Simply put, the only things on my machine that should phone out should be voluntarily invoked by me - the user. Namely the web browsers, software update, ssh, etceteras.
Adobe's behavior of late (and it will only get worse) is why applications like Little Snitch exist.
This kind of thing is why I wish The GIMP or similar would get useable* for those of us with hundreds of gigs of Photoshop documents.
* Open, Save, full support for all blending modes, masking modes, layer groups, and fonts/text editing capability up to at least Photoshop CS. I don't need the thing to handle Exactly Like Photoshop, but if it's going to be the "photoshop competitor" every FOSS advocate claims it is (instead of, say, the Paintshop Pro competitor that it actually is), then it ought to at least be able to handle my existing documents as well as OpenOffice handles.doc files.
Yes. There's Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite and the goddamned MS Office that every single Windows user seems to think Apple would absolutely DIE without.
Yet my intel iMa runs Windows XP, because there are two software products I use for Windows, and neither ISV has shown the slightest bit of interest in creating a Mac port : The Orange Box and 3d Studio Max.
It doesn't matter what software the platform runs - so long as it doesn't run every single last little application I need (or just use recreationally), I'm stuck in both worlds.
If Valve and Autodesk would wean themselves of the windows API teat, I'd be a happy, happy camper.
The cool comes from the potential to make it less random. For example, taking the results of a portscan and feeding that into an enemy generator - if there's a lot of AIM traffic, you'd be able to deduce this from the fact that you're fighting a lot of trolls... if more people are using Yahoo IM, you'd run into more Orcs, etceteras. I probably misspoke when I said random "seed" - the attraction with something like this is using the traffic to generate enough variation in the game environment to make each play experience different.
Now the big question: How long until major developers (Square, Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, etc.) start integrating elements of this concept into their games? Picture a Castlevania that determines enemy strength or random drops based on ambient wifi traffic... or a Final Fantasy that uses wifi traffic as a random seed for enemy encounters, money drops, gambling odds, etc. Heck, even randomly generated enemies (imagine a wlan full of pr0n browsers - your sedate Animal Crossing-like environment would suddenly mutate into Urotsukidoji!) You could program a reasonably robust set of default variables in the event there's no wlan available, of course...... but really, I'd like to see the DS wifi used for more than deathmatch, email and trading. And this, in my opinion, may well set a nice precedent.
I liked Buffy, I loved Firefly. I like comics. I make comics (okay not for a living thank gawd but that's not the point). The Buffy comics, in my opinion, are nowhere nearly as good as the series was. Could be pacing, could be the layouts (they don't help), could be the fact that one issue of the comic seems to cover a bizzaro combination of a quarter of an episode and half a season. Whatever it is, it's lacking.
So, meh. I don't want an artist's attempt at facsimiles of Mal and Jayne - I want more Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin. With shows like BTVS and Firefly, my enjoyment doesn't come from the script. The script is corn. My enjoyment comes from the actor's execution of that script. In comics, you don't have an actor giving a performance - you have a penciller (and then an inker, then a colorist) executing their impression of what they think the writer is trying to convey.
I hobby in comics, I've done bit parts in short films and web serials, I've made my own shorts - a great - or even a good - actor can make a passable pulp script a cult phenomenon. Anthony Stewart Head and Nathan Fillion are great examples of this. You cut down the creative team (as opposed to scale UP the creative team), and something gets lost in the process.
It's one thing to turn a comic book into a TV series or a movie - going the other way has always felt like a giant step backwards - not only do you lose the acting, you lose the cinematography and the editing, And even if all of that wasn't an issue, there's the fact that individual comic issues are as saturated with ads as a nuclear reaction chamber is with radiation - and with comics, the shift in visual style between comic content and ad content is even more jarring than it is with television ads or movie previews.
So, it might be good but as far as I'm concerned it won't actually be Firefly. If I'm lucky it'll be available in trade paperback by the time I'm finished with my reading list of comics that only exist as comics (currently plugging through The Invisibles as the spare change permits).
... that Vista wasn't only years late, many of the highly touted features (the new file system, for one) were cut in the process.
Leopard shipped Feature Complete.
Vista shipped late because Windows is a huge disgusting bastard of a codebase.
Leopard shipped late because Apple took the QA team off of the OS and put it on the f*cking iPhone so the iPhone could ship in a timely fashion.
I dunno about you, but that says a lot about Apple's priorities to me. It also cheeses me off a bit, as Leopard is something I use, whereas even if I did have a use for a cell phone, I couldn't possibly afford an iPhone.:P
...or some of us are just being "willfully obtuse" because either:
A. We can't afford another bill, no matter how "cheap" other people claim it to be.
or
B. We're sick to death of overhearing half of loud inconsiderate conversations on the bus, waiting for the bus, on the streat, in line at the store, etc. and can't fathom being that willfully obtuse to our fellow man.
