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Mac OS X 'Panther': User at the Center
MatthewRothenberg writes "Over at eWEEK, we believe we've got the drop on the much-discussed interface enhancements to Mac OS X 10.3, a k a Panther: The theme of this September release will be 'User at the Center,' an umbrella term for a variety of new features aimed at leapfrogging Microsoft when it comes to pervasive, user-focused computing. Niceties include user-configurable 'piles,' a fast-user-switching-type feature, and easy transferral of home directories among devices and the Web. Oh, and it's mo' definitely 64-bit-complete, too."
How can BSD be dying when it has a mascot like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks and gorgeous babes that BSD has to offer!
You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she make you hard? I know this little hottie floats my boat! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little cock teaser. Even this old bearded Unix guru is apparently unable to take his eyes off her!
Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!
piles?
I'm not touching those things.....
Yuck!
Also one hopes the general Really Slow problem will be reduced, but I'm not holding my breath. (Still using Bronze PB G3, yes, I know, shoot me.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Got the drop? There was nothing in this article that hasn't been floating around the mac rumor sites for weeks now.
--Dg
...new features aimed at leapfrogging Microsoft.... Niceties include...a fast-user-switching-type feature, and easy transferral of home directories among devices and the Web.
Not to troll, but if they're thinking they can leapfrog with user switching and roaming home directories, they need to jump a lot higher than that. User switching came with XP, and roaming home directories has been in since 2000. My home directory syncs automatically between my desktop & laptop & other home workstation, and it's been brain-free for years with Windows 2000 Server.
What's your damage, Heather?
What's next? The "Cougar"?
I've been planning to buy jaguar for a while but I never quite got around to it. I guess I'll stick with 10.1 intil the end of the summer.
Anyone know how Jobs pronounces "Panther"?
Panther for the IBM's 64-bit CPU "ppc 970"
"Features of the OS reportedly won't be frozen until May"
And it is due in September! Can you say scope creep!
Why slashdot? Why not?
Finally a desktop metaphor I can relate to. If I can lose the bowl in the 'specifications' pile and use the dried trail left over from some spilled dew as an index, it'll be just like IRL.
WTF? What on earth are they thinking making Apple's marketing campaign public over four months before it starts? Speculate on the hardware or software, fine. Make that public for page counts, for a little while. But can you imagine what it would be like if the Mini-me/Yao commercial was leaked this far before the laptops availability?!
They might actually be able to meet the demand by now.
easy transferral of home directories among devices and the Web
Keeping copies of your home directory on the web at the moment would seem to me impractical as many/most 'home users' still use a 56k modem which would make synchronisation of anything more than your office documents a bit of a joke.
Once you have broadband then you encounter the problem of web storage and assosiated costs. Most providers won't let you host illegal files to cover their own arses, and more than a few hundred MB is rare on most traditional web hosting packages. I see a market for a premium file mirroring monopoly here, jump onboard before AOL takes over!
This seems like an awesome UI concept, and one which will (Once again) put the Mac GUI head and shoulders above the rest.
I guess PHB's can start using them now that they can pile up documents in large random .. uh .. piles, all over their desktops, just like their desks and shelves.
Does this mean that Apple is going to be focusng on segmenting their multi-user systems in OSX 10.3? If so, won't this mean annoying permissions problems for admin users?
Science will save us. The question is, will it destroy us first?
From the article: In addition, sources said Panther will finally mark the debut of the much-discussed "piles" GUI design concept, which Apple patented in June 2001. According to the patent, piles comprise collections of documents represented graphically in stacks. Users can browse the "piled" documents dynamically by pointing at them with the cursor; the filing system can then divide a pile into subpiles based on each document's content. At the user's request, the filing system can automatically file away documents into existing piles with similar content.
/. Can someone enlighten me, please?
I must have missed the "much-discussed" piles conecpt on
How does this differ from a hierarchical filing system? Aren't my directories "piles of related documents"? Does ths just automate filing by indexing the content or am I missing something?
Apple does a much better job at font smoothing than Microsoft's Cleartype. Even though my main display is the 1280x854 hi-res PowerBook display, even when I mirror it to a CRT it looks a lot better than Cleartype in XP. I do think that Cleartype is (imnsho) superb to the anti-aliasing in xfs however.
.:diatonic:.
what about those of us whose home folders are gigabytes in size? This new feature eweek is talking about would work well for small home folders, but I'm not so sure about large ones. However, I hope that this means that we can easily switch our home folder to a different partition or disk.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Rumor has it that in 'Panther' they have replaced the Sherlock application with the new bumbling 'Inspector'
here is a preview of their new ad campaign.
(credit where due: my friend andy is a hopeless mac addict with apparently too much time on his hands, this is his handiwork)
---
^nA - my daily illustrations
^nA! Creatures in my Head
is how much is this new cat gonna cost?
Will we get to upgrade for free? Or is this our yearly $100 for an OS upgrade? Why not just have people who know they will want to upgrade subscribe to the OS (say, at a reduced rate maybe)?
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
Then I hope you get one soon:
http://www.oscast.com/stories/storyReader$340
I've seen the piles system on some professor's website about a year ago.
.1 of a version number. Sheesh!
Thought it was totally innovative, and a very cool way to classify documents, something like a crude version of the OS seen in Minority Report (why do all of the video clips in the future have to be all flickery and dark though?). I'm not sure if I would use it, but props to Apple for innovation.
Of course if you want to use this OS you will have to shell out $100 to upgrade
yeah well i'll never use MS windows until Microsoft becomes a reputable company.
(this includes but is not limited to:)
spying
installing software without user concent
leaving "backdoors" open
outrageous "lock in" licensing programs
With piles, you don't have to go "inside" the folder, just pick out the doc you want frm the pile. Take a look here:
http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/piles.html
LoL. Yeah. Apple sucks because they don't compete with Taiwanese no-name clones.
Clear, Dark Skies
I will note, however, that when I checked in stores the newer PBs weren't exactly beautiful to me. Then again, I am an old, old Mac fan dating back to 1987, so to me small, clear screen fonts like Geneva are best. Maybe the young'uns like their text fuzzy, I don't know.
I only wish we had the level of control over text in X that we did in 9. If you want to use Geneva/Chicago and NEVER smooth, this should be a choice! But not even TinkerTool makes this happen.
sulli
RTFJ.
The biggest thing that helps Windows' speed is the registry. It's basically a database and so it's faster in searching for settings and library links. However, there are two big problems with the registry that in my opinion do not offset its speed advantage. First, the registry slows down a lot as it grows and software is installed and removed. After a certain size, the registry actually makes things slower. Second, anyone who's used Regclean knows that it is almost NEVER in a clean state and eventually program installations get corrupted, "cruft factor" sets in, and people concede it's time to reinstall. You don't have this problem in OSX.
How come people always want things for free? What's the deal? Sometimes I think that people's adversion to capitalism hurts companies worse then Microsoft's anti-trust violations.
-BrentPC by definition is a personal computer, where you do what you want, using a UI, regardless of whether computing at home or on the web. In contrast, Microsoft's Windows UI is merely a front end to total server-side control over what you watch (DRM, UltimateTV), what you run (.NET+palladium) and how you log on (passport).
