but VFS (Virtual File System) is a plugin based file system which allows you to add file system support on top of it with added features. Okay HFS+, MacOS's current file system, is NOT a journaling file system. It COULD be under VFS. In theory one could write a plugin for HFS+ that would make it journaling. It may require some bit changes on the files, but it could be done in the same way that Win98 let you change you file system to Fat32 without hosing your harddrive (in theory, anyhow ;p ).
Burn Hollywood Burn
What a good number of /.ers don't realize is that the most rational reason Mac users remain hardcore in the face of a geriatric core OS is that the Mac UI
- makes good sense; menus flow in a useful way, every visual effect has a true meaning, and key shortcuts are presented in the context of an app. One could argue that a one button mouse falls into this set of considerations.
- is consistent. No other OS even suggests that applications coded for it follow it's UI. Apple has had a Human Interface Guidelines manual since before Sytem 5.0, which doesn't include a lick of code, but is probably their most important publication. (Imagine X with the same document...or even Posix; was -F "force" or "fast?"?
- is intuitive. The number of UI trivia one needs to learn to become proficient in Mac OS is simply much lower than any other OS UI I've seen.
The downside to all this (and it is significant), is that the decisions made about the UI are almost set in stone. In any other OS, one simply spends more time fooling around with the UI and thinking about how to get the computer to do what you want rather than making it do what you want, but then any change in the UI hits your workflow much harder.OS X is a significant departure, and no matter how well crafted, the departure is what will be commented on for some time. Whether it's good or not is best judged by how frustrating it is to be back in OS 9 after adapting to X.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
Seriously, should anyone be surprised by this?
I mean, Mac users have been changing and adjusting their GUI for years. From what I know, long before any other operating system. It was just a matter of time before people started messing around with OS X to change the outlook and functionality.
The only ironic part is that there are a bunch of themes out there trying to copy Aqua, and here we have a group of users trying to change their Aqua.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I remember on my first mac, i found some program that would imbue upon the finder the ability to draw windows 3 dimensionally... Alas, it did it in the harshest possible way, by overwriting the (i believe it was, it's been a while) WDEF resource with one of it's own, and without saving a backup.
I made a copy of the finder, opened it in resedit, deleted the new resource, moved the old one out of my system folder, renamed the finder copy back to finder, restarted, only to be greeted by a sad mac set against a black screen... Thank good for boot disks, but the finder on those only had black and white window borders, no system 7 greys....
Actually, this is the ONLY thing I like about the Dock. Put it in hide-mode, and having the trash handily pop up when you drag a file to the edge of the screen is great. It saves you the hassle of having to minimize a window that may be covering the trash icon on the desktop. However, minimizing the window wouldn't be one tenth the hassle it is, if they'd eliminate the dock and bring back windowshades.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Drive light's on, but nobody's home?
...and the room dropped to a dead silence as Ripp *thwaps* frogstomper on the back of the head, saying "Humor. Look it up sometime."
Blech. Signatures.
> machines was the ability to use more than one monitor simultaneously (and I don't mean mirroring). To my knowledge, windows and/or linux still cannot do this plug and play
Yes, Win2K supports Multimon (multiple monitors)
I have a Millenium II and a GeForce 2 in the same computer. It rocks for 3D development.
You can check the Multimon database at http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/db.asp
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why force users to throw out everything they already know? There has to be a study out there showing that people who stick to the keyboard as much as possible get stuff done more quickly than those who keep having to switch back and forth between keyboard and mouse. I know I'm faster that way. (Hell, I have four boxen running Linux at home, and only one has X installed.)
Given that the underpinnings of MacOS X have a 30-year lineage behind them (older than Apple itself, and older than the DOS that you denigrate), it seems absurd that you would be sniping at any kind of "legacy presence."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
What is news, is the fact that Apple has provided simple commands to change almost every aspect of how your desktop looks. Want a semi-transparent terminal? How about the trash on the desktop? Maybe you want that useless Apple in the middle of the Menu bar to actually do something, I'm sure you can do it. What's also cool is that "$man netinfo" pulls up a nice manual (read book) on the database for system settings, or that "$man perl" pulls up a damn BOOK on how to code Perl. OS X has the first functional man pages I've seen in my life (that is, they aren't written in geek speak for coders).