I'd carry a celphone distruptor before I'd cary a celphone. No plans to hassle with, no monthly bills. Just the occasional battery and the certain knowledge of a little peace and quiet (or at least some reflected frustration) when some asshat starts bellowing NO NO YOU'RE BREAKING UP I CAN'T HEAR YOU AUGH in the middle of rush hour.
... my house is wired up for cable (EXTENSIVELY, as there are drops on the ground floor, second floor, and attic), and I don't own a TV. I don't provide Comcast any revenue, though previous residents clearly did, extensively.
That would put me in one of the 70% of cabled houses, and in the 30% of the 100% of that 70% that, while having the wiring, does not have cable.
I did the same thing with my dad when he finally realized he needed a computer. He was set on a Dell because it was cheap. I told him he was getting an iMac, because he'd be calling me up asking why $whatever wasn't working right, and if it was a Mac, I'd be able to actually answer his questions. Six or seven years later and I've just recently handled my Annual Support Call, which involved snail-mailing* home a CD-R full of OS X and software updates so he could keep using the iTunes store over his crappy 33.6 dialup.
I'm quite pleased that I was able to win that particular argument, as it's made life a lot easier and more pleasant for all parties involved.
The post-Jedi Heir To The Empire books were, for me, the high water mark. Unfortunately, they opened the floodgates for additional books, none of which are nearly as good. The continued interest in SW fueled the THX remaster, the re-release of the toys, Shadows of the Empire.... by the time Lucas's ego went critical and he started work on Episode I, the market had already been flooded with new stories, new plots, new technology, and new aliens - all post Jedi - that were better than anything he could come up with. And then along comes Episode I, which does to Star Wars what Star Trek : Enterprise did to Star Trek.
Regarding CS3 : I'm stuck with work's budgeting schedule, which means I won't get it until January or February at the earliest. So, it's 5.5 until the Leopard upgrade, then PSCS. I have CS2 as well. With Classic already loaded, 5.5 loads the fastest, then PSCS, then much, much later, PSCS2. There's no excuse for this, in my opinion. Two dual cored 2.5ghz processors and four gigs of ram and that app ought to just Appear. Not sit on its ass "optimizing font menu performance" and "measuring memory" while I go get coffee, take a dump, and read the paper.
Using Windows, you haven't had your OS manufacturer kick the APIs out from under your ISV not once but two or three times over the past decade. PS has fewer performance problems under windows because Adobe didn't have to effectively port the entire application to a new OS like they sort of did with the completely halfassed pile of crap that was PS7 for the Mac... and now thanks to the intel transition, Mac users are still suffering at the hands of lazy or sluggish ISVs, while Windows users are toodling right along, as nothing's changed for them.
As for keyboard shortcuts - yes, you can reset them. To a point. A very short, very blunt point. The annoying thing about that is that while the shortcuts have changed for no obvious apparent reason beyond just changing them to change them, and there's no readily convenient method to just switch back to a 5.5 or earlier shortcut set. You have to go in and manually reassign everything, troubleshoot conflicts, reassign or unassign other shortcuts, etc. Adobe did a great job of keeping the interface and shortcuts consistent from PS3 (the earliest version I used) through 5.5 - since then, they seem to be going to greater and greater lengths to jam more and more crap into the application. It wouldn't surprise me if they add email or IM functionality in the future.:P
New versions of Vi, Vim, Emacs, nano, ed, etc. don't change the goddamned shortcuts - the users wouldn't stand for it. The difference is that if an emacs user has to buy new hardware (due to, say, a massive hardware failure on his existing workstation), he's not stuck with a newer, "better" version of emacs that doesn't handle anything at all like the application he used to wear like a glove.:P
You can sing the praises of CS3 all you like, but most of the features you're talking up aren't features I use or care about, so it's a null point.;) I'm interested in two things, and two things only - the preservation of my existing toolset, which has served me JUST FINE for the last nine years, and SPEED. Newer, Bigger, Faster hardware OUGHT to mean apps that are blazingly fast - not marginally faster than ten year old apps on ten year old hardware. Adobe keeps mucking around with my toolbox, and that can be corrected.... but load time can't, speed can't, and there's not much that can be done to remove all of the crap I don't need and will never use from current versions of the software.
Seriously. This guy's been Chicken Littling everthing for years now. When was the last time he was actually dead-on 100% right about something?
