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Nonexistent Windows OS Superior to Panther
Anonymous Coward writes "A Windows user slams Panther. 'Apple has implemented some basic desktop composition features in Mac OS X "Panther." But the basic problem with Mac OS X isn't going away: It's a classic desktop operating system that doesn't offer anything in the way of usability advancements over previous desktop operating systems. Today, Windows XP and its task-based interface are far superior to anything in Mac OS X. In the future, Longhorn will further distance Windows from OS X. (sic) From a graphical standpoint, there won't be any comparison. As Microsoft revealed at the PDC 2003 conference, Longhorn is far more impressive technically than Panther.'"
A long time ago Windows users used to blather on about how great Windows NT was going to be, even before it appeared. The funny thing was they then found it necessary to spend an amazing amount of time dissing OS/2, which was already being used happily by some of us. OS/2 users had years of using a great environment while NT users waited years for theirs to appear. It's like an OS version of short man syndrom. They know Windows sucks, so they get really shrill when they criticize other OSes. It's a repeating pattern.
As Microsoft revealed at the PDC 2003 conference, Longhorn is far more impressive technically than Panther.
Is? IS? Longhorn isn't even out yet, so there's no comparing them. So what if Microsoft says Longhorn will have features X, Y and Z? I don't see Longhorn on millions of computer systems today. By the time Longhorn comes out (late 2004 at best), there will in all probability already be another MacOS X revision.
It's just stupid to claim the superiority of software that doesn't exist in terms of users. I might as well go on a Mac-advocacy rant and say something like "Yeah, well, Longhorn sucks because Apple are developing MacOS XI, due 2006, which has features X, Y and Z, which Longhorn doesn't have. Therefore, MacOS X is just way better than Longhorn." This is childish and stupid, and worst of all, flamebait. Damn me for just responding to this rubbish!
Strange... I have all my finder so it shows everything in single view mode except for one folder that it always shows in list view after I set it that way
Are you running Jaguar, or Panther? I upgraded my G3/700 iBook to Panther yesterday and I'm very impressed with the improvements they made to the Finder. My first impression is that the new Finder is easier to use and seems more willing to stay in one view mode. The laptop feels much more responsive overall too.
By 2006, we're going to be on 10.5 or 10.6... and 2-3 more times we'll hear Apple is charaging$129 for an upgrade!Now if you want to see advancement in MacOS, just compare 10.0 to 10.3. Huge difference.
I'm sure Longhorn will be a great upgrade. But until it ships, we should only compare 10.3 vs. XP to be fair.
MS is just better at showing off vaporware then Apple. Apple has very few official leaks, sure we can predict what 10.4 might include, but so far Apple hasn't said one new feature it WILL include and given the Apple OS shipping schedule its due in Late 2004/Early 2005. A year before Longhorn! And we already know lots of the technology Longhorn WILL include.
Ah, yes. "Task-based" user interface. What a brilliant innovation that is. I'll be able to sit down at my desk in the morning, bring up the "Do you want to..." screen, and click "Publish a metropolitan daily newspaper."
What? What do you mean, that's not in the "tasks" list? That's my task. That's what I do every day. Why isn't it in the list?
Oh, well, fine. I'll just click "Compose the front page" instead.
Not there? What the hell?
"Copyfit an article."
Not there.
"Write a headline."
Strangely absent.
"Open a new InDesign document."
Aha. Now we're getting somewhere.
Wait a minute. Wait just a damn minute. This isn't any different! In fact, it's worse, because I was planning to copy yesterday's front page and replace the content. This just brought up a blank page!
"Task-based" my ass. If you want the computer to have a "task-based" interface, you'd damn well better make sure the computer has at least some basic knowledge of what my tasks are. If it doesn't, then the "task-based" interface can get the hell out of my way and let me do my job.
I assume this means an interface that can be set up for different tasks, such as programming, gaming, communication and web surfing. Doesnt the multiple desktop feature of MOST linux window managers/desktop environments do this already? Its hard to say "Linux has ... interface" because there are so many DIFFERENT interfaces. Sure, you could say "KDE has a ... interface" but not Linux. With FVWM2, I can set up groups of windows that open when I startx and have a desktop for programming (a couple of xterms and an editor, perhaps) communitaction (xchat and gaim) etc. How is this a "dated desktop metaphor?"
Desktop interface I assume means an interface like in earlier windows versions (or XP with certain non-default setups), OS X, and SOME interfaces for Linux, where you have a "My Computer" like icon on the desktop, and can browse through your files. While some may call this "dated," people seem to LIKE to work this way, so why change it for them? Give the user OPTIONS. Don't just go with whatever is the style now. On first boot: "Do you want a task based (defn.) or Desktop based (defn.) interface? This selection may be changed later at Start>Settings>Interfce>Whatever."
