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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."
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.
Been using it since beta 1. What kind of problems did you see? I saw no issues other than the email sync issues.
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.
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?
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.
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.
So happy I switched to VMware. It seemed like parallels was constantly breaking to force upgrades only for revenue stream; it felt like the late 90's all over again...
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.
I bought Parallels 2. It contained a bug in their handling of IPIs that caused host kernel panics on Core 2 processors (i.e. the processor that I'd bought to run it on). They eventually found the bug and fixed it... in Parallels 3. Their solution to the problem of selling me a product that was not fit for purpose was for me to give them more money. I switched to VirtualBox and will never give that company money again. VirtualBox lacks a few of the nice things in VMWare (in particular, it wires all of the VM's memory and doesn't do deduplication), but it's quite useable.
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
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.
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 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.
VirtualBox is also a bit easier to install in Ubuntu.
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.
It is my contention that these changes were good features for Apple, and not so good for users. That "many" users enjoy them means fuck-all. 5% of Apple users is still a bunch of people you could describe as "many".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.'"
Have you ever got virtualbox's 3d support to work? Every time I try, virtualbox crashes. This is why I'm still using vmware player, where it almost always works now (was still kind of flaky in 3, pretty good in 4, pretty great in 5.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not unless there is a location in California named Longhorn or Apple runs out of locations.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Users who don't like them can simply turn then off. It takes 5 seconds to do and the setting will persist through is upgrades.
I know you will conveniently ignore this again because you are just trolling, but I thought it would be fun to point out the facts.
PS everyone is not like you.
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.
Well that would explain why it got noticeably slower.
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.
Same here. I run every new version of the Mac OS in VMware and boot from 10.6.8 which sucks so much less than the new OSes.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.
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
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.
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.
But the BS here is that you have to hunt and look for where to do it.
There are so many "improvements" in the Mac OS that I simply want to GO AWAY. In many cases, you can't turn them off. Opening a folder in List View in the Finder by pressing the right arrow? It used to display instantly. Now, it cascades the content down in an animation that you can't turn off.
Just show me my fucking data as fast as you can, dammit! Stop stop stop animating EVERYTHING. Apple, if you INSIST on animating everything, at least let me TURN IT OFF or set the time to animate to NONE.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
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.