... and rowenta steam irons. Oh no, sorry, the steam irons were transparent and blue BEFORE the imac.
Right, the steam iron set off a design revolution.
I don't think any one is saying that Apple INVENTED translucent plastics. They just made them a crucial part of an otherwise very attractive package, which in turn, popularized the iMac, an popularized iMac design concepts.
And there is little evidence that most of the UI "enhancements" added into Mac OS X had anything like the thorough interface testing
There are a lot of really quite smart concepts that have been introduced that have nothing at all to do with eye candy. However, it does take a while to notice them. For example, in the Finder, if you hit Command-1 through Command-6, they each bring up a different portion of the filesystem, such as home directory, apps, documents, etc. This is real progress. Seems so simple and obvious, but it's quite useful.
As for testing in small group, I do think it is important, in moderation. I've seen products that have been UI-tested to death and they come out looking like Frankenstein. When a problem arises, for some reason, corrections focus on that one issue (hack is probably too strong of a word), rather than considering the interface as a whole. I know I sound looney for saying this, but it's been my experience. I think what Apple is doing is testing on a much larger scale, with a much broader type of audience (not just the type of people willing to sit in a room for two hours) by putting out the public beta. This doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.
Given a world where Windows 98 looks good enough to most people
I agree with you, to a point on this. I think people see Aqua, or more importantly, Aqua and WinXX running side-by-side, I think it will click. It's hard to deny how compelling the interface is.
Price plays a huge role, and this is where Apple still has a real problem in some segments, especially people new to the brand.
That's a complex issue. Since they don't have the volume of say a Dell, they don't get all the discounts on the components. Plus there's just the issue of pure revenue. If they lower the prices, will that actually bring in significantly more buyers, or will it just reduce total revenue. I think the $799 iMac is a good test bed.
The Cube is probably too expensive, and poorly positioned, though. I'm not sure who's supposed to by it, except people with extra cash laying around. If there weren't dual G4s available for just slightly more, it wouldn't be such a big issue. But on the other hand, I have no idea how much it costs to develop and produce that thing. There are a lot of new procedures that had to be developed to come up with that casing, so maybe the initial margin isn't soo high after all.
As a side note, people really shouldn't be that suprised at hairline fractures in the cube casing, as nothing like this has really been put out on the market before, especially without a fan. It's largely experimental. What's ridiculous is how Apple appears to be dealing with it.
He then said he didn't think Easel would ever work because they were "just slapping a UI on top of a Unix system". The guy sitting next to me almost split a kidney laughing.
If you think Mac OS X is just a pretty UI slapped on top of Mach, methinks you need to do some more reading and/or beta testing.
Oh, yes. I beleive they tried to kill Cocoa, but the it wouldn't die. I hope that *now* they will push cocoa as much as they can. It is rather easy:
There is some debate as to whether Apple tried to kill off Objective-C, but I don't think killing off Cocoa was ever in the cards.
This looks like a open source MacOS X clone on the horizon... maybe in 3 or 4 years.
It depends on what you're hoping to get out of Mac OS X. The most common reasons seem to be:
1) Love Mac hardware and general Apple system design concepts, want a good OS to go with it
2) Love Unix, want a well-designed GUI to go with it
3) Want anything that is not Windows and can still run most mainstream apps (read: Office)
Of course, when the Dock in OS X starts to fill the bottom of the screen, navigating around got a little tricky. For me (today) that point was when I was jumping between 5 apps and 8 windows so I could crib data while installing tomcat
Say what you will, but this is one area where it's hard to criticize the dock. In Windows, you'll get 5-8 different tabs in the task bar that have the exact same IE icon and just a bit of text associated with them.
Mac OS X, however, brilliantly generates a thumbnail of each window you send to the dock, and you get the full title of the window when you mouse over it. If you want to quicker access to various open terminal, consider changing the default window title or the background color of them (perhaps different color for each host or active app), then saving these settings as a separate file. This should greatly speed up navigation.
The criticisms of the dock and the new Finder are well-founded and the research behind the criticisms is documented.
Please point me at this documentation. So far all the complaints I've seen have been anecdotal, and along the lines of people whining about things being "too different."
Of course, I absolutely could not stand the Control Strip and rarely used the Apple Menu (except for "Recent Documents"). They may have made sense individually, but in 2000, they didn't really seem to mesh well with each other or the overall UI design anymore. The control strip was original designed only for PowerBook users. It always seemed out of place to me. Do you develop a control strip module or a control panel, for example? It was time to start from a clean slate, IMHO.
Cool.... Mail via LDAP, that's a cool new feature. I'm surprised it comes free with the OS. I'm not aware of anyone else doing it. Are there any mail servers for it? Oh wait, you meant IMAP didn't you...
Acutally, there is LDAP support sprinkled throughout as well. Sherlock has supported LDAP searches for some time, and the Address Book app in Mac OS X can be pointed at LDAP servers as well. I imagine the Mail app can use LDAP too.
There is no doubt that taste plays a role in this kind of thing, but that makes it especially strange for Apple to go against the very well-documented tastes of its current users. They had to work hard to change some of these UI details that really did not have to change, and for what gain?
I'm so very sick of hearing this. Enough. 1984 is done. Let's move on.
I know some people feel that the Mac OS 9 is "their" OS (mostly due to nostalgia), but unfortunately, this doesn't translate into broader acceptance of Mac OS X. You should have seen the look of the faces of my family members when I showed them Mac OS X. They instantly wanted it. All the nostalgia-induced love of the same UI is useless if Apple isn't growing marketshare.
I can still remember how some people solidly believed how GUIs (in general) were a bad idea because they were too different. I can remember how people thought that the iMac wouldn't sell because it was too different. Maybe Mac OS X will fail because it's too different, but thank goodness we have people at Apple stretching the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. That's the goal of computing, isn't it?
There really is an awful lot to like about Mac OS X, which is why I suspect the flaws and weird parts seem the more striking: this really could have been almost perfect.
What do you mean "could have been?" It's still in beta. Do you realize how much has changed since DP4? If these issues are important to you, and you'd like to consider using the final version of Mac OS X, go over to the Mac OS X feedback form.
I mean, really, guys. What would the response be if Microsoft came out with their own version of Linux, complete with Office, but if in order to run it, you had to buy a mysterious 'firmware' card from Microsoft to plug into your machine?? Why does Apple get away with selling some of the worlds most closed hardware in these parts?
Because it's part of the reason things works so well on the platform. The same reason game console popularity has exploded in the past few years. Many people just want stuff to work.
Microsoft's markets and Apple's markets may have some overlap, but they have much different philosophies. Apple is meticulous about architecting the entire computing experience. Example: iMovie. The only reason this came together so quickly and has been such a hit was because they could change the 1) hardware 2) OS 3) application on a whim.
If you like, feel free to continue buying an OS from one company, and all your other hardware from other companies. That's fine. But allow me to have the choice to buy an entire computer, and have that manufacturer be held accountable for the entire experience, not just the OS, or just the CPU or just the hard drive. I don't have time for that BS.
Besides, if you want to run OSX without all the extra stuff, download Darwin and hack it into whatever you want.
The Desktop seems (to me) a poor rip of the NeXT Workspace Manager. It is real crappy, have many bugs, and is nowhere as usable as the program he tries to clone. It is interesting to see that it is (almost) the only important Carbon app shipped with the system.
As a side note, the purported reason that the "new Finder" (whatever qualfies as that) is written in Carbon, is that Apple is "eating its own dog food" (Jobs' words). At the 1998 Apple developers conference, Apple said it would develop at least one major Cabon app, and one major Cocoa app to prove that both were plausible, and to make sure they deal with any problems that crop up. The former is the new Finder, the latter is the Mail app included with the system.
I would tend to disagree. In fact, I think it's just the opposite.
The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed.
This baffles me. I'm a "unix person" (have been using Unix for about 6 years -- SunOS, Solaris, Linux), and I'm actually quite amazed with how well the Mac and Unix worlds mesh under Mac OS X.
Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install).
For marketing/positioning reasons, it really doesn't make sense for Apple to include compilers and and X server with Mac OS X. They're not trying to be just another *nix distro.
The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.
No idea what this means. Classic is remarkably solid for me.
New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable.
I'd admit there are some rough edges, but I honestly thinks it's quite a revolution (in a good way). If you're on an iBook, yes you're going to have problems since you're maxed out at 800x600. As far as "not very customizable," nothing could be further from the truth. Most UI elements seem to be made up of PDF files stored throughout the system. Do a search for.pdf.
Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface
This was inevitable, and necessary, IMHO. I'm pretty darn tired of 1984-centric UI.
Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).
Something isn't normal. I'm running on a Blue G3/400. The install and setup went seamless, and in the two weeks I've been using MOSX for my day-to-day work, I have yet to see anything resembling a system crash. Classic dies from time to time, but that's not entirely suprising at this stage.
On the other hand, I've heard of people seeing kernel panics in the beta. Since the differences between my experience and others is so great, I suspect that certain hardware configurations are far more stable at this point than others (rather than just being general kernel problems). Especially since I've heard of people completely ignoring the stated minimum requirements, and then acting suprised when things don't work right.
Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits.:'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that things are still in progress. Note, for example, that there does not appear to be any support for 2D acceleration yet. This will slow things down substantially.
With 128MB of memory I found things quite usable (6-10 Classic/Carbon/Cocoa apps of varying sizes open), but not optimal. I added in another 128MB (256MB total) and the thing absolutely flies now. The OS boots faster, classic launches much faster faster, apps launch quicker, and the disk is rarely touched. I believe Apple is aiming to bring the minimum down to 64MB by the 1.0 release.
Also, you'd be suprised at how much faster the public beta is than DP4. I'm sure there are more optimizations to be done.
Antitrust laws are harmful to consumers. They raise prices, reduce competition, stifle innovation, and foster corruption of government officials. The laws are used not to 'manage competition', but as strategic weapons by less-successful competitors seeking an advantage over market leaders.
Thank you Mr. Freedom to Innovate.
But consider the case of preinstalling browsers. Microsoft was forbidding companies like Compaq from preinstalling Netscape and forcing them to install only IE, under threat of losing their Windows license. If that type of behavior goes unchecked, the web becomes little more that the Microsoft version of AOL. It doesn't matter how fantastic of a browser Netscape makes at this point, Compaq has the choice of being Microsoft's bitch, or going out of business.
Tell me how this does not harm consumers. Microsoft has way, way too much power.
Apparently, you can mount WebDAV volumes on the desktop by just entering the address (http://webdav.company.com) in to the "Connect to server" dialog under the Go menu in the Finder. As far as turning on your own WebDAV server, I suppose you can turn it on by just uncommenting these two lines in/Library/WebServer/Configuration/apache.conf:
Apple is probably going to spend a fair bit of money on the theoretical optimizations for the Mach microkernel that can (theoretically) make it faster. But, as far as the public knows, Linux holds the speed record right now.
Mac OS X public beta is considerably faster than even DP4, both of which run Mach 3.0. OSX Server has Mach 2.5 and display postscript, amongst many other differences. Mac OS X public beta and Mac OS X Server can't really be reasonably compared in terms of performance.
It bothers me that Apple didn't include an X server
That would be a huge, huge mistake. The current Mac people would be expected to run X11 apps instead of Aqua apps. That would be a UI disaster. Very, very bad.
Apple's version is the modlules it comes with - while webdav is there, there's no mod_perl, no php, and no mod_ssl. God knows how you'd add them
I'm pretty sure there is a mod_ssl, actually, but it's disabled by default. OpenSSL, along with OpenSSH, are preinstalled on the machine.
Anyway, you add modules via Apache's DSO mechanism. If you're not famliar with this concept, the idea is that you only compile the module without recompiling apache. Only problem is, you still need compilers. This is why I putting up a page for people to download DSO modules precompiled for Mac OS X/Darwin. All they have to do is drop the file in and modify/Library/WebServer/Configuration/apache.conf.
From reading the article, it looks like the author hasn't even used the Mac OS X public beta yet, so in my mind, has very little room to criticize it. Comments from the article:
Apple is doing it again. By raising the bar so high - you need a minimum of a 128 megabyte G3 or G4 based Mac just to run Mac OS X
That's what you need to run the beta. I think the goal for 1.0 is 64MB. And unlike some other company's stated minimum requirements, these are actually realistic. I've had 6-10 apps (some Classic) open all day today, and the machine didn't flinch (which is vast departure from DP4). I have a Blue G3/400 with 128MB of RAM. It's not horribly old system, but even a G4/350 (not a typo) is faster.
