well, it is open source so everything you need is already there
If only that were true!
other designers could easily make their own front end
The trouble is that there are no designers. At best, there are programmers that know a little bit about how to make a UI not suck. This will only get you so far. The UI is typically an afterthought, and the most common suggestions for improving it is "themes" or "skins" or "window decorations" or "make it an option", none of which actually address the problem.
You can buy a digidesign Mbox factory package for $550
So, for more than twice as much, you can get something different. You don't say. Sure, the Mbox is a good package, but $500 is still a lot of money, and ProTools LE is not even remotely as easy to use as GarageBand.
I mean, ProTools is the industry standard for digital audio recording and editing for a reason.
And that reason is inertia, more than anything else. ProTools is good, yeah, but that doesn't mean it's the best for everyone in all cases. There's a lot of different software on the market for a reason.
Then again, I suppose any "musician" who buys Garage Band isn't exactly looking to take their tracks to a real engineer or shop their creation around to record companies, and more than "graphic artists" who use MS Paint would take their creations to a printing press.
Why didn't you just say "I've never used GarageBand, so I don't get it."? Comparing it to MS Paint is absolutely rediculous. If you really want an analogy, I'd say it's more like Adobe Photoshop Elements. It's the home game of the pro app.
I've always seen GarageBand as the digital equivalent to the sub-$200 4-track tape recorder (a sub-$200 interface, like Apple's, will cement this analogy). There's a huge number of successful musicians out there that got started on a 4-track -- a lot of a lot of beautiful albums that were recorded on them (Iron & Wine's The Creek Drank The Cradle is a recent example), and a lot of happy users.
I'm also troubled by your implication that a musician that uses GarageBand is a "musician", somehow different than a person that uses ProTools. A talented musician will sound good on both. A skilled graphic artist could definitely make something worthwhile in MS Paint. They wouldn't, because MS Paint is crap, but the point is that it's the artist that creates the art, the tool is just a tool, good or bad.
That's Apple for you, always on the forefront of new technology.
You just linked to four different versions of the same thing. Which one was the first? Are the rest lame because they weren't on the the first? Where do you draw the line?
A thing doesn't have to be wholy new technology to be an innovation. The overwhelming majority of new products in the world are just refinements or modifications to that which already exists.
Wasn't designed for 2d, but that doesn't need to stop you using it as one. http://xfree86.org/4.4.0/glide.4.html/
I'm beginning to think that with open source, as the utility of a bit of code decreases, the likelyhood that someone has written it increases. I'm not terribly surprised that this was done.
However, the parent was asking for an explaination of why you couldn't do an accelerated desktop on a Voodoo2, and your link has only confirmed this impossibility:
This driver is a bit special because Voodoo 1 and 2 boards are very much NOT made for running 2D graphics. Therefore, this driver uses no hardware acceleration (since there is no acceleration for 2D, only 3D).
Actually Microsoft has a hardware accelerated UI in Windows XP. Read up on GDI+.
GDI+ is not the same kind of thing. It's more comparable to Quartz 2D, which is just part of Quartz. Yes, it's 'hardware accelerated', but not in the same way as Quartz Extreme.
The real difference in QE is the Compositor, which buffers each window independently, which prevents tearing (a minor but ugly problem in Windows), and greatly speeds up things like scaling multiple windows (think Expose or resolution-independent UI). This is acclerated with OpenGL in 10.2 and up, where it was not in 10.1.
Windows does not have a frame buffer for each window, and it's compositing is not accelerated with OpenGL. Longhorn will have this, though XP, for all it's acceleration, does not.
I don't understand how this is not deceptive, fraudulent and illegal...
Just because someone did something deceptive, fraudulent, and illegal, doesn't mean that the prosecution can slack off and charge them under a law that doesn't apply. Yes, it's because the law is stupid, and it's hard to understand why an anti-spam law doesn't apply to someone involved in spamming, but that's what we've got here.
why does it always take so long for good stuff to reach the United States?
In the asian market, companies are much more willing to put out products that won't be huge sellers. If they estimate the demand for Widget X to be (say) 1,000 units, they'll make it, where in the US, things don't get made until the demand is (say) 10,000 units. I'll leave it to more informed to explain why this is the case.
I think a better bookmark managment system needs to be implemented, especially when you move from office to home to mobile. possibly network storage system to publish your bookmarks so your browser can grab them automatically?
Just use del.icio.us, and set your user page (example) as your homepage. Accessable anywhere, nothing to install, easy to manage, searchable, etc.
