I have a copy of BBEdit Lite, but there must be a huge discrepincy between it and the full version, because while it has great search fascilities, it doesn't even have syntax coloring, which I have grown to like since my days using CodeWarrior.
If you didn't call the people at the ISP you were switching to, and made sure they were fully aware of what was going on, then you should have.
Given QWorst's history of line-leasing behavior, there's a good chance that Sound Internet is quietly building a lawsuit against them, and every customer complaint of QWorst shafting one of their clients can make their position just a tiny bit more actionable.
Actually, I have VISI DSL riding on Qwest's "premium" package (I was an early adopter, and got it fairly cheap). My upstream is roughly the same speed as downstream, and I know this to be true because I've downloaded files off my server from other places. My friends' cable modems (usually) have faster downstream speeds in general, but their upstream speeds just make me sad for them.
Here's the trick, and it worked for me when dealing with USWest (now QWest).
I signed up for USWest's DSL service. They were extremely prompt about installing everything so they could start collecting money from me.
After it was up and running, I called USWest and changed ISP's. They had no wiggle-room for fucking up the line, since it had obviously been working fine for the two months that USWest was my ISP.
I live in Bloomington, MN, and I get DSL service from VISI using QWorst's lines (because QWest sucks ass). If this law means that Qwest no longer needs to serve the DSL line for VISI, then VISI's residential broadband business dies, and that would be a shame.
I don't consider cable to be a viable alternative to DSL for me, because the upstream of Cable sucks. If affordable DSL (through locally-run companies) goes away, I'm jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon.
(For those of you wondering, VISI is formally owned by a bigger company, but it is still run by the same old geeks who defected from Winternet to establish it. Call their support line, and you get one of them on the phone.)
If you're 100% satisfied with OS X, you're mentally defective, easy to please, or you're at the command line more than 90% of the time. Or.. you're lying. No one is 100% satisfied with anything.
I didn't say I was 100% satisfied. I would like to see even tighter X11 integration. I think the Dock would be even more usefull if I could have more of a "multiple dock" solution, so I could switch between several dock configurations based on whether I was working with media tools, office tools, *nix administration apps, etc. Like you, I have a crapload of apps which I like to keep docked, and I'm getting to the point where I would like it to help me organize them a little more than what order I line them up in.
Having said all that, I've never had the eyestrain issues you are talking about (even on my puny iBook monitor), and have yet to hear such complaints from the many people I know who also use OS X.
While there are still a few minor kinks to shake out, I consider OS X to be the best GUI out there, bar none. Yes, even better than the "old-skool" MacOS desktop, far better than all the Linix evnironments out there based on XFree86, and certainly vastly superior to anything that has ever come out of Redmond. WindowsME was about the worst GUI mess I had ever seen, until XP came out. No, I am not easy to please, I am very demanding, and OS X has come closer to meeting my demands for a user interface than any other operating system.
Design the cars correctly (for easy battery swappage), and a very simple hydrolic machine could be built to safely swap a battery under the operation of a minimum-wage High School kid. You're making it harder than it had to be.
Just to be clear, I hate the current crop of electric and hybrid-electric cars. That said...
I've often thought that if electric cars ever became practical enough to catch on, I would want to open one of the first "battery swap" stations. Those who could afford it would simply drive into one of my stations, where a service guy would pull out their spent battery and drop in a fully-charged one, in about the same time it takes to fill up a tank of gas. It would certainly cost a little more that charging your car while parked at home, but not much more, and it could save a lot of hassle, especially for people who live in apartments or can't charge their car at home for other reasons.
Don't worry, dead sun. Some of us caught your sarcasm, even if most of those who replied to you here didn't. Had I been a mod today, I would have spent one on a "Funny" for you.
Gee, does anyone else get the impression that the quality (or lack thereof) of the default widgets is kind of a sore spot?
I noticed that too. It's like they are trying to say "this is just a lame demo. The real powe of our app is that you can write Real Cool Widgets of your own... and these Real Cool Widgets will be Real Easy To Write!!!!!!!!"