You're cut off. In talking to Apple reps today I learned that the 128 megabyte limit is a bare bones minimum that even they don't recommend. 192 megabytes is the practical minimum.
All I can say is this isn't my experience (though, again it was with DP4).
The beauty of PCs, and why I feel Windows ultimately won out over Mac OS in the mass market despite sleazy underhanded marketing by both Apple and Microsoft, is that PCs don't go obsolete every 2 years! Any given PC can run a wide range of DOS and Windows releases.
This statement is really ironic is so many ways. But let's focus on one point. The reason that old PCs can run new versions of Windows (95/98/Me) is that Windows/DOS itself is old. So are the processors that power them (x86). The only real improvements have been end-user features. The same is the case on the Mac side of the world. Up until Mac OS 8.5 and 9, very little had changed in the system itself. I once heard an ex-Apple engineer joke that in the years since he left the company, the employee directory had changed more than the API documentation.
Mac OS X is a huge leap forward. Spend some time with the system and you'll understand. If you want the same basic infrastructure on less hardware, download Darwin (PPC or x86). If you want all the fancy extras, you need hardware to power it. Mac OS X has to emulate Classic as a matter of everyday life. That's no simple task, and it requires some ram to do it.
Is the hardware that Apple supports for Mac OS X a bit steep? Yes. But bear in mind Apple also cares about something called user experience. Microsoft may list a 486 processor on their box as a reasonable minimum. But even if it installs/boots on such hardware, you ain't gonna be a happy person. Apple wants the people who purchase Mac OS X to have a positive experience. This may mean not "supporting" older, more quirky hardware, even though the OS may still install on it.
BTW: I had a Pentium 166 that tried to run Windows 95 and some games on it (Total Annihilation, Quake II) on it. It wasn't pretty.
And people leave and the Mac market shrinks. They use some fancy advertising to win people back.
Please. Apple's engineering group alone has done amazing things in the last three years. Give credit where credit is due.
I predict a mass exodus of Mac users as a result of the arrogant and irresponsible policy Apple has created for Mac OS X. Poor backward compatibility for old apps.
Huh? Classic works remarkably well. In fact, it really sets new standards in emulation (it helps to be on the same native processor). Virtually all apps run, except those that require low-level hardware access. Apple has gone to great extents to be backwards compatible. Look what it did with Carbon. With Carbon did 90% of the work for porting ancient Mac apps to Mach. That's amazing stuff. Rhapsody was not slated to do this, btw, which is why it was a Bad Idea.
Added to the insult of having to pay to beta test.
Nobody's holding a gun to his head.
I just installed the Mac OS X public beta yeterday, and it is an amazing piece of work. Despite the fact that the Mac and Unix are essentially polar opposites, Apple has blended the two in a strikingly graceful way. Despite all the potential for culture clash, things frequently just work the way you expect them to.
Now, I don't know if anyone here recalls this, but NeXTSTEP ran on a 33-Mhz Motorola 68030 with 8 megs of RAM. So there's no reason Mac OS X should require a 500 Mhz G4 with 256 Megs of RAM except for the fact that Apple wants to sell hardware to their customers.
Have you read ANY documentation on Mac OS X? It ain't NextStep. NextStep, for example, doesn't have to emulate Mac OS 9, which eats gobs of ram and cpu.
And yes, Apple does want to sell hardware to their customers.
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... and rowenta steam irons. Oh no, sorry, the steam irons were transparent and blue BEFORE the imac.
Right, the steam iron set off a design revolution.
I don't think any one is saying that Apple INVENTED translucent plastics. They just made them a crucial part of an otherwise very attractive package, which in turn, popularized the iMac, an popularized iMac design concepts.
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Scott Stevenson
And there is little evidence that most of the UI "enhancements" added into Mac OS X had anything like the thorough interface testing
There are a lot of really quite smart concepts that have been introduced that have nothing at all to do with eye candy. However, it does take a while to notice them. For example, in the Finder, if you hit Command-1 through Command-6, they each bring up a different portion of the filesystem, such as home directory, apps, documents, etc. This is real progress. Seems so simple and obvious, but it's quite useful.
