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OS X 10.9 Mavericks Review
An anonymous reader writes "John Siracusa at Ars Technica has put together a comprehensive review of Apple's OS X 10.9 Mavericks. This is the first time a major OS X update has been free, and it works on any device that supports Mountain Lion. This suggests Apple is trying to boost adoption rates as high as possible. Siracusa says the following about Apple's move away from skeuomorphic design: 'Mavericks says enough is enough. The leather's gone, the fake pages are gone, the three panes are independently resizable (more or less), even the title bar is bone-stock, and it's boring?' On the other hand, he was a big fan of all the internal optimizations Apple has done, since the energy savings over Mountain Lion are significant. He found a 24% increase in his old MacBook Pro's battery life, and a 30% increase for his new MacBook Air. He also praised the long-needed improvements to multi-monitor support: ' Each attached display is now treated as a separate domain for full-screen windows. Mission Control gestures and keyboard shortcuts will now switch between the desktop and full-screen windows on the display that contains the cursor only, leaving all other displays untouched.' The 24-page review dives deeply into all the other changes in Mavericks, and is worth reading if you're deciding whether or not to upgrade."
Apple has really fucked up big time on 10.9.
Basically, the sRGB spec is no longer sRGB, and colour managed applications that use ColorSync are completely hosed. Almost everything is more saturated then it should be. Towers of bug reports have been filed on this alone and absolutely nobody has received a response from Apple, which makes me think it's some retarded "stylistic choice" of theirs to literally try and make the OS "look better" (it doesn't).
So, basically, if you rely on OS X for colour accurate work, you're totally fucked.
Here we have Soulskill yet again trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about. This is not an important issue in human interface design. This seems to be some sort of pet peeve lens which Soulskill keeps bringing up. Skeuomorphism may bother designers who don't want to be tied down to designs based on mid-twentieth-century conventions of office life and people who demand every last pixel of their screen be useful for them. ell, it may even be the plastic teak dashboard of the 21st century, but its presence or lack thereof has such a tiny impact on usability for all but the most constrained interfaces that it is not worth /.'s concern. Please stop.
app store should not need it's own password/ login for free stuff.
also Software update seems better for OS stuff.
We use computers and mice, maybe a track pad. It is one thing to theme something with fluff and quite another to try to simulate historical metaphors while ignoring known methods of user input and popular conventions.
Making something look like a book is a nice touch that is a matter of opinion but making you do the motions of the real world to interact with a computer program using a mouse... that is just idiotic and should be a cause for concern.
Skeuomorphism is great if you are making something tor a target demo that understands some real world item well and would instantly "get it" while you could slowly migrate them to something better suited to the newer technology that is replacing it.
You might want to use VHS tape or film reels as metaphors when introducing video editing in the 90s... But as soon as people can adapt, those metaphors can be chucked for more modern or abstract ones; as Apple and others have done with digital video editing. Some terms like film and reels still remain despite this generation never using or even seeing actual film.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Hahhaha. Wat? As someone who's installed Linux since you had to write over the MBR manually, you sound ridiculous man. You know, Linus cranked out the simplest and most hacky POS kernel in a few days, bare minimums to get a shell up, using a shit ton of GNU software -- Ever write a compiler or editor? (Man, yeah, that's the real engineering feat). Linus then immediately got help from lots of folks who wanted to have Unix on their home PCs. If anything Linux is the epitome of the Bazaar approach vs the Cathedral (HURD) approach -- The EXACT OPPOSITE of know-how vs lots of hackers incrementally tinkering. Folks who had time to waste had home PCs, Linux was a kernel for 386 for home PCs. Blam. Win win.
Linux wasn't some major genius of engineering feat -- Remember when he didn't think real programmers needed an init? He admitted himself somewhat recently that was stupid before giving the finger to Nvidia. To this day Linus's best decisions were in project management. He was in the right place at the right time, and can manage a project like nobody's business. That's why Linux beats HURD -- that and HURD has some deep design issues, with FS nodes supplying their own "..", for example. In otherwords, there are not just BAD engineering choices in Linux -- The whole thing is full of them! We work them out over time to get by -- Read a mailing list, man. This project has a head of steam, and that's why it's awesome; Really has nothing to do with "common sense" (NO INIT?!) or "understanding of reality" (Programming the IO directly?! NO HDD driver?!) -- It has everything to do with tons of folks not wanting to run Windows.
Look, up through Win 95 I booted to the DOS terminal, and typed "win" to lose my shell if I needed some windows GUI program. I was not alone. When MS killed the terminal in 98, Linux was there for us to regain it, if we were crazy enough to do the highly impractical, nonsensical, detached from reality thing, and Install Linux -- A Work In Progress, instead of Windows.