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Windows Software Ugly, Boring & Uninspired
An anonymous reader writes "CPU magazine has written a very straight-to-the-point editorial on the lack of quality and innovation in software for the mainstream OS. They compare it to the Mac, which is found in a much different light. Where has all the innovation gone?" From the article: "There's too much coal and not enough diamonds within the sphere of downloads. The greatest pieces of software are plagued by unintelligent design, and very few rise to the level of ubiquity. Windows users don't have a strong sense of belonging; there's no user community rallying around the platform. We use the computer, certainly, or is the computer using us?"
Safari does indeed have tabbed browsing and pop up blocking. Not sure what you mean by ad blocking. Also the case for Orwellian design seems kind of weak to me. If you don't like it then don't buy it.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
First off, any widget that requires an internet connection isn't going to work when the connection is down.
Secondly, I guess I could have been clearer, but I'm talking about the browser together with the stock desk-accessories that ALL of these OS's have... calculator, notepad. And games too.
Want to know the 5-day forecast for the week? Well, of course your browser is already open, so you're not waiting for it to load. And of course you've already bookmarked the exact place where that forecast is available, so basically, you're clicking on a link.
So let me rephrase that...
Want to know the 5-day forcecast for the week? Click on a link.
Given that you're only loading the page for that one link, and not potentially dozens of pages like you are when activating Dashboard, it's much faster.
I could go on... but like I said in the other post, you should just learn more.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
I'll admit this is just a nitpick, but why Google FOR a calculator, when Google IS a calculator?
No, I included expressly because I think it's a big feature. Yet again you insist that I somehow know very little about OS X and FreeBSD? I think that to make such a baseless remark demonstrates that it is you who knows very little about computers in general. Very little.
The Steve Capps' Finder delivered with the original 128K Mac *still* blows away today's Finder in terms of elegance, responsiveness and overall usability. Moreover, I see no difference between today's Finder and WIndows Explorer, except for this odd example you give us which really has nothing to do with anything. BTW, I've never had the need for force-quit Windows Explorer. You really want to call that a feature?
We were talking about GUI's, otherwise I'd give you that one.
Talking about GUI's, remember? And there is a lot of shit you can get for free on Windows. I will admit though that the free DVD Player is nice.
That has no end of bugs to it. No thanks.
That I have to download again and reinstall anyways to get it working with GNU readline. Again, no thanks.
Eh? I've found exactly the opposite IFF we're talking about networking the same machines. Different machines, all platforms have quirks, even Samba under Linux.
Click on Services. Click on the Service you want to start. Done.
Already mentioned this, and it still isn't GUI-related.
When I need fast graphics rendering, it's when I play games (ohmigod, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring up the GAMES you can play on Windows and not on Mac, whatever was I thinking? :) )
Is getting rather old by now. Personally I think GNOME looks the best of all of them, but then, I am a minimalist. Plus, GNOME let's me make any window fullscreen. Steve Jobs will die before allowing that to happen under Aqua.
You know it's funny, I saved this message of yours to disk, and I'm STILL hearing the disk grind away in the background.
NetInfo. ooops. (and you say I don't know what I'm talking about?)
If only that were the case. Besides, many of the preferences you're describing are located in a single folder on Windows here too. I'd call this a tie.
I prefer *nix over Windows in this regard too, but it's a preference only, one that derives from FreeBSD (remember, when you said I don't understand OS X?), and one that ultimately is of little consequence to the end-user in any event, who is simply happy to find their file in the folder where they left it the previous day.
I'm sure you could, but as we've seen, you haven't really addressed the subject of the thread. You've offered no example of where Mac OS X outshines Windows
# Intelligent filebrowsing with the finder. I was using list view in Windows Explorer the other day and renamed a file in it. I was shocked to discover it didn't automatically reposition itself in the list based on its new name. Quick and convenient file search is available in a search box in every finder window. You can easily force-quit the Finder without having to worry about OS X crashing.
