Seriously, the state of the mac gaming market is a joke- unless you're big into emulators.
Likewise, I bought my machines for work, but all work and no play makes jack a dull boy.
We switched the OTHER way...
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Return of the Mac
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· Score: 4, Informative
Went from OS X server on a crotchety old blue G3 (upgraded to a g4/500 w/ a gig of ram) and a pile of firewire hard drives to debian on a cheapass x86 box with a 1tb SATA RAID. The box runs netatalk 2 and doesn't need to do anything else. Works perfectly.... and the PC and drives (with a stupid amount of ram, gigeth, etc) cost less than a base XServe.
I've been using macs daily since '98, and with the move to OS X, file sharing went from ACLs to unix permissions and suddenly there was no essential difference between using linux and using macos to the end user.... Since X came out and netatalk got useable, I've never had a compelling reason to use OS X on the server - but then, a server is (ime) a thing you set up once, lock up, and leave sitting in a rack until hardware dies. It probably helps that I'm a lot more comfortable with debian on the command line- it's easier to update and maintain a debian system without having to be at the box, in my experience.
But my job has no call for Serious Computers. So, YMMV.
Dude, if you want a unix that Just Works with a desktop that doesn't suck a golfball through a garden hose, your next hardware purchase needs to be a mac.
And if OS X burns your ass, you can always install freenix on it.:P
Jebus. Apple prototyped PVR/ VOD boxes in the mid nineties, based on modified Quadra 605 and 610 mobos with bigass MPEG decoder boards strapped on. I have several of them.
Much like their swat at the video game market (Pippen), Apple has ALREADY DONE THE PVR. Just so happens that they've been there, done that, before it was "cool" to like Apple.
Yeah, you can get a hell of a lot more bang for that buck, but can you fit that bang up your bung?
I doubt it. You're paying for the size here, and if you don't need the size, then who cares what the price is?
Re:VLC can use other monitors...
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Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 1
Huh.
I'll have to keep the bit about VLC in mind.:)
Like I said, I use Quicktime Pro as a professional tool, not an entertainment device- so I don't have much experience with longterm use of fullscreen. The Apple DVD player does the same thing (pops back to windowed when you focus something else), but you can turn that off so it'll run full in the background, which is really nice.
I have PS CS Mac and PS 5.5 installed on the same machine. (dual g5 w/ 2g ram)
I use PS 5.5 in Classic for hours every single day. It's so much faster than CS for so many things it's not even funny. I need the way it handles type, I totally HATE the interface changes in CS, Finder takes care of everything I'd need the file browser for... and man, CS is SLOW.* Especially for saving biggish files. Oh, and running 5.5 in Classic gives me windowshading and borders around windows- neither of which are in CS. I can NOT work with minimizing to the dock- it shoots my workflow in the face. The transform tool pisses me off as well- I can see how it might be an "improvement", but gawd is it annoying (being used to the old one). The draw speed of the crap CS does with the pen tool is pathetically slow- I take a huge speed hit doing path traces in CS, when I can do 'em lickety split in 5.5. Realtime fill isn't really a useful feature for me, thanks.
And is it just me, or does Photoshop get more and more and more of Illustrator's features with every version? Is Adobe merging the apps or what? o_O
Problem is, 5.5 fits my workflow so damned well that the "changes" introduced with 6 and up aren't improvements, they're extremely compelling arguments NOT to upgrade. I can't see Adove rolling back features any time soon, so it looks like I'll be using Classic until Apple drops support for it.
About the only thing I've needed it for was the one time I screwed up and ran over the 99-layer limit of 5.5. Had to open the file in CS and optimize it before passing it back.
I've had similar problems with "improvements" to Illustrator and Microsoft office. The end result? I'm using modern hardware to run Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8, and Office 98.... and they're all a hell of a lot faster than their OS X equivalents (especially office), and they do everything I need. Nice to be running them on an OS that doesn't go down a few times a day that has a command line and a modern browser.
* Slow but it does a better job of talking to the OS. I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop 5.5 waiting for it to finish crapping its pants on a swap operation- I gladly put up with my time losses on swap in exchange for the ability to run 5.5 at very near the Speed Of Thought - something that CS just will NOT allow me to do.
