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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."
Apple fans are like Cubs fans. Everyone is routing for them at one point, and pretty much hates them the rest of the time.
You always hurt the ones you love =)
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
"Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes, in my opinion, only two major new features, Spotlight and Dashboard, and both were clearly influenced by other existing products and services"
Bullshit! What about Automator? What about Core Image/Core Data? What about VoiceOver?
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... This isn't just a review of Tiger (because there are a zillion of those) but a review of Tiger by a Windows advocate man who dislikes Apple.
... he doesn't dislike Apple.
Which would at least have novelty value.
Except
So it's just another review of Tiger.
Stuff that matter, my arse.
Wake me up when the next story arrives, please.
...except on versions of their operating system below 10.0 that weren't AUX...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Peter Drucker, the creator of management science study, noted people don't buy "products". They buy "value".
Apple is finally being recognized by more and more people as offering high value, compared to the competition.
Ease of use and stability with a wide range of capabilities (arguably widest of personal computers...maybe) is starting to make a consumer impact.
that some of Apple's greatest critics are also it's biggest fans.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
bred for its skills in eyecandy.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
I don't mean to sound obtuse, but from what I've read of Spotlight and Microsoft's efforts in file indexing, the goals and results are the same: every file indexed so you can do instant searches (much like what BeOS could do, only a bit faster I believe).
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?
I just found it an odd statement, and perhaps someone could clarify. Otherwise, interesting read - Tiger is looking like a good upgrade. $129 worth? Undecided yet, but interesting.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
"My history with Mac" - ugg... skip to the end.
and skim-reading, wtf is this?
"Apple touts the ease with which you can upgrade your existing Mac OS X installation to Tiger, or perform a clean install. But if you're not really paying attention during Setup, you can quite easily do the wrong thing, especially if you want to do a clean install."
if you're not fucking paying attention when installing a new OS you can make a mistake!?!?! oh noes, what were Apple THINKING!!!???
According to this guy, every Mac OS system since 10.0 has been an update. And by that reasoning every earlier system revision from 1.0 to 9.0 was an "update."
But he's used to the system changes being more dramatic like in the P.C. world:
1) DOS (command line)
1.5) Windows 1.0, 2.0 (aborted)
2) Windows 3.0 (whoops kinda shitty, do over)
2.5) Windows 3.1 (works!)
3) Windows 95 (Now like MacOS!)
4) Windows 98 (Now with a web-browser built-in!)
5) Windows ME (What is the diff here again?)
Notice 1.5)-5) are all nothing but DOS running a new graphical shell. And other than "service-pack" level changes, I'm hard-pressed to describe how Win 95/98/ME differ at all.
6) Windows 2000 (Now using NT instead of DOS!)
7) Windows XP
Because XP came out about the same time OSX did (you didn't think the "X" in "XP" was an original marketing idea, did you?) this guy assumes OSX can't have progressed any faster than XP has.
But the truth is OSX has had to progress much faster because it was a brand-new OS to the PowerPC. Windows XP by comparison, had already been out in the market for nearly a decade as "Windows NT," before it got the Windows 95 "Finder" slapped on top of it to be rebranded "Windows XP."
So the best way to think of OSX vs XP is that OSX is a generation ahead of XP in many ways, but it was pretty much brand-new in its 10.0 incarnation. By comparison, XP was not a new OS, and Longhorn will not be a new OS either. "Longhorn," such as it is will be a series of system updates to various XP subsystems.
Additionally, the current thinking on the Longhorn update is to allow people with XP to update these subsystems themselves with special installers, effectively making this a piecemeal update cycle and hardly a whole new unified OS rollout at all. Now who's trying to pass off a series of subsystem updates as a new OS?
Of course he's been a "Mac fan" all his life.
That's true of nearly all Windows advocates. Windows has a long history of trying to be as much like the current Macintosh OS as at all possible, given their need for backwards compatibility with thier VMS-based MS-DOS roots. Even Bill Gates used a Powerbook as his primary computer for a lot of years.
Criticism of the Mac from the Windows crowd has always been:
1. You can't run the most popular business software on it. (True, to varying degrees from one year to the next.)
2. Macs are more expensive. (Also generally true.)
3. You are locked in to one hardware vendor. (This has not really been any more true for Apple motherboards than for Intel or AMD motherboards in a long time. ATI and nVidia need to flash their video cards slightly differently for Macs, but otherwise the Mac is made up almost entirely of industry-standard, interchangable hardware.)
