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."
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
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?
...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
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.
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
...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
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
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
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'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)
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.
>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.
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
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
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
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
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!
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)
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.
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."
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.
----
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.
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)
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.
> 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
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
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."
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
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,
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.
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
How tightly intregrated is Aqua to the OS? Apple's site shows a couple layers of APIs between Darwin and Aqua.
The OS is not (witness Darwin), the apps, however, are. Though the term "Aqua" is somewhat ambigous. It could mean the theme that Apple is currently using on its GUI layer, or it could be the GUI layer itself.
Perhaps OS X users might be happier with a port of X, running Enlightenment and eMac.
Yikes. I sort of doubt that. Mac OS X is much more than BSD running a pretty window manager.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
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.
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
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
Personally I cannot STAND it! But I suppose that just goes to show that people like what they're used to.
infinite height
Right..............
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").
I did not have to know how they worked.
I went to apple.com and read and learned where my apps are.
I read the docs and some websites (and downloaded the classic menu, open strip and jetclock.)
I took 15 fscking minutes to read the brochure that came with os-x.
The user they quoted is a lazy ass.
Remember Mac OS Before the apple menu? I do. The functionality (like being able to add aliases) were added in OS-6. The control strip appeared for powerbooks only in os-7. The mac os this guy misses is less than 5 years old. all of his widgets are relatively new.
OS-X will change over time too.
My fello Macheads...QUIT whining. Send comments ot Apple or whip up something yourself.
Cheers,
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
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
Yeah. It scares them so much that these customization features magically appeared in their software without being written.
Apple has usually been pretty indifferent about UI customization programs like Kaleidoscope. Apple keeps the UI consistent for newbies, but quietly writes in hooks for more advanced users to play with the system. Why do you think they released ResEdit as freeware years and years ago? They don't advertise what you can do, but it's all there. Apple seems to quietly approve of Mac users who like to tweak their system.
It's the blindness of people who are reliant on text files and CLIs to configure their system that leads to the Mac having a reputation of being uncustomizeable. Read any old Mac publication back-issues for a span of 3-4 months if you want to find an article on customizing your system. It was a pretty common thing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
what's really nice with KDE's way of doing it however is you have the choice to turn it off. or on. or off again. or on again...
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
In terms of menus, this means that it's easier to hit a menu if it is placed at an edge of the screen. In Windows apps, there is a space above the menus, so you have to be more precise with the mouse. It's a subtle difference, but it makes a difference in daily usage of the OS.
There is further discussion, with examples, here.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
agreed.
Many user interface studies have shown that it is significantly faster to have the menu on the top than on the top of Windows. Why? The menu height is infinite so there is much less need for fine motor control - you just jam the mouse to the top of the screen. The reason people don't think it is faster is that when accessing a menu on the top of a Window, users are using that fine motor control and lose track of the time it is taking. In other words, you may perceive it to be faster, but if you use a stop watch, it is actually slower. The orignal Macintosh user-interface designers studied this very carefully when they made the decision to put it on top.
See this article on AskTog (go to question #5)
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.
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.
I wonder if this is gonna freak out the folks at Apple
...
I wouldn't think so. They are no doubt expecting people to customize OS X after basing it on a free OS. I think Apple realises that customization is becoming a big thing, and they can avoid hindering that and base OS X on a proven OS at the same time. Not a bad plan
----- rL
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
That's a design difference between Macs and Windows/X -- one menu bar is easier to mouse to and understand than 3 or more on separate windows.
For a new user, if you tell them to go to the menu bar, they don't have to ask "which one?", if there's only one.
The funny thing is, I think Apple just stumbled into this one -- the UI was designed for the original toaster Macs (128K, 512K, SE, SE/30, Classic, etc), which only had 512x324 pixels. A menu on each window would eat up a LOT of screen real estate.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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.
Incase anyone wants to know, in Windows 2000 you would edit C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and place the appropriate lines in there.