I took one look at the color scheme and immediately thought flamenco dancer (and not the male half of the traditional duo). It doesn't look bad but really, what's with the sexual insecurity bit?
Yeah.... Maroon! I picture a velvet leisure suit....
And posing it on the table with the (still in plastic) potpourri candle... very manly!
I guess silver and gray is for sissys.;)
Has anyone noticed that the air vents in the new case make the G4 look kind of like a Jeep?
Although I've never even been in the same room as Copland, I've got a developer copy of Mac OS 8.7, which I believe to be Rhapsody just before it was merged with NeXT.
I had a copy of System 7.7 once, which more or less became OS 8 (not System 8, aka Copland). It had some weird features that I don't remember anymore, that never made it into OS 8. Mostly it just crashed:)
Another still in MacOS 9 is the smart text handling - the ability to click on a text string and have an appropriate handler come up for it: web, address, phone number, etc.
I loved that! Apple Deta Detectors. Then there was ICeTEe that let you click on URLs in almost any application and launch your web browser.
For OS X there is ICeCoffEE which does the same thing as ICeTEe under OS 9, but only with Cocoa applications. BBEdit and TexEdit Plus are two Carbon applications that let you Command-click a url.
Keep in mind that not all apps are MacOS X compliant... even thru the Classic layer (i.e. Quark). And small businesses do not necesarily have the cash to make a jump like this right away. Chances are this initiative will have this small business not buying new Macs, but doing a lot more shopping on eBay for used Macs in the year 2003.
What exactly is your point here? If a company is currently using OS 9, no one is making them switch to OS X. You say they don't have the "cash to make the jump" -- what jump? To OS X? They don't have to switch. Either they have money for new Macs or they don't. If they are buying used Macs just to keep using old software... well that's not very smart, is it?
Every company I ever worked for, no matter how small, had to get the latest versions of everything, so when a customer sends a Quark 5 file, you aren't stuck sitting there with a 5 year old copy of Quark 3.1 that wont open the file.
If they don't have the cash for new machines, what are they worrying about anyway? They already have Macs that work for them. If in that time they want new machines, well they have to get upgrades to their software, and since all the latest versions, except for Quark, run in OS X, they might already have those, unless they are one of those companies that is still using Photoshop 3 and Illustrator 88. In that case they doomed them selves!
This is just a knee jerk reaction. If this same company was still using System 7.5 when G3s came out they had the same problem. Or try running System 6 on a Powermac 6100.
Also Quark 5 works fine in Classic. I use it every day.
Classic has some Apple-imposed limitations. I believe it isn't allowed to interact directly with hardware, which makes it suck for some music-related stuff.
It's not that Apple imposed any limitations to be spiteful, it's just that allowing Classic more interaction than it already has with the hardware would also allow it to take the whole system down if an app crashed.
All the major music software will be out soon enough. I'm waiting for Cubase SX, but in the mean time I have been running Deck 3.5, which works great in OS X (I'm a long time Deck user, but switched to Cubase for the MIDI support).
Peak works much better in OS X also, but before I had Peak DV I ran Peak LE in Classic... it worked, but you couldn't record with it, just edit files.
Right now, I only use classic to run Quark, which works fine. I can't wait until I don't have to boot into OS 9 to work on music.
Its not like people will be stuck with Macs that suddenly wont boot into OS 9, if they do already. But keep in mind that the current models can't boot into OS 6, 7 or 8 either. So how is this any different? By the time the OS X only models are out all the software will be OS X only too.
My fiance needs OS 9 still for Quark, Illustrator, Photoshop and all the other essentials tools that she needs, but can't afford to upgrade to just now. In fact, I don't even think Quark is available for OS X yet.
Everything but Quark is out for OS X, and Quark 5 runs fine in classic (Quark 4 gets a little quirky however). Quark 6 will be OS X native, and that should be out early next year. Word has it that Apple is helping Quark out with it.
I know because I use these same apps to make a living.:)
If she can't afford to upgrade to new apps, she can't afford a new Mac anyway, so what's the problem? Steve Jobs is not going to come to her house and take her OS 9 running Mac away...
And sorry, but Photoshop, et al, still run better on Macs. Photoshop 7 runs great in OS X, why would someone want to bother trying to run it in Linux?
