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Comparing Tiger and Vista Beta 1
UltimaGuy writes "This article is an excellent comparison between the features of Apple Tiger and Windows Vista Beta 1. The point it raises - 'Windows Vista Beta 1 is a much-needed demonstration that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases, after years of doubt. For Mac OS X users, however, Windows Vista Beta 1 engenders a sense of déjà vu."
Really? I thought XP was fairly useful, if only an incremental upgrade to 2k.
Meanwhile, Vista is panning out to be nothing but XP with alpha transparency and a lot more DRM. As a network admin, I see no reason at all to upgrade. As a gamer, I see no reason at all to upgrade; Avalon/WGF are being ported to XP. As a user, there's incentive not to upgrade, because it costs more, it's more of a hassle, and it doesn't allow me to do anything I can't do on XP, already.
Spotlight is really slow on my G4 Powerbook (1GB RAM), it can take 8 seconds to find what I am looking for. I don't see why it should take so long if everything is pre-indexed.
Dashboard isn't terribly useful either, its a nice gimmick, but I find myself using it very infrequently. The selection of Widgets is symptomatic of this, I mean, who really needs a countdown timer to the next episode of Battlestar Galactica just one keypress away at any moment?
Both Spotlight and Dashboard have gained reputations for slowing overall machine performance too.
I have yet to find a use for Automator, and from what I can see from the rather uninspiring selection of Automator Actions people have created, neither has anyone else. Its a nice idea, but in practice not a very useful one.
Quite arguably. Say I'm looking for "Programming in C", which may or may not actually be named that on my disc (although I know it'll have program-something in its name).
Tiger:
Pro... Final cut pro shows up...gr
Vista:
You have two options:
Pro + enter
too many results, try again
Program + enter
program files.... look down the list.. there it is!
or
Programming + enter
hmmm... I don't see it... try
Program + enter
oh! the name was mispelled in the filename and was actually "programing" of course
And at this point I've made how many searches to equal the instant feedback of Tiger? Instant feedback is the whole point of having desktop search! Otherwise it's only a slight improvement over what they've had for ages.
Too, I'd like to remind you that Windows Vista is only in Beta 1. Lots of things are going to change, and many, many features will be added by Beta 2 and beyond. This stands in sharp contrast to Apple's approach with Tiger. If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger. A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added. This isn't how Microsoft works. Beta 1 is a minor subset of the overall functionality we're going to see in the final Windows Vista product.
So what he's saying here is that Apple figured out what features they wanted, then took years to refine them.
Vs. Microsoft, which has a beta out now but will cram a lot of stuff in over the next several months and let users test it in early releases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that you double click to launch applications from the finder but single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.
Another is that some configuration dialogs have `OK' or similar buttons, while others take effect immediately, while others take effect when they are dismissed.
These are hardly earth-shattering, and as a long-term GUI-distruster I'm very impressed (hell, I'm using `Mail' while since 1988 I've used MH or mutt). But it's not perfect: it's just very, very good.
ian
"It's not that hidden, it's right at the top of the Get Info window; and it's not just for documents, it's for *any* file or folder."
I saw a few comments similar to the one you were answering here, and my take is that all of the features he considers hard to find may only be so if one has only ever used Windows, and cannot get out of the windows mindset. I have had my notebook for about a year (and I have used many oses including dos, every version of windows to date, linux, irix, etc), and I find most features and ways of organization in os x to be more intuitive than any other os I have used.
Oh yea, I also agree about the origin of spotlight. He clearly says that he has no clue wether features like spotlight were originally intended, or came from microsoft? First of all, has apple historically ever worried about microsofts features validating their own ideas before including them? He certainly leaves the possibility open that apple somehow copied the idea for spotlight from microsoft, but it doesn't seem logical. For spotlight to work so well, and be so bug free (I have not noticed problems anyway) I doubt that they said "hey that sounds cool, we'll do it too".
Perhaps in another article he will talk about microsoft adding a new dashboard-like feature, so apple must have stolen it from microsoft. Give me a break.
Vista, to the end user, will probably look a lot like Windows XP with a bit of a UI refresh, but there's a whole lot going on under the scenes that only developers will appreciate.
.NET Framework (which will finally come with the OS so you can depend on it being there, assuming you're targetting Vista) replaces just about everything else.
Win32 has been how you write Windows software since Windows 95 (and that was based on Win16) - from the very first version of Windows to today, you're creating HWNDs and sending messages to them, and calling CreateFile when you want a file and so on.
But now Vista is delivering on a whole lot of strategies at the same time.
Avalon / Xaml replaces how you create user interfaces.