The criticism of Macs from Windows advocates has never been about the OS, because the Macintosh OS has been, during most of the modern history of the GUI, a few years ahead on the road Windows wants to go down.
Does this actually come as news to anybody?
It's the sign of changing times - Mac lovers no longer have to hide their feelings for fear of being ridiculed and discriminated against by society.
Expect to see more examples of Mac pride across the country, as more people come to terms with who they are, and stand up for their rights.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
An interesting previous tidbit from Thurrott:
...in December 2004.
And since announcing its Longhorn desktop search intentions, Microsoft's worst fears were realized. Other companies began copying the Microsoft desktop search strategy, knowing that the never-ending Longhorn delays would help them get to market sooner and appear to be nimbler and even more innovative, though it's sort of astonishing how transparent that latter claim is. Chief among these competitors are Apple and Google.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in June 2004 that the next version of Mac OS X, due sometime in 2005, will include a desktop search feature called Spotlight. The Spotlight feature set is a rough subset of the desktop search features Gates discussed in late 2003, but presented to the user with Apple's standard graphical excellence. Spotlight, according to Apple, is a "radically new and lightning fast way to find anything saved on your personal computer. Email messages, contacts and calendars, along with files and folders, all show up in Spotlight results." Spotlight's biggest claims to fame, presumably, are its near-instant search results and support for document meta data, both of which are, again, planned features of Longhorn. But no matter. While Apple has been busy copping Windows features since Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996, the company's tiny market share ensures that very few people will benefit from Spotlight, despite Apple claims that it will deliver on desktop search a year before Microsoft ships Longhorn.
Then in February 2005, he started to change his tune:
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?
And in today's review:
Apple decided to adopt a similar approach in various places throughout OS X Tiger--including the Finder, Mail 2, and elsewhere--providing Mac OS X users, for the first time, with true instant search functionality. Similar in execution to the instant desktop search feature Microsoft plans to ship in Longhorn next year, and to third party Windows products like MSN Toolbar Suite and Google Desktop Search, Spotlight works as advertised. It delivers near-instantaneous search results from the places you'd most often need to find files or other information.
[...]
Now, this kind of functionality is exceeding cool, because it's the first step toward divorcing ourselves from worrying about the hard-coded locations of files and other data stored on the computer's file system. If you think about it, it's kind of silly that we have to even worry about such a thing, and though recent file system niceties like the My Documents folder in Windows (simply called Documents in OS X) try to simplify matters, the truth is, computers should be good at finding the information we need. We shouldn't have to do all the work.
Not coincidentally, Microsoft is working on similar, if further-reaching, technology for Longhorn. Apple's solution, however, is here right now and it appears to work quite well. Score one for Apple.
Why the about face?
Thurrot is the Enderle ofthe Mac world.(actually they have enderle too)
Windows Ru13z and you can't compare to the power Longhorn will have over Tiger.
In reality one will have to compare The next version of OS X after tiger to Longhorn.
he doesn't really understand Longhorn doesn't exsist yet as a product. Even Beta's don't mean it will make it to the market. With the feature cuts Longhorn hasbeen undergoing, soon it will compare to win XP with better security(I Hope).
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It's not surprising at all that Mac fans would be critical of Apple. You're critical about things you care about. Yes, there are a bunch of braindead Mac-Macs, but they're not what I truly call the Mac Fanatics. I stopped counting the number of Macs I've owned when it hit 13. I've been invited to Cupertino three times already. You better believe that I bitched directly to VPs and product managers when I was there. The upside is that Apple finally started to listen to all the bitching, usually providing exactly what we were asking for.
So, don't be surprised that Mac fans are vocal and hard on Apple. They just want the Mac to get better...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Alas, despite the wait, Tiger is a minor revision, like all previous OS X updates.
I have some quips with this statement (its a favorite of Thurott's too.) Windows 2000 to XP was a minor revision (5.0 to 5.1 I believe.) So was, arguably, Windows 95 to 98. And 98SE to ME.
Also, since it seems Microsoft is releasing most of the cool Longhorn features to Windows XP... XP to Longhorn may very well be a "minor revision" as well.