This is how Window Maker dock tab works too. But the real question is, who's implementation of dock bar is better: Window Maker or Mac OSX? I know they both share the same heritage(NeXT), but there must be differences that makes one better than the other, no?
You know, I used to use Window Maker, and AfterStep in LinuxPPC, but I dont remember... I haven't used Linux in over a year.
Sorry, but that just doesn't work. The moment you have more than about 6 open windows at once (say you're doing some work and researching multiple places), you NEED to be able to switch between them. And you don't want to have to minimize them to get that shortcut access.
Yes, it does work, but maybe not in Windows. You can easily switch between open windows. If you right-click on the App's icon in the Dock you are presented with a list of that app's open windows. Plus every application has a window menu as an additional way to choose open windows without them cluttering up the Dock with icons.
Plus in Jaguar if you hide the application the minimized icons are also hidden, but still show up in the window list.
Actualy, speaking as a mac user, I like being able to click one applications window and bring the entire app to the forefront. If I'm working with 3 or 4 windows in an app, it makes my job that much faster
You can accomplish the same thing by clicking on the Dock.
And I agree. When I used to browse with IE, I simply hated the fact that all IE windows would appear on the taskbar. I mean, it cluttered everything!
This is where Apple's implementation of the Dock is a bit better. The Taskbar shouldn't be showing open windows unless they are minimized. This is the way the Dock works, and even the Dock can get cluttered if you minimized a bunch of windows.
I just leave them open behind each other and use the Window menu, right-click on the Dock icon, or Command-~ to switch.
I would rather have a machine that crashes occasionally rather than one that I don't understand how to use.
How can you not understand how to use it? You turn it on, launch your application and work just as in OS 9. OS X is as easy to use as OS 9, easier I think. You just don't want to learn something new. Take the time, you figured out how to use BeOS, right? You need to stop thinking OS 9, and think OS X... it's a matter of adapting to new habits.
How many home users truly need pre-emptive multitasking?
Any one who is doing more than one thing at a time. It's nice being able to launch three apps at the same time. It's nice launching a big app like Photoshop and not having to sit and wait for it. It's nice being able to do something that takes a while and not being stuck behind a modal dialog. It makes the Mac far more usable to anyone, newbie or power user.
I see people use Macs all wrong... They do things in these stupid convoluted ways. These are the people that can't get used to OS X. They complain that when they click on a window, only that window comes forward and they wanted to switch applications. Well, they did it the wrong way, and that wasn't even the way to do it in OS 9, so of course they are having problems. Just click on the damn Dock icon! Boy that was hard!:)
OS 9, despite having less eye candy than OS X, was architecturally better for the home user in just about every way than OS X
Some examples please. My 10 year old son likes using OS X better than 9, even though his Mac runs 9 and so do all the Macs at school.
At least with PCs, I can run BeOS on a laptop; with Macs, such is no longer an option.
Ummm you can run OS X on laptops. I love BeOS, but let's be honest here. What are you going to run on it? There wasn't much software back when Be was still in business!
And what are you going to do after it wont run on any new hardware you buy? So in five years I can still run OS X on a laptop, but Be?
I make a living using Macs, and I sure dont see where any of the software sucks. BeOS was nice and fast, but the GUI was fairly hideous, and a lot of the apps were a joke. OS 9's GUI is dated and not all that exciting. You fear change, don't you? You are one of these people who think the awful OS 9 application menu is better than the Dock right?
Talk about legacy... Mac OS 9 is dead, and so is BeOS.
First, that Apple took 15 years of hard work on their interface and threw it out the window. Why couldn't Apple have ported the OS 9 interface to the X API, instead of completely rewriting it and making it worse?
I have to disagree with you here. I have been using Macs since System 7.0, and I think Aqua is much nicer than OS 8/9 ever was. The 15 years of hard work turned out after a while to be how to try and make Mac OS do things it wasn't designed for. When they tried to upgrade it the way you want them to, they ended up with Copland, which turned out to be a big mess. The classic Mac OS didn't have all the features people are complaining are missing in OS X from the beginning. And many, like the menu bar clock, were shareware that Apple bought (SuperClock). OS X will continue to evolve the same way OS 7/8/9 did. I've been using OS X every day as my main OS since March 2001. I find I can do a lot more in X than in 9, and in that time I've crashed about 6 times. You are going to tell me OS 9 is better, or has a better kernel?
