While I agree w/ the spirit of what was feldsteins said, I feel obliged to comment on one aspect:
>the iDVD software was free when you bought Apple's >DVD-burning Mac. It was not legally acquireable in >any other way. Therefore, those who owned a legal >license to use the software already had an Apple- >branded DVD-burner.
Apple has included iDVD with their Mac OS 9 system software on at least a few occasions including systems which do not have a DVD SuperDrive---we don't have any here at work, and yet I've got iDVD here on my hard drive.
However, it does refuse to start up (the required hardware could not be found) or some such, so one can see that Apple's complaint had some merit (no altering their binary), but to say that there was no legal way to have that binary is IME incorrect.
More proper would've been to've said there was no legal way to use it w/o an Apple-branded SuperDrive.
I'd said: >Fink puts everything in/sw, and so has a hard >time playing nicely w/ tools which expect things >to be in normal places. Apple didn't help this by >using Wilfredo Sanchez's path preferences instead >of a more normative default.
Probably should've mentioned that was w/ the 10.0 release and that it changed w/ 10.1....
The sad thing here is that what's being lost in all this sturm und drang is that Mac OS X is seriously set back by this.
The Apple installer uses Pax instead of gnutar, and will blow away a link posing as a directory (so you can't mount an extra hard drive w/ full control / convenience).
http://www.osxgnu.org/ uses it (with extensions) though.
Fink puts everything in/sw, and so has a hard time playing nicely w/ tools which expect things to be in normal places. Apple didn't help this by using Wilfredo Sanchez's path preferences instead of a more normative default.
Gerben Wierda has a nice i-installer, but it's mostly used by the TeX community and has a limited number of packages available for it (and of course if one wants up-dates of classes, one must install them oneself using tex docstrip foo.ins or some such)
Oh for the halcyon days of NeXT when everything came in a.pkg, stored itselsf in/NextLibrary/receipts and it ``just worked''.
Okay, I forced myself to read through the remainder.
It doesn't do much for me, and I've considered most of those points already---I agree people should think more about things but still feel that people can learn a lot from archetypes and old stories, and that some of what's learned can / should be applied to one's contemporary life.
Brin seems to ignore completely for example, the matter of Gollum and that it was pity for him which had kept him alive, staying Bilbo's hand when otherwise he might've slain him.
William
Re:Frodo often seen as ``everyman''
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
My paternal great-grandfather only went to soldier in the Civil War because the Union seemed likely to attempt to destroy the bridge by which he shipped good from his farm to market. His farm was worked by himself, his sons and sharecroppers, most of whom were free blacks---I was fortunate when I was growing up to've lived next to the son of one of those sharecroppers, and at his side I learned the measure of a furlong (a furrow's length, the distance a horse can plow before it grows tired) and how to plant by the moon and a lot of other things which he'd learned from my grandfather who'd also been a sharecropper on my great-grandfather's farm.
People don't remember that Gen. Robert E. Lee personally cared for his family's last servant on his deathbed, nor that after his surrender, in Richmond while attending church, when a black gentleman went down from the coloured loft to pray at the altar after a service, Gen. Lee joined him, which should have (but sadly didn't) set the tone for the antebellum south.
Like I said, history and its attendant issues are far more complex than most people trouble to think about.
For those who're curious about the Old South and the ``recent unpleasantness'' as my Great-Aunt Annie-Mae called it, look up Fra. Ryan Abrams' poetry, esp. ``The Conquered Banner.''
William
Frodo often seen as ``everyman''
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 3, Interesting
in many academic writings, so I don't see where Brin gets, ``Through doughty Frodo, noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel, he proclaimed the paramount importance -- above nations and civilizations -- of the indomitable Romantic hero.''
Even Aragorn begins by seeming quite commonplace and ordinary and certainly the, ``Scouring of the Shire'' sequence (okay, we're into the next book, but...) argues for the necessity and virtue of the ordinary person doing what is right because it is right and theirs (and no one else's) to do.
At least he later says, ``All right, I read Tolkien's epic trilogy a bit unconventionally,''
I've never understood why people complain of royalty and their perquisites---certainly ``lese majeste'' was balanced by ``oblesse noblige''---far more appropriate than the riches of robber and merchant ``barons''. Should we argue for taking away the wealth of the Kennedys and Rockefellers as well? I find a family who traded power into a position of responsibility far more laudable than one which went for the root of all evil instead.
Tolkien is far more moral and complex than Brin makes him out to be and the ascension of royalty is far more complex than the black / white, good bad thing which he describes it as.
William (who couldn't bring himself to read beyond the first page---moderate accordingly)
Slideshowbob said: >NeXTStep's left hand scrollbars were wrong. >Think about it, within the span of 15 pixels you would >a) scroll the content b) change the selection c) resize the window.
Right. Everything all together for efficient mousing w/ minimal travel.
> NeXTStep also had a monolithic main menu, which I > think you knew. Maybe you meant the horizontal menu bar?
I meant monolithic in terms of immovable, unable to hide away / dispose of when one wants more screen space.
>Supportably better by Fitt's law.
I don't want only a vertical menu, but a choice between the twain.
>And I have right-click menus that are fully populated in all the apps that I use, *shrug*
I hardly consider Mac OS X's Carbon Finder's contextual menu to be fully populated, there're what, three entries in it?
