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Hacking Mac OS X
Bill Hamm writes "DB is carrying a deep interview with Jonathan Rentzsch, who created an open source technology to allow other developers to inject their code into any running process to alter its functions and written papers for IBM to program the PowerPC correctly. The interview is huge and technical, and all over the place in terms of content. Some of the things discussed are the reasons for corporate America's resistance to buying from Apple, software optimization, the importance and history of 10.4's Core Data, why WebObjects is no longer relevant, the status of PowerPC compilers, and why Mac OS X's Finder should be killed off."
Doubling the size of your IT department in order to deal with technical problems is MORE expensive...
Which, many believe, is exactly the conspiracy that IT pushes on management. Bad computers justify their very jobs.
I suggest you read Slashdot
If there are two things I don't like on my PB then it's Finder and QuickTime (player).
Finder does not seem to be multithreaded, if any network communication gets stuck the whole thing does. Even on large directories it's slow. And the way it insists on showing you previews of files (using QT) and then failing. I have to admit that I only use it as application launcher and simple file operations. For anything else the command line or mc works much better.
I like the UI, but the core should be rewritten.
I guess that's why there are Mac users, Windows users and X users -- for my part I find it incomprehensible that there are people who prefer the Windows paradigm of stacks of windows they blindly Alt-tab through, or having all their open Word or Excel documents globbed together in a giant opaque square. And I don't see why those globs are more attractive in the office than at home. But I'm glad we have a choice.
By the way, when people bitch about Mac usability by complaining about the drag-disks-to-the-trash issue that was resolved a decade ago and has always been a non-issue for any user I've ever seen -- the absence of any second criticism tends to make their point in the opposite direction of intended...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
To understand the basic complaint about the OS X Finder look at this ArsTechnica article.
Which is essentially asking for a finder that works like the spatial Nautilus (this isn't surprising given that spatial Nautilus was designed based on this series of Ars Technica articles). We all know how well spatial Nautilus was recieved. I don't think you can win - there is no "better" only "different".
In the end I quite like what Nautilus has ended up with - you can pick or choose between the two options, and both are reasonably (if not exceptionally) well implemented.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I was going to mod you down for this bit "Mac designers were so proud of multitasking that windows didn't maximize automatically -- hardly making efficient use of screen real-estate. (See! There are multiple apps running behind this window!)." but decided the post had some worthwhile things overall.
I suppose it's a usage debate, really, but it always made sense to NOT maximize Windows in the MS-OS's way. It's disgustingly wasteful. With higher res displays, one should not be asking for a wider view of a single window, but how one can use that space for multiple windows. That's efficient multi-tasking, in my opinion. Not having one giant square blocking everything else from view.
It's a well known fact that the term "hacker" did not originally apply to the people that media now calls hackers.
Cracking refers to people who break into computer systems using nefarious means. Ie Kevin Mitnick is mentioned on the wikipedia page, as he should be since he is probably the worlds most notorious cracker.
Just because the media says it, doesn't mean it's true. And if a cracker ever refers to him/herself as a hacker, you can rest easy because all your base will not belong to them. Anyone worth their merit knows the correct definition and differentations between cracking/hacking/spidering/phreaking/etc.
And just in case you all are too lazy to read the links... Linus Torvalds is listed as a famous hacker. This is the true definition of the term. It's not because he ever broke into computer systems, it's because he's a good programmer.
Also of note is that in the computer science community the word "hack" has gone on to have a somewhat negative connotation. For example, "Dude this code is such a hack." Although this refers more loosely to the "hack and slash" programming methodology... which often results in ugly code that is held together very loosely.
However, an ugly code "hack" and the word "hacker" are distinctly different. Please refrain from falling prey to false assumptions based on media in the future.
Ah, c'mon... that's not really a solution is it? Previewing is an excellent feature of column view, and it'd be a shame to turn it off since it's usually very handy. Sadly, Finder's brain-damaged handling of non-local storage makes it occasionally a bit of a nightmare.
