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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.
Okay, Panther is due out RSN - and Longhorn is due in, what, TWO YEARS? I guarantee you, OS X will be much farther along by 2005, and the effect on OS X by the PowerPC 970 & succeeding processors (we'll have at _least_ the 980 and possibly 990 by 2005!) will be pretty astounding, if early, unconfirmed reports are even halfway accurate.
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Okay, now about making windows do silly things - I gotta agree here - the first thing I do after installation of any system is turn off all window animations & effects. I want that extra millisecond!
I'm stuck temping on a weird laptop that keeps turning on window animation after every reboot - bizarre behavior. Plus it's Win98SE *sigh*. I haven't had to endure _that_ for quite some time.
I like OS X, and plan to switch to a Mac when I can afford a PPC970 machine (hopefully this year), but I must admit that I could do without all the extra window chrome in OS X. I don't even like the extra window chrome in Win Me/2000/XP (I turn it off, but it's still there in some apps like Windows Media Player), but in OS X, it's extra pixel hungry. And that frickin' metallic theme that Apple puts on everything now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed metal looks good on hardware, not on software.
I think the nickle summary is that Microsoft and Apple are madly hurrying to add stuff. They're not sure exactly what anyone is adding except they've heard there are rumors. Then they suggest you use google to go dig some unsubstantiated stuff up. Sheesh.
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Okay, 3d is a neat thing. It's really neat because it creates entire new genres of video games. And it also make really cool animation for movies and such possible. However, for user interfaces 3d is bad unless it's a hologram, and we're still talking flat monitors here. It's one thing if you use the 3d stuff to make it look cool. Say an icon is a spinning 3d image of a disk instead of a pixellated icon of a disk. That would indeed be cool, if useless. However, making the actual interfact 3d is bad. 3d implies depth which means something is behind something else. Behind is bad in UI, because it's obscured.
What I would like to see is a vector graphics based user interface. Right now my task bar I have to set the width in pixels. I have to select one of 4 sides of the screen to put it on. All of my windows are rectangular in shape. With a GUI based on vectors I could have a round web browser. Or an oblong winamp. My task bar could be a triangle in the lop left of my screen. I could change the shape of existing windows to make room for new ones. Usually if I've got 3 or 4 windows open on a desktop all the room is used, but a small piece is left over, or one of the windows has to be sized awkwardly to fit. The awkwardly sized window ends up having it's internal ui elements messed up. With a vector based ui you could morph each window to maximize use of screen space.
Microsoft is using 3d because they can. They are thinking about keeping a hold on their 3 year upgrade cycle. Apple, while not making a vector based ui, is thinking about making a good ui.
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Apple playing catch up? What article did YOU read? It was about Apple being ahead now and Longhorn will catch up in 2005 to Jaguar... which by that time Apple will have released some other OS X cat name...
"I do believe by 2005 when Longhorn is out, Apple will have made amazing OS X gains, heck it might even be OS XI by then, but I do NOT buy first to market wins."
I think the premmise of the article was that because Apple was so far ahead now when compared to XP, the introduction of Panther in a couple months will make that lead massive. In two years time that Massive lead will be growing exponentially.
While Longhorn may (or may not) be an innovative update, the article is simply saying that it will have to be absolutely INCREDIBLE to catch up to the hights that OS X will have achieved by that time.
Since its initial release just 2 years ago, Mac OS X has had 2 major revisions and numerous minor updates with significant performance gain and countless new features. In contrast, Win XP remains virtually unchanged apart from a single service pack and a large number of security patches.
.NET, Longhorn, speech recognition for so many years, but failed deliver any meaningful result. Now we know that Longhorn is at least 2 years away, and WinFS is just a Windows Service on top of NTSF rather than a revolutionary file system. The only things really worth mentioning in Longhorn appears to be the Aero GUI and Window rendering through GPU, basicly a second rate imitation of Aqua and Quartz Extreme.
MS is just full of puffs and bluffs. They have been talking about
MS is just a slow dinosaur that has to die sooner or later due to its total incapacity to innovate. Apple is 60 times smaller than MS, and yet makes more and better software than the Redmond beast, in addition to cool hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, iMac, PowerBook, and so on.
Although Win XP has some nice features, but it just doesn't feel nearly refined as Mac OS X. Judging from the recent leaks, Longhorn can't even match Jaguar, let alone Panther. And no one can imagine how much better OS X would be by 2005.
The second and third videos don't look like they're realtime to me... I imagine its just clipped video scaled, rotated, and alphamapped ...
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If she was hitting the "Start" key and the menu was being build and displayed, and all that, I would be a little happier with what I saw. But as it is, and knowing MS' track record of shoddy demo's, I'm gonna pass all judgement on Longhorn until I hear chimps talking about it on the bus.
Until then, ho hum
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Maybe I'm not the first to mention this, but the article is full of inaccuracies. OS X has had the "ability to create profiles that travel with them among machines," since it was still NextStep (and it had shared directory services before Active Directory was a twinkle in its daddy's eye). I'm not sure what "Terminal Services' access to multiple desktops" means, but Apple Remote Desktop (or the free VNC) will give you most of what Terminal Services gives you. Also, they spelled "Lifescape Solutions's Picassa" wrong (it only has one s). I don't mean to be a nerd about it, but it kind of shoots their point -- which I don't think is far wrong -- in the foot.
You were moderated up as "Funny" but I fear you are not joking...
This value comes at a price. You helped create a monoculture of operating systems, where interoperability is possible essentially only when Microsoft was late to the party, where a single virus outbreak may take down most of the world's connected desktops, and where one company decides where you want to go today.
I like Apple, but I wouldn't want to see Apple with 95% of the market either. What I want is diversity, where several competing platforms capture various niches, none able to dominate the others.
Funny you should mention value for the dollar. You do realize that Microsoft can probably sell Windows at $10 a copy and still make money, right?
The article referred to products, not Companies. Panther will tear up up Longhorn, not Apple will tear up Microsoft.
If the article said that, then maybe market share and earnings would be relevant.
A Porsche 911 Turbo will tear up a Honda Civic. Yet market share and earnings... Honda Civic wins. See what I mean?
How good a product is does not necessarily translate to how many of the items is sold. You're thinking like a member of a development team, not an end user. Which isn't all that surprising, considering your disclaimer
-- james
If you watch the video's you find at the last page of ExtremeTech you see a huge difference in filesize between RealMedia, Windows Media File format, and QuickTime format. Gives the average visitor the impression that WMF has better compression ratio.
What you don't see if you don't open all formats, is the higher quality of the QT version.
Near fraud - or pseudo journalism.
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* Sigh *
To be honest, this article didnt say very much about why "panther may tear up longhorn." It did however point out that panther is due out this summer, and longhorn not till 2005, making the comparison somewhat of a bad one. Who is really comapring the two anyway? Seems like we ought to wait until the 2003 mac OS to compare.
Aside from that I have one more question. Does anyone know if there will be a 64-bit version of longhorn, or if it will be exclusively 64-bit?
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou