I own several domains and get surprisingly little spam from the catch all accounts.
I actually find catch alls usefull for the reverse reason... when I am forced to enter an email address I use thesite@mydomain.com... this way I can track who is selling/trading my email address. So for example if I use amazon@mydomain.com and 3 weeks later I start getting spam on that address I know where it came from. Also I can then set up that email address as a real pop address and never check it or better yet forward it to uce@ftc.gov the government spam reporting email address...
As someone who grew up in and around doctors offices the vast majority of medical lawsuits at least in our small Texas town were brought by a small number of pathological people. Literally any visit to a doctor's office would be followed by a lawsuit.
While there are certainly people with valid complaints and suits, in my experience the system is so abused that this is a sad but logical outcome of years of frivolous suits.
Get yourself the fastest connection you can afford... (if everyone will be paying 20 or 30 bucks a month that's a decent connection).
Set up an 802.11b router with WDS. Apple's airport base stations have WDS and are super easy to set up.
Set up other routers as WDS repeaters around the building as needed... You probably would only need 3 or 4 depending on the size & construction of the building.
You're done... and you still have most of your cash for better things....like a G5.
$249. Base station w/ external antenna $099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna $099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna $099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna $099. Antenna
If you look over the last 10 years the MS Mac Business Unit has a pretty good record of releasing ground breaking software that then languishes. The question is whether this happens because of larger Microsoft/Apple squabbles or simply because of corporate negligence.
Explorer 5 for the Mac OS 9 was groundbreaking in it's support for web standards. The Tasman rendering engine really was ahead of it's time especially in the support of CSS and web standards. Also many of it's HI features were several years ahead of it's Windows brother and some features (like sliding drawers and XML based customizable buttons) seem to have been 'borrowed' in OS X. Although it was roundly savaged for being dog slow, the OS X port of Explorer helped legitimize OS X (even today it still is the best browser for rendering MS friendly websites). Given the state of development tools at the time (and OS X itself) just the fact that the port worked was a big deal, but MS has since let the browser die blaming competition from Safari. I think it's obvious that MS killed Explorer as a screw you to Apple, but my guess is that we'll have a better Safari as a result.
Starting with Office 98, the Mac versions of Word, Excel, and to a lesser extent Powerpoint have consistently surpassed the Windows versions in terms of usability and design. While the program has evolved little (even through it's OS X port) since 98, it's a workhorse that helps keep the Mac a viable corporate machine. The best thing the Mac BU did for the Mac OS was to make Office documents data compatible across platforms. Back in the late nineties when everyone was thinking the Mac platform was dying more than any other software this version of office and the cross platform documents it produced helped restore confidence in the Mac. Today this platform agnosticism seems to finally be breaking down (Office for Mac can't open some of the latest Office XP documents... but then again neither can older versions of Office for Windows. Also the files produced by the forthcoming Office for Mac will not necessarily be data compatible--you will have to run a check for compatibility instead of the document degrading gracefully). Evil plot or progress. You decide.
Entourage is the grown up version of Outlook Express which itself is the child of the much beloved Claris Emailer (the author was recruited by MS and Emailer's basic form and function were kept intact. While it's showing it's age, for my money, Entourage is still the best power user email solution for OS X (Apple's Mail has surpassed Entourage in junk mail filtering but is still behind in basic mail management especially for users with multiple addresses). Entourage's lack of full Exchange support is it's major flaw and the decision to not include this support seems to be politically motivated. I believe this presents an opportunity to third party developers as there are thousands of users looking for native OS X Exchange support. Otherwise as a personal mail manager Entourage runs circles around Outlook for Windows XP which seems primitive in comparison.
MSN for OS X is a bit of a joke. I'm not sure I've ever met a single person who uses it. It's feature poor (compared to it's windows cousin) and buggy. Especially galling is that you can only log on if you use MSN as your ISP. There are many ISPs (Verizon for example) that give you free MSN email addresses and theoretically should allow you to use this browser, but only a a Windows MSN client is allowed for login.
It will be interesting to see what the Mac BU does with Virtual PC. Most mac users feel that if Connectix was still at the help that we would have a G5 version of the program already available. Also regular updates seem to have just dried up. Will VPC still be a source of innovation or will it just languish... Again happenstance or evil plot? Hard to say.
Anyway the point of all this is that innovation does come out of the Mac BU but then programs are allowed to linger for years between updates and widely reported bugs are al
In addition to the official T3 website (which is pretty deep content-wise), the terminator people have an interesting site up that allows you to take a 2D picture of your face, extrude it into 3D and then damage it to see an endoskeleton inside. Pretty cool. Check it out. Does anyone know what technology is used to A recognize the face and then to extrude it so that the head can be rotated 360 degrees?
