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Ars Technica OS X 10.1 Review
Joystickit writes: "John Siracusa over at Arstechnica has posted his review of OS X 10.1. He comes to the conclusion that 10.1 is much improved but still leaves much to be desired. It is an excellent read. He always seems to have the most in-depth reviews. Check it out." John's earlier OS X reviews are excellent as well; seeing what Apple does right and wrong is informative reading no matter what OS you prefer.
Cause they're competition. New blood, competition, and rivalry prevent stagnation, inbreeding, and decay.
GPL Deconstructed
Here is CNET's review, which gives a quicker summary of the bottom line. Probably the most important piece is the improved feature set for working on a Windows network, which will make the Mac much more friendly in a corporate MS-owned environment.
"I am a cipher, a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce" -Jimmy James
John Siracusa writes solid reviews. I enjoyed this, as well as his other arstechnica OS X articles.
I like his "hands on" approach to testing OS K's handling of nice: compile main(){for(;;);} and run it!
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Can we get over our parochial OS and license flame wars to say "Well done" to the BSD crowd?
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
It has a very good looking desktop. Yet behind that beauty it has the power of one of the most powerful operating systems in recent history. In the past it has been often immitated, but never equaled. Windows '95 was a direct rip of the current (at the time) version of MacOS. And yet it missed out on the important points. Sure I could put in a CD and it would autoplay it, but what if I wanted the contents of the disc that I had just inserted to be available to me at that instant from the desktop? On MacOS I wouldn't have to go through the the same old "My Computer->CD Rom Drive" nonsense.
Ease of use people. That's what it's all about. Apple has always had it, Microsoft keeps trying and missing, and Linux is getting there via comapnies like Mandrake and desktops like KDE.
Apple: Port OS X to the Intel platform. Microsoft is already running scared, now is the time to make them cower in fear.
There are some other problems with 10.1 but for the most part I'd say the upgrade is well worth it.
CNET also has a review of OS 10.1. There's some contraversy surrounding The "Free" OS X 10.1 Update that costs you $20. TechTV (formerlly ZDTV) also has a review of Mac OS X 10.1. I'd recommend anyone interested in Mac OS X 10.1 read all these reviews to get full coverage, and unbiased opinions.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
...such an informed review of OS X finally.
Far too many reviews concentrate on the lack of Carbon apps for X. Of course this is a big deal, but it also shouldnt be any surprise - its a completely new OS. Besides, by next year, every major Mac application will be carbonized.
I recently started a new job and could choose between Windows, Linux and OS X. I thought, what the hell, I've never worked with Macs much, I wanna have a play with X, and if it sucks I can just slap Linux on there anyway.
After the first day of using it, I've never really thought about using anything other than X. Its a dream. As far as I'm concerned, its the best mix of Mac-style GUI, and a unix workhorse core. Who could ask for anything else?
Yeah, theres still some rough edges, things that should be there but arent, but theres also some damn nice stuff in there. I'd say I'm pretty neutral - I use Windows and Linux at home, and OS X at work with the occasional recourse to OS 9. I'm saving my pennies for a new 667MHz tiBook.
Os X is a Good Thing (tm). Bringing unix and open source to the masses. Stop pissing and moaning about what it lacks compared to Linux. OS X is nothing like Linux in user and market terms.
And, please, I implore, no one-button-mouse cracks.
While I respect John's reviews (and frequent ars), I think he understated the advantage of the speed boost in 10.1. Where my family's G3/450 desktop originally could not run OS X acceptably, as of 10.1 it has become the primary OS. RAM usage in classic has been massively improved (resulting in yet another overall performance boost), everything is quicker, and if you have a Dual 800 it will probably even slice your bread. ;)
On my 2001 iBook (with DVD drive) I am able to do the following (among other things of course):
1. Capture DV footage, edit it, and output it right back out onto a camera (or play it to a tv).
2. Run Apache, PHP4, and mySQL flawlessly together and then replicate my work onto my "real, live" server on the web.
3. Watch DVD's with no stuttering or slowdowns while working in the shell, editing code in BBEdit, listening to iTunes, and stress-testing the above Apache setup.
Make no mistake, OSX still has a way to go, but give it a year and it will be the propriatary OS to beat!!!!!
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
His rants on metadata are way off. Although file extensions for typing violate the basic rule of metadata, they still work better than Type/Creator codes.
I am sick and tired of hearing the rants about the inherently wrong nature of file extensions, versus the 'good enough' nature of Creator/Types. No. Both violate important principles, but file extensions can work well, and Creator/Type can not. Creator/Type advocates emphasize one virtue (the metadata nature of the typing system) and ignore the gross failures of Creator/Type to actually support what users need to do.
--Matthew
Mac OS X is eye candy. Pure eye candy.
10.1 is much improved. The speed improvment
is tremendous.
There are few things that are
annoying like not being able to get rid of the
menu bar at the top of the screen, but that puts the Mac is Mac OS.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Sure it has a few bugs here and there still, but the progress is great and the updates frequent, if not a little too much on the "big production" side.
I ordered my 10.1 update the day it was released. It *just* arrived today. (Good thing I have other connections which were able to get me an update image the day after it came out :)
Why on earth do so many people focus on the lack of a DVD video playback? I just don't understand it...do that many people use their computer DVD to watch movies on, instead of a dedicated DVD player attached to their TV and stereo?
I am personally a fan of having certain options (such as attaching the dock to the top of the screen) only accessible via power user edits (i.e. non-GUI in Apple's tools, or GUI via 3rd-party tools like TinkerTool). Keeping the experience with as few options as necessary and as clean as possible is more important for most users than a plethora of features.
Ease of use people. That's what it's all about. Apple has always had it
They have? I beg to differ.
I think you're mistaking user familiarity with ease of use. I find Linux to be much easier to use than any rev of Mac OS I've tried (from 7.x up to X) - the Mac only has one button for crying out loud!
I've actually seen a computer newbie use a Mac as their first computer. Sure, she was able to use it, but she kept complaining that her internet connection didn't work - sometimes she'd double-click on the browser icon, and it wouldn't start - it turns out that she was clicking on the "close" gadget to close the browser, but instead of closing the application it just closed the application window.. the browser was still running! And when she tried starting the browser a second time, it just flashed the "browser" icon in the top left of the screen.. hardly what I would call "easy to use". Until she was shown what to look for, she had no idea that clicking "close" didn't actually close the application (even though it did for nearly everything else.)