There are extentions to just about every browser to mirror your bookmarks, but I personally find the web interface more useful.
Some people are turned off by how everything you post to del.icio.us is public, but really, how private do most of your bookmarks need to be?
What I think wikinews needs, and indeed all wikis, is authorship so we can see who said what. If we implement something with PGP signatures, people can build reputations over time, and newcomers can filter out information from authors with no rep.
The basic form of this already exists. You can view the history of modifications for any article, and even see the diffs between any two versions. Here's an example.
Granted, this isn't exactly what you're suggesting; it's just the same 'good enough' approach that wikis have always relied on, and it's certainly a reasonable solution to the problem.
I was pointing out that the kind of authenticity that a hash check provides is not the kind of authenticity that is a problem on P2P networks.
Ideally you could trust that bad files will be unpopular and have fewer sources, but that simply doesn't happen.
I should have said that that doesn't always happen. What I was getting at is that it's not an entirely self-correcting problem.
For what it's worth, most of the P2P users I've observed have been KaZaA users, because, well, I was writing a paper on KaZaA user habits and P2P UI design. In my experience, eMule attracts a more technically literate crowd, which may account for our different observations.
eDonkey's way of rate limiting seems to ignore the fact that the majority of users will have asymmetric bandwidth. If I can only upload 16KB/s, I can only download 16KB/s from my peers plus a few KB for each seeder that himself isn't downloading something else. The most I've ever seen comming down from eDonkey is about 30KB/s.
What I'm saying is that, though this prevents leeching, it makes for a slower experience overall.
Doesn't bittorrent provide a hash of the file to authenticate it?
Yes, but this only verifies that two files are the same. It doesn't give you any indication as to the authenticity of the content. The file name itself is typically the only way one has to guess at the content, and files on P2P networks are notorious for inaccurate and outright misleading filenames.
Ideally you could trust that bad files will be unpopular and have fewer sources, but that simply doesn't happen. It's entirely too common for huge numbers of people to have the same mislabeled file. Users tend to continue to share files they know to be bad.
Anti-leeching => Edonkey uses download limits based on your upload limit. This is a very trivial problem.
In reality this makes eDonkey very, very, slow.
The nicest thing about BitTorrent has been that high-demand files tend to transfer really, really, fast for almost everyone. You get the file fast, and then it's up to you to keep seeding. Often, you'll get the whole file before seeding a single byte. Like many things, this would be perfect if people weren't assholes. [And if BitTorrent clients would give some indication as to what an acceptable ratio is, maybe people wouldn't find it so easy to be assholes.]
While I know this sounds good at first glance, it's just a modification to the much-maligned idea of mutating menus.
I'm sure several others will flame you for even mentioning it, but I'd rather point out that the only thing really wrong with the idea is the "automatically", part, which takes control away from both the user and the designer and puts it into the hands of some ranking algorithm that has an invariable bias towards certain user behavior, and is often too smart for it's own good.
A good idea would be to allow users to horizontally enlarge certain toolbar buttons (Internet Explorer's "Selective Text on Right" option does this well, but doesn't let you choose which buttons it effects). This is basically just an extention to the common customizable toolbar, without adding complexity.
People put up with it because the likelyhood that there will be an authentication problem is very small. Less than the chance of having some kind of hardware incompatability or glitch; something PC gamers already deal with all of the time, and gladly.
Remember, the people that Valve is cracking down on are people who are too cheap to buy the game. They aren't customers, and Valve has little incentive to treat them as though they were.
there's at least 50% chance you'll get to play the game you bought.
No. If you bought the game, the chance you'll get to play it is like 99%. If you stole the game, the chance you'll get to play it is significantly lower.
As a user first and developer second, I've found that using a Mac is a lot less like ramming my head against a brick wall repeatedly than Windows ever was. Now, I don't have any illusion that Apple really loves me in particular, or that they won't ever do anything that I don't like, but I do believe that they will continue to design products that are unlike ramming my head into a brick wall.
While it may not be as obviously bad as Comic Sans MS, Microsoft's adventures into bad typography also included Arial, the wretched bastardization of sweet, sweet, Helvetica. The rivalry is so bitter as to have spawned this Flash-based fighting game.
On the other hand, they did sponsor the creation of Verdana and Georgia, which are pretty good when used properly, unlike Arial and Comic Sans MS, which never look good.
Maybe for once... MS got to something before Apple?
I don't think either of them were the first to think of (or even implement) ideas like database filesystems, metadata/content indexing, incremental search, etc. There's a lot more out there than just Microsoft and Apple. They just happen to be the only two in a position to make headlines. So I really don't think there's much point in arguing who had the idea first.
