Apple has had a sporadic history with 'green' computers/packaging. They used to be quite conscious about this - the box for my first Mac (LC2) was natural brown cardboard, and i seem to remember Apple announcing that they pointedly weren't using white cardboard boxes to avoid bleached paper. I was sadly disappointed when the Performas came out... and disappointed too they reverted to shiny, white/full color boxes.
I also liked the design of the original iMacs, but it was also a little sad that they were relying on virgin plastic for their new look. I'd have expected Apple, over most other tech companies, to come up with an environmentally friendly design first. Specifically, recycled plastic (as this NEC machine uses) is a great direction.
That said, one of the best things hardware makers can do is produce low-power machines. Apple's switching to LCD's was a good first step; plus sleep mode on their iMacs uses like 4 watts, probably less than most people's TVs when they're 'off'.
I too loved the early versions of BeOS, they really flew on my PowerCenterPro 210.
Remember though, at the time BeOS had some gaping holes, such as printing. There was some amazing technology there, but Apple was much more strongly tied to print design than today (with the huge internet focus).
They'd likely have had much more work to do integrating an immature BeOS than it was with a very mature NeXT.
I understand that there are a couple of BeOS engineers at Apple now, let's hope we can get some of the very cool ideas that are now dead (replicants, instantaneous searching, semi-sane metadata, etc.).
My guess is that most serious Mac users care deeply about the quality of the interface of the software they use, especially things like being intuitive and having very good fit and finish. Most Windows users don't care about such things at all, and instead care more about the number of features.
... and i read somewhere (can't remember where) this week that the people who love OS X most tend to be converts from Linux/Unix, and the ones who hate it most tend to be OS9 users. The rationale is that Linux/Unix (and to some extent, Windows) users don't expect a polished, well-thought-out GUI and do expect to wrestle with the system for each hardware addition; for them a system like OS Xthat 'just works' it's the best thing ever. For OS9 users, that's the baseline.
finally, best of luck to John Gruber, nice work on BBEdit, you're (still) a great source of info on the mailing lists. (and interesting new website too)
Yes, clearly themes are the hallmark of a 'pro' OS.
"Hey boss, i can't get any work done because the background color of my icon text labels is too... how can i say it... uninspiring."
MS should be spending more time on stability and security, and less time on sticking a variable on every pissant little gui feature just IN CASE some secretary in Lincoln Nebraska wants to change the scroll bar color to match her socks.
People whine about the cycles Aqua takes, then whine more that they can't muck around with it. Hint: when a machine is crashing constantly, remove the stupid little gui 'enhancers' and watch your machine speed magically increase.
It's purely personal preference - I just can't be productive under any version of Windows, and i'm a 'pro' user. Believe me, i've tried. Too many little differences in behavior, too much muscle memory.
AppleScript is great for little projects that need to tie programs together - you don't want to use it for serious data munging, but it'll do a nice job of building a Quark document, or for quick little utilities.
Here's a quick list of mini-AppleScripts i use almost every day at work:
network login window - so i don't have to seperately log in to 3 different servers
faux-cli - to jump to different directory window (yes, this can be handy, especially when the alternative is drilling through 6 directory layers, when i can more easily type a known path) automated backup routine - for email mostly, with iDo script scheduler (this is on OS9, i'd use cron if i used X at work) create new folders - creates a numbered series of new folders where i say to phone search - gives a quick window to enter a search to our intranet's phone directory (which i wrote in PHP) file renaming - batch file renaming (search/replace, add prefix/suffix), just about the only way to do it in OS 9. Some of these are scripts that ship w/the OS general batch processing - converting Word files to text, print whole Quark document as single-page pdf files, lots of BBEdit-related scripts (ie, add the filename to the title of an html doc), etc.
You get the idea. Sure, lots of these could be done in other languages, but none of them took any time to write. AS is surprisingly powerful for these little uses, and runs very fast. It's a huge time-saver for me.
As for AppleScript Studio, it's a very cool thing, but it does add a level of complexity to the scripts. You're not just writing a little script, you're coding an app and interacting with the user - lots of additional complexity. It would sure make some pretty looking scripts though.
When i left my last job, my manager was just bursting to tell me about the counter-offer his boss had approved. They really wanted me to stay- the people i was leaving to take over my job were truly clueless.