I could go on about the "Trashcan" being used to eject disks, etc., but I hope you get my point. It's only easy to use because you believe it's easy to use.
John Siracusa has written some wonderful reviews on each of the versions of Mac OS X, from early betas, right up to 10.1, and I have enjoyed reading them.
But I must disagree with him on his views about file extensions. He is almost right when he says that applications "MUST" use file types, but I would relax that to "should". It's still stronger than Apple's "may", but more realistic.
He should realise that there are too many places where file types and creators are lost to rely on them. For example, a pure java application can't do file types, or when you are file sharing using windows (smb) or Unix (NFS) servers, you're going to lose if you need to have file types in there.
The fact is that the rest of the world doesn't support Apple's innovations, and they can't fight this uphill battle any more.
Give it up John. File types and creator codes are one of the defining aspects of the Macintosh experience, until you try to share your work with other people.
In what way is that amazing to anyone but users of previous Mac OSes or win3.x?
Considering the MAC is primeraly used in the DTP/Graphics area, does anyone know when the real graphic apps (native mode) will start flowing.
If I could get a OSX native copy of Quark, Photoshop & Illustrator we would switch all of our OS9 desktops to OSX immediatly.
This has puzzled me for a little while... When OS X was first announced, I read it as the letter X, like Rally X. Apparently it's really pronounced "O S Ten", because that's what it is.
If that's so, then what's OS X 10.1? "O S Ten Ten Point One"? Surely it should be OS 10.1 (which is what it is) with no X, or OS X 1.1 or R2 or similar (if it's a whole 'different product')?
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
If you have the pleasure of using an OS X box and want to install any of a number of open source packages, I highly recommend that you check out fink.sourceforge.net.
Fink includes a set of package descriptions that patch a downloaded sourceball, configure and compile, install it into a custom directory, then debianize the binary...
...and, finally, installs the debian package.
There is also a binary version available.
i.e. you can:
'fink install gimp'
... and it installs gimp and all depdencies.
Sircusa's article is extraordinarily pedantic, which is not all bad -- he raises valid points, and we need to keep Apple on their toes. However, the big point sort of gets lost in the details: OS X is the magic combination of Usability and UNIX we've been wishing for all these years.
Linux developers, take notes. Most of what OS X is doing is not magic -- it's just a lot of steady, careful attention to usability. Honestly, how hard would it be to implement OS X's lovely Network Settings panel under Linux, for example? Yes, the OS X Finder is still a bit glitchy, but it's still way ahead of the various Linux file system browsers I've used. Yes, the Dock has its glitches, but it's a darn shot easier to use and configure than either Gnome or KDE's taskbars. Apple is hardly perfect, but they are extraordinarily good at the usability stuff, where Linux software generally is not.
That's a shame -- Linux can and should be just as gorgeous and usable as OS X, or any other OS on the planet.
Linux developers: get off the high horse, and lay off the one-button cracks. You have a lot to learn, and if you are earnest students of this new OS now, in five years you'll be teaching things to Apple.
The article states that the update is obtained:
However, no update is available by download. That's getting kinda screwy. Even MS makes service packs available by download. Did a bean counter at Apple figure out that distributing tons of free CDs to stores is cheaper than the bandwidth? Yet they must be making a profit on the mail orders, as a CD-ROM costs only $1 to stamp and package, then add a few bucks for postage and let a distributor take care of the rest.
Anyone else find this weird?
One thing to be wary of when inter-operating OS X 10.x with Windows machines is the Mac approach to links/shortcuts. When you make a shortcut in Windows, it's a bit like a soft link in Unix- it's only a pointer. When you copy a shortcut in Windows, you don't do anything with the target .exe
or whatnot.
When doing backups of OS 10.x laptops from an NT-based backup system, I found that OS 10.x was sending the remote client (the backup agent) into a filesystem loop. I had the user's home directory shared and the Agent backed up files similar to \\computer\share\Library\Documents\Library\Documen ts\....
Which made for a drawn-out backup of a 300 Meg set of folders.
On a personal scale, this is easy to remember, but IIRC Apple has been preaching about how good of a network citizen OSX is. Quoting their site,
"We've also added support to natively connect to Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Unix-based SAMBA file servers with the built-in SMB client. These servers appear right in the Finder like any other file server. This makes Mac OS X fluent in all of today's network languages."
I'm not flaming Apple, but it seems that when it comes to interoperability between OS's, Apple could learn a lesson or two from the Unix side of the market.
On a side not, was anyone else annoyed with the way Apple promised OS 10.1 is September, announced it on the 23rd, then waited until the last possible day of the month to actually ship it? I can't find the Register article stating it, but an Apple rep was quoted as saying something to the effect of "we promised September as a release date, and we are still technically on-target for that".
I complain about not having DVD playback because I paid extra for a DVD drive in my B&W G3. Now it doesn't work. They promised DVD playback in the point release, but later rewrote that to exclude hardware DVD players.
Tssst. The update is not available on the Net because Apple didn't want to pay for the kind of server bandwith needed to distribute a 500 MB update to so many people. The update has been available for free in many Apple retailers. I got mine in France without a problem. I just had to show the Mac OS X proof-of-purchase which came with my iBook.
They've killed ars!
Making HTTP connection to arstechnica.com
Alert!: Unable to access document.
Yes it looks purty but I don't think it's any easier to use. In fact compared to 9.x the desktop metaphor is just plain retarded. I'm sure there is a strong voice somewhere in Apple insisting the dock should do everything. This voice is wrong; many Mac users like having icons strewn about the place so the dock should not be so integral. I also don't like that some context menu options like "Make Alias" are missing in certain view modes in finder and you can't label stuff anymore. I also don't think much of the Classic mode - it works, but seems to be an entity in its own right with little attempt made to share settings or account info between Classic or OS X.
Application wise, you get pretty much the equivalents of Mac OS 9 plus a few Unix style monitoring tools. No great shakes, everything seemed pretty much to work as expected. The DVD player is a major improvement over that piece of shit that OS 9.x touted, but still suffers from a minimalist UI. Quicktime still nags you to upgrade to pro - a major disencentive to ever use it again. iTunes is a nice new app for playing MP3s.
Aqua looks lovely but hogs CPU and offers few innovations beyond the old classic look. I would have preferred a incremental UI upgrade. I also wonder WTF Apple is doing by "hardcoding" all these colours and that damned brushed metal look - haven't they heard of customisation? I think this hardcoding will bite them as apps are likely to be skinned to look like Aqua which is all well and good until Apple go and change the L&F once more - UI hell will ensure just like on Linux.