Should Apple choose to do what it takes to "drastically reduce their hardware costs" (ie: Use cheap hardware, eliminate tech support, increase tolerances) I won't be using OSX any more. I hate buying crap that doesn't last.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Um, where's the content? Where's the screenshots? Looks like a press release in sheeps clothing to me.
"Yeah, it's got this feature and this one too...and it's gonna whoop up on Longhorn! Woohoo!"
Other than a feature list, which can be found in many other places, and some that aren't confirmed yet, this look like hype to me with little to back it up...
"How come people always want things for free? What's the deal? Sometimes I think that people's adversion to capitalism hurts companies worse then Microsoft's anti-trust violations."
Don'tcha think you jumped the gun a bit?
He didn't say free. He offered to pay a subscription. He wanted a little discount for being a loyal customer. It's a common thing these days.
"Derp de derp."
I'm not really adverse to paying something for it. I'd just like to know ahead of time what the deal will be. I also think it might be a nice move to give those of us who have supported each OS X rollout with our dollars a small break if/when we choose to again.
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
The journaling technology extends OS X's HFS+ file system and can be applied to current Mac OS volumes without reformatting. Users of Mac OS X Server can activate journaling by clicking on a "Make journaled" button within the Disk Utility application; they can also access it via the command line or remotely via a Secure Shell (SSH) connection.
Yes and apple is never guilty of the above mentioned tactitcs. Apple is just ad draconian and evil as MS if not more so. But since they're the little guy so they're cool. Apple is evil, Microsoft is evil. Microsoft is just the bigger evil company.
So I did a quick search for piles, and just about every article I read echoed this one. So, basically piles are folders (directories) that are non-nestable.
About the only use I can see for this feature is that it will help certain users who are fuzzy on how folder hierarchies are supposed to work...but heck, if that makes the user's computing experience all the more rich and it keeps people like my mother from calling me asking how to find her documents, why not?
Has anybody else reached a different conclusion than I have?
-AP
always want things for free? What's the deal?
Troll. I bet if microsoft charged $100US for a service release, you'd be one of the first to slag them off. It's not OS 11, it's a point release.
If only they would start to release the software on third party hardware like the rumors suggest...
I'm hoping for a German-like "Panzer". That would just be perfect.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Then why are you bothering to read this, much less comment on it? Boo-fucking-hoo. You won't buy OSX until it runs in a poorly-designed beige shitbox that you can hack to hell and gone. And when OSX starts to bloat up so that it can support all the cheap two-bit (not file size) junk that floats around in the PC world, you can bitch about the "old days" when OSX was a tight, well-constructed OS instead of a pile of kludges like Windows.
No OSX for you? Darn. I'd hate to see a narrow-minded troll running my favorite OS.
blog |
There is currently very little real information on Panther at this point. The only thing we really know for a fact is that it will be called 10.3 (since Jordan Hubbard said so in an interview). Other than this the only information comes from LoopRumors, MacOSRumors (dodgy), Mac Rumors and maybe one or two others. The information from these sites can range from dead on to absolute rubbish.
You are basically subscribing to it. Just they don't take your money every month.
Why can't people just save their money instead of blowing it on every DVD that comes out?
How about I offer a subscription and you pay me $10 a month, then 18 months later when they release the new OS for a hundred (or 129 like they did last time), I'll buy you a copy and ship it to you.
Who modded this up? Ridiculous. It's about on par with saying, "Windows is insecure and costs too much". Really insightful for sure!
I wish their was a "freaking obvious" moderation score.
Pooty tweet
You mean gutam goatse
here is a possible example of how they will work, flash required.
the idea is that you could stack documents in a group on top of each other, so to speak. say you are working on a web page, you could select say the index.html and the images (or whatever, im assuming) and group them together in one pile.
after this, you would convieably be able to click and hold or right click, and the pile would expand to show you the documents contained in said pile. while expanded you could select which file you actually want to open.
could be nifty
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
Who do you think makes Apple's computers? And I'm more worried about Apple hardware competing with cheap American Dells than Taiwanese no-name clones.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'll never drive a Mercedes until they lower their hardware costs.
Those fascists.
replace folders - they are strictly an organizational metaphor, nothing to do with how files are actaully stashed away.
Clear, Dark Skies
Someone else posted this nested in a thread.
http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/piles.html
cool cool cool.
Sorry to break it to you, but there isn't some magical hardware in the average Apple comp that you can't get in a Dell or IBM. They use pretty much the same components as anyone else. In many cases the components are crappier (Apple "Pro" speakers my ass, give me a pair of Klipsches any day!) If you take a look at the cost of the machine, you'll see it goes to three main places
- CPU
- Motherboard
- Apple markup
The last one is a little high, but okay for the level of case engineering, QA, and tech support Apple supposedly has. The first two (much larger) ones are an unavoidable effect of having a non-standard hardware platform.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Please say yes ... and please copy all that you can.
I want to remind people to check out this article as well, and keep this in mind as you hear about possible new features.
blarg.
First, 'piles' sound like it takes the desktop metaphor too far. The advantage of computers is that they provide and enforce rules that help us organize information. The problem with a real desktop is that there are no rules and therefore it is very easy to get every growing stacks of documents and clutter. If i wanted clutter I would just work on my real table. The last thing I want is to move my physical inability to organize to my computer.
Second is the security of movable home directories. Most of MS problems come from leaving things open to make those things more convenient for users. Even if we stipulate that the BSD core has an inherent security advantage, and Apple has and will do a good job at setting defaults to a secure state, can we be sure that average users will have the knowledge to maintain the security?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Who do you think makes Apple's computers?
The Irish...
Bah
More sex lies and 64 bit rumors!!!!
I think it depends what version you initially got. I seem to remember seeing a "free upgrade" certificate in the box of crap that came with my iMac two months ago... (which had 10.2.4)... so I'm guessing that means I can get 10.3 for free.
Other than that, I'd bet it costs...
Isn't "piles" also a name for hemorrhoids?
If so, it is damn well about time a GUI had that feature.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Oh, dear. Looks like I'll have to mirror the original.
heh.
blog
They could at least let us G3 Bronze sufferers turn it off! Very bothersome that this option is missing.
sulli
RTFJ.
Is it the Pismo? If so, you can replace that processor with something a bit more speedy.
I've been eying a 500MHz G4 for my 400MHz PB G3 for some time now. The ~$300 price tag is keeping it out of reach.
I don't find 10.2.5 too terribly slow, though the boot times are now much loonger than they were with 10.1, and my PowerBook can take almost 30 seconds to sleep at times.
Of course, the processing power I have became available when the P3 wasn't widely available.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
OSX 10.3 "Panther" is going to be a paid upgrade. Likely $129.
so basically it's a dropdown menu, only more annoying because you have to hold the mouse button down while you move the cursor to the document you want. way to go, apple!
