Slashdot Mirror
Follow-up To Critique of BeOS & Mac OS X
UnknownSoldier writes: "Scot Hacker has posted a great follow-up to his Tales of a BeOS Refugee entitled Reactions to Tales of a BeOS Refugee. (Hopefully everyone involved in implementing 'Linux on the Desktop' will eventually incorporate the best ideas of Be and Mac OS X for smoother usability in Linux.)"
Get a sense of humor, dude.
I know I'm not saying anything new here so please don't mod me down for being unoriginal, but I am dying for a x86 desktop alternative.
As somone who has been selling custom built computers for at least 5 years and tinkering with Linux and other free operating systems. I become increasingly disgusted when i have to buy a copy of windows forcing my customers to pay an extra $100 for the computer. If only there were an alternative desktop operating system which I felt my customers would be happy with.
Dozings.com -- Its kinda funny... If you're as crazy as me.
The funny thing I've noticed is that a lot of the BeOS and Linux types are migrating straight for OSX for exactly the reasons brought up in the article. It's UNIX, it's got a great interface, etc, etc, etc. On the other end of the coin, people who have been with the Mac for decades (me included) have yet to migrate over. I have my excuses - no photoshop, and it runs nice and slow on my 3-year old Blue G3. OSX works fine on my Powerbook, which actually came with it installed, but I downgraded as I didn't feel I had enough disk space to warrant running a 1 GB OS. That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design, Photoshop and video editing, and it works just fine. Rendering takes a few more seconds, but it's not noticable. As soon as I went over to OSX, it just got really choppy.
While I think it's great that OSX is getting so much new blood into the Mac, power users at that, I simply don't find that OSX has enough to offer me yet. I won't go so far as to say I hate it, as some of my other iPod-toting hardcore-Mac friends have said, it just has a little more way to go.
NerfOnline - Because Nerf Guns aren't just for kids -
What type of machine were you running it on? I just received a new Powerbook G4 (550/512MB) and it runs great on it. Very stable and fast. It has taken me a few days to find out where everything is, but I really like it once I got used to it. I'm a PC user, but Apple really tempted me with their notebook design and the promise of a great GUI on top of *nix. I think they delivered in spades. I've already compiled Apache/PHP4/MySQL on it and have a backup of my main site running so that I can test different things. It's a great combo. Add Airport (which I did) and I can work on development anywhere in and around my house.
To test their claims, I've plugged my digital camera and digital video camera in it and was pleasantly surprised that no drivers were needed and the correct apps popped up automatically. iTunes is a great MP3 ripper and manager as well. My wife and I played with iMovie this weekend and found it to be a great entry level movie editor. It even connects to my Samba server and WinXP desktop with no add-ons. Very cool, everything just works!
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
ACK.
.. If a user can, by a few judicious choices, really improve the interface, we probably have done a poor job.
One of the major points why I don't like KDE is that they don't make any choices but make everything a user decision. Having the menu bar in the window or on the screen top does not result in having the best but the worst of both worlds.
I'd like to remind all the people working on a user interfaces of this quote from the KDE UI pages:Avoid rampant customisation.
>> one of the fastest OpenGL implementation on Desktop PC For limited types of hardware, sure. When I last tried BeOS 4.5 (yes, I never tried 5), I was lucky that my nVidia TNT2 Ultra card was supported in 2D, and forget about 3D. Maybe Be's OpenGL implementation was one of the fastest software rendering implementations, but that can't hold a candle to proper hardware acceleration, and nVidia is currently the king in that area.
The blame for the lack of nVidia support in BeOS lies squarely on nVidia. As a member of the BeOS community I begged and pleaded with nVidia to either a) release their register info to Be, Inc., or b) just create the BeOS driver themselves if they want to keep the register info close to the vest. I kept all the emails short and polite, too.
All of that to play... Quake2. Or watch the Teapot rotate at insane speed.
Seriously though, hardware rendered OpenGL support for the nVidia line may have helped the wider appeal of "the little OS that couldn't-quite."