I personally care nothing for the gphone - I don't use cel phones and google as a company makes me nervous. That just means I'm not in the target market - all this thing has to do is be better than the microsoft phones (not hard) and cheaper than Apple's quite nice but stupidly expensive iPhone (also really, really not hard). Yet it's going to fail because some pundit who probably thinks the sky is green says it's going to?
I've been using 5.5 for the last several years - a forced upgrade from 5.0, as 5.0's SMP support didn't work under the G5, and 5.5's did. Now I'm forced to make a hard choice : Upgrade to OS X 10.5 and trade Photoshop 5.5 for Photoshop CS (forget CS2 or CS3, I like the idea that photoshop should load sometime today), or stick with OS X 10.4 and Classic, which gives me Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 9, and a couple of other apps that just are not nearly as fast in "native" versions.
I hate the hell out of the PS 6+ interface - the top bar, the fact you have to reconfigure tablet settings for each individual brush if you make the mistake of clicking on a different sized one instead of dragging the slider, the POINTLESS changes to keyboard shortcuts, Adobe's petulant refusal to follow the OS X HIG and actually listen to apple-H by default (you can force Photoshop CS to actually "hide" with the proper command, but other Adobe apps aren't so lucky - After Effects, to name one), the fact that swapping or saving with a huge (a few hundred megs to a gig or so) file will make iTunes or VLC skip (doesn't happen with 5.5 in Classic, in part because Classic's memory limitations won't allow the app to eat anything over a gig, no matter what it's doing)..... and the type tool (in CS, at any rate) is horribly, horribly buggy under OS X. It worked fine on my coworker's box for months but then suddenly started behaving like my install has all along - it'll show the first few characters of text during editing, but if you actually want to see the type you're inputting, you have to stop editing and treat it like a layer.
Oh, and on top of all of that, CS does one thing that 5.5 doesn't - it crashes.
And since it's Apple, it won't depreciate. At all.
Look at the price of used Intel Apple kit on ebay, then compare to used PCs of the same spec range. You'll find that no-name equipment is half, a third, or even a quarter of the price.
An Apple tablet is ultimately a moot point for me - they could release one tomorrow and I might - might - be able to afford it used in five or six years.:|
The first OS X to ship - OS X Server 1.0 (and 1.1), which was available long before Public Beta and bore no resemblance at all to the final product - had a Merge command in the Finder.
It was incredibly useful, prevented crap like this from happening, and has never appeared in any release of 10.x. For some damned reason.
And... ummm.. Where exactly is the appeal in the TabletPC?
They're loads cheaper than a Cintiq. And more portable.
As an artist, I thought a tablet PC would be awesome. However, the one I tried was a big letdown in terms of application support - Adobe apps are unuseable in portrait mode.:/
Make it, oh, say..... at least half as fast as Quicksilver?
I for one can't stand Spotlight, either as a "find" utility, or as an application launcher - it's far too slow to be useable as either, in my experience (and this is on machines ranging from 450mhz to 4x2.5ghz).
For me, it was "evens rule, odds suck" until First Contact. I thought it was absolute fanservice completely-missed-the-demographic ass... and it's Citizen Kane compared to Nemesis (10). Though 8 is still Beyond Awful for the horrible effect it's had on the Trek canon.:(
Much the same way 3d Max's implementation of mental ray has a LOT more granularity and options than its default scanline renderer. The problem for people like me is that you can flip a few switches in the scanline, wait a couple of hours, photoshop for ten minutes, and get something that would have taken you DAYS of messing around with mental ray.:P
... the fact is, Maya's UI sucks. 3d Studio's UI sucks. Power Animator's UI sucks. Cinema 4d's UI sucks. Rhino's UI sucks. Nendo's UI sucks. Silo's UI sucks. Softimage's UI sucks. Lightwave's UI sucks. ALL 3d application UIs suck ass until you get up on the learning curve, because all 3d applications do fundamental things differently.
I "grew up" with 3d Studio MAX - Maya, Rhino, etc. all make my brain BLEED - not just because they're Not MAX (the way The GIMP is Not Photoshop) but because they're Not MAX the way Emacs is Not Vi.* 3d is HARD, dammit - hard to code, hard to learn. I'm picking up Silo pretty fast, but mostly because Silo seems to make it a point to do intuitively a lot of really basic things that are a massive assraping pain-in-the-ass to do in 3d Studio MAX.
That said, I have only two complaints about blender.