As for testing in small group, I do think it is important, in moderation. I've seen products that have been UI-tested to death and they come out looking like Frankenstein. When a problem arises, for some reason, corrections focus on that one issue (hack is probably too strong of a word), rather than considering the interface as a whole. I know I sound looney for saying this, but it's been my experience. I think what Apple is doing is testing on a much larger scale, with a much broader type of audience (not just the type of people willing to sit in a room for two hours) by putting out the public beta. This doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.
Given a world where Windows 98 looks good enough to most people
I agree with you, to a point on this. I think people see Aqua, or more importantly, Aqua and WinXX running side-by-side, I think it will click. It's hard to deny how compelling the interface is.
Price plays a huge role, and this is where Apple still has a real problem in some segments, especially people new to the brand.
That's a complex issue. Since they don't have the volume of say a Dell, they don't get all the discounts on the components. Plus there's just the issue of pure revenue. If they lower the prices, will that actually bring in significantly more buyers, or will it just reduce total revenue. I think the $799 iMac is a good test bed.
The Cube is probably too expensive, and poorly positioned, though. I'm not sure who's supposed to by it, except people with extra cash laying around. If there weren't dual G4s available for just slightly more, it wouldn't be such a big issue. But on the other hand, I have no idea how much it costs to develop and produce that thing. There are a lot of new procedures that had to be developed to come up with that casing, so maybe the initial margin isn't soo high after all.
As a side note, people really shouldn't be that suprised at hairline fractures in the cube casing, as nothing like this has really been put out on the market before, especially without a fan. It's largely experimental. What's ridiculous is how Apple appears to be dealing with it.
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Scott Stevenson
He then said he didn't think Easel would ever work because they were "just slapping a UI on top of a Unix system". The guy sitting next to me almost split a kidney laughing.
If you think Mac OS X is just a pretty UI slapped on top of Mach, methinks you need to do some more reading and/or beta testing.
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Scott Stevenson
Oh, yes. I beleive they tried to kill Cocoa, but the it wouldn't die. I hope that *now* they will push cocoa as much as they can. It is rather easy:
There is some debate as to whether Apple tried to kill off Objective-C, but I don't think killing off Cocoa was ever in the cards.
This looks like a open source MacOS X clone on the horizon... maybe in 3 or 4 years.
It depends on what you're hoping to get out of Mac OS X. The most common reasons seem to be:
1) Love Mac hardware and general Apple system design concepts, want a good OS to go with it
2) Love Unix, want a well-designed GUI to go with it
3) Want anything that is not Windows and can still run most mainstream apps (read: Office)
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Scott Stevenson
Of course, when the Dock in OS X starts to fill the bottom of the screen, navigating around got a little tricky. For me (today) that point was when I was jumping between 5 apps and 8 windows so I could crib data while installing tomcat
Say what you will, but this is one area where it's hard to criticize the dock. In Windows, you'll get 5-8 different tabs in the task bar that have the exact same IE icon and just a bit of text associated with them.
Mac OS X, however, brilliantly generates a thumbnail of each window you send to the dock, and you get the full title of the window when you mouse over it. If you want to quicker access to various open terminal, consider changing the default window title or the background color of them (perhaps different color for each host or active app), then saving these settings as a separate file. This should greatly speed up navigation.
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Scott Stevenson
The criticisms of the dock and the new Finder are well-founded and the research behind the criticisms is documented.
Please point me at this documentation. So far all the complaints I've seen have been anecdotal, and along the lines of people whining about things being "too different."
Of course, I absolutely could not stand the Control Strip and rarely used the Apple Menu (except for "Recent Documents"). They may have made sense individually, but in 2000, they didn't really seem to mesh well with each other or the overall UI design anymore. The control strip was original designed only for PowerBook users. It always seemed out of place to me. Do you develop a control strip module or a control panel, for example? It was time to start from a clean slate, IMHO.
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Scott Stevenson
Cool.... Mail via LDAP, that's a cool new feature. I'm surprised it comes free with the OS. I'm not aware of anyone else doing it. Are there any mail servers for it? Oh wait, you meant IMAP didn't you...
Acutally, there is LDAP support sprinkled throughout as well. Sherlock has supported LDAP searches for some time, and the Address Book app in Mac OS X can be pointed at LDAP servers as well. I imagine the Mail app can use LDAP too.
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Scott Stevenson
There is no doubt that taste plays a role in this kind of thing, but that makes it especially strange for Apple to go against the very well-documented tastes of its current users. They had to work hard to change some of these UI details that really did not have to change, and for what gain?