To answer you, no, i played with it in a shop, as i said, and didn't take the time to discover that it could be made to look like win2k. Win2k is nothing to write home about either, though. I was hoping that xp would be a step forward, UI-wise, since there has been tons of great research in what works in UIs since even win2k came out. It's a very active area of research, and i was disappointed to see that out of the box it comes with the childish looking UI that it does.
Saying that you have a choice between the childish UI and one that belongs in 1995 doesn't sound like much of a choice to me. I guess I was just hoping for something different from M$, since I do use windows begrudgingly, and was disappointed to see that the microdrones are still pawning off the same old shit. Whatever.
I wonder if apple is planning on making the default file system in Mac OS X to be UFS. This could help reduce costs on FS development. This does not mean the death of metadata. TrustedBSD is working on giving UFS extended attributes and ACLs. So maybe Apple could use those for metadata
I spent quite a bit of time using it at the local Circuit City here. It's no Apple Store, but it's decent enough for my needs. I just need a computer with MacOS X on it, and no one to pester me. It's PERFECTLY useable on Apple's low end machines. Just make sure you have a bunch of ram and you'll be fine. The interface didn't take too long to learn. The most confusing aspect of it was what the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top-left corner of every window are. If you can learn what those are, then you'll do fine with the rest of the OS. The thing that really struck me as handy was the one click to all the system prefs you could ever need. It's just right there on the dock. Click, and it comes up. Can't get much simpler than that.
The software Apple bundles in is pretty slick too. iTunes is great stuff. The visuals are awesome. But then again, how hard can it be to make an easy-to-use MP3 program? I haven't seen one yet that wasn't common sense to use. The MP3s included are pretty good too. iMovie is incredible stuff. There was a camcorder already attached to the iMac when I got there. I don't think those guys at circuit city would care enough to install drivers and such. Thank god it just works at the mere action of plugging it in. But anyway, I recorded just a bunch of customers walking and I went to edit it with iMovie. I have never used it before, and within 5 minutes I had created a movie that looked awesome. Well, as awesome as it could look. Customers walking isn't too entertaining.
I guess I'm a firm believer that technology should be simple to use. It is to be there to assist you, not to work against you. To that end, Apple's the best. Taking complex technology and making it easy enough for the average person to use. It's the reason why people bother purchasing macs. It's not like they're faster, or that they get the latest and greatest in software first, and it's certainly not price or that it's the latest trend. It's because they do what is advertised. They just work.
A couple other notes: judging from the front page of Apple's website, I think MacWorld is going to be big. Very big. You can catch the live webcast on Janurary 7th on Apple's website.
Correct--and that is a good thing. Time spent learning a new interface is not productive time. Most productivity gains can be had these days by making the standard (and well-known/understood) UI metaphors smarter, so that more things "just work" and don't require futzing around or technical knowledge to use... not by reinventing everything just for the sake of doing so.
It's possible to build a user interface that is both obviously different and obviously better
Is it possible? Are you sure? Can you point to any examples? Ones that people actually like to use, as opposed to 'interesting proofs of concept'? It's easy to wave one's hands and say "things ought to be better", and it's possible to write a user interface that is radically different from the standard one we have now (people occasionally do this), but I have yet to see an alternative user interface that is "enough better" to justify requiring everyone to re-learn how to use a computer. Hell, we can't even get people to use Dvorak instead of Qwerty, let alone getting them to give up an interaction paradigm that took many of them years to learn...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Now, this may be a karma whore (don't bother to register, post as AC, and you don't have these problems ;)), but it *is* a surprisingly concise explanation.
See, turns out Feng Shui isn't *just* about empowering your office. It's a damn big set of rules for consistency.
I was watching a documentary a while back, about the reconstruction of a classic bridge in China. There was some argument, as the site zoned for the bridge violated Feng Shui- it was north of a public lavatory, rather than south, or something like that. A trivial complaint, and construction continued, but the important thing is that, in Imperial China, you knew which way to run if you had to go!
OSes benefit from that level of consistency; UIs benefit if the consistent solution is the optimal solution.
You stop where apple stopped, with case. "Test" and "test" are the same but "One_two" isn't the same as "One two". Apple isn't the only one to go down this path and at least they made it case preserving. "Test" stays as "Test" and will never be printed as "test".