For me, there were many more reasons to leave than the money. I'd been there ~3 years, with almost no new challenges and nowhere to go within the company. The work was boring and the management clueless (especially my manager who thought he had a chance to buy me off...).
When he brought up the counter-offer, i declined to even meet about it and left very happily unaware of their offer. My new job only paid a little more than the old one, so the counter-offer would surely have been more money. So what did i gain?
I have a much better work atmosphere, great manager, clued-in top management, interesting and challenging work, much more flexibility, and most importantly, room to grow. In short, there was a lot more gained than a couple of bucks.
I made this job change a week before i got married, we were looking to buy a house and start a family (both of which we have done since). The stress of making the decision at the time has been more than made up for in the reduced stress since then. Oh, and i've gotten a promotion and 2 very nice raises in the 2.5 years i've been here too.
I haven't shopped at Worst Buy for about 8 years, since i was falsely accused of stealing from the store.
I'd been shopping for a walkman, spent 20 minutes in the store trying to decipher the display with no luck. There were models out that weren't in stock, no prices, and piles of boxed models with no info at all, and not a salesperson in sight. I walked out the door, only to have some guy follow me across the street and ask me for my ID. He said i looked like a guy who had stolen something in the past month.
The visit before that was about a year before, when it had taken 45 minutes to get them to honor an "instant rebate" that included free CDs (i was buying a CD deck). The sale price wasn't automatically rung up at the register (as the signs had indicated), and i had to go through 2 more checkouts to get full credit back.
Needless to say, i don't shop there any more.
If that isn't bad enough, here in the Twin Cities, they are building a new headquarters building. They lobbied the 'lucky' suburb to evict and tear down a decades-old car dealership in the process. bleah.
They're evil! I'll stick to online shopping - they might also be idiots, but at least i don't have to talk to them.
Our production department just got one of these, after much research. A transparency adapter was important for us, and that helped drive the decision, but that alone added $1k to the price (about $3k total).
It's a very nice scanner though, and includes lots of items you could easily pay a few hundred for alone: Silverfast software, color calibrating software & plates, fast SCSI + Firewire + USB interfaces.
The preview and scan speed is fantastic (we use it on fast SCSI). We're still nailing down the color on transparencies. The reflective quality is wonderful right out of the box, though it tends to want to 'help' by saturating soft colors.
I agree with the earlier poster about using a service bureau - if you don't need the large size very often, they can be very cost effective. For us, we scan enough that this should pay for itself in about 3 months (vs using a scanning service)
Those items aren't off the machine, they're installed but turned off. Big difference. It's a pretty well-equipped machine, but a secure one.
This is something Apple does really well, btw - there are lots of very cool extras that the power user will find with a little digging. Apple suckers you in with a nice interface, then amazes you with how much power there is, if you look. This effect is multiplied 100x with OSX.
I just saw this for the first time recently. The computers were hilarious!
I didn't get a really close look (i should rent it again, it's on dvd). The desktop was obviously Mac, but they were doing lots of command line work. There were also what looked like console screens going. I figured it was maybe the old AIX (apple unix) system, or maybe just some odd development software interface i hadn't seen before. Even AIX would have been laughably ancient for them to be using though (see other posts, re: ancient software boxes).
I love the dead tree editions. Online manuals (the PHP manual is the best example i've seen) are fantastic, but only when i'm sitting at the computer online.
There are lots of times when i just want to see some good examples of code use, and that can be really hard to find online.
plus, i don't have a network connection in the bathroom...
Is this going to be Photoshop for audio? It's been a few years since we could trust the authenticity of any photograph, and now it sounds like this is the final leap over traditional sound editing - audio can't be completely trusted any more either.
actually, since the placement of the widgets is consistent (unlike too many *nix guis), colorblind people will be fine - look at stoplights, same red/green problem, and they get by (and i'm pretty bad with the red/green myself).
there ARE visual cues to the window widgets - mouse over and they display little + or - icons much like a webpage to indicate their function, if the color doesn't tell you. a nice, webpage-related feature for those millions who's only computer interface is the web.
i agree on the pinstripe appearance - i'm afraid it'll end up being too much, especially for design types. i still set my desktop to a plain dark blue, despite the ability to put any kind of crazy photo there...
can't wait for osx, and really can't wait until i can afford a machine that'll run it...
i can't play that game more than 5 minutes without wanting to hurl. ironically, i bought it for myself, but my video card was too slow so i didn't play it for a couple of months. my wife gets a new imac, and we start playing it on that - i get sick even watching it, and she kicks ass on it. (even better: she's 28, never had a driver's license)
Newspapers really have to stick with the niche they've been in since TV news took over the bleeding edge. Newspapers still fit nicely in the area where they can give more detail and less glitz than the evening new (which still generally sucks), but more concisely than the weekly magazines.