I'm so very sick of hearing this. Enough. 1984 is done. Let's move on.
I know some people feel that the Mac OS 9 is "their" OS (mostly due to nostalgia), but unfortunately, this doesn't translate into broader acceptance of Mac OS X. You should have seen the look of the faces of my family members when I showed them Mac OS X. They instantly wanted it. All the nostalgia-induced love of the same UI is useless if Apple isn't growing marketshare.
I can still remember how some people solidly believed how GUIs (in general) were a bad idea because they were too different. I can remember how people thought that the iMac wouldn't sell because it was too different. Maybe Mac OS X will fail because it's too different, but thank goodness we have people at Apple stretching the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. That's the goal of computing, isn't it?
There really is an awful lot to like about Mac OS X, which is why I suspect the flaws and weird parts seem the more striking: this really could have been almost perfect.
What do you mean "could have been?" It's still in beta. Do you realize how much has changed since DP4? If these issues are important to you, and you'd like to consider using the final version of Mac OS X, go over to the Mac OS X feedback form.
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Scott Stevenson
I mean, really, guys. What would the response be if Microsoft came out with their own version of Linux, complete with Office, but if in order to run it, you had to buy a mysterious 'firmware' card from Microsoft to plug into your machine?? Why does Apple get away with selling some of the worlds most closed hardware in these parts?
Because it's part of the reason things works so well on the platform. The same reason game console popularity has exploded in the past few years. Many people just want stuff to work.
Microsoft's markets and Apple's markets may have some overlap, but they have much different philosophies. Apple is meticulous about architecting the entire computing experience. Example: iMovie. The only reason this came together so quickly and has been such a hit was because they could change the 1) hardware 2) OS 3) application on a whim.
If you like, feel free to continue buying an OS from one company, and all your other hardware from other companies. That's fine. But allow me to have the choice to buy an entire computer, and have that manufacturer be held accountable for the entire experience, not just the OS, or just the CPU or just the hard drive. I don't have time for that BS.
Besides, if you want to run OSX without all the extra stuff, download Darwin and hack it into whatever you want.
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Scott Stevenson
The Desktop seems (to me) a poor rip of the NeXT Workspace Manager. It is real crappy, have many bugs, and is nowhere as usable as the program he tries to clone. It is interesting to see that it is (almost) the only important Carbon app shipped with the system.
As a side note, the purported reason that the "new Finder" (whatever qualfies as that) is written in Carbon, is that Apple is "eating its own dog food" (Jobs' words). At the 1998 Apple developers conference, Apple said it would develop at least one major Cabon app, and one major Cocoa app to prove that both were plausible, and to make sure they deal with any problems that crop up. The former is the new Finder, the latter is the Mail app included with the system.
Or at least this is how it was in May 1998.
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Scott Stevenson
Worst of the Unix and MacOS worlds put together.
.pdf.
:'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.
I would tend to disagree. In fact, I think it's just the opposite.
The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed.
This baffles me. I'm a "unix person" (have been using Unix for about 6 years -- SunOS, Solaris, Linux), and I'm actually quite amazed with how well the Mac and Unix worlds mesh under Mac OS X.
Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install).
For marketing/positioning reasons, it really doesn't make sense for Apple to include compilers and and X server with Mac OS X. They're not trying to be just another *nix distro.
The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.
No idea what this means. Classic is remarkably solid for me.
New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable.
I'd admit there are some rough edges, but I honestly thinks it's quite a revolution (in a good way). If you're on an iBook, yes you're going to have problems since you're maxed out at 800x600. As far as "not very customizable," nothing could be further from the truth. Most UI elements seem to be made up of PDF files stored throughout the system. Do a search for
Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface
This was inevitable, and necessary, IMHO. I'm pretty darn tired of 1984-centric UI.
Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).
Something isn't normal. I'm running on a Blue G3/400. The install and setup went seamless, and in the two weeks I've been using MOSX for my day-to-day work, I have yet to see anything resembling a system crash. Classic dies from time to time, but that's not entirely suprising at this stage.
On the other hand, I've heard of people seeing kernel panics in the beta. Since the differences between my experience and others is so great, I suspect that certain hardware configurations are far more stable at this point than others (rather than just being general kernel problems). Especially since I've heard of people completely ignoring the stated minimum requirements, and then acting suprised when things don't work right.
Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that things are still in progress. Note, for example, that there does not appear to be any support for 2D acceleration yet. This will slow things down substantially.
With 128MB of memory I found things quite usable (6-10 Classic/Carbon/Cocoa apps of varying sizes open), but not optimal. I added in another 128MB (256MB total) and the thing absolutely flies now. The OS boots faster, classic launches much faster faster, apps launch quicker, and the disk is rarely touched. I believe Apple is aiming to bring the minimum down to 64MB by the 1.0 release.
Also, you'd be suprised at how much faster the public beta is than DP4. I'm sure there are more optimizations to be done.
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Scott Stevenson
Why not the Macintosh (OS X) Foundation Classes ?
;)
MFC is already taken.
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Scott Stevenson
Antitrust laws are harmful to consumers. They raise prices, reduce competition, stifle innovation, and foster corruption of government officials. The laws are used not to 'manage competition', but as strategic weapons by less-successful competitors seeking an advantage over market leaders.
Thank you Mr. Freedom to Innovate.
But consider the case of preinstalling browsers. Microsoft was forbidding companies like Compaq from preinstalling Netscape and forcing them to install only IE, under threat of losing their Windows license. If that type of behavior goes unchecked, the web becomes little more that the Microsoft version of AOL. It doesn't matter how fantastic of a browser Netscape makes at this point, Compaq has the choice of being Microsoft's bitch, or going out of business.
Tell me how this does not harm consumers. Microsoft has way, way too much power.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
And of course if Palm does move to the StrongARM as they are rumored to be doing, it will get very interesting...
:)
That would be irony. Palm moving to the same platform as Newton.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Is webdav there? How do you turn it on?
/Library/WebServer/Configuration/apache.conf:
/System/Library/Apache/Modules/libdav.so
Apparently, you can mount WebDAV volumes on the desktop by just entering the address (http://webdav.company.com) in to the "Connect to server" dialog under the Go menu in the Finder. As far as turning on your own WebDAV server, I suppose you can turn it on by just uncommenting these two lines in
#LoadModule dav_module
#AddModule mod_dav.c
Save the file, restart Apache. I haven't tried it, but assume it will work. All the appropriate files are there.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
And why the hell can't Apple ever name anything that gives you an idea of it's purpose instead of giving it some cute nickname?
Like GNOME?
I'd rather have a cute nickname than a widly out-of-control buzzword fest like:
Java 2 and Objective-C API Set for Mac OS X
...
Pro Enterprise Edition.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
I have Tomcat running under OS 9
But Mac OS 9 doesn't hava Java 2 support, which is required for JSP 1.0+. How'd you do it?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Actually, all that good scripting power is already there in the default install. Well, at least TCL is for sure, I beleive Perl is as well.
Perl, TCL, Java, tcsh, all preinstalled. Along with OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Java2, WebDAV and the newset version of Apache.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Apple is probably going to spend a fair bit of money on the theoretical optimizations for the Mach microkernel that can (theoretically) make it faster. But, as far as the public knows, Linux holds the speed record right now.
Mac OS X public beta is considerably faster than even DP4, both of which run Mach 3.0. OSX Server has Mach 2.5 and display postscript, amongst many other differences. Mac OS X public beta and Mac OS X Server can't really be reasonably compared in terms of performance.
No doubt that LinuxPPC is fast, though.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
VNC (there's a java client which should run under MacOS X as well)
Actually, it runs suprisingly well under Mac OS 9 with IE5.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
It bothers me that Apple didn't include an X server
That would be a huge, huge mistake. The current Mac people would be expected to run X11 apps instead of Aqua apps. That would be a UI disaster. Very, very bad.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
And since X is a protocol, it is neither slow, buggy or holding anything back any more than HTTP is slow, buggy or holding the web back.
Actually, some people do believe this to be true. Who says a protocol can't be bad? And who says there isn't room for a better protocol than X?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Apple's version is the modlules it comes with - while webdav is there, there's no mod_perl, no php, and no mod_ssl. God knows how you'd add them
/Library/WebServer/Configuration/apache.conf.
I'm pretty sure there is a mod_ssl, actually, but it's disabled by default. OpenSSL, along with OpenSSH, are preinstalled on the machine.