... for the most part :)
I'm a fan of OS X -- my PC's now just a Wintendo games machine. The Mac has a whole slew of applications I've come to rety on which are just plain better than alternatives (in my experience, of course).
I also think OS X has some really interesting technology in it, and I find it a real pleasure to use.
I don't have a problem with how the Finder works. Of course, there's room for functional enhancements, but I'm not crying out for anything at the moment. But it really handles previewing (especially over network links, as noted) awfully. It's the only app that causes the spinning-wheel on my system. The idea that waiting for the view of a network share (or even my iDisk) to refresh should cause every other Finder window (including the Desktop) to freeze is crazy. Finder's much better than it was in 10.0, 10.1 (where there was literally NO threading) or even 10.2. But the core really needs some tweaking.
QTPlayer's not so bad. I've got the Pro version, since I like having Pro's editing and conversion features. It does its job well, but not spectacularly. I'm not going to rant about it because in a few weeks time, I'll be running Tiger with a much-overhauled QuickTime 7.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Replace "PowerBook" with "laptop" and it makes perfect sense. It's not about the brand name, so much as the flexibility that a portable offers. Some people, upon buying a laptop, get rid of all their desktops and live off of the notebook. It becomes a "lifestyle," inasmuch as your work files, eMail, calendar, address book, etc. are all on a single machine. Like the Blackberry lifestyle, or the Palm Pilot (remember those?) lifestyle, or the cell-phone lifestyle.
For the longest time, Mac-heads used "PowerBook" to mean "laptop" the way some people use "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue."
Apple has had *so long* to get the finder *perfect* and it's still not nearly as good as it could be.
looks-wise: when going from 9 to X, they threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater. consider active and inactive windows. in OS 9: foreground window had 3d effects all around it. EVERY OTHER WINDOW was solid light grey and a 1-pixel darker grey outline, period. no question about which was which. in OS X, it's waaaay too overly-cutely-designed and too subtle to be useful. OK, so the drop shadow is a bit smaller? great, that'd be tought to see even if my desktop picture *weren't* black. And the stoplight buttons are not there? OK, thanks. and the titlebar text goes from dark grey to medium grey? OK, super. OS 9 made the state of the computer *obvious.* OS X hides it behind pretty-but-subtle cues.
And the performance isn't nearly what it could have been. Every use BeOS? You make a file on the desktop from within an app, boom, it appears in the background instantly. OS X: make a file or folder, click on the desktop to (hopefully) force a redraw, and a moment later (on a dual-G5) it'll show up. Editing a file that you can see in a window in list view? Save it and BeOS updates the 'date modified' column in the background instantly. OS X? Click the file and it'll update. And the Finder is especially lazy about updating disk usage when you have the 'calculate folder sizes' option checked. C'mon, Apple... I had BeOS R3 for Intel and PPC in *1998*! It's 2005 now! Want me to send you my old CDs?
perfect quote: "Finder X is the compromise between the Mac OS folks and the NeXT folks. Neither won, everybody lost."
great quote: "the entire bastardized notion of switching from metal to aqua and hiding the sidebar when clicking on the toolbar chiclet in the upper right-hand corner. Bonus: notice how if you click on the extreme right of the chiclet and try to switch back, you fail -- the window theme switch moved the chiclet slightly to the left and now you've got to follow it. Gag. Folks, this type of stuff makes Gnome look good."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Thats a horrible idea. You want them to ditch great next generation technology just to fit in? Apple is all about next generation technology like Quartz, and how would dropping Quartz help them fit in? Every platform has it's own programming interfaces. Linux does, Windows does, Apple does. Are you suggesting that Linux drop its own API's and have everyone standardly use WINE because thats what everyone else uses? Cause Cocoa is so easy, if I had to code using other API's, I would leave the Mac platform.