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Raskin On 'Raskin On OS X'
Kelly McNeill writes: "A recent editorial appearing on osOpinion.com (and linked
to here on Slashdot last Thursday) dealt with comments made by Mac creator
Jef Raskin and his opinion of Apple's upcoming next generation operating
system OS X. The somewhat controversial editorial generated a ton of mixed response
both here as well as on the publishing site. As it seems, Mr. Raskin's thoughts
on OS X (and Unix) were very misunderstood and he has since stepped up to the plate
to clear the air and responded
to the technology community at large."
--
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Gimp already runs under MacOS X. However Gimp is dependant on X Windows for it's display and this doesn't ship with MacOS X. Instead Apple developed their own Display-PDF based "Quartz" graphics engine and then built their "Aqua" GUI on top of this.
X-Free86 has been ported to Apple's Darwin & MacOS X but it doesn't run under Quartz/Aqua. Thus under MacOS X one must shut them down and run X-Free 86 on it's own; not most Mac users first choice since they then can't use any native GUI applications.
Tenon does have a commercial X Windows server for MacOS X that runs under Quartz/Aqua. Indeed it already runs Gimp just fine. "Xtools" is still in extended beta but it's expected to be final when MacOS X finally ships. This is the sort of thing most Mac users are likely to be most interested in - X windows as a peer and not a separate environment.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
"The user must be in command, and the computer, the obedient servant. "
:)
I don't know about you, but I work only to support my computer habit.
I don't use eleetism in my Email
... is a *TIGHTER* integration
d
/k *cdd %1
/e,%_cwd
;-)
*Why* can't I select files in the gui, and have a shell "smart enough" to know what I selected!?
Or,
*Why* can't I select files in the shell, i.e. select *.txt *.doc, and have those files selected in the gui explorer!?
Here is how I have a partial compromise on my Win2K boxes:
I press Windows-E to bring up the explorer, with drives on the left pane, current contents of the selected folder on the right pane. I can right-click on a folder/directoy, and I get a menu choice "4NT Prompt Here" A shell opens up with it already in the selected directory.
If I navigate around in the shell, changing directories, I have a command called "explore", (which I usually make an alias called "x") that brings up the 2 pane explorer view, with the current directory allready selected!
It is REAL handy being able to go back and forth between the shell and the gui explorer.
Here is how you can do this under Windows...
Regedit:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Prompt\
(Default)&Prompt there
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Prompt\comman
REG_SZ: 4NT
explorer
4NT has the special commands "cdd" for change drive & directory, and %_cwd for "current working directory", since the default cmd.exe that ships with Windows is, uhm, under-powered
Not to say that it couldn't be done, but if you want Gimp to have an interface consistent with OSX (I don't mean aqua, I mean menu selections, keyboard shorcuts, dialogs, etc), that will necessitate some major changes. If you like appearances, this will especially be an issue. For starters, there's the matter of menus. The menu selections in Gimp (as pretty much in all other GNOME programs that use libgnomeui macros) are copied from M$. This means getting into the source code and changing the menu selections such as "Exit" to "Quit"(and dealing gracefully with the unused underline accelerators). It sounds petty, but mac people are UI afficiado's, and we don't tolerate windoze-lookin' stuff. You also have to keep in mind that the Gimp UI was designed for a UI system that doesn't have the menubar at the top. In order to have multiple top-level windows without having a menu for each one(which might be weird in a graphics program), gimp on X-windows uses (and IMAO, abuses) the hell out of contextual menus (aka right-clicking). To get GIMP to work, look, and feel well on an UI that implements a global menubar (such as OS X), you're going to have to move or duplicate alot of the stuff from contextual menu and put it in pull down menus. And some stuff that you find in a right-click menu might not translate very well to a global menubar menu if it's blindly copied. Yet more code writing.
