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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.
I came across this article this morning. It's great to see Ars Technica pumping out another of their signature ridiculously-in-depth technical reviews. I have just (like 15 minutes ago) finished installing OSX 10.5 on my MacBook. The review is right about some of the aesthetic changes being a step backwards, but on the whole it feels snappier and some of the new functionality (stacks, time machine) is fantastic. I am looking forward to having a proper play tonight.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
If you read the other reviews Siracusa did for Ars Technica, you'll see that he has a long and difficult history with the OS X GUI. If I were you I'd try out 10.5 myself and see if it is a worthwhile update or not. All in all, I got the impression from his interview that while there were some changes that he absolutely loathes (rounded menus etc), there are many as well which he have been longing for (disabling the "are you sure" check when changing extensions for instance) or which really impressed him with their usability (quicklook).
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.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/16
(down the page, you'll find it)
I run Tiger. My regular userid is not an administrator.
OSX will prompt me to enter an administrator username and password under three circumstances (in my experience):
In all three cases, I expect the prompt and the reason is clear. I think it works well...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
9:00 a.m.
Despite having no friends, no life, no education no job, and no prospects, despite the war in Iraq, a plunging dollar, the looming energy crisis, global warming, and the sheer horror of being alive in this day and age, this morning, I woke up happy, for today would be my most exciting review: OSX 10.5 was being released.
I am not normally one to get excited about reviewing a product, especially if it is my first time using it; usually there is a feeling of trepidation about stepping outside my comfort zone, but today, it is notably absent. Perhaps because I have been following this product since its inception, living the Apple lifestyle in preparation, and becoming fully engrossed by the user community. The experience has been like a second birth to me, and the release of 10.5 is the wonderful culmination.
But I should back up. For those of you who have been living normal, healthy lives, 10.5, also known as the Leopard is the single most anticipated OSX release of all time, packed with 300 new features that would surely leave its competitors (the monolithic Microsoft and agile Linux) stunned and possibly bleeding as it whizzes by in a blur of growing market share and spots.
Apple Inc., the Cupertino-based personal electronics company behind the Leopard, burst into the public view in 2001 with the introduction of the phenomenally popular iPod music player. Apple then followed up that success with the iPhone brand cellular phone, which has sold a whopping 1.4 million units since its summer debut. Today, Apple hopes to leverage that success to bootstrap its long-stagnant personal computing platform, the Mac.
For the last decade, the Mac has maintained a relatively constant 5% share of the global computing market. In recent months, however, increasing disillusionment with the new Microsoft Vista operating system has pushed more and more people into Apple's open arms, but the uptake has been slow. The release of the Leopard, Apple hopes, will be the impetus for users to peek beyond the simple familiarity of Windows. Drawn by the prospect of a bigger and better world, they will slowly venture beyond their thatched grass huts into the thrilling unknown. The Leopard will then snatch them up and drag them into its stylish and intuitive tree to feast.
Or so it is planned. But will Apple be able to succeed where so many others have failed? Will it finally be able to wrest control of the desktop from the Monopolist? Yes, of course. But it is my duty as a reviewer to show, not just tell. So join me as I prepare to drink deeply of the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid and plunge myself into the Leopard, to prove this Apple revolution is truly the way of the future.
Part 1: Getting OSX
3:30 p.m.
The cold rain pours down outside, but under the glass roof of the Christiana Mall, it is warm and dry. Twenty yards away is the only Apple Store for miles, and consequently where one must go for the latest Apple releases.
Though I had arrived early, there is already a sizable line, stretching back to where I find myself now. The head of it, I am told, had been waiting since early morning, growing progressively more excited as the day wore on. His manic energy is infectious, it seems, and the light buzz of excitement percolating through the crowd quickly set my nerves on edge in the best possible way. This, I reflect, is better than most drugs.
I strike up conversation with the man waiting impatiently in front of me. When I ask him what he intends to do with the Leopard when he brings it home, he stares at me for twenty minutes. His steady gaze says more than any words could, and when he tells me he will teach it to love, and then maybe make a movie, I weep for the sheer joy that wells up in my heart. He holds me, understanding.
5:57 p.m.
The excitement has reached an almost painful level. It is a silent buzz permeating the very air; the crowd is l
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!
Thank you for that little vision. Vista (or XP for that matter) as an annoying, barking, 3 inch tall Chihuahua is just perfect.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
I'd never consider buying a computer I couldn't rebuild or modify (or build entirely) so using Apple's software is never an option for me.
Nor would I. That's why I bought a Mac desktop, where I can replace all the same components I can with a PC desktop... and lets face it, with just about any PC chassis you're going to be almost as limited since motherboard formats change over time. Over the years people have offered processor upgrades as well, made easier of course by them using Intel chips now where processor swaps are just as easy as any other PC motherboard.
And of course I have a laptop. And just like most laptops, there are more limited changes I can make - but Mac laptops come with a good range of i/o options, including gigabit ethernet and firewire 800.
Are you honestly saying you never ever would buy a laptop? To me I just can't see saying that someone would never buy a Mac because they can't upgrade one, is just not being true to yourself. You don't want a Mac for other reasons, that's fine - but lets all stop pretending the upgrade options are so very different.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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".
After having used Leopard for the past four days, the one feature that I so far love to (almost) hate is Stacks. From a theoretical standpoint, Stacks sound great, but Apple's implementation leaves something to be desired. In it's current incarnation, Stacks are barely usable, especially if you relied on the old Dock functionality that turned any docked folder into a nested hierarchal menu.