No. You should never have settings or options available only via contextual menus, which a TON of users never even see. If they're in a contextual menu, find a place elsewhere for them, as well.
Panther provides an action menu icon in the finder that just shows the contextual menu options available. This should mainly solve this problem.
I disagree with your contextual menu religiosity in general. Many users still doesn't know where fonts should be installed. Or pref panes, or anything else that needs to be in a specific folder. The contextual menu is a perfect place for allowing a user to do this semi-automatically. As the menu in Panther is selected from an icon, it should be semi-obvious and makes sense. Contextual menus aren't bad just because many people don't use them. they are a way for users to get certain esoteric tasks done quickly.
re the dock:
If you have 80 items in the Dock, the Dock is not your problem
Actually I had 80 items. With Launch Bar & Drag Thing in place I now have seven items
re finder screen real estate:
The scroll bars and window title bars are the same size in OS X and OS 9. For example, the window title bars are 22 pixels tall in both 9 and X.
True, but now in Panther you have a sidebar, a top bar, and multiple scroll bars in column view. That's a whole bunch of pixels.
Re can opener finder
The Safari rendering engine is built in. Quicktime is built in. Why would you not show these in preview? It costs you very little. Preview can be turned off if you don't like spending the cycles. As for fonts, previewing in the finder is something that would make the life of virtually every designer (a core Mac market) easier
The folder method doesn't work for me for two important reasons.
1. Folders in the dock all look alike unless I create custom folders.
2. I have to click hold and drag which is very different than click, click.
In OS 9 I had six labeled tabs each with about 20 items. This gave me two click access to about 120 items. This is the standard I am working against. I'm not saying the dock should emulate this exactly, but fast hierarchical access to a decent number of frequently used items is important for people like me who work with lots of apps.
Truth be told, OS X has two third party apps which ease my pain somewhat:
Launchbar is genius and is my main launching tool these days. It is the perfect geek too. But it doesn't allow me to browse a category... let's say vector graphics apps... in order to "discover" a tool I might use.
Dragthing takes up the rest of the slack providing 90% of the functionality of the old style tabs. My only criticism is that drag thing is not built in and integrated at a core level.
While I love these apps, I believe that Apple could put the same team that came up with Exposé to come up with a fantastic solution to this problem so that all users would benefit.
Overall the enhancements make Panther a must have upgrade. I'm especially keen on the Finder's live sorting and the overall speed (even when dealing with huge folders).
Exposé is so good that after only a day or two of using panther, I now find myself reaching for it when I am back on jaguar (or on windows/linux machines).
As always I have a few notes.
The Finder
1. The metallic interface should be optional.
2. Column view still lacks sorting by anything other than 'name' in column view. I would suggest adding sorting options via a contextual menu.
3. Fonts, HTML, EPS and any file handled by quicktime should be previewable right in the finder.
4. Contextual menus need to be smarter. For example if I click on a font or a saver file I should be able to send it to it's proper folder.
5. Lack of customizability is still a major complaint. There is still no way to change the font, to set the style of the desktop font, or to control grid spacing. Also we are limited to 10 point minimum font size.
6. Finder windows still take up too much screen real estate. If apple used small scrollbars it would save a significant # of pixels per window.
7. The finder still does not respect drag and drop locations when something is dropped on the desktop. This is a major sin in my book.
8. Minimization of fields in list view is still one of my pet peeves.
Why minimize 'Date Modified' to 'Dat..fied" when it could be "Date" Why minimize 'Size' to "..." instead of 'Size' or 'kb' Why does 48KB go from "4..b" to "..b" to "..." instead of "48k", "48", "48"... and so on. The kind field is especially dumb.
Also why doesn't the text get more condensed as it did in OS 9 when the field gets narrow.
9. Labels for items that one does not have permission to label should be handled more gracefully. Right now if you try to label something out of your permission range the labels are simply not selectable. This will be confusing to many users who don't understand permissions.
10. The way labels are indicated in column view is extremely confusing. Especailly if your highlight color is similar to a label, labeled items appear to have been selected.
11. The admin should be able to control what kind of finder window a user sees and they should be able to control which drives/folders are available within the finder window.
12. A new (better) folder design would be appreciated.
13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).
The Dock
The current dock is great for computer newbies and casual users, but it quickly breaks down when power users are in production on a big project.
1. Exposé is fantastic, but it still does not solve the problem of minimized windows (it does not show windows minimized to the dock although it probably should). While minimized windows will be used less often when users get the hang of Exposé, there is still a need for some sort of windowshading that allows for speedy one or two click window swapping. I personally miss having windowshade from OS 9 and had a haxie installed to add this behavior. Even better is minimize-in-place hack from unsanity which recently became available. I have found shading invaluable in production. The standard OS X minimize/maximize simply takes too long to swap between windows and windows get lost in the dock. Also exposé, does not solve the problem of window clutter (many of our designers are clean desktop sort of people), while some sort of shading allows for clean desktops and efficient production. 3rd party hacks are great, but having it built in would be better.
