I think what he's saying is that tabs make the interface inconsistent. One of the marks of good interface design is that the same actions accomplishes the same thing throughout the program.
It's a bit like the whole double-click mess. Tons of people double-click hyperlinks and form buttons in web pages because their experience with Mac-Finder/Win-Explorer tells them that double-click means "make this do something."
Anyway, I love tabbed web browsers -- I generally have 6-10 websites open at any time, and that's far too many windows to juggle. Especially given that OS X is so cluttered and all the widgets are huge -- I can never seem to fit enough in a 1024x768 screen.
I think the answer to this particular interface inconsistency problem is to make tabbed browsing available for advanced users who are bright enough to turn it on. A bit like two-button mice; don't ship them with the computers, but have support ready for those who want to go out and buy them.
A cursory look at a few of my web pages confirmed that Safari is not a Gecko browser. It does not support negative margin-top CSS values, and does not recognize DIV {overflow:auto;}. Chimera (and all Gecko browsers) handle all of these correctly.
The choice of this K stuff over Chimera/Gecko is puzzling, but the performance is there.
The Register wrote a great editorial on the importance of having a truly great web browser on the OS X platform. The short of it is, people are out there buying $2000+ iMacs and finding that they don't surf as well as $400 Walmart PCs. That makes getting a good browser on OS X damned important.
I'd have preferred they went with Gecco, but... whatever. So far, Safari seems nice. MUCH faster than Chimera, but the CSS isn't as good.
There's a good bit on Daring Fireball about GUI Scripting, a new feature of AppleScript that allows developers to control applications that do not have Applescript support. It's, um, weird.
It does a sort of Lynx emulation, actually. Go to View/Style and switch to User mode (not Author mode) and pick the text-only style at the bottom of the list.
Incidentally, you're right -- I use Lynx to test my sites for handicapped and vision-impaired accessibility. If a site can be read on Lynx, it can be read by anyone.
There is a glaring problem with Opera 7's much-touted "PDA support." Opera does not automatically pick up stylesheets declared as media="handheld". In other words, instead of using a stylesheet that specifically formats a page for PDAs and handheld devices, Opera will try to reformat the page on its own.
That's a pretty neat trick for pages whose designers aren't thinking about the bigger picture (the Hiptop does something similar), but a real pain in the ass for those of us who are building pages "the right way" (i.e. XHTML for content, CSS for layout). This is particularly annoying in that Opera claims to fully support W3C CSS Mobile Profile 1.0. As far as I can tell, it doesn't.
One reason: they're slow. An 800mhz C3 is NOT as fast as an 800mhz P3 or Athlon. An 800mhz processor really is acceptable for most work or even as a TV companion, but C3's are barely up to 500mhz standards.
If Transmeta could sell processor/board combinations as cheaply as VIA C3s, they'd murder the Mini-ITX market. Unfortunately, hobbyists and home-builders are not a priority to them.
Similar to the way that an Athlon 1600+ is faster than an older 1600mhz Tbird, the VIA C3 processors are nowhere near as fast as equivalently clocked Pentiums or Athlons. I'm highly skeptical that a 900mhz C3 is close to the performance of a 900mhz Crusoe, which by most accounts performs as you would expect a near-1ghz processor to do.
But man, Transmeta has totally missed the boat by not making basic, affordable computers available to hobbyists. FlexATX and C3-driven Mini-ITX boards are enjoying the kind of hobbyist popularity that helped put AMD on the map a few years ago. This $1000 "developer board" is too little, too late, and too much freakin' $$$!
...I'm sure they'll come up with some real winners.
.cam - nubile 16-year-old girls with Amazon wishlists, and the FBI spooks who lurk there
.bomb - all venture-capital-rich startups start here for one year. if the company has not purchased any Aeron chairs within that period, they get awarded a.com
.trek - a special little home for people who actually care that Enterprise and Nemesis are completely out of synch with the rest of the series
.slash - a copyright-free zone for hot man-on-man fan fiction. may have a little overlap with.trek
.google - because sooner or later, Google is going to become the Internet anyway
.mac - give them their own damned internet so the rest of us can hear how much prettier, faster and more expensive it is. Pages will only move at 56k speeds, but a special "double-pumped" technology using two phone lines will supposedly make it as quick as DSL.
I was pestering my brother-in-law to read Cryptonomicon for years, and left a hardcover at his home. He started reading, got hooked, but the hardcover was too inconvenient for him to lug around on the bus, etc.
