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Inside OS X Mavericks
rjmarvin writes "Apple's era of naming OSs after big cats is over. The Mavericks wave is rolling in, and the first four developer previews have given an inside look at the cutting-edge OS. Users and developers have almost entirely positive things to say about Mavericks, from faster speed and improved stability to new features like iBooks and iCloud keychains. While some installation concerns and errors have arisen, developer preview have improved version by version, and Mavericks is looking good."
Parallels briefly mentioned Parallels desktop 9 was available in their spam window, but it's not shown on their website.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Anybody know is OSX Mavericks AirDrop compatible with iOS7 AirDrop? I know Mountain Lion's isn't.
They better hope Dr. Light doesn't work for Microsoft.
Alleged "article" is zero information and all noise. Read at your own risk of brain damage.
From the article:
> He concluded by mentioning that he hoped Mavericks would serve as the bridge between OS X and iOS, allowing his company to make Mac versions of its iOS titles.
So basically this guy is happy that OS X is bridging closer to iOS (because his business stands to gain from this).
How exactly is that supposed to warm my heart as a user who already thoroughly loath the very idea of the "Natural Scrolling(tm)" option on previous updates?
Is it too much to ask for them simply not to break anything and leave me with the halfway-decent UI to a powerful *nix that I am happily using?
I'm still on Lion. I have a 2011 MBP and I'm thinking I might stay on Lion. I'll be handing it down to my wife and would consider the big version upgrade, but my recent experience with iOS upgrades was that the new OS was way more resource-intensive than the old, even though people told me it'd be so great and Apple doesn't do upgrades that slow your machine down, etc. Thoughts? Should I think about an upgrade to Mavericks?
I'll wait for the Ars Technica review.
That's why I'm still on Snow Leopard. Sigh.
Is it too much to ask for them simply not to break anything
Yeah, this is unfortunately a very serious worry with OSX......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Been using it since beta 1. What kind of problems did you see? I saw no issues other than the email sync issues.
I do, regularly enough that when I'm attending one of the "tech only" training day the local apple guys know that I will be a source of useful information and will tell them what is shit and where, but that sort of thing doesn't make the news.
There's also the percentages problem - considering the size of the user base, it's not really surprising that people encounter problems with the product. The only piece of software I've seen work flawlessly in the last, what, 20 years would be Hobbit's netcat, and that doesn't handle IPv6.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Yup. Apple is following Microsoft for a change. Not only in tabletifying their OS but also in their naming of it.
I remember Jobs way back in the cat era poking fun at Vista's pre production name "Longhorn" and now they name their own OS "Mavericks" which as every QI watcher knows was originally a term describing unbranded cattle.
So is this all a hidden homage to Tucows or a comment on how they see their customers?
Why? What change have they introduced to improve iOS compatibility that you can't just ignore if you don't like it?
The OS X desktop and interface have not changed much at all.
The scrolling, which is a vast improvement for many, you can turn off. Autohide scrollbars, again a godsend for many users, you can turn off. Everything else, you can just not use.
Okay, j/k.
But did they name it after John McCain or Sarah Palin?
page 2 has some interesting directions for iCloud Keychain.
"...online, shared between your devices and backed up by a meaty encryption system"
Will all that 256-bit AES encryption system to outlast a NSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter) like effort or will it be a form of one time, one way only online system?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Actually, it's named after a beach, which in turn was named after a dog.
IIRC, the only joke about Longhorn was about how long it was taking them to ship it, not about the name itself.
Look, it can simply be interesting from a tech point of view, without resorting to hate or fanboyism.
I hated... HATED... "Natural Scrolling" when it first came out. But I gave it a week. You push up on the trackpad... screen goes up. You push down, screen goes down. It just feels.. natural.
Now when I use another computer the scrolling just feels weird.
Well, it's a Mac, so the appropriate animal is the Dogcow.
OTOH, given they're moving to location names, Mavericks is apparently a place for surfers. Unofficially, at that, so it's either a play on the stereotype of Californians, or Apple's OS names are going to be of obscure place names only known to locals.
Then again, maybe Apple's transitioning to sports equipment?
I hate natural scrolling too, but that's because I still use a mouse. Most Mac users are using touchpads (laptops), where it is more natural. And you can turn it off.
It says it will enhance cloud integration and "all your passwords" can be in the cloud. Of course one can do that voluntarily now (lastpass etc) but it wigs me out a little. I recently bought a chrome book and when you fire it up you realize how when you commit to the cloud whole hog that there is some magic. It's like going back to the convenience of the thin client days but in a full modern way. But what I find frightening is that literally my whole life hinges on my google password. My computer, all my documents, google wallet, and of course g-mail (which is where all your other accounts password recovery) can come to. With the advent of cell phones containing all your passwords and very likely also being your two-factor ID device, basically, if your cell phone gets in the wrong hands your data world is toast.
