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Windows Journalist Takes On Tiger
BRSQUIRRL writes "Paul Thurrott has posted a review of Mac OS X 'Tiger' on his SuperSite for Windows. He gives it a score of 4 out of 5. Interesting to get a Microsoft Windows journalist's take on Tiger, especially one as hardcore as Thurrott. In the article, he actually confesses that he has 'been a Mac fan [his] entire life.' Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past."
As a Windows user and fan, I have to take exception to the "XP service packs are more substantial than the OS X upgrade".
This is far from the truth. In my experience, Windows XP is just a facelift of Windows 2000. Sure, the default colors are different and the buttons look different, but it's all the same stuff - just a minor upgrade to colors and a bunch of bug/feature fixes.
XP service packs are just that - they fix stuff that is totally broken or flawed, or worse, they layer in new software that I don't want or that break my older apps.
So although I agree with him that Windows XP is a good and solid OS, touting the transition from Windows 2000 to XPsp2 as multiple "major upgrades" looks just like fantasy. I consider them all to be in the "minor bug/feature/UI fix" category.
You have to remember that at it's heart Apple is a hardware company. Yes they make a great OS, but the purpose of that OS is to drive hardware sales. Making the x86 platform a more user friendly environment would actually hurt apple sales.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Automator and VoiceOver are most definitely user features. Automator is like a GUI version of pipes on the command line (I don't know how else to describe it, having not used it myself yet), and VoiceOver is an OS-integrated text-to-speech system for the visually-impaired.
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Well if you add NextStep into the picture, OS X's heritage is as old as NT. What difference does it make anyway?
If you add NextStep's UNIX heritage and NT's VMS heritage to the stack, there's even less "difference." That's why I said OSX was new to PowerPC. The difference was that XP had already been running as NT on x86 for 10 years with millions of users and years of active development. By contrast, the NextStep roots of OSX had never been on PPC, never been used as a MacOS, and never been marketed by Apple until v. 10.0.
Whilst I agree with you, when I read that portion of his review I thought to myself that he might in fact be correct. It seems to me that most of the features being included in Tiger are beyond the user's immediate ability to see as they're all behind the scenes.
I don't know about you, but I think I'm more excited about the tools and features being brought to developers through Tiger than anything else. My favorite OS X app, Quick Silver, is requiring Tiger for it's next release. I'm looking forward to playing with these new features and seeing what developers do with them.
"I'd like to highlight some of the features that I feel set MSN Search apart from its competitors, chiefly Google [...]
What happened to Apple?"
Apple doesn't provide web search. MSN does. Thurrott isn't comparing desktop searching in the quoted article.
There is no "about face". Thurrott's earlier comments agree 100% with his comments today - Microsoft did announce "Fast Search" functionality in 2003, but the numerous delays that have plagued Longhorn have allowed other comapanies (Google, Apple) to ship their versions first.
Neither Apple nor Google were the first to feature a search technology of this kind. BeOS, for example, had file and email search using the pseudo-database BeFS from the very start.
Microsoft planned to ship Fast Search with Longhorn, Apple decided to include it in their next version of Mac OS.
FTFA: "Dashboard, a controversial new feature that owes more than a little to a third party application called Konfabulator."
I fail to see how it's "controversial". Unless the author as something against little widgets on his screen.
Hm. Maybe the developers of Konfubolator suing Apple, then leaving the Mac platform to code for Windows isn't controvesial after all.
Meh. I don't think this is the greatest analogy.
The best way to summarize my attitude about Apple (as an owner of almost 8 Macs now, starting with the LC) is "love the product, hate the company". Namely, service and support- which are the worst in the industry, and always have been. They're advanced machines, a great operating system. The company itself though, clearly does not subscribe to the "don't be evil" philosophy Google's PR department has been expousing.
My PB 1400 kept crashing while sleeping. I sent it in for repair to TEXAS, the only place you can get it repaired. Each time it came back, the HD was wiped, and on the second trip, they broke the 3rd party ethernet card's jack. On my third attempt to get it serviced, the Apple "customer relations" agent who was supposed to hear out my side of the story...started screaming at me.
