Yeah, because the UI was really the highlight of the features shown, what with the truncated titles, execrable icons from the 1990s, and dreary grey tinge. Lots of new ideas in there. ?
This is a damage limitation exercise because of all the bad press. When even your fan sites are calling it a 'train wreck' any publicity is bad publicity.
I don't think you have this right here - ALL Aqua apps will have the new NSToolbar look (if they use a Toolbar). In fact this at least makes toolbars consistent between metal and aqua windows, so that's a plus - both have toolbars that extend the window title-bar : )
The thing that bugs me personally are those buttons, which are no better that the previous ones (which could be scaled anyway) and are fact much uglier IMHO - they remind me of Entourage. They are also out of style with all the other apps (including Apple ones).
Apple really should hire someone to look after the HIG again and try to be consistent, otherwise they *will* end up with every app pulling the GUI in 10 different directions like Windows. Especially with loads of new developers coming to the platform from other ones - the rules need to be stricter and Apple needs to follow them. Changing styles for a new version of the operating system is good (despite the inevitable whining), but having 5 different styles of window within a system with no consistency is not.
This is a really nice idea. I wish OS X had this - new apps could be trusted only with the prefs folder and your documents folder initially, and then the user prompted if it asked to save something elsewhere (or perhaps the system could be smart and allow override from within the system save dialog).
Network access for apps should only be enabled if explicitly allowed (you'd only have to do it once per app after all).
At the moment if you download a binary you just have to pray that you are correct to trust it. It'd be nice to have this kind of fine-grained control.
users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Web browser.
You're the fool if you think this makes it an open format. I guess you hadn't considered people on platforms which don't have Internet Explorer? I think they forgot to add 'on Windows' to that sentence. Telling isn't it.
Looking at the screenshots here for example, it looks like NSToolbar has a gradient down from the top of the window in all cases, which looks nice - perhaps that's what you mean. But, I think what the other poster was referring to were the buttons in the Mail.app toolbar, which I have to agree look pretty horrible and don't appear anywhere else that I've seen - are they a new control or a custom thing?
Not that you had anything to do with them or care probably : )
Now all we need is someone to build a retro looking top part to sit on top of it with a portrait LCD inside that the mini slides into. Perhaps it could have a handle on top, and we'd have a mac classic. Actually not a bad idea for people who just need it for typing.
The second amendment is more important because it establishes gun ownership as a right. Meaning, members of the militia can blend into the regular populace. In other nations undergoing violent revolt, gun ownership = rebel and/or death. In a US revolution, the availability of guns to all citizens provides something most rebels will kill for: plausible deniability. That is, truly, essential. Rebels have to blend back and forth into the general population at will. An outright ban on arms will make that, largely, impossible...I am not an idiot. A militia of that size could form, and would be legal
You're being totally unrealistic here. The moment there is a hint of armed revolt, the 2nd ammendment, and any other protections, would evaporate and be replace by tight repression. You would have precisely zero rights, let alone the right to carry an arm. After the first weapons amnesty where upstanding citizens could prove they were not terrorists your arm would be a liability.
In a state of civil war citizens rights are no longer sacrosanct. Hell, the US citizenry has given away most of their rights already, and said thank you afterwards, all in the name of perpetual war with a nebulous, often changing enemy.
A widespread revolt would eventually topple the government in the US, but not via the means you mention. The mechanism of government would simply fail if enough people went on strike/marches and refused to co-operate with law-enforcement.
Quite apart from all of that, would you like the kind of government/civil war your proposed scenario would install any better than Bush/Cheney et al? Almost *every* violent revolution in the world's history has installed a dictatorship - the previous US one was a notable, and noble exception.
I find the way OS X handles this interesting in contrast.
On OS X there is a small subset of Apple supported frameworks and binaries that will be on a system with each point release. This doesn't usually change between point releases, so you can safely say 'Requires OS X 10.3' and know the user will have a certain set of libraries/binaries at known versions.
If a developer needs to use another library/framework/unix binary (or a more up to date version of one that's installed) they can just put it inside the application bundle (because.app files are actually folders with a file structure inside them), and link to it directly, without worrying about interaction with other applications.