But if making über-cool apps is so easy with Konfab, why do you demonstrate the power of it with... a lame clock program?
My first impression was, "I like the weather app, but I wish there was a way I could just dock it."
Get this: you can't even dock the widgets as applicaitons, becasue they are really documents of Konfab, and therefore go into the document side of yout dock. This would not be so bad if Konfab had a dock item of it's own when running, allowing menu-access from the dock of any running applets (and maybe the ability to launch others).
Anybody who tells you that Konfab doesn't completely violate the OS X user interface guidelines, and I mean that in a bad way, doesn't really understand Aqua.
Which is why the "tap" feature is almost always turned off now days. (That, and the fact that tapping can actually damage the track-pad over time, if you are one of those people who tapped really hard.)
My iBook does nto support using the trackpad as a mouse-button.
I hate the IBM nipple with a passion. It's like trying to mouse around with a teeny-tiny one-finger joystick... actually, it's not "like" that, it is that.
I thought the old mini-trackballs were okay, but you gotta clean them even more often than regular non-optical mice.
Whenever possible, I prefer to plug a mouse into my notebook, because no mobile solution is quite as good. However, when I'm on a plane or at a tiny coffee-shop table or something, the trackpad is far and away the best mouse replacement, once you get used to it.
The link in this story isn't really much deeper than that. It kind of reminded me of Homer explaining the history of Rock to Bart.
Grand Funk Railroad paved the way for Jefferson airplane, which cleared the way for Jefferson starship. The stage was now set for the Alan Parsons project, which I believe was some sort of hovercraft.
As far as I could tell, the whole story was really a promotional tool to sell some of their back-catalog items. Shows you can catch on cable, like Cowboy Bebop or Sailor Moon, were given a passing mention, but OVA's which are neither older nor more important to anime history are mentioned as shows you absolutely must see, you culturally illiterate philistines!!! Oh, surprise surprise, the site where this story appears sells those very same videos.
The "infomercial" started out as half-hour ads disguised as talk shows, but they are creeping into every part of society lately. Last night my local Public Television station showed a "documentary" about the history behind an expensive lodge in Glacier National Park, a grotesque and obvious pimping for a vacation destination. ABC did them one better two years ago, by airing a prime-time "special" during sweeps week, featuring Britney Spears at Disneyworld, which not only promoted the attractions at Disneyworld and the new Britney Spears album for an hour, but was also did pretty good in the ratings, helping ABC sell adds. (For those of you who don't know, ABC and Britney's record label are both owned by Disney, making this a massive cross-promotional tool.)
I'm not calling for regulation or alarm or anything. I'm just saying that everybody needs to keep their radars up for this kind of shit a little more, because it's everywhere these days.
Okay, first of all, none of this represents "hard times" for Apple. It just represents "hard times" for you while using OS X. Don't try to weasel out of what you said originally. Apple has not fallen on hard times. You flat-out mispoke, admit it.
As for the other points you made about OS X...
My primary complaints being:
1- Drop shadows replacing window borders. I cannot grab and resize a window from an edge. I cannot comfortably use programs with multiple windows (think Electric Image Universe) because the shadows overlap the other windows. If I shut them off, I'm left with windows that do not have borders, and that blend into windows behind them. Neither one is livable.
The drop-shadows in OS X are damn near invisibile. Unless you are really badly mis-setting the brightness and contrast on your monitors, I just don't see how the shadows could be causing you this much trouble. Maybe you should get your vision checked. Seriously. As for switching windows, learn to use the dock properly. Any open file can be selected from the dock, under a menu for the application which opened it. You no longer even need to see a window to open it.
2- Transparency. In some cases it's nice, in some cases it renders things unreadable. once agian, it's an "all or none" thing.
Could you be more specific? I've rarely run into transparancy causing problems, but I have on occation I have, especially in earlier incarnations of OS X. As you said, it is often very nice to have. (Are you one of those people who turns their Terminal sessions transparent? If so, you can hardly blame Apple for your troubles, as they do not even have terminal window transparancy as a GUI option, let alone as the default.)