So he hops on Kazaa and finds an eBook copy that will install on his Palm. Now, no legitimate electronic copy of Crypto exists (to the best of my knowledge), so this is probably a copy that some dedicated hackers scanned and OCR'ed page-by-page.
Now he AND my sister have become heavy readers again, but there's a catch -- they only want to read books they can download to their Palm. So they're basically stuck reading dedicated-geek crap like AD&D Dragonspear shit that fanboys go through the trouble of making their own digital copies of.
Let's hold a fund raiser to buy out Random House or Ballantine and hand it over to O'Reilly. Whaddayasay?;)
...you mean non-standard widgets and tools, then yeah. Those scrollbars on the documents, for example, aren't "real" Macintosh scrollbars, it's goofy proprietary code. When OS 9 (or was it 8?) had a facelift a few years back, XPress suddenly stopped matching the rest of the operating system and had to be patched up because of this.
You're exactly right about the "hacked up" bit. In any other Classic application, porting is relatively easy -- just recompile your code using Carbon and you're on your way. Quark XPress, on the other hand, needs to be rewritten from ground up.
Personally, I think this delay is great for the desktop publishing world, because it's allowed InDesign to get a (minor) foothold in the industry.
This is covered with red flags...
on
New Mad Max Film
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· Score: 3
$25m = Can you name a single movie where the lead made that kind of $$ that was actually any good? I'd rather see Guy Pearce (Memento) or Bruce Campbell get paid $1m to play Max.
"highly polished" == script-writing by committee, always a good sign.
"script has been in the works for 3 years" = "The first draft sucked. The second draft sucked too. 37 drafts later, we still think it might suck, but then, we're the kind of jerks who will put a script through three years worth of rewrites before shooting a lame horse."
My suggestion for the title: "Mad Max Resurrection." I wanna be optimistic, but oh man this looks bad...
If you're going to post some goofball disclaimer like "long-time PC supporter and disliker of Macs," why not at least be consistent and include "would-be towelboy of Steve Jobs" on all the pro-Mac reviews?
Anyway, I've been following the DVE articles for a while, and my impression is that White is a long-time Mac fan who is looking at objective benchmarks and finding himself somewhat disenchanted.
I can't believe they still haven't incorporated "single window mode" into the built-in tabbed browsing features of Mozilla. Every person I've talked into trying Mozilla wants to know why windows still open all over the place when they're using tabbed-browsing mode. Instructing them to go find an obscure plug-in, and then configure it, is not an acceptable solution for Joe Mousepad.
Like most other articles and editorials that criticize GUI design, he points out a lot of flaws, but few answers.
Oddly enough, most of his complaints about the handling of files are being addressed in the next Microsoft file system, that's reportedly being based on ODBC (effectively turning the entire file system into a massive database -- the BeOS guys tried and failed at doing something similar).
Perhaps the Windows right-click-drags he vilifies should be an "advanced feature" that has to be turned on manually, and maybe it isn't magically intuitive, but damn, I'd sure like to see him come up with an alternative that allows a user to quickly and easily take files and copy, move, or alias them with a single gesture this easily.
Assembly language is nearly as close to programming in the language computers actually speak as possibly, short of actually writing your code in binary or hexadecimal. In a language like Basic or C, you're using a lot of predefined functions and tools (like Print, Goto, etc.); in Assembly, you write practically everything yourself.
Assembly code is incredibly fast, and massively time consuming to write. It is very un-portable, though... assembly code written for an Intel Pentium-class chip sometimes won't work on an AMD chip or even a Pentium IV.
sorry... experimental Phoenix for OS X. p.s. I forgot to mention, it also has a Google searchbar!
Phoenix for Mac OS X
on
Midweek Upgrades
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· Score: 5, Interesting
While you're checking Chimera out, give Phoenix for OS X a try. This is an UN-official port of the Phoenix browser, which was created to accomplish more-or-less the same thing on Win and Linux that Chimera does.
The Phoenix group said that they weren't going to pursue an OS X version because the Chimera group has that covered for Mac users... but I gotta tell you, this "experiment" is already much faster than Chimera (on a G3 400mhz 300mb RAM, the differences are very pronounced; on a faster machine, possibly not so much).
It's clear that they're somewhat fans of Macs, but they don't buy the Jobs Distortion Field claims that a 1ghz G4 (or even dual 1ghz chips) are as fast as a 2ghz P4. They've been totally up-front and honest about the strengths and weaknesses of OS X, too. Ars Technica has consistently had the most fair and balanced coverage of Apple that I've seen anywhere.