One of the things I love about macs is that if you don't want to go quite that far, macs are pretty nice. The make backing things up and syncing things pretty easy. Apps work across many devices in the same way. you dont have to have the same password for your login as your google account. I can have a lot of convenience without going the whole thin client and betting it all on one password.
I'm hoping that the icloud integration fixes this issue, so I can have my cloud and my peace of mind too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So it would only be valid news if it put Apple in a negative light then? Or are we not allowed to hear about Apple at all?
There are less conspiracies going on in the world than you think.
Yup. Apple is following Microsoft for a change. Not only in tabletifying their OS ...
Even Snow Leopard had LaunchPad - and that was being sold in 2009. You almost never see it, though, because the tablet paradigm doesn't translate well to a computer... so no one chooses to use it.
#DeleteChrome
I'd bet they paid the same amount that Google pays for new Android releases, Microsoft pays for new Windows releases, and Linus Torvalds pays each time a kernel version comes out. All of which get plenty of coverage and exposure on /., and always have.
Yup. Apple is following Microsoft for a change. Not only in tabletifying their OS but also in their naming of it.
I don't think that's at all true.
Microsoft decided the tablet and the PC were exactly identical, and made one the other at the cost of both.
Apple however, has said a number of times that PC and tablet/mobile OS's are different things, with different needs (and that desktops do not need touch screens, just gestures). While OSX may borrow at times from iOS, and also share frameworks in some cases, the way you use them and the abilities they have remain pretty different.
Just the aspect of Mavericks adding on a lot of welcome additions to multiple screen use including multiple menu bars (something very un-tablet like indeed) indicates a strong separation - for the better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been a Mac OS user since 1997, and I love the interface (in some respects I still like Mac OS 9 better than X). I have owned two PowerPC Macs before, but when their move to Intel coincided with a little personal economic downturn, I went the hackintosh way. Sometimes I think of getting a new actual Apple, but when I look into it, they don't offer a machine that suits me.
You just can't get a headless system with good specs, except the Mac Pro, and that's crazy overkill. The mini is a complete joke, with little memory, lame Intel video, no optical drive, no expandability whatsoever. I could go for an iMac (and deal with external drives, a single 1TB disk doesn't really cut it anymore). But I'd have to go with the rather expensive 27-inch ones to get a video card that beats my rather outdated GTS 250. Seriously, I assembled this machine a couple years ago, penny-pinching all the way, and even back then I knew this video card was the bottleneck. They still sell machines with worse video. It's quite ridiculous.
So... too much money for little benefit. Maybe some other time, Apple.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Launchpad came with Lion, not Snow Leopard.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You can switch the mouse scrolling to normal in System Preferences.
My spoon is too big.
It's not news at all, it's just spam trying to generate some buzz around the new OS release. This is just a beta, not even an RC. TFA is mostly just people saying how wonderful it is, barely even bothering to cover the new features. I don't know why it was called "inside OS X" because it's extremely superficial and lacking in technical detail.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are some cool things in Mavericks for developers, including a 2D Sprite and Physics engine framework. That should help with bringing a lot of iPad-level 2D games to the Mac.
Curring edge features: interrupt coalescing, memory compression, grand central dispatch, app nap. Amongst others. Having run it since DP1 on my main machine, the only minor issues I have had have been Wifi stability (which looks to be fixed now) and blanked out preference panels in the early DPs for features they were in the process of implementing. Battery life is more than 15% better than Mountain Lion (which is already a lot better than Windows), performance seems as fast or even faster.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Don't worry, you won't.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Timer coalescing is nice, but it's not that new. iOS and Android have done it for a while and it's mostly useful on devices that spend a lot of their time asleep. App Nap looks a bit annoying: much of the time I have apps hidden behind others because they're doing something processor-intensive that won't be finished for a while, so I hope it correctly handles this case instead of just slowing them down unconditionally. If the app is well-written, then apps that aren't doing anything won't be doing idle processing and so they will be asleep anyway. Safari Power Saver sounds like the thing that the Android Browser does in 4.1, which is quite annoying as it optimises for minimising RAM usage at the expense of responsiveness. Hopefully Apple's implementation is better than Google's... Compressed Memory is another thing that's nice, but not exactly cutting edge and also very easy to get wrong.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think this guy has managed to use the word "nigger" in his posting more times than it is used in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn". While that is kind of an anti-achievement, I think he has also more than adequately demonstrated his lack of gray matter between his ears. He's probably depressed because it's still hard to get Twinkies.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Same here.
After being thoroughly conditioned to be used to think of scrolling as something you do by dragging the thumb of a scrollbar for many years, I decided to give this a chance nevertheless, knowing the brain can be pretty quick in 'rewiring' itself to changes like this. It's even possible to get used to seeing the world upside down within a few days: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-research-seeing-upside-down - or maybe right side up, as the image on the retina is normally inverted.