Why nobody else will ever be able to implement Piles in their OS: as you can see from the demo above, they are heavily graphically intensive. Unless you've got Quartz pushing it, you're gonna be out of luck! Rock on, Apple!
iNtEnSe d00d!@# images moving around on the screen! sorry, guys. my commodore 64 can do that.
despite this kind of silliness, macOS X seems pretty nice.. if only apple would move beyond on their vanity hardware and port the thing to PC.
aw cmon...
you know you'd just spend it on crack...
if only apple would move beyond on their vanity hardware and port the thing to PC
get a job
I am a user of OSX. For them to follow through on a promise of leapfrogging competition, this is what I recommend:
-The yearly payware upgrades to the OS strongly fragment the market, as alot of software can only run on a most recent version. Contrast this to the Microsoft realm, where the mainstream apps in the stores run on the last 6-8 years (from 95-98 upwards). The minor version updates are good (and a simple way of keeping a targeted system), but either the price needs to drop on the payware upgrades, or the incompatible major version upgrades need to be spread to two years or more, so that developers can reach their audience.
-Ship hardware ordered from the factory with a recent version of the OS. The one I received was over 9 months behind. I could see how this can happen with a machine that was in a store, but straight from the factory, that is an excessive interval. When I unwrap my new computer, there is a 200+MB upgrade patch from the last 9 months to upgrade (when paying by the minute for dialup in Ireland).
-User-centered doesn't mean I am forbidden by all means of booting into OS 9 when I need to (which apparently happened as of Jan 9th). That is someone-else centered, not putting me in control of how my own computer is used. Many of the heavy CD-based applications don't run in Classic mode, rendering my software into coasters). An upgrade should either put back my own ability to start OS 9 if I want to, or else clean up Classic emulation so that it works.
-If there isn't a task sceduler already (don't know because of point above I won't upgrade). I use the GPL CronniX, but it is a small app to whip up, and something that really belongs with an OS (in the Utilities folder) and should be supported by the OS manufacturer.
-Fix cinema display or allow configuration for what "fullscreen" means. A large slice of the Mac games when I run fullscreen get horizontally stretched when run fullscreen. There is 100% hardware/software integration, so there is no excuse not to have a display preference to turn off the extra side pixels so that the display really is in a 3:4 height:width ratio.
-The Apple CD authoring software (for data) is atrocious from a UI point of view. How could they buy Astarte and still have such a subpar offering. One of the perks of such an expensive computer is that one expects to have good capabilities ready to go. iTunes does this well, and is the best music player I have seen. Data CD authoring needs to be brought up to this level.
-The bizarre removal of the capacity for me to have a heirarchal list of more rarely used applications (the Applications Apple menu in prior versions/a Windows Start menu/A KDE/Gnome start panel menu) is not user-centered. The quoted reason is "we don't want people to use menus, use the dock". This is unreasonable, as instead of organization of items into utilites, programming, in the dock there would just by over 200 minature icons in a flat bar. I had to make a poor-man's equivalent by putting a folder in the dock with folders of aliases, and then move the dock on the left side of the screen so that the menus expand to the right instead of backwards, but that is a crap workaround for an optional feature that should have been not removed from the user.
-Support a Quartz port of OpenOffice. It can't be bundled in the OS because it isn't BSD, but certainly can be a separate download, similar to how they are working on a good X11. If want to truly move away from Redmond, need to remove dependence on them for a wildly expensive Office suite, and a slick fast OpenOffice helps in that regard.
They are doing alot of things right, but as regards to besting the competition, there is certainly some work that can be done.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
It's not really a point release and this same thing was explained with the release of 10.2. A point release would be like upgrading from 10.2.0 to 10.2.2, etc. Apple has too much invested in the X logo and "Mac OS X" marketing to move on to 11.
I've been using "user-configurable 'piles,'" to organize my real-life desktop (and office) for years now. However, nobody recognized my genius. People generally seemed to think this system of mine was "messy," "disorganized," or worst of all "a pig sty." Perhaps I will get some credit for being ahead of my time now. In fact, I think Apple ought to share a piece of their patent with me, since I was using this system long before they reinvented it. :-)
They already have a subscription program:
z Cu stom.woa/70706/wo/gq575DlYKg5c3ssmgl41Pl1kpVK/1.7. 0.5.1
http://store.apple.com/AppleStore/WebObjects/Bi
All technology in the future will be jittery and disorienting to the point of being useless. Gap commercials will overlap one another to the point at which they're all incomprehensible. Newspapers will change while you're reading them, making it pretty hard to read a whole story. Sensitive criminal investigations will occur so quickly on a dizzying, gesture-based UI that nobody can adequately document the process to protect against charges of abuse.
"Piles," meanwhile, seems more like a UI version of the piles of paper people have on their desks. Very old fashioned, and it makes perfect sense once you see a single demo page. You'd maybe use it as an adjunct to true directories -- leave a pile of downloaded nature photos on the desktop before you decide which ones to print for your kid's science report.
Sliding "drawer" folders struck me as a similar UI approach. Based on a physical analog, and popular with some -- but other people didn't use 'em a bit.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I dunno, I thought this was a pretty convincing argument...
Piles?
...truly "bleeding edge..." ...They should have called their releases "preparations..."
Sounds as if 10.3 will be a real pain in the butt...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Haha, nobody expects it for free, but at the same time why do we have to pay for all these marginal upgrades to the OS? AFAIC 10.0->10.2 should have been free upgrades since much of what they did was fix functionality that was supposed to have worked right in 10.0.
And no, I am not impressed with all the new "free" iApplication upgrades along the way. I want a working, non-broken OS not a bunch of iApps. Make those that want the iApps buy them as a bundle, subscribe or something. But don't use OS upgrades to finance them.
Rumormongers in the Mac world are so prevalent (me being one of them) that there are at least a dozen rumor sites all groping for attention. eWeek likes to get in on the gig once a month or so. But Stevie runs a tight ship, so most of it is vague, or sometimes just made up (ala MacOSRumors.com). Hard evidence is a real rarity, and sometimes does more harm than good. (There are several examples in the past of rumor sites getting too close for Steve's comfort and suffering a backlash as a result.)
You can't directly blame Apple for any of this. It's just that Apple has often come out with something so new and cool that a lot of us are like kids willing to see their presents before Christmas.
Boom Shanka
Look at the Apple laptops and then compare them to Dell laptops. You will see they compare favorable.
Here is the scoop on Apple Laptops
photosMy Photostream
Piles isn't going to make MacOS X (or Windows) any easier to use. While die-hard Macintosh users, who may know all the obscure combinations of Shift, Command, and mouse clicks, may be wowed by such gee-whiz features, regular users are already stymied by concepts like "open" and "closed" folders. Adding yet another kind of "collection of documents" will lead to more confusion and more support calls. (Incidentally, Apple also didn't invent the idea--piles have been in scanning and document management software for Windows for years.)
But they're independent of folders. All files will still belong to a folder, but they can also be in one (or more?) piles, organized after whatever scheme makes sense to the user.
Also, you can browse through your pile effectively, and you can tell by looking at the pile roughly how much stuff is in it, and possibly (it's been talked about) how old it is or how long since it's been touched by how much dust and spider web it's collected.
A lot of people are excited by this and have talked about it for a long time, so I hope it will be good. Only actual use will tell though.
Then I take it you haven't noticed that Apple's machines are often cheaper than similar Dells.