Burn Hollywood Burn
Why, because they name their extensions with english sounding names?
Hmmmmmmm?
TCP/IP
Sound Manager
Speech Manager
QuickTime
QuickDraw 3D
LaserWriter 8
File Sharing Extension
AppleShare
Appearance Manager
I can see how those would be *really* hard to figure out if you need them or not. Not like Windows even lets you have that hope... Move a DLL out of the Windows folder? The registry isn't aware of that and your programs crash when they look for it. ANd how would you even know which DLL's to take out, for trouble shooting purposes? They're all named in 8.3 conventions, even in NT, when fat32 and ntfs support longer, more detailed file names.
Even from the Linux perspective, navigating the Extensions folder on a Mac is generally much more insightful than building a kernel with make xmenuconfig... I swear, i don't know what 40 or 50% of the options there mean, and a lot of the help screens don't yeild much more valuable information.
It's been hackable for quite a while now. We just call them extensions rather than hacks. But thanks for the BSD layer.
I do to, but according to the research mouse menu commands are actually faster than keyboard shortcuts, even though the research subject themselves think the keys are faster.
It's one of the weirder things in UI design. Of course, since users are more comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, the software should provide it as well.
And no, this is not a joke. I'm not making this up.
1) have to adjust the mouse and click again because I was too far down or,
2) have to put up with Quicktime or RealJukebox open because I was too high and had clicked on the "Quick Launch" (misnomer, eh?) bar instead?
Then I have to put up with my father telling me that it's because I go too fast. Anytime I have a problem, it's because I go too fast. I closed Simcity and for some reason the OCR daemon (I know MS calls them TSR's, but that's a game manufacturer) loaded and that was because I go to fast. I don't know how to click slower.
Anything that makes a feature easier to use is a good thing. And make everything customizable and/or optional. Don't force features on the users, allow them decide what they want and how they want it.
how are we going to hack aqua without the source code ???
or are we juss writing applications for it ??
or am i getting the meaning of hacking wrong ??
"The world is coming to an end. Please log orff."
Right up until a newbie starts running more than one program at once; or forgeting to close an app, start another up and close it- only to be confronted with the first program's menu again. This came up all the time while I took calls, along with- 'Where'd my Special menu go?'
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
True, they did do usability testing, and they did find that a single menu bar was better. IIRC, they did have a menu per window at one point in the design (see "Insanely Great" by Steven Levy).
However, I believe that the size of the screen negated any other decision they may have wanted to go with (menu bar in each window, floating menu bar, whatever). Well, I guess, a combination of design decision and hardware limitations. A context-sensitive menu (a la Xerox PARC STAR) would require multiple buttons on the mouse (anathema to "easy to use" in Apple's mind), so a menu bar is required. The small screen negated the option of multiple menu bars (in a usability sense of having as many pixels available for documents as possible).
But, I still find that an old Mac SE/30 with System 7 is one of the great computers. I absolutely dote on mine. It's still a major axe in my arsenal. I even seem to be more creative at it.
(tho web browsing is pretty painful, plain old text editing is just fine)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
bash, csh, etc. are all incredibly more powerful and much nicer (tab completion!!) than DOS. Wildcard expansion is better, and you can write real programs for the interpret, and not these klunky batch files that need the Norton utilities to be useful.
Not entirely true. Do Macs not have superior color calibration capabilities, and thus is the preferred platform for graphics designers? Furthermore, some of use Macs because the PHB uses them (lots of PHBs in academia use Macs).
---
Santa Claus: "Ho ho ho!"
NO CARRIER
As a NeXT wannabe, I shunned Finder and have been using Greg's Browser and Malph as my primary interface to MacOS since the early '90s. Now that the functionality of these insanely useful utilities is to become the default MacOS interface, users are screaming about it. Fools!
I guess I'm used to having the option of throwing whatever Window Manager I think looks pimpin' on top of Xfree86. How tightly intregrated is Aqua to the OS? Apple's site shows a couple layers of APIs between Darwin and Aqua.