My Powerbook Lombard had a screen clutch fail. Like many other Lombards, this causes the video screen cable to get chewed up. Before this, a thick white line suddenly appeared down one side. Apple wouldn't fix any of it.
My Powerbook 17" makes crackling and squealing noises with CPU activity. The hinges loosened up during the warranty period, and when I went into the apple store, the guy said "oh, well, ours in the store does it too." How does a retail demo unit's condition become acceptable...wait a sec, how does "ours fails the same way" suddenly not make it "normal" and not covered by warranty? Then I found out the little power plug on the A/C adapter, called a "duckbill", isn't covered by Apple. "We don't cover that part." "My warranty covers everything. It doesn't say, 'does not cover the power adapter'." "We DO NOT cover THAT PART. They break a lot." "On a three grand laptop you're going to tell me a $10 part isn't covered because it wasn't designed properly and breaks?" Then there was getting the little rubber feet replaced(those are covered, yay!)- I spent 20 minutes waiting for the guy to finish doing PAPERWORK to replace $2 in parts, and I had to initial and sign 5 different "invoices" and statements that I had -actually- received the service in question.
I had a friend who couldn't return her powerbook after 12 days because, despite clear proof on the Apple Store homepage, the customer service reps claimed shipping time was included in the 14 day evaluation period. Slimy. Needlessly so. Guess what? She hates Apple with a passion now, and tells everyone who will listen about how they're a bunch of crooks and liars. She's right.
Please help metamoderate.
THe mini's don't have gigabit ethernet, meaning they are going to waste a lot more cpu in communication, even for small data sets(IIRC, the delay is much less on gigabit then it is on normal ethernet) so the speed gains may not be as much as you would think. Furthermore, the G5 can actually use it's 64 bit integer ALUs to do 2 32 bit ops at a time(check out Apple's g5 info page, it's a pretty neat trick).
One of the shittiest things about the g5 is that it's cache is the same as the g4's 64k L1(which is standard) but only 512k L2(a lot of the higher end cpus in the x86 world have at least 1 meg). Hopefully the next g5s will have 1 meg l2 cache...
Not saying that mini-clusters are worthless, they are small and relatively low-power, but the speed differences probably will not be all that great.
Monstar L
Think of all the external third party devices or PCI cards that are used in Macs. And Apple does not have the world of hardware developers trying quite as hard to make sure it works with all the Macs when doing development...
Apple actually has a worse time of hardware support than Microsoft if you think about it!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Windows through to WinXPSP2 _still_ does not have TRUE pre-emptive multitasking.
Witness the trials of "program not responding."...
Hit 'X'. Nothing.
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete...wait LONG time for task manager to get a time slice and run.
(under TRUE pre-emption everything else would get blocked on Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but it doesn't)
Select rogue Task, click "End Task". Nothing.
Do it again. Nothing.
Do it again. Nothing. (repeat ad nauseum)
Wait a while, program gives in and dies.
(under TRUE pre-emption the scheduler would terminate it; under windows it gets politely "asked" to die...)
Alternatively; stop ever using the task pane in task manager and terminate processes (except the task manager doesn't tell you what tasks each process belongs to - great task _management_ there...), which works somewhat better (usually only 2 instructions before the process complies.
Essentially Windows is a different computing paradigm to any other; in most OS environments the user is seen as giving "commands". Windows treats everything you tell it to do as a "request", and feels at libery to refuse that request on a whim.
Take unmounting USB drives; Windows will refuse if it thinks the drive is in use - OSX will just unmount the drive when told to, I assume linux is suitably obedient too...
So how is Microsoft's service "father reaching"? Is he including possible network indexing so you can find every file on the network as well (perhaps something for Windows Longhorn Server) - and is this ability to be used in OS X Tiger Server?