Anyway, you add modules via Apache's DSO mechanism. If you're not famliar with this concept, the idea is that you only compile the module without recompiling apache. Only problem is, you still need compilers. This is why I putting up a page for people to download DSO modules precompiled for Mac OS X/Darwin. All they have to do is drop the file in and modify
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
From reading the article, it looks like the author hasn't even used the Mac OS X public beta yet, so in my mind, has very little room to criticize it. Comments from the article:
Apple is doing it again. By raising the bar so high - you need a minimum of a 128 megabyte G3 or G4 based Mac just to run Mac OS X
That's what you need to run the beta. I think the goal for 1.0 is 64MB. And unlike some other company's stated minimum requirements, these are actually realistic. I've had 6-10 apps (some Classic) open all day today, and the machine didn't flinch (which is vast departure from DP4). I have a Blue G3/400 with 128MB of RAM. It's not horribly old system, but even a G4/350 (not a typo) is faster.
You're cut off. In talking to Apple reps today I learned that the 128 megabyte limit is a bare bones minimum that even they don't recommend. 192 megabytes is the practical minimum.
All I can say is this isn't my experience (though, again it was with DP4).
The beauty of PCs, and why I feel Windows ultimately won out over Mac OS in the mass market despite sleazy underhanded marketing by both Apple and Microsoft, is that PCs don't go obsolete every 2 years! Any given PC can run a wide range of DOS and Windows releases.
This statement is really ironic is so many ways. But let's focus on one point. The reason that old PCs can run new versions of Windows (95/98/Me) is that Windows/DOS itself is old. So are the processors that power them (x86). The only real improvements have been end-user features. The same is the case on the Mac side of the world. Up until Mac OS 8.5 and 9, very little had changed in the system itself. I once heard an ex-Apple engineer joke that in the years since he left the company, the employee directory had changed more than the API documentation.
Mac OS X is a huge leap forward. Spend some time with the system and you'll understand. If you want the same basic infrastructure on less hardware, download Darwin (PPC or x86). If you want all the fancy extras, you need hardware to power it. Mac OS X has to emulate Classic as a matter of everyday life. That's no simple task, and it requires some ram to do it.
Is the hardware that Apple supports for Mac OS X a bit steep? Yes. But bear in mind Apple also cares about something called user experience. Microsoft may list a 486 processor on their box as a reasonable minimum. But even if it installs/boots on such hardware, you ain't gonna be a happy person. Apple wants the people who purchase Mac OS X to have a positive experience. This may mean not "supporting" older, more quirky hardware, even though the OS may still install on it.
BTW: I had a Pentium 166 that tried to run Windows 95 and some games on it (Total Annihilation, Quake II) on it. It wasn't pretty.
And people leave and the Mac market shrinks. They use some fancy advertising to win people back.
Please. Apple's engineering group alone has done amazing things in the last three years. Give credit where credit is due.
I predict a mass exodus of Mac users as a result of the arrogant and irresponsible policy Apple has created for Mac OS X. Poor backward compatibility for old apps.
Huh? Classic works remarkably well. In fact, it really sets new standards in emulation (it helps to be on the same native processor). Virtually all apps run, except those that require low-level hardware access. Apple has gone to great extents to be backwards compatible. Look what it did with Carbon. With Carbon did 90% of the work for porting ancient Mac apps to Mach. That's amazing stuff. Rhapsody was not slated to do this, btw, which is why it was a Bad Idea.
Added to the insult of having to pay to beta test.
Nobody's holding a gun to his head.
I just installed the Mac OS X public beta yeterday, and it is an amazing piece of work. Despite the fact that the Mac and Unix are essentially polar opposites, Apple has blended the two in a strikingly graceful way. Despite all the potential for culture clash, things frequently just work the way you expect them to.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Now, I don't know if anyone here recalls this, but NeXTSTEP ran on a 33-Mhz Motorola 68030 with 8 megs of RAM. So there's no reason Mac OS X should require a 500 Mhz G4 with 256 Megs of RAM except for the fact that Apple wants to sell hardware to their customers.
Have you read ANY documentation on Mac OS X? It ain't NextStep. NextStep, for example, doesn't have to emulate Mac OS 9, which eats gobs of ram and cpu.
And yes, Apple does want to sell hardware to their customers.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson