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A Mac Fan's Take On Vista
jcatcw writes "Ken Mingis has been running Vista on a MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks. Highlights from his review: 'Apple's UI is called Aqua. Microsoft calls its interface Aero. Hmmmm... Gadgets and widgets. What's that line about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?... The UAC implementation in Vista is heavy-handed and intrusive — it halts what you're doing, even if you want to do something as simple as change your clock. My sense here is that Microsoft has been criticized so often for security vulnerabilities that it decided to club users over the head with its new operating system-in-lockdown-mode... I'm more enamored of Vista's Flip 3D feature, which basically takes all of the open windows on your desktop, stands them up on end and stacks them in a way that you can cycle through to the one you want to use. It's similar to what Apple's Expose does... Vista's method wins on aesthetics.'"
I'm not going to copy and paste them here, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista for all of the features & enhancements that really make vista what it is.
The new gui is just a fraction of what Vista offers and i'm amazed at home many people praise it or deteste it based on that single aspect alone.
UAC annoying? Not really, it finally juts alerts you to a change that affects your system as a whole. UAC used to be MUCH more annoying on previous betas but really is a non issue for most people on 5728 or higher because once your running there really isn't much you need to change and being alerted to changes that can impact your system is a good thing.
It takes 2 seconds to disable it if you don't like it. Windows R, msconfig, disable UAC, reboot.
Runs on my XP 1700 as a "headless" media center server powering two xbox 360 and handling file share and windows media share for over 10,000 photos and about 7,000 songs. This machine has 1 gig of ram, several 250 gig hard drives and handles recordings with a single tuner at this point in time. Working on a second tuner that will run FireSTB to handle pulling hi-def from my comcast box.
I only have a geforce 4 mx 440 on thre so my score is 1.0 but everything that ran in XP is useable and same performance in vista.. i can swap out video cards and make the desktop fully useable with aero but i like it powering my extenders. Biggest thing i did was optimize the system for services, enable a large cache and dump my recordings on a different drive then what most of my pre-recorded stuff is and have a seperate boot drive as IO is where most of my latency is.
I will be throwing in an XP 2600 becuase i got one off ebay dirt cheap, but there you go. Vista works and it doesn't need a super system like you fellas seem to believe. Beta testers have it working on much lower end systems as well - just add memory.
..."Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"
Well, as far as I'm concerned, both UIs can just go suck my... whatever. I don't like either of them. Vista's UI is just more of the sameoldsameold slapped on top of an OS I prefer to shun, and Aqua (as distinct from OS X, which seems pretty good at its job) is an irritating pain to use.
Although I do own a (now aged but nonetheless functional) iBook G4 in addition to my desktop and server machines, I prefer to run Linux on it with Gnome as my UI of choice. Part of the reason for this choice is simply that I often prefer to work in maximised windows, and the Aqua UI, as far as I have been able to tell, only offers the option with a trackpad click on the appropriate widget rather than offering a hotkey or default action for the purpose. I know that might seem petty, but it's little irritations like this that make a difference for a lot of people. I am aware that Apple might have philosophical reasons for telling people to think the way they do, but I've spent too long operating with interfaces that are more customisable to fit comfortably into their little box.
That would be "Ignis" UI. Pyro is Greek, Aqua, Terra and Aearo is Latin, thus Ignis is more apropriate ^_^
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
Here are some subjective comments from someone who operates two laptops - a ThinkPad running FreeBSD and a PowerBook running OS X - which I hope will answer your questions on the Os X side.
- Aqua is fast. All windows are buffered, and so dragging them around only causes a small CPU spike. This was bigger before Quartz Extreme, because it was all handled on the CPU. Now it's done on the GPU, and even my old S3 ViRGE could handle compositing opaque textures easily (the shadows around the edges, and any transparent windows require a little more power, but not too much).