Can the GUI be replaced while maintaining compatability? That's an honest question, not an invite to flame. Perhaps OS X users might be happier with a port of X, running Enlightenment and eMac.
I'm glad they rectified the problem. I just don't feel like an elite, hard core, down-to-the-metal hacker unless I have on my computer desktop a group of pixels in the shape of a garbage can.
Cheers,
tell application "Appearance" to set scroll bar arrow style to "dubl"
and run.
Of course, only the genius of Microsoft would think of putting menubars at the top of each window plus an additional menu bar 1 pixel from the bottom of the screen.
Well, it could be done the way supermount works in linux. You put in a floppy and when you access it, it is mounted according to need. When you are done, you push an eject button and it is spit out and unmounted simultaneously.
The mechanical button ALWAYS gives you your disk, regardless of power status of the computer or the existence or non-existence of a trashcan, etc.
Having to resort to a straightened paperclip to get a disk or CD out is really poor design, as far as I am concerned, when there is a software, os, or power problem.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I can see the people at Apple freaking. How could they do this with our OS? Too bad.
If I don't like the way it performs and I can change it, I will. I paid for the 'upgrade', so live with it.
It will be interesting to see how the public reacts to people succeeding in modification.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
But anyway, being able to customize Aqua sounds damn cool, and only increases my desire to get a G4 system... I really want to see for myself what OSX can do - and yes, I really like having that spiffy little trash can on my desktop.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
But they have Alpha channels.
The only times I've used the KDE, you couldn't actually get an infinite height menu. You could have the menus across the top of the screen, but the blasted things worked like buttons / MS Windows menus - you could still run off the top of them, because the top row or two of pixels on the screen wasn't part of the menu. It struck me as remarkably stupid, to put the menus along the top of the screen, but then to have the very top row or two of pixels not actually activate the menus.
Maybe in KDE 2 this has been fixed, I don't know...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Now that I think of it, this reminds me of the mess MS made with their stupid "one click to launch" and active desktop moves. The number one request they had was to turn them off by default, since the majority of users hated them.
The point being you don't need to worry about the cards or anything. Just plug it in, it goes. (Most) Windows display cards that can do multiple monitor support cost MUCH more than just buying two run of the mill cards.
Wrong. Windows has had multiple monitor support since Windows 98 (or maybe 98SE). I use it every day at work, and you don't need a "fancy" card. I use the old Voodoo 3 2000 PCI out of my Pentium 233mmx, in conjunction with any number of AGP cards, GeForce, Voodoo 3, Matrox, ATI, you name it, it works for the most part. Pretty much any video card manufactured in the last three years will work just fine, if that doesn't meet your definition of "run of the mill" cards, then I don't know what does.
What you're probably being confused by is thinking that this ability requires a Matrox card with two VGA outputs. You don't need a fancy card like that, pretty much any two cards will work just fine.
My normal setup at my old job was a 21 inch Gateway CRT, attached to my TNT2 AGP card, and a 15 inch Apple LCD attached to my Voodoo 3 PCI card. Yes, Apple. The blue and white LCD panels work fine with PC's.
You can even get pretty cheap corporate PC's with dual head support. Just configure a Dell Optiplex GX110 or 115, add the TNT2 PCI card, and you're all set, since the motherboard has an onboard AGP video chipset as well. You just need to enable it in Windows, plug in a second monitor, and you've got loads of screen real estate.
Don't underestimate how useful this is, try it, even if all you've got is an old 15 inch CRT, you'll find it useful, I guarantee it.
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
USB is basicaly a greatly improved version of ADB, which it replaces. FireWire replaces SCSI, which was at least as broadly-used as FireWire is today.
The lines aren't quite as clear as you draw them.
[1] I'm under the impression that it is/was used in Sun and SGI workstations. I'm not sure whether they are/were charged for it.
'nuff said.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
There are many extensions and utilities to modify the apple UI to make it more usefull.
Kalidescope allows you to modify Mac OS look and feel with "THEMES" much like Gnome.
Now Utilities has/d a package to add all sorts of UI enhancements
I use personally use pertisimo which puts up and down arrows on both ends of the scroll bar. I find very usefull, and I miss it at work...
resexcellence.com has some other utilities.