Lack of forced upgrades my ASS.
on
Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Dude, you're coming into Appleland well after the OS X bomb went off. Apple has been working passive-aggressively to get their users to drop cash on new kit for years, and they've been leveraging the OS to do this. To whit:
1. You can run OS 9.1 on the 6100 through early-mid G4s, though it has to be installed from CD in the x100s (instead of a patch update)
2. OS 9.2.X requires first-gen G3s or better, though you can hack it onto older gear with the right tools.
3. 10.0's official sysreqs were "G3 and up". Ditto 10.1 and 10.2. 10.2 introduced Quartz Extreme, which instantly obsoleted non-AGP macs and most mac video boards. And all iMacs and portables with less than 32 vram.*
4. 10.3 won't install on beige hardware. To run the current OS, you've got to be using a machine with New World roms (or hack the sucker on with XPostFacto).
5. 10.4 will be shipping on DVD. I'm sure there'll be a CD option as well, but if it's DVD only, that chops out a couple of generations of iMacs, some blue g3s, and some powerbooks, etc, etc.
It's only a matter of time until the OS requires Altivec- the entire product line has been G4 or G5 for awhile now, so I imagine Apple is going to drop support for G3 machines as fast as they can.
And it's not like they "drop" support per se (unless obviously, as with the 10.3 release)- they do it passive-aggressively, by introducing new features that require recent hardware to use.
Doesn't help that you need a dual G5 and 2g of ram to get the Photoshop performance OS 9 has on less than half the hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you on all other points. But no forced upgrades? Please. You should've seen the 68k -> PPC transition.
* Yeah, you can use OS X with less than 32vram but the difference between QE and non-QE on slower, ram-starved machines is obvious.
Re:Probably worth mentioning...
on
Hacking Mac OS X
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· Score: 2, Informative
I find the CLI to be vastly superior for everything but dealing with large amounts of data. I just like having the ability to see what I'm working with on multiple levels at once, make irregular selections, etc. In this respect, an Apple gui is stupidly efficient for me.
As a Quicktime Pro user, all I can say is that the player is a piece of shit- it hasn't evolved much since 1999 and it really, REALLY needs to. Quicktime the API is GREAT for video work, I wouldn't use anything else, but for playback? omfgSUCK. I use VLC for everything and mplayer for whatever VLC doesn't handle- Quicktime (including Pro) doesn't believe in playlists, and VLC and MPlayer both have application-level volume control, whereas QTP implements on a per-file basis, which is 31 flavors of ghey.
For working with video, Quicktime Pro is pretty decent, though I try like hell to stay away from the player as much as possible. As an entertainment devices.... gag. It sucks. The ONLY area where Qucktime Pro has an advantage over VLC or MPlater for entertainment purposes is it'll go fullscreen on the monitor of your choice (both VLC and MPlayer pop fullscreen to the "root" window), it listens to the typical system keyboard shortcuts, and it's about as good as it gets for scrubbing or single-frame advance/rewind, which is something VLC and MPlayer both suck hard at.
Cracks me up that here we are in 2005 and you can't "go to" a specified time in any of these apps- you have to scrub close to where you want and let fly from there. You want precision? You have to dump into editing software and hope to hell the quicktime API can handle the video (it horks like a mother on a wide, wide variety of divx-variants).
... noteably from the standpoint that selecting a quicktime or other video file that Quicktime thinks it can deal with in column view causes the thing to thumbnail preview in the Finder, which flags the file as being IN USE. So if you're using something like Media100 (hardware accellerated video), and you select a media100 file in the finder, Quicktime shows a preview... you double-click to open the sucker and OH GUESS WHAT YOU CAN'T BECAUSE THE MEDIA100 HARDWARE IS IN USE BY ANOTHER APPLICATION.
So you either flip to list or icon view to select and open the godsdamned document, or you open it from inside the media100 software.
Finder, imo, is the one thing that needs SERIOUS improvement in OS X. I shouldn't be forced into using third party software* ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com ) just to have a useable system.
* Quicksilver keeps me very, very far away from the Finder. I like it that way.
I still love MacOS. I still WANT MacOS. But I've moved to OS X and I'm staying there for the following reasons:
1. Quicksilver ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ ) 2. "long" filenames. 3. The unix thing. I like the command line, dammit. 4. It doesn't crash six times a day. 5. It's orders of magnitude better for working with video.
"interface" isn't on the list and never will be. I'm no fan of the dock, and I don't like how "big" Aqua feels compared to Platinum- and Platinum felt kind of chunky compared to System Seven! The only major UI improvement in OS X is the file open-and-save dialogue being a system-level "widget"- I don't miss the application-specific dialogues of the MacOS era at all (though I'm still stuck with System Seven open and save for the version of photoshop that handles type the way I need type to be handled for the work I do).