2. Grouping would really help the power user. I currently have 80 items in the dock and can never find anything. I use all my apps frequently so I want easy access to them. If instead of having them all minimized, I had springlloaded tabs in the manner of O
One of the reasons DRM is so insane is because it is incredibly short sighted. I have records that are over 50 years old. I can play those records on virtually any turntable out there. Imagine if those records had been made with some sort of primitive DRM that required them to be played on a specific machine or required a call into a company to input a code before they would play. The truth is that most of those record companies don't even exist today. A huge cultural legacy would be lost.
The truth is obsolescence is already built in. Formats change computer file systems change, OSes change, our standards of quality change. My bet is that 50 years from now it will be just as rare to find someone playing mp3 files as it is tto find people playing old records now. You will have find a machine to read a certain kind of hard disk, find a way to read a particular file system, and then to interpret the format. Making those formats closed is virtually insuring the digital death of the music (or the video or whatever data they happen to contain).
I already see this problem with old software and data. I have a ton of programs from the apple ][ days. With some doing I can get that data off the old 5 1/2 inch disks and into an emulator under OS X. Most programs work and I can see the data (mainly high school book reports in appleworks), but it's a lot of effort. Luckily I was pretty good about keeping serial numbers around, but the programs that inevitably fail are the ones with anti-copy copy protection. Even back then the odd sector layout would cause problems on certain disk drives. Now the programs are essentially dead. With enough work I could probably revive them, but who has the time? We see the same problem now with certain cds with bad data written in on purpose to foil copying, but also foil playing on certain systems (actually in this case maybe it is a good thing to prevent Celine Dion from propagating her evil).
I have the same problem with my old Mac data circa 1984/85 even without copy protection. I have data in formats of programs that simply don't exist anymore (does anyone remember Fullwrite...so far ahead of it's time, but doomed by MS Word). My only hope for reading this data is finding an old machine or waiting until someone builds a good 68000 emulator (vmac has a ways to go)
Doing this to music (on purpose no less) is particularly insidious because music is one of the things that should live on as a cultural legacy. When I buy a CD I want it to last and I want to be able to play it whether I am here in LA or in a Kashgari taxi. I doubt that 2053 my grandkids will enjoy my Nada Surf mp3s the way I enjoy my grandfather's Vera Lynn and Tex Williams records, but I would like them to have the chance at listening to them in the first place.
You can find local coverage of one of the debris fields from the Lufkin Daily News (this is the biggest newspaper in the area). There is also a page of photos.
If apple wants to make iSync a killer app, they should publish the API and allow 3rd parties to create modules sync anything to anything.
I for example would like a Calendar/Address Book -> Entourage Sync, or my filemaker database to address book... I'd also love to sync everything to my my Motorola phone.... it's gotta be possible.
The fact is Apple has claimed that corner of the screen and is doing what it can to discourage/prohibit developers from using it. There was no misleading reporting there.
Most apps/utils that use the menu bar have either had to jump through hoops to get around apple's prohibitions or they are not actually using the menu bar APIs, instead they are just apps that float above the menu and masquerade as menu bar icons.
While it appears that all is hunky dory in menu-icon land (I have 3 or 4 3rd party apps with icons up there), the truth is that until Apple opens the API all 3rd party utils run the risk of breaking each time Apple updates it's system (many of the apps broke when apple went from 10.1-10.2). This is not cool.
OS X skins are just that. Skins that change the look but not the function of OS X's widgets.
Both Kaleidoscope schemes and OS 9's Appearance themes, were much more robust than X Skins. Not only could widgets be skinned, but they could also be moved around and their function could be modified. OS X skins are pale imitations of their OS 9 counterparts. While the majority Kaleidoscope schemes were butt ugly, it only takes one good one to convince.
The more interesting question is whether such themes are even possible in OS X as Cocoa and Carbon use different methods to create windows. Carbon uses an updated version of OS 9 Appearance Manager themes to create the Aqua widgets (windows are handled separately). Carbon seems to use something called a LAYO (layout) resource to determine the placement of widgets. Cocoa apps do not use these resources and my guess is that Cocoa hardcodes the locations of widgets.
Decent apps for skinning and icon changing do exist in X, but these changes are cosmetic. Real support for allowing systemwide HI/UI behavior changes to Aqua is almost nonexistent. The few apps that have achieved systemwide mods (windowshade comes to mind) seem to many focus on the window manager which is handles window drawing and layering.