And christ, he couldn't be bothered to RTFM? To use the EXCELLENT help guide. To visit apple.com.
What a loser.
Maybe this is flamebait, but OS-X is easy. Just as easy as OS9.
This reminds me of when the Mac came out. The biggest whiners were the Apple ][ users.
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Hope springs eternal with the mac fans, doesn't it?
Hope springs eternal for anyone hoping for a choice outside of Windows. But considering that Apple has $4 billion in the bank, and $11 in cash for every outstanding share (vs. $3 for Gateway and $1.75 for Dell), as well as quite product line and some impressive software technology, I don't think we're really in Armageddon mode here.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Only if we're lucky.
For those who have missed it, point your browser here:/macos-x-beta-1.html> (After having removed the space added after 'macosx-pb1' by slashdot)
Unfortunately, the article is a nice piece of shit (wait a bit before moderating down, please. and read the article. it may also help if you use OS X on a daily basis).
The guy use very technical words to tell the world that what is miss is, mainly, an apple menu. He seems to have trouble keeping itself calm in the last couple of pages. He want is apple menu back. We'll he even reboot in real Mac OS 9, so he can have its apple menu. His OS 9 crashes two times, but, what the hell, he prefers crashing than lacking its fucking apple menu.
If he wants, he can go on www.Stepwise.com (on softrack), where he'll find free replacements for it, but no, no, no. He wants it in _standard_. He wants apple to push its apple menu to every mom and dad of the world.
Apple deserves him the holy apple menu.
There is a rant about the '5 seconds faster to boot that saves 50 lifes', which get in connection with its apple menu at the end. He probably beleives that the apple menu, beeing a so superior design, is probably worth 500 lifes. (Btw, give the time an OS 9 takes to boot and the incessant crashing it have, forcing the switch to OS X on every mac user would probably save the population of a medium city)
But the reality he refuses to face is that the apple menu plain sucks (cluttered. hard to read [icons are smaller than what is generally used for an app]. difficult to use with the nested hierarchies. used as a 'kitchen sink' for every crap in the computer, easy to laucnh the wrong app, impossible to launch several item at once, impossible to drag a document on a menu entry to do 'open with', etc, etc). He is used to it, and I can understand that, but it sucks as much as the windows start menu, or the gnome one. (Worse is better, bad ideas get copied). AND IF HE WANTS ONE, WHY CAN'T HE DOWNLOADS ONE ? By the time it took him to rant about it, I would have WRITTEN one.
There is a pathetic rant about the:
> lack of a universally accessible, user-configurable, hierarchical quick-access > mechanism. [it] is necessary if advanced users are ever to be as efficient in > OS X as they are in classic Mac OS.
Boys, I love the precision of the description.
* universally accessible
--> I want it on the menu bar, at a fixed place (ie: on the top left or top right). In one word, I want a menu
* user-configurable
--> I don't want it do be tied to the filesystem, or filled magically. I want to fill it myself, like the good old apple menu [note: this looks like a advanced feature for Mac OS X. My dad will never find how to fill an apple menu. He dosn't even _exctly_ know the difference between a macintosh and windows (sic)]
* hierarchical quick-access mechanism
--> I want it to be a hierarchical menu
This looks like jobs descriptions used when the guy is already choosed. Maybe he could have added:
* colorfull
--> As it is easier to spot. Maybe it could have rainbows color, so I could use it to check if I am not on a monochrome monitor. I would recommend the representation of a fruit, but a company logo could do well too
I also love the various attempt at 'the apple logo in the middle of the screen have no use', remove it, or (better) find a use for it (hint, hint)
Mac looser at its best.
Why don't he says what his trouble really is ?
Finding and launching applications and documents is painfull. There are other means to solve that than the apple menu. (For instance: search for NeXTstep 4.0 alpha screenshot on the web. There was a fantastic shelf in this version that never made it into 4.0. Pity).
This is something that apple can understand and take into account. Pushing an crappy concept in the new os is just plain stupid. And there is a lot more missing in OS X than the apple menu.
I bet apple have already the apple menu somewhere, but want to wait for 1.0 so jobs can make the holy demo: clicking on the apple, and having the menu down.
I already see al the suckers applauding.