I now think of scrolling like: finger drags content up or down. Simple. No inbetween stuff like screens, mouses, trackpads, scrollbars - just my finger moving around content.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
... and now they name their own OS "Mavericks" ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_(location)
"Longhorn" was announced about at the time when MacOS X 10.3 "Panther" was released. And panthers kill longhorn. Microsoft delayed delivery until after the release of 10.4 "Tiger". Tigers and longhorn don't live in the same place.
Most Mac users are using touchpads (laptops), where it is more natural.
And for the Mac users with a desktop, most of those will use Apple's Magic Mouse, the top of which is basically a trackpad.
You can still scroll the old-fashioned way by doing mouse stuff in the scrollbar, but it's not what most people typically seem to using anymore.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Isn't the OS X name a little bit old? A lot has changed since the first revision came out over a decade ago.
captcha: trapped
It's like they reversed the up/down rotation on an aircraft or switched left-right steering in a car. Yeah, you can get used to it, but then whenever you use a non-Apple product it feels weird again.
I would assume they did it because it's kinda skeudomorphic, as in you would push in that direction. Now they seem to be abandoning the skeudomorphic stuff in favour of a flat look it would make sense to go back to the normal way, but I doubt they will risk annoying everyone twice.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So they name their latest version with the term for "unbranded cattle". Sounds like an internal Apple term for people who are not yet customers. Existing customers are successfully branded cattle.
Quite unlikely to go from Panther to Mountain Lion, seeing as Panther was PPC only and Mountain Lion is Intel only...
OSX pwns.
"The scrolling, which is a vast improvement for many, ... Autohide scrollbars, again a godsend for many users,..."
Ridiculous hyperbole and utterly false. Things worked the way they did for a reason. The changes suit an agenda, they aren't a "vast improvement" or a "godsend" to any user. They couldn't be regardless of merit.
That's right. Adding a broken scrolling concept onto a horrendously non-ergonomic mouse is the last thing you want to do. Typical for Apple, though. There was never a mouse they couldn't ruin.
I remember Jobs way back in the cat era poking fun at Vista's pre production name "Longhorn" and now they name their own OS "Mavericks" which as every QI watcher knows was originally a term describing unbranded cattle.
They had no choice; if they'd kept up the feline naming scheme, the only one left was "OS X Domestic Cat".
Which still would have been better than "Mavericks".
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think this is actually one of the few Apple mouse incarnations that doesn't suck for some reason. The original Mac mouse, while innovative at the time, was a non-ergonomic brick which had to be cleaned about once a day, the original iMac mouse was a barely usable hockey-puck sending of the mouse in unexpected directions, there was a period where they stubbornly refused to give us a second button, etcetera. Their previous mouse was almost OK, except that the tiny scroll thingy on top would always become blocked after a few weeks/months of usage, leaving that part useless.
Personally, I'm quite pleased with their latest mouse - it admittedly took them long enough to come up with a decent one, though.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
I smell horse shit. Panther was released in 2003 and ran only on PowerPC Macs. You're not going to be able to run Mountain Lion on any machine capable of running Panther.
> Apple's era of naming OSs after big cats is over. The Mavericks wave is rolling in
So we will eventually see a MacOS Longhorn?
Apple needs to address legacy support and stop abandoning old software and data. Just because they want to move forward doesn't mean we as users want to give up access to our existing data. We need an operating system that supports all software. This should include all versions of the iOS, MacOSX, MacClassic, AppleII, etc. Even DOS, CPM and Windows. Offering universal emulation is possible - Apple hardware has the computing power and Apple Corporation has the resources. Doing this would set them apart and above all other vendors.
I hated... HATED... "Natural Scrolling" when it first came out. But I gave it a week. You push up on the trackpad... screen goes up. You push down, screen goes down. It just feels.. natural.
I'm agnostic about it but since I have to use lots of machines that scroll the traditional way I don't really want to screw myself up. I could get used to either direction but I don't want to have to get used to both.
Snow Leopard is slowly becoming the XP of Macs. You aren't alone. Too bad Apple still artificially limits what OSes run on their machines despite being standard x86 hardware underneath.
that people have died when they after a Mavericks crash.
Why is that hyperbole? I used to work on HP machines a long time ago (when they were running some HP-owned BASIC) and I loved the natural scrolling. It took some time get used to used, but I preferred it over the "non-natural" on all other machines.
Autohide scrollbars is also nice to have, though I'm not religious about that one - scrollbars just use up precious screen estate. Especially when using two-finger scrolling on touch pads, I don't really need to see the scrollbars all the time.
No, not an Apple fanboy - there is enough to criticize and I usually criticize Apple a lot - but not for these features, that you can actually turn OFF.