/usr/games/fortune
this beeping problem I have. When ever I'm writing a paper on my PC, all of a sudden it goes BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, and like half of my paper is GONE!! So I have to write it again, and I have to do it fast, so it's not as good.
E.F.
Still I find the Windows 2000 Explorer, with the folder tree and folder contents in separate windows, more useful.
I respectfully submit that you don't know how to use the Panther Finder. It doesn't work like the Windows Explorer. It's completely different. Learn to use it, then draw your comparisons.
The OS X Save As feature is horrible! It doesn't default to the original file's directory, but to the Documents folder.
It doesn't default to anywhere. The choice of where to open the Save dialog is entirely up to the application developer. If the developer said to go to the Documents folder, then that's where it goes.
In any case, check out the pop-up menu of recent directories. It's darned useful.
On several occations, this has made me open up old revisions of documents, which is a drag.
The Save dialog can't open anything. Maybe you're just a fucking idiot?
It looks like this 'story' is just a troll. Aren't we supposed to wait till after the story is posted for the trolls?
It seems to me that all the comments here are generally the same -- you can't compare something that isn't out yet (and not due for 3 years) with something that is. There's also the fact that M$ is very good at promising the world and delivering Outer Mongolia. And, as we've seen, frequently when M$ adds something new or does a drastic redesign, it takes years (1995 for Win95 to 2002 for WinXP) to get most of the bugs out and make it stable.
/.'ers calmly explaining the fallacy of his arguments and why his technical arguments are weak, he may not be as likely to spread such FUD in the future.
So this guy thinks Longhorn and XP are fantastic and Linux and OSX are crap...
Why is everyone here preaching to the choir and patting each other on the back for OSes that many of us use regularly instead of educating the person who runs the "Win Super Site" on what is going on?
Perhaps if he gets a few e-mails from
The "iterative" and "task-based" nature of things gets to be kind of interesting. Rather than opening an app, you might pick (from a "start" menu that takes up a third of the screen), for example, a "photo" section (or "activity center," as Microsoft was calling them back in the late '90s). What's that get you? A UI (quite possibly full-screen) that looks a little like a website, with a list of places you might Want To Go Today[tm]. Maybe you want to import photos, maybe you want to print photos, maybe you want to organize photos, etc. Thus the "task-based" part. You click on what you want, and it gives you step-by-step "iterative" stuff, like a "wizard." Or... well... DOS. :)
So... basically, Microsoft is working on making the system extremely easy to use for people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. They're aiming at folks who are going to do one thing at a time, more or less. Perhaps they'll still have a "classic" interface available for people who've actually used a computer for more than a week, since a "task-based" "iterative" interface would be absolutely maddening for many of us. :)
Historically, there's been this zeitgeist of "Windows is somewhat hard to use, but it's cheap, and you can do so much with it!" First UNIX-like OSes became cheaper than Windows, then Macs became price-competitive, and now Microsoft wants Longhorn to be the OS of choice for clueless newbies. Earth's magnetic poles should be flipping any day now...
All over the world, people are writing uninformed opinions designed to get a reaction rather than educate. Apparently, Some of them make Slashdot.
Display compositing isn't rocket science. It's feasible now that video hardware with a lot of memory is common.
What is almost rocket science is fine-tuning an OS's user experience. I use Windows, OSX, and X11 (xfce currently, but I switch every few weeks), and OSX has some of the most consistent user designs ever. Preferences each application is in the same place (both file-wise and in the menu).
All I see in windows is an onion-skin of new UI elements being added onto old ones. Someone at work has Longhorn (he's an official MS tester), and the "My Computer" now has everything all lumped into it -- devices, addresses, etc. It's just plain confusing.
So my point is, while OS X is getting simpler to use, Windows, and I fear even some X11 desktops/window managers are getting more complicated. I feel bad for the windows users I know that can't even tell that IE is a browser!
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Q: What's with this Palladium stuff I keep hearing about?
A: One of the most exciting aspects of Longhorn is its optional integration with Palladium
Ok, this guy must either work for Microsoft or is getting some serious kick-back. I wonder what he's getting because no sane person would use exciting and Palladium in the same sentence.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Outlook 2003 already does this, as long as you have an RMS (Rights Management Server) running, it can be contacted when receipient wants to view the message, and you are using only Outlook or some Microsoft reader program.
People fear what they don't understand, but Palladium is about securing the PC and protecting your privacy, plain and simple. Microsoft isn't trying to usurp your PC.
Ah, yeah, right, as long as you're running all Microsoft software on your desktop and Microsoft software on your servers...
I wonder what he's getting because no sane person would use exciting and Palladium in the same sentence.