Advantages: It's unusual for Apps to need admin privileges on install Apps often don't need installers as all required files are inside them No library conflicts or overwritten libraries
Disadvantages: The OS may take up more space, because more libraries are included as standard. Apps sometimes take up more disk space, as occasionally a library will be duplicated.
I think it's worth sacrificing a little extra disk space for the freedom from worries about conflicting libraries when you install, or having to use a package manager to look for dependencies.
My knowledge of Linux is sketchy so perhaps there are equivalents to this in Linux-land? You said binary compatibility is hard, but isn't that really more true on Linux than elsewhere (because of its origins and the emphasis on compiling from source and installing libraries in different locations)?
(Hopefully that's not also Linux flamebait, it's not meant to be : )
All of our word documents get converted to PDF before they get sent to our client
Was very confused for a moment there : ) I'm aware you *can* produce PDFs, and even not bad HTML (nowadays it's pretty clean) from MS Word (didn't realise it could be automated, but I guess a quick macro would do it).
What I was trying to say was that your clients are using the product of a company that actively tries to discourage them from being able to interoperate with other software not from MS (hence the byzantine binary format), this restricts a lot of possible future uses and ties you into using an MS product forever and facing real upgrade headaches in 10 years when old documents are no longer fully supported. If you chose an open format, that wouldn't happen.
THere are benefits to using industry standard programs.
There are even greater benefits to not allowing a supplier to lock you in to their formats. I guess it's too late for your firm though.
I find it difficult to believe that you have saved hundreds of pages of work in a file format like MS Word, which is neither stable between MS Word versions nor consistently readable by other tools (for generating PDFs, web pages, putting in a CMS etc etc *automatically*).
Great example of apples practice of breaking API's leaving developers out of the loop
It's an undocumented, unsupported API; that's what the article is about. What broken APIs were you thinking of? Carbon took over most of the OS 9 ones (apart from some clearly documented exceptions).
If you had read the article you might actually have had something useful to say.
Hmm, if you talk in sentences of less than 5 words, you could attempt to hold a conversation. Not very convincing...
... ALICE: Are you free? Human: Are you an expert system? ALICE: I am an expert on many subjects. Human: Presumably holding a coherent conversation is beyond your capabilities, nonetheless? ALICE: I think Presumably holding a coherent conversation is a lot of things. Human: Do long sentences which look too difficult to parse always have the same sort of response? ALICE: You have reached the limits of my knowledge. Check back later and see if I learn the answer to that one.
Simple find by content isn't that interesting, as you point out, however meta-data on each file (and saved auto-updating searches on that) is a big deal. One day we won't use folders at all.
If you're willing to type out descriptions on all your files, the point being. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight he had a load of images from Corbis which had all been nicely tagged and described by the good people that work there. People who don't have the luxury of being revered as gods inside Cupertino would have to actually type these lengthy descriptions themselves.
You've managed to effectively argue for the point you wished to oppose. You initially claimed only music files have meta-data, and then you go on to mention Corbis images - which are carefully tagged with extensive meta-data.
The meta-data from Corbis is put to good use by a lot of people who buy their images (publishers for example). Currently only people running a program like iView can search on that data. With spotlight anyone can - I know that this will make my life easier personally, and I'm more likely to purchase images with said data pre-entered (note that they do this now, on all images, not just for Steve Jobs as you imply).
Where there is financial value for adding meta-data (and in many cases in business there definitely is) it *will* be added, and extensively used. Programs like Word already add author specific data to files, I imagine once it is a system-wide service this sort of facility will be pervasive, as it will allow sophisticated searches and sorting of documents which previously had to be done by hand. Initially inside organisations and between trusted partners, but it will happen. Perhaps it will never spread to the internet, but if we're talking about Spotlight that is irrelevent.
Meta-data on the internet is a joke because of trust issues. You have extrapolated from that narrow case to all others. Please don't do that.
It'd be even nicer if it didn't grab all the fonts and put them higgelty-piggelty into one folder - you should be able to tell it where to find the fonts, then it should (optionally) leave them where they are and index/activate them from there. Most professional fonts come in a folder with several files for each font, and copying all the font files takes up a significant amount of space when you have over a few hundred.