(tear off sub-menus) >I would welcome them back provided the mechanism for tearing them off is done well (NeXTStep's >were too easy to accidentally tear off when accessing the lowest menu item or a submenu)
How so? One could only tear them off by dragging the sub menu by its title bar _which is at the _top_ of the menu_. Have you ever used NeXTstep?
(Services) >Carbon application developers will add support for those things when Apple provides the APIs >(or in the case of Services, *now* that Apple has provided the APIs -- they weren't available until 10.2)
I'm currently beta-testing for a Carbon application which doesn't support Services---the lead Mac developer claims supporting such would require a complete re-write, which I've begun arguing for.
>Of course, you could always not use Carbon applications and live in your happy little ivory >tower if they bother you so much.
Why should I have to enter a spelling dictionary exception more than once? Why should I have to switch apps to be able to do something as simple as convert the case of a text string?
It's actually been a lot easier to just stick with NeXTstep.
(menu shortcut styles) >You've provided an excellent example of one of the things I hate(d) about NeXTStep.. uppercase vs. >lowercase menu labels are extremely difficult to differentiate on a high-res monitor!
That's another thing which Apple hasn't yet gotten right---there needs to be a way to crank up the dpi representation on-screen. 72dpi just doesn't cut it anymore.
>The Mac way is far better, if command-shift-s is the menu equivalent, then you will see the command >symbol, the shift symbol, and an s in the menu. WYSIEWYG.
Except that the ``E'' depends on which keyboard one has. Some of Apple's keyboards have different symbols. Moreover, the funky symbols are a nuisance to write down / transcribe / communicate via e-mail.
(re print menus) >Fax and Save to file are in my print dialogs. PDF rather than PostScript *shrug*.
But Fax isn't in everyone's, so consistency takes a big hit there. The contortions one has to go through to get PostScript (for distilling for publishing purposes) are unpleasant.
I'd said: >>File dialogue boxes which no longer support tab >>completion, filename selection to populate the >>filename text field, or automatically creating >>a path of folder(s) in which to save a file
>Yet another example of something the Classic Mac implementation did very well.
You're kidding, right? There's no tab completion or any other way to fill in a filename to use it or edit the end of it in a Classic Mac OS dialogue box. You have to click the (New Folder) button once for each folder one wishes to add---by contrast in NeXTstep, one could fill in as many as one wished separated by slashes, and have the created with a single confirming click in a dialogue box.
>Why OS X regressed in this area is unexplainable, but don't blame the Classic Mac UI.
Right, because it didn't regress, it improved over the Classic Mac UI, but not over that of NeXTstep.
cpt. kangarooski said: >However, catering to the NeXT faithful is just as bad.
Having catered to the NeXT faithful would've avoided that laundry list of problems which I cited.
(snip) >The NeXT purchase was a mistake.
Gee, wish my last mistake had resulted in selling ~100,000 copies of a beta program. I wish my company would make a mistake which would result in their hiring a computer programmer in the same class as Avadis Tevainian (the most heavily recruited computer science student of all time by some accounts w/ job offers from AT&T, IBM, Microsoft and NeXT).
(re: Unix covered w/ a world-class graphical shell) >Second, seeing something won't stop you from being effected by it.
Right, one never sees the underlying Unix in NeXTstep unless one chooses to go looking for it.
(re: multi-user things) >It should be so much better that it's in a class of its own.
Apple did that once, and was absolutely incompatible w/ the rest of the world. On some things, one has to work w/ what's available.
(re: shell) >But it basically has tcsh. It doesn't have a new shell that is so good that no one would ever consider the alternatives.
Find me another implementation of tcsh which pervasively supports drag-drop, and has nifty features like pbcopy and pbpaste and open.
>Apple isn't trying to kick ass anymore.
Yeah, they are, your problem is that one of the arses which they've been targetting is the Mac faithful (for some minor love taps).
cpt. kangarooski said: >Fundementally, that they no longer had a >committment to creating a superior UI.
Right, as I pointed out they chose to cater to the Mac faithful.
>Unix >was never designed to have a particularly >good UI -- by using it, it compromised >everything else. After all, how do you have an >OS which is in every way intended to promote >usability if a huge portion of it was never >intended to do so?
It's covered over with an elegant, consistent graphical interface and the typical user never sees it?
I don't see that you've demonstrated that Mac OS X is bad at multiple-user things---certainly SoftMagic's Project-M never would've allowed such difficulties as I described (Two copies of Quark having a file open, the last one closed trumps previous changes).
(re: a typical user needing access to a CLI) >Delete files? The permissions are so royally >fucked up on OS X that it's routine to see >people be unable to delete their files and be >told to resort to its craptastic shell in order to >accomplish this trivial task.
That doesn't jibe with my experience---I've never had an occasion where a file refused to be deleted in Mac OS X from my Administrator account. Have you reported such things to Apple?
Moreover, Mac OS X has a very nice shell with tab completion of filenames and which supports drag / drop from the GUI.
cpt. kangarooski said: >I would argue that using NeXT ruined Apple's UI work...
and your arguments for this are?
>NextStep had all sorts of terrible Unixisms in it >that have infected the Mac, e.g. the file >structure,
As opposed to the typical ad hoc mess w/ no system or file hierarchy of the typical Mac user's desktop?