1. The open/save dialogue (as has been said elsewhere) does suck a load of flaming ass. Weapons grade Anthrax ass.
2. Like almost all modern 3d apps, you need a three button scroll-wheeled mouse to get ANY use out of the app at all. Which makes the app unuseable if you're using an input device, with, say... two buttons. While that's all fine and good, it ought to be fairly trivial to poll the bus, check for pointing devices, and pop up a nice little "FOR OPTIMAL USE PLZ ATTACH 3-BUTTON SCROLLWHEEL THINGER. [DIAGRAM WITH FUNCTIONS OUTLINED]" if inadequate hardware is detected. If Blender did this, it would put it well ahead of commercial apps for first-impression useability.
* Pick any two apps that generate the same results but go about it using completely contradictory and counterintuitive methods. Same principle.
Every time I go off about OS stability there's always somebody who chimes in and bellows about how MacOS Revision Whatever was Rock Fscking Stable and it's My Fault for doing it wrong, or whatever.
Well, if the ten apps you used were well written, that's fine for you. But of the ten apps I used, the only ones that never, ever dropped the machine were Photoshop and MacSSH. Various flavors of Mozilla and IE, Yahoo messenger, ICQ clients, AIM clients, etc. had a nasty habit of shitting all over everything in sight.
As for compatability, it took finally throwing out Classic with the move to Intel to get rid of 68k support code. Quite the lifespan. I love Classic - the apps I still use (old photoshop, old illustrator, old fontographer) run just fine, I've never had any stability issues, and Classic seems to play a hell of a lot better with system i/o than current Adobe apps do. But I'm not going to get Classic support on "the new platform," which is one less reason to upgrade.
As for what I'm whining about..... I'm grumpy about current hardware running current applications being effectively no faster (or in many cases, slower*) than old hardware running applications and an OS from that era. I'm grumpy about spiraling system requirements for software that does nothing substantially different beyond running slower on my current hardware. Ultimately, my point of contention is that while hardware keeps getting faster, software keeps bloating more and more and more, to the point that my coworkers and I are spending upwards of ten grand a year on hardware just to keep doing what we're doing at the same speed we've been doing it at for the last eight years. Yeah, we're able to work on bigger photoshop files and in HD video and applications have adapted to handle that, but we're still stuck with bullshit like not being able to feed an exact numeric value into the compressor slider of the Quicktime (API) export dialogue.
* My iTunes library hasn't changed in size since 2002. It's gone up a bit, down a lot, back up a bit, but it's always floated around 60 gigs. iTunes 2 on a 9600 loads that library faster than iTunes 7 on a G4. Not only that, iTunes 7 decided to stop playing the.mpg (mpeg audio - not.mp2 or even.mp3) files that comprise about a third of my library, and that have played fine in every single previous version of the software. The current version of DVD Studio Pro takes up to 25 seconds to load on my quad G5; the first version took seconds to pop up on a 733 G4. Eight times the processing speed and I'm waiting eight times as long to perform exactly the same tasks? Now that's PROGRESS!
(yes, I know the newer DVDSP is shitting its pants loading templates and so forth, but if you don't need them for what you're doing, all it does is slow you down)
Yeah, they've run out of base-level hardware (USB, firewire, etc) to exclude, so now they're going by clock speeds and other minutae.
That technically gives me one home machine (out of four) that'll run 10.5. Two if the OS just checks for clock and doesn't eyeball the actual motherboard/hardware the way Classic MacOS did.
And I can't afford any new Apple kit that isn't horrifically handicapped by Intel graphics.:|
Apple moved their entire userbase from an older, crotchety OS that crashed every ten minutes (thanks not to the OS, but to the apps you use day-to-day being horribly written), to a Brand New OS with much more security and more features, that ate eight times the RAM, had above-moderate-for-the-time minimum VRAM requirements, thrashes the hard drive like a mother, can't be used on older hardware, and everyone absolutely loves it.
Microsoft does the same thing, and fails. A lot.
Of course, Apple was willing to shit on millions of legacy application users in the process*, whereas Microsoft isn't: backwards compatability for zillions of business apps is one of the selling points - "it doesn't work on XP" keeps people on 2k, and "it doesn't work on Vista" is keeping people on XP.
Why go to all of the hassle to upgrade your OS if it doesn't do what you need it to do?
(disclaimer : gradual hardware failure combined with tactically-delayed feature inclusion in new versions of applications forced me to OS X. Vista's still lacking the 'killer app' that bellows IT IS SAFE TO UPGRADE!!!!.)
* 68k -> PPC shit on developers and consumers; PPC -> Intel did the same thing again, or will the second Apple drops support for their PPC hardware.
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Simply put, the only things on my machine that should phone out should be voluntarily invoked by me - the user. Namely the web browsers, software update, ssh, etceteras.
.doc files.
Adobe's behavior of late (and it will only get worse) is why applications like Little Snitch exist.