On the other hand, this particular product definitely seems like a reaction to Spotlight and Google Desktop. I seriously doubt that it was on the drawing board before Spotlight was unveiled in June, even if all of the technology behind it was being developed for Longhorn.
Can someone please explain a little more as to how Spotlight using metadata is a "radical" new thing?
What's new about it is that it works well.
Seriously, that's it. I mean, there might be some technical detail that hasn't been seen before, but really the only new thing about it is that it's actually something that people are going to find useful.
(granted, exactly what sort of type this 'Metadata' is, I don't know...might be other sort/type of 'Metadata' then what we are discussing here...)
That's right. Spotlight's metadata and HFS Resource Forks are different critters. Resource Forks are one of those strange old Mac things that nobody really understands and don't really matter anymore.
The first thing I'll do is try making an Automator to create thumbnails.
I managed to do this just now (after reading your post) in about 5 minutes, and it's the first time I've used Automator. It took 3 actions: 1-Choose Files, 2-Create Thumbnails, 3-Copy Files [to save].
QuickSilver and Spotlight seem very similar at first glance, but are in fact very different creatures. They have the same appeal, but very different, but overlapping functions. QuickSilver is still basically a launcher, and Spotlight is still basically a Find function.
I've found that the things QuickSilver excells at are the things that Spotlight can't inherently do, like abbreviated searches (try "sl do" to launch Slashdot), complex actions, certain application integration. Likewise, Spotlight excels at everything QuickSilver can't do, like metadata/content indexing, natural language searches ("chat with joe about guns", "images from yesterday"), and overal OS integration.
Neither is a replacement for the other. They both rock.
Slashdot Mirror
well, it is open source so everything you need is already there
If only that were true!
other designers could easily make their own front end
The trouble is that there are no designers. At best, there are programmers that know a little bit about how to make a UI not suck. This will only get you so far. The UI is typically an afterthought, and the most common suggestions for improving it is "themes" or "skins" or "window decorations" or "make it an option", none of which actually address the problem.
You can buy a digidesign Mbox factory package for $550
So, for more than twice as much, you can get something different. You don't say. Sure, the Mbox is a good package, but $500 is still a lot of money, and ProTools LE is not even remotely as easy to use as GarageBand.
I mean, ProTools is the industry standard for digital audio recording and editing for a reason.
And that reason is inertia, more than anything else. ProTools is good, yeah, but that doesn't mean it's the best for everyone in all cases. There's a lot of different software on the market for a reason.
Then again, I suppose any "musician" who buys Garage Band isn't exactly looking to take their tracks to a real engineer or shop their creation around to record companies, and more than "graphic artists" who use MS Paint would take their creations to a printing press.
Why didn't you just say "I've never used GarageBand, so I don't get it."? Comparing it to MS Paint is absolutely rediculous. If you really want an analogy, I'd say it's more like Adobe Photoshop Elements. It's the home game of the pro app.
I've always seen GarageBand as the digital equivalent to the sub-$200 4-track tape recorder (a sub-$200 interface, like Apple's, will cement this analogy). There's a huge number of successful musicians out there that got started on a 4-track -- a lot of a lot of beautiful albums that were recorded on them (Iron & Wine's The Creek Drank The Cradle is a recent example), and a lot of happy users.
I'm also troubled by your implication that a musician that uses GarageBand is a "musician", somehow different than a person that uses ProTools. A talented musician will sound good on both. A skilled graphic artist could definitely make something worthwhile in MS Paint. They wouldn't, because MS Paint is crap, but the point is that it's the artist that creates the art, the tool is just a tool, good or bad.
That's Apple for you, always on the forefront of new technology.
You just linked to four different versions of the same thing. Which one was the first? Are the rest lame because they weren't on the the first? Where do you draw the line?
A thing doesn't have to be wholy new technology to be an innovation. The overwhelming majority of new products in the world are just refinements or modifications to that which already exists.
Wasn't designed for 2d, but that doesn't need to stop you using it as one. http://xfree86.org/4.4.0/glide.4.html/
I'm beginning to think that with open source, as the utility of a bit of code decreases, the likelyhood that someone has written it increases. I'm not terribly surprised that this was done.
However, the parent was asking for an explaination of why you couldn't do an accelerated desktop on a Voodoo2, and your link has only confirmed this impossibility:
This driver is a bit special because Voodoo 1 and 2 boards are very much NOT made for running 2D graphics. Therefore, this driver uses no hardware acceleration (since there is no acceleration for 2D, only 3D).