It's an important area of coverage that too many papers have been ignoring as they try harder to compete with either Newsweek or CNN. Local and regional news has inherent value that just won't get covered by any other source.
On the web front, if newspapers choose to expand into real-time internet coverage, they are indeed competing directly with the CNNs of the world, and without the massive resources of the national media outlets. But here again, newspapers can give breaking news on the web that would not be worthy of interrupting Oprah for for a broadcast update.
i say newspapers can do perfectly well serving their communities, which is really their original and best purpose. They just need to focus on what those communities are in the cyber age.
GIMP is fine for web graphics, and a nicely evolving tool. BUT, print professionals will not take the GIMP seriously until it has some standardized color controls and some DTP equivalents to Quark or Pagemaker or Framemaker. Photoshop is only one part of the creative process for print work, and until you can use all the tools you need on one platform, the GIMP and other Linux tools will languish in the hands of those determined to use them, not the masses of creative professionals.
Another thing, GIMP is fine for pixel graphics, but there is nothing on Linux for vector art. The vast majority of my art creation (illustrations, schematics) are done in Freehand and sometimes Illustrator. Without those tools available on Linux, i'm staying with the Mac.
a third thing, it's not just creating graphics, it's getting them printed (still assuming print work here, which won't die in the face of web graphics, ya know), even if you get all 3 parts of print production on Linux (vector, pixel and layout tools), you need Linux-savvy service bureaus who can take thos wacky file formats and make them RIP like regular files.
oh, and the beautiful thing about pdf is that you can do ANY kind of layout work and make it a pdf. Take your average high-quality design and convert it to HTML and it'll look like your average drone with FrontPage did it. HTML was never meant for high quality work. A pdf can be used for the web, for print, for onscreen navigating, all within the same file. it's a beautiful, beautiful thing, and IMHO the best product Adobe's come up with since Postscript.
- jub, graphics professional, thank you very much.
hey, read the announcement again - THIS IS A CONSUMER MACHINE. i'll bet your crappy CTX won't plug into an LCD projector either. 99.99% of consumers will never even think of this capability, and they shouldn't have to pay for still more useless features, that's the whole point. i think they've done a really good job of making a somewhat stripped-down notebook that's still very usable. i'd like to see it close to the $1200-1300 originally rumored, but it's not bad. if you need to produce presentations, shell out (and write off) the $2.5k and get the professional version - that's what it's for. When i can scrape up $1500 for a notebook, chances are i'll get a used G3pro book rather than the ibook just because i'll want the expandibility and bigger screen, but it's a choice... sheesh, if only half the people here would READ the stories before posting...
if yo've ever used the macos, you'd realize it's a whole lot closer to a cli than windoze or any of the window managers in *nix. The finder is truly a thing of beauty - you act directly on your files, no browser that has to be manually refreshed, and you know immediately what's happening where. In kde (or any other x-window system) you're dragging files around with no indication (highlighting) to let you know whether the files you're moving are going in a folder or subfolder. try grabbing the middle 5 out of folder of 10 things and copying them to another directory - on the mac you'll be moving on to other things before yo'd even finish typing filenames on the command line. the cli -vs- gui winner depends purely on the work you're doing. if you need to move massive files, create logs, do keewl strings of pipes while typing and typing (with occasional glances at that handy command reference book), use the command line. Otherwise, a well-done gui can let you manage files without having to become a sysadmin.
my GCC printer at home has this - you can change the printer options, turn on/off ports and their options. it's a nice interface, but nothing you have to use on a regular basis. might be more useful in situations where you have to admin a whole building of printers - bookmark the printers and check status.