On the other hand, OS X is Unix underneath (BSD in fact) and seems a lot more stable than OS 9. I did hang it pretty convincingly once and had to reboot but normally I could recover with the ALT+Apple+Esc. It's worrying that I've had to do this quite a bit during setting the machine up. I also finally figured out to enable the root (because it's disabled by default) so I was able to drop to a console and install a few GNU tools that I like.
So all in all a mixed bag. Stability good, usability bad. The desktop is a major, major step backwards. Personally I wouldn't recommend it to a traditional Mac user unless they're clamouring for the Unix stability. Wait until 10.5 or 11 even.
I complain about not having DVD playback in Linux because I paid extra for a DVD drive in my computer. Now that I'm not using Windows it doesn't work.
I guess the only difference is that Apple made both the hardware and the software so they should support thier own hardware!
the charge is not for the software itself, but for the production costs associated with the media, tiny manual, etc...
You can supposedly walk into any Apple Store and get a free copy of the CD burned for you. I can't say for sure as I don't have an Apple Store within 200 miles. heh.
Still, the price seems a little high. And, they should have made some effort to offer the upgrade via download (although it is around 300 megs).
that would be because the update is around 600+megs. How many people do you know can/would down load all of that?
There is also updates to the developer CD's that are also included on seperate CD's.
For trash, when you select the CD-ROM or mounted drive or whatever... guess what happens? The Trashcan icon *changes*. It becomes an eject icon.
Other than that you can *also* press the eject button, the f-12 key, or Apple-E.
On a Mac, the fifth window is accessable by right-clicking on the IE icon in the Dock and selecting the fifth window.
Or, if you use a single button mouse, ctrl-clicking. Or keeping the button depressed until the contextual menu pops up.
Point being, I think the MacOS UI is better, not everywhere, but in most places.
Instead of 50 items in the task bar (5 windows per app, 10 apps), you have 10 icons in the Dock with context windows of 5 entries each.
GPL Deconstructed
For example. If I have Mac IE open with 5 windows, to get to the 5th window (which is hidden behind quark) I have to click on the apple menu to activate IE, then minimise 4 windows before I can get to the 5th. On a PC, the 5th window is 1 click on the task bar away!
Apparently you haven't used OS X much?
Right-click on IE in the dock (yes, I have a two-button mouse) and you get a list of all of its windows. You can choose one to bring it to the front. You can also hide or show all of them en masse.
I always found the windows taskbar irritating, because opening more windows clutters it up. I like having the windows grouped by app. I guess familiarity is king, and it's all a matter of individual taste -- although in this case, Microsoft agrees with Apple, since they're switching to a windows-grouped-by-app model in XP.
You dont say what machine your using. I would guess a dual 800 because thats not my experience. I can do the same on my dual 866 PC with 1 gig of ram and the machine probably cost 1/3 of the mac. Dont get me wrong I love the UI and I own a 733 quicksilver, but things mac users think are suddenly amazing are no big deal on a PC.
Why didn't they use mirrors? I'm sure they could get people to help out.
In what way is that amazing to anyone but users of previous Mac OSes or win3.x?
In the same way that having a user connect a firewire DV camera into their computer and having it work without any configuration issues (yes, recompiling the Kernel for "Video-For-Linux" is a "configuration issue"), and then using an industrial strength GUI, and professional grade video editing software is amazing to Linux users. I mean, there barely is a viable DVD player available for Linux! (I know they're out there, but there isn't a feature complete one out there yet.) Also, I have yet to find USB support for Linux that rivals Apple's support.
Linux is great, but it's not the answer for everything. The funny thing is, OSX seems to be slowly becoming that.
How the fuck was that offtopic? I fail to see how any comment could have been more ontopic.
You dont say what machine your using.
Which part of On my 2001 iBook (with DVD drive) ... did you miss? It is the first line of the post you are replying to.
Or were you just a troll?
Steve M
Now THAT was a good call! Pr0pz to all my AC troll homiez!
Holy shit, a *two* button mouse?!?!? Apple really is blazing trails!
...OR they could go to any Apple dealer and pick up the FREE updater. Yes there's a $19 updater - it comes with more CDs/Docs/Etc than the free one. It's a 550MB update. Apple's already shipped 200,000 upgrade CDs - imagine the bandwidth -> not so upsetting that it's not downloadable. $19 $79 for those alleging MS-like upgrade policies. [Ignoring the $0 version].
I don't think users of Windows 3.x would especially amazed by that. YMMV.
BSD Subsystem: 2,723K
The rest of the updates are unecessary language packs. I think a lot of people would be willing to download a 217 meg update. If you don't have a cable modem at home, download it at work and burn it on CD. As for cost, ever hear of mirrors? Besides, Apple should take responsibilty and the bandwidth hit to fix the buggy software releases. Using the bandwidth rational then I guess Linux distros should start charging for downloads and what about Windows Update?
A couple of minutes with a hex editor and you'll be able to play DVDs in OS X.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
While I agree that a free download would have been really nice for those who wanted the upgrade fast, you could get the upgrade CDs for X and 9 for free at a some stores (e.g. MicroCenter, CompUSA, Elite and the Apple stores themselves). I figure Apple wanted the people to actually go to the stores so that they might buy other stuff while they get their upgrade CDs. Too bad that the supply for the update CDs wasn't that great, so you had to wait a couple of days to catch a fresh shipment at your local store.
Thats $19.95 once. Not per month.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Besides being ass-huge, one point that everyone misses is that 10.1 contains a DVD Player.
The DVD Forum license prohibits downloadable players. This issue generates flames on PC boards from time-to-time, so Apple isn't alone.
(and yes I realize that they could have packaged the DVD separately, but judging by the amount of flamage over the topic, it wouldn't have helped.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with almost everything you said.
His rants on metadata are way off. Although file extensions for typing violate the basic rule of metadata, they still work better than Type/Creator codes.
No way. Type/Creator codes rock. They absolutely devastate file extensions in user-friendliness. Besides, there's nothing to stop you from using extensions. OS X supports either or both.