3- Placement of drives as they are mounted. It's haphazard. Sometimes my CD-ROM will come up in the expected place, sometimes it will come up in the middle of the screen, sometimes it will come up behind another icon. The same with network icons. I have to minimize every window I have open in order to find where the drive has been mounted.
See that smiling Apple logo on the right hand of your dock? Click on that, then click on "computer." That's where your drive is mounted. The icon on your desktop is just a shortcut.
4- Placement of icons within folders. The default view is "icon view", and when I open a folder for the first time in "icon view", the icons are often overlapping.
I've seen that happen once in a while, too. Good thing there's a "Clean Up" option in the "View" menu which always fixes it. This seems like a pretty minor nit-pick to me.
5- Application menu. It contains things that have NOTHING to do with the application, and that I don't want to even SEE on the application menu.
Are you, by any chance, refering to the "services" sub-menu? I find that to be extremely handy, and I think the Application menu is the perfect place for it. And, I should point out, very consistant.
6- Dock. It doesn't contain text descriptions of what the hell it is that's on the dock. To find something I have to mouse-over. I have multiple applications with similar icons, and have to mouse-over to find the windows for these applications. It's mystery meat navigation, and a poor implementation of it because THE ICONS CHANGE POSITION TOO! Yes, that's right- if I have my icons nicely placed, then open an application it will show up on the Dock and move all the other icons around. Alltogether this adds up to requiring me to keep the dock 3-4 times larger than I'd like to have it, and to mouse-over every time I need to find something. Also, because the dock has to be so large in order for me to reap its functionality, I have to have it auto-hide, which means that the bottom part of my screen is unusable, because if I go down there, the dock pops up again.
Once again, I find myself wondering if you should invest in trifocals. Get thee to the optomitrist! I have my Dock reduced to an insanely small size on my tiny iBook screen, and I've never had a problem telling one icon from another. Also, while the Dock items do slide over a little when another item is added, they stay in the same order, so if iTunes is the 5th icon from the left on your dock, it still will be the 5th icon from the left after you minimize another window into the dock.
7- Quartz. It offloads to my video card which increases system performance but makes my video card perform like shit until I've de-aquified OS X.
"De-aquified"? I suspect I'm starting to see where your trouble is coming from. Thousands of Mac users have great experineces with OS X out of the box, but rather than un-learn some bad habits you picked up from the OS 7 & 8 days, you've chosen to tweak the shit out of the GUI... Changing the graphics settings, auto-hiding the dock, playing with the monitor brightness because you find the GUI uses "too much white", etc. It would appear that you've created most of the usability problems yourself.
You claim at the beginning of your post that OS X fails to follow a paradigm consistantly. That's incorrect. It follows a very consistant paradigm, but it's a different paradigm that OS 9. The sooner you get past that concept, the sooner you will realize that the new GUI has some real advantages. When using System 7 and MacOS 8, I found myself storing more and more things on the desktop, because it was the easiest way to keep track of them. Now, the more I use OS X, the more I realize that the desktop is really just there to help old Mac users make the transistion. At the moment, my desktop is completely empty, save for the browser window I'm writing this post in, and the dock. I have other tasks I'm doing, but I don't need to have a lot of desktop clutter to multitask effectively anymore, and I think it's great.
I love the Mac quite dearly, but it's going through tough times right now
Actually, Apple is expected to post a profit this quarter, and have weathered the NASDAQ crash a lot better than certain other computer companies I could name.
Oh, by the way.... Once you've downloaded the compiled older version of MacOS, you can view and edit all of the system resources with ResEdit, and other free tools are out there for further hacking the MacOS.
So, unless you are planning on writing a derived OS and calling it Linmac or something, there's really not a whole lot of reason why anybody would want the source of System 7.
No it's not. People who love movies are more likely to be concerned by the misbehavior of the MPAA, not less.
Hypocracy is not writing about how horrible the MPAA is while writing good things about new movies. Hypocracy would be if they wrote about how horrible the MPAA is, told you not to go to any movies, and secretly went to them anyway.