Second, that Apple spent a huge amount of time improving the Mach kernel. As long as Apple was going to spend so much time improving a kernel, why couldn't they have done work on L4, or another nanokernel? It wouldn't have been any harder, it wouldn't have delayed the production of OS X at all; yet Apple had its programmers work on Mach instead, in my opinion a colossal waste.
Apple bought NeXT. NeXT runs on Mach. Avie Travarian, the VP of Apple wrote Mach. You really think they are going to switch kernels?
You need to think of OS X as the next version of NeXT/OPEN Step, because that's what it is.
I suppose you would have liked they bought Be OS instead (and I was a former Be user as well, and really liked it). But we would have ended up with something even LESS like the classic Mac OS!
Since you like all these other parts of OS X what don't you like about Mach? Apple programmers (or NeXT programmers actually) worked on Mach because it was already part of NeXT Step.
Oh, and dragging a disk to the trash can to eject it makes perfect sense...
You can still do this, but you can also press Command-E for eject, choose Eject from the File menu, or press the Eject toolbar button, if you added one.
The point is that you are unmounting a volume, not putting the contents in the trash. Once new Mac users got past the first instance of dragging a disk icon to the trash they knew what it did. I think Apple leaves it there because old timers are used to it.
It also makes no sense to drag a DiskBurner CD icon to the trash to burn the disk, but the icon does change to show its state, so it's really no longer the trash.
Spinning disk. I hope you'll sometimes run a recovery or database transaction or something and watch your spinning disk not knowing where you are. What I said is there is no guidelines how and when to handle such actions.
Yes, there are guidelines. The spinning disk is just like the watch or hourglass indicators used by other OS's. And in fact applications in OS X can, and should show a progress indicator in their Dock icon. Toast does this when you are burning a CD. BBEdit also has this feature.
Name a few applications in OS X that do now show a progress indicator while executing a task. I can't think of any. Every application I run on a day to day basis shows progress indicators with such common tasks as opening and saving files, performing an action on files, sending and downloading, etc. Mail even has a mutithreaded task window showing what it's doing at any given monument.
You know it makes a huge difference of how much white light is facing you. So borders and toolbars are in question.
Only if you are sitting in the dark, and you should have some low ambient light just for that reason. I have a red flylight keyboard light for this reason. OS X really has no window borders, and tool bars can be collapsed. Use a dark desktop background and you are all set! Or just press Control-option-command-8 in Jaguar. Nice and dark!
MDI is usable, just not as Windows proposed it. Tabbed interface on the other hand is very useful way of MDI
A tabbed interface is better that a parent child UI, (such as with Limewire in OS X) but you still have to have the entire application's UI in front of you, even if the document is small. Maybe I want to have a Word document open along side Photoshop, so I can copy and paste text or whatever. This would be a pain if I had to have Word's toolbars follow the doc.
...for an Apple Dev site to chide "poor" UI designs when their own site needs dome fixin'. For starters, the tips menu items hang over the boundaries of the box beneath them.
Not on my system it isn't. I'm viewing it in Mozilla, and the text is inside the boxes.
Also the text is forced to a smaller size than is comfortable to read on screen and by using this size text the bold headline sbecome blurry and even more difficult to read.
Assuming you are using Windows, I find text is far more legible on Macs.
To be fair, I'm guessing they designed their site to be viewed on Apple systems and there is a difference in screen metrics because Macs are basedon a 72dpi resolution while PCS use 96dpi (though they can be changed to anything from 72dpi-144dpi).
That's not the problem. Mac monitors are no longer 72 dpi if you run them at high resolutions. I'm using a 19" Sylvania monitor set at 1280 X 1024. Mozilla's display resolution is 96 dpi, same as on PCs. IE also defaults to 96 dpi.
The real issue is not screen resolution, but the size of fonts on Windows.
A 10 pt font is expected to be 10 points. There are 72 points to an inch (or 2.54 cm). Windows fonts are too large, with 10 points closer to 12 points. I know this because I work in pre-press. This is why the text on websites made on PCs often looks too small on Macs, and vice versa.
Fifth point. They forgot to take in consideration points of no happenings. While Aqua constantly freezes while you're waiting on something, there is no visible progress (at least as I checked out in 20%). This point is very good described in Gnome human interface design.