Clear, Dark Skies
This article on discusses many interesting UI possibilities, but the one I'm most interested in is the 'live search folder' concept, where you declare a 'folder' to contain the continually-updated contents of a search.
iTunes has this (Smart Playlists), and I'm quite smitten by it, and I'd like to see something similar rolled out across the UI (and, possibly, done as a framework for other apps to hook into).
Combined with 'piles', you could have your smart pile of apps, pile of word docs, pile of porn divx, etc.. Makes some sense to me..
Personally, I liked that demo. It would be great to open, say, the images subdir of a website I'm working on and see all the navigation images in one pile, widgets in another, etc, without the need for separate folders. It extends the desktop metaphor--piles are a natural way of interacting with documents.
That's not an aversion to capitalism, it's an aversion to giving away money. That's one of the best parts of capitalism.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Capt'n Hector - So you are the guy that has been bugging me in Escape Velocity! I'd like to have some words with you. Meet me at the bike racks at 3pm.
Random is the New Order.
He wanted a little discount for being a loyal customer. It's a common thing these days.
;)
I prefer the 'I have friends doing tech support in advertising and digital music" discount myself...
Why not just have people who know they will want to upgrade subscribe to the OS (say, at a reduced rate maybe)?
How do you know if you're going to want to upgrade? If it comes out and it's worth $129 to you, buy it (for $79 or $99 from Amazon, of course); if it's not worth it, or especially if it sucks, don't upgrade - your computer will still work fine, and they'll keep releasing the security patches you need for quite a while.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...the more I "get it" and like the idea.
One thing is that I'm not a big fan of the term "piles"--it seems to imply disorganisation (as does "clutter"), which is preceived as a characteristic that reduces productivity. I figured a marketing wonk would've come up with a more clever name.
Worse yet was my FIRST thought upon hearing the term "piles"... "Great...first all those poor old macs get constipated trying to run the latest nifty new browser. Now, the damn things will have piles and mac users will need to stock up on Preparation H!"
It's mostly a GUI innovation, and is unrelated to hierarchical storage. The same document might be in several piles if its content is related to all of those piles.
If it's really slick, it might be one of the best things about MacOS X. If it's lame, it'll change or get forgotten.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
This could be so cool in Safari -- auto-filing bookmarks. I should be able to save a bookmark and the computer should be able to file it according to the contents of the web page (maybe it fits in more than one folder -- no problem).
I wrote up a spec on how auto-bookmarks should work and then realized I have no time to work on such a beast and figured I'd just have to wait until someone else did it.
Maybe I won't have to wait that long after all. :)
I would prefer to call piles "stacks." It sounds neater.
You could put all kinds of content in them, including pictures, text, sounds, video, user-programmable buttons, etc. And you could link items to other items in the same stack--or even items in different stacks! And if you could attach some sort of script to any item in a stack, that would be hyper cool!
I know... I know... that idea's waaaay too far ahead of its time.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
What a concept! More than one person logged on to a machine at the same time, running apps in thier own space... Amazing! What will they think of next?
My Ass hurts.
It's more graphically intense because, for one thing, most icons in OS X are vector images, not raster images.
No, they're raster images. But here's the thing. Icons under Quartz Extreme are implemented as geometry. That is, they're OpenGL squares with the icon image projected on them as textures. Under Jaguar, icons are implemented as billboards; they scale, but they don't rotate. In Panther, they may-- MAY-- be implemented as full-fledged OpenGL geometry objects, spinning and flipping around and whatnot.
Um, I don't think Apple even *makes* a machine similar to a Dell. Dell's mid-range machines start with a 3GHz P4. Apple doesn't even have a processor that fast. Just for kicks, I tried to configure a $2500 machine, which I consider mid-range to high-end.
$2506 bought me a (single) 1GHz G4, 256MB of RAM, 60GB disk, GeForce 4MX, 17" LCD, and Apple "Pro" speakers.
$2558 (admittedly after rebate, but I bought an Inspiron last year and my rebate came quickly) bought me a 3 GHz P4, 512MB of RAM, 120GB disk, Radeon 9800 Pro, 18.1" LCD, and Altec Lansing 4.1 speakers.
Both had 3 year warrenties, though Dell's came standard and Apple's cost $200.
These Dell's are great machines. Pretty much everyone in our dorm has one, and I've owned one since 1998. They are whisper quiet. I have one running 5 feet behind me and I just had to turn around to check if the power light was on. They're easy to open, easy to work inside of, and the power supplies will last forever (the one in my 1998 Dimension has been going for years in dusty basements).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
just so we're clear, os x 10.1 was actually system 11 10.2 was system 12 and panther will be system 13. this isn't a difficult concept to grab. the minor point releases are upgrades, the middle point releases are the 129$ new systems. whats the big deal? windows upgrades every 2-3 years and it costs about 200$ mac upgrades every year and it costs 100$. griping is only justified when comparing with OSS systems. the windows and mac systems cost the same over time. (give or take 50$) whine about something new.
-
It depends..personally, I think that this could be a major pain in the butt..to be honest. It depends on how the program divides up the documents automatically, it could be rather hard finding one document in a large grouping.
To be honest, I've been happy with folder shortcuts in all OSs...you really shouldn't need one more menu to organize your files...
You are right however, that is one use for it, sorting files outside of the folder directory..however, isn't that not much more than a glorified search? In this way, I'd be worried about either the loading time for the piles, or the processor consumption in the background watching for file updates.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. i t.
retard
ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahaaahahah
dimw
I don't care for your attitude though so I'm not going to dig up the edit. THere is an entry in a plist file that sets the point size at which anti-aliasing occurs. Set it to a number super high that's all.
How come people always want things for free? What's the deal? Sometimes I think that people's adversion to capitalism hurts companies worse then Microsoft's anti-trust violations.
Cos then they can spend the money on blank CD's to pirate music onto.
Alex
hehehe
(just dropped a new GPS and bluetooth carphone in it.. bling bling!!!)
Thanks for the link. Quite informative.
hell, even over broadband it'd be annoying to have to sync my home directory with the .mac server... I've got at least 1GB of things in my Documents folder, almost 10GB in music, and god knows how much in the movies dir.
One word: rsync.
-Waldo Jaquith
I just find $129 per year to keep my OS current is far too expensive. Especially when to a large extent the improvements are bug fixes. If anyone should pay for that Apple should pay me for selling me a defective product.
Wanting to get a good deal as a buyer is an essential part of capitalism.
Wow, I didn't know that. Thanks.
Apple has been going with an alternating `paid upgrade, free upgrade, paid upgrade...' plan for years. I imagine this will be the same.
(Of course, some people will have to pay $20 for an upgrade CD.)
Don't take my word for it, but I don't see why they would change their policy now.
A focus follows mouse option. I hate click to focus. I also like to be able to work in windows that are underneath others... Typical X stuff.
I've reported it as a bug to Apple, but they are ignoring me... .
-Craig.
I was going with...