I *hate* the default of moving the fonts out of their folders and stuffing them all in ~/Library/Fonts/ which just leads to an ungodly mess in there. Here's hoping it can now parse nested folders.
Democratic; definitely, Socialist; not remotely (not that I view socialism as a panacea).
Communist manifesto... New Deal
That's a fun comparison, but the communist manifestos claims were made in the midst of the industrial revolution, almost 2 centuries ago, when child labour was common and workers lives and health were disregarded. It's not surprising they'd focus on egregious abuses that today we find abhorrent. I'm sure Marx and Engels would have a few things to say about current Western conditions - though perhaps they'd focus more on the export of our wage-labour to other countries (Mexico, China etc) than conditions at home. Our current economies in the west depend on conditions elsewhere after all.
The New Deal is no longer in force in the States, though many of the advantages remain (though far less so than in many EU countries).
Public works programmes are anathema to the current US administration (unless they happen to be military ones it seems). They are talking about undoing the public pensions part of the New Deal in the new term. I wouldn't call any of their ambitions, aspirations or achievements socialist - by any stretch of the imagination. To say that the US is therefore socialist is really disingenuous at present.
Confusing socialist with liberal with communist does nothing but muddy debate and leaves us using labels and accusations (like those in the grandparent's post).
I was just sitting at my freelance gig, reading some online encyclopedia (win supersite, I believe) and the scientist there said that there are only 2 features: spotlight and something else. He stated that all other ones are pretty much nothing.
He also said, and I'll have to agree with him on this one, that SP 2 is a much better update than Tiger, and it's FREE!
I don't even know what you MAC people are cheering about, you're not even getting a firewall OR pop-up blocker, not to mention malicious software detector with you're upgrade your paying $$ 4! LOL!
Thanks for this post; the only amusing one in this topic so far. I particularly liked 'the scientist... stated'. Unfortunately the parody seems to have slipped past most moderators so far.
Well, regardless of how far you can count, you obviously didn't look very hard for changes. The improvements to web-kit alone are major, and have also been back-ported to OS 10.3.9 for free (the latest minor release). The features you list
Spotlight Automator Core Video
Are not currently available in any other desktop OS (though Linux has beagle). In fact Longhorn won't now have WinFS (perhaps a more flexible solution than Spotlight but unfortunately vapour-ware).
You missed out: Dashboard Core Data Web Core (DOM API accessible in cocoa etc) xGrid PDF annotations and forms (plus various preview.app enhancements) Jabber, H.264 and multiple video IM etc,etc...
Consider Microsoft's approach - renaming Windows 2000 to Windows XP (now with hideous colours), service packs for bug fixes, a monthly scramble by customers to install updates for remote vulnerabilities before they're exploited, and an attempt to move their customers to a subscription model (which looks like it's failed, but that's their goal).
Compare and contrast with the consistent and regular updates to OS X - major updates which you can *choose* to upgrade to every couple of years, augmented by regular updates every month or so fixing bugs and adding minor features.
I know which world I prefer to live in.
Just why should Apple give this update for free to all its customers, they already update the OS around every month for free? Sounds to me like you're the one who is cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
oh thanks, didn't know that. I was just going by the screenshots...
One of the focus areas of IP protection
Yeah, because the UI was really the highlight of the features shown, what with the truncated titles, execrable icons from the 1990s, and dreary grey tinge. Lots of new ideas in there.
?
This is a damage limitation exercise because of all the bad press. When even your fan sites are calling it a 'train wreck' any publicity is bad publicity.
I don't think you have this right here - ALL Aqua apps will have the new NSToolbar look (if they use a Toolbar). In fact this at least makes toolbars consistent between metal and aqua windows, so that's a plus - both have toolbars that extend the window title-bar : )
The thing that bugs me personally are those buttons, which are no better that the previous ones (which could be scaled anyway) and are fact much uglier IMHO - they remind me of Entourage. They are also out of style with all the other apps (including Apple ones).
