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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
Can we get over our parochial OS and license flame wars to say "Well done" to the BSD crowd?
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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.
...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.
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
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?
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's been around since the inception. have you tried the obvious: http://www.apple.com.cn/macosx/?
When you make a shortcut in Windows, it's a bit like a soft link in Unix- it's only a pointer.
What? It's not *anything* like a soft link. It's not a filesystem pointer, it's a file. You can open it up and look at its contents. It's just a "special" file that the explorer knows how to read and interperet.
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.
And you expected what? NT doesn't have any concept of a symbolic link, so there's no way to communicate to an NT machine that a file is one of those. There's just no language to describe it that NT will understand. Either symlinks work over SMB, and NT will follow them like any other file/folder, or they don't work at all, which would be very inconvenient, and very confusing to fix your special case of making backups from a platform too stupid to understand soft links.
Apple could learn a lesson or two from the Unix side of the market.
What lesson? Try the same thing on a Samba server running on Linux or FreeBSD. If you create an fs loop with symlinks, then your backup is going to fill up with your loop.
That's why we don't run backups on NT servers. Run your backups on a system capable of actually understanding the semantics of other machines, or run the backup from the machine with the content and pipe the data to the tape on the backup server.
It's NT that isn't a "good network citizen" and it always has been.
>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.
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.