I can come up with one:
"The RIAA, MPAA, and Proprietary software vendors, are all excited about the amount of choice taken away from users with Palladium"
I'm not sure whether to laugh or what on that "usability enhancements" part. I used Windows for many years, switched to Linux for a while, then picked up an OS X machine to use along side my Linux box. While I was away from the Windows world XP came out. I find XP nearly unusable in the default state -- no I DON'T want the little dog from MS Bob helping me, thankyouverymuch. I'm not interested in the "do you want to..." sidebar. The new start menu drives me nuts. I end up switching XP boxes to the "Windows Classic" interface -- it's better for my blood pressure. So from my point of view, Windows needs all the usability enhancements it can get -- not necessarily the way MS defines them though :)
Yes, I've seen one of Microsoft's slogans in one of their flyers:
Our software makes your daily work more interesting
Yes, that's exactly it. Not "easier". Not "more effective". Not "fun". Not "better quality". Exactly, "more interesting". When opening your email is connected with all the thrills "Does it contain a virus or not?", when setting up some network is a challenge, when finding TCP/IP networking in the bunch of "non-technical-sounding" wizards in XP takes half a hour, it certainly makes your work more interesting... to anyone who happens to watch you fuming over that stuff.
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However, it seems like one of the big things in Longhorn will be the WinFS--which I understand to the the database-as-a-filesystem.
(a) Not a new idea. MS will be the first to try to put it into a popular OS, though.
(b) Apple has done similar before, though you'd be unlikely to guess it from the interface -- they had the desktop file, a constantly OS-maintained index of the filesystem.
(c) There are a number of technical and user interface issues with this approach -- there's a reason folks standardized on a hierarchical system. We'll see what happens, though.
Incidently, Windows is the only popular OS that still only supports a tree-style filesystem. Classic Mac OS, modern Mac OS, BSD and Linux all support any fully connected graph you might desire, thanks to symlinks (and on classic Mac OS, aliases).
d) This isn't actually all that new even from a UI perspective -- think of using Apple's Find File. Perhaps you toss in a few more search parameters to get at more metadata and data. The real difference is that traditionally, you must *also* assign a file a position in a hierarchical filesystem (though your hierarchical filesystem could potentially consist of just a single directory node with lots of files in it, a la the My Documents MS approach).
e) I'm remembering the last time the database research people at Microsoft convinced everyone that going all database would be a great idea. MS SQL, for a period of time, used tables internally for *everything*. Performance sucked, but they did it anyway. It's sexy from a theory point of view, because it simplifies things. Unfortunately, it throws out a lot of area-specific design knowledge that's been built up over the years. We know a lot about how to do a good filesystem, and there are features that apply nicely to filesystems that are less convenient with a traditional database. It's going to be tough to make a better system by throwing everything out.
f) I've heard ominous rumblings about WinFS being removed from Longhorn. It may or may not be living up to internal expectations.
g) Anytime something like this is announced *this* far in advance and isn't getting shown off in final form, it means that the promises frequently come from the research people. Research people have all sorts of rosy views about their own work, plenty of pet ideas, and may not have spent a long time doing usability tests. (This comes from one of those research people.) I wouldn't get excited about this any more than I would the frequent announcements on Slashdot about nonexistent new storage technologies ("in four years, we're all going to be using five terabyte 1 cubic centimeter Jell-O blobs to store our data!"). Yeah...come back when you have something shipping instead of a bunch of theoretical maximum numbers coming from a research team.
May we never see th
I thought Mac users were the ones that belonged to a "cult"
I like microcars
Microsoft has in the past, and will presumably retain in the future, a vision of "ease of use" that is premised on making pre-existing, complex, multi-step tasks "easy" by implementing a condescending "wizard"* to walk the user through the task. Then, as soon as you step out of the wizard framework, or try to do anything that wizards haven't been pre-written to help you accomplish, there is a strong possibility that whatever you're trying to do might not make sense. And it seems that MS doesn't see anything wrong with glossing over an fundamentally hard-to-use system in this manner.
Apple takes a very different approach to usability, and is (strikingly) often regarded as more successful at creating a usable system. You are very unlikely to find any obnoxious animated creatures or magical wizards to guide you through complex tasks, because Apple spends a great deal of time trying to make sure that few tasks ever become complex.
Apple's approach makes things easier for everyone, from beginners to very experienced users. Microsoft's approach makes certain things easy for some novice users, but can infuriate experienced users, or at a minimum force experienced users to deal directly with a kludgy interface (either the wizard, or the system directly).
Stepping back, the long view is one that reveals two very different philosophies: Apple empowers the user. Microsoft empowers itself.
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* On "Wizards":
I guess people are supposed to think, "Wow, computers are so complicated, they're like magic! I could never use a computer if Microsoft didn't come up with all these wizards to make it easier!"
