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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.)"
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.
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".