There's currently a debate going on in the Macintoshian Achaia over at Ars on whether or not Stacks are a useful addition to the OS, or a horrible mess that should've been sorted out before Leopard's release. My personal opinion is that while Stacks show promise, making them a substitute for the old functionality (hierarchal menus) was unwise (to put it kindly). Stacks should have been an addition to Dock functionality, not a replacement for a widely-used system of navigation.
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.
This is a troll, right?
What exactly on this list is "not of interest to geeks"?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
[I apologize for the long post, but I'm procrastinating from vital schoolwork and this is as good of a way as any to do so.]
...and 2 that I must have thought I counted but didn't. Oops.
/.configure with the appropriate options, and then building. However, when doing so, you have to worry about dependencies and such yourself -- the exact thing that made Linux an absolute PITA to use before distributions started widely using package management stuff. Because of this, I'm going to count installing
Okay, this argument has come up in most Vista articles here. After one of them about a month ago, I started logging every UAC prompt I've gotten, because I didn't believe that Vista actually prompts for *that* much more than what you would get on other systems. I cannot compare with what OS X does, but I can somewhat compare with what Sudo does on Linux. These comparisons are not completely fair, because I'm running Vista in the normal setup, with the almost-admin user, but I have no reason to believe that there would be many more prompts with a limited account.
Since I started logging, I have gotten 72 UAC prompts in 25 days I have spent most of my time booted to Windows. I'll break down the prompts in a few ways.
First, by reason:
* 29 prompts were for program installations or updates, things that would require 'sudo emerge' or whatever on Linux. 10 of these prompts were while starting Firefox; I'm running the Alpha version, and get prompted to update to the latest nightly each time I run it. 4 of them were from trying to install one particular program, it's patch, and trying to work around a couple compatibility issues. One prompt was for Windows Update, to update Vista itself.
* 10 prompts were from when I logged in and this buggy hardware monitor program that I have ran. For some reason, it requests elevation. (Then, after running for a while, pegs one of my cores and I kill it. One of these days I'll remove it from the startup sequence...)
* 10 prompts were from enabling and disabling my NIC. I was having network problems for about a week, and was trying to diagnose. (This is essentially doing 'ifconfig eth0 down/up' in Linux, except that it tries to get a new DHCP address upon up, and I don't recall if ifconfig does this. )
* 8 prompts were from when I was trying to solve a weird permissions issue when I was trying to delete something. This involved various permutations of trying to take ownership of the file, changing permissions, doing something in the Users dialog, etc.
* 5 prompts were from opening the anti-virus dialog
* 2 prompts were for OKing software for the firewall
* 2 prompts were from doing some process management stuff; one from instructing task manager to show all processes, and one from running ProcessExplorer in admin mode, probably to try to figure out what program was holding a handle open to a USB drive.
* 1 prompt was from messing with the Steam service
* 1 prompt was from opening regedit
* 1 prompt was from opening the drive format dialog so I could see the options in it
* 1 prompt was from a user environment variable change. This is not entirely necessary -- a user doesn't need admin rights to change them. However, the dialog Windows provides to do so involves both user-local and system-wide environment variables, and doesn't appear to provide a way to access it with the latter in read-only mode, hence the elevation request. (XP does BTW.)
* 1 prompt was for something TrueCrypt related, but I'm not sure exactly what
* 1 prompt was for something that I have no clue about, because I got distracted before recording what caused it and forgot
Now, let's compare with what would have happened on Linux:
29 program installations. Assuming you're like my impression of most Linux users, you're using something like Portage or Apt to install programs, which means you're doing it as root, and need to sudo. In Linux it is usually possible to install programs locally, usually by downloading the source, doing
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.
Others are set to join him.
Almost 12 months since Java 6 was released on other platforms. Still waiting, Steve.
It was the single most comprehensive, interesting, thorough, thoughtful, and worthwhile review of *any* product I have ever read, *ever*.
I personally don't care about your accusations of fanboy-ism. You are irrelevent. You did not produce an absolutely awesome review, with about as much balance and fairness as is humanly possible. The author at Ars Technica *did*, and your unfounded accusations and complaints are just not even worth reading. Which is why I only skimmed your post.
I did read your last sentence though, and honestly, do you think anyone *cares* if you shudder when you read reviews that don't match your personal preferences? Or that you are going stick to running two operating systems?
Seriously man. This was an incredibly good review. It did not deserve your accusations of fanboy-ism. I don't even own a Mac, and my total time using Mac OS X amounts to probably less than 5 minutes. And yet, even I could recognize the quality of this review. You say that the review didn't "slam" OS X for its user interface inconsistencies???? Did you even read the review? It *did* slam OS X for the new UI inconsistencies; maybe it didn't do it using obscenity and OMFG THIS SH** IS THE SUCKS language, so you didn't understand what was being written. Regardless, it definitely slammed OS X pretty hard for these problems. But it also recognized that these are relatively minor faults that most people probably won't even know or care about. Which is undeniably true.
I think there is something so insidious about the kinds of complaints that people like you make about reviews. You express this sort of unprovable accusation that "if you were reviewing product X instead of product Y, you would have a completely different bias". But they aren't reviewing product X, they are reviewing product Y. How is what they would do when reviewing product X even relevent? It's mud-slinging that you engage in when you accuse the author like you have, and I think it's pretty lame, especially when considering how clearly well thought out, detailed, and just all around *excellent* that review was.
Not just semantics - very important. If a firewall couldn't distinguish they wouldn't be functional firewalls.
With TCP the packet type is a part of the packet data and even the old stateless firewalls could handle it. With UDP you could argue that there's no difference but even then you rely on certain standards to filter (in the old days you just let any UDP packet with a destination >1024 in.. luckily those days are long past us).
There's a *huge* difference between asking to OS to block all *incoming* connections and asking it to block replies as well. No firewall works like that.