My understanding is that Microsoft's plans for Longhorn (although it changes every day) include the use of richer metadata than Apple uses... In other words, photos can be tagged as "Vacation at Niagara Falls" and searched on that basis, while Spotlight is more likely to use the file path for this purpose.
I should add a huge disclaimer: I'm not entirely sure of my characterization of either product... I'm just sharing what I've picked up while watching these guys go at it from a distance.
I don't consider Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" missteps. What we have now in OS X, Cocoa, that's what it comes from. The problem wasn't anything to do with Rhapsody, it was with Adobe. Adobe refused to port their apps to what became Cocoa, forcing Apple to make this huge unweildy sidestep through Carbon that kept the abysmal OS 9 alive for years longer than it deserved, and where we ended up now is EXACTLY where we'd be if Apple had been able to convince Adobe and a few other key developers to stick with the program... except years later *and* most of the key apps that Apple bent over for ended up getting dropped anyway.
Spotlight is a HUGE step forward. It's killer functionality, and needs OS support to work right, but just a touch. OS X provides that support... without creating a new "search-based" file system.
Because you don't (despite what Be and Microsoft say) need a new file system to manage metadata, you just need a mechanism for applications to talk about it... WHEREVER it's stored. That's why Find on palm OS already exists, and has existed since 1996, despite Palm OS having a file system that's hardly worthy of the name. And that's why Spotlight works and Microsoft's dithering on WinFS.
And if I hadn't bought a Mac Mini I would have skipped Panther altogether because Panther *is* a relatively minor release. Tiger, with Spotlight, is a different kind of cat altogether.
I found that when I updated to 10.3, there were only a couple big features I used: expose and the updated open/save dialogs (Which were tied into the updated Finder). Both were wonderful, and not having expose causes me great pain when I am on a windows or linux box.
However, the real meat of the OS X upgrades is all the little things: stuff that doesn't necessarily get mentioned on apple's marketing pages, and that you may not even notice at first. Here are some that stick out in my mind.
- Of course there is the speed. Every update to OS X has improved that.
- The contextual menus for apps in the dock got an item for "Hide"
- There were all sorts of changes to System Preferences. The best, I'd say, to the Network panel, adding diagnostic information and a button to renew a dhcp lease, amongst other things.
- Word document support in TextEdit
- Improvements to Safari's rendering engine and featureset
- Putting software update directly in the Apple menu
There were countless countless others, but I can't think of many more right now, probably since it has been a long time since I've used 10.2 to compare.
Suffice to say, that I expect the same sort of thing to happen with 10.4. There will be a several big hyped up features that I may or may not use, and hordes of little improvements that together have a bigger impact than the major features do individually.
To quote:
"In the previous version of Mac OS X, version 10.3, Apple introduced a feature for power users called Exposé that seeks to help manage the multiple applications and windows one typically opens in the course of using a Mac. But Exposé is a weird solution, requiring you to hit various "hot keys" (read: A function keys) in order to trigger its display, kind of a throwback of sorts to the early days of DOS-based applications. "
Presumable this "I-have-loved-Macs-all-my-life-power-user" has not realised Exposé can be triggered just with a mouse movement, but what would he have preferred? Alt-Ctrl-E ? Or is he looking forward to the days when we can trigger Exposé with a blink, a nod of the head or a spit at the screen?
I suppose it would be nice of me to include the Mactouch benchmark:
o uch.gif
http://www.mactouch.com/IMG/gif/Tiger_Benchs_MacT
[quote]
My Powerbook 17" makes crackling and squealing noises with CPU activity.
[quote]
This is the cpu going into/out of rapid sleep cycles in order to conserve power and stay cool. Annoying as heck sometimes.
You can solve it by installing the CHUD tools from the developer area on the Apple site.
CHUD installs a new preference pane called "CPU" under system preferences. Open that up, and UNcheck the button marked "nap". Instance silence! Of course, your fan will come on more often --and stay on longer-- but that's sometimes worth it. Personally, I hop back and forth.
