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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!
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"?
Anyone know how Jobs pronounces "Panther"?
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.
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:.
Dude, lighten up. You're using equiptment that is at the bottom end of the spectrum for OS X. You're complaining about smoothing on an old LCD, and speed on an old CPU. If you want compare the two, try running XP on a sub gigahertz PC with a 15" CRT. I'm sure you're complain about it being Really Slow and hurting your eyes.
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?
It's the Bronze G3 that's giving you a problem with font smoothing. I know because I have that same computer. I also have a PBG4 and it's so much better, it's unbelievable. Font smoothing on the Bronze G3 is so horrid it makes OS X unusable for me.
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
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
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
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.
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...
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.
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
I suspect that the subpixel algorithm assumes that an LCD has stripes in the order RGB... and, IIRC, the bronze G3 has GRB stripes, meaning that it's setting the wrong subpixels. What they really need is an algorithm that can adapt to this situation... but apparently it's a small enough population of their market that it's not worth the effort, and (AFAIK) /every/ color LCD is RGB order right now.
I've had this sig for three days.
I'm hoping for a German-like "Panzer". That would just be perfect.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
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.
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
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.
Oh, dear. Looks like I'll have to mirror the original.
heh.
blog
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
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. :-)
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.
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..
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)
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.
How to make OSX more useable on low end hardware.
1. Add RAM.
2. Newer, faster HDD.
3. Add RAM.
4. The dock settings:
Shrink the dock down as small as you can, and still use it.
Magnification off
Possition whatever you like.
Minimize using Scale Effect.
Uncheck Animate opening applications.
Uncheck Automaticly hide and show the dock.
5. Did I mention add RAM.
This is what I did to my 266Mhz Wallstreet, 192Meg RAM, 20 Gig HDD, and it is quite useable. A little slow opening apps, but quite useable otherwise.
With all the Dock eye candy turned on, it was unusable.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
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.
Not to mention the security issues with Windows Terminal Services, which is a prerequisite for the FUS service. Now I'm aware that XP's security is not OS X's problem, but the fundamental things I dislike about the whole Fast Switching concept will remain.
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
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
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
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.
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>
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.
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
You can turn it off. Set it to 'Standard - Best for CRT'. That uses standard, not sub-pixel, anti-aliasing.
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!
Try using a better ColorSync profile -- it helped me a lot.
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.
Don't be so depressed, the problem that the poster mentioned isn't really a problem at all. :-)
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
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...
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.