I posted a negative comment earlier about this article, but the idiocy gets worse and worse as you go on.
"Though it is marketed by Apple as a major release, Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world"
What Windows service packs have come with major new features? A firewall in SP2? Please. Hell, what Windows OS releases have come with major new features?
"It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984"
Err...yeah. Sorry, the telepathic mind-reader is coming in 10.5.
"Don't get me wrong, please: Again, Tiger is a solid release. It's just not a major upgrade. And it's certainly not worth $129."
Right. Tiger is not worth $129, but Windows XP is worth $250 or whatever over Windows 2000.
"nor does it include the iWork '05 productivity applications, which include Pages (a weird word processing/page publishing hybrid)"
Weird? Pages is weird?! What the hell is Word, then? Certainly not a word processing/page publishing hybrid, oh no.
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They're not mutually exclusive. I am a fan of Linux, but that doesn't stop me from issuing criticism when it's warranted.
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.
I didn't find many complaints about this article. Unlike his usual rants, the writer was even-handed mostly in giving praise where praise was due.
However, the writer proves he's still too enamored with the Microsoft software release philosophy in comparison to what Linux and Mac users enjoy.
Consider: When a new Mac OS update is imminent, users are practically enthusiastic on installing on their computer and seeing what new tricks have come from Apple. Generally speaking, these users expect goodness in each update. That's less of the case now in the OS X days than the old OS 9 days, but Mac users don't generally fear their computer or the company that makes it. We like evolution and strive to keep our computers one-up with the others. While a lot more propellerhead and not as intuitive, the power users of the Linux camp also enjoy the fun flavors they get from the latest bug fix of SAMBA or whatever. Using Linux and Mac OS X, to take two common examples of the UNIX families, are fun to tinker with.
A Microsoft Windows user is besieged. And I mean not just with spyware and worms, but also with Windows Updates. They're doing the same thing as Apple's updates (make no mistake--both companies are giving you bug fixes), but there are so many updates for this mysterious vulnerability or that compromise that a typical home user is overwhelmed by not only by the OS prompting them to the point of annoyance that you have new Windows Updates as well as the number of patches and attacks. And Windows can be so finicky and problematic that most users don't WANT to rock the boat by applying some update. This situation has improved a bit with Windows XP, but there's still too much information.
Microsoft's marketing expects you to find a revolution in every box they sell. I don't know about you, but revolutions as a whole are a bitch to endure, no matter what form they take. Evolution, on the other hand, gives you change without making you feel swept up by it.
You'll know what I mean when the Windows Longhorn project is finished. It may be new and powerful, but most of us just want to write a letter, not launch and land a Space Shuttle. Simple is good.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
His current protestations aside, Thurrott has a long history of bashing on the Mac. My thinking is that he's starting to realize that the Mac platform is moving ahead more rapidly than Windows, and may be close to achieving what he considers to be parity with Windows.
So if you make your living writing about Windows, it doesn't really do to talk about how far Apple has come with the Mac, or how it may in fact be better than Windows. You focus instead on a different opponent altogether. Microsoft has told the world that it has its sights set on Google. Everyone knows Google is the reigning champ of the consumer Internet application, and that they're trying to route around Microsoft's client OS dominance.
If you're Thurrott, you talk about how nice Apple is on the client end, giving it just enough kudos so as to not lose your credibility entirely, but you also demean the importance of Apple by focusing on Microsoft's war with Google.
Thurrott has always been a difficult guy to figure out, so my guess may be completely off. But it's the only one I can come up with that makes any sense.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I think maybe Thurrot, while being a self-described "Mac fan", does not know quite as much about the inner workings of Mac OS X than he ought to before attempting such a review.
Mac OS X 10.4 is certainly much more than a "minor upgrade with few major new features", especially when you look past the somewhat superficial nature of the "gee-whiz" features like Spotlight and Dashboard. The improtant changes are under the hood, in the form of Core Data, Core Image, better SMP support, etc.
I certainly do, however, agree with him in chiding Apple for their frequent UI experimentation that seems to throw one usability concept after another out with the bath water, so to speak.
But as far as likening Tiger to "what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world", consider the contents of the Slashdot story that appears on the front page along with this article, Survey Shows Admins Avoiding SP2.