There's other UI matters, such as dialogs. For example, mac users are used to seeing dialogs that have the "Cancel" button on the left and the "OK" button on the right (UI experts such as Bruce Tognizzini say this is the correct way to do it, but that's another arguement for another time). Gnome does it the other way (the Windows way), where you have "Ok" on the left and "Cancel" on the right. Until the Gnome project decides to implement some sort of platform look and feel code (or libgnomeui for OSX is seriously recoded), the dialogs in Gimp under OSX wouldn't look like real mac dialogs.
Finally, the other thing you have to keep in mind is that Gtk/Gnome straightly recompiled without serious work probably wouldn't take advantage of all those tasty OSX/G4 graphics features like Altivec (someone correct me if the powerpc linux gdk, libart, etc. work well with altivec), PDF-based graphics system, and color correction. I'm not saying a port of Gimp to OS X can't be done, but to keep UI consistency with OS X and utilize all its special features and optimizations to the fullest would probably be a lot of work.
I'd like to see it happen, tho'.The ATI video cards since the Rage 128 based units have had one thing sorely lacking in any other video cards even today: an integrated idct (inverse discrete cosine transform, if I recall) unit in the video hardware. Basically, the idct is the most intensive part of MPEG-2/DVD decoding, so doing it in hardware takes most of the work off the CPU. Granted, a full hardware MPEG-2 card takes almost all the burden off the processor, but there's something you obviously don't know.
Hardware isn't necessarily better than software, if the hardware takes shortcuts that the software doesn't and you have enough processing power to run the software. I myself have a Hollywood+ card which I have been very happy with--I used to laugh at those fools using PowerDVD or other software-based DVD players, when I had dedicated hardware that had higher image quality.
However, for analogue video capture as well as its TV tuner features--the best on the market, bar none--I got an ATI All-in-Wonder 128. On my old K6-2 400 machine it couldn't play DVDs well at all, which was fine since I got the Hollywood+ for that. Well, when I got my new KT7-RAID not too long ago, with a processor that'll o/c to 1GHz, I reformatted and reinstalled everything. I tried the ATI's DVD software, just to soo if it worked with the faster machine and all--and it did, surprisingly so. It has much better image quality than the Hollywood+ does. I hate to say it, since I championed the REALmagic card for so long, so smug that it was better than any other DVD solution. But, the fact is thatimages don't lie, and after comparing the output time and again from both cards--the Hollywood+ with its complete hardware MPEG-2 decoding, and the ATI with its hardware idct unit and the rest in software, I came to the reluctant realization that the ATI unit had a much clearer, more detailed image.
The key is that I think the Hollywood+ must be trying to do some edge enhancement or something, because when I examine the two streams on my 20 inch 1600x1200 display, the ATI looks extremely lifelike and the Hollywood+ seems to look duller, less sharp but with more prominent edges. To try to eliminate resolution as a factor, I dropped down to 800x600 and 1024x768 to see if it made a difference--but it didn't. The ATI was always clearer, crisper, than the H+. This was on a new install with the latest drivers and the latest VIA 4-in-1's and the latest BIOS, with a Pioneer 10x DVD drive, and everything seemed to be functioning perfectly.
Basically, I think the ATI's DVD software, based around the Cinemaster decoding engine, does a reference-quality job of decoding DVDs. The H+, on the other hand, seems to use some edge enhancement trick, or just doesn't decode as well. I think it's the former, because the H+ does in fact look better than the ATI when viewed on a standard television via the on-card TV Out. I think the H+'s decoding engine was designed around the idea of decoding DVDs for display on a standard TV, which doesn't benefit from a clear full-res picture but does benefit from a little bit of modest edge enhancement. Now, I could be totally off base with thisedge-enhancement theory, maybe the H+ doesn't do that, but the fact remains that its picture is not nearly as clear and pristine as that of the ATI at high resolutions or the native DVD res, though the H+ does look better than the ATI on a regular TV. The other area in which the H+ is superior is in its color: it has more vivid, rich colors and saturation than the ATI, but this is a function ATI and Cinemaster could easily improve in future software revisions--as it is, the ATI software offers little in the way of color/saturation/hue/brightness tweaking, while the H+ gives you total control.