The truth is that for most people this is not a big deal. Most people simply accept the UI as being what it is. This said, I think that if people had the option to fiddle with the HI/UI they would (just look at the range of background choices people make).
What is more troubling for most is the lack of basic options. For example there is no known way to change the system font for menus/dialog boxes/window titles. There is no way to change the font style for icons on the desktop (the default bold white with a shadow rankles many). And Apple's anti-aliasing controls are primitive at best. Even if Apple does not supply a UI for making such changes (don't want to scare the newbies with too many options), the ability to change these things should be available via the terminal or by making a change in a plist. Apple has done this with the dock and should continue this trend systemwide.
As for the argument that support would be difficult if users have the ability to make dramatic HI/UI changes, I would suggest the solution is simple (a keyboard command to set everything back to default).
And for the argument that it is confusing if different users set up their machines using alternate schemes, I would argue that this is the point of having a multi-user system.
the trailer looks pretty decent. That said I'm still mych more pyched to see the T3 teaser. Cameron or no Cameron, arnie vs a terminatrix is going to be a good time. Cameron is a god but what has he done lately other than sit in his castle bitching about Titanic.
Amen. (and many thanks for sputnix)... the irony of this decision (at least for me) is that much of what i was looking for on audiogalaxy were rare out of print recordings many taken from vinyl. This decision has woken me up... I joined the EFF today. If you are angry as I am about this, you should too.
God this is horrible news. Since I started using audiogalaxy (via a non-spyware OS X client), I have discovered tons of odd and rare recordings I would have never found otherwise. Also in the last six months since I started using AG, I've bought more music than I have in the last six years. In my case at least the RIAA has put a bandaid on it's finger but has chopped off it's arm.
I don't know of any other place on the web that offered the ability to intuitively browse and play rare music. This is a sad sad day.
In Jaguar we already see this happening. In fact in many of the WWDC Jaguar sessions Apple kept emphasizing that developers can't count on file to live locally or on a local filesystem. This is, I believe, a very good thing.
She has a great music show on KCRW the public radio station here. I've seen her in person she is skinny, but in no way anorexic (ie black toothed and bow legged)
http://kcrw.com/show/td
http://kcrw.com/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?show_code=td& am p;tmplt_type=Everything
OS X will not threaten Linux until it runs on x86 boxes--that much is obvious. But until that day, we in the Linux community should keep a close eye on X--we have much to learn from Apple and they from us. I just got back from Macworld where I saw how very simple it was to install OS X (a 12 minute brainless procedure). This alone is something we should look at. I've installed various flavors of Linux on some 20-25 machines and each has had it's own set of special problems.Obviously Apple has the advantage of creating the whole tamale, but man was that install appealing. They had a woman from the crowd in control and someone came up with the TCP info for an airport base station connected to a T1 line. They had it connected and surfing wirelessly in about 5 minutes flat. I kid you not.
I also saw a version of X Windows running GIMP side by side with an OS X version of Filemaker. Additionally I got to peek at alpha OS X versions of MS Office and Photoshop (screenshots only of Photoshop). Did I mention Maya?! Maya on OS X is spectacular. These apps won't be out for a few months, but I was amazed to see them running on an OS with a fully functional terminal and backwards support for OS 9 legacy apps. And of course Apple will bundle their consumer apps (iMovie, iTunes, Appleworks, and (soon) iDVD). This is all hot stuff.
Imagine you are a school admin and you want to host a website using Apache. Under OS X this takes all of 2 minutes. It is literally a click of a button. When I saw this I was blown away. Should we run away and give up. No of course not. We should keep pushing for easier installs, better apps, and more consistent HI. Apple will not be able to break out of the PowerPC niche for at least the rest of this year, and this gives us time to make Linux better for the day when OS X is released for x86 with a Windows Red Box (seems absolutely obvious that this will happen eventually). If we have not made Linux better and easier to use when that day comes, we should indeed be worried, because OS X is the real deal. When admins realize that they can save countless dollars on IT support, run their heavy duty Unix apps, and still have access to consumer stuff like MS Office on a machine that an idot can use, people will be running to OS X.
Maybe I got caught in that famous reality distortion field but I know that I went to Macworld out of pure curiosity and have come home with a pending order for one of those shiny new powerbooks. I can't wait to see if I can get it running as a triple boot OS 9, OS X, LinuxPPC system. I know that installing OS 9 and the X beta won't be a problem. My guess is LinuxPPC will be slightly more problematic. Wish me luck.
Slashdot Mirror
I own several domains and get surprisingly little spam from the catch all accounts.