(rant) of course, a lot of workgroup printer issues would be helped greatly by using an OS that relays the printer feedback to the user. Hmm... let's see... Macs do that! I'd love to show otherwise, but i've never seen a windows or linux box that gives you the message, "paper tray is empty" or "output bin full". (/rant)
seriously, i'd LOVE to see this functionality in linux - it's one of those fabulous touches i'd sorely miss if i dumped macos
you can't even compare dell, compaq, et. al. with apple. compare apple with ibm or sun if you must- they're the only comparable companies with a stake in both the hardware and software side. apple makes their money off the hardware, but sells the software, so it makes perfect sense that they want the tightest possible control over the system as a whole. if the hardware isn't solid and 100% compatible, the os and the user experience sucks. that's not to say they haven't shot themselves in the foot multiple times over the years on their hardware decisions, but overall, their systems are of the cohesion and quality that only similar vendors such as sun and ibm. dell, gateway, and the others are merely assemblers. they can make the hardware work with the m$ os, but they react, they can't lead.
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Apple has had a sporadic history with 'green' computers/packaging. They used to be quite conscious about this - the box for my first Mac (LC2) was natural brown cardboard, and i seem to remember Apple announcing that they pointedly weren't using white cardboard boxes to avoid bleached paper. I was sadly disappointed when the Performas came out ... and disappointed too they reverted to shiny, white/full color boxes.
I also liked the design of the original iMacs, but it was also a little sad that they were relying on virgin plastic for their new look. I'd have expected Apple, over most other tech companies, to come up with an environmentally friendly design first. Specifically, recycled plastic (as this NEC machine uses) is a great direction.
That said, one of the best things hardware makers can do is produce low-power machines. Apple's switching to LCD's was a good first step; plus sleep mode on their iMacs uses like 4 watts, probably less than most people's TVs when they're 'off'.
I too loved the early versions of BeOS, they really flew on my PowerCenterPro 210.
Remember though, at the time BeOS had some gaping holes, such as printing. There was some amazing technology there, but Apple was much more strongly tied to print design than today (with the huge internet focus).
They'd likely have had much more work to do integrating an immature BeOS than it was with a very mature NeXT.
I understand that there are a couple of BeOS engineers at Apple now, let's hope we can get some of the very cool ideas that are now dead (replicants, instantaneous searching, semi-sane metadata, etc.).
finally, best of luck to John Gruber, nice work on BBEdit, you're (still) a great source of info on the mailing lists. (and interesting new website too)
Yes, clearly themes are the hallmark of a 'pro' OS.
"Hey boss, i can't get any work done because the background color of my icon text labels is too... how can i say it... uninspiring."
MS should be spending more time on stability and security, and less time on sticking a variable on every pissant little gui feature just IN CASE some secretary in Lincoln Nebraska wants to change the scroll bar color to match her socks.
People whine about the cycles Aqua takes, then whine more that they can't muck around with it. Hint: when a machine is crashing constantly, remove the stupid little gui 'enhancers' and watch your machine speed magically increase.
It's purely personal preference - I just can't be productive under any version of Windows, and i'm a 'pro' user. Believe me, i've tried. Too many little differences in behavior, too much muscle memory.
boo hiss to the wrestling... it's all fake, man... not flesh and blood like WE!!!!
Here's a quick list of mini-AppleScripts i use almost every day at work:
You get the idea. Sure, lots of these could be done in other languages, but none of them took any time to write. AS is surprisingly powerful for these little uses, and runs very fast. It's a huge time-saver for me.
As for AppleScript Studio, it's a very cool thing, but it does add a level of complexity to the scripts. You're not just writing a little script, you're coding an app and interacting with the user - lots of additional complexity. It would sure make some pretty looking scripts though.
When i left my last job, my manager was just bursting to tell me about the counter-offer his boss had approved. They really wanted me to stay- the people i was leaving to take over my job were truly clueless.
For me, there were many more reasons to leave than the money. I'd been there ~3 years, with almost no new challenges and nowhere to go within the company. The work was boring and the management clueless (especially my manager who thought he had a chance to buy me off...).
When he brought up the counter-offer, i declined to even meet about it and left very happily unaware of their offer. My new job only paid a little more than the old one, so the counter-offer would surely have been more money. So what did i gain?
I have a much better work atmosphere, great manager, clued-in top management, interesting and challenging work, much more flexibility, and most importantly, room to grow. In short, there was a lot more gained than a couple of bucks.
