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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."
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?
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!
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:.
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...
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.
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.
I could see the registry explaination almost making sense during startup. But an app isn't going to re-read a preference every time it draws a UI widget. It'll read them all in at startup and store them.
Also, searching thru 10 megs of data for the registry is definately going to be slower than reading and parsing a 2k text file, especially if you're actually using all the info in the text config file.
A more likely explaination of why Windows GUI apps are faster is because of how GDI resources work. All the UI in your app gets copied into GDI's memory space, which runs in kernel space. Of course, the problem with this approach is GDI resources are rather limited (altho they seem to increase in each Windows release). Ever see your icons turn black? Or open a new window and the toolbar isn't showing up? That means you ran out of GDI resources.
>User-centered doesn't mean I am forbidden by all means of booting into OS 9 when I need to
Please. The sooner OS9 is forgotten, the better. I understand that there are devices, and applications that haven't been brought forward - Quark for example, and many scanners and printers. That doesn't mean Apple should have to maintain one modern OS, and one legacy OS.
Microsoft doesn't support Win3.1 for a reason, you know. Granted MS did a better job of making printers and scanners work, but the point remains.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
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 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
They created the idea in the early 90's, so yes apple invented the idea before windows could probably use a scanner.
I'd ignore you as well if you reported it as a bug. "click to focus" has been the standard on the mac for almost 20 years. I'm a very experienced computer user and "focus follows mouse" drives me absolutely batty. That's just my preference and the preference of the vast majority of computer users.
That said... maybe if you put it in as a feature request that could be activated as a system preference... well then you might just get somewhere. If you're not snide about these things, you just might find that they'll take you a bit more seriously.
And yes, i realize this was probably intended to be a humorous post, but even as a joke, there are probably people who seriously take such stupidly non-diplomatic approaches to dealing with Apple or any other software developer.
Pooty tweet
You have to remember there is a MAJOR problem with focus follows mouse concept in OS X. The menu bar is at the top of the SCREEN not the top of the window. This means if you want to select a menu item, you move to the top of the screen... guess what, the mouse cursor just popped out of the window, and possibly onto another window. And now the menu that you were moving to is no longer the one you want.
----- "Blame the guy who doesn't speak English." -- Homer J. Simpson
Who the hell cares about how the files are ACTUALLY stashed away? Should I remember the cylinder address of whatever file I want to start modifying?
OF COURSE it's an organizational metaphor. What on a GUI screen isn't? The only question is whether it's more or less useful than other metaphors for more or less humans.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
When people talk about Mac OS X being slow, they are talking about a lack of interface responsiveness because of the double-buffered and 32-bit composited display. Nothing ever appears out of thin air. It's drawn in a buffer and then composited with your current display.
An analogy is that you could watch a 2-hour movie in 1:45 if you took out all the wipe transitions and just went boom, boom, boom between scenes. Technically this is faster, but it is not better. The way MS Windows is doing its display and interactivity it is cheating all the time. Once you get used to Mac OS X it is like looking at real stuff and interacting with it and you get used to the fact that a window slides away and your pace matches it quite easily.
It is not slow at the kernel level. Real-time multimedia stuff is amazing. Lots of audio tracks, lots of videos, you can really move data around in real-time with low, low latencies that can't be achieved with MS Windows. Also Mac OS X is fast at waking up from sleep so you can close and open your PowerBook all day long with no penalty. It also does a lot of things automatically that you would have to hand-hold a Windows machine. Also one crash per year and the thing runs 24/7 other than that really saves time over a Windows machine. Application admin and security audits and software updates are all also much quicker in Mac OS X. Apps usually work first time and don't break later at all. Very time-saving.
Maybe because case-sensitivity is a stupid carry-on from UNIX filesystems. How the hell do you explain to a new user that the files 'MyFile', 'MYFile', 'MYFILE', 'myfile' and 'myFile' are all different files? What OS X does is case-preservation without case-sensitivity, so you can save as 'myFile' for example, but all other combinations such as 'MyFIlE' refer to that file. It makes more sense, and I've been a UNIX user for 15 years.
By the way, this does knacker up LWP-Perl which insists on having a /usr/bin/HEAD command that screws around with /usr/bin/head, which I think goes to prove my point. Why should a system have two differently operating commands that have the same name and location and only differ in case? It's completely braindead.
Of course, if you need it for UNIX development, you can make a UFS disk image in Disk Copy, mount it and work on your code in that Volume which will be completely case-sensitive.
Wilfredo Sanchez of Apple wrote a paper on this and other HFS+ vs UFS issues for USENIX, and you can read it here.