I actually find catch alls usefull for the reverse reason... when I am forced to enter an email address I use thesite@mydomain.com... this way I can track who is selling/trading my email address. So for example if I use amazon@mydomain.com and 3 weeks later I start getting spam on that address I know where it came from. Also I can then set up that email address as a real pop address and never check it or better yet forward it to uce@ftc.gov the government spam reporting email address...
As someone who grew up in and around doctors offices the vast majority of medical lawsuits at least in our small Texas town were brought by a small number of pathological people. Literally any visit to a doctor's office would be followed by a lawsuit.
While there are certainly people with valid complaints and suits, in my experience the system is so abused that this is a sad but logical outcome of years of frivolous suits.
Get yourself the fastest connection you can afford... (if everyone will be paying 20 or 30 bucks a month that's a decent connection).
Set up an 802.11b router with WDS. Apple's airport base stations have WDS and are super easy to set up.
Set up other routers as WDS repeaters around the building as needed... You probably would only need 3 or 4 depending on the size & construction of the building.
You're done... and you still have most of your cash for better things....like a G5.
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
If you look over the last 10 years the MS Mac Business Unit has a pretty good record of releasing ground breaking software that then languishes. The question is whether this happens because of larger Microsoft/Apple squabbles or simply because of corporate negligence.
Explorer 5 for the Mac OS 9 was groundbreaking in it's support for web standards. The Tasman rendering engine really was ahead of it's time especially in the support of CSS and web standards. Also many of it's HI features were several years ahead of it's Windows brother and some features (like sliding drawers and XML based customizable buttons) seem to have been 'borrowed' in OS X. Although it was roundly savaged for being dog slow, the OS X port of Explorer helped legitimize OS X (even today it still is the best browser for rendering MS friendly websites). Given the state of development tools at the time (and OS X itself) just the fact that the port worked was a big deal, but MS has since let the browser die blaming competition from Safari. I think it's obvious that MS killed Explorer as a screw you to Apple, but my guess is that we'll have a better Safari as a result.
Starting with Office 98, the Mac versions of Word, Excel, and to a lesser extent Powerpoint have consistently surpassed the Windows versions in terms of usability and design. While the program has evolved little (even through it's OS X port) since 98, it's a workhorse that helps keep the Mac a viable corporate machine. The best thing the Mac BU did for the Mac OS was to make Office documents data compatible across platforms. Back in the late nineties when everyone was thinking the Mac platform was dying more than any other software this version of office and the cross platform documents it produced helped restore confidence in the Mac. Today this platform agnosticism seems to finally be breaking down (Office for Mac can't open some of the latest Office XP documents... but then again neither can older versions of Office for Windows. Also the files produced by the forthcoming Office for Mac will not necessarily be data compatible--you will have to run a check for compatibility instead of the document degrading gracefully). Evil plot or progress. You decide.
Entourage is the grown up version of Outlook Express which itself is the child of the much beloved Claris Emailer (the author was recruited by MS and Emailer's basic form and function were kept intact. While it's showing it's age, for my money, Entourage is still the best power user email solution for OS X (Apple's Mail has surpassed Entourage in junk mail filtering but is still behind in basic mail management especially for users with multiple addresses). Entourage's lack of full Exchange support is it's major flaw and the decision to not include this support seems to be politically motivated. I believe this presents an opportunity to third party developers as there are thousands of users looking for native OS X Exchange support. Otherwise as a personal mail manager Entourage runs circles around Outlook for Windows XP which seems primitive in comparison.
MSN for OS X is a bit of a joke. I'm not sure I've ever met a single person who uses it. It's feature poor (compared to it's windows cousin) and buggy. Especially galling is that you can only log on if you use MSN as your ISP. There are many ISPs (Verizon for example) that give you free MSN email addresses and theoretically should allow you to use this browser, but only a a Windows MSN client is allowed for login.
It will be interesting to see what the Mac BU does with Virtual PC. Most mac users feel that if Connectix was still at the help that we would have a G5 version of the program already available. Also regular updates seem to have just dried up. Will VPC still be a source of innovation or will it just languish... Again happenstance or evil plot? Hard to say.
Anyway the point of all this is that innovation does come out of the Mac BU but then programs are allowed to linger for years between updates and widely reported bugs are al
In addition to the official T3 website (which is pretty deep content-wise), the terminator people have an interesting site up that allows you to take a 2D picture of your face, extrude it into 3D and then damage it to see an endoskeleton inside. Pretty cool. Check it out. Does anyone know what technology is used to A recognize the face and then to extrude it so that the head can be rotated 360 degrees?
Not a flame, just a response...
No. You should never have settings or options available only via contextual menus, which a TON of users never even see. If they're in a contextual menu, find a place elsewhere for them, as well.