Indigo replaces how you do communications.
WinFS (which will probably get rolled into Vista at some point, now that it's gone from vaporware to betaware) replaces a lot of how you manage your data.
The rest of the
It probably won't be for another 5 years or so, when developers can start thinking about depending on this stuff, that things will really change, but for Windows developers, it is a pretty big change.
The Mac of course has made these kinds of "forget everything you know and start over with this new technology" changes many times. It's the courage to do this that has kept the Mac alive, and I think shows that Microsoft is on the right track.
The really annoying thing is that both companies are radically changing how you develop software for their platforms, and they're completely different.
As a developer, will I ever get to use Avalon in a real app? I'd guess not. Making a portability abstraction for Avalon and Xaml is a lot different than wrapping a button or a listbox with a generic API. Every platform has buttons and listboxes; no other platform has a Xaml equivalent yet (XUL is a bit of Xaml but they're not really directly comparable).
Doubtful. The Windows/Mac ratio is what, about 17:1 or some such? With XP, Microsoft couldn't even get half the installed base upgraded within a year. And considering the percentage of users who have hardware that meets Longhorn's requirements, I'm gonna make a bold statement and say that half of all Windows users will NOT upgrade within the first week of release. So 1,000X+ comes down to something more like 8x, and I think even that is wildly optimistic. I predict it's gonna take a few months for Longhorn to achieve the market penetration of OS X. Of course it will surpass it, the much larger installed base guarantees that. But uptake of new releases is yet another area where Microsoft has lost a whole damn lot of momentum in recent years.
[no envelopes were harmed (or even discolored) in the making of these wild ass guesses]
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Disregard the parent post. The author is a "known" Linux shill. She'll often post comments bashing MS and anything that paints Linux in a bad light. She'll frequently use ad hominem attacks to attempt to discredit articles posted by those who don't agree with her viewpoints.
/. And who is to blame her... after all her post was modded "Informative".
How can you debate a point when you must rely on ad hominem?
Despite the fact that her posts are horribly inaccurate she whores for a lot of karma by pandering to the Linux zealots on
I do agree with your main point. But I believe your math is a bit off.
Windows owns around a 95% marketshare and Macintosh has around a 1.9%, and Linux has around a 2%. Please note that I am talking client not server OS.
Now, I bet that way less than 10% of the Windows users will upgrade to Vista within the first month of release. So I do agree with your email in principle. The bad news for these users is that companies like Dell, HP and IBM will make Vista the default OS and that will drive Vista as the defacto standard within a couple of YEARS. Then after a year or so most large companies will standardize on it, and thus drive even more sales.
Now, having said that, it is my belief that Linux will continue to chew in to Microsoft's client market year after year and this will in a weird way also help Apple. It is my belief that when Linux hits around 10-15% marketshare the game will be over for Microsoft. At around 12% ALL companies will be forced to provide drivers and support and thus the core reasons for not using Linux starts to fade away. It is also my belief that it will take Linux far longer to reach 8% desktop market share than it will take it to go from 8 to 12%. Once the ball starts rolling it will be hard to stop it.
I say 10 to 12% because that is around the time management types start listening and reacting. A perfect example is Mozilla and Firefox. Quite a few companies around my area have started "fixing" their web applications because they didn't work with anything but IE. Well it took Mozilla to get enough traction for these companies to allocate resources to fix their applications. Trust me, NONE of those companies wanted to do this work. It took them time and time is money...
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I've not dug into the nuts and bolts of XP or Vista, but if Vista is making more extensive use of DirectX and hardware acceleration for graphical effects than XP that would make sense.
When XP was first released, there was still a very large # of PC's coming out that didn't have hardware acceleration on the video "card". If it's more common to have that today, then offloading from the CPU onto the GPU will garner at the very least an increase in perceived performance.
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But, even if you accept that Windows is attacked because it is ubiquitous--and not because it's an easy target--then OSX still is a safer bet, and OSX will remain a safer bet until it's saturation reaches 51%--if we're, again, assuming that market-share is directly correlated with exploited vulnerabilities. This of course means that OSX will remain a more secure system for the foreseeable future. This is what you pro-Windows guys don't seem to get, OSX is more secure than Windows right now, you'll spend less time farting around with malware.
As for applications, it depends on what you do, I for one use the iApps and FCP and consider the Windows equivalents to be anemic at best.
Finally, OSX is very easy to deal with, I don't get the odd dialog asking me if I want to launch a wizard every time I do something new and I don't have Outlook demanding attention. I have to deal with fewer patches and updates and I get some very cool extras like Automator that make my computing life a little easier. You should try OSX when you get the chance.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.