"Nothing says personal like iPiles"
or
"Piles! For when you really need to dig deep, but don't want to get your hands dirty"
or
"Piles! What are you waiting for? Climb aboard the latest Apple innovation"
or
"Piles! He did it, but we did it better"
or
"Piles! Things are looking up at Apple"
or
"Piles! We help tame your crap"
or
"We have a tradition of reaching for new heights"
OS X icons are not vector images, they are a collection of 128x128, 64x64, and 32x32 bitmaps. The smooth scaling is just regular old bitmap scaling.
The hierarchal model - which incidently emulates a low tech FILING CABINET which everybody uses - still cannot be figured out by most users.
It's astounding but true.. So any 'new thinking' is likely to be met with new confusion.
www.lonseidman.com
And I want a Pony too.
Doug
They created the idea in the early 90's, so yes apple invented the idea before windows could probably use a scanner.
No, they won't be releasing patches for 10.2 once 10.3 is out. Once Jaguar was here, there were no more updates to 10.1.
sig
Give a Dell Windows PC a year and it will flake out. I know many people and there computers work far worse then any of my linux boxen or my apples. Dell is the lowest common demoninator PC built super cheap without employing and R&D staff of course they are cheaper. But it is like comparing a well build automobile to a yugo.
If you want that "Microsoft" effect (which, it should be noted, was pioneered by Apple many years ago), set your font-smoothing prefs to Medium. That's the only one which does that wierd color-halo-effect from Windows that people inexplicably seem to love so much.
Well, you are probably right... in that this is as far as you can see.
Having used both 10.0 and 10.2 (and all "points" in between.... ugh... sorry for that one), I can assure you that the 10.x.0 releases were both major overhauls, not just incremental changes. The look was pretty much the same, but in terms of function, the differences in going from 10.0->10.1->10.2 was every bit as great as going from 95->98->ME... except getting better instead of simply more bloated.
And it's not because 10.0 was as "broken" as you claim. When 10.0 came out, it was already my preference over any other UNIX-based GUI on Earth. More consistant, user-friendly, and functional than Gnome, KDE, or any X environment you could name. Yes, it was sluggish... but you should see Gnome running over Linux on my comparable x86 box. Yeesh!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Be-Fan it is not a matter of the types of parts used, clearly you do not understand designing your own motherboards and casing systems. The difference in apple quality is that an engineer is designing a system, not assembling a sum of parts. Apple keeps its principle suppliers and does not change based on the low price of the week as some PC manufacturers do. For a real computer apple is very cheap and offers good performance.
You are a moron. You are babbling about six+ year old technology here. Your nonesense is sooooo out of date that it is exceptionally pitiful. Neither your windoze box or your mac could ever compare to anything today. Do us all a favor and shoot yourself in the head now.
get more ram. 512 on my g3/400 and it flies. i love it.
So therefore, OS X is dying. Do not waste your money and time on such a tool of Great Satan. OS X is not on this computer, in fact it is 200 miles from my computer and its manual is burning in hell.. It's so easy to use it doesn't HAVE a manual to burn? Pah! I hit OS X with my shoe. Take THAT!
</SarcasticTroll>
Apple's bumped the iBooks up to 900MHz and dropped the price a little, as per the usual incremental upgrades. Also, the lowest-end iBook now has 32MB VRAM, so it supports Quartz Extreme. Nothing major, but it might be worth taking a look if you've been on the fence.
(Not Whoring)
Get a newer machine and you won't be fighting anything. 9 SUCKS at multitasking. Quit wasting your breath and OUR time.
I loathe theming. The very idea makes all of the UI neurons in my brain fire in panic. I love Mac OS X. The 9 UI is nice, but it's dated. I used a Mac for ten years, used a NeXT for three, and now use Mac OS X and my NeXT. The Mac OS X GUI has some oddities, and the NEXTSTEP GUI has some odd limitations, but they're both so far ahead of other options, that it doesn't bother me.
The only thing I really miss is the windowshade feature. That and the ability to click on the menu bar to stop all system processing. That was more handy than one may suspect.
Wow, I didn't know that! Thanks.
Does anyone else thing that piles could be used to implement BeOS-style live searches?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Yes there were.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
That's because it's not true. YHBT again.
<nelson>Ha-ha!</nelson>
Not that there's anything wrong with Klipsches, but it should be pointed out that the sound systems on most current Apple models were designed by the good folks of Harmon Kardon.
The first two (much larger) ones [CPU, Motherboard] are an unavoidable effect of having a non-standard hardware platform.
Apples use PowerPC CPU's, which are also used by Motorola in a lot of embedded applications, and by IBM in their servers. If a chip design is being heavilly used by more than three major NASDAQ players, is it really still "proprietary" just because you can't use it in your home-brew budget Windows box?
Also, the motherboards, while not designed to cram into ATX cases, are made up almost entirely of very standard components and design concepts. The only major difference is Apple's boot ROM's. The ATA connections for the drives, the memory bus, the PCI and AGP connections, the USB and Firewire ports... all very similar to the parts you would see on your better Pentium and Athlon motherboards. I find it hard to believe that the motherboards that Apple makes are that much more expensive than the ones that go into Dells.
The real cost of Apples is the markup to finance their R&D, QA, etc. Plus, their higher profit margin per machine allows them to thrive and survive as a niche player.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Or maybe it is you who has been trolled.
ASSHOLE.
Ha! Good luck with that! I got those coupons too, and I can assure you... they aren't worht the paper they're printed on. Seriously, this isn't some sort of troll or anything. I bought a machine with 10.1.2, it came with software update coupons. Jaguar rolls around, "Sorry! Can't use 'em!" I think basically they're for the minor updates (10.2.x) where you could either: (a) download for free, (b) pay $19.95 for Apple to send you a CD, or (c) use a software update coupon.
Sorry to burst your bubble! I got the same kind of thing with my iBook (shipped with 10.2) and I expect they won't be valid for 10.3. Hell, I don't think I even saved them.
There were still security updates for 10.1.5, as recently as last month. Just no more 10.1.x point releases.
I got a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop with a faster processor, more ram, the 15.4 widescreen display, cdrw/dvd combo drive, etc...for over $800 less than I could the Apple laptop. I guess its how you define favorable..
... you can only look at the top file :-)
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
No, it's about texturing bitmapped images onto OpenGL quads to get "free" transformations and compositing, for the most part.
Trust me, Mac OS X icons are bitmapped.
DNA just wants to be free...
The biggest speed increase in Windows is the registry?
Dude, lay off the pipe.
The registry still has to do reads and writes to commit state to the hard drive. The performance difference between an app doing that and doing file I/O for it's own config files is nil. Most apps will mmap the file so it's just a memory operation anyway.
Case in point, KDE and GNOME both use file based configuration schemes and they're not as slow as OS X.
The OS X UI is slow because for two main reaons:
1) It's a new piece of software still adding features to it's core modules (QE, Aqua, etc are all new) and so performance isn't as optimized as X Windows or M$ Windows (NT GDI and USER has been around since the early 90s now).
2) Hardware limitations. Sure, Intel has stretched the crap out of the Pentium pipeline to achieve Mhz numbers and yes, that means that it needs those Mhz to crank through the pipeline. But at this point, the Intel Mhz has more than made up for any pipeline extensions. The PPC might be a more efficient chip, but when the less efficient chip is so much faster it doesn't matter.