Panther provides an action menu icon in the finder that just shows the contextual menu options available. This should mainly solve this problem.
I disagree with your contextual menu religiosity in general. Many users still doesn't know where fonts should be installed. Or pref panes, or anything else that needs to be in a specific folder. The contextual menu is a perfect place for allowing a user to do this semi-automatically. As the menu in Panther is selected from an icon, it should be semi-obvious and makes sense. Contextual menus aren't bad just because many people don't use them. they are a way for users to get certain esoteric tasks done quickly.
re the dock:
If you have 80 items in the Dock, the Dock is not your problem
Actually I had 80 items. With Launch Bar & Drag Thing in place I now have seven items
re finder screen real estate:
The scroll bars and window title bars are the same size in OS X and OS 9. For example, the window title bars are 22 pixels tall in both 9 and X.
True, but now in Panther you have a sidebar, a top bar, and multiple scroll bars in column view. That's a whole bunch of pixels.
Re can opener finder
The Safari rendering engine is built in. Quicktime is built in. Why would you not show these in preview? It costs you very little. Preview can be turned off if you don't like spending the cycles. As for fonts, previewing in the finder is something that would make the life of virtually every designer (a core Mac market) easier
The folder method doesn't work for me for two important reasons.
1. Folders in the dock all look alike unless I create custom folders.
2. I have to click hold and drag which is very different than click, click.
In OS 9 I had six labeled tabs each with about 20 items. This gave me two click access to about 120 items. This is the standard I am working against. I'm not saying the dock should emulate this exactly, but fast hierarchical access to a decent number of frequently used items is important for people like me who work with lots of apps.
Truth be told, OS X has two third party apps which ease my pain somewhat:
Launchbar is genius and is my main launching tool these days. It is the perfect geek too. But it doesn't allow me to browse a category... let's say vector graphics apps... in order to "discover" a tool I might use.
Dragthing takes up the rest of the slack providing 90% of the functionality of the old style tabs. My only criticism is that drag thing is not built in and integrated at a core level.
While I love these apps, I believe that Apple could put the same team that came up with Exposé to come up with a fantastic solution to this problem so that all users would benefit.
Overall the enhancements make Panther a must have upgrade. I'm especially keen on the Finder's live sorting and the overall speed (even when dealing with huge folders).
Exposé is so good that after only a day or two of using panther, I now find myself reaching for it when I am back on jaguar (or on windows/linux machines).
As always I have a few notes.
The Finder
1. The metallic interface should be optional.
2. Column view still lacks sorting by anything other than 'name' in column view. I would suggest adding sorting options via a contextual menu.
3. Fonts, HTML, EPS and any file handled by quicktime should be previewable right in the finder.
4. Contextual menus need to be smarter. For example if I click on a font or a saver file I should be able to send it to it's proper folder.
5. Lack of customizability is still a major complaint. There is still no way to change the font, to set the style of the desktop font, or to control grid spacing. Also we are limited to 10 point minimum font size.
6. Finder windows still take up too much screen real estate. If apple used small scrollbars it would save a significant # of pixels per window.
7. The finder still does not respect drag and drop locations when something is dropped on the desktop. This is a major sin in my book.
8. Minimization of fields in list view is still one of my pet peeves.
Why minimize 'Date Modified' to 'Dat..fied" when it could be "Date"
Why minimize 'Size' to "..." instead of 'Size' or 'kb'
Why does 48KB go from "4..b" to "..b" to "..." instead of "48k", "48", "48"... and so on. The kind field is especially dumb.
Also why doesn't the text get more condensed as it did in OS 9 when the field gets narrow.
9. Labels for items that one does not have permission to label should be handled more gracefully. Right now if you try to label something out of your permission range the labels are simply not selectable. This will be confusing to many users who don't understand permissions.
10. The way labels are indicated in column view is extremely confusing. Especailly if your highlight color is similar to a label, labeled items appear to have been selected.
11. The admin should be able to control what kind of finder window a user sees and they should be able to control which drives/folders are available within the finder window.
12. A new (better) folder design would be appreciated.
13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).
The Dock
The current dock is great for computer newbies and casual users, but it quickly breaks down when power users are in production on a big project.
1. Exposé is fantastic, but it still does not solve the problem of minimized windows (it does not show windows minimized to the dock although it probably should). While minimized windows will be used less often when users get the hang of Exposé, there is still a need for some sort of windowshading that allows for speedy one or two click window swapping. I personally miss having windowshade from OS 9 and had a haxie installed to add this behavior. Even better is minimize-in-place hack from unsanity which recently became available. I have found shading invaluable in production. The standard OS X minimize/maximize simply takes too long to swap between windows and windows get lost in the dock. Also exposé, does not solve the problem of window clutter (many of our designers are clean desktop sort of people), while some sort of shading allows for clean desktops and efficient production. 3rd party hacks are great, but having it built in would be better.