This kind of thing is why I wish The GIMP or similar would get useable* for those of us with hundreds of gigs of Photoshop documents.
* Open, Save, full support for all blending modes, masking modes, layer groups, and fonts/text editing capability up to at least Photoshop CS. I don't need the thing to handle Exactly Like Photoshop, but if it's going to be the "photoshop competitor" every FOSS advocate claims it is (instead of, say, the Paintshop Pro competitor that it actually is), then it ought to at least be able to handle my existing documents as well as OpenOffice handles
Yes. There's Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite and the goddamned MS Office that every single Windows user seems to think Apple would absolutely DIE without.
Yet my intel iMa runs Windows XP, because there are two software products I use for Windows, and neither ISV has shown the slightest bit of interest in creating a Mac port : The Orange Box and 3d Studio Max.
It doesn't matter what software the platform runs - so long as it doesn't run every single last little application I need (or just use recreationally), I'm stuck in both worlds.
If Valve and Autodesk would wean themselves of the windows API teat, I'd be a happy, happy camper.
The cool comes from the potential to make it less random. For example, taking the results of a portscan and feeding that into an enemy generator - if there's a lot of AIM traffic, you'd be able to deduce this from the fact that you're fighting a lot of trolls... if more people are using Yahoo IM, you'd run into more Orcs, etceteras. I probably misspoke when I said random "seed" - the attraction with something like this is using the traffic to generate enough variation in the game environment to make each play experience different.
Now the big question: How long until major developers (Square, Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, etc.) start integrating elements of this concept into their games? Picture a Castlevania that determines enemy strength or random drops based on ambient wifi traffic... or a Final Fantasy that uses wifi traffic as a random seed for enemy encounters, money drops, gambling odds, etc. Heck, even randomly generated enemies (imagine a wlan full of pr0n browsers - your sedate Animal Crossing-like environment would suddenly mutate into Urotsukidoji!) You could program a reasonably robust set of default variables in the event there's no wlan available, of course... ... but really, I'd like to see the DS wifi used for more than deathmatch, email and trading. And this, in my opinion, may well set a nice precedent.
I liked Buffy, I loved Firefly. I like comics. I make comics (okay not for a living thank gawd but that's not the point). The Buffy comics, in my opinion, are nowhere nearly as good as the series was. Could be pacing, could be the layouts (they don't help), could be the fact that one issue of the comic seems to cover a bizzaro combination of a quarter of an episode and half a season. Whatever it is, it's lacking.
So, meh. I don't want an artist's attempt at facsimiles of Mal and Jayne - I want more Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin. With shows like BTVS and Firefly, my enjoyment doesn't come from the script. The script is corn. My enjoyment comes from the actor's execution of that script. In comics, you don't have an actor giving a performance - you have a penciller (and then an inker, then a colorist) executing their impression of what they think the writer is trying to convey.
I hobby in comics, I've done bit parts in short films and web serials, I've made my own shorts - a great - or even a good - actor can make a passable pulp script a cult phenomenon. Anthony Stewart Head and Nathan Fillion are great examples of this. You cut down the creative team (as opposed to scale UP the creative team), and something gets lost in the process.
It's one thing to turn a comic book into a TV series or a movie - going the other way has always felt like a giant step backwards - not only do you lose the acting, you lose the cinematography and the editing, And even if all of that wasn't an issue, there's the fact that individual comic issues are as saturated with ads as a nuclear reaction chamber is with radiation - and with comics, the shift in visual style between comic content and ad content is even more jarring than it is with television ads or movie previews.
So, it might be good but as far as I'm concerned it won't actually be Firefly. If I'm lucky it'll be available in trade paperback by the time I'm finished with my reading list of comics that only exist as comics (currently plugging through The Invisibles as the spare change permits).
... that Vista wasn't only years late, many of the highly touted features (the new file system, for one) were cut in the process.
:P
Leopard shipped Feature Complete.
Vista shipped late because Windows is a huge disgusting bastard of a codebase.
Leopard shipped late because Apple took the QA team off of the OS and put it on the f*cking iPhone so the iPhone could ship in a timely fashion.
I dunno about you, but that says a lot about Apple's priorities to me. It also cheeses me off a bit, as Leopard is something I use, whereas even if I did have a use for a cell phone, I couldn't possibly afford an iPhone.
...or some of us are just being "willfully obtuse" because either:
A. We can't afford another bill, no matter how "cheap" other people claim it to be.
or
B. We're sick to death of overhearing half of loud inconsiderate conversations on the bus, waiting for the bus, on the streat, in line at the store, etc. and can't fathom being that willfully obtuse to our fellow man.