Let me get this straight: You prefer a system with only one axis for categorizing files, where the user can change the type of a file (leaving behind no trace of what it used to be) by accident; where one application on installation hijacks all documents sharing an extension type it recognizes, by default. You cite as an example a file type that Windows bastardized. It's not
Other than the simple circumstance that I disagree with your unsupported opinion, MacOS does do pretty much exactly what you request (with some tasks facilitated by a simple freeware utility, which doesn't count as a hack in my book); no extension-based system that I've ever heard of does. Besides, there are plenty of ways around that. If you don't have the creator application on your system, you get a list of compatible alternative applications. There also are ways to open a document in an application other than the default (in most cases, the creator); anyone with enough expertise to wish to do so can probably list several of them.
I am sick and tired of hearing the rants about the inherently wrong nature of file extensions, versus the 'good enough' nature of Creator/Types. No. Both violate important principles, but file extensions can work well, and Creator/Type can not. Creator/Type advocates emphasize one virtue (the metadata nature of the typing system) and ignore the gross failures of Creator/Type to actually support what users need to do.
I'm sick and tired of critiqes that don't even identify what they criticise. What are these heretofore-unnamed important principles that these data typing systems violate? Creator/Type can work, does work, and for 17 years has worked extremely well. It is less prone to user error than file extensions. Its default behavior supports what users want to do most of the time. It isn't less capable than extensions; it's more capable. It degenerates to extension-based functionality when better methods fail.
Let's embark on a little thought experiment. When you create a document in a given application, in which application are you most likely going to want to open the document thereafter? If your answer is anything other than the creator, well, I don't believe you.
Even if you can't be persuaded that extensions are an inferior way to classify files, the Creator/Type system can be made into a pure extension-based system if that's what you want it to do. Is the reverse true?
Creator/Type is not merely "good enough"; it is excellent. The 3-character file extension is a horrible kludge that even Microsoft has been trying for the last 6 years to get the world to forget.
who does not understand database concepts?
let us play a game, shall we? organize ten thousand files. customize their application association, oh, and by the way, you cannot use an abstract file number, but must instead track the file path, and keep it current.
your file system will become slow as shit.
combine this nonsense with a windows-type registry. forget to back up for a few weeks. crash. lose all your bullshit file mappings.
but the system will be strangely faster! of course, you had to reinstall the system and initialize your drive.
this way lies windows madness. admit it, your a win-whore, aren't you? share the misery, apparently, some folks in cuppertino want to please you.
It listed localization packs for Japanese, and other Euro langs..
Although there's no localization pack for the 'other' east asian language, does anyone know the status of chinese support under OS/X (ie, displaying, rendering fonts, input methods, unicode conversion etc...)?
Windows 2000 and Linux supports se asia l10n pretty well now, though w2k is really good! Everything is stored 'internally' as unicode, and the input/output can be converted to other (popular) encodings such as big5. Even the input methods are fairly complete.
I want to convert to mac for DTP stuff (but requires chinese typesetting for many clients). I tried searching for Chinese support (like truetype fonts, input methods) and the only thing I can find is old 3rd party software for Mac 7.x or something...
all right, if this is a troll, I'll bite...
HOW THE HELL IS THIS A TROLL?
Seriously! OS X is based on NeXTStep/OpenStep technology & APIs... so how is is a troll?
Which part of On my 2001 iBook (with DVD drive) ... did you miss? It is the first line of the post you are replying to.
The ability to run all of these tasks at once would be greatly dependant on RAM (It looks like the iBook supports anywhere from 128MB to 640MB)
So to answer your question, you idiot, I missed the part that specified the amount of memory YOUR ibook has.
Wow, that's amazing considering I walked into my local Fry's over the weekend and got the update package for FREE from the salesman. Get your facts straight.
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
http://www.macgamez.com/features/2001/10/starcraft osxquestions/
"Blizzard Entertainment is pleased to announce plans to release a new patch for StarCraft and StarCraft: Brood War. Available this fall, the patch will bring the classic StarCraft gameplay experience to the next generation of Macintosh operating systems, allowing both games to run in Carbonized form under Mac OSX v10.1 and subsequent versions."
From your original post:
I would guess a dual 800 because thats not my experience.
I was unaware Apple had released a dual CPU iBook. And I was unable to find that option in Apple's online store.
The ability to run all of these tasks at once would be greatly dependant on RAM (It looks like the iBook supports anywhere from 128MB to 640MB)
So why didn't you simply ask how much RAM was in the iBook (or Mac since you missed the iBook part) in your original post?
So to answer your question, you idiot, I missed the part that specified the amount of memory YOUR ibook has.
Zero RAM. I don't have an iBook. I have never had an ibook. I don't expect to ever have an iBook. I'll let you figure that one out.
So, you want to rethink that bit about who's the idiot in this thread? (I suppose an argument could be made that it is me for feeding a troll.)
Steve M
1) linux is built by people with absolutely NO taste. And every shitty Window Manager shows that. And every shitty skin by every non-artist shows that also. This is why linux is not pretty and doesn't have a sense of style. (not to mention every idiot out there trying to make linux look like windows)
2) linux users ENJOY that linux is difficult to use. Oh sure, they brag that linux is an easy install NOW and that Caldera/Red Hat is easy to use/install. Well, guess what. IT ISN'T! With patches and kernel mods coming out all the time linux WILL stay an OS that is made for engineers by engineers. This keeps linux ugly.
Linux users should rally behind OS X. And who really gives a damn if OS X won't run on a P166 rig that costs $200.
You get what you pay for.
Wait a minute. Months before Apple's target was "around the end of summer". In July it was targeted "in September".
Sure they missed "end of summer" (by one week). I n the software industry slipping only one week is almost a miracle.
Now, as for the later date: "in September". You're mad because they said "in September" and actually finished and shipped the product "in September"? Me, I was just overjoyed that:
a) Apple met their target.
b) OS X.1 is as nice as it was and not some half-baked upgrade shipped out the door to meet an artificial deadline.
You might claim that the previous verions of OS X were half-baked. I claim that Apple warned everyone well in advance what each version would be like, and why it was released "incomplete".
Last year when the beta was released (compare 10.1 to OS X Public Beta, then compare a year's worth of improvement in other OSs.), Apple warned that OS X.0 wouldn't be for everyone and it'd take "a year" from it's initial release to get there. We still have about 6 months left on that clock and 10.1 pretty much delivers (just need applications now). If OS X.2 is as much better than X.1 as it is from X (or as X was from Public Beta), then it'll be stunning.