"Hannibal" also has an incredible knack for making the workings of microprocessors understandable to those with no hardware engineering backgrounds.
Dumb remark. Office for OS X is gorgeous. Give the MS Mac guys credit where credit is due... or accept that your opinions of MS are blinded by zealotry.
(or maybe, just maybe, you really do think Office X is fugly... in which case you merely have bad taste)
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I think what he's saying is that tabs make the interface inconsistent. One of the marks of good interface design is that the same actions accomplishes the same thing throughout the program.
It's a bit like the whole double-click mess. Tons of people double-click hyperlinks and form buttons in web pages because their experience with Mac-Finder/Win-Explorer tells them that double-click means "make this do something."
Anyway, I love tabbed web browsers -- I generally have 6-10 websites open at any time, and that's far too many windows to juggle. Especially given that OS X is so cluttered and all the widgets are huge -- I can never seem to fit enough in a 1024x768 screen.
I think the answer to this particular interface inconsistency problem is to make tabbed browsing available for advanced users who are bright enough to turn it on. A bit like two-button mice; don't ship them with the computers, but have support ready for those who want to go out and buy them.
A cursory look at a few of my web pages confirmed that Safari is not a Gecko browser. It does not support negative margin-top CSS values, and does not recognize DIV {overflow:auto;}. Chimera (and all Gecko browsers) handle all of these correctly.
The choice of this K stuff over Chimera/Gecko is puzzling, but the performance is there.
The Register wrote a great editorial on the importance of having a truly great web browser on the OS X platform. The short of it is, people are out there buying $2000+ iMacs and finding that they don't surf as well as $400 Walmart PCs. That makes getting a good browser on OS X damned important.
I'd have preferred they went with Gecco, but... whatever. So far, Safari seems nice. MUCH faster than Chimera, but the CSS isn't as good.
There's a good bit on Daring Fireball about GUI Scripting, a new feature of AppleScript that allows developers to control applications that do not have Applescript support. It's, um, weird.
It does a sort of Lynx emulation, actually. Go to View/Style and switch to User mode (not Author mode) and pick the text-only style at the bottom of the list.
Incidentally, you're right -- I use Lynx to test my sites for handicapped and vision-impaired accessibility. If a site can be read on Lynx, it can be read by anyone.
There is a glaring problem with Opera 7's much-touted "PDA support." Opera does not automatically pick up stylesheets declared as media="handheld". In other words, instead of using a stylesheet that specifically formats a page for PDAs and handheld devices, Opera will try to reformat the page on its own.
That's a pretty neat trick for pages whose designers aren't thinking about the bigger picture (the Hiptop does something similar), but a real pain in the ass for those of us who are building pages "the right way" (i.e. XHTML for content, CSS for layout). This is particularly annoying in that Opera claims to fully support W3C CSS Mobile Profile 1.0. As far as I can tell, it doesn't.
That's a terrific idea. It's not as if there aren't any great local musicians in this town. And thanks for the sammich recommendation...
One reason: they're slow. An 800mhz C3 is NOT as fast as an 800mhz P3 or Athlon. An 800mhz processor really is acceptable for most work or even as a TV companion, but C3's are barely up to 500mhz standards.
If Transmeta could sell processor/board combinations as cheaply as VIA C3s, they'd murder the Mini-ITX market. Unfortunately, hobbyists and home-builders are not a priority to them.
Similar to the way that an Athlon 1600+ is faster than an older 1600mhz Tbird, the VIA C3 processors are nowhere near as fast as equivalently clocked Pentiums or Athlons. I'm highly skeptical that a 900mhz C3 is close to the performance of a 900mhz Crusoe, which by most accounts performs as you would expect a near-1ghz processor to do.
But man, Transmeta has totally missed the boat by not making basic, affordable computers available to hobbyists. FlexATX and C3-driven Mini-ITX boards are enjoying the kind of hobbyist popularity that helped put AMD on the map a few years ago. This $1000 "developer board" is too little, too late, and too much freakin' $$$!
and most importantly,
I was pestering my brother-in-law to read Cryptonomicon for years, and left a hardcover at his home. He started reading, got hooked, but the hardcover was too inconvenient for him to lug around on the bus, etc.
;)
So he hops on Kazaa and finds an eBook copy that will install on his Palm. Now, no legitimate electronic copy of Crypto exists (to the best of my knowledge), so this is probably a copy that some dedicated hackers scanned and OCR'ed page-by-page.
Now he AND my sister have become heavy readers again, but there's a catch -- they only want to read books they can download to their Palm. So they're basically stuck reading dedicated-geek crap like AD&D Dragonspear shit that fanboys go through the trouble of making their own digital copies of.