While Apple may indeed find that "Tiger's retail success is far more important to Apple than Windows' retail success is to Microsoft", my prediction is that Apple, on the day of Tiger's release (or very, very shortly thereafter), will have sold enough copies of Tiger at $129 or $199 to cover 24% of their installed Mac OS X user base, while Microsoft, having given away Windows XP Service Pack 2 for free eight months ago, still can't seem to convince enough of their users to adopt it to even hit the one-quarter mark.
I have already ordered the upgrades for my three compatible Macs, how about you?
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.
Widget hater...
But who's your money on in a twelve round rumble between a Tiger and something that goes "Moo"?
Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits
From TFA's "Conclusions" section: ... [Tiger] adds a few major new features, and applies a nice spit polish to hundreds of other small features.
Though it is marketed by Apple as a major release, Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world.
Is this not a contradiction? The Windows XP SP1 (and SP1a) and SP2 feature lists look a lot to me like the Mac OS X updates such as the most recent 10.3.8 (incidentally, also free like MS's Service Packs).
If OS X Tiger has just a few new features, (the two TFA discusses as most important are Spotlight and Dashboard), then what is Longhorn? [hint: Microsoft doesn't even know]
in closing, the review gives props to Apple for OS X but in the end, TFA's author is unable to keep himself from borg-like Apple bashing.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
If Tiger is merely a "Service Pack," and Microsoft just released this "amazing" XPSP2, then how come the majority of the features in Tiger, namely Dashboard and Spotlight, won't be available until the next MAJOR release of Windows?
These features are not Service Pack level features, and if they were, God bless em, Microsoft would have ripped them off and crammed them into XP by now.
As far as I'm concerned, we aren't truly living in a tolerant and enlightened society until ABBA-fans openly can admit that they are fans and still feel safe and respected.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Well bust my buttons. I didn't know there were "niceties" in the XP UI that make it more "appealing" to new users. Colors? Whiz-bang? Buttons the size of Delaware? Conversely, is he purporting that OS X is better for the power user -- to "get your job done?"
I always thought it was the other way around. My bad, dude.
It's OpenSTEP, formerly NextSTEP. Circa mid-1980s. It's a very mature platform, with one of the better application frameworks around.
But, yeah, it's hard to argue that Apple hasn't been putting serious new capability with each new revision. It's certainly not "updates." It's "upgrade" type work.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
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.
While there are a number of different clustering tools for MS Windows IFAIK MS doesn't have a standardized version distributed with XP. The parent posting is right in pointing this out.
Xgrid prefs panel
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
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.
This guy writes like a car reviewer that has never seen under the hood of a car.
"Ah, still using four tires, I see. And there's a steering wheel, too. Still, the color is nice, and the radio looks expensive."
I prefer reviews that do more than comment on the styling and goo-gahs. I expect him to drive the damn thing, pop the hood and see what has changed. Offer an explanation of why and how these changes improve the user's day-to-day work experience.
I propose that the reason he's discounted the other 198 claimed features is that he has not the foggiest idea what they do or how they fit into the future of Mac OS X.
-Hope
Dashboard
Um, right. Since PCs and Macs have had tiny utility applications since the early 1980's, it's unclear why Dashboard widgets can't simply work on the normal Mac desktop (which is how Konfabulator works, incidentally). Having to move into and out of the Dashboard to perform these tasks seems a bit unnecessary. Why segregate them like that?
I guess in the Mac world not everything belongs on the desktop. Apple likes to keep system utilities organized with other system utilities. In the Windows world, you can put shortcuts everywhere: Desktop, Quicklaunch, Menu Bar, etc. It's a style change if you are used to Windows.
Apple's Mail application (sometimes referred to as Mail.app because of it NeXTStep heritage) has been significantly updated in Tiger, though I'm a little unexcited about yet another user interface style being introduced in OS X. . . The toolbar buttons, however, are bizarre looking and unlike the icons found in any other Mac OS X applications, another case of Apple trouncing all over its own user interface conventions. It's astonishing to me that Mac fanatics let the company get away with that.
This is downright inflammatory. MS changes the UI in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. XP's color scheme is vastly different from the 98/2000.
Apple touts the ease with which you can upgrade your existing Mac OS X installation to Tiger, or perform a clean install. But if you're not really paying attention during Setup, you can quite easily do the wrong thing, especially if you want to do a clean install.
