Slashdot Mirror
Apple's OS X Leopard In Depth
jcatcw writes "Computerworld begins its Week of Leopard with an in-depth review and image gallery covering Apple's newest version of OS X. Is it worth the wait? Well, Yes. It trumps Vista, of course; the Finder, Quick Look and Cover Flow provide better functionality and eye candy; Time Machine is the biggest undelete ever and the restore function is one of the coolest things we've ever seen; it has iChat; and has lots of updates under the hood. The answer might be no if you're lacking in the hardware department - an FAQ on how to get ready for the new version will help."
Yes. It trumps Vista, of course
Is that really a big accomplishment? I mean, really? XP trumps Vista.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Tech-Recipes got a copy. Here are their first 20 tutorials about the new features of Leopard.
If you prefer the old dock style, Mac OS X Hints has that tutorial now as well.
Anybody going for a T-shirt tomorrow?
This is a feature that should be high on anyone's list: the ability to direct someone else to change system settings without having to give them a long GUI script along the lines of "Open this, click here, click there, this should say X, type Y". I just love being able to package up these types of changes into a command-line like that.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac trolling fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while you attempt to rephrase a old troll from kottke.org. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be trolled more often, I'm rarely trolled once a year. If that.
In addition, during this trolling attempt, I can not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my assistant is straining to keep awake as you type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while waiting for your various trolls, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Wintel troll that has been posted faster than its Mac counterpart, despite Wintel users generally having less of a life, and more time to hang out on Slashdot. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs circles around you, and a small Perl script could out troll you most times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh troll is a superior troll.
Mac troll addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to troll a Mac user over other faster, cheaper, more stable people.
Finally, a multiple desktop application made by Microsoft itself. Now I don't have to put up with half-assed, buggy, slow 3rd-party solutions! I can use a half-assed, buggy, slow 1st party solution!
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
I don't think it will. I've been hunting for a decent virtual desktop manager for Windows for ages now, and they all have horrible issues. The best one I've seen so far is Dexpot, but even it is annoying to use.
As far as I can make out, the problem is this: Windows doesn't have a window manager in the traditional X sense. Applications handle their own resize, show and hide events. This means that for the desktop manager to switch desktops, it has to send the appropriate show and hide events to the applications... and the applications can take their own sweet time dealing with them. If the application's busy, the window won't change state. One desktop manager I tried to use (briefly) would actually wait for all the applications to process the events, which meant that if you tried to change desktops with an unresponsive application visible, the desktop manager would hang. Not great on a developer machine.
It gets worse: Desktop managers don't appear to get the opportunity to mediate when an application tries to show or hide itself. Certainly, it was all too common in Dexpot for an application to make itself visible when it was already visible on another desktop, with the result that Dexpot would get confused and think that the window was visible on two desktops simultaneously. I tend to run Thunderbird in #1 and Firefox in #2. Clicking on a link in Thunderbird would cause Firefox to become visible in #1 and #2, which isn't really what I wanted.
I eventually gave up and now when I have to use Windows I don't use a desktop manager. The irritation of having to deal with all my windows on one desktop is actually less than the irritation of having to deal with a broken desktop manager.
Because Apple's point releases are called 10.x.y, not 10.x. For instance, Tiger, which is 10.4, was released in April 2005, swiftly followed by 10.4.1, 10.4.2, etc, all the way up to 10.4.10 (the current version) and 10.4.11 (probably the last version, due probably tomorrow). These 'point point' releases provide the 'bug fixes and a few little extras thrown in' that you describe, and are free, automatic downloads through Software Update. It's these 'point point' releases that are equivalent to Microsoft's Service Packs. Leopard, 10.5, isn't a 'point release' at all in anything other than name. The only reason it's called 10.5 and not OS XV is because Apple like having the X/Ten play on words. Y'know, it's after OS 9, but it's also UNIX, ho ho ho. A quick run through http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html will show you that Leopard consists of much more than 'bug fixes and a few little extras thrown in', such as a completely new backup system, redesigned and simplified system preferences, a completely rewritten scheduler, full 64-bit architecture, and a whole lot more.