>security and multiuser systems,
Oh, it was a _good_ thing for one of my co-worker's files to've gotten clobbered by another co-worker who'd had the file open in Quark XPress so that when it was closed by the second co-worker Quark restored the file as it was when originally opened losing ~3 hours work?
Wait, networking should only be for connecting to a printer like on a 128KB Mac? and one should use sneakernet and only share files on floppies?
>outdated CLIs, etc.
Show me a Mac tool which approaches the efficiency of handling complex file editing tasks as sed and awk and this might have some merit as an argument. The other day one of our clients added two pages to the middle of a book whose index had already been done (manually:(. While the Mac operators were busy trying to figure out how many pieces to cut the index into so as to have multiple people up-date it by hand, I dumped to XTags, fed the file through a one-line awk script to increment all of the page numbers larger than 436 by two and had it loaded back into Quark XPress for proofing before they'd decided that they'd all need to work on it (four people) and to drop all other production to get it done.
>MacOS should have been replaced by the mid-90's at >the latest, but it's sad to see the crap coming >out of Cupertino these days.
Only because it's not as nice as what NeXT used to make available. It's far better than what Apple has in the past made with the exception of A/UX and when they were selling OpenStep (which I wish they'd continued).
I'd put in: Verbose Mac-style menu shortcut descriptions which use weird symbols which aren't even consistently on all Apple keyboards (NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == S, Save As == S)
That last should've been: NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == (CloverleafCommandSymbol) S, Save As == (CloverleafCommandSymbol) (Shift) S
Except that the usability, consistency and elegance of NeXTstep has been sacrificed to appease the Mac faithful's absolute assurance that the Macintosh Way is the one true way.
Scroll bars are on the wrong (right) side, so using NeXT's wonderful Miller column browser becomes an awkward back and forth burlesque for broad directory structures w/ lots of entries
Monolithic main menu, no pop-up right-button main menu (and the contextual menu is all-too sparsely populated most times) which can become gestural in nature with sufficient usage (Altsys Virtuoso - right click, Arrange | Path Operations | Punch is a single flick of the mosue for me;)
No tear off sub-menus---in NeXTstep one can customize the UI by strategically tearing off and placing sub-menus (need to print a bunch of Envelopes? Install Poste.app, open one's word processor, tear off the Services menu and position it so that ``Print Envelope'' is at (say) the bottom left corner of the screen---you can get to it with a single flick of the mouse and a click).
Carbon implementations drag UI expectations down---all too often they don't support Services, File Filters &c. Sometimes not even Quartz live-window drag / re-size
Verbose Mac-style menu shortcut descriptions which use weird symbols which aren't even consistently on all Apple keyboards (NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == S, Save As == S)
Dumbed-down print dialog box w/ no Fax or Save (PostScript) buttons
File dialogue boxes which no longer support tab completion, filename selection to populate the filename text field, or automatically creating a path of folder(s) in which to save a file
And altogether too many apps haven't made the transition yet---I still want replacements for NoteBook.app, Lotus Improv / Quantrix, TouchType.app, Altsys Virtuoso (and don't point me at Illustrator or FreeHand, the UI for the former disappoints me, the latter isn't sufficiently integrated w/ Mac OS X, no Services, &c.), TeXView.app (TeXShop is quite nice, but lacks the IPC (inter-process communication) which made InstantTeX possible---EquationService.app isn't supported by a lot of apps too, so isn't as useful as TeXView.app's TeX Eq -> eps Service), Webster.app, Digital Librarian (MT Librarian is close, but crashes when I try to index texmf's doc tree), Digital Shakespeare, Oxford's Book of Quotations and TypeView.app
I've some information on NeXTstep and its UI on my personal pages at http://members.aol.com/willadams but GNUstep sadly lost GYVE, so improving on NeXTstep / Altsys Virtuoso seems rather remote at this time:(
I am still mystified that a discussion like this can take place and the system which Donald E. Knuth created to enable him to write TeX (www.tug.org, see the book, _TeX: The Program_ for the pretty-printed source) and METAFONT (_METAFONT: The Program_) is almost never mentioned.
DEK has since written an entire book on the concept (_Literate Programming_ a CLSI series book) a decade ago, but one seldom sees source so provided.
There are some really cool example programs which're quite interesting (and educational) to read, for example:
Will Crowther's game Adventure - available here: http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/advent.w.gz (with an offer of a $2.56 reward check if one can find a bug), or as a document to just read here: http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf Or a CWEB version of the RPN calculator for K&R's C Book: http://www.literateprogramming.com/krcwsamp.pdf
Probably what really needs to happen is a way to post a program as a web page, then to click on a link on it, to automagically compile and run it....
Interestingly, I've found programs with interfaces modeled on the Star Trek: The Next Generation interface by Okuda, ``LCARS'' (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System) fairly useful on my Fujitsu pen slate. They're also called, ``Okudagrams'' (the gel-based mockups from the sets which occasionally become available for sale).
Fun too.
Unfortunately there isn't a real depth to them, and little in the way of productivity apps as-of-yet, but it does show potential, and it'd make an interesting alternative for Linux advocates to just cloning whatever MS is doing.