Not even the most zealous slashdotter would actually defend finder. It's the biggest piece of crap out there... single threaded (do something that takes any time and your desktop is hosed for minutes), and as for youre force-quit comment.. *why should I need to*. If finder was actually stable and didn't keep locking up I wouldn't need to force-quit it (oh, and force-quit does not always work. Sometimes you have to powercycle.. presumably it tries so hard to stop the OS failing it gives up).
Tabbed browsing: It's a preference.
Turn on the debug menu: Into a terminal window type this:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Block ads: Create a style sheet and select it under preferences->advanced. Below is what what mine looks like. You can copy and paste it into a text file if you like. I'm sure it can be made better, but it works pretty well for me. Mine's called adblock.css, but you can name it anything you like. Restart Safari when you're done.
A:link[HREF*="ad."] IMG { display: none ! important }
/* disable ad iframes */
IFRAME[SRC*="ad."] { display: none ! important }
/* turning some false positives back off */
A:link[HREF*="ads."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/ad"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/A="] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="?click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="?banner"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="=click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="/ar.atwo"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="spinbox."] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="transfer.go"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="adfarm"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="bluestreak"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="doubleclick"] IMG { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="ads."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/ad"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/A="] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="?click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="?banner"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="=click"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="/ar.atwo"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="spinbox."] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="transfer.go"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="adfarm"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="bluestreak"] { display: none ! important }
IFRAME[SRC*="doubleclick"] { display: none ! important }
xIMG[usemap] { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="download."] IMG { display: inline ! important }
A:link[HREF*="click.mp3"] IMG { display: inline ! important }
It simply takes a more developed skill set to write apps for MAC and *nix.
I'm sure I don't know what you mean. Have you even heard of Xcode? It's like Visual Basic, except it's free, a little more intuitive (to me, at least), and it can import make files like they were project files.
Direct away from face when opening.
That's perhaps what you want to know, but I daresay the majority of computer users out there are using it only because they have to, and if there was anything that could make the experience more compelling, they'd perhaps hate using it a little less.
Apple does not make computers. They make creative experiences.
Even though I made the switch in 2000, I'm still pleasantly delighted when things just work the way I would hope they would, like when I copied World of Warcraft onto my iPod, and it ran on other Macs!
That is part of the excitement... the idea that without knowing exactly how everything works, you could discover it.
So while you might only ask "does it work?" there's definitely something involved in human emotion which makes it more worthwhile, I think, if you can answer the "does it work while making me happy?" in the affirmative.
yours,
kbs
Frankly, comparing the Finder to Explorer is kind of like comparing dysentry with cholera. They're both sorry excuses for the most common piece of software a typical user uses on a daily basis.
One thing I'll say for Finder - yes, you can force-quit it. And usually, when you have to, 90% of the time, you're back in business. Not so with Explorer. Once you kill Explorer, sometimes it starts back up, sometimes it doesn't. When it does, you're still often in an unstable situtation. Worst thing about Explorer is it's lack of apartment-threading, (seems to be fixed in XP though) where you can't do multiple copy-jobs to one explorer window; once a copy is in-progress, you're stuck until it's done.
Oh, I've got a lot to complain about with Finder, (like how it barfs when you select a corrupt mpeg - hey, I'm just selecting the damn thing, maybe I want to delete it?) as well, but at least Apple has steadily (if slowly) improved it along the way. The same isn't true for Explorer - but with XP, at least it's semi usable now.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Not a productivity app? Too bad. It's too much fun for me to care. That creative energy is what later enables me to be more productive elsewhere when I work. And yes, I only use Comic Life at home, so don't make assumptions. Try it, it's that good.
Er...the real reason "Gen X" caught on was not because "X" referred to the "10th generation", but rather because "X" felt right to the general culture in an algebraic sense, as in for the value x. Undefined, without reference points, without grounding. Thus the easy move to "Y" for the next group --- other than at its initial introduction, no one thought X=10. Though "Y" isn't accurate as a count, it is here to stay.
We have Douglas Coupland to thank for much of the spread of "Gen X" as a term; we have The Replacements to thank for singing great songs which (without intention) gave voice to much of what Gen X-ers were thinking.