Okay, now you can moderate down to (-1) flamebait.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
It's good underneath too. I wish they'd kept more of the NeXT look though.
Ok, who else is annoyed at Wired's change in format to:
Headline
(abstract blurb)
[sidebar] [irrelevant links]
(rest of the story)
I think Netscape is just on crack. In IE the page looks fine: though the links are still inside the story, the sidebar is indeed to the side. Yes, still annoying that the links are actually inside the story and break it up, but it is still on the same page.
You know well you can't make it alone... you can't make it alone.
This comment would be great, if it actually made some sort of concrete point rather than just quote somebody else's opinion.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
How long, I wonder, before some of these hacks start appearing in aada's Aqua etheme. Also, does anyone know of a mirror for his web site because it appears to be down and I would really like to remove that damn icon bar on the lower left-hand side of the screen.
We also have a Workspace.app and some other applications.
It's Mac users like that that give us all a bad name.
hear hear. i'm posting this from work in a tech support call center. ever try to walk a newbie mac user through checking their network settings?
sigh.
"the computer for the rest of us" seems to be "the computer for people who have no curiosity about how things work."
--saint----
put the following in /etc/hosts (most unices) or c:\windows\hosts.txt (Win9x)
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
127.0.0.1 slashmirror.tripod.com
127.0.0.1 slashtroll.org
Never again will you see anything from those servers.
0 1 - just my two bits
Don't forget OmniWeb. It's definitely not a port from the Windows world...it's a port from the NeXT world!
Actually, IE on the Mac is notoriously slow at rendering Slashdot. iCab, OmniWeb, Netscape and Mozilla all render Slashdot in a few seconds.
Hmmm, I haven't had the same results as you have with complex pages in Mozilla. It's not surprising that iCab, OmniWeb and Netscape would render faster, though. For the most part, all they care about is HTML, and it one case - CSS (albeit poorly). You can't see it on Slashdot, but on sites that use CSS extensively (which are rapidly becoming quite common), you'll be wishing for the MacIE rendering engine. And that sophitication doesn't come without extra consumption of resources.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Yeah, it's kinda odd that Kahney seems to have missed the fact that being able to make such changes is a good thing. (To whatever extent OS X / Aqua makes this easier, about which I'm not really sure.)
Plus, I wonder what definition of "legion" Kahney uses, especially given that s/he later grudgingly admits that "it's impossible to know how many people have 'Macified' Mac OS X".
"Hey, look! Some people don't like the New Thing!" Uh, yeah, no kidding?
Another cotton-candy story from Wired ...
(Just kidding! DTP people are using Macs because their photoshop plugins have been optimized for RISC routines. Without the optimization working on a Mac would suck big time).
Honestly when are you going to get off your high horse and accept the MacOS as a viable platform? Fine - i will accpet that anything before X was kind of stilly (but still far superior for any sort of graphics work).
/. readers are typically the nerdier sections of any community. X is going a LONG way to bring unix to the desktop. The code monkeys are poking around and figuring out how to make it even easier for morons to use and you mock them? Go soak your head. The quicker we can get people to accept a BSD/Linux/Unix/*nix style operating system the sooner we will all be able to play together a lot better.
X is BSD and its a MARKET interface. Remember that
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
http://www.kaleidoscope.net/
Macs have whacked interface schemes since Greg Landweber and Arlo Rose hacked this piece of shareware out.
Kaleidoscope has schemes rivaling anything on themes.org.
I've always prefered the interfaces and icons of Mac users create to anything coming out of the Windows or Linux camps.
Take a look at Audion's Faces compared to WinAmp's Skins.
Is there a Windows or Linux equivalent to Icon Factory?
Whatever. I actually own a G4, and it's quite fast enough for me when you're on a good network connection. It renders Slashdot in less than a second on Netscape 4.75, so what's your problem? Not happy with being able to blink between hitting return at the URL bar and getting a page, or is it just IE envy?
I think you're just spewing nonsense and hatred, free from the burden of facts.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Livin in the mac world is like living in Nowhereville, USA. Everyone there is of the same race and the same religion. The families have lived there for decades... Almost complete homogeny. But no crime. No poverty.
