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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.
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
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.
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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. ;)
Microsoft is already running scared,
Care to explain that one? By all indications, XP looks like it's going to be a HUGE seller. Or do you mean "running scared" as in "own 90% of the world's desktops"?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Bye-bye, karma. I know this is off topic, but...
I'm saving my pennies for a new 667MHz tiBook.
I'd advise you to save about 150,000 of those pennies and buy an iBook instead. My best friend has a PowerBook G4, and I have an iBook, and while the big screen on the G4 is nice, we both agree that my iBook is a better laptop.
That nice titanium case on the G4 scratches and scuffs incredibly easily, and it gets very very hot. Not to mention the fact that the slight flex in the G4's case makes it all too likely for a spinning CD or DVD to grind against the inside of the drive; it happens to my friend about once every other day.
My iBook, on the other hand, is a dream. I'd consider it to be *almost* good enough for an only machine, and perfect for a second machine.
Oh, and another thing. (feeble attempt to get back on topic) My iBook and my friend's PBG4 feel just about the same under OS 10.1 with 384 MB of RAM each. Both very, very usable.
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.
Illustrator 10 for OS X is in stores now (well, it was on sale at the London Computer Arts show last week).
Adobe said recently that Photoshop for X would be due at the beginning of next year, and apparently (don't quote me on this - i don't use it) Quark is due before Christmas.
This is what I hate. People talking about things they have never used.
:)
If I want to eject my music CD from the CDROM I should be able to press the button labeled EJECT and have it pop out, not have to drag it to the trash! - Ease of use people..
Have you ever used OS X? Oh... wait... no you haven't and I can tell that from that stupid mis-informed comment. OS X turns the trash can INTO an eject button when you highlight a CD or removable media device. It turns the trash can into a disconnect button when you highlight a network connection.
But seriously, ease of use is a matter of perception. On I MAC I find the concept of every app having each window as a floating MDI child without any real parent object frustrating! 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!
Bzzzz... please come again when you tried OS X and not OS 9. OS X does still carry on the floating MDI window paradigm, but when apps are minimized they are minimized as individual screens on the right side of the dock, and the "application icon" on the left side is a grouping of all the windows (ala KDE, and Win XP) where if you hold the mouse button over it, you can pick a window to bring forward or restore.
Oh, and the new iBook has an eject button too. Let's try to stop spreadin the FUD now shall we? I really like OSX, I really like *nix, and I think OSX is the best version of it out there. Anything that integrates the CLI to the degree that I can grep a highlighted set of icons and then have only the ones that pass the expression match still be highlighted is cool. Any OS that lets me use APT-GET is cool too
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.
...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].
A couple of minutes with a hex editor and you'll be able to play DVDs in OS X.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
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.
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.
When I first started running X I was annoyed at the UI changes, but after a while I started to use them, and now I think that OS 9 is pretty awkward. The Finder's toolbar/shelf is really handy, and is far nicer than tabbed folders, and Column view is really handy once you get used to it. I miss labels too, you should submit feedback about that.
There is a tool called ASM if you clamor for the App Switcher in the upper righ like I do, that I use all the time. It makes things feel a lot more like OS 9.
The Dock tries to do less in 10.1 than it does in 10.0.x (menu items taking over), so maybe things are heading away from the Swiss Army Dock. I think the Dock can be fairly handy, and as it evolves I bet it will get better.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
What, are you kidding?
Dragging disks to the trash to eject them is a _FEATURE_. I swear, I am not kidding. God's truth, it's a feature.
Now sit here beside the fire, my children, and receive the lore of early Mac disk management....
As a cost-savings measure, because Apple had (wisely) chosen to use the brand-new Sony 3.5" floppies with a whopping 400kB of capacity, the Mac had only one drive. (and this was a _big_ floppy for the time, in terms of storage space) Although users could have a second, or even a lot of external, daisy-chained FDDs, they couldn't be assumed to.
So there was a problem: how would a user use two floppies simultaneously? After all, 1) the noun-verb language of the GUI demands that there be a visible target for an icon to be moved. And anyway, 2) many users would want an OS disk, an application disk, and a data disk... maybe a lot.
The solution was this: the volume was slightly divorced from the media!
That is, if you want to copy 'Empty Folder' (because the original OS couldn't create new folders) from disk Fred to disk Barney, and Fred contains a copy of the OS to boot off, you'd do this:
1) Boot up from Fred.
2) Select Fred on the desktop, and use the Eject Disk command in the menu. This ejects the physical disk, but leaves a 'shadowed' copy of the volume on the desktop.
3) Insert Barney, which is then mounted on the desktop.
4) Drag 'Empty Folder' from the shadowed Fred volume to the fully active Barney disk.
5) The OS will at this point, autoeject Barney, leaving a shadowed copy of _its_ volume on the desktop, and ask for Fred to be inserted
6) Insert Fred, and the OS (which obviously couldn't've cached this) copies 'Empty Folder' to memory, then autoejects Fred, and asks for Barney to be inserted
7) Insert Barney, and the OS writes 'Empty Folder' to it, leaving a shadowed copy of Fred, still on the desktop.