2. Grouping would really help the power user. I currently have 80 items in the dock and can never find anything. I use all my apps frequently so I want easy access to them. If instead of having them all minimized, I had springlloaded tabs in the manner of O
Shortsighted
One of the reasons DRM is so insane is because it is incredibly short sighted. I have records that are over 50 years old. I can play those records on virtually any turntable out there. Imagine if those records had been made with some sort of primitive DRM that required them to be played on a specific machine or required a call into a company to input a code before they would play. The truth is that most of those record companies don't even exist today. A huge cultural legacy would be lost.
The truth is obsolescence is already built in. Formats change computer file systems change, OSes change, our standards of quality change. My bet is that 50 years from now it will be just as rare to find someone playing mp3 files as it is tto find people playing old records now. You will have find a machine to read a certain kind of hard disk, find a way to read a particular file system, and then to interpret the format. Making those formats closed is virtually insuring the digital death of the music (or the video or whatever data they happen to contain).
I already see this problem with old software and data. I have a ton of programs from the apple ][ days. With some doing I can get that data off the old 5 1/2 inch disks and into an emulator under OS X. Most programs work and I can see the data (mainly high school book reports in appleworks), but it's a lot of effort. Luckily I was pretty good about keeping serial numbers around, but the programs that inevitably fail are the ones with anti-copy copy protection. Even back then the odd sector layout would cause problems on certain disk drives. Now the programs are essentially dead. With enough work I could probably revive them, but who has the time? We see the same problem now with certain cds with bad data written in on purpose to foil copying, but also foil playing on certain systems (actually in this case maybe it is a good thing to prevent Celine Dion from propagating her evil).
I have the same problem with my old Mac data circa 1984/85 even without copy protection. I have data in formats of programs that simply don't exist anymore (does anyone remember Fullwrite...so far ahead of it's time, but doomed by MS Word). My only hope for reading this data is finding an old machine or waiting until someone builds a good 68000 emulator (vmac has a ways to go)
Doing this to music (on purpose no less) is particularly insidious because music is one of the things that should live on as a cultural legacy. When I buy a CD I want it to last and I want to be able to play it whether I am here in LA or in a Kashgari taxi. I doubt that 2053 my grandkids will enjoy my Nada Surf mp3s the way I enjoy my grandfather's Vera Lynn and Tex Williams records, but I would like them to have the chance at listening to them in the first place.
You can find local coverage of one of the debris fields from the Lufkin Daily News (this is the biggest newspaper in the area). There is also a page of photos.
a new plugin using the 3.0 SDK. Also has anyone successfully imported an old plug. I'd love to check out the results.
If apple wants to make iSync a killer app, they should publish the API and allow 3rd parties to create modules sync anything to anything.
I for example would like a Calendar/Address Book -> Entourage Sync, or my filemaker database to address book... I'd also love to sync everything to my my Motorola phone.... it's gotta be possible.
The fact is Apple has claimed that corner of the screen and is doing what it can to discourage/prohibit developers from using it. There was no misleading reporting there.
Most apps/utils that use the menu bar have either had to jump through hoops to get around apple's prohibitions or they are not actually using the menu bar APIs, instead they are just apps that float above the menu and masquerade as menu bar icons.
While it appears that all is hunky dory in menu-icon land (I have 3 or 4 3rd party apps with icons up there), the truth is that until Apple opens the API all 3rd party utils run the risk of breaking each time Apple updates it's system (many of the apps broke when apple went from 10.1-10.2). This is not cool.
OS X skins are just that. Skins that change the look but not the function of OS X's widgets.
Both Kaleidoscope schemes and OS 9's Appearance themes, were much more robust than X Skins. Not only could widgets be skinned, but they could also be moved around and their function could be modified. OS X skins are pale imitations of their OS 9 counterparts. While the majority Kaleidoscope schemes were butt ugly, it only takes one good one to convince.
The more interesting question is whether such themes are even possible in OS X as Cocoa and Carbon use different methods to create windows. Carbon uses an updated version of OS 9 Appearance Manager themes to create the Aqua widgets (windows are handled separately). Carbon seems to use something called a LAYO (layout) resource to determine the placement of widgets. Cocoa apps do not use these resources and my guess is that Cocoa hardcodes the locations of widgets.
Decent apps for skinning and icon changing do exist in X, but these changes are cosmetic. Real support for allowing systemwide HI/UI behavior changes to Aqua is almost nonexistent. The few apps that have achieved systemwide mods (windowshade comes to mind) seem to many focus on the window manager which is handles window drawing and layering.