Bear in mind that numbering schemes are simply marketing and entirely arbitrary.
Even Windows 98 could do what you describe out of the box
Windows '98 = 1998
System (Mac OS) 7 = 1991 - but in fact, the multiple monitor support was in the Mac OS as early as 1986.
QuickDraw was based around a grid coordinate system, so you could place your two (or six, as I did once as a proof of concept with a Macintosh IIfx) monitors in any number of arrangements, instantly. Because the coordinate system was respected by anything that wrote to the screen using QuickDraw, only a very tiny fraction of apps had wonky behavior, such as always writing the top left corner of the window to 0,0 (some bad game ports did this).
Again, because of QuickDraw's flexibility and rather more enlightened design, you never had the very stupid behavior exhibited by Windows 98 and 2000 of dialog boxes that defaulted to the center of the screen, splitting the dialog among two displays. And you could place monitors in any configuration - even corner to corner if needed. The displays did not need to have identical resolution and bit-depth, as with 98 and 2000, nor did Mac users ever have to use a special video dual-head card simply to ensure that both video cards would work together, as I encountered many times on 2000.
I think the parent poster's point is proven - the Mac did multiple displays first and better. And while Windows has caught up in some respects, the Mac still does a better job of remembering window positions, etc. when moving from a laptop+large monitor to laptop display configuration.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I won't comment on the quality of the programmers -- both companies draw from similar pools -- but the way they manage those programmers is significantly different. Probably the biggest beef I have with Microsoft's management is their devotion to Jack Welch's (of General Electric management fame) idea of doing a company reorganization ("reorg") roughly every 16 months. Not everyone moves around, since certain people don't make sense to move, but there is disruption. This kind of management "theory" makes sense when everyone is viewed as unskilled, interchangeable production units, but it doesn't make sense in software where the value is in slowly acquired knowledge of the source code base, and knowledge of how to interact with everyone on the team to minimize team issues. Reorgs flush some of that away, every time. I realize they teach from Jack Welch's playbook in most MBA programs, but Microsoft needs to abandon this practice. There are other major differences between the two companies attitudes and group dynamics as well. You really have to have worked inside one (or preferably both) to get a good comparison.
Another, more minor beef, is Microsoft's philosophy that others will put up with things that they wouldn't personally put up with. For instance, internal to Office, Clippy is known as TFC_* in function names... based on a comment from Bill Gates that "I don't want to have to deal with That F*cking Clip every time I want to print." Bill hates it, but he nevertheless still shipped it. In contrast, Jobs would never ship a feature he hated; he'd view it as a personal affront. This attitude pervades Microsoft. For instance, everyone at MS realizes the overly tiered pricing scheme is customer hostile -- they know many customers realize they're being either nickle and dimed or had -- but they still ship it because it maximizes revenue in the short term, regardless of damage to long-term company goodwill. Jobs won't dish out something he wouldn't personally put up with. Perhaps it's ego, or perhaps he understands that Apple's success depends almost entirely on goodwill. This all sounds handwavy, but it's another major difference in the the two company philosophies.
I could spend all day comparing the two companies; it's fascinating. And no, not everything about Apple's culture is superior.
I've seen it run on a 1Ghz G4. Some of the new features are a little chuggy (spaces, stationary in mail, etc), but it works fine overall. I'm planning to install it on an 800Mhz G4 iBook, I think it'll run fine.
Both of those machines have maxed out ram. I'd recommend at least 1GB of ram for average usage patterns, more if you're into multi-tasking.
As for features that existed on both Tiger and Leopard? Many of them are much faster on leopard than tiger. Spotlight absolutely screams on leopard. Results start appearing as you lift your finger from the key, even on the 1Ghz G4. I've uninstalled quicksilver, since spotlight is just as fast now.
Yeah right like you had six graphics cards in 1991.
Yes, I did. Because I was working at Apple at the time. My IIfx had 64MB of RAM - that was quite a bit, as the 60ns RAM was both hard to come by and built in 8 bit sticks. With eight slots, you needed eight MB SIMMs. I figure that on the street, the cost of the machine as configured (see below) was well over $25,000.
