Slashdot Mirror
OS X 10.1 Coming Today (Sorta)
usa35.com writes "News.com has a story detailing the release of Apple's 10.1 update. They say "unveiled" today, probably meaning actually disseminated to us general public folks sometime in the coming days." This is of course the release that regular users can actually use. Supposedly this is a free upgrade. Speed improvements, UI fixes, DVD stuffs. I can't wait to test it out a little. And those new iBooks are pretty reasonably priced (I figure that they can sell them cheap by cutting corners like most of the mouse buttons ;)
I'm sorry, but 10.0 was a very... incomplete release. It was sluggish, didn't have important things like DVD or CD-RW capabilities, plus it didn't always work correctly. 10.1, on the other hand, is just incredible. The speed increases are phenomenal (from 50-400%, depending on your CPU) and the added functionality and general GUI cleanup are much welcomed. 10.0 always had sort of a beta feel to it, but 10.1 feels like a sleek, finished OS. Kudos to Apple for the great job.
There is also talk of it finally fixing legacy appletalk support (not TCP/IP based). Yeah I know, move to NFS, be a real man, etc... But a lot of my co-workers are stuck in a MacOS less than 10. Makes it difficult. Not to mention that you can't communicate properly with a Linux server running netatalk. I can't wait!
Check out Althea for a stable IMAP email client for X. Now with SSL!
Sounds crazy, but it's Apple so nothing is ever out of the question.
Macslash has a thread going about the release and a lot of developers with Betas are reporting some significant improvements in speed - most notibly the time to load apps in native and classic modes.
Sound waves should be free!
Not OS X per se, but its core software, Darwin, is essentially an open source BSD release. Quite a lot of work has been done on it. You can't run OS X-specific apps (things that expect the Aqua interface), but Linux and UNIX apps should port as well as they do in OS X.
It's the power and integration of the Macintosh hardware and software that makes OS X shine. Even if Apple chose to port the Whole Thing to x86, you would need a much more fortified PC than you would normally buy off the street.
Better than nothing, or maybe just do FreeBSD. Try www.darwinfo.org.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/
Tom.
Oh arse
The developer tools are a free download from Apple (you have to sign up for a free developer account). I'm sure the new OS 10.1 tools will show up there soon.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
For those of us who also happen to own a multi-processor machine and have been unable to run Mozilla as a native OS X app, it looks like part of the problem was with 10.0.4's MP support and will be fixed in 10.1. For more info, check out this bugzilla bug.
Perhaps this could even mean an end to the dial-up disconnection woes, as those, too, were MP related. (For those of you blissfully unaware, MP machines with a dial-up modem connection had a tendency to randomly drop said connection.)
All in all, very good news, especially since Apple appears to have listened to its customers and will be making the upgrade free.
I have used some of the earlier builds of OSX(though I haven't gotten the latest yet). It should be noted for build 5G64, which I have heard is the Golden Master, DVD playback will not work on Macs that use hardware DVD-decoding(ie. B&W G3 or Yikes G4/PCI with DVD piggyback card, Lombard G3/400 models and perhaps Wallstreet PB G3s with the DVD decoder PC Card). Since some of these computers are the very ones that would most benefit from an OS speed increase, potential owners should check with Apple, or they might have to be prepared to continue using OS9 a little bit longer. Newer macs that use software decoding work great.
I agree...where are the speedups? I was expecting major improvements out of 10.1.
On my Wallstreet G3/300 with 256MB of RAM:
- slightly faster, but not drastically so.
- Launching IS much faster, but this is due to
two-level namespace linkage, not due to any
innate optimization.
- OpenGL still is not implemented for Rage Pro.
- Skyline/Lucent wireless cards still do not work.
Skyline is Farallon's fault, but the Lucent *SHOULD* work, since it worked under OS 9 without
any 3rd party drivers.
- Still cannot eject PCMCIA cards without shutting down. Though it no longer kernel panics when you
manually remove one.
- PCMCIA-based hard drives still are not recognized.
- Still won't play DVD. Apparently they don't support the hardware DVD decoder cards (this IS an officially supported machine...where's the official support?)
- The compiler is godawful slow. I took a project
that built in 58 seconds under OSX Server 1.2, and it takes over 5 minutes to build on OS X 10.1 (on a G4/400 with 1.5GB of RAM!)
- On the plus side, sleep FINALLY works. It used
to turn on the fan when I put the machine to sleep, which would promply drain my batteries dry.
10.1 is finally USABLE, but it's still not what I wonder consider great.
$ java -version
java version "1.3.0"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.3
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.3.0, mixed mode)
So, a reasonably up-to-date version of Java ships with the OS. I'm guessing they'll send out updates with Java's minor releases, but not the micro releases.
The good news is, it's just BSD. So, if you want to upgrade it yourself, you can with a little work. I've yet to find a java app that doesn't run OK on it. I'm currently in the process of downloading Sun's Forte for Java IDE (shipping for Solaris), just to see if I can get that running ;)
--Mid
I have the MS Intellimouse with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel too. On a mac. Just install an extension [USBOverdrive.com], reboot, and voila. Plus you can configure all buttons too. This is a non-issue. Beginners like the simplicity of a zero-button mouse. 'Power users' can buy a multi-button mouse. End of the story.
Specifically, is it bearable on a new iBook? When I tried 10.04 on a new iBook it was like running Windows 2000 on a Pentium 133
Well, it wasn't that slow.. but it was slow.
The reason is very simple.