I made this job change a week before i got married, we were looking to buy a house and start a family (both of which we have done since). The stress of making the decision at the time has been more than made up for in the reduced stress since then. Oh, and i've gotten a promotion and 2 very nice raises in the 2.5 years i've been here too.
I haven't shopped at Worst Buy for about 8 years, since i was falsely accused of stealing from the store.
I'd been shopping for a walkman, spent 20 minutes in the store trying to decipher the display with no luck. There were models out that weren't in stock, no prices, and piles of boxed models with no info at all, and not a salesperson in sight. I walked out the door, only to have some guy follow me across the street and ask me for my ID. He said i looked like a guy who had stolen something in the past month.
The visit before that was about a year before, when it had taken 45 minutes to get them to honor an "instant rebate" that included free CDs (i was buying a CD deck). The sale price wasn't automatically rung up at the register (as the signs had indicated), and i had to go through 2 more checkouts to get full credit back.
Needless to say, i don't shop there any more.
If that isn't bad enough, here in the Twin Cities, they are building a new headquarters building. They lobbied the 'lucky' suburb to evict and tear down a decades-old car dealership in the process. bleah.
They're evil! I'll stick to online shopping - they might also be idiots, but at least i don't have to talk to them.
Our production department just got one of these, after much research. A transparency adapter was important for us, and that helped drive the decision, but that alone added $1k to the price (about $3k total).
It's a very nice scanner though, and includes lots of items you could easily pay a few hundred for alone: Silverfast software, color calibrating software & plates, fast SCSI + Firewire + USB interfaces.
The preview and scan speed is fantastic (we use it on fast SCSI). We're still nailing down the color on transparencies. The reflective quality is wonderful right out of the box, though it tends to want to 'help' by saturating soft colors.
I agree with the earlier poster about using a service bureau - if you don't need the large size very often, they can be very cost effective. For us, we scan enough that this should pay for itself in about 3 months (vs using a scanning service)
Those items aren't off the machine, they're installed but turned off. Big difference. It's a pretty well-equipped machine, but a secure one.
This is something Apple does really well, btw - there are lots of very cool extras that the power user will find with a little digging. Apple suckers you in with a nice interface, then amazes you with how much power there is, if you look. This effect is multiplied 100x with OSX.
I just saw this for the first time recently. The computers were hilarious!
I didn't get a really close look (i should rent it again, it's on dvd). The desktop was obviously Mac, but they were doing lots of command line work. There were also what looked like console screens going. I figured it was maybe the old AIX (apple unix) system, or maybe just some odd development software interface i hadn't seen before. Even AIX would have been laughably ancient for them to be using though (see other posts, re: ancient software boxes).
I love the dead tree editions. Online manuals (the PHP manual is the best example i've seen) are fantastic, but only when i'm sitting at the computer online.
There are lots of times when i just want to see some good examples of code use, and that can be really hard to find online.
plus, i don't have a network connection in the bathroom...
Is this going to be Photoshop for audio? It's been a few years since we could trust the authenticity of any photograph, and now it sounds like this is the final leap over traditional sound editing - audio can't be completely trusted any more either.
actually, a G4/450 will process a SETI unit in about 6.5 hours - duals should cut that way down (assuming they ever rewrite the mac client....)
actually, since the placement of the widgets is consistent (unlike too many *nix guis), colorblind people will be fine - look at stoplights, same red/green problem, and they get by (and i'm pretty bad with the red/green myself).
there ARE visual cues to the window widgets - mouse over and they display little + or - icons much like a webpage to indicate their function, if the color doesn't tell you. a nice, webpage-related feature for those millions who's only computer interface is the web.
i agree on the pinstripe appearance - i'm afraid it'll end up being too much, especially for design types. i still set my desktop to a plain dark blue, despite the ability to put any kind of crazy photo there...
can't wait for osx, and really can't wait until i can afford a machine that'll run it...
i can't play that game more than 5 minutes without wanting to hurl. ironically, i bought it for myself, but my video card was too slow so i didn't play it for a couple of months. my wife gets a new imac, and we start playing it on that - i get sick even watching it, and she kicks ass on it. (even better: she's 28, never had a driver's license)
It's an important area of coverage that too many papers have been ignoring as they try harder to compete with either Newsweek or CNN. Local and regional news has inherent value that just won't get covered by any other source.