In addition to the 80MB SCSI drive, my IIfx had the following graphics cards:
5x8*24 Graphics cards.
1x8*24GC (Accelerated with an AMD RISC processor)
Along with my, uh, regular work, I used this setup to play Hellcats over the Pacific, which was the first flight simulator to support multiple displays for a panoramic cockpit view. Of course, that feature only required three monitors. The rest were for fun.
Incidentally, the IIfx was not just a 40MHz 68030+68882 FPU - it also had two 6502 processors. One for each serial port.
If you'll remember, the 6502 was the Apple II's CPU.
noidentity: OK, open up the terminal
user: What? Is that in my Dock?
noidentity:..erm ok, then go to HD > Applications > Utilities > Terminal
user:OK
noidentity:Now type defaults write com...
user:Where do i write 'com', on my note pad?
noidentity:no, no I mean type write
user:I don't have a type writer
noidentity:sigh. No, the word write, type the word write
user:I think i typed it right, w r i g h t thats right, right?
--- Time Passes ---
noidentity:OK, now, using the keyboard on your computer, type the following words -boolean YES;
user:Whats a hyphen?
--- sound of gunshot ---
user:Hello?
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
But that's the point: Normal users aren't really supposed to figure this out. As a software developer and UI designer, it's part of my job to make sure every UI decision doesn't result in a new preference. 90% of the time, preferences are cop-outs: If the design team can't decide on what solution is best, they make it a checkbox. Don't do that. It's your job to figure out the best solution, don't burden the user with it.
What Apple does is the right thing: Make what they think is best default. Don't make preference for it. But if somebody absolutely needs to have his Dock look different, give him a way that does not involve changing the actual application resources.
I've just written about this: Don't make preferences until you absolutely have to. Furthermore, it wouldn't work: Many Mac applications have no windows. Why would, say, an unzip application need a Window? Unless you unzip an actual file, there's no need to show a window; so where would you put the menu bar? What about applications that have small windows, but wide menus?
It just makes no sense.
This article should clear up your confusion about Time Machine.
From the article (page 3):
The Time Machine settings in System Preferences show the time scheduled for the next backup. When that time arrives, it displays a progress thermometer during the backup, which typically only takes a few seconds, unless you've generated a huge amount of new content in the last hour. Again, that's because Time Machine doesn't scan through your entire drive looking for changes, but rather only consults FSEvents for a listing of what has changed recently.
and more from page 4...
Time Machine has been frequently compared to Microsoft's Shadow Copy (or Volume Snapshot Service), because both systems involve file backup. In reality, they are not really very similar at all. Microsoft uses the background Shadow Copy service to duplicate files on the same disk. Those shadow copies record a "snapshot" of the file at a given moment in time, and can be accessed by the user using Previous Versions (which shows up in the file properties viewer), or tapped into by an external network backup system. Backing up these "shadow copies" simply prevents the external backup system from running into problems trying to back up live files that may be locked by the user working on them.
The data backup features related to Shadow Copy are only useful if a Windows machine is running in an environment with a server backing them up. Shadow Copy is not in itself a backup system, although it can present a listing of duplicated files that were captured by the shadow copy service. Without a dedicated backup system, Previous Versions only shows local shadows of a file. It does not copy files to an external disk for safekeeping, and its shadow copies can't be browsed through by the user in the file system by date or by query. Shadow Copy is certainly not an easy to use consumer backup solution (nor is intended to be), which is what Time Machine expressly is.
In Windows Vista, Microsoft also tied Shadow Copy into System Restore, which allows users to roll back their entire PC software install to a previous point in time. This is not a backup system either; it's a system wide undo. System Restore is oriented around undoing the problems caused by installing a software title, a Windows software update, an unsigned hardware driver, or some other event that causes problems that need to be rolled back. It doesn't go back and find something lost from the past; it reverts the clock to a previous checkpoint and throws away the future from that point forward. System Restore is not even loosely related to Time Machine in what it does, how it does it, or why it exists.
Actually, their whole series on Leopard called The Road to Mac OS X Leopard is rather good. Lots of facts and history.