So it is your contention that these things which you do not like could not be good features for anyone in the world?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
No, the naming scheme is in reference to self-identified groupings of American politicians.
Mavericks refers to John McCain and Sarah Palin, who considered themselves renegade "maverick" politicians unbeholden to traditional power structures.
The next OS Release will be OS X "Wankers" featuring American politicians who went off the deep end with sexual and/or other humiliating exploits, ie. Spitzer, Weiner, and that Idaho guy soliciting gay sex in a gas station restroom.
Look for OS X Teabaggers in 2015, featuring the crew that helped tank the American economy through gross ignorance and populist pandering, not to mention wanton obstructionism.
Finally, about 2017 we can enjoy OS X Convicts, featuring Rod Blagajevitch from Chicago, and those other former pols doing hard time, usually for trafficking of influence, narcotics evations, money laundering, and all those other things that add salt and pepper to democracy.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Which still would have been better than "Mavericks".
Well, if they're naming OSX releases after Santa Cruz surf spots, it stands to reason that the next one will be called "Steamers", which I think is an excellent name for an OSX release.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OS X Bastet - I think I'll call it that anyways. If they had, then they could make a variant called OS X Ubasti
I'm usually not a huge fan of updates that are largely cosmetic (think Aero being the defining feature of Vista) but OS X really needs a face lift. It has been essentially the same for 10 years. Faux metal windows, annoyingly small open/close/minify buttons and the dashboard. I guess the metal look kind of blends in with the alumnium cases of most of their machines but still ... oh hum ala Win 95.
It's like they reversed the up/down rotation on an aircraft or switched left-right steering in a car. Yeah, you can get used to it, but then whenever you use a non-Apple product it feels weird again.
I would assume they did it because it's kinda skeudomorphic, as in you would push in that direction. Now they seem to be abandoning the skeudomorphic stuff in favour of a flat look it would make sense to go back to the normal way, but I doubt they will risk annoying everyone twice.
Ok, how many times do people that actually know have to tell the slower ones that "natural scrolling" is a switchable option? It is not a locked in default on the desktop OS. Stop ragging on something that you can easily turn off! Don't like it, turn it off. Plus, how cognitively challenged are folks that they can't switch between modes after one or two mistakes going from platform to platform? I do it daily! Sure there are those one or two awkward, "Why isn't it scrolling?!?!" moments but then it's over. Kind of as annoying as sitting at the command line and typing "ls" in a Windows command prompt. It's going to happen, only in that case there is no option to switch it off.
There is a nagging bug in the DVD player I have reported to Apple and they have not fixed that is not present in the Snow Leopard version.
What kind of bug?
that's cute - posting AC and still concerned enough about how people see you to disclaim yourself :)
(Disclaimer: i'm not such a cunt in real life)
I think this guy has managed to use the word "nigger" in his posting more times than it is used in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn".
Mark Twain, however, was a damn fine writer. It's just a pity they "make" kids read his books in schools - it takes the fun out of them (and they are fun), and usually kills off any inclination to visit them in any later, more receptive frame of mind.
Snow Leopard is slowly becoming the XP of Macs. You aren't alone. Too bad Apple still artificially limits what OSes run on their machines despite being standard x86 hardware underneath.
Yup. I have run Lion & Mountain Lion on my macbook, but my iMac is Snow Leopard, and I have no reason to upgrade. The newer OSs aren't nearly as bad as Vista or W8, but they aren't as good as the older SL. Apple, like Microsoft, is getting worse, not better.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I understand Apple running out of cats. But they surely could have switched to dogs. There's a lot of dogs that are better than "Maverick".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I was going to write the same thing about totally different architectures. I used 10.3 on my 12" G4 when it was brand new. It was terrific for that machine. But I wouldn't even try and run something as complex as Mountain Lion on that machine even if it were possible. 1.25g of RAM would be a serious problem for one thing.
Yes that is too much to ask. Apple has right now has their new target customers are people who buy iOS devices. While they are doing some stuff to retain traditional OSX users they are going to continue to shift towards iOS customers in the UI to help bring them over.
Apple sees what Microsoft is going through with the XP transition. Why would they want that?
That being said... 25% of the userbase holding back from Lion / Mountain Lion is an interestingly high number.
I wanted lynx.
Well that would explain why it got noticeably slower.
I'm with you, and my only solace is that I believe Apple is less stupid than Microsoft. If they pull something comparable to the Windows 8 "Start Screen", I don't know how I'm going to cope. I guess I'll have to move to Linux, even if I lose a lot of applications.
App Nap simply reduces CPU and IO priority of your application, so if your CPU intensive application will continue to run at full speed, unless your foreground application needs to do something. Responsive foreground applications are pretty fun.
Also from the demo that they showed AppNap only kicks in when the window of that application is completely covered by other windows.
It tastes soooo good.