Once again, John has done an excellent job reviewing the Mac OS. I have to disagree with him about the need for global menu bar modifications. He says,
He goes on to say it's a bad thing to not allow third parties to modify the menu bar
The problem is, when you let third parties modify the menu bar, they always do it, whether the user wants them to or not. I remember back in Mac OS 9 and before, every software developer wanted their application to be right up front, so it seems everybody was sticking inits in the Extension folder so they could have their own menu bar icon. Microsoft would add one for some sort of shortcut. Palm adds one to access Palm Desktop. Power On Software would stick one on there for their contact manager. I personally found it annoying that these apps would unnecessarily clutter the menu bar, forcing me to dig through through the System Folder to get rid of whatever they stuck in there. It was even more annoying that under Mac OS 9 you have to reboot after removing an init.
Apple is now saying, if you want a global menu item, use the Dock. Of course, some enterprising small developer will hack the menu bar for some specific function, but at least the big software companies won't clutter the menu bar just because they want the "premium real estate".
Related to that, it's even better now that applications are self-contained into bundles, because I found it equally annoying that apps would scatter things all over the System Folder, making it annoying to delete everything.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Its funny to me how we gleefully bash Microsoft for its monopoly, but hardly anyone ever mentions Apple's monopoly. The only difference is that no one really considers Apple a threat.
Hey Apple - as a dare, how about releasing OSX for the Intel platform? Apple's biggest problem is that they cant decide what they want to be - a software company or a hardware company. And since the time is ripe for a better OS than windoze, maybe its time they realize no one wants their crap hardware, and instead use their current established "religion" to move on into Microsoft's turf. Think about it...
Then again, Bill has them in his back pocket already anyway...
On a side not[e], was anyone else annoyed with the way Apple promised OS 10.1 is September, announced it on the 23rd, then waited until the last possible day of the month to actually ship it?
(you really have to dig having spell-checkers work inside of web browsers...)
Now, you have to keep in mind that in the closing days of finalizing OS X 10.1 at least some key Apple employees were caught well out of Cupertino when weekend getaways got dragged out to a week or more due to the airlines shutting down here in the USA. The ship date was on track to be closer to the 15th. Even Steve Jobs can't prevent the kinds of events that took place on 9/11.
Because it was all in capital letters, three words long, and grating and irritating, but did not make any points, provide any information, or provide any conceivable springboard for discussion.
In other words, it was equivalent to a garbage (or "crapflood") post, which is generally considered on slashdot to fit under the definition of "troll".
I hope this makes things clearer for you. Have a nice day.
I also have the same ibook with DVD-drive. It has 312 Megs of RAM in it.
Then you saw the "Next" button at the bottom of the Ars page, realized you only read the first page of a multi-page article, and really wished you could delete posts so people wouldn't know that WiggyWack is an idiot...
Man, it never fails...I always have moderator access to stories involving me. Anyway, now that I've forfeitted it, but while I still have a chance of being scored up, I'd like to pimp the Apple topic icons I emailed to Malda (where procmail no-doubt sent them to /dev/null :-P) The current one is just plain ugly, IMO. How about this instead? (Two versions of the same thing)
c ap ple-1.gif
c ap ple-2.gif
http://siracusa.home.mindspring.com/images/topi
http://siracusa.home.mindspring.com/images/topi
(Without the space...grrr)
you really shouldn't talk about your mom like that.
W()()T!
the case of powermacs have been set, for the most part, since the blue and white g3 hit stores.
i find them to be very nice. why pull off a flimsy metal cover or unscrew panel when i can lift a lock and drop the whole side down?
when i want to check the oil in my jeep, i pop the latches and prop the hood open. i don't unscrew the whole hood from the front end.
ease of use people...
:-/
The problem was that this time, when Steve Jobs announced that you could get it at any place that sold Macs, he had neglected to tell most of the rest of Apple of "Plan B". As a result, most of the company, prepared for the original "Plan A" announced at MWNY went scrambling to get the upgrade ready and out resulting in delays and a mess.
I thought we were already at X11r4.6 :-)
Linux is great, but it's not the answer for everything.
And what of Windows?
I have been using Windows 2000 since early beta, and none of the "amazing stuff" this guy's Mac does sounds at all amazing to me. Its stuff I've been doing every day for years without even giving it any thought.
Don't get me wrong, I've used MacOS X and it is rather nice, but its not quite the revolution in computing some people make it out to be.
I'm running 10.1 on my new iBook I got two months ago. I anxiously awaited the 10.1 release and bumrushed my local TechSource store in Fresno to get a copy. Man, that was fun, a ton of people there waiting for the UPS guy.
I was/am very happy with my iBook when I first got it, I ordered a 256Mb chip from coastmemory.com and got OS 9.1 set up really nice. I was very anxious to run OS X 10.0.4 and got it installed. Damn it was slow.
Now, I'm in 10.1 as I write this and I have some complaints that no one has really mentioned that I think are show stoppers:
- You cannot shut your laptop lid without the iBook going into sleep mode. Forget using all those nice ports you paid for. My LCD will die shortly. They broke this in 9.2.1 and 10.x. I have some rubber feet stuffed in between my LCD and keyboard docked into a plastic laptop stand.
- My brand new machine runs IE 5 on OS X like SHIT. It takes literally 2 minutes of a spinning color cursor just to render one Slashdot comments page. What the heck is up with that?
-PatThat's a good feature, and OS 9 is pretty pathetic in the handling of file types, even if it has the right data in the file system. But the problem is that the knowledge of what's in the file has to be in the users head, when the computer could easily keep track of it.
If it's your own files that you've worked with recently, that pretty OK. But if you're dealing with other peoples files or stuff you did years ago, you'll have to resort to a lot of trial an derror.
The image buffering thing is really unsettling. Given that Quartz is an inherently vector-based system, wouldn't it make much more sense to store the vector representation of the window, rather than the image contents? The memory requirements for this would be much more nominal.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I walked into CompUSA with my OS X box, showed it to the clerk, he handed me an OS X 10.1 upgrade, I walked out with it, and no money changed hands.
That's why the DVD Forum can fsck off and die...
Seriously, though, I doubt that this was the straw that broke the camel's back. Apple had better have better reasons than this to disenfranchise all the early adopters who bought OS X 10.0 under the impression that they wouldn't have to pay anything to upgrade to OS X 10.1.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Posting late on this topic but I had to add my two cents,
I have used macs to make money for about ten years now. So OS X development has been real important to me and yeah I was very disappointed with system OS 10.0.0 and even 10.0.4. I could not get any work done on it.