I miss the cohesion of drag and drop, I MISS WINDOWSHADING, and I miss windows having grabbable borders. The lack thereof in OS X versions of Photoshop is a HUGE impediment to my workflow.:|
1. I grok the three button mouse. PPC linux installs, however, don't seem to like powerbooks. At ALL. This is pretty damned irritating. The physical hardware has one mouse button.:P
2. You seem to think that by ripping on linux, I think MacOS is perfect. Not so.:) OS X sucks ass in terms of interface consistency- on the Mac platform, this peaked with MacOS 8.6 and Quicktime 3. (Quicktime 4 introduced the Metal look, Sherlock 2 was the second app to use it, then along came iTunes, etc, etc.) The OS X Finder really, really sucks IME. Gnome beats it in a few respects, but only because Gnome is starting to get close to the classic MacOS spatial finder, which is still better than the OS X finder. (the sidebar in 10.3 is nice, but dear gods does list view SUCK)
Virts are nice. Regardless of virts, I run multiple monitors when I need more real estate. X-windows isn't exactly awesome at multi-head.
Focus Follows Mouse can suck my ass. I'm an artist- the LAST thing I need is a terminal window popping into focus when I'm panning between photoshop windows. Blows things all to hell. It's great if you live in browsers and terminals, don't get me wrong- but for creative apps... AUGH.
Case sesnsitive filesystem? GIMME. I WANT I WANT. One of the reasons why all of my servers are linux- strip off the desktop and give me a choice between darwin and debian and I'll take debian in a heartbeat.
... all you have to do is say "I CAN FIX THAT!" and have more of a clue than the person with the broke gear.
Considering the number of retards and windows installs in the world, this is fairly easy to do.
Computer "repair" is a lot like plumbing... the difference is that you don't see everyone who's plunged a toilet calling themselves a plumber and billing out 50$ an hour. Real plumbers know their shit and get paid accordingly- likewise, a real pc tech who actually knows their shit is earning their paycheck without breaking much of a sweat.
The problem is finding competent people. It's reasonably easy to tell if your plumber doesn't know shit, but if you're not some degree of geek, you'll get totally snowed by "computer repair"- though if you're some degree of geek, you don't need one.:P
I want a decent file browser, useable (system-wide) drag and drop, homogenized toolkits (none of this "three apps, three different looks" bullshit), a friendlier clipboard (I got a powerbook here, this whole THREE BUTTON MOUSE!!!!! thing is killin' me!), a non-shitty default aesthetic that doesn't compell me to change everything out of its sheer ugliness, a useful offline help system, CAREFULLY THOUGHT OUT CONSISTANT AND TESTED CONFIGURATION MENUS and.... (pause for breath) everything else MacOS had in 1994. Which so far only MacOS and OS X seem to have.
Windows still hasn't caught up and freenix "desktops" are still catching up to windows. 32-bit icons and font smoothing are candy things.... and unfortunately, they're a hell of a lot easier to impliment than Basic Functionality.:|
I've heard about "OMFG OS X PEE DEE EFF!!!!!11111" for years. YEARS I SAY.
I print tiffs from photoshop. I'm not really a document kind of guy. I've run off some ebay invoices from textedit a couple of times, but that's been it. I've never dicked with pdfs in OS X.
So just for the heck of it, I hit Apple-P (PRINT) in Safari on this article. Got a list of shared printers three floors above my head, and options to [ PREVIEW ] [ SAVE AS PDF ] and [ FAX ]*. Saved off the article as an 11 page pdf and opened it up in Preview for a skim. Smooth.
PDFing in OS X is a completely transparent process- it's an option in the print menu, which is in turn present in damned near every application under the "File" menu. None of this obnoxious "Office Toolbar" crap.
* I imagine FAX capability would be damned handy for some people.
Mac OS 8 and 8.5: These 1997 and 1998 releases are as dead as Windows 95, thanks to their own lack of USB support --
Bull.
8.0? Yes. 8.1 shipped with the RevA iMac, 8.5 with the RevB- MacOS has had full, solid USB support since 8.5- enough to run the basics. Keyboard, mouse, zip drive, scanner, trackballs... hard drives, SCSI adapters, printers... I was running all this shit under 8.5 well before the 8.6 update was released.
Aside- Stability-wise, 8.6 is still the most stable release of MacOS I've ever used. If you can stomach IE5 or Mozilla 1.0 and aren't using the box for music (SoundApp is as stable as it gets for mp3 playback, pre-iTunes), 8.6 will do ya fine- especially on beige machines.