This isn't true. First off Aqua doesn't freeze while you are waiting for something. If the task is busy, you get the spinning color disk, and you can move on to another task while you wait. But the Finder in Jaguar is multi threaded, so even if I'm copying 5 files, emptying the trash, and getting info on four other files, I haven't had any spinning disks of death. If it's an action like copying a file, you get a progress indicator. Many applications show either the pre Jaguar "chasing arrows" or the new spinning progress indicator in Jaguar.
Seventh point. Gray is not out. Aqua is not in. As much as I dislike Windows, there at least is option to choose non gray colors. On MOX, well no, it's WHITE. Skin interface rules.
I have to agree that OS X (NOT MOX) was too bright in the beginning, but I got used to it. Documents are usualy white anyway, and the window borders dont take up much room. Who stares at the window borders anyway? I look at what I'm working on. Apple doesn't want users to change the GUI. It makes things more consistent, which is what this article is about.
Eight point. MDI is usable. It's just a point of usage (sometimes yes, sometimes not). Having hundred windows belonging to same application on screen all thrown up there on desktop is not really friendly. This point is nicely addressed in Gnome human interface design.
If your document window is inside the application window you are stuck having that whole mess on your screen when you want to look at the one document.
The thing I really like about OS X, as compared to OS 9, is the window interleaving. I can have two different documents on screen next to each other from two different applications, without looking at all the other parts of either apps UI. I do this all the time too.
Consistent with what? Other toasters? No, it doesn't.
Yeah, but you know all toasters have a control for how brown the toast gets, and something to start the toast cycle.
The controls might look different... a slider instead of a knob, and maybe numbers or colors, or even push buttons, but they still should make sense.
If your toaster had instead of say, 1 to 9 for the toast timer, and had a slider going from blue to green, you wouldn't have any idea what that did until you either read the manual, guessed, or tried it out. Or maybe a knob that pulled out that had no indication of function. People wouldn't enjoy using that toaster because they would perceive it as hard to use.
I don't think Apple cares if you use a slider, or a pulldown with numbers to change a value, just as long as you use native widgets.
This is not how I operate my toaster (single dial and slider to depress bread) or microwave (timer dial with separate on/off/pause button) or my fridge (single slider for thermostat, built in switch for the light.)
A toaster is not a microwave, so we don't expect them to work the same way. But if you are used to using one certain toaster, and then you use a different toaster and the controls are laid out differently, you have to stop and learn the layout. It only takes a moment, but Apple is trying to avoid that moment altogether. And as the complexity of the application grows, the longer the learning curve.
I think we've all seen appliances with bad UI. Maybe the readers of Slashdot don't have problems with working their microwaves, or setting the clocks on their VCRs (and microwaves), but look how many people do!
Another example is cassette tape recorders. It would seem that manufacturers can't make up their mind about what order the control buttons should be placed, so on one machine play might be the first button, followed by stop, but on the next it might be rewind followed be record. If you have a few tape decks you have to stop and look before you press buttons.
Windows dialogs can be confusing. And pull down (pop up?) menus have the same appearance as a text input field, but you can't enter text. Plus having to press the detail button just makes for more steps.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah.... Maroon! I picture a velvet leisure suit....
And posing it on the table with the (still in plastic) potpourri candle... very manly!
I guess silver and gray is for sissys. ;)
Has anyone noticed that the air vents in the new case make the G4 look kind of like a Jeep?
I had a copy of System 7.7 once, which more or less became OS 8 (not System 8, aka Copland). It had some weird features that I don't remember anymore, that never made it into OS 8. Mostly it just crashed :)
I loved that! Apple Deta Detectors. Then there was ICeTEe that let you click on URLs in almost any application and launch your web browser.
For OS X there is ICeCoffEE which does the same thing as ICeTEe under OS 9, but only with Cocoa applications. BBEdit and TexEdit Plus are two Carbon applications that let you Command-click a url.
You can get it from http://web.sabi.net/nriley/software/
What exactly is your point here? If a company is currently using OS 9, no one is making them switch to OS X. You say they don't have the "cash to make the jump" -- what jump? To OS X? They don't have to switch. Either they have money for new Macs or they don't. If they are buying used Macs just to keep using old software... well that's not very smart, is it?
Every company I ever worked for, no matter how small, had to get the latest versions of everything, so when a customer sends a Quark 5 file, you aren't stuck sitting there with a 5 year old copy of Quark 3.1 that wont open the file.