It seems like some "outsiders" are moving into their quaint little town and shaking things up...
Mwa ha ha...
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
I guess Mac users don't like having to "Think Different".
As they say over at Despair.com
Think Same.
As for me, the only working computer I personally own at the moment is an Apple ][+.
Help me! I'm a Luddite! ;)
i see why these people are reacting so harshly: i did the same when i started using OS X. however after using it for a while, i started to realize that while not perfect, many aspects of Aqua are very good additions. at the very end, the article even gives a quote that expresses just this:
what it really comes down to is that people are afriad of change. still, it is nice to have a customizable GUI. keep in mind however that the MacOS has always been customizable through hacks, so this is hardly anything new.
- j
I don't have time to dig up the reference, but if you measure it, it turns out that on average Mac users do menu commands 5 times faster than other system users.
.. the perfectly round, one-button mouse.
.. Ah, okay. Stupid bloody design that is .. it doesn't fit your hand at all, at least not adult hands.
Oh, you mean the hockey-puck on a wire?
--
Delphis
I don't know what's up with my computer, but that ranges anywhere from instantaneous to 15 seconds on my system. And it insists on spinning up my second hard drive before it'll autocomplete.
--
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
The exact same feelling of being lost happens when a Windows user switch to other desktop environment. At least, in this case, it's worth it :)
A lot of the more popular interface hacks are simply people turning on functionality that's built into the OS but which they haven't written an interface for yet by default. For example, you turn on mounting disks directly on the desktop just by flipping a bit in a property list. Likewise, the terminal app has built in support for translucency that you can turn on just by adding a property to your prefs file. People are discovering more of these goodies every day.
Contrary to all the people wailing about how lost they feel, I'm excited to be spelunking in new territory, finding and being turned on to new details and fun shit every day. There's a lively network of young sites (macosx.com, osxtalk.com, macosxhints.com, etc) where people can swap bits of new knowledge. This is the fun part of an OS's evolution, before people's ingrained habits and the backwards compatabilty albatross start to become a drag. I know I'm not missing the fricking Apple menu.
-d.w.
While you've got some points to make, there are stretches of your post that are virtually unreadable thanks to your... creative spelling, grammar and language. What otherwise would have been an informative or insightful post instead comes across as only slightly more sophisticated than the ravings of a lunatic.
will be OS 9.
What is so new or surprising about this? Mac owners have been hacking the Mac user interface since the day it came out. Many of the features on the classical Mac user interface started out as user hacks (clocks, hierarchal menus, etc). The fact that users are hacking at Mac OS X is the best news I could imagine - the big fear in the Mac community was that the interface would be 'unhackable' so that the creative energy of the Mac community would be locked out.
Thankfully this is not so, and as a result I expect to see some really cool additional features added to Aqua by Apple that start out as user hacks.
When you say that Netscape renders /. in less than a second, I'm assuming that you have a T3 connection, so the download time for the page is almost instantaneous. Therefore, the HTML compilation time for Netscape is less than a second, or over 500 milliseconds. Once again, pathetic for a local operation. IE on Windows can load a local HTML in less than 200 milliseconds.
Do you still say that this quantitative analysis is nonsense?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Mac users had best NEVER complain about windows bloat again, sheesh. I'm sorry, but I want my GUI to be NOTHING but 256color square box's, that is a GUI that loads fast, and fits in under 200k.
Anybody here remember the old DOS SHELL? I loved that thing, used it as my GUI for ages, ran great, easy to pop in and out of, and it supported multi-tasking of sorts. If you wanted to customize it, you could change the colors of the window bars, text, and text background. That was it, period. No anti-aliased interpolated transparent buttons, no OPEN-GL effects, the damn thing just RAN, and on any computer too. Same thing with X-TREE, but its default color scheme was ugly (at least I thought so then.)
Sheesh, I never did understand the whole entire customize the look of your OS thing, hell, I think beige is the PERFECT color. There are so many different shades of beiege, the APPLE II line alone had a variety of Beige's! Gray, Beige, Black, White, that is what a OS's GUI should look like, period, end of story. I want to run a program, I click on its icon, it runs, no fancy sound effects, no bells and whistels, and NO freeze ups. Simple. You could write a decent GUI in basic if you wanted too, as long as you got a version of basic that supported running EXE's and BAT files.