The thing about the scroll bars that has been irritating me lately is that if you have a table UI control and scroll to the bottom of the table, the scroll bars appear (because you're scrolling), but the bottom scroll bar obscures the last row of the table. You have to wait for the scroll bars to go away before you can interact with that last row. Permanent scroll bars (which I like for other reasons as well) would solve that problem.
Most serious mac users on a desktop have switched to the Magic Trackpad. I can't stand a mouse anymore. I like that it works the same as on my Macbook.
Really? I use a mac at home, and Windows 7 on a Thinkpad at work. After the first week, I haven't had any issues with remembering "which is which."
And even during that adjustment, I'm frankly unable to see this as a terribly impactful mistake to make - "I was reading a web page, and went to scroll down, forgot I was on Windows, and actually scrolled up!" Oh, the humanity. Won't somebody think of the children?
It has nothing to do with "skeuomorphism" - that would be somehow coding every scroll bar to look like a fucking Mouse wheel, and animate it in time with the scrolling of the wheel or something like that. Skeuomorphism is making user interface elements look like their real-life counterparts. The natural scrolling is completely natural on a tablet or phone, and the only reason it's "unnatural" on a mouse is because you've been trained for so long to be mindful of the machine interface between you and your computer screen.
Explain to me what it means to "scroll down" on a mousewheel that has no "down" direction? What does it mean to "scroll up" on a mousewheel that has no "up" direction? The axis of the wheel is parallel to the ground... any rotation around that axis is inherently not "up or down" - one side of the mouse wheel is going "up" relative to the ground, while at the same time the other side is going "down" relative to the ground. Given that... why not make it work as if there *were no mouse* and you were controlling it by placing your finger directly on the virtual "document" and moving it around?
Well the other day I upgraded my Pentium II from Windows 98 to Win 7 64 bit. What do you mean that's not possible. Pentium II, Pentium D, they're the same thing. 98, XP are the same right? "I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yup. Apple is following Microsoft for a change. Not only in tabletifying their OS but also in their naming of it.
I don't see how Neptune (XP) -> Longhorn (Vista) -> Blackcomb (7) -> Jupiter (8) -> Blue (8.1) is similar to: [cat name] 10.1 -10.8 -> Mavericks (10.9)
I remember Jobs way back in the cat era poking fun at Vista's pre production name "Longhorn" and now they name their own OS "Mavericks" which as every QI watcher knows was originally a term describing unbranded cattle.
Um every surfer knows Mavericks is a popular surfing spot. Apple has already stated that they named it after this location. There was even a movie released called Chasing Mavericks . Also unless you are stuck in the 1860s, the more contemporary meaning of maverick is "rebel" like in Top Gun.
So is this all a hidden homage to Tucows or a comment on how they see their customers?
Maybe it's your reading of a meaning that isn't there.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What's so "cutting edge" about an OSX update? I saw nothing to reinforce the claim other than being expected to believe anything from Apple is inherently cutting edge.
They'd call it the Stockholm syndrome.
I kid. I switch between OSX and Linux daily, and on OSX I have natural scrolling enabled. And I use a mouse with a scrollwheel... It feels fine. I don't really think about it, I guess my brain is used to switching.
Don't quote me on this.
My working Macs (at the office) are still on Snow Leopard, but my home systems are newly bought and are stuck on (now) Mountain Lion. The two Lions are broken in many ways. The two that I dislike most are the "looks just like your paper calendar" craziness that was overflowing the whole UI and whatever it is that they've done with memory management that causes 4GB to be too little to really work on. This last one gripes me because I bought a 4GB MacBook Air because (silly me) 4GB had been more than plenty for my Snow Leopard systems. I had to bump the wife's MacBook Pro up to 16GB so she wouldn't keep running into the spinning beachball after a day's work, something I never run into with 4GB Snow Leopard systems after weeks of heavy lifting. I will be switching to Mavericks at the .1 release point hoping that both of these will be improved if not fixed.
Autohide scrollbars are one of the worst UI decisions ever.
Good-bye
If I scroll on my mac right now, the place where the scrollbar goes does not change size at all, merely a long oval appears in the 'bezel'. If it doesnt change the size of the window WHY CANT I HAVE THE SCROLL MARKER IN IT AT ALL TIMES THAT CAN BE GRABBED BY THE MOUSE?
Good-bye
How much did they pay you to write this?
Don't quote me on this.
There is a nagging bug in the DVD player I have reported to Apple and they have not fixed that is not present in the Snow Leopard version.
What kind of bug?
pop ups that tell you to clean your room and brush your teeth.
I was actually a little intrigued when they said the next release would be called Sea Lion. I could get behind that, as I like sea lions, and the name was self-conscious enough to be silly and not just dumb. Then they said they were joking. Ah, well. Mavericks just seems kind of pretentious, and everyone I know who has heard the name thinks they named it after the sports team, which makes it even worse.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
They should have kept going to Ocelot, at least.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I regularly have a Macbook on my desk with my Windows PC. It's really not that hard to switch back and forth between them. (Then again, I can do the same with keyboard layouts. Maybe I'm just weird.)