Remember the old Apple bunny suit parody commercials? Back then the PPC used to smoke the X86 and Apple was merciless about exploiting that fact. Now that PPC is slower because MOTO doesn't give a crap about it anymore, Apple is singing a different tune.
Don't get me wrong, I like Apple products and have since I started coding on an Apple II+ back in the late 70s. And I'm not likely to switch to X86 machine just because the Apple CPUs are lagging. But I don't blindly believe what Apple says or make up excuses for them...and hopefullly competition from IBM will spur MOTO to either get their fab processes in line or cause Apple to switch to IBM PPC chips.
the cat's TONGUE has got YOU!
Did that Dell have a SuperDrive (not a ComboDrive) and FireWire as well as built in wireless networking and a processor that doesn't run at half speed most of the time?
How was the weight? Was it as light as the PowerBook?
What about the optical drive. Did it have a tray that just looks like it's waiting to break off or was it a slot-loader?
There's a lot of other factors (especially on a laptop) besides processor and RAM. If your major deciding factor was that you wanted the fastest processor and the most RAM for the cheapest price, then an Apple is a poor choice. If you want the other goodies then an Apple is your only choice.
So if your laptop does not have all the extra goodies, what exactly do you use that mega-hyped fast Intel processor for? Running Office XP? Hmm.. well, yeah.. you'll need it for that. ;-)
You bring up an interesting point-- maybe they called it "piles" to avoid conflicting with the existing hypercard stacks terminology. As we all know, hypercard was way ahead of its time, like many Apple products; look at how well flash has done with the same concept that grew out of Hypercard and Macromedia Director. In the piles concept the interrelationships between files could be useful in the context of a "view related documents" function in a window when you look at one of your files. Perhaps they will add this command to the preview feature in finder column windows.
And maybe we'll get a "Panzy the Panther" mascott!
You can't take the sky from me...
Why does that remind me of hemorroids?
This is bullshit and I should know, I've owned both a 500MHz original dual-USB iBook (now dead) and one of the new 800MHz ones (for two weeks). The 800 was much better than my 500 which I had grown to despise, but OSX is so heavy that it was still noticeably slow. I returned it and picked up an Acer TravelMate 800LCi with a 1.3GHZ Pentium-M and the new Centrino chipset and could not believe how much faster it was. Plus, I got built-in wireless (mini-PCI), USB 2.0, IEEE1394 (Firewire), a PC-Card slot, 512MB DDR standard, 40GB hard drive, 4-5 hour battery life, and a 15" 1400x1050 screen with Mobile Radeon 9000 64MB graphics. Upgrading the iBook with an Airport card and a 512MB SODIMM increases the price up to around $1550, while the Acer was $1700 with rebate. For the extra $150 I get a much faster processor, just about double the number of screen pixels, and a bigger hard drive. Plus, I can actually listen to an MP3 stream without the player sucking 15% of my CPU.
Also, I agree with Sulli that ClearType does a hell of a lot better than CoreGraphics at subpixel antialiasing, especially at small sizes. I too used to think iBooks were good deals for what you get, but compared to this TravelMate the iBook is an overpriced, underperforming clunker.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
Yeah and maybe you could explain to me why M$ is making it so difficult for me to get my Win 95 FE box to authenticate with Server 2003? Dude, shut the fuck up.
did no one notice that it will be 64 bit? One of first confirmations of Apple's use of the PPC 970?
So now you can also patent stupid excuses for directories? & Would the Commodore 64 filesystem not be suitable "previous art"? :-)
Anyway, someone's got to tell Apple that those so-called "folders" were invented to keep your documents from piling up on your desktop back in the analog days, and not the other way around. Yet, now that Apple has finally invented the digital mess, MacOS X will be a richter user experience!
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Niceties include user-configurable 'piles'
MacOSX gives you piles? Count me out. What's next? Longhorn includes user-friendly nappy rash?
...it uses webDAV
If you want GUI Hemmorhoids......
Use Preparation H.
(I think Microsoft may buy the company as THEY recognise the need created by Windows!)
There's something seriously messed up with the display of the eWeek site in Konqueror. The center text section completely spills out over into the righthand bar area thing.
Just an observation.
Although not calling it anything, except perhaps "user friendly," it's already been done. What is now being called "user at center" was done by Apple back in '82 and '83 on the Lisa 7/7 and iñ 1984 on the single drive 128k Mac running System/Finder 1.0. That's back when the Mac and Lisa were light years ahead of the IBM-PC and when Mac users were scorned and ridiculed by PC users for having a GUI and a mouse. Fast User switching is not new. If Microsoft claims to have invented it, they're flat wrong. It was in wide use & worked flawlessly on IBM mainframes since before 1975. You could log in at least 5 users simultaneously and switch between logged in users by typing a simple ba, bb, bc, bd, or be. Plus you could log your Raytheon PTS100 or IBM TPC3 (or whatever) to multiple computers simultaneously and instantly switch between them.
Apple has just put out 10.2.5 for free. In my OpenGL app, the upgrade gave me a
10% speed improvement. It's also 10% faster than the almost identical code running
on Windows and Mac OS9. Again, this was free for the download. Plus, nothing
(at least for me) broke after the upgrade unlike countless Windows updates I've
done through the years. It's also packaged cleanly; a couple clicks, wait a little bit,
and everything works better. Paying $120 a year for Apple's diligence is a bargain.
It also appears that Apple has developers working on improving things beyond just
fixing bugs and adding features to leverage market share. From my point of view,
if a developer at Apple owns a piece of code, he continually works to make it as good
as it can be, as a commitment to excellence. With all of the Windows I've bought and
installed over the years, that seems to be the last thing on the list, by corporate edict.
With Linux, it seems like the effort is mainly just to put out something and
they are still playing catchup to Sun and SGI, with a small touch of Windows envy.
At $100 a year, even if Apple saves you 10 hours of trouble and distraction over that
year, isn't your time worth at least $10 an hour?
OS X is not only a bargain, it's downright cheap!
What is being touted as a new feature in Panther is switching to another user on the console - using GUI applications, not merely the remote login capability (text-only apps) that has been a part of all UNIXen (including OS X) from the beginning.
That was teh dumbest comment evar.
Your major problem has already been addressed.
Simply predict where the cursor is going, if it's going to stop before it gets to the menu bar then switch, otherwise don't switch applications.
It's already done with menus (though it's just more of a delay than a prediction). Notice how you can switch from a menu to an item in a submenu and cross over the desktop yet the submenu doesn't disappear? That's the same technique that can be applied to the cursor follows mouse control.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
The *upgrade* for Windows 2003 Server is a lot more then $100, and I'm not hearing too much complaining.
-BrentRight clicking on the Application folder bring forth an instant "start menu", not like the left click, wait a couple seconds then get your menu.
Actually, you want RsyncX. It has a nice GUI front end, understands MacOS resource forks, and still uses rsync on the back end.
So the journaling features already present in 10.2 are finally going mainstream, but is there any possibility or reason in the future for HFS+ to support case sensitivity? This is something I've become used to on ext2/3 file systems, but is there a particular design reason that apple would not want to support this?