And it could go without saying that the ATI needs more CPU time, but even with my little Duron cranked down to a paltry 700 it still only eats ~30 to ~50 percent of the CPU, with a few other processes in the background to boot. The H+ uses much less, but the tradeoff is in image quality. Disagree all you want, but as an owner of both I have compared performance and decided to use the ATI when viewing DVDs on my PC, but when playing them on my TV for other people I use the H+. At high res, the ATI wins hands-down.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
1) Virtually all of today's GUI's are derived directly or indirectly from his work on and before the Mac.
2) He's written a book that explains what 'something much better' might look like.
Then came along Apple with their underpowered Macintosh programmed in assembly language and Pascal. They produced something that looked nice, but its model of applications and data was not much different from your average DOS machine. And that metaphor has held the desktop in a tight grip ever since and been copied over and over again, by Windows and now Gnome and KDE.
I think what Raskin is complaining about is ultimately due to Apple and their initial success with what was already then a broken paradigm. It seems like adding insult to injury for an Apple employee to come back now, 15 years later, and say that everybody is doing things wrong. Well, of course we are doing things wrong. That's because the market and users expect things to be done "wrong". Undoing the damage now will be much harder because everybody now expects things to be done that way.
Jef,
:)
Regards and my apologies for the backlash from a few here that felt your comments too close at heart
I'm working on a new UI written in objC and built around OpenGL, IBM Via Voice and touch input. I've been a fan of you and the MacOS for quite sometime. Our software is now mature enough to be opened to the public (It's an opensource project, but due to the nature of the project, we saw that it would be best that we worked on it silently till it matured towards version 1.0). Right now we have been able to built the server/client application on Linux, SGI and Digital Unix archs.
We have 2 developes and 5 artists/designers. The team came from various backgrounds (including game development (and a very dead famous game company), sgi and yes microsoft).
Our solution to the problem of UI was to forget everthing that we saw in other UI's out there. We even forgot what we saw in futuristic UI's (often seen in SciFi and so on).
The use of an UI should be intutive enough for a child of say age 3, to be able to play around and navigate with ease. Our design relies around the way humans see things in general. The whole interface is a 3d window into a virtual space (which we call home for a lack of a better term), where you interact with objects such as pens and paper to write.
Now the input to the UI could be done via touch (touch screen), mouse, keyboard and voice. One of us worked real hard on the Via voice engine and got it working well enough with a unqiue set of gramatical markup language that lets us navigate the UI with ease.
For example, one of the applications we have is something called Achilles. Achilles is our human interface to a number of other transports (Eg: E-mail, News, Jabber (yes it works very well with jabber), IRC and even slashdot). Achilles interface is represented virtually by an Avatar (by default called Vishnu). A realistic human type avatar. Say you get a mail, Vishnu would call out for you, and when you aproach him, he'd open his hand and show you the scroll, that's how the e-mail goes, and a number of things are also send through the voice transcoder to be read out through the speakers intead of been shown.
Now that's how some of our applications are. But we seem to have stumbled on a problem that we cant seem to get away from. Vishnu is very bright and nice, but everytime we present it to a test user, they almost always reverts Vishnu to an alternative text input interface. And read mail as they did with their other applications. But when we presented the same applications to a child, they immeditaly used the highest form of non abstraction (ie. Voice + Realitistically animated character).
Now our question to you is. Is there a problem with the way we visualize UI's ? Is this derived from how we've seen UI's in the past? What would it take to break people from the usual Windows/Mac UI habits?
Thank you.
Trust the source!
Like all computer it will read your mind. The problem is that now all the computers can do with the information they pick up off of your brain waves is store it and secretly plot against you. Do you think its a coincidence that your computer only crashes when your trying to get important work done? Or that only the important files get corrupted? Its all a plot I tell you, the computers are out to get us. When I see adds for new computer hardware all I can think is "dear God, the've learned how to reproduce using a Human as the gestation hoast, but then I'm a bit mental at times.