If you can't convince them, convict them.
It's like they reversed the up/down rotation on an aircraft or switched left-right steering in a car. Yeah, you can get used to it, but then whenever you use a non-Apple product it feels weird again.
Poor choice for your first analogy, because natural scrolling behaves *exactly* like the up-down pitch on an aircraft. Pull control toward you on a plane (drag finger towards you on trackpad), your view goes up; push away, your view goes down. I think you've inadvertently hit upon a concept that should make Apple's method instantly intuitive for every pilot and flight-sim enthusiast.
After reading through all three pages (the first page being a real push not to read further), I was able to almost find out more about the new OS.
Being fairly anti-mac (I am also anti-windows, but use it every day anyways...), I was wondering what the new offerings were, and what it might actually have to compete.
And I have to say, I was completely unsuprised. By both the reviewer and the review. The direction appears to be divergent of functional use, and more in line with "synergistic management solutions". Bringing more shared functionality between devices (and I do see this as a boon for the Apple "Brand").
On the same note from what I read, the concerns I have (about the review and the reviewer) are as follows: /dev. Windows reintroduced it in a meaningful way with DirectX 1.0 (before that there were third party solutions). So, I am not really sure if this is new to Mac, or if there was new functionality introduced, but as it stands, it feels like a Jeep thing, and I just don't get it...
Audio HAL... Unless Apple redefined HAL, a hardware abstraction layer in direct access devices is nothing new. Linux has had it since day one, with
OS bound password storage... Yeah, NO. The last thing (and I am not just being my normal paranoid self) I would ever want is my operating system to upload my authentication information up to a third party (them) storage container. Not only do I as an individual have to worry about their security, their intentions, and well the honesty of every one of their employees, it seems to be a lazy, sloppy, and self-defeating method of security. If you are going to give your passwords to someone else to keep them safe, why are you using passwords (Yes, I am aware, we have no choice)?
Wireless external monitor support... Love the idea, I wish that the wireless HDMI support actually went somewhere. I keep a half a dozen pcs within kissing distance of my T.V. It would be nice to be able to use my T.V. as an alternate display. With that being said, it's another tribute to the catch all AirPlay concept. Great for Apple, but highly limiting to the level of supported devices and environments. I would rather have my choice of devices, but, then again, that's why I appreciate their business model, and don't buy their products.
The last thing I would like to mention is the fact that the article holds to a standard format of first give a positive impression. Then outline some real world issues, then leave on a positive note. This leaves the impression that it is a highly biased review. The OS is obviously struggling, and there are some areas that are fairly niche where it is struggling, but when one of the core benefits you outline is directly (or indirectly) related to the the most significant issue they are struggling with, it is not a positive thing. It is something to watch for, and unless it is a must have technology, or you are a developer looking to get in at the ground floor, this is actually something you want to avoid until it is resolved.
Many Linux and Windows people have suffered through early adoption. And while the concept of early adoption is fairly foreign to Apple (I won't go into the semantics of it, but open-source, and open development have caused both Windows and Linux to display research and development opportunities that very few Apple users have had a chance to really experience), there are growing pains that comes with it. Now, this doesn't mean that I think that the new OS will fail, or that it will be anything less than a raving success.
I won't even go as far as to say that the only people who will buy into this are Mac Fanboys. I don't think that will be the case. Apple has proven time and again that "Synergistic Management Solutions" work. And this is a step towards a more integrated solution. That means more adopters, and ideally a more "Dedicated Ecosystem". As a result, they should see a growth in their market. But, this needs to be taken with a grain of salt. When companies make steps like this, they always falter. And a blind review does not directly help the cause. Bashing it doesn't help either. Apple has their work cut out for them, and this is one of the biggest risks I have seen them take in quite a few years.
Does "System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: > Always" not work for you? My scroll bars seem to stay put with that option on.
Uh, you can. Mouse settings and trackpad settings are separate.
Kind of as annoying as sitting at the command line and typing "ls" in a Windows command prompt. It's going to happen, only in that case there is no option to switch it off.
I hate doing that. Along with WINDOWS-SPACEBAR and looking for Spotlight in the upper right corner.
Waking up is really tough these days. Autopilot is easier.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Even better, a large Wacom 5 tablet. Then you can have everything - fingers, mouse, pen and even an airbrush if you want.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I assume he/she meant Tiger. Pretty easy to get your cats confused--I can barely even remember what the current version is called except by version number.
R.Mo
I guess i dont understand why they are hidden in the first place. THis is the sort of tweak that should default to standard behavior and have an option to make them go away if desired.