Not having Windows is better than having it; so it is only a slight jump of logic to conclude that NOT having Windows OS is superior to having Panther.
More importantly, if something coming out 2-3 years from now is not technologically superior to Panther (including any Apple OSes that come out in the next couple of years) I would be very disappointed and suprised.
How is this suprising or news?
I can go to an Apple store and find several models of computers coming with OSX pre-installed. How many computers are shipping with Longhorn? Nobody is using it..it must suck.
And compatibility is an absolute nightmare. I've been to every computer store in the country and not a single printer, camera, scanner, card or anything is listed as being compatible with Longhorn. Simply put Longhorn has a tiny niche market for time travelers and can not survive as such.
Here's a quote WRT the 32-bit counter (it's basically Unix's "Y2.038k bug" but happens a thousand times faster, one of the few things in Windows which does):
Here's the 95/98/ME uptime issue straight from the horse's mouth:
Things to note:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
XP doesn't have a task-based interface, it has a chore-based interface: it makes many otherwise simple things a chore to do. The reason we're seeing Longhorn betas now but no real product for maybe 3 years is because the bits that are important to Microsoft have nothing to do with the shiny new flavour-of-the-year (in particular, last year) blue plastic interface. What Microsoft see as most necessary is the sheaf of bondageware going in behind it. Once the shackles are welded firmly in place, we'll see an official release.
Three months later, passport.com (and so your Longhorn machine) will be 0wn3d by a Brazilian/Russian/Korean cracker collective who will be running it from their satellite-connected PDA while they blitz around in their shiny new Hummer all funded in part by your credit card - if Microsoft remember to renew the domain registration, that is. By which time all of Asia, Africa, South America and much of Europe will be running Linux anyway, and won't care.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I've read a number of articles on Winsupersite, and come to the conclusion that Paul Thurrot really likes Windows. I read the bit where he takes four (4) laptops to the Microsoft PDC 2003 and then it hit me: He doesn't get it. He really doesn't get it. He's been to some of the OSX roll out events and claims that they're every bit as geeky as the Microsoft one's, yet I would be buggered to know why anyone takes 4 laptops (one of them an iBook) to a conference. I was under the impression that the purpose behind a laptop was to minimise one's burdens.
.Net, but I can see the costs invloved due the MS' hunger for money and control alienating many customers (Who the hell is going to trust MS not to lock them in? How many AV vendors are going to go out of business?)
And that attitude strikes me as the main failing behind almost all Microsoft OSes: Add so many features and doodahs that you kill any attempt at good usability. Can someone explain to me what a sidebar that takes up fully one sixth of the screen is doing there? I appreciate the fact that one would have a calendar, IM and mail notifications and all sorts of other stuff readily available, but wouldn't an improved task tray have solved that problem?
Crazy.
The task oriented approach as started in XP works with utter newbies. Doing sys admin, I saw anti-tech types and neophytes get on well with the task oriented approach. As we all know, most normal Windows users will get rid of the task stuff as soon as they can as it is damningly slow to do anything but I think many geeks and developers wildly over estimate the clueless newbie (I saw at least three people never use Windows Explorer and do all their searching and document managment from the Windows open/save dialogs-They didn't even know Windows Explorer existed, let alone know what a network drive or other computer arcana are). For home users and newbies, this is a good idea, make no mistake.
Apple's approach is make the UI consistent and simple, and is a good middle of the road approach and a better longterm idea, but Windows task stuff also works for newbies.
The Aero GUI running on the Avalon engine will no doubt be very good, but here too, I have the feeling that MS is going to overdo it in terms of mindlessly long paths to do any task, insane effects and crazy animations (what the fuck is a puppy doing there when I want to find something-- and yes I know you can get rid of it, but how easily?)
The palladium stuff will also find it's market in that some companies will swear by it. There will be just as many others that will swear at it though. It might very well help in terms of Virus and spam stuff though, but it really remains to be seen if that approach works, since there will be a lot of legacy stuff floating around which is usually where the exploits happen. I'm willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt that they can make the OS more secure by rewriting the whole thing in
I dunno. I think Longhorn will probably be ok in terms of previous OSes, but I think the lock-in will be more painful and costly than before.
Microsoft will continue to bastardize the HTML standard.
"After a week with a Windows machine I get the feeling that this system is designed by people who know a lot about computers. Macs, on the other hand, seem to be designed by people who know a lot about people."
That pretty much sums it up right there for me. Apple will continue to appeal to those who like machines designed with a person in mind while Windows users will tend to want something that pushes technology boundaries whether that's useful or not. Any Mac user who gripes about Windows having a lousy interface is missing the point of being a Windows user. Any Windows user who gripes about Apple's technology lagging is missing the point of being a Mac user. I prefer the latter, but that's me. I find the real key to productivity is not cutting-edge technology but logical design.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."