I'd carry a celphone distruptor before I'd cary a celphone. No plans to hassle with, no monthly bills. Just the occasional battery and the certain knowledge of a little peace and quiet (or at least some reflected frustration) when some asshat starts bellowing NO NO YOU'RE BREAKING UP I CAN'T HEAR YOU AUGH in the middle of rush hour.
... my house is wired up for cable (EXTENSIVELY, as there are drops on the ground floor, second floor, and attic), and I don't own a TV. I don't provide Comcast any revenue, though previous residents clearly did, extensively.
That would put me in one of the 70% of cabled houses, and in the 30% of the 100% of that 70% that, while having the wiring, does not have cable.
I did the same thing with my dad when he finally realized he needed a computer. He was set on a Dell because it was cheap. I told him he was getting an iMac, because he'd be calling me up asking why $whatever wasn't working right, and if it was a Mac, I'd be able to actually answer his questions. Six or seven years later and I've just recently handled my Annual Support Call, which involved snail-mailing* home a CD-R full of OS X and software updates so he could keep using the iTunes store over his crappy 33.6 dialup.
I'm quite pleased that I was able to win that particular argument, as it's made life a lot easier and more pleasant for all parties involved.
The post-Jedi Heir To The Empire books were, for me, the high water mark. Unfortunately, they opened the floodgates for additional books, none of which are nearly as good. The continued interest in SW fueled the THX remaster, the re-release of the toys, Shadows of the Empire.... by the time Lucas's ego went critical and he started work on Episode I, the market had already been flooded with new stories, new plots, new technology, and new aliens - all post Jedi - that were better than anything he could come up with. And then along comes Episode I, which does to Star Wars what Star Trek : Enterprise did to Star Trek.
Bleh.
Regarding CS3 : I'm stuck with work's budgeting schedule, which means I won't get it until January or February at the earliest. So, it's 5.5 until the Leopard upgrade, then PSCS. I have CS2 as well. With Classic already loaded, 5.5 loads the fastest, then PSCS, then much, much later, PSCS2. There's no excuse for this, in my opinion. Two dual cored 2.5ghz processors and four gigs of ram and that app ought to just Appear. Not sit on its ass "optimizing font menu performance" and "measuring memory" while I go get coffee, take a dump, and read the paper.
:P
:P
;) I'm interested in two things, and two things only - the preservation of my existing toolset, which has served me JUST FINE for the last nine years, and SPEED. Newer, Bigger, Faster hardware OUGHT to mean apps that are blazingly fast - not marginally faster than ten year old apps on ten year old hardware. Adobe keeps mucking around with my toolbox, and that can be corrected.... but load time can't, speed can't, and there's not much that can be done to remove all of the crap I don't need and will never use from current versions of the software.
Using Windows, you haven't had your OS manufacturer kick the APIs out from under your ISV not once but two or three times over the past decade. PS has fewer performance problems under windows because Adobe didn't have to effectively port the entire application to a new OS like they sort of did with the completely halfassed pile of crap that was PS7 for the Mac... and now thanks to the intel transition, Mac users are still suffering at the hands of lazy or sluggish ISVs, while Windows users are toodling right along, as nothing's changed for them.
As for keyboard shortcuts - yes, you can reset them. To a point. A very short, very blunt point. The annoying thing about that is that while the shortcuts have changed for no obvious apparent reason beyond just changing them to change them, and there's no readily convenient method to just switch back to a 5.5 or earlier shortcut set. You have to go in and manually reassign everything, troubleshoot conflicts, reassign or unassign other shortcuts, etc. Adobe did a great job of keeping the interface and shortcuts consistent from PS3 (the earliest version I used) through 5.5 - since then, they seem to be going to greater and greater lengths to jam more and more crap into the application. It wouldn't surprise me if they add email or IM functionality in the future.
New versions of Vi, Vim, Emacs, nano, ed, etc. don't change the goddamned shortcuts - the users wouldn't stand for it. The difference is that if an emacs user has to buy new hardware (due to, say, a massive hardware failure on his existing workstation), he's not stuck with a newer, "better" version of emacs that doesn't handle anything at all like the application he used to wear like a glove.
You can sing the praises of CS3 all you like, but most of the features you're talking up aren't features I use or care about, so it's a null point.
Seriously. This guy's been Chicken Littling everthing for years now. When was the last time he was actually dead-on 100% right about something?
I personally care nothing for the gphone - I don't use cel phones and google as a company makes me nervous. That just means I'm not in the target market - all this thing has to do is be better than the microsoft phones (not hard) and cheaper than Apple's quite nice but stupidly expensive iPhone (also really, really not hard). Yet it's going to fail because some pundit who probably thinks the sky is green says it's going to?