Old-time Mac users will be familar with the infamous Disk Swap Tango.
However! What is of note here, is that the Eject Disk command literally ejects the disk, but does not unmount the volume. In order to dismount a volume, you use the entirely seperate Put Away command.
In fact, if you use Put Away on a volume that is active because the disk is physically inserted, the disk is ejected AND the volume is dismounted. Clearly, Put Away should have been a popular command.
Except that, ultimately, the developers making the damn thing found this cumbersome. Even thought the UI people (who are human, after all) were telling them that this was the best way to do it. So one programmer, following the Mac edicts of 'there's more than one way to do it' and 'direct manipulation is superior to abstract manipulation' (i.e. moving things with icons, clicking on close boxes, is better than using the menus to accomplish the same goals) made a shortcut whereby if you dragged an active or inactive disk/volume to the trash, it would be Put Away. (and of course, if the disk was present, ejected)
Although this was immediately picked up on by the HCI people as a bad idea -- because doesn't that imply that the disk is being erased? -- they found that it was, in practice, a damn lot more useful and easy to remember than the above confusion with the menus.
A few years later, of course, hard disks became commonplace, and the need for this behavior was mostly lost. Nowadays in fact, Eject Disk both dismounts _and_ ejects the disk, instead of only the latter.
So it was _never_ a kludge. It was in fact a really good shortcut that wound up becoming more common than the behavior that it was originally intended to be a power user's way of accomplishing! In fact, tests in the mid 90's indicated that changing the Trash into an Eject icon was disconcerting, and so never really pursued at the time, though it had been on the drawing board for ages.
It's not foolishness. Not in the least. I will agree, of course, that a physical eject button wired to the OS so that it is aware that a disk is dismounted is also a good idea. But given the needs in the early/mid 80's, the old behaviors made perfect sense.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
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.
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.
.hell :)
No.
- Its not all vector based, there are plenty of bitmaps flying around.
- A backing store is "the right way" to do it. The perpixel backing store is what allows all the funky blending operations like shadows & transparency.
- A hack exists to turn on the built in backing store compression which substantially cuts the memory usage. If a windows contents don't change for a while CoreGraphics will automatically compress the backing store and decompress it again when it needs to. Fast, efficient and effective.
- Memory is cheap, OS X is designed to last a long time. You should avoid assumptions based on todays hardware when designing something thats meant to last. CoreGraphics will scale well to future generations of graphics cards with tons of on board memory. These cards could render to on board backing stores and composite them totally off the processor. 3D cards do most of this work now, its only a matter of precision and flexibility before this becomes common.
In reference to the main article, I'm always impressed with Johns ability to communicate his opinions. I don't always agree with him but its always worth a read, this one being no exception. Unless he flames me with that extensions vs type/creator code again, then he can rot in
Take it easy,
Guy
Currently, I'm using OS X on a G3 300 with 192 MB RAM. Everything runs fine. I don't know what all these people are talking about.
Ofcourse, the more RAM the better, but you most certainly do not need 512. Thats just FUD.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Of course, it takes a /.er to want to use XF86 instead of Quartz. Must be the OSS circlejerking.
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.
BSD may need Mac OS X, but Mac OS X doesn't need BSD. They're only hyping it up so that people like you will be impressed.
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."
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
Classic is killing him. When Classic is not loaded, OS X is no more memory hungry than a Linux box running KDE or GNOME, perhaps less so.
The problem with Classic is due to the architectural limitations of the old MacOS, which has always been memory hungry. In particular, Classic apps don't share memory like on *nix and *doze systems. Further, it's known that the best way to ensure stability under the old MacOS is to reserve more memory for each app than it is likely to need, and simply buy as much memory as needed to give your apps some headroom. It's likely that John has his OS 9 system set up to give each of his major apps the memory they need, and that spills over into Classic mode under OS X. Anybody who works with multiple simultaneous OS 9 apps running in Classic is going to need much, much more memory than the native-apps-only OS X user.
Personally, I got by with 128MB on my iBook with practically no paging unless I was running Classic apps. Now I've got 256MB and I can run one or two Classic apps comfortably alongside a few OS X apps without seeing a lot of paging. And without Classic running, I can open a whole assload of native apps before I see anything get swapped out.
I can attest that this is not necessary, even when using Photoshop under classic along with 10 other native apps running. OS X.1 does very little HD hitting for me on my laptop with 256MB, once I turned on the window buffer compression feature. (It makes the OS use far less memory, and speeds up window moving and resizing to boot. It will be turned on by default in the next release of OS X, Apple just had it off in this build because they thought it was the cause of a particular kernel panic.)
And with 384MB in my desktop, life is just dandy. Sure, more RAM is always better, and nowadays it's so cheap there's little reason not to get half a gig or so, but OS X does not require it.