I could not use my Wacom tablets on my Ti PowerBook or my G4 Tower, hence I never booted into OS X. I have a nice scsi raid that I inherited after my friend sold his Avid system and that wouldn't mount. I hate the Apple Pro Keyboard, mushy nasty keys and I have a nice USB Aftermarket one. It wouldn't work. With my powerbook I would get kernal panics and lockups for some reason when I had my second 256MB chip installed (crucial, good stuff). And yeah, slow.
Since the Saturday I installed OS 10.1 I have yet to reboot back into System 9. Everything works and everything is fast enough for me. It might not be as snappy as 9.2.1 but hey I will take the protected kernel and the flat memory architecture since I have yet to crash 10.1 on accident (installing X gave me some weirdness but I expected it, this is not the same as apps blinking into the either because you did something silly like trying to access the file menu in order so save instead of just hitting apple-S)
Classic works much, much better then I would have thought considering the OS is running as an app and I have yet to see an emulator this side of MAME works as well.
Boot up OmniWeb and check out Slashdot to understand how nice the Quartz layer looks. Not only are the fonts beautiful but Slashdot gets a spellchecker since OmniWeb is hooked into the system library. IE 5.1... is a Microsoft product... If you like them, enjoy. Otherwise Mozilla and OmniWeb are all I need from browsers.
I have an external TDK VeloCD 16/10/40 FireWire and both the PowerBook and the Tower can burn disks from the finder with no problems whatsoever. Also, I keep hearing people saying that DVD playback is erratic. Heh, on my PowerBook DVD playback is fixed. It always sucked in 9.2.1 no matter which version I used of the player. Now it is flawless and I actually use it to watch movies now, this delighted me.
You know what sucks? This is what sucks. You can't tidy up the desktop as easily as you could with OS 7.x - 9.x. "arrange by name" is wonky and "clean up" only sometimes does. This is the desktop mind you, drive navigation is now actually fun. I also hate that the scroll wheel on my mice and trackballs work natively in OS 10.1, but don't under the classic environment, no matter if you load the drivers under classic or not.
The only thing I have not tried yet is Games, I have heard the OpenGL drivers are much improved and the tower came with a nVidia card so I should get around to it eventually. But if I do enjoy playing games on the Mac too damn much... well what am I going to use my Win2K box for?
I guess my point is this, I need my Mac to earn. So I can't have a broken OS, since installing OS10.1 I have gained much and lost nothing. That sounds like a successful release to me.
First it was...
Windows kicks ass Macs suck
Then it was...
Linux rocks Windows lusers suck
Now it is...
OSX kicks ass all other OS suck
As one spineless lemming to another
what OS can i use so that i can be 733t?
I want to be accepted by mindless robots around the world.
Viva Napal!
Viva Napal!
Come on -- the most common 'early adoptor' reaction was "Wow! ... Photoshop runs slow .. Cool! .. WHAT?! I have to reboot to watch DVDs! %*#!@%ing Apple!".
And it costs just as much to ship a CD with a DVD player on it as it does to ship the whole damn OS. Furthermore, I'd bet that 75% of the target market (higher-end, memory upgraded machines) has DVD-equipped Macs.
Another reason might be is that you have to boot off the CD to upgrade and CD burning didn't exist under 10.0.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
There should be a +1 (Painful truth) moderator option
If this is what is required to make OSX useable, Apple is finished. Memory is cheap but you have to market to what the average Mac owner already has.
I can practically assure you that very few Mac users have 512MB desktop systems.
Good luck Apple.
However, I do agree that Apple should have made attempts to make it downloadable, but it is obvious that Apple had enough trouble just getting this out the door in September, let alone setting up a distibution net that could handle tens of terrabytes. As for Windows Update, it offers small updates usually not in excess of 15MB, just like Apple's Software Update, and I seem to recall that MS charges users for updates of the magnitude of 10.1, even if they are just bug fixes (which 10.1 is not).
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
All I can say is, whatever. I just bought a G4 733 a few months ago (got in on the "the new macs are coming" sale) and have been MORE than pleased with it. At first I had OS 9.1 only (the upgrade coupon took about 3 weeks), and I was a tad confused. Coming from a Windows environment, Macs take a little getting used to.
:)
I played a little Diablo 2 on it, learned some of the quirks, and basically got to liking how MacOS did things (there were various minor complaints, but mostly they were my preconceived "windows-esque" notion of how things work.) then my 10.0.3 CD came in the mail. I did the repartition thing, put OS X on and gave it a whirl. I liked it. It was a tad slow, but I liked it. I still found myself booting into OS9 to play D2 (which I still do with 10.1), but for the most part, I was an OSX user.
I got my 10.1 upgrade last weekend (figured I'd avoid the "rush"), and all the little annoyances in 10.0.4 were gone. I was astounded. This is no small feat, considering what a Died-in-the-Wool x86 person I was. Not anymore. OSX and my PowerMac have converted me.
I still use Linux (Gnome desktop) and that will never change. But I love MacOS just as much now. *grin* I don't have to 'abandon' MacOS to love Gnome and vice versa.
Of course the last line of your comment is quite funny. I doubt there are too many Mac users alive who'd even admit to giving up MacOS for WinXP.
Not to detract from the 50 or so people that will upgrade from Windows98:SE/Windows ME to XP, but I think Microsoft is aiming squarely for their foot with this release. Let's hope Ballmer & Co. are lousy shots.
JFT
---- James
I think the 'interface wars' are all becoming irrelevant. What is inevitable in the future, and what I would like to see being developed now, is a set of universal 'Desktop Settings' that you can put on a web site and access from anywhere.
Just think, you could sit down at your buddy's computer, click on a control panel, and type in the URL of your Desktop Settings.
Bing! the screen flashes. You're looking at your favorite desktop metaphor. And it behaves like your favorite desktop. You can have multiple desktops and serve window apps like X. You can have your menu bars in the windows like in Windows, or one menu bar at the top like the Mac.
Damn it, we need this capability. Like, now. And as I said, I think it's inevitable. There is no reason that our powerful machines (Pentium, A6, PPC, whatever) couldn't run any of these desktops or all of them.
I keep telling my co-workers who fight over which interface is better, "it's just software! It's supposed to be flexible!" You should be able to choose your desktop like you choose your wallpaper.
Is there an open-source project to do this? Let's start one. Let's stop complaining and make it happen.
- MFN
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
>Both GNOME and KDE have more software available than OSX.