Good-bye
I fucking HATE autohide scrollbars. I want to know what can scroll without having to interact with the system to know it.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
So am I. There are so many annoying "animate everything" additions to the UI that you simply can not turn off. "Natural scrolling" isn't natural at all.
Look, an iOS device and a Mac are not and should not be the same thing. User interface metaphors must be different for these devices. We have different screen sizes, amounts of RAM, storage speed and size, speed of network connections and basic interaction methods.
The two devices IN NO FUCKING WAY should be merged into one.
This is a massive disservice to the users. Utterly massive.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Yes, it sucks. Yes, you can set the scrollbars to "Always Display" in the System Prefs. No, you can not get scroll bars back where the scroll thumb actually is the width of the actual area you can click on to click and drag. I fucking hate that.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
don't*
can't*
Come on man. Spell the words.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I hated... HATED... "Natural Scrolling" when it first came out. But I gave it a week. You push up on the trackpad... screen goes up. You push down, screen goes down. It just feels.. natural.
Now when I use another computer the scrolling just feels weird.
I set "natural" on trackpad interfaces. I leave the mouse scroll to be "legacy".
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Why?
Good-bye
Also, the app needs to set a flag that opts into AppNap, otherwise it'll continue to have the same CPU and IO priority as before.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
fuck the magic mouse. it's all about the magic trackpad + better touch tool
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
If we're just talking about 1 button Apple mice, I think the Pro mouse is better than ADB II. Also, it's not hard to get used to the hockey-puck, even if you have enormous hands like mine.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Highly unlikely it was Tiger or Leopard. The main reason being is that Macs that were released with those versions of OS X were Intel Core not Core 2 As such, they cannot be upgraded to Mountain Lion. Unless the poster downgraded the Mac for some reason (and got his hands on another version), his/her story doesn't make sense.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Curring edge features: interrupt coalescing, memory compression, grand central dispatch, app nap.
Presumably you're either referring to changes to GCD or expanding the use of GCD, given that GCD first appeared in OS X in Snow Leopard.
I bet most of those folks are using older machines that can't use 10.7+. There are a quite a number of Macs that don't make the minimum reqs. Mac OS 10.7 requires a 64-bit CPU. 10.6 was the last to support 32bit. I have a MacBook at home that is stuck at 10.6.
Apple and Google treat tablets as large phones.
That is also not quite right...
Apple is the company that has different design standards for tablets vs. phones, even going so far as to have some different UI elements for the tablet, and different navigation approaches. On Android developers do think of tablets as large phones, which is a big part of why they have trouble gaining traction.
The tablet for Apple is a fairly different thing for the phone, the only thing they share in common from a design sense is touch input.
So Apple has three distinct platforms to design for, Google has one (Android), and Microsoft has one (The PC, as you said).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Most serious mac users", eh?
....
Most power users need a more granular control of their machine....which requires a mouse, trackball, or pen. Most users concerned with consuming Perez Hilton or Youtube are just going to need simple gestures. If that is what qualifies as 'serious' in your world, I suppose it's a little different than the business realm I deal with every day.
PowerShell aliases ls to whatever the PowerShell equivalent is (Get-Content? I don't know, I always type ls). Handy, that.
I need precise control of a lot of machines, for which I use a keyboard. The gestures on the Magic Trackpad do help in switching between virtual desktops and session windows, though.
Hey, Blagojevich managed to kill at least one person - his aide, Chris Kelly.
And the list of Illinois Gubernatorial felons is deeper than two - Otto Kerner and Dan Walker went to the big house too. Big Jim Thompson was too smart to get caught and Jim Edgar was too nerdy. The joke around these parts is if you manage to avoid be sent to jail as Governor, they'll name a big building after you (Thompson Center, Ogilvie Center, Stratton Building). Heck, Stevenson had a highway and pretty much every third school in the state named after him... (of course, you have to go way back to the 50s to find someone that clean in Illinois politics)
Sounds pretty sensible then. I suspect, from what they say on the Apple site, that it's actually slightly more subtle than reducing the priority, as that alone wouldn't give the power savings that they claim. I would think that what they're actually doing is increasing the time between scheduling quanta for AppNap applications and tacking them on to the end of quanta for foreground apps so that the CPU doesn't get two wakeups.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Because cant is a word that means something totally different from can't. It means a kind of argot used to obfuscate meaning except within a defined group (for example, thieves cant to keep the police in the dark). So your sig actually means:
"What good is a police state if I write at length online in an impassioned, obfuscated way that those outside my identified group can't understand".
Which I'm pretty sure isn't your intention.
They actually registered Lynx and Cougar as trademarks.
It's really not that hard to switch back and forth between them.
