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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.
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.
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.
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.
As the other poster said, I have never seen files of the same type with the wrong type code.
"Hard-coding applications for documents": Not hardly. The separation of type and creator allows an app to own files, but it also allows apps to acquire files. An app that supports files of type JPEG can open all JPEG files regardless of creator. If you drag a JPEG file to it, it will open normally. If you drag that JPEG to a program that doesn't support JPEG, you can't open it, instead of opening it and getting garbage as happens in this review. If you double-click on the file, the app that created it launches. Best of all worlds.
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.
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.