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Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn
Sophrosyne writes "Microsoft Watch has presented an article on Longhorn, which is due not before 2005, and compares it with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), which may be released this September. The article touches on some of the areas where Windows is ahead in operating system design and technologies, as well as how Panther plans to compete. Included in Microsoft Watch's article were links to a Extreme-Tech article on Desktop compositing, and 3D User Interfaces. It also contains videos of Longhorn's 3D Quartz-like user interface in action." If processor power is so important, why are we so willing to waste it on making windows do funny things when we move them around? Just wondering.
What the /hell/ are you on?
1. NO 970 MACHINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED BY APPLE YET. Say it with me, dammit. While it may be likely, don't take as canon rumor sites and IBM press releases that don't even mention Apple Power Macs. Jeez. You're already a Mac user, eh? (And I say that being one.)
2. 980? 990? WTF? At what data are you looking? Search Google for "ibm 970 chip" and the only info you find are two random comments in some forum somewhere; search IBM for roadmap info on PowerPC, and you will find their "9xx" selection, and the only thing under that is this:
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/tec hdocs/A1387A29AC1C2AE087256C5200611780
Lastly, with the release of the 970 being sometime in the second half of this year , don't you think saying we'll probably have a "990" by 2005 is a little premature?
Meh.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
It is 3d in the resect that the content of the windows are treated as textures which are mapped onto planes. That allows the compositing to be handled by the video chip instead of the CPU.
Apple introduced this in Jaguar as "Quartz Extreme". Basically some of the CPU intensive stuff in the interface is offloaded into the 3D functions of the video chip. It requires a fairly hefty video chip (Radeon, or GeForce2+), but those are common now. The upside to it is that Quartz Extreme makes some of the flashier features (e.g. transparancy) available with no additional CPU cycles. It uses the video chip (which is largely untaxed anyway unless you are playing a game). In fact, on a Mac with QE, you can play a quicktime movie under a transparant terminal window with no slowdown and no increase in CPU use. You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
On windows xp, reassociate movie files with "mplayer2.exe" (comes with the OS), and you can have back the stable old simple interface movie player from Windows 2000.
The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.
Also, as everyone knows, Apple is famous for not saying anything until the product is in trucks, and heading to stores. So while it is not a guarentee that they will be using it, I would put money on the fact that the next step in the evolution of Apple computers will be twords the PPC 970.
I do agree that 980/990 prediction is a little early at this stage in the game though.
Quartz is vector-based. It has a built-in path rasterizer and support for floating-point coordinates (among other things). It can also do nonrectangular windows (and change their shape on the fly), but no one really takes advantage of this outside Apple's sample code.
With OSX you don't lose CPU cycles for all the extra animation. Quartz off loads the Open GL and most vector processes to your video card. This frees up your CPU for real tasks.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
"Don't forget Microsoft OWNS a rather big hunk of apple"
They don't anymore, and $150 million worth of shares in a company that has $4 billion in the bank isn't really a "big hunk" of the company anyway.
> now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed
> metal looks good on hardware, not on software.
Brushed metal is indeed annoying. Fortunately, it's simplicity itself to be rid of. Wether an application used Aqua or brushed metal widgets is defined by a single variable in an xml file inside the application bundle. Change that variable, restart the application, and the accursed brushed metal is gone!
There are free programs that'll demetallify all your apps in one step; or do so on an app by app basis, and keep track of the altered ones in a central location.
If you're some kind of freak, you can even ADD the brushed metal skin to applications that didn't use it in the first place!
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Yeah, stop with the "eye candy". Just because you've only seen OS X in screenshots doesn't mean that its features stop there.
... the stuff that the regular user doesn't interact with except that it works.
... our network here just configured itself, including the printer that's on the base station appearing on all the Macs, and music and photos that are shared show up for browsing on all the other Macs and also our TiVo. Mac OS X doesn't crash. It moves between networks transparently, even between Ethernet and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The whole GUI and many apps are scriptable. The file system is Unicode and can hold $ and ? and * in filenames. Searching for something takes milliseconds, and you can fsck a 120GB disk in 10 seconds. You can turn any folder into a virtual disk file, with optional AES-128 encryption. There is a complete 32-bit audio subsystem and full MIDI routing. Consumer-level movie editing and DVD creation is built-in. I could go on and on and on.
It's more about what's under the skin
FireWire is always there and always works. Bluetooth is fully-functional. Wi-Fi(g) is done and I'm sending this over a g network now. Rendezvous is zero-configuration networking
The eye candy is the least of it. Bill Gates complained at WinHEC that Windows apps look like crap and asked developers to take advantage of the 3D video cards that are only used for gaming on the PC. On the Mac, our video cards work just as hard as every other part of the complete system, and things that look like eye candy come with no performance penalty. Steve Jobs says something like, "we've got a 64MB NVIDIA card in there that can do amazing things with OpenGL, so why not use it?"
Also, all Macs are dual display and have TV out. These features really work for you when you have them all there at once and they are easy to use and work every time.
Developers are exploiting this stuff in new ways and users are loving it. You are missing out on so much if you haven't at least given a Mac a test drive at an Apple Store.