Apple really should hire someone to look after the HIG again and try to be consistent, otherwise they *will* end up with every app pulling the GUI in 10 different directions like Windows. Especially with loads of new developers coming to the platform from other ones - the rules need to be stricter and Apple needs to follow them. Changing styles for a new version of the operating system is good (despite the inevitable whining), but having 5 different styles of window within a system with no consistency is not.
This is a really nice idea. I wish OS X had this - new apps could be trusted only with the prefs folder and your documents folder initially, and then the user prompted if it asked to save something elsewhere (or perhaps the system could be smart and allow override from within the system save dialog).
Network access for apps should only be enabled if explicitly allowed (you'd only have to do it once per app after all).
At the moment if you download a binary you just have to pray that you are correct to trust it. It'd be nice to have this kind of fine-grained control.
users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Web browser.
You're the fool if you think this makes it an open format. I guess you hadn't considered people on platforms which don't have Internet Explorer? I think they forgot to add 'on Windows' to that sentence. Telling isn't it.
That's what NSToolbar looks like now.
Really?
http://photos.asleep.net/OSX-Tiger
Looking at the screenshots here for example, it looks like NSToolbar has a gradient down from the top of the window in all cases, which looks nice - perhaps that's what you mean. But, I think what the other poster was referring to were the buttons in the Mail.app toolbar, which I have to agree look pretty horrible and don't appear anywhere else that I've seen - are they a new control or a custom thing?
Not that you had anything to do with them or care probably : )
program.files.each do | class |
class.methods.sort.each do | method |
5.times { method.refactor! unless method.elegant? }
end
if problem_domain > current_language
choices << comp.lang.each
current_language = choices.best
project.restart
evangelise(current_language)
end
end
comments << intentions.remove(implimentation_details)
puts comments
def refactor!
method.split! unless method.size < Too_Big
method.rename! unless method.name.clear?
end
def evangelise(lang)
slashdot.comment.post
puts "#{lang} is the only real language"
end
goto (1.0/0.0) and $beyond
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?MoviesTheRubyWay
I wouldn't bother waiting till next year, you may as well make your decision now, after all, Tiger is here : )
By the looks of things Longhorn won't ship in 2006 - it's now mid 2005 and they haven't even hit the first beta stage.
Now all we need is someone to build a retro looking top part to sit on top of it with a portrait LCD inside that the mini slides into. Perhaps it could have a handle on top, and we'd have a mac classic. Actually not a bad idea for people who just need it for typing.
The second amendment is more important because it establishes gun ownership as a right. Meaning, members of the militia can blend into the regular populace. In other nations undergoing violent revolt, gun ownership = rebel and/or death. In a US revolution, the availability of guns to all citizens provides something most rebels will kill for: plausible deniability. That is, truly, essential. Rebels have to blend back and forth into the general population at will. An outright ban on arms will make that, largely, impossible...I am not an idiot. A militia of that size could form, and would be legal
You're being totally unrealistic here. The moment there is a hint of armed revolt, the 2nd ammendment, and any other protections, would evaporate and be replace by tight repression. You would have precisely zero rights, let alone the right to carry an arm. After the first weapons amnesty where upstanding citizens could prove they were not terrorists your arm would be a liability.
In a state of civil war citizens rights are no longer sacrosanct. Hell, the US citizenry has given away most of their rights already, and said thank you afterwards, all in the name of perpetual war with a nebulous, often changing enemy.
A widespread revolt would eventually topple the government in the US, but not via the means you mention. The mechanism of government would simply fail if enough people went on strike/marches and refused to co-operate with law-enforcement.
Quite apart from all of that, would you like the kind of government/civil war your proposed scenario would install any better than Bush/Cheney et al? Almost *every* violent revolution in the world's history has installed a dictatorship - the previous US one was a notable, and noble exception.
I find the way OS X handles this interesting in contrast.
.app files are actually folders with a file structure inside them), and link to it directly, without worrying about interaction with other applications.
:
:
On OS X there is a small subset of Apple supported frameworks and binaries that will be on a system with each point release. This doesn't usually change between point releases, so you can safely say 'Requires OS X 10.3' and know the user will have a certain set of libraries/binaries at known versions.