I agree about the feet, though. I've gone through three sets, and managed to get them replaced for free each time by being all-nice-like to the geniuses at the NYC SOHO store and Tekserve. YMMV, of course.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
No, it's not. I'm not sure where this rumor got started. Maybe somebody misunderstood it during the demo.
Automator is the modern equivalent of the venerable UNIX command line. You know what makes the command line cool? Pipelines and loops. You can route the output from one command-line tool to the input of another and create pipelines, and you can loop those pipelines over input. You can type, for example,(The sips command is the Mac's command-line image processing utility. Other platforms have their equivalents.)
What Automator does it it lets you create the equivalent of UNIX command lines without having to learn a command-line language and without being locked into just what the command-line gives you. In place of UNIX tools like "find" and "sips," you use Automator actions. Instead of building command lines, you build workflows.
For instance, to implement the same basic operation as an Automator workflow, I'd start by dragging the "Get Selected Finder Items" action to the workflow pane, then follow it with a "Scale Images" action, then a "Change Type of Images" action.
Then I can save my workflow as a Finder plug-in, which means it's available from the Action menu in any Finder window. I can select any file (or group of files), choose the workflow from the Automator sub-menu of the Action menu, and off we go.
That's a ridiculously simple example, sure, but in a work environment it can be amazingly useful. For example, say your job is to post news stories and accompanying photographs on the Web. Each photograph has to be scaled and converted from CMYK to RGB, applying the correct ColorSync profile in the process and embedding IPTC copyright metadata. You could do that today with a program like Photoshop using scripting, or you can do it with Automator in much less time and with a much higher degree of desktop integration. Just click an image and run the "Make ready for Web" workflow. Easy.
Automator actions can be either compiled AppleScripts or Objective-C code fragments (strongly recommended). Into any workflow you can insert a "Run AppleScript" action if you absolutely have to call AppleScript; you can even insert a "Run Shell Script" action if you absolutely have to call a shell script. But the actions themselves are little tiny code fragments written in Objective-C that implement runWithInput:fromAction:error.
Think of a UNIX command-line tool that accepts standard input and sends standard output and standard error and you'll have the idea. An Automator action is basically a command-line tool without the nasty command-line interface.
Will most people use Automator? Frankly, probably not. But most people don't create command-line pipelines and scripts either, even the ones who know how. But for those who want to, Automator is there.
Frankly, I never thought I would like it. It just didn't interest me. But then one day I had to do a tedious repetitive task, and ever since I've been a big-time Automator junkie.
With Spotlight, you get custom plugins to pull all kinds of metadata from common files (like EXIF data in pictures or strings in PDF).
You also get an API where a program saving a file can present custom metadata to the Spotlight engine (I think). Or at least help it interpret what metadata is in the file.
In addition to the general plugin ability to scan different types of files, WinFS (not in Longhorn anymore though) offers I believe is that a user can enter and control their own metadata - key/value pairs.
This is of course the wrong way to do things. People generally do not want to be, and are bad at, maintaining metadata. So I think that Spotlight represents a best case for accurate user searching without a lot of work on the part of the user.
And for most things that you might want custom metadata on (really pictures) the common formats generally already have the means of storing metadata that will be searched on (EXIF tags).
I'll expand just a little on "users do not want to generally enter metadata" as I know that will get some people riled up. There are cases (mostly pictures again) where you do care very much about metadata and even spend some work on it. But this is done through a speciailized interface dedicated to this task (like iPhoto or other media managemnet tools) and not some generic metadata tagger. I have yet to see a generic metadata tagger that people actualy liked to use and/or used heavily. So I think that an approach that presents a clean API to let a customized interface present the metadata to the user and the system in ways that make sense to each of them has a lot more value than a lot of key/value pair editing abilities.
In the end I think to the user WinFS and Spotlight will seem more similar than not - though the Spotlight UI is pretty good and we haven't really seen how search results will work with WinFS much.
