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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.
Someone needs to counter-balance the horrendous anti-Apple bias found here on /.
So when can we expect the Review of Ars Technica's Review of OS X Mavericks?
#DeleteChrome
From what I've seen, the anti-skeumorphic hatred started with WinPhone 7 users desperate to find a way their phone was superior to iPhone. They tied it with the idea that WP7 was a unique UI (and it was nice, but not as nice as the Zune HD, and not amazingly original). After that some Android users jumped on the bandwagon, also wanting to feel superior. Some iPhone users started to feel bad about it.
Skeumorphism is just a thing, if done right it is great, if done poorly, it is bad.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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> Skeumorphism is just a thing, if done right it is great, if done poorly, it is bad.
As a 3D, UI, & UX expert I concur 100%.
Skeumorphism is like spice. A little kicks it up a notch. Not having any is TOO plain; having too much and that is worse then not having any.
IMO the BIGGER problem is OSX 10.9 and iOS 7 completely desaturating and removing all 3d shading -- THAT is the hideous UI crime. The UI designers should be forced to use Windows 1.x for their stupidity.
I guess it depends on what your standpoint is. From a user standpoint, transitioning to a new technology via a familiar UI is better than doing it via an unfamiliar one. Once there however, the real test is how unintrusive and easy to use the UI actually is.
From a designer standpoint, again, when in transition, a familiar UI is easier to work with. However, once the transition period is over, it can be a limiting factor for improvements to the interface or to the functionality of the device.
Take the keyboard for example. We still use the same QWERTY layout of its predecessor, the typewriter. This was the natural course of evolution for typing as people transitioned away from typewriters to keyboards. But it is limiting, in that the key layout is not ideal for the typist, and the flat keyboard layout itself is not friendly to the hand at all.
On the other hand, look at the Segway. It has such a revolutionary interface that nobody really knows what to do with it. It probably would've gained far more traction had it looked closer to a bicycle. It could have eventually replaced all those motorized bikes with the 80cc engines, been legitimately the next revolution in transportation. Instead, it's now associated in my mind with being a fat slob, since the only people I've ever actually seen use one are mall security guards and the occasional beat cop.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I don't know what in hell you are talking about and apparently neither do you. There is no requirement for any info whatsoever to get security updates. I hit the apple in the top corner of the screen, scroll down to software update, it shows the updates and I hit go and it goes. My computer asks for my administrator login/password. That's pretty much it, a lot like updating my linux box. I get the idea you've never used an apple computer.
You would not pass any computer art class today with that attitude.
Every professor out there has been teaching this is the way to go and flunking out those who do these outdated 20th century things. Unfortunately, this trend is post impressionism which once became popular because herasy to do art any other way. These new students are landing jobs at companies like Apple and Microsoft. Simple color is it.
http://saveie6.com/
With your "OMG, they must be fucktards" mentality and your openly bias "Linux before God" agenda have you ever stopped to consider for so much as a second that Apple's setup has some real value to ordinary consumers who just want shit to work?
Their closed garden approach may irritate the hell out of you information ought to be freers but good God, it makes certain my grandmother doesn't have to worry about viruses or malware. There is plenty of shit to be found on the app store, but a hell of a lot less than for Linux or Windows [or the Mac for that matter] on the wider Internet. You may prefer a over the antenna, torrenting or streaming approach - or just anything without DRM - but the movies, television shows, etc. provided by iTunes are of a reasonable, watchable quality and portable.
Besides, if you want to talk about the "brainwashed idiots" crowd - who are really not Apple fanbois, but instead the techno hypster - news flash, Linux is next for them. (Fuck, my bet is that you're one of them because you aren't stopping to really consider that OS X may provide all they need for a great many people. Fuck, Windows does.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you're asking an art professor about HCI, then you're doing it wrong. Try looking over in cognitive psychology for people who can give useful input.
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I am really curious what power optimizations were done?
You are in luck. An article about that is the topic under discussion.
Any "computer art professor" that teaches which style is "superior", as opposed to "how to do" any style you are tasked to implement, isn't worth the time spent with them.
The issue of replicating physical interfaces is not, and never will be, cut and dry. Some physical interfaces are highly refined and functional, and abandoning them leads to problems (look at a modern audio system as compared to, for instance, a late 1970's Marantz. Now try to turn up the midrange, or route one recording input to a recording output, assuming your modern hardware even has them.)
There are some excellent UI design guidelines out there. Like, don't constantly show and hide interface elements, it fouls up muscle memory. But "bury everything in menus" is a total newbie suck move, and "remove all familiarity" (which is what the rabid anti sku folk are saying, really) is also a suck move.
Change and so forth in moderation, see?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The Sprite Kit is just a 2D sprite library
There you go again. Have you used it? It's "just" a 2D sprite library that has the simplest API I've ever seen, and yet handles all the OpenGL stuff behind the scenes for you, has a full particles system AND a physics engine, all built in. The physics alone (which is not just basic collision detection but a full physics environment) is worth the price of admission, which is ummm, free.
As a test I piled sprites of about 100x100 pixels, all with attached particle emitters and each with a physics body into the system, moving randomly and interacting according to their 'natural' physics. On my 13" Macbook Pro Retina I only started to see the framerate dip below 60fps when I got to almost 3000 sprites. That's good performance actually.
2D games may be ho-hum to some, but with simple API, power and performance SK gives you, I look forward to seeing what cool stuff people come up with. Should be fun.
John Siracusa's reviews of OS X over at Ars Technica have always been in-depth and informative, and while John Siracusa himself may be a fan of OS X, he doesn't shy away from being very critical when it does something not-so-great, or he sees a problem with Apple's direction. This year he (rightfully) railed against several UI elements that are pretty bizarre. It's hardly a puff piece. It's more educational, than anything.
In general, I find his reviews much more about explaining how things work, than actually praising or criticizing. It's a review, in the sense that it's an overview of the new operating system, rather than some sort of grading of the operating system. He's not comparing it to anything except the previous versions of OS X, and then only in objective technical respects. It's not about competing views of different products, it's to tell existing OS X users what they can expect if they upgrade.
Mostly Siracusa talks about under-the-hood workings of the operating system and computer hardware, and past Siracusa reviews have even included code examples to explain new APIs to developers interested in the platform, and users who may be the beneficiaries of developers using new APIs. This year it talks quite a bit about race-to-sleep and other technical issues that apply to computing as a whole. It's exactly the sort of review somebody would want to read if they were technically-inclined, like the Slashdot audience. I would say a Siracusa OS X review is entirely appropriate, here. If you're just looking for some kind of Windows vs. Mac (vs. Linux) argument fodder, it's not the review for you. I wouldn't want or care about those sorts of reviews on Slashdot.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You are correct. What people don't realize is that there are actually two different update mechanisms behind the "App Store" updates. When you check for updates, Apple displays the updates for applications purchased from the App Store along with updates for the OS-- but the fact that they're displayed together doesn't mean that they behave exactly the same way. The updates for App Store apps are downloaded from the App Store and require you to have an App Store account, but the system updates are downloaded from a different location, and no account is required.
I administer these things as part of my job. You definitely don't need an account to download system updates.