Naw.
I've been using 5.5 for the last several years - a forced upgrade from 5.0, as 5.0's SMP support didn't work under the G5, and 5.5's did. Now I'm forced to make a hard choice : Upgrade to OS X 10.5 and trade Photoshop 5.5 for Photoshop CS (forget CS2 or CS3, I like the idea that photoshop should load sometime today), or stick with OS X 10.4 and Classic, which gives me Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 9, and a couple of other apps that just are not nearly as fast in "native" versions.
I hate the hell out of the PS 6+ interface - the top bar, the fact you have to reconfigure tablet settings for each individual brush if you make the mistake of clicking on a different sized one instead of dragging the slider, the POINTLESS changes to keyboard shortcuts, Adobe's petulant refusal to follow the OS X HIG and actually listen to apple-H by default (you can force Photoshop CS to actually "hide" with the proper command, but other Adobe apps aren't so lucky - After Effects, to name one), the fact that swapping or saving with a huge (a few hundred megs to a gig or so) file will make iTunes or VLC skip (doesn't happen with 5.5 in Classic, in part because Classic's memory limitations won't allow the app to eat anything over a gig, no matter what it's doing)..... and the type tool (in CS, at any rate) is horribly, horribly buggy under OS X. It worked fine on my coworker's box for months but then suddenly started behaving like my install has all along - it'll show the first few characters of text during editing, but if you actually want to see the type you're inputting, you have to stop editing and treat it like a layer.
Oh, and on top of all of that, CS does one thing that 5.5 doesn't - it crashes.
And since it's Apple, it won't depreciate. At all.
:|
Look at the price of used Intel Apple kit on ebay, then compare to used PCs of the same spec range. You'll find that no-name equipment is half, a third, or even a quarter of the price.
An Apple tablet is ultimately a moot point for me - they could release one tomorrow and I might - might - be able to afford it used in five or six years.
The first OS X to ship - OS X Server 1.0 (and 1.1), which was available long before Public Beta and bore no resemblance at all to the final product - had a Merge command in the Finder.
:P
It was incredibly useful, prevented crap like this from happening, and has never appeared in any release of 10.x. For some damned reason.
Maybe they're saving it for 10.6 or 10.7.
And... ummm.. Where exactly is the appeal in the TabletPC?
:/
They're loads cheaper than a Cintiq. And more portable.
As an artist, I thought a tablet PC would be awesome. However, the one I tried was a big letdown in terms of application support - Adobe apps are unuseable in portrait mode.
Apple doesn't release Mac OS X for other machines because doing so opens them up to unknown performance and stability.
Wrong. Apple doesn't release OS X for other machines because they don't sell the other machines . It's as simple as that, really.
Study your Apple history. Read up on the Clone Wars. Apple offered their OS to third party vendors and it very nearly destroyed them.
Make it, oh, say..... at least half as fast as Quicksilver?
I for one can't stand Spotlight, either as a "find" utility, or as an application launcher - it's far too slow to be useable as either, in my experience (and this is on machines ranging from 450mhz to 4x2.5ghz).
For me, it was "evens rule, odds suck" until First Contact. I thought it was absolute fanservice completely-missed-the-demographic ass... and it's Citizen Kane compared to Nemesis (10). Though 8 is still Beyond Awful for the horrible effect it's had on the Trek canon. :(
Robust has more options than good.
:P
Much the same way 3d Max's implementation of mental ray has a LOT more granularity and options than its default scanline renderer. The problem for people like me is that you can flip a few switches in the scanline, wait a couple of hours, photoshop for ten minutes, and get something that would have taken you DAYS of messing around with mental ray.
... the fact is, Maya's UI sucks. 3d Studio's UI sucks. Power Animator's UI sucks. Cinema 4d's UI sucks. Rhino's UI sucks. Nendo's UI sucks. Silo's UI sucks. Softimage's UI sucks. Lightwave's UI sucks. ALL 3d application UIs suck ass until you get up on the learning curve, because all 3d applications do fundamental things differently.
I "grew up" with 3d Studio MAX - Maya, Rhino, etc. all make my brain BLEED - not just because they're Not MAX (the way The GIMP is Not Photoshop) but because they're Not MAX the way Emacs is Not Vi.* 3d is HARD, dammit - hard to code, hard to learn. I'm picking up Silo pretty fast, but mostly because Silo seems to make it a point to do intuitively a lot of really basic things that are a massive assraping pain-in-the-ass to do in 3d Studio MAX.
That said, I have only two complaints about blender.