Quill and GDT - http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/quill/ (gest ural UI design)
SATIN - http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/satin/ (sket ch and ink-based toolkit)
DENIM and SILK - http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/ (info rmal tools for GUI and web design)
Someone else already mentioned Squeak, a SmallTalk implementation suitable for use w/ pens www.squeak.org, as well as www.handhelds.org, (which should be obvious)
www.mira2go.com had Linux pen systems pretty recently (and was even advertising here on Slashdot).
The critical issue to my mind is getting some sort of natural ink handling w/ nicely integrated gesture support as well as document annotation.
Alias Wavefront Sketchbook
(draw, annotate, present)
- http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/sketchbo ok/info.shtml
Even EDS is getting into things: http://www.eds.com/products/plm/teamcente r/ (but the project lead for that said this is a better url: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/021107/sfth058_1 .html )
www.infocater.com and www.pencomputing.com have reviews / product listings / links.
The name of a font as you note can be protected by trademark law, as can any other product name.
see www.typeright.org for more details
as regards cheap clones, well, sadly there're all too many of them available (and no, I'm not going to cite sources). Fonts like software are hard to create and should only be freely available if the designer so wishes (of course it helps if you get a six digit grant from the Department of the Navy and other sources as did Dr. Donald E. Knuth when he made Computer Modern).
William
drag-drop-(was Re:well, for one thing it kinda...)
on
What Happened to 5dwm?
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· Score: 2
Never used NeXTstep, huh? Drag-drop, and Services too.
NeXTstep had a marvellous integration and consistency which far surpassed anything else---esp. the Mac OS, and even Mac OS X (which is riddled w/ backwards-compatible Mac UI-isms which are execrable and excrutiating)
For those who're unfamiliar with Dr. Knuth and TeX, here're some links:
his home page: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
Google's directory page on him: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Hi story/ Pioneers/Knuth,_Donald/
If memory serves, this is a good inteview which explains TeX for the layman (read, non-print publishing professional) http://www.advogato.org/article/28. html
William (who has a check for pg. 43 of _Digital Typography_;)
I've wanted a pen slate system, nee PDA since reading Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ when I was a teenager---I've finally gotten one which is pretty decent (Fujitsu Point 510), which is running a fairly up-to-date Windows 95 w/ Pen Services 2.0 and the failings of the UI and integration are dis-heartening at times.
WinCE and even NewtOS 2.0 didn't cut it for me 'cause there's no bezier curve drawing package (I use Futurewave's SmartSketch (but HWR doesn't work in it!) which came from Go Corp.'s PenPoint platform) and FreeHand (which is directly compatible with Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube)), nor (complete) TeX implementation (there is an abbreviated LaTeX almost WYSIWYM editor for NewtOS 2.0).
I've posted a number of times to comp.sys.pen 'bout what software works and what doesn't, with little response.
But that's mostly 'bout capabilities.
UI-wise, I think there's still a lot to be learned / improved upon, beyond mere systemic integration.
I never found my Newton quite as comfortable as PenPoint, and there's nothing like to PenPoint for WinCE or Palm OS, so what I'd like to see is:
- UI as good / thorough / integrated as PenPoint
- artificial ``intelligence'' like that of the NewtOS
- resolution independence / scalable UI
- synchronization as effortless as Palm Pilot
- Desktop app support like to that of Pocket Word/Excel in WinCE
- app availability like Windows for Pen Computing (but with HWR always working)
- rich programming environment and nifty Services like Mac OS X / NeXTstep
- wide variety of available form-factors (from as small as a Rex credit card to full-sized pen slate)
- elegant hardware docking (like that of the Mitsubishi Amity VP)
- batteryless pen w/ pressure-sensitive (a la Wacom graphics tablet) input
I guess the ideal would be something like an ``OQO'' or IBM's ``metacard'' (or is it metapad?) which would work like a Palm Pilot, and which could be connected to larger displays, keyboards, etc. in a highly modular fashion
1957 Chevy- carbureted, change spark plugs at ~20,000 miles, tires which last ~30,000 miles, ~15MPG, probably no AC and AM only radio, might not have seatbelts
2002 Toyota - fuel-injected, possibly 100,000 miles to first tuneup, tires will last 50--60,000 miles, ~35MPG CD player, AC, seatbelts, airbag, crumple zone.
PDAs have a long way to go, as do portable computers---that said, the later Newtons were quite good, and the new pen slates are okay for Windows systems.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree w/ the spirit of what was feldsteins said, I feel obliged to comment on one aspect:
>the iDVD software was free when you bought Apple's
>DVD-burning Mac. It was not legally acquireable in
>any other way. Therefore, those who owned a legal
>license to use the software already had an Apple-
>branded DVD-burner.
Apple has included iDVD with their Mac OS 9 system software on at least a few occasions including systems which do not have a DVD SuperDrive---we don't have any here at work, and yet I've got iDVD here on my hard drive.
However, it does refuse to start up (the required hardware could not be found) or some such, so one can see that Apple's complaint had some merit (no altering their binary), but to say that there was no legal way to have that binary is IME incorrect.
More proper would've been to've said there was no legal way to use it w/o an Apple-branded SuperDrive.
William
I'd said: /sw, and so has a hard
>Fink puts everything in
>time playing nicely w/ tools which expect things
>to be in normal places. Apple didn't help this by
>using Wilfredo Sanchez's path preferences instead
>of a more normative default.