Let's hold a fund raiser to buy out Random House or Ballantine and hand it over to O'Reilly. Whaddayasay?
sigh
...you mean non-standard widgets and tools, then yeah. Those scrollbars on the documents, for example, aren't "real" Macintosh scrollbars, it's goofy proprietary code. When OS 9 (or was it 8?) had a facelift a few years back, XPress suddenly stopped matching the rest of the operating system and had to be patched up because of this.
You're exactly right about the "hacked up" bit. In any other Classic application, porting is relatively easy -- just recompile your code using Carbon and you're on your way. Quark XPress, on the other hand, needs to be rewritten from ground up.
Personally, I think this delay is great for the desktop publishing world, because it's allowed InDesign to get a (minor) foothold in the industry.
$25m = Can you name a single movie where the lead made that kind of $$ that was actually any good? I'd rather see Guy Pearce (Memento) or Bruce Campbell get paid $1m to play Max.
"highly polished" == script-writing by committee, always a good sign.
"script has been in the works for 3 years" = "The first draft sucked. The second draft sucked too. 37 drafts later, we still think it might suck, but then, we're the kind of jerks who will put a script through three years worth of rewrites before shooting a lame horse."
My suggestion for the title: "Mad Max Resurrection." I wanna be optimistic, but oh man this looks bad...
If you're going to post some goofball disclaimer like "long-time PC supporter and disliker of Macs," why not at least be consistent and include "would-be towelboy of Steve Jobs" on all the pro-Mac reviews?
Anyway, I've been following the DVE articles for a while, and my impression is that White is a long-time Mac fan who is looking at objective benchmarks and finding himself somewhat disenchanted.
Does he have any tips on running the sort of monopoly that a company like Microsoft could actually take notes from?
In my experience, PostgreSQL is faster if your code is well written and carefully optimized (particularly through careful use of transactions).
I can't believe they still haven't incorporated "single window mode" into the built-in tabbed browsing features of Mozilla. Every person I've talked into trying Mozilla wants to know why windows still open all over the place when they're using tabbed-browsing mode. Instructing them to go find an obscure plug-in, and then configure it, is not an acceptable solution for Joe Mousepad.
P.S. The default theme is impossibly ugly. ORBIT
Pity that they picked one of those ass-ugly Shuttle cases instead of a supersexy Soldam model.
Oddly enough, most of his complaints about the handling of files are being addressed in the next Microsoft file system, that's reportedly being based on ODBC (effectively turning the entire file system into a massive database -- the BeOS guys tried and failed at doing something similar).
Perhaps the Windows right-click-drags he vilifies should be an "advanced feature" that has to be turned on manually, and maybe it isn't magically intuitive, but damn, I'd sure like to see him come up with an alternative that allows a user to quickly and easily take files and copy, move, or alias them with a single gesture this easily.
Assembly language is nearly as close to programming in the language computers actually speak as possibly, short of actually writing your code in binary or hexadecimal. In a language like Basic or C, you're using a lot of predefined functions and tools (like Print, Goto, etc.); in Assembly, you write practically everything yourself.
Assembly code is incredibly fast, and massively time consuming to write. It is very un-portable, though... assembly code written for an Intel Pentium-class chip sometimes won't work on an AMD chip or even a Pentium IV.
sorry... experimental Phoenix for OS X. p.s. I forgot to mention, it also has a Google searchbar!
While you're checking Chimera out, give Phoenix for OS X a try. This is an UN-official port of the Phoenix browser, which was created to accomplish more-or-less the same thing on Win and Linux that Chimera does.
The Phoenix group said that they weren't going to pursue an OS X version because the Chimera group has that covered for Mac users... but I gotta tell you, this "experiment" is already much faster than Chimera (on a G3 400mhz 300mb RAM, the differences are very pronounced; on a faster machine, possibly not so much).
mmyeah, and if Sony and Dell still made laptops with 500mhz P3 processors, we might get 8-hour PC laptops too.
(I'm not being entirely facetious, I actually think a slow processor, gobs of RAM, fast HD, super-battery-life laptop would be neat-o)
"Hannibal" also has an incredible knack for making the workings of microprocessors understandable to those with no hardware engineering backgrounds.
Dumb remark. Office for OS X is gorgeous. Give the MS Mac guys credit where credit is due... or accept that your opinions of MS are blinded by zealotry.
(or maybe, just maybe, you really do think Office X is fugly... in which case you merely have bad taste)