- Aqua is quite memory intensive. A moderate size window is likely to require about a 3MB buffer. Assuming it's double buffered, guess 4MB (we'll allow for some smaller windows in the average). Now multiply that by the number of windows you have. You're looking at a lot of memory just for this. I don't know how much of it is VRAM, but on my system it amounts to more than my total VRAM so it can't be all unless they use some form of lossless texture compression.
- Widgets have a big memory footprint. Each one seems to have its own instance of the Javascript runtime (probably for security reasons). 20MB of real memory each seems a good approximation. Invoking the dashboard after doing other memory intensive things will cause a lot of swapping.
Widgets, I could easily live without. There doesn't seem much point in having them written in Javascript other than buzzword compliance. Let me write them in a language that doesn't require a hefty runtime (or, at least, one where the runtime overhead can be shared more efficiently), and I might change my mind.Aqua, however, is worth the cost. Memory is cheap; this machine has 1.5GB in it, which is slightly more than I actually need (it struggles a bit with 1GB, I have some spare in 1.5GB), and it's a couple of years old. If the cost of a more responsive UI is more RAM, I'll pay it. When compositing support stabilises in x.org, I'll probably enable it there as well.
More bugs? Hard to quantify. I've encountered bugs in Quartz (a lot in Quartz 2D Extreme, which is why it's not enabled by default in spite of being faster), and I've encountered bugs in x.org. In a purely hand waving manner, I would say I've encountered more bugs in Quartz, but more serious bugs in x.org, so it probably evens out in the end.
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*sigh*
I guess you've never heard of Desk Accessories, have you?
Hint, they were included with the very first Macintosh.
But, Gruber says it best:
"Bullshit. Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they're doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a "widget" is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory."
Whaddaya mean, "now"? To quote someone's sig, if I yell "Frog blast the vent core!", is Ken going to duck and cover, or will it be a whole cow-oncoming train thing? I'm strongly betting on the latter. We've had command- (and yes, it's "command", dammit, not "apple") tab since, what, System 8? The people who pass for Mac fans these days....
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Both do pretty much the same thing; Vista's method wins on aesthetics.
It may win on aesthetics, but that's ALL it wins on. Okay quick example here... this is early in the morning and I've barely begun to work at ALL, but I've already got Mail open, one email being written, 1 finder window, iTunes and 8 movies open in QT. (Gotta check last night's compressions in the morning) So that's 12 windows open here... not really that much but, let's say I want to go right back to the email. I can either Apple-Tab (4 times in this case) or I can hit F9 for all window Expose and them simply click it.
Now compare that to Flip 3D. I'm gonna flip through my ROLODEX? From all the videos I saw it appeared each window shows up separately(Thanks you spell check) so I would actually have to hit the flip key 12 times here? How is that better? It's not. Expose is O(1), Flip 3D is O(N). They definitely do NOT do the same thing, one shows you all your windows, the other buries them.
Here's how I think it went down. Rumors have been around for years about Apple's "Piles" and how they were going to be the next generation file system interface. Microsoft thinks they know what Apple's next big secret is, so they try to get a jump on them and release it first. Whoops... fooled you, "Piles" are actually part of "Stacks" and the light table mode in Aperture... now THAT is useful! (Check out Compare and Select videos 2 and 4 here.) Good thing they got rid of that stupid code name "Piles" :-)
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I've used the 10.5 developer preview, and while it naturally lacks a lot of system polish (a 38GB swapfile!), Dashboard is already eating far less RAM. That gives me hope for 10.5, especially since capturing any part of a webpage into a Widget makes it far more useful.
It is possible to use unsigned drivers. You just have to press F8 while booting and choose "Disable Driver Signature Enforcement".
from the OP:
Hmmmm... Gadgets and widgets. What's that line about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?...
I'm so tired of hearing this. I'm not disputing that Microsoft took some good ideas from OSX for Vista, but one thing needs clarified. "Widgets" didn't originate in Mac OSX. I was using Konfabulator (now owned by Yahoo) Widgets in both Windows and OSX before 'Widgets" were part of the OS in either.