Yea, what's up with that? Does anybody have a mirror where we can get an uncompressed verion of that manual (or at least something compressed by a sane choice of tools, like gzip or something.)
rar is for usenet warez d00ds. Please don't use it for stuff like this.
A lot of republicans would love to fix or repeal the DMCA. If there were time this session, I'm sure Orin Hatch would enthusiastically author such a bill, as would John McCain.
However, with shit like Kennedy filibustering to prevent the appointment of a former Clinton judge beacuse he's supposedly too conservative, there's no way anything is likely to get done beyond the budget bill and Iraq's Saddamectomy.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that the story here is not that they are splitting their product. It already was split. BBEdit was $89, and BBEdit Lite was free.
Now it appears they have released a $49 app to replace the free one, and nearly doubled the price of the full version.
The headline should have been "BBEdit decides to put the squeeze on their customers, announces it as a produict release."
There is.
And yes, the full fersion has syntax coloring.
Given QWorst's history of line-leasing behavior, there's a good chance that Sound Internet is quietly building a lawsuit against them, and every customer complaint of QWorst shafting one of their clients can make their position just a tiny bit more actionable.
Actually, I have VISI DSL riding on Qwest's "premium" package (I was an early adopter, and got it fairly cheap). My upstream is roughly the same speed as downstream, and I know this to be true because I've downloaded files off my server from other places. My friends' cable modems (usually) have faster downstream speeds in general, but their upstream speeds just make me sad for them.
I signed up for USWest's DSL service. They were extremely prompt about installing everything so they could start collecting money from me.
After it was up and running, I called USWest and changed ISP's. They had no wiggle-room for fucking up the line, since it had obviously been working fine for the two months that USWest was my ISP.
I reccomend this tactic highly.
I don't consider cable to be a viable alternative to DSL for me, because the upstream of Cable sucks. If affordable DSL (through locally-run companies) goes away, I'm jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon.
(For those of you wondering, VISI is formally owned by a bigger company, but it is still run by the same old geeks who defected from Winternet to establish it. Call their support line, and you get one of them on the phone.)
I didn't say I was 100% satisfied. I would like to see even tighter X11 integration. I think the Dock would be even more usefull if I could have more of a "multiple dock" solution, so I could switch between several dock configurations based on whether I was working with media tools, office tools, *nix administration apps, etc. Like you, I have a crapload of apps which I like to keep docked, and I'm getting to the point where I would like it to help me organize them a little more than what order I line them up in.
Having said all that, I've never had the eyestrain issues you are talking about (even on my puny iBook monitor), and have yet to hear such complaints from the many people I know who also use OS X.
While there are still a few minor kinks to shake out, I consider OS X to be the best GUI out there, bar none. Yes, even better than the "old-skool" MacOS desktop, far better than all the Linix evnironments out there based on XFree86, and certainly vastly superior to anything that has ever come out of Redmond. WindowsME was about the worst GUI mess I had ever seen, until XP came out. No, I am not easy to please, I am very demanding, and OS X has come closer to meeting my demands for a user interface than any other operating system.
Design the cars correctly (for easy battery swappage), and a very simple hydrolic machine could be built to safely swap a battery under the operation of a minimum-wage High School kid. You're making it harder than it had to be.
I've often thought that if electric cars ever became practical enough to catch on, I would want to open one of the first "battery swap" stations. Those who could afford it would simply drive into one of my stations, where a service guy would pull out their spent battery and drop in a fully-charged one, in about the same time it takes to fill up a tank of gas. It would certainly cost a little more that charging your car while parked at home, but not much more, and it could save a lot of hassle, especially for people who live in apartments or can't charge their car at home for other reasons.
No. Almost, but no.
However, a $100 bicycle can even carry you 12 mph for 5 miles.
Don't worry, dead sun. Some of us caught your sarcasm, even if most of those who replied to you here didn't. Had I been a mod today, I would have spent one on a "Funny" for you.
I noticed that too. It's like they are trying to say "this is just a lame demo. The real powe of our app is that you can write Real Cool Widgets of your own... and these Real Cool Widgets will be Real Easy To Write!!!!!!!!"
