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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.
...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.
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
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"
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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"...and Maddest of all, to see Life as it Is, and not as it Should Be."