If a developer needs to use another library/framework/unix binary (or a more up to date version of one that's installed) they can just put it inside the application bundle (because
Advantages
It's unusual for Apps to need admin privileges on install
Apps often don't need installers as all required files are inside them
No library conflicts or overwritten libraries
Disadvantages
The OS may take up more space, because more libraries are included as standard.
Apps sometimes take up more disk space, as occasionally a library will be duplicated.
I think it's worth sacrificing a little extra disk space for the freedom from worries about conflicting libraries when you install, or having to use a package manager to look for dependencies.
My knowledge of Linux is sketchy so perhaps there are equivalents to this in Linux-land? You said binary compatibility is hard, but isn't that really more true on Linux than elsewhere (because of its origins and the emphasis on compiling from source and installing libraries in different locations)?
(Hopefully that's not also Linux flamebait, it's not meant to be : )
All of our word documents get converted to PDF before they get sent to our client
Was very confused for a moment there : ) I'm aware you *can* produce PDFs, and even not bad HTML (nowadays it's pretty clean) from MS Word (didn't realise it could be automated, but I guess a quick macro would do it).
What I was trying to say was that your clients are using the product of a company that actively tries to discourage them from being able to interoperate with other software not from MS (hence the byzantine binary format), this restricts a lot of possible future uses and ties you into using an MS product forever and facing real upgrade headaches in 10 years when old documents are no longer fully supported. If you chose an open format, that wouldn't happen.
THere are benefits to using industry standard programs.
There are even greater benefits to not allowing a supplier to lock you in to their formats. I guess it's too late for your firm though.
I find it difficult to believe that you have saved hundreds of pages of work in a file format like MS Word, which is neither stable between MS Word versions nor consistently readable by other tools (for generating PDFs, web pages, putting in a CMS etc etc *automatically*).
Why would you do that?
Really, you missed the best one, my best mistakes are in bold .
BTW It wasn't a correction, it just seemed like an amusing portmanteau of a new word - I'm pleased to learn it's a French one.
diffamation - is that where you take something famous and change it?
I swear you could invent a new language from the typos on Slashdot.
Great example of apples practice of breaking API's leaving developers out of the loop
It's an undocumented, unsupported API; that's what the article is about. What broken APIs were you thinking of? Carbon took over most of the OS 9 ones (apart from some clearly documented exceptions).
If you had read the article you might actually have had something useful to say.
Hmm, if you talk in sentences of less than 5 words, you could attempt to hold a conversation. Not very convincing...
...
ALICE: Are you free?
Human: Are you an expert system?
ALICE: I am an expert on many subjects.
Human: Presumably holding a coherent conversation is beyond your capabilities, nonetheless?
ALICE: I think Presumably holding a coherent conversation is a lot of things.
Human: Do long sentences which look too difficult to parse always have the same sort of response?
ALICE: You have reached the limits of my knowledge.
Check back later and see if I learn the answer to that one.
Hint : It's all about the meta-data
Simple find by content isn't that interesting, as you point out, however meta-data on each file (and saved auto-updating searches on that) is a big deal. One day we won't use folders at all.
Why should Microsoft have the right to lock up my documents and not tell me how to get my document complete with formatting from their program?
Why the hell are you still using MS software and formats?
Switch.
If you're willing to type out descriptions on all your files, the point being. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight he had a load of images from Corbis which had all been nicely tagged and described by the good people that work there. People who don't have the luxury of being revered as gods inside Cupertino would have to actually type these lengthy descriptions themselves.
You've managed to effectively argue for the point you wished to oppose. You initially claimed only music files have meta-data, and then you go on to mention Corbis images - which are carefully tagged with extensive meta-data.
The meta-data from Corbis is put to good use by a lot of people who buy their images (publishers for example). Currently only people running a program like iView can search on that data. With spotlight anyone can - I know that this will make my life easier personally, and I'm more likely to purchase images with said data pre-entered (note that they do this now, on all images, not just for Steve Jobs as you imply).