Frankly, I think the cutoff from Gex X to Y ought to be 1974 --- do you have at least vague recollection of when Nixon was president? The worldviews of those born after are often much, much different than those born before.
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
I was using list view in Windows Explorer the other day and renamed a file in it. I was shocked to discover it didn't automatically reposition itself in the list based on its new name.
Thats arguably a feature. Sorting is something that should happen when you first open a view onto a folder or when you change the sort criteria. Sorting should NOT mean that when you rename a file it suddenly jumps to another part of the list, making it seem like it disappeared, or alternatively cause your place in the list to suddenly jump. That's an unexpected side effect, NOT a feature.
I thought I'd add something more to this point. If you're viewing a folder and an application creates a new file in it then the file appears at the very end of the list. Way easier to spot it as you're likely to have an active interest in the file. If you want the folder sorted, hit refresh.
Then you click it away with one button. Bam..it's gone.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Actually, in my experience Widgets take a fair amount of memory. Each Widget seems to take around 150 Meg ov VM, and use several Megs of real memory. They also seem to leak real memory. This is after about four days:
Real Mem Virt Mem NAME
27.33 MB 159.59 MB Weather DashboardClient
11.51 MB 144.20 MB Stickies DashboardClient
10.85 MB 147.11 MB Oblique DashboardClient
9.13 MB 154.76 MB Unit Converter DashboardClient
9.11 MB 144.05 MB Calendar DashboardClient
8.79 MB 151.12 MB Dictionary DashboardClient
8.65 MB 144.61 MB World Clock DashboardClient
6.20 MB 126.45 MB Calculator DashboardClient
This adds up to about 90 Meg of real memory, and over a gig of virtual memory, for about eight widgets. Desk accessories the world over are hanging their head in shame.
They did fix it. mv, etc., work for resource forks now.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Konfabulator -- you'll remember that that's the program that everybody cried bloody murder over when Apple announced Dashboard, because it's pretty much the same thing -- allows you to run widgets. It's been available for Windows since 2004. It does all the same basic things that Dashboard does -- calculator, calendar, world clock, search boxes, weather, Winamp/iTunes control. They look and function almost exactly the same.
Based on the idea of Konfabulator is a newer program called Kapsules, which works the same way, with the major difference being that instead of just writing widgets in JavaScript (which is how you do it in Dashboard and Konfabulator), you can write Kapsules widgets in any language that works with Windows Scripting Host (PHP, VBScript, Perl, whatever you want).
Before Kapsules and before Konfabulator was ported to Windows, there was also AveDesk, which does sort of the same thing (well, it can do the same thing, although i don't think most people use it for the stereotypical widgets you see in Dashboard and Konfabulator; they usually use it for stuff like 'emulating' OS X-style desk-top icons).
Before AveDesk, there was Samurize. Originally it was intended to be just another system-monitoring application (sort of like CoolMon, but a little fancier), but later versions get pretty advanced, and they let you create, or use pre-made, widgets using VBScript. Same thing again -- they let you control Winamp/iTunes, check TV Guide listings, check weather, and so forth, just like Dashboard.
Before AveDesk, there was DesktopX, which is a Stardock program released in 2000, that, yet again, does exactly the same thing as Dashboard and Konfabulator. Clocks and calendars and things like that.
In any case, most of that stuff is just FYI. The point is that all of these things work exactly the same as Dashboard. The singular difference is that the Windows ones aren't tied in to the operating system. But... that really makes little difference. I think the only widget Apple has released where that makes any difference at all is the address-book one; all of the other ones are basic generic stuff like calculators and world clocks that could be written regardless of how close the engine works with the operating system. And even then, maybe you could work out some kind of address-book tie-in on Windows, i don't know. (I've never used the address book, so i guess it beats me.)
I did notice, however, that my machine was quite a lot slower after installing Tiger. I poked around, and found the reason was that it was swapping a lot more. The Dashboard widgets were using around 50MB of real memory doing nothing - it seems they don't even get completely swapped out when the Dashboard is hidden. This was just enough to push my RAM usage high enough that switching applications required swapping. I suppose it's to be expected though, after all my PowerBook `only' has 512MB of RAM...
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