Any plug-ins to modify your GUI just take up more HD space and increases the time it takes for your system to load, and with OS X running at a snails pace already (do to the above mentioned trancparency, OpenGL and such) I see no reason why a mac user would want to further hinder their system's performance with some sort of Scheme programs or any other sort of GUI ajustments. Of course, I guess with only 1 mouse button, they have to entertain themselves somehow (how DO you guys do 3d modeling with only 1 mouse button, isn't it mentaly painfull?)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
However, please remember that it's Mac OS X, not X. I think X has gone as far toward taking BSD to the consumer market as it ever will. Instead of the ability to run multiple xterms, I think it is the Aqua interface and the BSD stability that will make Mac OS X a success.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Watching the mac community i have seen it simply split in half between those who want Aqua and those who don't. Those who have discovered aqua works for them are happy and have the luxury of getting to simply label anyone who doesn't agree with them as closed-minded and reactionary; those who don't are simply having to face the reality that for the next God knows how long they will hve to either live with this or screw up their system with half-assed, patchwork third-party hacks. Those in the second group are becoming desperate, and are probably closing themselves to some of the [very few, in my opinion] interface changes in os x that needed to be done. Apple, meanwhile, is (i'm afraid) going to wind up so inundated with DUDE WHY DID YOU GET RID OF TEH AAPPOLE mENU!!! you SUCK!!! That they will probably be somewhat closed off to any real, constructive critisism.
From my end, this is not about resisting change. It's about customizablity, and apple's dogged resistance to allowing it. The mac os, since version 8.5, has had the most advanced theming system ever designed for anything; apple refuses to release the specs on how to design for it. Themes exist based on reverse-engineered specs, and most of them are quirky and/or slow. Apple seems to have some kind of seige mentality.
Aqua is everything some people need. It doesn't fit everyone's needs. It was designed to be as simple as possible, to be straightforward for imac users and not overwhelm people. The problems from go from practical -- that os x, rather than doing things in a different way, simply removes huge blocks of functionality (say, an easy heirarchal interface to common things, or an easy way to knock windows out of the way such as windowshade as opposed to a minimize that turns the window into an postage-stamp white blur eating up the single most precious piece of screen real estate you have) without providing new ways to do it -- to personal -- in my opinion, maximize/minimize and excessively paned interfaces are hideous, clumsy concepts, and this is simply the way i feel and the way i've always felt -- to the simple fact that aqua, with its glaring white lack of contrast between different screen areas, gives me and many other people literal splitting headaches with prolonged use. (the headaches have stopped now that i've installed a far uglier but at least darker theme.) Obviously not everyone will feel these way. Some people will find the way the dock lets them do the practical things efficient, some people have different personal preferences, some people won't have the headache problem.. and i am happy that these people get to use mac os x and are satistfied with it. But apple needs to recognize that people's opinions will differ, and build in the greatest amount of customizability they can...
Or maybe they're forcing everyone to use the aqua interface as a test. Maybe they're preparing at the same time a completely old-school os 9 interface you'll be able to switch between at will with an aqua interface. There is already signs of this; there is a quick, simple command (defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSInterfaceStyle nextstep) that will let you completely convert all cocoa apps to an old-school completely nextstep interface, both in appearance and behavior. (Minimizing even works the old, cool, freeform nextstep-dock way.) Maybe apple is forcing us to use the new interface because they want us to all give it as much of a chance as we can so we can overcome our initial misgivings and give real, informed feedback on it instead of just switching into an OS 9-style shell without giving it a chance, and once the real os x is released they'll suddenly give us all these options that were hidden before. But i don't feel terribly optimistic.