Others have Linux because of either the free/open-source model as a philosophical thing, or because they're in education and linux (w/ the source codes) is a great way to learn OS design and implementation.
I couldn't name one person out there who says "yeah, i just HAD to go get Linux 'cause there's this great Desktop called GNOME out there..."
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I'm sure he has some great ideas (it's giving me a few ideas) but I don't think he's helping himself much. The whole piece was "I didn't say that. If you would read my book you would know better." Well, let's see. Here's an (printer friendly version) article by him, from Wired magazine.
p r.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/1.6_guis_
What does he say? The same stuff he says he didn't say. Start typing to make a document. Start drawing with a pen tablet to make a drawing. "One big mistake is the idea of an operating system." And, "An operating system, even the saccharine Mac or Windows desktop, is the program you have to hassle with before you get to hassle
with the application. It does nothing for you, wastes your time, is unnecessary."
How can he blame his critics for saying such things?
AI shell> get all files ending in tmp in my home place
OK, I've found 10 files for your request
AI shell> go to the place where my temporary files are stored
OK
AI shell> drop the files there
10 files dropped.
You have been eaten by a Grue.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
AI Shell> Go North
Ok.
You see a troll.
AI Shell> Kill Troll
You hit the troll.
Troll says "p0uR h0t gr1tZ d0Wn mY pAnTz!"
Troll died.
You found one suspicious box of kleenex (used).
And for the bloat-haters out there, such an "AI Shell" would actually be very similiar to the natural language interpreter in Zork and other Infocom games. And that ran fine on 8-bit 48K machines.
Apple has something similiar with HyperTalk/AppleScript, but the filesystem bindings are really wierd, and furthermore, it doesn't really run interactively.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Definitely. The command line for the average user is absolutely garbage. Why doesn't the Linux/FreeBSD community recognize its explosive growth for what it is: proliferation of decent GUI's like KDE2, Gnome and Eazel is causing the growth.
I have a professor who's been using Unix for some 20 years (he is the only one in our college with a Sparc on his desktop), and he prefers the GUI to the command line for most tasks. I installed RedHat on his laptop, just with the command line (he originally said this was fine) and he came back in a month asking for X-Windows.
Point is, neither the command line nor most GUIs are terribly intuitive. But GUIs, for the end user, make a hell of a lot more sense. Unix's underpinnings are great. Its current interface is absolute garbage.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
He just hates to be wrong...
he refered to us as "making a mistake" and "he is disappointed so few of them(us) took the time to understand the context of his remark(s)"
Not once does he say, "well I guess I should have said".....or "what i meant was"....He seemed to blame us for not getting it. As if he made no mistakes, but it was the reader that was mistaken 100%.
I guess I just dont like the idea that he did not put his ideas out correctly and then goes on the make it the reader's problem - I almost get the feeling of "if you did not read it right, you are dumb."
Quite cocky if you ask me...
Jef is right.
When you're writing a document in your favorite OS, be it OS X, Win2k, or Linux, it should be the interface of writing the document, and not the interface of the OS, that you should be dealing with. The constraint, put before by he and his crew upon the first iteration of the Mac OS, was of consistent UI so that all apps looked alike and felt alike. It was supposed to lessen the learning curve.
What he is saying isn't wrong. If the OS is an interface you have to learn first, before you can use your app or do your work, it is a waste of time, it is unnecessary. Hardware should be powerful enough today that the OS intrusion should be minimal. When you're using something like Netscape, a web browser, it should be a world of URLs, links, images, files, and content. You shouldn't have to worry about fonts, except perhaps as a preference, or printer setup, except when you want to choose specific printers, or about security settings, except when you want warnings or such. Compare that with Linux, and compare that with Windows. Printers and fonts and stuff just works behind the scenes. Netscape does it's part, and gets what it needs from the OS, without having to fiddle with configuring printers for Netscape, configuring fonts or font servers for Netscape, etc.