Seems like I was using gdesklets (more widgets) in Gnome before OSX introduced their Widgets, too.
Since the OSX Widgets are so similar to the pre-existing Konfabulator Widgets (and even share the same name) I guess I just assumed that Apple licensed the Konfabulator software (though I don't know that, it was just an assumption).
I'm not a fanboy of either OSX or Windows, so please don't take this as that sort of slam. I don't have a problem with people noting which ideas have been obviously copied, I just hate to see incorrect statements repeated over and over.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
"Widgets" didn't originate in Mac OSX. I was using Konfabulator (now owned by Yahoo) Widgets in both Windows and OSX before 'Widgets" were part of the OS in either.
The first place I saw widgets were in the NeXTStep OS, circa 1993. Mac OS X was not the originator, but it's what popularized it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
And I was using Desk Accessories even before that.
(almost) Every idea works off of previous ones.
So the more things change, ...
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
I guess you've never heard of Desk Accessories, have you?
Desk accessories were a hack to workaround the lack of multitasking in early versions of Mac OS. See MultiFinder.
Apple Widgets are a knockoff of Konfabulator because Apple borrowed the idea of writing little desktop applications in Javascript.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Windows has this function too, you just can't access it with the out-of-the-box install, it requires a special addon to actually enable it. If I remember, what they did was write the code to implement it, then decided against it and removed any way to access it. Also, I'm pretty sure this was from Windows NT, so all NT based OSes potentially have this feature.
I've never tried this add-on, but a friend tells me it's totally half-assed. Not half-assed as in "it can't do everything FVWM can do", half-assed as in, "you can crash it by closing the GUI widget and then using the keybindings". Haven't tested it myself, but it's about what I'd expect after trying their mouse-focus add-on, which had race conditions in it (as of about a year ago). The Windows UI works OK; it would be better (for me) with multiple desktops and mouse-focus if they were done right, but they apparently aren't ready for serious use now and probably never will be.
Don't confuse Aqua with the Finder.
Apple users and Windows users alike agree that the Finder is a huge steaming pile of crap that should have been completely overhauled a few versions back. It's not multithreaded, it isn't particularly elegant, and hasn't really evolved much since the OS 7 days (yikes!).
If you're performing an operation within the Finder that hits some sort of bottleneck (ie. a slow network link, unresponsive storage device, etc.), the entire system grinds to a halt. Likewise, the Finder performs comprably on my 450mhz G4 from 7 years ago as it does on my Core Duo Mini.
Aqua itself is pretty snappy. If you're interacting with applications directly (and not the finder), the system is fast and responsive provided that there's enough RAM. The 7-year old G4 still runs all the day-to-day software I use regularly just fine. There's a bit of a lag for graphical stuff like Expose or drawing long menus, but I suppose that you could attribute that to the 7-year old graphics card. Mind you, this is a computer that shipped with MacOS 8.6 on it when it was new. The latest version of Final Cut Pro runs unbelievably fast on it, with almost no UI lag. Rendering is a different story, but of course, that's to be expected.
I'll agree that Windows is probably the "snappier" of the two operating systems when running a well-equipped system, although this would appear to be due to a single software bottleneck (the finder). Apple, however, has done an incredibly admirable job of supporting their old hardware with new software releases. Try running XP (or Vista if you're feeling masochistic) on a 500mhz Pentium.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Spaces actually interests me greatly and is likely to be the first time I use a virtual desktop. It finally advances the virtual desktop concept by also wrapping it around expose. Hit a key, and now you see every virtual desktop and can drag windows between them.
0 190215821 is a video of it in action.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=125465655
Not to mention that Windows has also had virtual desktops since 2001 (although the implementation is admittedly inferior to Spaces). I assume Mac fanboys choose to ignore that since as you have to download it they regard it as 'not technically part of the OS'; but personally I'd rather have it as a free download than pay $129 for it...
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Actually it originated in Mac OS, pre-X:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_ko