Can someone explain how I'm not currently doing this with Mac OS X - and have been since 10.0 shipped?
Each of the client machines in my office are essentially identical. Users sign on and their l/p are authenticated against our Xserve, their home directory (plus appropriate groups, etc) are mounted locally, and they go about their work. Everything runs out of their account on the server. We mount via AFP, but we could do NFS if we opted.
Users have no idea that they aren't working locally until they need to walk up to some other machine, log in, and everything is exactly the same. Users can run multiple sessions from their account as well. Network traffic isn't too bad since it's generally only reading config files and prefs and hitting the server on demand.
BTW, this is a pretty straightforward setup on OS X Server. If the server is on your subnet (mine isn't) then you hang the entire thing off of DHCP - plug in a brand new machine out of the box and you can hit your user account with no configuration. That's cool...
With piles, you don't have to go "inside" the folder, just pick out the doc you want fr[o]m the pile.
How do you think piles will appear in the CLI? Regular directories, just like application packages?
How come every time I use Mac OSX; I feel like it is UNIXs red headed step child. We are going to see another Vetenarian or a Doctor who has one Mac and no servers tell us how well they network and how you don't even need an IT guy within 100 miles to help you out. They are going to get Elen Fiese or whatever her name is stoned again and tell us how great apple is.
.1 release.
Everyone hates uncle bill, but Jobs wants you to work on his OS for free and call it "Open Source" then charge everyone for a
BTW... how come a UNIX based OS like MAC OSX does not even come with simple scripts such as useradd.
Use Linux such as Yellowdog or Mandrake on PPC--It works fine for everything you would do with OSX and GNOME and KDE are more complete user interfaces. Let's face it
i am going to go ahead and proclaim publically that the emperor is naked.
os x is *not* user-friendly! i am a professional software engineer, sys/network admin ever since i started my own hosting business and a long time linux/*nix user. a mac was the first desktop pc i ever saw and used and i remember loving it back then.
a few months ago, i was confronted with using an osx box. i could *not* for the love of god figure it out. i was not under the influence, there were no electromagnetic storms and the flux capacitor was not fluctuating. it was simply not intuitive.
i never knew what program was open - before closing an application i had to go into different menus to see if i can determine which app was active by the options that were available in there. i couldnt find anything, sherlock was apparently high on cocaine and produced a lot if irrelevant results (when it did).
my (then) boss, staring over my shoulder, was beginning to doubt my sanity. that was easily fixed when i told him to try it himself - he proceeded to swear even more heavily than he usually did for a half hour until he gave up.
what does this prove? i first thought that the problems i was encountering came from overeducation - i admit i have been spoiled by bash and context menus on left click. my then boss, however, was not a power user by any means and would in fact fit the bill of a typical mac user.
what the heck went wrong there? i have no idea. what i do know is that i am never touching that thing again unless it has the full suite of gnu utilities on it and presents me with a terminal window that clearly states 'console' in the titlebar.
paul
I'm sick and tired hearing this 'Mach is crap", "Mach is slow" crap. First, when Torvalds claimed Mach is crap he didn't know what he was talking about. He's claims were based on over 10-year old arguments against Andrew Tanenbaum which cannot be used aganst Mach kernel used on Mac OS X. It's NOT a micokernel, you idiot!
Wonder what he would say about Windows 2000/XP kernels...
Linux: wrong operating system, wrong kernel.
Torvalds: accidental "hero" who just got lucky.
It's not your Mac.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
But don't blame Apple for the hype, and resulting dissapointment if anything less than voice-activated flying cars isn't included in the new OS release. This is basically an eWeek reporter building a story on tidbits from "inside sources", with a dash of speculation: in short, a rumor piece. As far as Apple is concerned, they've not commented on any of these journalistic gems - in fact they have a strict policy of not commenting on rumors in a (futile) attempt to stop rumor problems.
/. reader commented above "Not to troll, but if they're thinking they can leapfrog with user switching and roaming home directories, they need to jump a lot higher than that." (#5782007) Come on people, you're criticizing the company for a few unconfirmed upgrades in a future release that has not yet been announced, while dismissing this same effort as not enough. No wonder the poor company is paranoid about media leaks.
One
Apple's "diligence" is the key word. It's worth paying for. You run a single installer on a disc and it installs itself and just works. Software Update is polite and reliable, and the updates are spaced out well and versions are easy to understand and libraries and other things are all done in the right order.
... you save money and time and trouble and do better work all the time on the new Mac platform.
The idea that anybody could save money by updating parts of their system themselves is ludicrous. They ask you to pay about US$100 every 18 months or so and for that the OS just updates itself every six weeks or so and also does security updates and bugfix updates for the software that came with the computer (iMovie, iTunes, etc). It's such a ridiculous IT labor steal because it really does work and you really do use it. The logs are right, the security is right.
I recommend to new Apple users that they pick a system that they can afford to replace every three years. Buy AppleCare for those three years, which is about US$300, and put aside $100 for a future OS update, and buy the maximum RAM for your system. After three years, you sell your system, get about 1/3 or more of your money back, and then buy the new equivalent system (new PowerBook to replace old PowerBook) with AppleCare and do three more years. If you ever have a computer problem, you call Apple, they answer quickly, and they help you to fix it or send a box for the system and you get a 3-day repair. It is a STEAL when you look at the uptime of the systems and their capabilities and how good the service is from one source.
Example:
iBook $999
AppleCare $299
Maxed out RAM $199
Future boxed system update $100
That's about $500 per year to run the newest Mac OS X totally worry-free. At the end of three years, you can get $500 at least for that system, probably more.
You have to compare the above not just to a PC system, but also to all the installation and add-ons and admin and virus checking and all the other stuff that comes free with a Dell. How much does it cost to get three years of trouble-free computing from Dell? Can you go three years without MS Windows fucking you at some point? Apple simplifies so many things that it is the death of 1000 cuts to MS Windows
Looser? What's the problem, something too tight for you?
You didn't understand the point the poster was trying to make. Your logic is very weak.
int f(int x) { return x / 2 };
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
int a = 6, b = 8;
int c = f(a), d = b / 2;
if (c == d)
printf("MS == Hitler\n");
}
The Apple platform has made more progress in the past two years than MS Windows has made in the last eight years since Windows 95.
This is, quite simply, not true. My platform of choice is OS X, but if I have to use Windows, I'll use one of the NT variants. To parallel your biased comparison: given a choice between OS 9 and Windows XP, I'll install cygwin on the latter, thank you very much, and you can keep your buggy application bringing down the whole OS.
NT has been in preparation since the early nineties. So has Rhapsody. If you think that Jaguar is better than anything Microsoft has to offer (as I do), make that claim, not some other, baseless one.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
darndog
One more performance boost - or at least, *percieved* performance boost -- get Fruitmenu by Unsanity.
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu/
Aside from being absolutely unarguably fantastic, it gives you an option to turn off menu fading effects. While this probably doesn't speed up any system with quartz extreme (since the fade will be done by the compositor/opengl) it does increase the perceived performance.
Speaking as an old hardcore BeOS user, it's not the *real* performance that matters, but the perception of it.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Seriously though, $129 for a service pack, even a comprehensive one, approaches Micro$oftian levels of asininity. That works out to about $10-11 per month, assuming one big 'Jaguar'-style update per year.