Or something similar with CD burning, under OS X and under Windows. If the drive is connected, all you have to do is drag files to it to burn stuff to it! No interface windows, no volume information, no format or filename or filesystem fiddling. Just treat is as another device to write to!
Treat ripping music, making mp3s, and burning them as one set of functions. That's iTunes. OS doesn't get in the way. In fact, if OS really didn't get in the way, the CD should automatically connect with CDDB, so that when you popped up explorer or Finder, the CD has all the names, titles, album info, etc. Drag one of these items into an MP3 folder, or just drag the whole CD into the MP3 folder, and mp3 files, or even a whole mp3 album, gets created. The UI, in this case drag and drop, don't get in the way, and are the seamless transparent means by which one could operate. The OS merges functionality with the Apps involved, but it's the app you're using that gets the focus.
His much maligned word processing example; start typing, and the OS should figure out you're writing an email, or a letter, or drafting a document. Does the system do it for you now? No, you need to find the right icon or the right folder, first. Why should this be? Why should the system be smart enough to figure out what we need? If you want to start browsing, just typing http://slashdot.org into a commandline-like interface should be enough to bring up Netscape. If you want to send an email, typing louisjr@nospam.com should bring up the right email program. Want to play music? How about 'play sad_songs' Or pop a CD into the drive. Want to copy it? 'copy CD to c:\scratch\music'
Of course, my own guesses and implementation of Jef's idea may be broken too. But I think there's merit.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Mac OS X is basically BSD under the hood, so source compatibility should be good. I was able to compile and run most of the Obfuscated C Contest entries without a hitch. XFree86 has already been ported to OS X in full-screen mode; a hot key toggles between it and the normal OS X interface. Tenon is working on a (commercial) rootless X server for OS X, they have a beta available here.
I really tend to judge OS's by looks a,d not substance I suppose, which is why I like gnome and Macs and not MS so much.
I hope you're not implying that MS wins on substance :)
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Mac OS X has very little to do with Mac OS 6.0-7.5, and the relationship between them is only on the surface. (Hell, not one machine that can run Mac OS 7.5 will run OS X.) Mac OS X is not an "old-designed, cooperative multitasking OS;" it is "UNIX... made at least somewhat usable to Joe Schmoe."
The Mac OS's strength has always been its powerful but easy to use (the two are not mutually exclusive) interface. It was never designed for novices; it was designed so that the computer does not get in the way of the user's work (as Raskin said). The user could be a third grader or any power user who could stand the OS's admittedly weak underpinnings. The lack of a command line does not make Mac OS < 10 a toy for third graders and grandmothers; it makes it a tool that a relatively large audience can use relatively efficiently, whether they be third graders, grandmothers, or people who know computers very well and have real work to get done.
At the risk of pointing at the blatantly obvious, Mac OS X has a GUI that seems like it will be at least decent (it may not be as mature as Mac OS 9 until version X.1 or X.2) coupled with a command line (for those who want it) all built on top of a buzzword compliant core.
Therefore, Mac OS X is an OS that third graders can and 'power users' can both use as they see fit. I've been running the Public Beta for 4 months now, and this is definitely not your grandmother's OS (although mine will be using it :) ).
Apple has "been dying" for the past 10-12 years or so. Just like I wouldn't reccomend Linux for people who have problems running winblows, I wouldn't reccomend an AVID or an SGI to someone who just wants to edit their Public Access TV show.
Having worked on SGIs and Apples (both Mac powered AVIDs and standalone DV-equipped Macs), in both professional and commercial-grade applications, Apple is *far* better at doing most TV-quality applications that need to get done.
Unless you're doing Music Video editing, special effects, or are producing the next 3 hour long movie, an Apple w/ Final Cut Pro (or even Imovie) will do what you want, when you want it to, without having to resort to more costly options that produce only marginally higher quality stuff.
P.S. G4 video output made for TV production and watching DVDs. Most PC video cards are made for playng quake. Which tastes better: Apples or Oranges?