If they don't have the cash for new machines, what are they worrying about anyway? They already have Macs that work for them. If in that time they want new machines, well they have to get upgrades to their software, and since all the latest versions, except for Quark, run in OS X, they might already have those, unless they are one of those companies that is still using Photoshop 3 and Illustrator 88. In that case they doomed them selves!
This is just a knee jerk reaction. If this same company was still using System 7.5 when G3s came out they had the same problem. Or try running System 6 on a Powermac 6100.
Also Quark 5 works fine in Classic. I use it every day.
It's not that Apple imposed any limitations to be spiteful, it's just that allowing Classic more interaction than it already has with the hardware would also allow it to take the whole system down if an app crashed.
All the major music software will be out soon enough. I'm waiting for Cubase SX, but in the mean time I have been running Deck 3.5, which works great in OS X (I'm a long time Deck user, but switched to Cubase for the MIDI support).
Peak works much better in OS X also, but before I had Peak DV I ran Peak LE in Classic... it worked, but you couldn't record with it, just edit files.
Right now, I only use classic to run Quark, which works fine. I can't wait until I don't have to boot into OS 9 to work on music.
Its not like people will be stuck with Macs that suddenly wont boot into OS 9, if they do already. But keep in mind that the current models can't boot into OS 6, 7 or 8 either. So how is this any different? By the time the OS X only models are out all the software will be OS X only too.
Everything but Quark is out for OS X, and Quark 5 runs fine in classic (Quark 4 gets a little quirky however). Quark 6 will be OS X native, and that should be out early next year. Word has it that Apple is helping Quark out with it.
I know because I use these same apps to make a living. :)
If she can't afford to upgrade to new apps, she can't afford a new Mac anyway, so what's the problem? Steve Jobs is not going to come to her house and take her OS 9 running Mac away...
And sorry, but Photoshop, et al, still run better on Macs. Photoshop 7 runs great in OS X, why would someone want to bother trying to run it in Linux?
Macs aren't going anywhere for graphics.
You know, I used to use Window Maker, and AfterStep in LinuxPPC, but I dont remember... I haven't used Linux in over a year.
Yes, it does work, but maybe not in Windows. You can easily switch between open windows. If you right-click on the App's icon in the Dock you are presented with a list of that app's open windows. Plus every application has a window menu as an additional way to choose open windows without them cluttering up the Dock with icons.
Plus in Jaguar if you hide the application the minimized icons are also hidden, but still show up in the window list.
You have never used OS X, have you?
You can accomplish the same thing by clicking on the Dock.
Same action, just a different target.
This is where Apple's implementation of the Dock is a bit better. The Taskbar shouldn't be showing open windows unless they are minimized. This is the way the Dock works, and even the Dock can get cluttered if you minimized a bunch of windows.
I just leave them open behind each other and use the Window menu, right-click on the Dock icon, or Command-~ to switch.
I love Mozilla's tabs!
How can you not understand how to use it? You turn it on, launch your application and work just as in OS 9. OS X is as easy to use as OS 9, easier I think. You just don't want to learn something new. Take the time, you figured out how to use BeOS, right? You need to stop thinking OS 9, and think OS X... it's a matter of adapting to new habits.
How many home users truly need pre-emptive multitasking?
Any one who is doing more than one thing at a time. It's nice being able to launch three apps at the same time. It's nice launching a big app like Photoshop and not having to sit and wait for it. It's nice being able to do something that takes a while and not being stuck behind a modal dialog. It makes the Mac far more usable to anyone, newbie or power user.
I see people use Macs all wrong... They do things in these stupid convoluted ways. These are the people that can't get used to OS X. They complain that when they click on a window, only that window comes forward and they wanted to switch applications. Well, they did it the wrong way, and that wasn't even the way to do it in OS 9, so of course they are having problems. Just click on the damn Dock icon! Boy that was hard! :)
Some examples please. My 10 year old son likes using OS X better than 9, even though his Mac runs 9 and so do all the Macs at school.
At least with PCs, I can run BeOS on a laptop; with Macs, such is no longer an option.
Ummm you can run OS X on laptops. I love BeOS, but let's be honest here. What are you going to run on it? There wasn't much software back when Be was still in business!
And what are you going to do after it wont run on any new hardware you buy? So in five years I can still run OS X on a laptop, but Be?