The finder sucked and they didn't use the graphic acceleration of the videochip.
They rewrote the finder and turned on the grpahic acceleration of the videochip.
Last weekend we had a local MUG meeting in which Apple showed both an iBook and a G4 with MacOS 10.1.
The speed difference was quitte noticable.
The speed was equal to a Pentium III 1 Ghz with windows 2000.
So, it could be a little bit better but it was quitte acceptable.
A: The one mouse button was thought up by a guy named Jeff Raskin who is largely responsible for starting the Macintosh project at Apple. He thought that mouses with more than one mouse button would be confusing for new users. This might seem like an oversight, but when you consider how uncomplex graphical interfaces were back than and the fact that virtually no computers in mass production had mice as an essential navigational tool, it really isn't.
A: Because we can use the regular pull down menus to bring up a menu. If you take a look at *NIX & Windows UI's, you often see that not all menu items for the program are in the pull-down menus. Often, there are some commands that you can only access through right-clicking (i.e. the contextual menu). When this is the case, you're going to need a 2nd mouse button. Contrast this with the mac paradigm, where is it a cardinal sin to have commands that are not listed in the pull-down menus.
A: No and yes. Unlike other platforms, macs have the pull-down menubar at the top of the screen instead of on each window, like you usually find on Windows or GNOME or KDE (yes, KDE does have a mac menubar mode, but not by default). A menubar at the top border of the screen has been proven in usability labs to be far faster to access than menubar stuck on a window, because the user can ram the mouse pointer into the top of the screen to click on the inital menu item and they can't overshoot. This illustrates a principle of Fitt's Law, which states that things on the borders are faster to access than things that aren't because they are infinitely large . To learn more about Fitt's law, go here . This being said, contextual menu (i.e. right-clicking) is faster IF you can do it anywhere to bring up the same menu anywhere on the screen, because the mouse pointer can be anywhere and the menu will appear right under it. Unfortunately, bringing up a contextual menu in windows/GNOME/KDE almost always requires that you first land the mouse on a tiny visual target. If you have to click on a tiny 15x10 pixel icon in an e-mail program to bring up a contextual menu for it, any speed advantage of right clicking is negated.
A: The reason that mac users use those keyboard strokes is because Apple was smart enough to have the keyboard complement the mouse instead of replacing it. Just like right-cliking is supposed to do on windows. Notice that the command key most often used on macs for the keyboard combinations is located in a spot that is in the center of the keyboard, so a user doesn't have to stretch their fingers 3 miles to hit an out of the way key. Also notice that keyboard strokes using the command key make use of the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand: the index finger and the thumb. The result is that keyboard shortcuts on a mac are easy to do, and they can be done easily with one hand. Why don't Windows users use keyboard shortcuts as often as mac users? Because microsoft was stupid and tried to have the keyboard replace the mouse instead of complmenting it. They added those underline thingies on all the menus (technically, they're called mnemonics), which are far less efficient because you have to hit two sets of keys "Alt+firstletter Alt+secondletter" to use them. This added so much visual clutter and so jammed the users mental keyboard-menu associations that most Windows users also filtered out the keyboard shortcuts (i.e. Ctrl+letter). There is even less incentive to use keyboard shortcuts on windows because the ctrl key that makes use of them is far at one end of the keyboard, which makes keyboard combinations with keys in the center of the keyboard very hard to do with one hand and impossible to easily with the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand (the thumb and index finger). One final advantage of mac keyboard shorcuts is that the command key is represented in the menu system by a symbol that take up one character's worth of menu real-estate as opposed to "Alt" or "Ctrl", which take up 3-4 characters of menu real-estate.
A: Yes. I don't think you'll find many mac users who are against having more than one mouse button, but they are against some dumb windows/unix geek who knows nothing about macs and who refuses to learn anything about the way they are designed arrogantly assuming that the machine is unusable in some sort of way.
Windows has three main keyboard modifier keys (Shift, Alt, Ctrl) and two mouse buttons. Macs have four main modifier keys (Shift, Option, Command, and Control) and one mouse button. It works out to the same thing, because the single, straightforward "click" on the Mac is easy to execute in concert with a keyboard modifier key. Control+click, Option+click, Shift+click, Command+click are all easy to use and explain, regardless of left/right handedness, etc.
Mac OS X doesn't require you to use context menus. The Dock's menus can optionally be accessed with a right-click, but that is sensible shortcut for people who use a multiple-button mouse. You Control+click to see the menu, or Command+click to see the actual item that the Dock item refers to. You can also click-and-hold to get a Dock menu, and for most people this is just fine.
If you were running X-Windows on a Dell notebook, you'd have a much more serious problem, because X-Windows expects you to have three buttons. Mac OS X doesn't expect you to have more than one.
There's 2 ways to get this upgrade.
Option 1, the so called 'instant upgrade'. Starting on September 29th, Apple resellers(including the Apple store and other retail outlets. probably CompUSA, MicroCenter, etc) will get CDs that will upgrade from Mac OS X 10.0.4 -> 10.0
Cost: Gas to get to the store
Option 2: The Apple Mac Up To Date program. You print out a PDF form and mail it to Apple. They mail you back the OS X 10,1 CD, as well as the Mac OS 9.2.1 CD and Developer Tools CD, I believe.
Cost: $19.99, a 6-12 week wait(according to the PDF form)
I think I'll swing by a CompUSA saturday, which is when they hand out the CDs(yes, saturday is the release date. Saturday is always the day retail Apple OS's go on sale it seems...)
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47