Where there is financial value for adding meta-data (and in many cases in business there definitely is) it *will* be added, and extensively used. Programs like Word already add author specific data to files, I imagine once it is a system-wide service this sort of facility will be pervasive, as it will allow sophisticated searches and sorting of documents which previously had to be done by hand. Initially inside organisations and between trusted partners, but it will happen. Perhaps it will never spread to the internet, but if we're talking about Spotlight that is irrelevent.
Meta-data on the internet is a joke because of trust issues. You have extrapolated from that narrow case to all others. Please don't do that.
Shame about the last chapter though - he really should stick to subjects he knows something about (hint, Art History is not his strong point).
Personally I preferred "Words and rules" to How the Mind Works, but it was an interesting read, and a nice summary of current thought on the topic.
It'd be even nicer if it didn't grab all the fonts and put them higgelty-piggelty into one folder - you should be able to tell it where to find the fonts, then it should (optionally) leave them where they are and index/activate them from there. Most professional fonts come in a folder with several files for each font, and copying all the font files takes up a significant amount of space when you have over a few hundred.
I *hate* the default of moving the fonts out of their folders and stuffing them all in ~/Library/Fonts/ which just leads to an ungodly mess in there. Here's hoping it can now parse nested folders.
democratic and socialist
Democratic; definitely, Socialist; not remotely (not that I view socialism as a panacea).
Communist manifesto... New Deal
That's a fun comparison, but the communist manifestos claims were made in the midst of the industrial revolution, almost 2 centuries ago, when child labour was common and workers lives and health were disregarded. It's not surprising they'd focus on egregious abuses that today we find abhorrent. I'm sure Marx and Engels would have a few things to say about current Western conditions - though perhaps they'd focus more on the export of our wage-labour to other countries (Mexico, China etc) than conditions at home. Our current economies in the west depend on conditions elsewhere after all.
The New Deal is no longer in force in the States, though many of the advantages remain (though far less so than in many EU countries).
Public works programmes are anathema to the current US administration (unless they happen to be military ones it seems). They are talking about undoing the public pensions part of the New Deal in the new term. I wouldn't call any of their ambitions, aspirations or achievements socialist - by any stretch of the imagination. To say that the US is therefore socialist is really disingenuous at present.
Confusing socialist with liberal with communist does nothing but muddy debate and leaves us using labels and accusations (like those in the grandparent's post).
I was just sitting at my freelance gig, reading some online encyclopedia (win supersite, I believe) and the scientist there said that there are only 2 features: spotlight and something else. He stated that all other ones are pretty much nothing.
He also said, and I'll have to agree with him on this one, that SP 2 is a much better update than Tiger, and it's FREE!
I don't even know what you MAC people are cheering about, you're not even getting a firewall OR pop-up blocker, not to mention malicious software detector with you're upgrade your paying $$ 4! LOL!
Thanks for this post; the only amusing one in this topic so far. I particularly liked 'the scientist... stated'. Unfortunately the parody seems to have slipped past most moderators so far.
Well, regardless of how far you can count, you obviously didn't look very hard for changes. The improvements to web-kit alone are major, and have also been back-ported to OS 10.3.9 for free (the latest minor release). The features you list
Spotlight
Automator
Core Video
Are not currently available in any other desktop OS (though Linux has beagle). In fact Longhorn won't now have WinFS (perhaps a more flexible solution than Spotlight but unfortunately vapour-ware).
You missed out:
Dashboard
Core Data
Web Core (DOM API accessible in cocoa etc)
xGrid
PDF annotations and forms (plus various preview.app enhancements)
Jabber, H.264 and multiple video IM
etc,etc...
Consider Microsoft's approach - renaming Windows 2000 to Windows XP (now with hideous colours), service packs for bug fixes, a monthly scramble by customers to install updates for remote vulnerabilities before they're exploited, and an attempt to move their customers to a subscription model (which looks like it's failed, but that's their goal).
Compare and contrast with the consistent and regular updates to OS X - major updates which you can *choose* to upgrade to every couple of years, augmented by regular updates every month or so fixing bugs and adding minor features.
I know which world I prefer to live in.
Just why should Apple give this update for free to all its customers, they already update the OS around every month for free? Sounds to me like you're the one who is cheap.