Probably should've mentioned that was w/ the 10.0 release and that it changed w/ 10.1....
The sad thing here is that what's being lost in all this sturm und drang is that Mac OS X is seriously set back by this.
/sw, and so has a hard time playing nicely w/ tools which expect things to be in normal places. Apple didn't help this by using Wilfredo Sanchez's path preferences instead of a more normative default.
.pkg, stored itselsf in /NextLibrary/receipts and it ``just worked''.
The Apple installer uses Pax instead of gnutar, and will blow away a link posing as a directory (so you can't mount an extra hard drive w/ full control / convenience).
http://www.osxgnu.org/ uses it (with extensions) though.
Fink puts everything in
Gerben Wierda has a nice i-installer, but it's mostly used by the TeX community and has a limited number of packages available for it (and of course if one wants up-dates of classes, one must install them oneself using tex docstrip foo.ins or some such)
Oh for the halcyon days of NeXT when everything came in a
William
Okay, I forced myself to read through the remainder.
It doesn't do much for me, and I've considered most of those points already---I agree people should think more about things but still feel that people can learn a lot from archetypes and old stories, and that some of what's learned can / should be applied to one's contemporary life.
Brin seems to ignore completely for example, the matter of Gollum and that it was pity for him which had kept him alive, staying Bilbo's hand when otherwise he might've slain him.
William
My paternal great-grandfather only went to soldier in the Civil War because the Union seemed likely to attempt to destroy the bridge by which he shipped good from his farm to market. His farm was worked by himself, his sons and sharecroppers, most of whom were free blacks---I was fortunate when I was growing up to've lived next to the son of one of those sharecroppers, and at his side I learned the measure of a furlong (a furrow's length, the distance a horse can plow before it grows tired) and how to plant by the moon and a lot of other things which he'd learned from my grandfather who'd also been a sharecropper on my great-grandfather's farm.
People don't remember that Gen. Robert E. Lee personally cared for his family's last servant on his deathbed, nor that after his surrender, in Richmond while attending church, when a black gentleman went down from the coloured loft to pray at the altar after a service, Gen. Lee joined him, which should have (but sadly didn't) set the tone for the antebellum south.
Like I said, history and its attendant issues are far more complex than most people trouble to think about.
For those who're curious about the Old South and the ``recent unpleasantness'' as my Great-Aunt Annie-Mae called it, look up Fra. Ryan Abrams' poetry, esp. ``The Conquered Banner.''
William
in many academic writings, so I don't see where Brin gets, ``Through doughty Frodo, noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel, he proclaimed the paramount importance -- above nations and civilizations -- of the indomitable Romantic hero.''
Even Aragorn begins by seeming quite commonplace and ordinary and certainly the, ``Scouring of the Shire'' sequence (okay, we're into the next book, but...) argues for the necessity and virtue of the ordinary person doing what is right because it is right and theirs (and no one else's) to do.
At least he later says, ``All right, I read Tolkien's epic trilogy a bit unconventionally,''
I've never understood why people complain of royalty and their perquisites---certainly ``lese majeste'' was balanced by ``oblesse noblige''---far more appropriate than the riches of robber and merchant ``barons''. Should we argue for taking away the wealth of the Kennedys and Rockefellers as well? I find a family who traded power into a position of responsibility far more laudable than one which went for the root of all evil instead.
Tolkien is far more moral and complex than Brin makes him out to be and the ascension of royalty is far more complex than the black / white, good bad thing which he describes it as.
William
(who couldn't bring himself to read beyond the first page---moderate accordingly)
Slideshowbob said:
r y/docum entation/nextuiguide.pdf
>NeXTStep's left hand scrollbars were wrong.
>Think about it, within the span of 15 pixels you would
>a) scroll the content b) change the selection c) resize the window.
Right. Everything all together for efficient mousing w/ minimal travel.
> NeXTStep also had a monolithic main menu, which I
> think you knew. Maybe you meant the horizontal menu bar?
I meant monolithic in terms of immovable, unable to hide away / dispose of when one wants more screen space.
>Supportably better by Fitt's law.
I don't want only a vertical menu, but a choice between the twain.
>And I have right-click menus that are fully populated in all the apps that I use, *shrug*
I hardly consider Mac OS X's Carbon Finder's contextual menu to be fully populated, there're what, three entries in it?
(tear off sub-menus)
>I would welcome them back provided the mechanism for tearing them off is done well (NeXTStep's
>were too easy to accidentally tear off when accessing the lowest menu item or a submenu)
How so? One could only tear them off by dragging the sub menu by its title bar _which is at the _top_ of the menu_. Have you ever used NeXTstep?
Please read this:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/nextlibra
before responding, 'kay?
(Services)
>Carbon application developers will add support for those things when Apple provides the APIs
>(or in the case of Services, *now* that Apple has provided the APIs -- they weren't available until 10.2)
I'm currently beta-testing for a Carbon application which doesn't support Services---the lead Mac developer claims supporting such would require a complete re-write, which I've begun arguing for.
>Of course, you could always not use Carbon applications and live in your happy little ivory
>tower if they bother you so much.
Why should I have to enter a spelling dictionary exception more than once? Why should I have to switch apps to be able to do something as simple as convert the case of a text string?
It's actually been a lot easier to just stick with NeXTstep.
(menu shortcut styles)
>You've provided an excellent example of one of the things I hate(d) about NeXTStep.. uppercase vs.
>lowercase menu labels are extremely difficult to differentiate on a high-res monitor!
That's another thing which Apple hasn't yet gotten right---there needs to be a way to crank up the dpi representation on-screen. 72dpi just doesn't cut it anymore.
>The Mac way is far better, if command-shift-s is the menu equivalent, then you will see the command
>symbol, the shift symbol, and an s in the menu. WYSIEWYG.
Except that the ``E'' depends on which keyboard one has. Some of Apple's keyboards have different symbols. Moreover, the funky symbols are a nuisance to write down / transcribe / communicate via e-mail.
(re print menus)
>Fax and Save to file are in my print dialogs. PDF rather than PostScript *shrug*.
But Fax isn't in everyone's, so consistency takes a big hit there. The contortions one has to go through to get PostScript (for distilling for publishing purposes) are unpleasant.
I'd said:
>>File dialogue boxes which no longer support tab
>>completion, filename selection to populate the
>>filename text field, or automatically creating
>>a path of folder(s) in which to save a file
>Yet another example of something the Classic Mac implementation did very well.
You're kidding, right? There's no tab completion or any other way to fill in a filename to use it or edit the end of it in a Classic Mac OS dialogue box. You have to click the (New Folder) button once for each folder one wishes to add---by contrast in NeXTstep, one could fill in as many as one wished separated by slashes, and have the created with a single confirming click in a dialogue box.
>Why OS X regressed in this area is unexplainable, but don't blame the Classic Mac UI.
Right, because it didn't regress, it improved over the Classic Mac UI, but not over that of NeXTstep.
William
cpt. kangarooski said:
>However, catering to the NeXT faithful is just as bad.
Having catered to the NeXT faithful would've avoided that laundry list of problems which I cited.
(snip)
>The NeXT purchase was a mistake.
Gee, wish my last mistake had resulted in selling ~100,000 copies of a beta program. I wish my company would make a mistake which would result in their hiring a computer programmer in the same class as Avadis Tevainian (the most heavily recruited computer science student of all time by some accounts w/ job offers from AT&T, IBM, Microsoft and NeXT).
(re: Unix covered w/ a world-class graphical shell)
>Second, seeing something won't stop you from being effected by it.
Right, one never sees the underlying Unix in NeXTstep unless one chooses to go looking for it.
(re: multi-user things)
>It should be so much better that it's in a class of its own.
Apple did that once, and was absolutely incompatible w/ the rest of the world. On some things, one has to work w/ what's available.
(re: shell)
>But it basically has tcsh. It doesn't have a new shell that is so good that no one would ever consider the alternatives.
Find me another implementation of tcsh which pervasively supports drag-drop, and has nifty features like pbcopy and pbpaste and open.
>Apple isn't trying to kick ass anymore.
Yeah, they are, your problem is that one of the arses which they've been targetting is the Mac faithful (for some minor love taps).
William
cpt. kangarooski said:
>Fundementally, that they no longer had a
>committment to creating a superior UI.
Right, as I pointed out they chose to cater to the Mac faithful.
>Unix
>was never designed to have a particularly
>good UI -- by using it, it compromised
>everything else. After all, how do you have an
>OS which is in every way intended to promote
>usability if a huge portion of it was never
>intended to do so?
It's covered over with an elegant, consistent graphical interface and the typical user never sees it?
I don't see that you've demonstrated that Mac OS X is bad at multiple-user things---certainly SoftMagic's Project-M never would've allowed such difficulties as I described (Two copies of Quark having a file open, the last one closed trumps previous changes).
(re: a typical user needing access to a CLI)
>Delete files? The permissions are so royally
>fucked up on OS X that it's routine to see
>people be unable to delete their files and be
>told to resort to its craptastic shell in order to
>accomplish this trivial task.
That doesn't jibe with my experience---I've never had an occasion where a file refused to be deleted in Mac OS X from my Administrator account. Have you reported such things to Apple?
Moreover, Mac OS X has a very nice shell with tab completion of filenames and which supports drag / drop from the GUI.
William
Oh yes, one other question:
Name something in Mac OS X which a typical user would want to do which _requires_ one to make use of the CLI.
William
cpt. kangarooski said:
:(. While the Mac operators were busy trying to figure out how many pieces to cut the index into so as to have multiple people up-date it by hand, I dumped to XTags, fed the file through a one-line awk script to increment all of the page numbers larger than 436 by two and had it loaded back into Quark XPress for proofing before they'd decided that they'd all need to work on it (four people) and to drop all other production to get it done.
>I would argue that using NeXT ruined Apple's UI work...
and your arguments for this are?
>NextStep had all sorts of terrible Unixisms in it
>that have infected the Mac, e.g. the file
>structure,
As opposed to the typical ad hoc mess w/ no system or file hierarchy of the typical Mac user's desktop?
>security and multiuser systems,
Oh, it was a _good_ thing for one of my co-worker's files to've gotten clobbered by another co-worker who'd had the file open in Quark XPress so that when it was closed by the second co-worker Quark restored the file as it was when originally opened losing ~3 hours work?