.Mac and software upgrades into a single annual charge (say $99/year), but they must have thought of this and decided that they could still earn more money overcharging for an online component and service packs while still suffering piracy.
Of course, if Apple were smarter, they'd bundle
And, btw, the fact that OSX is as good as it is keeps me buying (and recommending) Apple hardware. In fact, one of the big reasons I'm holding off on the 17" upgrade (besides the fact that I'm still waiting for the ol' Direct Deposit tax refunds) is to wait for Panther.
What if this whole portable home directories thing is more along there lines. .Mac (it only read your Library and then starts a slow download of all your other stuff, with some kind of algorhythm that pulls your most recently used items first). There's an interesting thought. Of course, this means that all those UI hackers are going to throw a hissy fit, but quite frankly I could care less (and so could Apple for that matter probably). I don't know how they'd pull it off with today's existing Directory Services but maybe they've been pulling extra hours in the programming department and figured out how to do it seemlessly (with only a few bugs). Also, it's very simple to sync a home directory to a remote server using several existing utilities (rsync, Mike Bombich's stuff, MacOSXLabs.org stuff). What would be great is if Apple implements this for us so we don't have to sit there and configure servers all the freaking time. Anyway. That's my thoughts on this whole "leapfrog" issue. I'd love to be right, but somehow I doubt it.
Take your iPod (10GB, whatever). You put your home directory on it. Then you go to another computer, plug your iPod in. Log into the computer with your account, even through that computer was never really set up with your user profile at first, but the OS detects your home directory, adds you to the Directory Services (temporarily) and lets you use the computer with your settings, your files, your e-mail, your bookmarks, etc. The only thing that would be missing would be silly UI hacks or other funky applications that may not be installed on that machine (hence, Apple's distaste for UI hacks). Then they take a lot of those silly UI hacks that don't go completely against Apple's own UI guidelines and they implement them in 10.3. Now, you can go to any Mac running 10.3 and have your stuff with you. If you don't have an iPod, you can set up the Mac to pull your home directory from
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Hrm, is there a suit in the works? XP already piles windows into the taskbar after you, say, open up three Windows Explorer windows or Mozilla or what-have-you.
Sure, these are piles of windows, not files, and you can't cut them into separate decks (how long before we're playing a new type of solitaire on Mac desktops?), but it's funny watching two giants -- or at least two commerical OS makers -- rush to get this paradigm into different parts of their GUIs first. I doubt Apple could win a suit against Microsoft for the windows piling, but it's a pretty similar beast.
Any prior art in this one? Seems like Linux likes to anticipate cool features in some obscure application somewhere. Anybody seen other piles of things similar to piles?
As an aside, I can see why Apple had the idea of piles first. One day I selected all of the email addresses in my Em@iler address book and "drug and dropped" them to BBEdit Lite. I missed, and they landed on the desktop in, that's right, a giant pile of text clippings. Took me forever to get them off for some reason -- seems I could only grab so many at a time. Gotta imagine something similar happened to somebody brighter than me at Apple and *poof*, piles are patented.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
A paid 'upgrade' of $129 is just buying the damn thing all over again, like we did with Jaguar.
I'm not saying don't pay Jobs and crew for their work. But if you want users to follow the 'upgrade path' (and they do), then cut us a little slack -- that's all people are asking. Give us a discounted upgrade fee. $50 would be sweet. $79 would be decent. $85-90, you're pushing it, but it's in the bounds of feasibility.
If Jobs doesn't, he can't really then turn around and be puzzled as to why sales flag.
>> i first thought that the problems i was encountering came from overeducation - i admit i have been spoiled by bash and context menus on left click.
/Applications/Utility.
Overeducation in what? You are kidding yourself. A middle-aged lady next door has never touched a computer till she bought an iBook recently. With a bit help from me on a few occasions, she has pretty much figured out most of the things on her own and is a very happy OS X user. In fact, she now spend hours everyday playing games, listening music, watching DVD, surfing the Web with the AirPort wireless and broadband.
And by the way, you must be the only "power user" in the world who doesn't know that OS X has bash (as well as csh, tcsh, zsh) and contextual manual.
>> what i do know is that i am never touching that thing again unless it has the full suite of gnu utilities on it and presents me with a terminal window that clearly states 'console' in the titlebar.
WTF are you talking about? There are many different terminal applications on OS X, and they shouldn't be titled "console" because they are not. You obviously don't know what is a console, but there is a separate OS X application called "Console" under
According to nmap 3.0 (for what its worth): Remote operating system guess: Linux Kernel 2.4.0 - 2.5.20
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
+1 for sandbagging sanctimony.
Something like this would definitely help a researcher like myself used to working with large numbers of text documents -- some in .txt, others in .html, .pdf, .doc, .rtf, you name it.
Tabbed browsing helps me order the .html files for a given project, but switching between those and files opened by other programs is a major drag. Particularly so, I'm sorry to say, via the Dock, since it's so full of other icons that clutter complicates its usage for retrieving open documents; besides, why, when I'm dealing with a group of documents related to the same subject, should I have to keep track of which app opens them? The implementation of piles you've shown us is more intuitive.
>> i do not have an osx box, so i can not verify your suggestions about the menubar and all. however, something is clearly wrong if i didnt see it, isnt it?
Yeah, either your brain is wrong or you haven't got one. The name of the active application is always the first item on the menubar, but obviously that's too well hidden for over educated power users like you and your boss.
Are you really smart enough to work with Linux? You definitely smell like a poor Windows victim used to the stupid idea of shuting down your Pee Cee by clicking the Start button.
fuck all anti-mac losers.
you, my friend, definitely smell like someone who overpaid for inferior hardware =]
I must have missed the "much-discussed" piles concept on /. Can someone enlighten me, please?
Piles hasn't already been out for 6 months, so of course you haven't heard about it on Slashdot.
at least we can see where you are coming from. any reasonable person who knew what they were talking about would have a hard time qualifying that statement across the board of apples product line. Not many, if any companies have a better laptops, monitors, mp3 players, dvd burning support that matches apple in price or performance when all the bells and whistles are added to match was apple includes as standard. And not one of them cant match apple in reliability because they cant, they dont make the OS and the the hardware. Any even if cpu on desktop is lagging due to Motorola (the only proprietary "inferior" part, the case design is years head of any dell. A machine which doesn't run OS X, so i wouldn't want it even it was a couple $100 cheaper. My friend just had a PC mac bigot build her a PC from scratch, after he slammed her mac. she got a piece of shit and she cant even figure out how to copy files on it. A machine she is already having to pour more money into on back-end to get to where she would have been out of the box on any mac. by time she is done she will have spent more $. Any one who would slam the door forever on a OS for the problems you describe, half of which was your own ignorance, is a close minded fool.
I get teary eyed thinking of hypercard. My first stack consisted of a drawing of a sexy girl with a button on her boob that went "Boooiiinnng" when you clicked it while playing screen effects.
I need to get out more.
KDE + GNOME have both had the window "piles" as you call them for a while.
Why not fork?