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Ars Technica Reviews OS X 10.5
E1ven writes "Ars Technica has published their in-depth review of the newest version of Mac OS X.
John Siracusa both covers the user-visible features such as the new UI tweaks and Time Machine, and dives into the increased use of metadata and the new APIs introduced and what they mean for the future of OS X."
All of the reviews I've read thus far, including Ars, have been very positive. It's amazing how much can be done in a corporate/development culture like Apple in 2.5 years compared to the debacle that is Vista, which MS took 5+ years to produce (not that there's nothing at all positive about Vista, but looking in comparison).
Hopefully a good step forward for Apple that will lead to larger market share. I'll be installing as soon as my job gets its site license worked out.
Seriously, does ANYONE think the Dock is good? It's an unholy combination of the "Launcher" from the old days, and the Windows taskbar. It does neither job very well.
The weird thing about OS X is that in most ways, the GUI isn't as good as MacOS 9. I mean, the only real problems with the "classic" Mac GUI were that there wasn't a easily visible way to keep track of/switch between running programs, and the Finder was a pain to work with. Well, and the lack of right-click context menus.
The Dock is a crappy task switcher, and the Finder is still broken in most of the same ways it has been broken since, oh, 1984.
Apple just bugs me. They have neat products, but they could be GREAT. They aren't bound by compatibility like MS is, or even Linux. They could do whatever they want. The best of everything. But instead they keep refusing to improve the obvious things.
Not even close. The volume of "are you SURE you want to do this?" prompts that I get on Vista far, far outweigh the number I get on my Mac. I can get upwards of a dozen per day on Vista (heck, I don't even use it *that* much) and maybe once a week I'll get interrupted on OS X.
Let not even discuss the sheer volumes of the little balloons that pop up in the bottom right. It feels like both XP and Vista always want my attention. Hey, no security is installed. Hey, you need to activate. Hey, you have new updates to install. Hey, are you sure you want to do this? Are you really, really, really sure????
For me, a good OS gets out of the way and lets me work...I don't need something yapping at my ankles all day.
The other main complaint is the menubar - it's about 10% (guesstimate) transparent. It just adds a subtle shading to the otherwise-white bar. I rather like it, as did most of the commentators in the discussion that I skimmed through. Some people get far too fixated on minute inconsequential details...
So Leopard has an easy way to switch/keep track of running programs (the Dock), the Finder is no longer a pain to work with, and OSX has a context bar. And this one is worse ? I got to admit, I'm not an "old-mac" fan - I thought the OS was a piece of crap, and I far preferred my unix workstations of the day, so perhaps there's some magic thing the old OS did. I'm *really* not seeing much wrong with Leopard though. It's still the best damn unix workstation I've ever used, and I've used a lot of them...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
According to the article (with which I agree), the only real reasons the finder seems to be broken is because Apple is making it a crappy combination of a browser (or explorer, if you are more comfortable with that term) and a spatial system (like the old finder) instead of clearly separating these things and letting the user to decide what they want to do. The new global view options mung things up even more as far as an intuitive UI goes, IMHO. I guess I can understand the gripes about the Finder, but I really don't use it that much. I prefer using it as a browser in column view, and with that I rarely have to have more than two finder windows open to do any given task. However, my organizational style is probably quite different from others.
That said, I haven't used Leopard yet, but there are a few things that I'm really not looking forward to. The Dock doesn't seem like too much of a nightmare if it is pinned to the sides (stacks default to grid view, I'm told). I'm a "pin it to the left, keep it small, and keep it hidden" dock user. The new folder icons and their previews on the dock look like they will drive me crazy, but it shouldn't be hard to change that (hopefully).
Anyway, I don't think the dock is really meant to be a task switcher. Just a launcher that can also give some basic application status information.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Seriously, does ANYONE think the Dock is good?
Yes, I like it far better than the WinXP Taskbar (which I also use every day) or other Linux equivalents I have tried.
To me it does a far better job of telling me what applications are in use than the taskbar (which tends to run about three to four lines long in use), and acting as a store for my most common application sets. As someone else said, you use Expose for task switching which is simply the best mechanism for said switching that I have used to date.