But if making über-cool apps is so easy with Konfab, why do you demonstrate the power of it with... a lame clock program?
My first impression was, "I like the weather app, but I wish there was a way I could just dock it."
Get this: you can't even dock the widgets as applicaitons, becasue they are really documents of Konfab, and therefore go into the document side of yout dock. This would not be so bad if Konfab had a dock item of it's own when running, allowing menu-access from the dock of any running applets (and maybe the ability to launch others).
Anybody who tells you that Konfab doesn't completely violate the OS X user interface guidelines, and I mean that in a bad way, doesn't really understand Aqua.
Downloaded it, tried it, deleted it.
2001 called. They want their one-button-mouse troll back.
My iBook does nto support using the trackpad as a mouse-button.
I hate the IBM nipple with a passion. It's like trying to mouse around with a teeny-tiny one-finger joystick... actually, it's not "like" that, it is that.
I thought the old mini-trackballs were okay, but you gotta clean them even more often than regular non-optical mice.
Whenever possible, I prefer to plug a mouse into my notebook, because no mobile solution is quite as good. However, when I'm on a plane or at a tiny coffee-shop table or something, the trackpad is far and away the best mouse replacement, once you get used to it.
Are you sure? "CAMM-in-oh" vs. "cah-MEEN-oh"...
At least with Chimera, you could point somebody to a dictionary to set them straight.
Grand Funk Railroad paved the way for Jefferson airplane, which cleared the way for Jefferson starship. The stage was now set for the Alan Parsons project, which I believe was some sort of hovercraft.
As far as I could tell, the whole story was really a promotional tool to sell some of their back-catalog items. Shows you can catch on cable, like Cowboy Bebop or Sailor Moon, were given a passing mention, but OVA's which are neither older nor more important to anime history are mentioned as shows you absolutely must see, you culturally illiterate philistines!!! Oh, surprise surprise, the site where this story appears sells those very same videos.
The "infomercial" started out as half-hour ads disguised as talk shows, but they are creeping into every part of society lately. Last night my local Public Television station showed a "documentary" about the history behind an expensive lodge in Glacier National Park, a grotesque and obvious pimping for a vacation destination. ABC did them one better two years ago, by airing a prime-time "special" during sweeps week, featuring Britney Spears at Disneyworld, which not only promoted the attractions at Disneyworld and the new Britney Spears album for an hour, but was also did pretty good in the ratings, helping ABC sell adds. (For those of you who don't know, ABC and Britney's record label are both owned by Disney, making this a massive cross-promotional tool.)
I'm not calling for regulation or alarm or anything. I'm just saying that everybody needs to keep their radars up for this kind of shit a little more, because it's everywhere these days.
As for the other points you made about OS X...
My primary complaints being:
1- Drop shadows replacing window borders. I cannot grab and resize a window from an edge. I cannot comfortably use programs with multiple windows (think Electric Image Universe) because the shadows overlap the other windows. If I shut them off, I'm left with windows that do not have borders, and that blend into windows behind them. Neither one is livable.
The drop-shadows in OS X are damn near invisibile. Unless you are really badly mis-setting the brightness and contrast on your monitors, I just don't see how the shadows could be causing you this much trouble. Maybe you should get your vision checked. Seriously. As for switching windows, learn to use the dock properly. Any open file can be selected from the dock, under a menu for the application which opened it. You no longer even need to see a window to open it.
2- Transparency. In some cases it's nice, in some cases it renders things unreadable. once agian, it's an "all or none" thing.
Could you be more specific? I've rarely run into transparancy causing problems, but I have on occation I have, especially in earlier incarnations of OS X. As you said, it is often very nice to have. (Are you one of those people who turns their Terminal sessions transparent? If so, you can hardly blame Apple for your troubles, as they do not even have terminal window transparancy as a GUI option, let alone as the default.)
3- Placement of drives as they are mounted. It's haphazard. Sometimes my CD-ROM will come up in the expected place, sometimes it will come up in the middle of the screen, sometimes it will come up behind another icon. The same with network icons. I have to minimize every window I have open in order to find where the drive has been mounted.