Some people can do this but most of us would find it irritating even if we could do it. There is really no benefit and there is a downside. It requires learning two things that are functionally equivalent neither of which is objectively better than the other. It's not that one is right and the other is wrong. It's that you are learning the same thing twice to no obvious advantage. To get proficient you also need to practice it both ways. There are a LOT of well established advantages in having standard interfaces even in cases where they might not be optimized for a specific task. We use the steering wheel and two/three pedals in automobiles. We could use a joystick or other arrangement but there is no obvious advantage to doing so and there IS an advantage to having a consistent interface between cars. (less training, less accidents, cheaper to build, etc)
The ironic thing is that Apple gets props for being design gurus but this pretty much violates what is good design if you are using a mouse. (for trackpads it's a different story - those actually make sense to do like a smartphone screen) I've been using scroll wheels the traditional way for 15+ years now and if I run into one that works in reverse it just screws me up for a while. I don't really want to think about that anymore.
But what I can't have is natural scrolling for my trackpad where it makes sense, but normal scrolling for my scroll wheel, where its just wrong.
Absolutely correct. Mod points for this comment!
If you have a laptop and switch between trackpad and mouse, you cannot differentiate scrolling directions between the two devices. In fact, if you check 'natural scrolling' on trackpad prefs this changes the settings under the mouse prefs. I submitted this as a bug and Apple kicked it back as 'performing as expected'. I suspect Apple implemented natural scrolling in a way that allows them to easily have different devices use different scrolling directions.
Very very very annoying.
Yes, it was in snow leopard. It is still cutting edge, as no other OS has anything similar throughout the OS.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Better battery life, better openGL performance, new features like Fusion drive (SSD caching) and multi disk time machine are more than worth the 5 seconds you need to spend to turn the new preferences off if you don't like them.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yes, it was in snow leopard. It is still cutting edge, as no other OS has anything similar throughout the OS.
GCD might be cutting-edge, but it does not itself make Mavericks a cutting-edge version of OS X, given that it dates back to Snow Leopard, and it doesn't belong in a list whose other members are features new in Mavericks. In the list "interrupt coalescing, memory compression, grand central dispatch, app nap.", at least one of these things is not like the others, as the saying goes, and, if by "interrupt coalescing" you mean "timer coalescing", exactly one of those things is not like the others.
(As for "interrupt coalescing", I have no reason to believe that, for example, jerbun's comment in this Gizmodo story:
is a good guess.
I'm more inclined to go with Apple's own description of it in their "OS X Mavericks Core Technologies Overview" document, which indicates that it shifts the times of events scheduled to happen sufficiently close together in time so that, instead of happening at a time as close as possible to the scheduled time, they happen at times further from their scheduled time in a fashion that allows more of them to be handled within one timer-based wakeup. One consequence of this might be that fewer timer interrupts occur (as I remember, XNU was made tickless at least as far back as Lion, so there aren't periodic timer interrupts), but that particular bit of interrupt coalescing - it only concerns timer interrupts - isn't the main goal, and is arguably not a goal at all, just a side-effect of reducing the number of timer-based wakeups from sleep.)
On my end, a lot of businesses I work with are sticking with 10.6 for compatibility with other software. And a few just because things are setup that way, it works, and they don't want to change.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Yes there is a reason scrolling was the was it was: a mouse wheel was the only way it was used. Now that people are using touch phones, tables, trackpads and mice, it makes sense to provide the option to invert the behaviour to more closely match the way people scroll today. The benefit is uniformity of input across devices. You might not consider that an advantage but many do. If you don't, just turn it off.
Why use a Dell if you don't use what makes it different from countless PCs out there?
There's nothing that does. Dell is about as generic as it comes these days.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I bet most of those folks are using older machines that can't use 10.7+.
Maybe. Maybe not. For myself, I have a 15 inch macbook pro that is capable of running the latest but I chose to stay on Snow Leopard. The "integration" of the app store with the OS was a severe turnoff for me. Rather like slapping makeup and perfume on a drugged up alcoholic *hooker: It is still gross.
Honestly, there have been no changes to the operating system that interest me enough to switch. There have been no upgrades to its performance or usability that interest me.
*For those who are not lining things up properly, the app store is the hooker and the perfume and makeup is OS X.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
The messed up thing about this is that Apple only legally supports 10.7+ to be virtualized. So if you want to run your older software, you are going to have to buy an older machine (according to Apple). It's too bad they didn't decide to let 10.6 be virtualized since I have some older software too that I'd like to keep.
Nah... for me that doesn't bother me much in 10.7. It's just another menu item under the Apple menu. I just don't use it. I basically don't see it or notice it except when I forget and do the OS 'full screen' and it limits me to one screen (I have a multi-monitor setup)... that is annoying. (I'm glad they finally fixed it in 10.9). The biggest thing moving to 10.7 was all the Rosetta apps I lost. I knew 64bit was coming so I'd have to deal with it at some point. Luckily I found replacements for almost all of them.
seriously, who else gets eye strain the instant he clicks that link?