The Dock is a crappy task switcher, and the Finder is still broken in most of the same ways it has been broken since, oh, 1984.
It's well threaded now which fixed just about all of my remaining complaints. Since I can't see why anyone would use anything other than column view I really am pretty happy with how it works now. Even the lack of FTP support for me is a "do not care" since I don't mind using Terminal for that anyway, and it can have files drug into it just like finder...
Then again, I never did like the OS 9 UI overmuch so I guess I have a different sensibility.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sadly that's not really possible anymore, as each of the three desktop offerings is made less versatile than a standard desktop PC by design decisions. The Mini uses low-end laptop components, sacrificing performance in the quest for small and quiet. The iMac uses a laptop MB and processor (most notably limiting RAM expansion), can fit only one hard disk, and saddles the buyer with a non-reusable, non-upgradable monitor that will still be looking gorgeous when the iMac is obsolete. The Mac Pro uses a staggeringly expensive dual-Xeon board (with equally expensive FB-DIMMs) and custom componentry throughout. (Oh, yeah, and costs $2200 and way up.)
I see the logic behind Steve's not wanting to offer a prosumer/hobbyist desktop. It would violate his design principles, cannibalize his high-margin iMacs, and create support problems for some users. But what he should do is license OS X on a very narrow basis. Allow one or two white box manufacturers to sell OS X-capable mid-price desktop machines with a very limited range of hardware, that could be extensively tested to keep "it just works" intact. Make the boutique makers offer their own support. I think you'd find small makers eager to take up the challenge for what would probably be a $200-$300/box OS X premium. I know I'd pay it!
Yeah, you turn off UAC, then you get a nasty red shield with "Windows is not protected" and balloons saying "User account control is off". A power user can ignore these security warnings since they probably already do the right steps, but a normal user will turn it off, see the red shield, then "fix it" and boom, UAC is on again.
Worse yet, there are apparently a set of distinct tasks that can only be done with either UAC off, or UAC on. Some tasks require UAC to be on, while others require it to be off (I can't remember the list, but there are a few picky settings).
Some things with UAC on just really make life miserable - before I reinstalled Vista, I copied off my downloads and a few other directories to a USB disk (why redownload files that are downloaded in the past week?). Afterwards, with UAC on, mysteriously all the executable files cannot be run at all, even answering "Allow" to the UAC prompts. Useless. Permission repairing, setting security, etc., I could not figure out how to get those executable installers running again. Turn off UAC, boom they work just fine. All it takes is a folder on a network drive, or copied from a thumbdrive, and you can be seeing this happening relatively often if one of your applications gets tagged like that. Worse yet, Windows may decide your app is insecure and start prompting you with UAC prompts. It's random enough to be frustrating...
I found the old IE model a bit annoying (where every file downloaded off the internet gets marked with a "downloaded" attribute (NTFS)), but at least it prompts you if you want to run them, then lets you run them. Better than making it look like it works, but fails silently.
The strange thing is, Unix, OS X, and Linux get it right. If you're changing a user setting, no annoying prompt. A system setting - a password prompt (and it's usually good for a few minutes, so you can avoid seeing it repeatedly). The differentiation between user and system is such that rarely does one need system privileges, so seeing the dialog is a rare enough event.
Vista's "user virtualization" (where the system registry keys and system folders are silently mirrored to user accessible versions) could accomplish the same thing for the millions of broken Windows apps out there, and the amount of prompting kept a minimum... but it's like Microsoft intentionally decided to inundate us with this "security".
This review is great, I'm glad we have a source like Ars Technica to provide counterbalance to all the vapid and superficial product reviews we usually find elsewhere; Siracusa goes in-depth on every topic from the UI to the filesystem to the new Core APIs and Objective-C 2.0. I agree on just about every point, particularly his comment about Apple's need to eventually supplement OS X with a first-class managed code language and runtime:
(As much as I love working and programming on the Mac, seeing how nice .NET is really gives me concern for the long-term future of Apple's platform.)