Anytime you do an system upgrade, you have to be careful in any OS whether it's Linux, Windows, OS X. SP2 isn't even an upgrade but a service pack, and it might crash your system.
Apple's success has hinged largely on its ability to keep its product plans secret and then use "event marketing" to pump each release as the be-all, end-all solution to whatever problems you may be having.
Every new software markets itself as the solution to all your problems. Win 95 was supposed to the holy grail. No wait, it still uses DOS in the background. It'll be 98. Nope. 2000. Nope. ME. God no. XP. Okay we're getting there. Longhorn will have all these features. Well, maybe not this feature or that one. Overpromising isn't unique to Apple or MS. At least Apple doesn't tease with all the features it said it would build but then withdraws them later.
But Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was arguably a bigger advance over the initial release of XP than Tiger is over Mac OS X 10.3. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality.
SP2 fixed a lot of the things wrong with Windows security. Upgrading the firewall, adding a spyware tool, etc. is not an OS upgrade. It's a patch. Tiger adds new features and tools. According to MS marketing, Linux is slow and isn't ready for the enterprise and no company really uses it. Especially when they don't mention Google, Amazon, etc.
Apple also offers a 5-Mac "Family Pack" for $199 that lets you install the system on up to 5 Macintosh systems, though there is no copy protection or activation scheme in the single Mac version that would prevent you from installing a single copy on multiple machines.
So, Apple will rely on the honor system instead of putting up obstacles and Gestapo-like enforcement tactics (i.e. Ernie Ball). It might cost them sales but it won't piss off their customers.
My sources on the beta tell me that testers were shocked Apple decided to finalize the software when they did. Apparently a lot of problems still exist in the final code.
This is not new. Every new software isn't 100% perfect. I'm sure all Windows versions were not 100% ready either.
Though it is marketed by Apple as a major release, Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world.
Maybe the problem here is that the author is thinking in terms of Windows. MS always trumps the changes no matter how small. Apple's style is to be minimalist and doesn't mention anything that the enduser may not see.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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?
Windows reviewers are so vapid. Great, the guy gives a nice review of 10.4, but misses what is great about Apple's upgrades. Sure the interface tweaks are nice, the cute little tools make some day-to-day tasks easier -- but what is the best about OS X version iterations is their overall improvements to stability / operation, and dedication to their *NIX roots. With each OS X version it gets a bit more nimble, a bit more efficent (anybody remember loading 10.0 PR 1 on an iMac G3 600mhz?). Note that the guy makes no reference to Apple's continued dedication to improving their *NIX underpinnings in terms of it's vast functionality (can anybody say spot-light command utilities?). Maybe he ignores the UNIX(like) under-pinnings, and the vast revamp they get every upgrade, because he is a windows guy ("yay for the impotent win32 cmd prompt") so he only knows a GUI. OS X get's my support through and through because they are always able to make a OS that supports everybodies needs -- from a GUI friendly enough to make your grandmother feel comfortable, and the command line environment to make programmers and systems administrators alike happy. This makes for a fast, efficent, and fully-usable OS. OS X gets extreme points for being heavy into interoperability from their server OS down to the client (their OS X server handles mixed networks of Windows, OS X, linux, bsd, etc. VERY well -- so that the capable admin should never have to worry about what client platform he is dealing with). If microsoft could create anything nearly as full-featured as that I might give them the time of day -- but the unrelenting dedication to a buggy interface and the worthless win32 platform is what will leave "die-hard" windows users in the dark forever. Sure they will come over one at a time and buy an iPod or 'mini, but they will likely always let the really wonderful nuances pass by without any attention paid.
Tiger is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Longhorn is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Why is Tiger being reckoned a small update, a revision, when the guy spends half the site hyping how big of a release Longhorn will be? Do you have to break bonds with ten year old APIs to be a major new version?
From the article: "Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is, in fact, a minor upgrade to an already well-designed and rock-solid operating system. It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984. That isn't a complaint about Tiger, per se: It's a high-quality release. But Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was arguably a bigger advance over the initial release of XP than Tiger is over Mac OS X 10.3. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality."