1. The open/save dialogue (as has been said elsewhere) does suck a load of flaming ass. Weapons grade Anthrax ass.
2. Like almost all modern 3d apps, you need a three button scroll-wheeled mouse to get ANY use out of the app at all. Which makes the app unuseable if you're using an input device, with, say... two buttons. While that's all fine and good, it ought to be fairly trivial to poll the bus, check for pointing devices, and pop up a nice little "FOR OPTIMAL USE PLZ ATTACH 3-BUTTON SCROLLWHEEL THINGER. [DIAGRAM WITH FUNCTIONS OUTLINED]" if inadequate hardware is detected. If Blender did this, it would put it well ahead of commercial apps for first-impression useability.
* Pick any two apps that generate the same results but go about it using completely contradictory and counterintuitive methods. Same principle.
Every time I go off about OS stability there's always somebody who chimes in and bellows about how MacOS Revision Whatever was Rock Fscking Stable and it's My Fault for doing it wrong, or whatever.
.mpg (mpeg audio - not .mp2 or even .mp3) files that comprise about a third of my library, and that have played fine in every single previous version of the software. The current version of DVD Studio Pro takes up to 25 seconds to load on my quad G5; the first version took seconds to pop up on a 733 G4. Eight times the processing speed and I'm waiting eight times as long to perform exactly the same tasks? Now that's PROGRESS!
Well, if the ten apps you used were well written, that's fine for you. But of the ten apps I used, the only ones that never, ever dropped the machine were Photoshop and MacSSH. Various flavors of Mozilla and IE, Yahoo messenger, ICQ clients, AIM clients, etc. had a nasty habit of shitting all over everything in sight.
As for compatability, it took finally throwing out Classic with the move to Intel to get rid of 68k support code. Quite the lifespan. I love Classic - the apps I still use (old photoshop, old illustrator, old fontographer) run just fine, I've never had any stability issues, and Classic seems to play a hell of a lot better with system i/o than current Adobe apps do. But I'm not going to get Classic support on "the new platform," which is one less reason to upgrade.
As for what I'm whining about..... I'm grumpy about current hardware running current applications being effectively no faster (or in many cases, slower*) than old hardware running applications and an OS from that era. I'm grumpy about spiraling system requirements for software that does nothing substantially different beyond running slower on my current hardware. Ultimately, my point of contention is that while hardware keeps getting faster, software keeps bloating more and more and more, to the point that my coworkers and I are spending upwards of ten grand a year on hardware just to keep doing what we're doing at the same speed we've been doing it at for the last eight years. Yeah, we're able to work on bigger photoshop files and in HD video and applications have adapted to handle that, but we're still stuck with bullshit like not being able to feed an exact numeric value into the compressor slider of the Quicktime (API) export dialogue.
* My iTunes library hasn't changed in size since 2002. It's gone up a bit, down a lot, back up a bit, but it's always floated around 60 gigs. iTunes 2 on a 9600 loads that library faster than iTunes 7 on a G4. Not only that, iTunes 7 decided to stop playing the
(yes, I know the newer DVDSP is shitting its pants loading templates and so forth, but if you don't need them for what you're doing, all it does is slow you down)
Yeah, they've run out of base-level hardware (USB, firewire, etc) to exclude, so now they're going by clock speeds and other minutae.
:|
That technically gives me one home machine (out of four) that'll run 10.5. Two if the OS just checks for clock and doesn't eyeball the actual motherboard/hardware the way Classic MacOS did.
And I can't afford any new Apple kit that isn't horrifically handicapped by Intel graphics.
Actually, my Quadra 950 runs AUX 3 and I use it as a nightstand. ;)
Apple moved their entire userbase from an older, crotchety OS that crashed every ten minutes (thanks not to the OS, but to the apps you use day-to-day being horribly written), to a Brand New OS with much more security and more features, that ate eight times the RAM, had above-moderate-for-the-time minimum VRAM requirements, thrashes the hard drive like a mother, can't be used on older hardware, and everyone absolutely loves it.
Microsoft does the same thing, and fails. A lot.
Of course, Apple was willing to shit on millions of legacy application users in the process*, whereas Microsoft isn't: backwards compatability for zillions of business apps is one of the selling points - "it doesn't work on XP" keeps people on 2k, and "it doesn't work on Vista" is keeping people on XP.
Why go to all of the hassle to upgrade your OS if it doesn't do what you need it to do?
(disclaimer : gradual hardware failure combined with tactically-delayed feature inclusion in new versions of applications forced me to OS X. Vista's still lacking the 'killer app' that bellows IT IS SAFE TO UPGRADE!!!!.)
* 68k -> PPC shit on developers and consumers; PPC -> Intel did the same thing again, or will the second Apple drops support for their PPC hardware.