/.er figured out after 16 years of the 'low marketshare' Mac, no amount of excuses (68k -> ppc, OS9 -> OSX) will do?
... but since the packages are mostly unfinished shit, like GNOME and KDE themselves, it's no big loss. However, if you really want to torture yourself like that, just install XF86 and XDarwin...
>With such low marketshare, the sea-change from OS9 to OSX will see many Apple users moving to Windows (or something else).
Mmmm hmm. Apple's had 'low marketshare' for how many years now? Hasn't the average
>I applaud Apple trying to make a fight of it, but you can't make abrupt changes
Like classic.
>like this at the same time Microsoft is. For many Mac users, being forced to start over
... with classic mode, such a tragedy.
>will make starting over with Windows XP that much more attractive.
... until they upgrade their box and it doesn't boot.
They've tried many times in the past to switch tracks, but Apple is a hrdware company and they always will be. Porting OSX to x86 would destroy their hardware business, and the resulting port to x86 would be worthelss as it would have no software available. It would take years to get vendors to redistribute x86 binaries.
u are a tool.. win 2000 would spit the camera back at you "unsupported device". it would tell you apache has an "illegal instruction, please use IIS" and attempt to convert that DVD u were watching into some proprietry WMF format.
Both GNOME and KDE have more software available than OSX
;-)
Untrue. MacOS X runs the current MacOS 9 applications transparently. However what makes your statement so ludicrous is that MacOS X is an easy target for most open source software. Additionally various unix app vendor have or are porting to MacOS X.
MacOS X lets a user run shrink wrapped retail applications and games, some traditional unix apps and tools, and much open source software all in the same environment.
My wife already has made the move after finding OS9 app support under OSX to be...severely lacking
Right, she had much better luck running her MacOS 9 apps under Windows.
You can watch a movie, work in a shell, edit code, listen to music, test a website, and carry on a conversation at a normal pace, all at once? That's incredible! How many monitors do you have?
I have trouble keeping a lively conversation going if there's so much as a TV running in the background, it's just too distracting. Never mind actually watching the TV, let alone editing code while I talk.
okay.. karma trolling here, but I missed this link the first time I read through the article.
Here's Apple's Technote on OS X 10.1 chock full of useful tidbits about what bugs were fixed (lots of 'em).
------------
"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."
Only on slashdot would such a comment be modded up
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Why do I have to lie about being a student to get decent pricing from Apple?
Because if everybody got the educational discounts, Apple wouldn't have the means to develop and give away iMovie, iDVD, iTools, etc for free. Plus they subsidize Darwin and several other open source projects.
Dell and Apple have completely different types of products, business modules and value propositions. The only thing the two companies have in common is that they both make computers.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Its funny to me how we gleefully bash Microsoft for its monopoly, but hardly anyone ever mentions Apple's monopoly. The only difference is that no one really considers Apple a threat.
A monopoly over what? The hardware THEY design? Quick, somebody sue Nintendo. They have a monopoly over the GameCube.
Anybody else is free to make their own platform. Sony created the PlayStation. Sony doesn't have a monopoly over PlayStation hardware any more than Apple has a monopoly over Macintosh hardware.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Yes it looks purty but I don't think it's any easier to use
On the contrary, I think Mac OS X provides a much more clear message to the user about how to perform tasks. But it is different than Mac OS 9, which some people have gotten used to.
I'm sure there is a strong voice somewhere in Apple insisting the dock should do everything. This voice is wrong; many Mac users like having icons strewn about the place so the dock should not be so integral
Mac users can strew things across the desktop if they like, but I think the Mac has long been begging for a central management metaphor. In OS9, you had the control strip, the application menu, the Apple menu and some other gadgets. None of them really looked or worked the same. Sure people became accustomed to it, but that doesn't mean it was good.
Application wise, you get pretty much the equivalents of Mac OS 9 plus a few Unix style monitoring tools.
By this you obviously are talking purely about the applications that are included on the CD, which some people might not figure out unless you say it explicitly.
Aqua looks lovely but hogs CPU and offers few innovations beyond the old classic look
There are real improvements present, but some of them are subtle. Aqua itself isn't going to provide anything other than the look -- it's just a theme. But other Mac OS X UI conventions, like drawers and sheets offer something quite new and quite useful, IMHO.
I think this hardcoding will bite them as apps are likely to be skinned to look like Aqua which is all well and good until Apple go and change the L&F once more
UI calls are abstracted in most cases, and the OS generates the widgets. ProjectBuilder handles all of this for you.
Overall, I find Mac OS X feels more like home to me than Mac OS 9 does now. More work to do, but good progress is being made. Progress was not being made in OS9 UI, it was just familiar, and felt somewhat stale.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
However, no update is available by download
.1 version is misleading. The OS has had major changes at every level. It's a biggun.
The
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
What is inevitable in the future, and what I would like to see being developed now, is a set of universal 'Desktop Settings'
This requires way more cooperation than I see willingness to do at this point.
Not to mention the fact if people stick to one desktop metaphor, they'll never experience better ones. These concepts are still evolving.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
First off Apple has been shipping macs with keyboard software controlled eject BUTTONS for quite some time now. You can buy one if you wish.
...and, or... drag to the trash. Moroever the OS notifies you of trash can ejects visually as soon as you start to move a mounted drive. If you cant eject a disk froma mac you could use a few extra brain cells. The OS comes with 5 different ways of doing it. Ease of use... and then some.
... considering you have used the system for at least a whole day.
:)
Second, all macs can eject disks via f-12, command-E, the system menu bar
As for the global menu bar in MacOS. Honestly, you're not use to it. Combine this with MacOS's drag and drop abilities (which dwarf all other OS's) and you can use multiple apps as if they are all one. It's really quite awesome.
Moreover, now in OS X one can pull up individual app windows (if the app has been designed to do so) with out having to pull up a whole frek'n app. This really does rule
But then again, clicking an App'n icon in the dock will pull all of it's windows to the front, if they are hidden. It's also possible to pull forward an individual hidden window from an app via dock menus or an app's window menu.
Now, I use Win2k and XP everyday at work. Don't get me wrong...I know all the little ins and outs of the windows GUI. Even with OS X's variouse GUI bugs, I find general window navigation to be muuuch more sophisticated with X (and 9 too). Hell, even folks like adobe are trying to bring typically mac native windowing features into their Windows applications. (ie windows hovering and not needed to be constrained to a window with a menu bar).