First, a sidebar, the "change the way we use computers" ditty has been used to contrast searching (with Spotlight) as opposed to digging through folders (with Finder) as a way to organize stuff. Thurrott seems to misattribute the quote. I can only recall two previous mentions of similar phrases by Jobs - "change the way we use computers" (again) when Exposé was introduced and "change the way we listen to music" about the Shuffle feature (which I'm the first to admit isn't unique to Apple at all), first in a magazine article and then in a keynote. These three things all do pretty much the same thing, in essence: bring order into chaos by taking away choice temporarily; rearranging your windows, files and songs for the moment, to make it easier to deal with.
Back to the quote... How many under-the-hood changes did SP2 have? How many reworkings of the whole how-drawing-works wiring did SP2 go through? SP2 was designed to improve on a few key points, such as the wireless network support, filling of some security holes and consolidating all bug fixes and patches (the last point is common to all SP releases). This is nowhere near Tiger, even if the effect it has on daily use might be more prominent for the user going from XP/XPSP1 to SP2 than the user going from Panther to Tiger. He had better not have any issues with reality, because it seems he's having trouble grasping bits of it in the first place.
Your argument is highly unlikely. It's true that Mac OS has to support a wide range of devices. It has to support several Mac motherboards, many different PowerPC processors, a plethora of Mac add-on PCI cards, and a great many external devices that were either made by Apple or made to the same specifications as the apple devices (like USB keyboards/mice).
Compare this to Windows and Linux (heh, those two don't get grouped together very often). Both of these operating systems have to support several different architectures, as well as motherboards, cards, and various peripherals manufactured by thousands of companies, each with various standards of quality control and wildly different drivers.
Who do you really think has the worse job? Sure, most drivers are written for Windows. Then again, since the internals of Apple computers are incompatible with the internals of X86 computers, chances are pretty good if you are making hardware for a Mac, you will be writing drivers for a Mac. Since your product won't even work in a Windows computer, I have to wonder why you would bother writing drivers for it to do so.
Computers need to explode more often.
One service pack added IE 6.
Another service pack added the security center and a firewall.
Another (way back when) Embedded IE into the OS.
It's a fair comparison.
"What about Automator?"
Most users probably won't use it. It's not like Mac OS didn't have AppleScript before.
Have you seen the demonstration video? It shows just one example (bulk renaming files) that I have seen COUNTLESS people ask how to do on photography forums. And it makes it really, really easy... I'd say that if any system is ever going to get people scripting who have not before, this is it.
Yes there was AppleScript before. But that still involved writing code - very simple code, but code anyway. With Automator you are selecting a sample set to work against and then just modifying a few dialogues as to what you want to do. For many bulk file operations alone, a whole bunch of people are going to be using Automator that never touched Applescript before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
[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
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
I can almost gurantee you are not going to be waiting that long.
Why? Because Core Image and Core Data (especially Core Data) are going to make a lot of interesting applications possible with a lot less work. So sooner rather than later you are going to see some cool stuff come out and you are going to have to upgrade.
With most other OS releases there were not that many compelling API changes and so few apps made you upgrade to the very latest version, almost always generally suppotring at least two releases. But I think many developers will break that rule for this release.
Another side reason is that with every update there has been a speed boost, which generally has been worthwhile as well.
"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
Panther:
Expose, OK, though I prefer Peter Maurer's Witch.
Massively broken Finder, Jaguar's was much more practical and less "in the way".
Safari... uh, that came out in Jaguar.
Fast User Switching... a big disappointment, free UNIX has had virtual consoles for years before OS X existed... and they work better.
Preview... that came out in Jaguar as well.
I can't comment on iChat AV, Filevailt, or Inkwell... I don't use them.
Slight performance increase for some models.
Several free third-party tools that worked under Jaguar required shareware upgrades for Panther.
If it wasn't for the fact that Panther came along when I upgraded to a Mac mini I'd still be using Jaguar.
Tiger:
Spotlight... a killer new functionality that I'm truly hungry for.
20-50% improvement in GUI performance.
Just those two points alone make it worthwhile.
If such was the case, then SOMEONE would be able to tell me what hardware/software combination would yield Linux-like stability.While that is correct, it does not follow that Windows is unstable because it does not do that.
Windows is the way it is because Microsoft had OTHER goals and decided to achieve those goals.
Apple does not focus on monopoly maintenance or killing Netscape. Apple focuses on getting one set of hardware to work flawlessly with one OS.