I make a living using Macs, and I sure dont see where any of the software sucks. BeOS was nice and fast, but the GUI was fairly hideous, and a lot of the apps were a joke. OS 9's GUI is dated and not all that exciting. You fear change, don't you? You are one of these people who think the awful OS 9 application menu is better than the Dock right?
Talk about legacy... Mac OS 9 is dead, and so is BeOS.
I have to disagree with you here. I have been using Macs since System 7.0, and I think Aqua is much nicer than OS 8/9 ever was. The 15 years of hard work turned out after a while to be how to try and make Mac OS do things it wasn't designed for. When they tried to upgrade it the way you want them to, they ended up with Copland, which turned out to be a big mess. The classic Mac OS didn't have all the features people are complaining are missing in OS X from the beginning. And many, like the menu bar clock, were shareware that Apple bought (SuperClock). OS X will continue to evolve the same way OS 7/8/9 did. I've been using OS X every day as my main OS since March 2001. I find I can do a lot more in X than in 9, and in that time I've crashed about 6 times. You are going to tell me OS 9 is better, or has a better kernel?
Second, that Apple spent a huge amount of time improving the Mach kernel. As long as Apple was going to spend so much time improving a kernel, why couldn't they have done work on L4, or another nanokernel? It wouldn't have been any harder, it wouldn't have delayed the production of OS X at all; yet Apple had its programmers work on Mach instead, in my opinion a colossal waste.
Apple bought NeXT. NeXT runs on Mach. Avie Travarian, the VP of Apple wrote Mach. You really think they are going to switch kernels?
You need to think of OS X as the next version of NeXT/OPEN Step, because that's what it is.
I suppose you would have liked they bought Be OS instead (and I was a former Be user as well, and really liked it). But we would have ended up with something even LESS like the classic Mac OS!
Since you like all these other parts of OS X what don't you like about Mach? Apple programmers (or NeXT programmers actually) worked on Mach because it was already part of NeXT Step.
You can still do this, but you can also press Command-E for eject, choose Eject from the File menu, or press the Eject toolbar button, if you added one.
The point is that you are unmounting a volume, not putting the contents in the trash. Once new Mac users got past the first instance of dragging a disk icon to the trash they knew what it did. I think Apple leaves it there because old timers are used to it.
It also makes no sense to drag a DiskBurner CD icon to the trash to burn the disk, but the icon does change to show its state, so it's really no longer the trash.
Or Apple? Let us not forget where this came from... the Apple Menu, which is where you shutdown and reboot in OS X.
Yes, there are guidelines. The spinning disk is just like the watch or hourglass indicators used by other OS's. And in fact applications in OS X can, and should show a progress indicator in their Dock icon. Toast does this when you are burning a CD. BBEdit also has this feature.
Name a few applications in OS X that do now show a progress indicator while executing a task. I can't think of any. Every application I run on a day to day basis shows progress indicators with such common tasks as opening and saving files, performing an action on files, sending and downloading, etc. Mail even has a mutithreaded task window showing what it's doing at any given monument.
You know it makes a huge difference of how much white light is facing you. So borders and toolbars are in question.
Only if you are sitting in the dark, and you should have some low ambient light just for that reason. I have a red flylight keyboard light for this reason. OS X really has no window borders, and tool bars can be collapsed. Use a dark desktop background and you are all set! Or just press Control-option-command-8 in Jaguar. Nice and dark!
MDI is usable, just not as Windows proposed it. Tabbed interface on the other hand is very useful way of MDI
A tabbed interface is better that a parent child UI, (such as with Limewire in OS X) but you still have to have the entire application's UI in front of you, even if the document is small. Maybe I want to have a Word document open along side Photoshop, so I can copy and paste text or whatever. This would be a pain if I had to have Word's toolbars follow the doc.
Not on my system it isn't. I'm viewing it in Mozilla, and the text is inside the boxes.
Also the text is forced to a smaller size than is comfortable to read on screen and by using this size text the bold headline sbecome blurry and even more difficult to read.
Assuming you are using Windows, I find text is far more legible on Macs.
To be fair, I'm guessing they designed their site to be viewed on Apple systems and there is a difference in screen metrics because Macs are basedon a 72dpi resolution while PCS use 96dpi (though they can be changed to anything from 72dpi-144dpi).