Really, it is MacOS's GUI that has kept MacOS alive for sooo many dark years. It's better. Try to intermesh a few macromedia apps on both platforms and you'll understand why it is better. If I was in my office I would resort to a few quick visual aids.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Look at his name for christ's sake. Everyone already knows he's an idiot.
damn typos
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Hey Apple - as a dare, how about releasing OSX for the Intel platform?
There are so many reasons not to do it, and it would take quite a while to explain. I'll try to summarize:
[1] Revenue
[2] User Experience
[3] Value Proposition
[4] Mac Office
[5] OS X would never get preinstalled
Apple's biggest problem is that they cant decide what they want to be - a software company or a hardware company.
Jobs has been very clear that they are a computer company. That is they make the whole computer, not just the shell.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Unlike a certian OS company the begins with M. Apple seems to listen to their users. If enough people compain that they miss for example: spring loaded folders. They will bring them back.
And remember...post nicely! E.G. Don't tell them "the dock sucks". Tell them you "think the usability of the dock should be improved", and make suggestions to improve it.
Bullshit. W2K has more (3rd-party) driver support than you think, Apache runs flawlessly on it and no, it doesn't convert data into propietary MS formats.
Read from my lips:
Microsoft is NOT inherently evil.
Open source, closed minds.. sheesh
"Slashdot - the one place on the internet where guys brag about how small it is." - that IT girl
many commentators with an eye towards, and knowledge about HCI find OS X to be a step backwards from MacOS
Well, perhaps the design differs from what they would envision, but that doesn't make them bad.
A lot of the article I've read in the context you describe consists of people heavily mixing their own personal tastes with fact. They are afraid pretty things are major threat to robot-like efficiency.
All too often, there are people speaking purely from the perspective of scientific interaction, not taking overall experience into account. There's more to it than how quickly a action can be performed. Experience is what really dictates the user's level of satisfaction. My sister, for example, enjoys her iBook much more with Mac OS X installed on it. Whether a UI expert thinks she should or not doesn't really matter. She likes Mac OS X.
I share my sister's sentiment. I like my computer experience much better with Mac OS X running than any other operating system.
User interface is in no way a mature medium, and I would guess rules are going to be rewritten before some stablization occurs. Not that these commentators didn't bring up some valid points, but many of them have been addressed since the public beta came out.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
What Apple should have done, IMHO, is acknowledge that this is a new operating system, which is System 10. I am pronouncing it "Mac OS Ten" or "Mac OS Ten point One."
My guess is that the X is supposed to be a convenient and obvious way to express that this is not a continuation of the old product line. I've seen posts even on slashdot where people don't understand that OS9 and OSX are completely different types of operating systems. The fact that X has something of double meaning is very much in Apple's style.
They should leave the "X" as a marketing gimmick anyway, since all it really does is make people confuse it with the X Window System.
It's certainly a marketing gimmick as well, but I doubt they're very concerned about people confusing X11 with it.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
You know how Solaris 2.6 was reported as SunOS 5.6? It's like that. Mac OS X is more than a version number, it's a new brand name. They may change it again, though.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Just a few things I want to mention...
TrollTech has a beta of Qt for Mac OS X.
GTK+ has been ported and GIMP runs on it.
I've compiled and run WindowMaker myself.
More software doesn't mean better software. What good are hundreds of text editors and graphics apps compared to BB Edit, GraphicConverter, the Gimp, and a dozen other tools?
Most Mac apps run just as well in Classic on Mac OS X as they do on Mac OS 9. See http://guide.apple.com/ if you'd like to search for something.
What does WinXP have that could possibly be attractive to a Mac user? I really haven't seen anything particularly promising; did I miss something?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Overloading one piece of meta-data (the filename) to do the work of three (the filename, type, opener app) was a screwed up idea from the inception. The worst part is that novice users can easily change the filename without having a clue they may be making the file unusable to the OS. A good OS should shield users from these casual blunders, and one good way to do it is by encoding the meta-data separately as the MacOS has done for years. Moving to file extensions is a major step backwards.
To say that Apple should give up and move on shows lack of foresight. Other OS's should follow Apple's example, or they'll never move forward. What good is all the buzzword-compliance in the world if the computer doesn't do a good job of what it's supposed to do - which is make life easier for people. People shouldn't have to remember to make life easier for the computer. It's idiotic, and Apple realized it back in 1984. It boggles me that they're choosing to forget this lesson now.
Constitutionally Correct
When Linux desktop and the GPL is being slowly rooted out in today business model. Comes an operating system that Linux nor windows has touched. Its power and beuty rivals no other. In fact, I said that the screws of the linux coffin are slowing being nailed down......
Long live Steve Jobs...
The content of the article was good, but he is a terrible writer. He takes more words to say the simplest things than anyone I've read before. He really needs an editor.
-D
Most Mac apps run just as well in Classic on Mac OS X as they do on Mac OS 9. Except for photoshop, and mac really only has two applications (I say this as a mac user), Photoshop and Finalcut Pro. When using Photoshop in OSX it tends to randomly lockup. Until PS runs native there won't be a big shift to X.
There is actually a reason for this... Apple sells quite a bit through its online store now, but many (if not most) of its systems are sold through 3rd party vendors such as clubmac, powermac, outpost, etc.
They have in the past specifically requested of apple that they keep the ram amounts fairly low, as it gives them incentives and packaging deals to try to move units. Ie, "oooh clubmac will give you 256megs free with every imac for $30 install fee!" If you check out you'll see what i mean.
Sure they are. What are you, asleep? Just read the front page of Slashdot, right now, and read the story about MSN and Qwest. Or the other one about MS saying that the problem isn't their buggy software, it's people talking about how buggy their software is.
I swear, some people post like they just aren't paying any attention.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
mac really only has two applications (I say this as a mac user), Photoshop and Finalcut Pro.
That's funny, I'm a Mac user as well, and I don't have either of those installed. Hm. I wonder what I do with my time?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
You really dont' know what you're talking about... photoshop and final cut pro are cool, but photoshop is often used for benchmarks.
New media is cool, but want to know what 75% of all photoshop work targets? Print work. For that you need quark. Illustrator. Freehand. The whole bit.
And yes, all those applications exist for windows. But know what? They don't work correctly. They come close, but not close enough for a production environment. I've seen 2 print shops get it into their heads that they should go all-PC and it was a disaster every single time.
there are just so many things built in to the OS that most people don't need (color sync being one) that people who use their macs to generate dough really truly need.