Wait, networking should only be for connecting to a printer like on a 128KB Mac? and one should use sneakernet and only share files on floppies?
>outdated CLIs, etc.
Show me a Mac tool which approaches the efficiency of handling complex file editing tasks as sed and awk and this might have some merit as an argument. The other day one of our clients added two pages to the middle of a book whose index had already been done (manually
>MacOS should have been replaced by the mid-90's at
>the latest, but it's sad to see the crap coming
>out of Cupertino these days.
Only because it's not as nice as what NeXT used to make available. It's far better than what Apple has in the past made with the exception of A/UX and when they were selling OpenStep (which I wish they'd continued).
William
I'd put in:
:(
Verbose Mac-style menu shortcut descriptions which use weird symbols which aren't even consistently on all Apple keyboards (NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == S, Save As == S)
That last should've been:
NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == (CloverleafCommandSymbol) S, Save As == (CloverleafCommandSymbol) (Shift) S
Used angle brackets
Except that the usability, consistency and elegance of NeXTstep has been sacrificed to appease the Mac faithful's absolute assurance that the Macintosh Way is the one true way.
;)
:(
Scroll bars are on the wrong (right) side, so using NeXT's wonderful Miller column browser becomes an awkward back and forth burlesque for broad directory structures w/ lots of entries
Monolithic main menu, no pop-up right-button main menu (and the contextual menu is all-too sparsely populated most times) which can become gestural in nature with sufficient usage (Altsys Virtuoso - right click, Arrange | Path Operations | Punch is a single flick of the mosue for me
No tear off sub-menus---in NeXTstep one can customize the UI by strategically tearing off and placing sub-menus (need to print a bunch of Envelopes? Install Poste.app, open one's word processor, tear off the Services menu and position it so that ``Print Envelope'' is at (say) the bottom left corner of the screen---you can get to it with a single flick of the mouse and a click).
Carbon implementations drag UI expectations down---all too often they don't support Services, File Filters &c. Sometimes not even Quartz live-window drag / re-size
Verbose Mac-style menu shortcut descriptions which use weird symbols which aren't even consistently on all Apple keyboards (NeXTstep, Save == s, Save As == S; Mac OS X, Save == S, Save As == S)
Dumbed-down print dialog box w/ no Fax or Save (PostScript) buttons
File dialogue boxes which no longer support tab completion, filename selection to populate the filename text field, or automatically creating a path of folder(s) in which to save a file
And altogether too many apps haven't made the transition yet---I still want replacements for NoteBook.app, Lotus Improv / Quantrix, TouchType.app, Altsys Virtuoso (and don't point me at Illustrator or FreeHand, the UI for the former disappoints me, the latter isn't sufficiently integrated w/ Mac OS X, no Services, &c.), TeXView.app (TeXShop is quite nice, but lacks the IPC (inter-process communication) which made InstantTeX possible---EquationService.app isn't supported by a lot of apps too, so isn't as useful as TeXView.app's TeX Eq -> eps Service), Webster.app, Digital Librarian (MT Librarian is close, but crashes when I try to index texmf's doc tree), Digital Shakespeare, Oxford's Book of Quotations and TypeView.app
I've some information on NeXTstep and its UI on my personal pages at http://members.aol.com/willadams but GNUstep sadly lost GYVE, so improving on NeXTstep / Altsys Virtuoso seems rather remote at this time
William
I am still mystified that a discussion like this can take place and the system which Donald E. Knuth created to enable him to write TeX (www.tug.org, see the book, _TeX: The Program_ for the pretty-printed source) and METAFONT (_METAFONT: The Program_) is almost never mentioned.
t .w.gz (with an offer of a $2.56 reward check if one can find a bug), or as a document to just read here: http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
DEK has since written an entire book on the concept (_Literate Programming_ a CLSI series book) a decade ago, but one seldom sees source so provided.
There are some really cool example programs which're quite interesting (and educational) to read, for example:
Will Crowther's game Adventure - available here: http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/adven
Or a CWEB version of the RPN calculator for K&R's C Book: http://www.literateprogramming.com/krcwsamp.pdf
Probably what really needs to happen is a way to post a program as a web page, then to click on a link on it, to automagically compile and run it....
William
No, it's a Lotus, from a Bond film w/ Roger Moore as Bond.
7 .h tm
Ah, here we are, Lotus Esprit S1 from _The Spy Who Loved Me_
http://www.iol.ie/~donohoer/0Lotus_Esprit_S1_00
William
Interestingly, I've found programs with interfaces modeled on the Star Trek: The Next Generation interface by Okuda, ``LCARS'' (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System) fairly useful on my Fujitsu pen slate. They're also called, ``Okudagrams'' (the gel-based mockups from the sets which occasionally become available for sale).
Fun too.
Unfortunately there isn't a real depth to them, and little in the way of productivity apps as-of-yet, but it does show potential, and it'd make an interesting alternative for Linux advocates to just cloning whatever MS is doing.