Actually Microsoft has a hardware accelerated UI in Windows XP. Read up on GDI+.
GDI+ is not the same kind of thing. It's more comparable to Quartz 2D, which is just part of Quartz. Yes, it's 'hardware accelerated', but not in the same way as Quartz Extreme.
The real difference in QE is the Compositor, which buffers each window independently, which prevents tearing (a minor but ugly problem in Windows), and greatly speeds up things like scaling multiple windows (think Expose or resolution-independent UI). This is acclerated with OpenGL in 10.2 and up, where it was not in 10.1.
Windows does not have a frame buffer for each window, and it's compositing is not accelerated with OpenGL. Longhorn will have this, though XP, for all it's acceleration, does not.
I'd love to see a convincing explanation of why you couldn't do an accelerated desktop on, say a voodoo 2 card.
Um, the Voodoo2 couldn't do 2D at all. It was a 3D-only add-in card that used a video pass-through cable. You still had to have a normal video card.
Video cards used with windows have been doing acceleration since the 3.0 days, though back then it was almost all 2d accel.
Likewise, this existed on the Mac for quite some time. Quartz Extreme is a different thing.
I don't understand how this is not deceptive, fraudulent and illegal...
Just because someone did something deceptive, fraudulent, and illegal, doesn't mean that the prosecution can slack off and charge them under a law that doesn't apply. Yes, it's because the law is stupid, and it's hard to understand why an anti-spam law doesn't apply to someone involved in spamming, but that's what we've got here.
why does it always take so long for good stuff to reach the United States?
In the asian market, companies are much more willing to put out products that won't be huge sellers. If they estimate the demand for Widget X to be (say) 1,000 units, they'll make it, where in the US, things don't get made until the demand is (say) 10,000 units. I'll leave it to more informed to explain why this is the case.
I think a better bookmark managment system needs to be implemented, especially when you move from office to home to mobile. possibly network storage system to publish your bookmarks so your browser can grab them automatically?
Just use del.icio.us, and set your user page (example) as your homepage. Accessable anywhere, nothing to install, easy to manage, searchable, etc.
There are extentions to just about every browser to mirror your bookmarks, but I personally find the web interface more useful.
Some people are turned off by how everything you post to del.icio.us is public, but really, how private do most of your bookmarks need to be?
Harrison ford was born on 13 July 1942. That makes his 62.
You gotta admit, for 62, the man looks pretty fucking good.
Remember also that he was in his late 30s/early 40s when he was not just Indiana Jones, but also Han Solo, and Rick Deckard. The man is a badass.
What I think wikinews needs, and indeed all wikis, is authorship so we can see who said what. If we implement something with PGP signatures, people can build reputations over time, and newcomers can filter out information from authors with no rep.
The basic form of this already exists. You can view the history of modifications for any article, and even see the diffs between any two versions. Here's an example.
Granted, this isn't exactly what you're suggesting; it's just the same 'good enough' approach that wikis have always relied on, and it's certainly a reasonable solution to the problem.
Can you name a single P2P app that does?
No, and I wasn't claiming that there was one.
I was pointing out that the kind of authenticity that
a hash check provides is not the kind of authenticity
that is a problem on P2P networks.
Ideally you could trust that bad files will be unpopular and have fewer sources, but that simply doesn't happen.
I should have said that that doesn't always happen. What I was getting at is that it's not an entirely self-correcting problem.
For what it's worth, most of the P2P users I've observed have been KaZaA users, because, well, I was writing a paper on KaZaA user habits and P2P UI design. In my experience, eMule attracts a more technically literate crowd, which may account for our different observations.
eDonkey's way of rate limiting seems to ignore the fact that
the majority of users will have asymmetric bandwidth. If I can only upload 16KB/s, I can only download 16KB/s from my peers plus a few KB for each seeder that himself isn't downloading something else. The most I've ever seen comming down from eDonkey is about 30KB/s.
What I'm saying is that, though this prevents leeching, it makes for a slower experience overall.
Doesn't bittorrent provide a hash of the file to authenticate it?
Yes, but this only verifies that two files are the same. It doesn't give you any indication as to the authenticity of the content. The file name itself is typically the only way one has to guess at the content, and files on P2P networks are notorious for inaccurate and outright misleading filenames.
Ideally you could trust that bad files will be unpopular and have fewer sources, but that simply doesn't happen. It's entirely too common for huge numbers of people to have the same mislabeled file. Users tend to continue to share files they know to be bad.