That's not the problem. Mac monitors are no longer 72 dpi if you run them at high resolutions. I'm using a 19" Sylvania monitor set at 1280 X 1024. Mozilla's display resolution is 96 dpi, same as on PCs. IE also defaults to 96 dpi.
The real issue is not screen resolution, but the size of fonts on Windows.
A 10 pt font is expected to be 10 points. There are 72 points to an inch (or 2.54 cm). Windows fonts are too large, with 10 points closer to 12 points. I know this because I work in pre-press. This is why the text on websites made on PCs often looks too small on Macs, and vice versa.
This isn't true. First off Aqua doesn't freeze while you are waiting for something. If the task is busy, you get the spinning color disk, and you can move on to another task while you wait. But the Finder in Jaguar is multi threaded, so even if I'm copying 5 files, emptying the trash, and getting info on four other files, I haven't had any spinning disks of death. If it's an action like copying a file, you get a progress indicator. Many applications show either the pre Jaguar "chasing arrows" or the new spinning progress indicator in Jaguar.
Seventh point. Gray is not out. Aqua is not in. As much as I dislike Windows, there at least is option to choose non gray colors. On MOX, well no, it's WHITE. Skin interface rules.
I have to agree that OS X (NOT MOX) was too bright in the beginning, but I got used to it. Documents are usualy white anyway, and the window borders dont take up much room. Who stares at the window borders anyway? I look at what I'm working on. Apple doesn't want users to change the GUI. It makes things more consistent, which is what this article is about.
Eight point. MDI is usable. It's just a point of usage (sometimes yes, sometimes not). Having hundred windows belonging to same application on screen all thrown up there on desktop is not really friendly. This point is nicely addressed in Gnome human interface design.
If your document window is inside the application window you are stuck having that whole mess on your screen when you want to look at the one document.
The thing I really like about OS X, as compared to OS 9, is the window interleaving. I can have two different documents on screen next to each other from two different applications, without looking at all the other parts of either apps UI. I do this all the time too.
Yeah, but you know all toasters have a control for how brown the toast gets, and something to start the toast cycle.
The controls might look different... a slider instead of a knob, and maybe numbers or colors, or even push buttons, but they still should make sense.
If your toaster had instead of say, 1 to 9 for the toast timer, and had a slider going from blue to green, you wouldn't have any idea what that did until you either read the manual, guessed, or tried it out. Or maybe a knob that pulled out that had no indication of function. People wouldn't enjoy using that toaster because they would perceive it as hard to use.
I don't think Apple cares if you use a slider, or a pulldown with numbers to change a value, just as long as you use native widgets.
A toaster is not a microwave, so we don't expect them to work the same way. But if you are used to using one certain toaster, and then you use a different toaster and the controls are laid out differently, you have to stop and learn the layout. It only takes a moment, but Apple is trying to avoid that moment altogether. And as the complexity of the application grows, the longer the learning curve.
I think we've all seen appliances with bad UI. Maybe the readers of Slashdot don't have problems with working their microwaves, or setting the clocks on their VCRs (and microwaves), but look how many people do!
Another example is cassette tape recorders. It would seem that manufacturers can't make up their mind about what order the control buttons should be placed, so on one machine play might be the first button, followed by stop, but on the next it might be rewind followed be record. If you have a few tape decks you have to stop and look before you press buttons.
Windows dialogs can be confusing. And pull down (pop up?) menus have the same appearance as a text input field, but you can't enter text. Plus having to press the detail button just makes for more steps.
I'm a Cubase VST user, so I agree. But most of the VST plugs out there are still classic only.
I did download the great free mda plugs for OS X.
It would be nice to see Cubase, and Logic support both formats.
Hey, I have an antiquated Oberheim Matrix-6! Want to trade? ;)
I have an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 audio/midi card, and I was pleasently surprised to see Audio Midi Setup app find all my gear.
Now I'm just waiting on Cubase SX...
:)
Actually they didn't die... they morphed into Chuck-E-Cheeses! (seriously)
Same difference though. :)
This is also the same company that turned down the Apple I computer because their home Pong game was going to be The Big Thing...
Yep. But still, "you're" is a contraction for "you are" not a the possessive form of "you." Not in any language... sorry.
The post you referred to had no misspelled words.
But that deal was part of an out of court settlement, along with the 150Mill, for MS ripping off Apple patents.
The deal came to an end this month...
Lately Apple has been pushing Mozilla over IE