William
Here're a couple of links which may help with this sort of thing:
c ollaboration w/ PDAs)
t ural UI design)
t ch and ink-based toolkit)
o rmal tools for GUI and web design)
- http://www.linuxslate.org
(drivers &c. for Fujitsu and other pen slates, also XScribble (graffiti-like handwriting recogntion)
Various Berkeley Java based Pen / gestural UI things (w/ source):
starting at:
http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/
NotePals - http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/notepals/
(
Quill and GDT - http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/quill/
(ges
SATIN - http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/satin/
(ske
DENIM and SILK - http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/
(inf
Someone else already mentioned Squeak, a SmallTalk implementation suitable for use w/ pens www.squeak.org, as well as www.handhelds.org, (which should be obvious)
www.mira2go.com had Linux pen systems pretty recently (and was even advertising here on Slashdot).
The critical issue to my mind is getting some sort of natural ink handling w/ nicely integrated gesture support as well as document annotation.
William
(shamelessly taken from Motion Computing's page:r e_ coolstuff.asp )
o ok/info.shtml
e r/1 .html
https://www.motioncomputing.com/products/softwa
FranklinCovey TabletPlanner
(Planning, Scheduling, Notes)
- www.tabletplanner.com
Corel Grafigo
(Create & Collaborate)
- www.corel.com/grafigo
Zinio Reader
(Digital eMagazines & eBooks)
- www.zinio.com
This came from www.sportinit.com
Alias Wavefront Sketchbook
(draw, annotate, present)
- http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/sketchb
Even EDS is getting into things:
http://www.eds.com/products/plm/teamcent
(but the project lead for that said this is a better url:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/021107/sfth058_
)
www.infocater.com and www.pencomputing.com have reviews / product listings / links.
William
Actually it's more complex than that.
A digital font _program_ can be copyrighted.
The name of a font as you note can be protected by trademark law, as can any other product name.
see www.typeright.org for more details
as regards cheap clones, well, sadly there're all too many of them available (and no, I'm not going to cite sources). Fonts like software are hard to create and should only be freely available if the designer so wishes (of course it helps if you get a six digit grant from the Department of the Navy and other sources as did Dr. Donald E. Knuth when he made Computer Modern).
William
Never used NeXTstep, huh? Drag-drop, and Services too.
NeXTstep had a marvellous integration and consistency which far surpassed anything else---esp. the Mac OS, and even Mac OS X (which is riddled w/ backwards-compatible Mac UI-isms which are execrable and excrutiating)
William
http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/satin/
They have some sharp sample apps, and interesting publications.
William
For those who're unfamiliar with Dr. Knuth and TeX, here're some links:
i story/ Pioneers/Knuth,_Donald/
. html
;)
his home page:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
Google's directory page on him:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/H
If memory serves, this is a good inteview which explains TeX for the layman (read, non-print publishing professional)
http://www.advogato.org/article/28
William
(who has a check for pg. 43 of _Digital Typography_
I've wanted a pen slate system, nee PDA since reading Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ when I was a teenager---I've finally gotten one which is pretty decent (Fujitsu Point 510), which is running a fairly up-to-date Windows 95 w/ Pen Services 2.0 and the failings of the UI and integration are dis-heartening at times.
WinCE and even NewtOS 2.0 didn't cut it for me 'cause there's no bezier curve drawing package (I use Futurewave's SmartSketch (but HWR doesn't work in it!) which came from Go Corp.'s PenPoint platform) and FreeHand (which is directly compatible with Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube)), nor (complete) TeX implementation (there is an abbreviated LaTeX almost WYSIWYM editor for NewtOS 2.0).
I've posted a number of times to comp.sys.pen 'bout what software works and what doesn't, with little response.
But that's mostly 'bout capabilities.
UI-wise, I think there's still a lot to be learned / improved upon, beyond mere systemic integration.
I never found my Newton quite as comfortable as PenPoint, and there's nothing like to PenPoint for WinCE or Palm OS, so what I'd like to see is:
- UI as good / thorough / integrated as PenPoint
- artificial ``intelligence'' like that of the NewtOS
- resolution independence / scalable UI
- synchronization as effortless as Palm Pilot
- Desktop app support like to that of Pocket Word/Excel in WinCE
- app availability like Windows for Pen Computing (but with HWR always working)
- rich programming environment and nifty Services like Mac OS X / NeXTstep
- wide variety of available form-factors (from as small as a Rex credit card to full-sized pen slate)
- elegant hardware docking (like that of the Mitsubishi Amity VP)
- batteryless pen w/ pressure-sensitive (a la Wacom graphics tablet) input
I guess the ideal would be something like an ``OQO'' or IBM's ``metacard'' (or is it metapad?) which would work like a Palm Pilot, and which could be connected to larger displays, keyboards, etc. in a highly modular fashion
William
1957 Chevy- carbureted, change spark plugs at ~20,000 miles, tires which last ~30,000 miles, ~15MPG, probably no AC and AM only radio, might not have seatbelts
2002 Toyota - fuel-injected, possibly 100,000 miles to first tuneup, tires will last 50--60,000 miles, ~35MPG CD player, AC, seatbelts, airbag, crumple zone.
PDAs have a long way to go, as do portable computers---that said, the later Newtons were quite good, and the new pen slates are okay for Windows systems.
William
OklaKid said and asked:
>never heard of it, where are some screenshots???
How's your Russian? This was Google's sixth hit for ``Go PenPoint''
http://history.handy.ru/museum/eo.html
> will it run on a x86 ATX mainboards with
> intel or athlon CPU
http://www.globalmonitor.com/730Tos.html
Lots of links and information at the latter site.
William