The truth is that for most people this is not a big deal. Most people simply accept the UI as being what it is. This said, I think that if people had the option to fiddle with the HI/UI they would (just look at the range of background choices people make).
What is more troubling for most is the lack of basic options. For example there is no known way to change the system font for menus/dialog boxes/window titles. There is no way to change the font style for icons on the desktop (the default bold white with a shadow rankles many). And Apple's anti-aliasing controls are primitive at best. Even if Apple does not supply a UI for making such changes (don't want to scare the newbies with too many options), the ability to change these things should be available via the terminal or by making a change in a plist. Apple has done this with the dock and should continue this trend systemwide.
As for the argument that support would be difficult if users have the ability to make dramatic HI/UI changes, I would suggest the solution is simple (a keyboard command to set everything back to default).
And for the argument that it is confusing if different users set up their machines using alternate schemes, I would argue that this is the point of having a multi-user system.
*$&^@*! .Mac bandwidth restrictions.
the trailer looks pretty decent. That said I'm still mych more pyched to see the T3 teaser. Cameron or no Cameron, arnie vs a terminatrix is going to be a good time. Cameron is a god but what has he done lately other than sit in his castle bitching about Titanic.
According to the offical T3 site the T3 teaser will be playing in front of Men in Black.
Amen. (and many thanks for sputnix)... the irony of this decision (at least for me) is that much of what i was looking for on audiogalaxy were rare out of print recordings many taken from vinyl. This decision has woken me up... I joined the EFF today. If you are angry as I am about this, you should too.
God this is horrible news. Since I started using audiogalaxy (via a non-spyware OS X client), I have discovered tons of odd and rare recordings I would have never found otherwise. Also in the last six months since I started using AG, I've bought more music than I have in the last six years. In my case at least the RIAA has put a bandaid on it's finger but has chopped off it's arm.
I don't know of any other place on the web that offered the ability to intuitively browse and play rare music. This is a sad sad day.
In Jaguar we already see this happening. In fact in many of the WWDC Jaguar sessions Apple kept emphasizing that developers can't count on file to live locally or on a local filesystem. This is, I believe, a very good thing.
She has a great music show on KCRW the public radio station here. I've seen her in person she is skinny, but in no way anorexic (ie black toothed and bow legged)
& am p;tmplt_type=Everything
http://kcrw.com/show/td
http://kcrw.com/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?show_code=td
Apple's G4 case is not a big part of it's price. The plastics cost about $14. Maybe a little less now that they have been mass produced for so long...
OS X will not threaten Linux until it runs on x86 boxes--that much is obvious. But until that day, we in the Linux community should keep a close eye on X--we have much to learn from Apple and they from us. I just got back from Macworld where I saw how very simple it was to install OS X (a 12 minute brainless procedure). This alone is something we should look at. I've installed various flavors of Linux on some 20-25 machines and each has had it's own set of special problems.Obviously Apple has the advantage of creating the whole tamale, but man was that install appealing. They had a woman from the crowd in control and someone came up with the TCP info for an airport base station connected to a T1 line. They had it connected and surfing wirelessly in about 5 minutes flat. I kid you not. I also saw a version of X Windows running GIMP side by side with an OS X version of Filemaker. Additionally I got to peek at alpha OS X versions of MS Office and Photoshop (screenshots only of Photoshop). Did I mention Maya?! Maya on OS X is spectacular. These apps won't be out for a few months, but I was amazed to see them running on an OS with a fully functional terminal and backwards support for OS 9 legacy apps. And of course Apple will bundle their consumer apps (iMovie, iTunes, Appleworks, and (soon) iDVD). This is all hot stuff. Imagine you are a school admin and you want to host a website using Apache. Under OS X this takes all of 2 minutes. It is literally a click of a button. When I saw this I was blown away. Should we run away and give up. No of course not. We should keep pushing for easier installs, better apps, and more consistent HI. Apple will not be able to break out of the PowerPC niche for at least the rest of this year, and this gives us time to make Linux better for the day when OS X is released for x86 with a Windows Red Box (seems absolutely obvious that this will happen eventually). If we have not made Linux better and easier to use when that day comes, we should indeed be worried, because OS X is the real deal. When admins realize that they can save countless dollars on IT support, run their heavy duty Unix apps, and still have access to consumer stuff like MS Office on a machine that an idot can use, people will be running to OS X. Maybe I got caught in that famous reality distortion field but I know that I went to Macworld out of pure curiosity and have come home with a pending order for one of those shiny new powerbooks. I can't wait to see if I can get it running as a triple boot OS 9, OS X, LinuxPPC system. I know that installing OS 9 and the X beta won't be a problem. My guess is LinuxPPC will be slightly more problematic. Wish me luck.