On the other hand, if you're not interested in all this technical mumbo-jumbo and only wanted to catch a glimpse of the new intro movie, here it is.
Nope, none at all. Objective-C 2.0, a new version of Xcode, Core Animation, the Dashboard development app....
Or were you talking about a different kind of geek?
First the two things I'd like to have that it doesn't have:
1. sliding from desktop to desktop ala Enlightenment.
2. right/control-clicking on a Window border and and a menu coming up to send it to Space X, or Show on All, ala Gnome and XFCE (KDE probably has this too, but I don't use it, so I'm not sure)
The first is just something I got used to a long time ago and haven't used in years, it was just nice. The second is a bigger absence, but the Exposé-style zoom out to display all workspaces way of doing it is practically instantaneous, and all desktops are in realtime, with videos running, new IMS coming up, it's a cool little multiple workspace monitor as long as you don't need to control one of those apps while watching. Multiple desktops were, for me, one of the Linux killer apps that made using it more enjoyable than Windows. Macs now having it (as opposed to the utterly-useless-in-my-opinion Exposé, especially with more than a handfull of windows) is major boost to its usability for me. Definitely the single most-used addition for me so far, and likely to be until I get a hard drive I can dedicate to Time Machine.
I definitely agree with a lot of the issues with the Dock. Being forced to see Address Book as the Applications icon is probably going to cause me to remove most folders from my dock entirely, which is a shame because I really like the "stack" behavior.
This is deliberate, and when I first switched I hated it, but now I love it. The Apple UI does not encourage MDIs like it does in Windows, instead it's clearly designed for a huge amount of inter-application interaction (drag-dropping between apps and windows, etc). This is most probably born through Apple's media-centric roots where interacting between several apps very quickly is an absolute must. This is why the UI encourages users to keep windows to whatever size they need, and maintains a very "multitasking" feel by removing a simple way to shove a window over all available pixels. I find it only is annoying on poorly ported apps that maintain their Windows design cues - apps that demand a vast amount of screen space to do their job, and thus require constant maximization and takeover of my desktop.
the number of mouse buttons on their laptopClearly a preference matter. I've used Toshiba, IBM, and Apple laptops personally before, and I greatly prefer the fact that I have two-finger click on the Mac. It's a must simpler gesture than reaching for the other button, I find, but again, this is purely personal preference.
I gotta agree about Finder and menuing. The finder has been, IMHO, largely fixed in Leopard, something that has been LONG overdue. Menuing over multiple monitors is a huge gripe. Why can they not simply clone the menu across all screens? It's not perfect, but it gets the job done dammit.
Apple doesn't understand one thing: Not everyone on Earth shares others , especially Steve Jobs graphical taste.
Now I am buying a 10.5 Family Pack and will be following Unsanity weblog for first Shapeshifter beta. Candybar is easy, I bet it will only take weeks.
The theme I will use at most of the times? Gershwix of course
The story writer wouldn't spare 3 pages if Apple finally allowed "themes" and didn't come up with Sci-Fi looking ideas like 3d Dock. On 3D Dock they are breaking their _own_ interface guidelines.
One way Macs are upgradable is the high resale value. You sell your current Mac and buy a new Mac, which comes with all the latest software also. Nobody had to get out any tools and now there are two happy Mac users with two complete and functioning Macs. It's a sensibly designed PC with a full array of ports and compatibility with Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows XP and Vista. What exactly are you going to fix about it? Just sell it whole and buy a new one, like a watch or a TV.
Some people just buy a new Mac when there is a new OS and sell the old system. That is a great way to fly. Not only do you always have the most current gear, you have zero recycling problems.
The article is extremely myopic. It assumes that protection from incoming connections must be provided by filtering TCP ports.
If they had actually tried so much as compiling an application they would have realized that Mac OS X shifts that security to controlling which applications can listen for incoming connections. Since this is something far more easily understood by users I would submit that this is a security improvement.
Using ipfw or other firewalls as you main line of defense on a desktop machine is far inferior to providing actual control over which files can be applications. Now if there are holes in that security feature I'd like to hear about it.