I could be a bit off on details of either system, corrections appreciated.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not that it invalidates any of your other statements. I just wanted to point out those little ear buds are pretty good.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
For the record, Spotlight's image importer extracts both IPTC and EXIF metadata. IPTC metadata is used to populate the following Spotlight attributes:
kMDItemHeadline, kMDItemTitle, kMDItemDescription, kMDItemAuthors, kMDItemKeywords, kMDItemInstructions, kMDItemCopyright, kMDItemCity, kMDItemStateOrProvince, kMDItemCountry
We also pull EXIF metadata to populate these items:
kMDItemExposureTimeSeconds, kMDItemFlashOnOff, kMDItemFocalLength, kMDItemAcquisitionMake, kMDItemAcquisitionModel, kMDItemRedEyeOnOff
And so on.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Cocoa is not the 'proper' OS X framework, it's just one of many that work. Carbon is still supported and will continue to be supported for a long time. Cocoa is only 32-bit and will continue to be for a while yet.
All the 'Core' technologies don't have counterparts on Windows. CoreData, CoreAudio, CoreVideo,etc. Even quicktime on windows is a hack compared to how quicktime on OS X is integrated with the OS services. Using coredata for your data model in future OS X applications will make implementing things like undo almost free.
OS level integrated scripting? OS X has this, where is it on Windows? Sure, some applications support it, but most Windows applicatons are not scriptable while most are on OS X. This is because the OS X frameworks make it easier to implement. ( and it's better integrated with the system )
One can't really call os x a generation ahead, but it does have many of the 'features' that MS says that it is implementing in Longhorn (and currently don't exist in XP).
Except WinFS 'filesystem' will NOT be a part of LONGHORN!
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
Minor point of trivia here:
The poisoned drinks which the Jim Jones cult drank when they committed mass suicide was made with Flavorade, not Kool-ade.
Still, "drinking the Kool-ade" rolls off the tongue a little better when you are talking about joining the Mac faithful, so I guess the expression is here to stay.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If you hold down one of the modifier keys (I think it's control) at the right time (when clicking End, I think) you get the equivalent of SIGKILL. I think it only works on the processes tab, though.
I know this is a little vague, but it usually takes me a while to remember. :)
Apple buys the processor from IBM, but they design and make the motherboards (not in the states, though), the cases, and even have a significant number of custom ICs (e.g. accelerometer chip in PowerBooks), that go into their computers. That seems to me like a hardware company.
Apple certainly is a hardware company, personally I think hardware is one of the things they do best. Just because they don't own a fab plant and make the processor doesn't make them "not a hardware company." Furthermore, your comment seems to imply that Apple used to be a hardware company (by which you seem to mean a processor manufacturer) before they started buying them from IBM. This is also untrue -- before they bought them from IBM, they bought them from Motorola. Apple, to the best of my knowledge, has never made processors. Despite this, they have always been a hardware company.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You see, John Siracusa is a Mac fan who's hard on Apple. John Gruber is a Mac fan who is hard on Apple. Paul Thurrot is a Microsoft-shill who writes uninformed trolling articles to drive pageviews. Go ahead, read any of his articles on Longhorn, Windows XP, anything Apple/Linux/Google related and try and tell me he's even the slightest a "fan" just trying to be constructive.
He's a very skillful troll. Thanks for feeding him.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
200 new features! You were right there, because you found the 10 main new features. Just one click away. Better luck next time.
Hi. It's 2005. Glad to see the trolls have switched off of WTFBBQLOLZ 1 button mouse LOLZ!!11! and you are now flogging the games issue. World of Warcraft works fine on my laptop. Also runs better in Windowed mode than on a PeeCee.
Only game not supported that I even *vaguely* care about is HL2.
Note I said vaguely: I'm not really into installing compromised code on my computers.
But then again, that's why I don't have any windows boxen in my house. Savings in crap "commodity" hardware and a video card upgrade every year is nice too. My XBox and PS2 have managed to take care of any game needs the Mac hasn't.
- learn to swim.