Quick note to Prophet of Doom and Ex Machina: Yer idiots. Both of you. OK, maybe not idiots. But you are at the least uninformed. OS 9 was customizable. There were more wierd interface hacks for every Mac OS i've used since 7 than you can imagine, interface customizations that ran deeper than anything i've seen as part of windows. Maybe the proverbial sheeplike mac user who will accept whatever they put in front of them unquestioningly exists, but i don't know where they are. Most mac users either use it unquestioningly because they *like* it that way-- and if they don't, they switch to windows or download an extention or something. meanwhile: OS X will The "customizable" things here have nothing to do with the bsd code inside. The part we are talking about customizing here is the interface, which is not part of the open source core any more than GNOME is part of the linux kernel. Yes, it is possible now for us to compile our own kernels, which is wonderful. But in the end it isn't the least bit relevant to aqua. In the end it will be more possible to make os x "hackable" than it was for OS 9, but this has nothing to do with anything apple will do and allow and everything to do with simple subtleties of the way Objective C and the apis work, everything to do with nib files and messaging.. basically not becuase apple makes it easier to customize in os x, but because os x makes it easier to go around apple.
In the meantime if i was happy with a good, modern OS with a nice convenient bash shell and a clumsy interface i would have switched to debian a year ago. But i'm staying with os x because i think i can meld it to what i want, and because i believe below aqua it is the best OS ever created...
OK, I submit now for your flames. I suggest you ignore the question of whether i am making any kind of general point, take some one tiny aspect of what i've said which is flawed, blow it up real big and use it as an excuse to dismiss everything else i or any other mac user has ever said and conclude with a personal attack.
-mr. cranky
i hate slashdot
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Two-button mouse support is in OS X. The new optical mouse is terrific. And not round.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I simply bought myself a multiple button mouse. Ingenious for a Mac user isn't it? I model quite well now =)
One of the frustrating things about the article, and about the Aqua controversy in general, is that the Nextstep/Openstep users were ignored. It's not just Mac users who are losing out. Apple ignored (horizontal menus) or destroyed (the browser, the dock) parts of the interface, in favor of Mac conventions or rewriting the app to make it unappealing to both sets of users. The Apple file browser is a huge step backwards; so is the rewrite of Projectbuilder. IMO, users would have been better off if Apple had adopted Workspace.app, and junked the aging MacOS interface. (Ironically, Apple did something like this when the moved from Apple II style character based apps to the Macintosh)
I personally feel that Aqua is, as others have stated, a marketing ploy. I fiddled with the beta for awhile- crunching away at it felt like I was sitting at a slicked-up Xterm. The functionality and grace of the MacOS were completely stripped out, in favor of... .what? And it ran like ass on my G3/400 desktop with 512 megs of RAM.
Same on my powerbook, the only difference being that the bettery meter told me how long a charge was going to take when I plugged into the wall.... I'm not trading the big stack of features I love the MacOS for in exchange for one itty bit of convenience.
The Mac has always been hackable- and one up on everything else, you can hack a COMPILED binary. This is great, and I'll miss Resedit if I EVER get around to using OSX.
Users want the Apple Menu. They want the Desktop (a LOT.) They want tabbed folders, they want the control strip.... and out of the handful of Pittsburghers that have tried the Beta, not one of us has anything positive to say about functionality. The menu windows are bulky and ugly, universal drag and drop is a joke, and there are so many things just fundamentally WINDOWS in the way the system now handles that I'm sure more than one crossplatformer is tearing his hair out in anger.
I am totally in favor of hacking this sucker for useability. I've tried a few of the add-ons, but I really don't like the idea of having to boot my apple menu after I boot my OS. I'm not digging tacking an extra 64 megs onto RAM useage in order to boot Photoshop.
Whoever can hack Aqua and replace it with a useable interface- for example, the OS 9 front end (finder windows, apple menu, desktop, control strip, and NO FRIGGIN DOCK) will probably be hailed as a hero in the Mac community.
Mac users want current MacOS functionality, if they wanted NeXT, they would have bought NeXT cubes when the company was still around. Aqua fails to deliver in every area so far, with the possible exception of Colorsync.
Between the Cubes and MacOSX, it looks like NeXT shall rise again... rather the present Mac user base likes it or not.
Yeah mine sometimes spins up the fecking CD drive too, I think if you've ever accessed a page on your CD drive it does it. Even if it doesnt its not instantaneous. As with all windows things it probably depends on how long its been since you installed windows :-)
no sig.
Incase anyone wants to know, in Windows 2000 you would edit C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and place the appropriate lines in there.