Firstly, to get this out of the way, let me state that people who say Paul Thurrot's can be a fan and critical at the same time are right. That should be obvious to anyone who isn't waving their respective computer platform's flag. I would in fact argue that a review that isn't critical isn't a review, but mere company PR.
Good, that's out of the way. Now on to this review and why it irritates me intensely. Paul Thurrot might indeed be a closet Mac fan, although, from his previous articles, one would never guess it. The fact that he has numerous Macs, including a newish 12" Powerbook, and has in fact been running OSX since the 10.0 release indicate either someone who is obsessed with something he hates, a closet admirer, or, more to the point, someone who makes his money, aka his bread and butter, his moola, his bucks etc, by pumping out glorious reviews of Microsoft's software. I seriously doubt that the powers that be in Redmond would be happy to see Winsupersite (which is about as Microsoftish a name as one can come up with, but that's something for another post) offer scathing criticisms of Longhorn and general dissings for Microsoft's piss poor security record and abuse marketplace behaviour.
So, it might well be that he does like Macs and OSX in general, but can't afford to say so too loudly on a site that is mainly a mouthpiece for Microsoft OS betas.
I still find the review irritating, even in that light. The features he highlighted, such as Dashboard, Spotlight, Safari and Mail, are things one sees from a cursory 5 minute glance of the OS, but generally, one would expect a review to offer more depth than that. I am surprised (although maybe I shouldn't be, given his history) that he never mentioned Automator, XCode 2 or any of the new APIs, which, given that Micosoft has always aimed its OS squarely at developers, is a bit surprising.
You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether Dashboard is a Konfabulator ripoff or a Desk Accessory renewal, and you can argue that Windows has MSN search, Google Desktop etc, but the real new features in Tiger are under the hood and are aimed squarely at developers, just as Microsoft has always done, except that I think that Apple is doing it better (get to why in a sec)
The APIs, such as CoreImage/Video and CoreData make multimedia a breeze in development and embedded Database development incredibly easy (and you can't tell me that these two features are not needed by an enormous number of applications from media to business). XCode 2 offers automatic diagramming of class structures, pointing to the beginnings of a free CASE tool that comes with the OS, and I have yet to see Thurrot offer the tidbit that XCode comes free with the OS (he seesm to ignore this bit every time he does a review). So when will MS offer VS.Net for free? This is Apple's big hook with developers. The IDE is free and remains free, even when you're not a student anymore.
Add to that that Dashboard widgets are generally HTML/CSS/Javascript apps. There are literally millions of web developers who can make applications for Dashboard right off the bat, without learning a single new thing. And Automator for making a point and click batch processing app makes the OS very attracctive to those who need to automate daily tasks but can't code to save their lives.
Finally, I do find some of Thurrot's more superficial criticisms insightful. The new Look and Feel in Mail 2 now brings the total number of concurrent L&F's to 3 (White, Brushed Metal and Plastic). I feel this is terrible for consistency in the UI. His idea that this is some kind of service pack, however, is pure FUD. he KNOWS better than this, and if his reviews of Longhorn betas were anywhere near as critical as his reviews of OSX, I would take him more seriously.
Sadly, as is the case with Apple zealots, there are a lot of Windows zealots out there (generally the folk who feel hurt everytime an article about a new exploit for windows is published here on slashdot) who see Winsupersite and Thurrot as some kind of high priest, and they'll take him seriously.
However, when you do shell the money for it and use it for bit, you can't bring yourself to used the previous version. At least that is the way I feel, I couldn't go back Jaguar after using Panther. Certainly, that would indicate that there is something there that justifies the upgrade expense.