Anti-leeching => Edonkey uses download limits based on your upload limit. This is a very trivial problem.
In reality this makes eDonkey very, very, slow.
The nicest thing about BitTorrent has been that high-demand files tend to transfer really, really, fast for almost everyone. You get the file fast, and then it's up to you to keep seeding. Often, you'll get the whole file before seeding a single byte. Like many things, this would be perfect if people weren't assholes. [And if BitTorrent clients would give some indication as to what an acceptable ratio is, maybe people wouldn't find it so easy to be assholes.]
Most used buttons become automagically bigger.
While I know this sounds good at first glance, it's just a modification to the much-maligned idea of mutating menus.
I'm sure several others will flame you for even mentioning it, but I'd rather point out that the only thing really wrong with the idea is the "automatically", part, which takes control away from both the user and the designer and puts it into the hands of some ranking algorithm that has an invariable bias towards certain user behavior, and is often too smart for it's own good.
A good idea would be to allow users to horizontally enlarge certain toolbar buttons (Internet Explorer's "Selective Text on Right" option does this well, but doesn't let you choose which buttons it effects). This is basically just an extention to the common customizable toolbar, without adding complexity.
Why would anyone put up with this crap?
People put up with it because the likelyhood that there will be an authentication problem is very small. Less than the chance of having some kind of hardware incompatability or glitch; something PC gamers already deal with all of the time, and gladly.
Remember, the people that Valve is cracking down on are people who are too cheap to buy the game. They aren't customers, and Valve has little incentive to treat them as though they were.
there's at least 50% chance you'll get to play the game you bought.
No. If you bought the game, the chance you'll get to play it is like 99%. If you stole the game, the chance you'll get to play it is significantly lower.
You're right, Mr. AC.
Microsoft is all about the developers.
Apple is all about the users.
As a user first and developer second, I've found that using a Mac is a lot less like ramming my head against a brick wall repeatedly than Windows ever was. Now, I don't have any illusion that Apple really loves me in particular, or that they won't ever do anything that I don't like, but I do believe that they will continue to design products that are unlike ramming my head into a brick wall.
While it may not be as obviously bad as Comic Sans MS, Microsoft's adventures into bad typography also included Arial, the wretched bastardization of sweet, sweet, Helvetica. The rivalry is so bitter as to have spawned this Flash-based fighting game.
On the other hand, they did sponsor the creation of Verdana and Georgia, which are pretty good when used properly, unlike Arial and Comic Sans MS, which never look good.
Maybe for once ... MS got to something before Apple?
I don't think either of them were the first to think of (or even implement) ideas like database filesystems, metadata/content indexing, incremental search, etc. There's a lot more out there than just Microsoft and Apple. They just happen to be the only two in a position to make headlines. So I really don't think there's much point in arguing who had the idea first.
On the other hand, this particular product definitely seems like a reaction to Spotlight and Google Desktop. I seriously doubt that it was on the drawing board before Spotlight was unveiled in June, even if all of the technology behind it was being developed for Longhorn.
Can someone please explain a little more as to how Spotlight using metadata is a "radical" new thing?
What's new about it is that it works well.
Seriously, that's it. I mean, there might be some technical detail that hasn't been seen before, but really the only new thing about it is that it's actually something that people are going to find useful.
That's the standard Apple formula for success.
(granted, exactly what sort of type this 'Metadata' is, I don't know...might be other sort/type of 'Metadata' then what we are discussing here...)
That's right. Spotlight's metadata and HFS Resource Forks are different critters. Resource Forks are one of those strange old Mac things that nobody really understands and don't really matter anymore.
The first thing I'll do is try making an Automator to create thumbnails.
I managed to do this just now (after reading your post) in about 5 minutes, and it's the first time I've used Automator. It took 3 actions: 1-Choose Files, 2-Create Thumbnails, 3-Copy Files [to save].
I'm not sure how Apple will improve on this.
QuickSilver and Spotlight seem very similar at first glance, but are in fact very different creatures. They have the same appeal, but very different, but overlapping functions. QuickSilver is still basically a launcher, and Spotlight is still basically a Find function.
I've found that the things QuickSilver excells at are the things that Spotlight can't inherently do, like abbreviated searches (try "sl do" to launch Slashdot), complex actions, certain application integration. Likewise, Spotlight excels at everything QuickSilver can't do, like metadata/content indexing, natural language searches ("chat with joe about guns", "images from yesterday"), and overal OS integration.
Neither is a replacement for the other. They both rock.