See that smiling Apple logo on the right hand of your dock? Click on that, then click on "computer." That's where your drive is mounted. The icon on your desktop is just a shortcut.
4- Placement of icons within folders. The default view is "icon view", and when I open a folder for the first time in "icon view", the icons are often overlapping.
I've seen that happen once in a while, too. Good thing there's a "Clean Up" option in the "View" menu which always fixes it. This seems like a pretty minor nit-pick to me.
5- Application menu. It contains things that have NOTHING to do with the application, and that I don't want to even SEE on the application menu.
Are you, by any chance, refering to the "services" sub-menu? I find that to be extremely handy, and I think the Application menu is the perfect place for it. And, I should point out, very consistant.
6- Dock. It doesn't contain text descriptions of what the hell it is that's on the dock. To find something I have to mouse-over. I have multiple applications with similar icons, and have to mouse-over to find the windows for these applications. It's mystery meat navigation, and a poor implementation of it because THE ICONS CHANGE POSITION TOO! Yes, that's right- if I have my icons nicely placed, then open an application it will show up on the Dock and move all the other icons around. Alltogether this adds up to requiring me to keep the dock 3-4 times larger than I'd like to have it, and to mouse-over every time I need to find something. Also, because the dock has to be so large in order for me to reap its functionality, I have to have it auto-hide, which means that the bottom part of my screen is unusable, because if I go down there, the dock pops up again.
Once again, I find myself wondering if you should invest in trifocals. Get thee to the optomitrist! I have my Dock reduced to an insanely small size on my tiny iBook screen, and I've never had a problem telling one icon from another. Also, while the Dock items do slide over a little when another item is added, they stay in the same order, so if iTunes is the 5th icon from the left on your dock, it still will be the 5th icon from the left after you minimize another window into the dock.
7- Quartz. It offloads to my video card which increases system performance but makes my video card perform like shit until I've de-aquified OS X.
"De-aquified"? I suspect I'm starting to see where your trouble is coming from. Thousands of Mac users have great experineces with OS X out of the box, but rather than un-learn some bad habits you picked up from the OS 7 & 8 days, you've chosen to tweak the shit out of the GUI... Changing the graphics settings, auto-hiding the dock, playing with the monitor brightness because you find the GUI uses "too much white", etc. It would appear that you've created most of the usability problems yourself.
You claim at the beginning of your post that OS X fails to follow a paradigm consistantly. That's incorrect. It follows a very consistant paradigm, but it's a different paradigm that OS 9. The sooner you get past that concept, the sooner you will realize that the new GUI has some real advantages. When using System 7 and MacOS 8, I found myself storing more and more things on the desktop, because it was the easiest way to keep track of them. Now, the more I use OS X, the more I realize that the desktop is really just there to help old Mac users make the transistion. At the moment, my desktop is completely empty, save for the browser window I'm writing this post in, and the dock. I have other tasks I'm doing, but I don't need to have a lot of desktop clutter to multitask effectively anymore, and I think it's great.
Actually, Apple is expected to post a profit this quarter, and have weathered the NASDAQ crash a lot better than certain other computer companies I could name.
*cough*Compaq*cough*
They should almost just go ahead with three X's in the logo, as "XXX" would be the appropriate rating for hot X on X action!
So, unless you are planning on writing a derived OS and calling it Linmac or something, there's really not a whole lot of reason why anybody would want the source of System 7.
(Actually, IIRC, they have bumped their free "abandonware" OS list to everything up to 8.1 now, but I could be mistaken about that.)
Hypocracy is not writing about how horrible the MPAA is while writing good things about new movies. Hypocracy would be if they wrote about how horrible the MPAA is, told you not to go to any movies, and secretly went to them anyway.
rar is for usenet warez d00ds. Please don't use it for stuff like this.
However, with shit like Kennedy filibustering to prevent the appointment of a former Clinton judge beacuse he's supposedly too conservative, there's no way anything is likely to get done beyond the budget bill and Iraq's Saddamectomy.
No.