Moreover, compared to Windows, the upgrade costs are pretty cheap. For one, you get a Family pack deal for 199 whereas with activation you have to buy upgrade cd for each computer. After 2 computers, you already pay more than with Mac OSX. Second, the $129 single cd is a full install CD. With Windows, an upgrade is $116* and the full CD is $200. In my experience, full cd's are better because you don't have to install old OS then upgrade to rebuild the system. So, I don't really understand why reporters insist on lambasting Apple for a measly $13 difference.* The upgrade can be had for $99 at Compusa. So, its 30 but you can still make the arguement
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The article shows it too. The entire point of that article was to appeal as if he were a Mac fan, hype of some of the improvements that nobody will consider a big deal or that Windows already has or will have, and then make Tiger out to be no big deal. It's a well written, remove the hype piece from a Windows guy. Let's face it. He's covering features that nobody will really care about: 1. Searches everywhere 2. Widgets 3. Pinstripe look fading 4. Safari's great, too bad it's not on Windows Automater alone makes me want a Mac. In my mind that is the single most impressive new feature and he went out of his way not even to highlight it among the "minor" improvements.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
You are off on each item by an order of magnitude in usefullness to the user:
.NET)
Automator:
VB/VBScript/VBA (look up SendKeys)
Windows Scripting Host since Windows 2000
Windows Management Instrumentation since Windows XP
You just described Applescript. Not Automator which make Applescript accesible to the user who is not used to writing scripts at all. Imagine if you included a very lightweight version of VB in the OS by default and made it usable by non-programmers.
Core Data: Databinding (available in VB6, MFC,
Binding to... what exactly? Again it's not just data binding, but the actual DATABASE too! That's the whole point. When used apps get free undo capabilities, for example (since you can automatically record and unwind actions taken by the app).
Core Image: DirectX (but main shell doesn't use it, which is sort of good because it keeps base OS video requirements down, and sort bad because Tiger gets cooler graphics)
Avalon (Longhorn)
Not off by an order of magnitude per se, but I think you still have this a bit wrong... Core Image is at a lower level and mainly provides a nice library for quickly modifying images. It's not really like DirectX at all (that's why they have OpenGL). Nor is it like Avalon really, though it makes writing something like Avalon much easier.
Expose: definitely a plus for OSX simply because it looks cool, but Windows' taskbar is definitely HCI-wise superior (and renders an Expose-on-Windows unnecessary simply because it is _way_ more discoverable.
That is so wrong it's not even funny. I use the damn taskbar by day, and Expose by night. From an HCI standpoint it is FAR easier and quicker to find most windows visually than to play Shrunken Taskbar Icon Hunter. Folding the taskbar icons (grouping) helps you find windows easier but is way slow to use. Leaving them all out (which I prefer) makes them unreadable and still makes it hard sometimes to quickly get to what you want.
Expose is the first window finding sceme that took away my yearing for X-Windows style rooms.
There, that's enough counter-groupthink for one day. Bring on the flames.
No flames, just corrections to erroneous data. Really the HCI thing is the only one you have that can really be debated, you just got the others plain wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Couldn't even splurge on one last drink. Cheap bastard...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Did anyone else notice the line in the story about 10.4 being sold on DVD only?
This will be a pain. I started with 10.1. I bought 10.2 (academic) at retail, and that had a dud disc in it. I ended up shipping it to Apple to get a replacement, waiting a couple of weeks.
I then had 10.3 through my college's program. 10.3 also had a dud disc - this one, though, I figured out, could be fixed by making a disc image of the disc and copying to a CD-R.
Let's just say that Apple's OS upgrades haven't had a great history of being shipped on usable discs.
If Tiger gets shipped on a DVD disc, I'm worried about that "burn" trick working. I know it won't work at all if the DVD disc is larger than 4.5 Gb...
"Then again, since the internals of Apple computers are incompatible with the internals of X86 computers, chances are pretty good if you are making hardware for a Mac, you will be writing drivers for a Mac."
I haven't seen a NuBus slot in a Mac since 1996, they've all had PCI slots, which are electrically equivalent to the PCI slots in PCs. 8 feet behind me is a 1997 PowerMac 6500 with a Netgear Ethernet PCI card and Belkin USB PCI card, neither of which are supported by the respective manufacturers for Macs, but both work perfectly with Mac OS 8.6 (old, I know, but it illustrates the point). The only cards that don't work properly are ones that need to be functional at startup, before drivers are loaded from hard disk; AFAIK this does take a custom ROM.
"Since your product won't even work in a Windows computer, I have to wonder why you would bother writing drivers for it to do so."
Again, the PCI bus is an electronic standard applied the same way in both Macs and PCs; as long as the card sees the same bits at the same voltages, it doesn't care what processor or operating system is sending the bits. The Mark of the Unicorn PCI-324 is a good example of a card originally designed for the Mac that works in PCs, and that's just the first that springs to mind. Which may actually be evidence supporting your position: for many years MOTU refused to support the PC for precisely the reasons you cite.
Blank until