On the web front, if newspapers choose to expand into real-time internet coverage, they are indeed competing directly with the CNNs of the world, and without the massive resources of the national media outlets. But here again, newspapers can give breaking news on the web that would not be worthy of interrupting Oprah for for a broadcast update.
i say newspapers can do perfectly well serving their communities, which is really their original and best purpose. They just need to focus on what those communities are in the cyber age.
- Bill Connell, U of MN journalism grad
for that matter, if you ran some strings out to it so you could reboot by yanking a string.... you could call the network marion.net
450 mHz... 500 within a month or so...
yeah, it's good to know what you're talking about...
Another thing, GIMP is fine for pixel graphics, but there is nothing on Linux for vector art. The vast majority of my art creation (illustrations, schematics) are done in Freehand and sometimes Illustrator. Without those tools available on Linux, i'm staying with the Mac.
a third thing, it's not just creating graphics, it's getting them printed (still assuming print work here, which won't die in the face of web graphics, ya know), even if you get all 3 parts of print production on Linux (vector, pixel and layout tools), you need Linux-savvy service bureaus who can take thos wacky file formats and make them RIP like regular files.
oh, and the beautiful thing about pdf is that you can do ANY kind of layout work and make it a pdf. Take your average high-quality design and convert it to HTML and it'll look like your average drone with FrontPage did it. HTML was never meant for high quality work. A pdf can be used for the web, for print, for onscreen navigating, all within the same file. it's a beautiful, beautiful thing, and IMHO the best product Adobe's come up with since Postscript.
- jub, graphics professional, thank you very much.
amen! even better, how about an AirPort upgrade card for my Pro? skip IR altogether...
hey, read the announcement again - THIS IS A CONSUMER MACHINE. i'll bet your crappy CTX won't plug into an LCD projector either. 99.99% of consumers will never even think of this capability, and they shouldn't have to pay for still more useless features, that's the whole point. i think they've done a really good job of making a somewhat stripped-down notebook that's still very usable. i'd like to see it close to the $1200-1300 originally rumored, but it's not bad.
if you need to produce presentations, shell out (and write off) the $2.5k and get the professional version - that's what it's for. When i can scrape up $1500 for a notebook, chances are i'll get a used G3pro book rather than the ibook just because i'll want the expandibility and bigger screen, but it's a choice...
sheesh, if only half the people here would READ the stories before posting...
if yo've ever used the macos, you'd realize it's a whole lot closer to a cli than windoze or any of the window managers in *nix. The finder is truly a thing of beauty - you act directly on your files, no browser that has to be manually refreshed, and you know immediately what's happening where.
In kde (or any other x-window system) you're dragging files around with no indication (highlighting) to let you know whether the files you're moving are going in a folder or subfolder. try grabbing the middle 5 out of folder of 10 things and copying them to another directory - on the mac you'll be moving on to other things before yo'd even finish typing filenames on the command line.
the cli -vs- gui winner depends purely on the work you're doing. if you need to move massive files, create logs, do keewl strings of pipes while typing and typing (with occasional glances at that handy command reference book), use the command line. Otherwise, a well-done gui can let you manage files without having to become a sysadmin.
(rant) of course, a lot of workgroup printer issues would be helped greatly by using an OS that relays the printer feedback to the user. Hmm... let's see... Macs do that! I'd love to show otherwise, but i've never seen a windows or linux box that gives you the message, "paper tray is empty" or "output bin full". (/rant)
seriously, i'd LOVE to see this functionality in linux - it's one of those fabulous touches i'd sorely miss if i dumped macos
you can't even compare dell, compaq, et. al. with apple. compare apple with ibm or sun if you must- they're the only comparable companies with a stake in both the hardware and software side. apple makes their money off the hardware, but sells the software, so it makes perfect sense that they want the tightest possible control over the system as a whole. if the hardware isn't solid and 100% compatible, the os and the user experience sucks.
that's not to say they haven't shot themselves in the foot multiple times over the years on their hardware decisions, but overall, their systems are of the cohesion and quality that only similar vendors such as sun and ibm. dell, gateway, and the others are merely assemblers. they can make the hardware work with the m$ os, but they react, they can't lead.