Also aside- the article author has such a giant juicy pants-bulge for USB that he's obviously forgotten that loads of PCs still ship with PS/2, parrallel and serial ports... and that there are still shipping devices that use 'em.
I'm fine with 60 on some displays, but I prefer 85. The fun part is when you start dealing with multiple monitors, and those monitors are different size and different manufacturer CRTs. Two different model trinitrons at 85hz, you might see some lines through one or the other or both - frequently going one way up one monitor and the other way down the other.
To combat this, I run my work system at 85hz and 100hz (2x21") and my home system at 70hz/60hz/75hz (15"/20"/15")- oddly enough, I have no problems with 60hz on my 20"... though on everything else I can simulate an LSD flashback just by crunching an ice cube.
Or rather, I can see it, but I don't really process the fact that I can until the headache sits in. I'm fine with a fixed rez and frequency monitor (typically 1280x1024x85hx), but going through a protracted period of switching, like you'd do with finding optimal video card settings for a video game, gives me one hell of a headache.
Middle of last week I thought I was getting a migraine from the Splenda-laced drink I was enjoying, but it turned out to be Halo- 60hz on a display my brain was used to taking in at 85. Stabby-stabby-stabby!
And what am I going to watch when Speakeasy is experiencing a Network Service Event (aka downtime)? What the hell am I going to back up my video, music, and work files to? HDDs don't last forever. DVD's a great storage medium. It's okay for movies, but hey- I've been ripping my DVD video to DIVX. I've found it handy to keep the optical drive free.
I'm not interested in 4398573489 commentaries, cast and crew bios (imdb is much more thorough...), FX production documentaries, Making Of documentaries, etc, etc. That shit all started to blend together well before LOTR shoved the "extras" thing straight into overkill. The few movies I really want to see extras on (Repo Man, Dark Star) are light on 'em.
If Apple could do for selling movies what they've done for selling music, I'd be on that shit in a heartbeat- cheap entertainment I can back up and view whenever I get bored. No problem.
DVD's great for extended bouts of offline, or if you're one of those consumers with the Ultra Mega Home Theater, but video viewing is tied fairly tightly to my computer useage, so hey- broadband video delivery is right up my alley.
But I'll be burning it off to DVD-R for backup and offline storage, kthks.:P
... is that these "specific formats" typically consist of a 200 song playlist. There were a hell of a lot more hit singles in the 80s- nevermind hit albums or hit artists.
I listened to the local Clear Channel Alternapop Earcock a couple of days ago for the first time in months... in a thirty minute span, I didn't hear anything I haven't heard a few hundred times before, and years previously. Last I checked, Radiohead has written more songs than "Creep"- but you wouldn't know it to listen to these asshats.
When I got to this town (Pittsburgh) in 1997, there was a Jazz station parked at 104.{5|7}. It was nice and I listened to it quite a bit... until one day it magically Changed Format to hiphop/r&b. Just like that. A few years later and that frequency is a black hole of Rod Stewart / Michael Bolton-esque soft rock.:-| And College Radio can't get the OMFG TECHNO OMFG GANSTA RAP OMFG HIPPY MUSIC out of their systems either.
Radio's great when you're in the serviced demographic- if you're noti, it's a vast, staticy wasteland.
But then, I stopped listening to radio years ago- I pull my weather from the *.gov, and get everything else through iTunes and the internets. I once heard podcasting described as "an audio blog"- my response was something along the lines of "just what I want to hear- more talk radio."
Blogs have given us a few million Spider Jerusalem wannabes- podcasting and cheap cams will give us a few million Edison Carter wannabes. While technology has decimated the entry barrier and given any medium to anyone with enough motivation to make a try for it, it's done nothing to make it easier to sort through the crap and find the good stuff (example- webcomics. Finding a good webcomic that's not run by someone who's even better at marketing is a crapshoot).
Stern, Limbaugh (sp?), et. al. irritate the everloving crap out of me- if I wanted a cult-of-personality circlejerk I'd buy a TV and watch the local news. Those jackoffs can't seem to get their faces off of billboards, and they look a few notches up the percieved quality scale from all of the radio "personalities" splattered across same. Stern went to XM- that's good, he can stay there. I don't miss him. If podcasting is similar, then I'm so far out of the demographic that I'm orbiting pluto.
If I really want talk radio, I can pipe an infobot or eliza through a speach synthesizer and be done with it.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
But then I'd have to buy a TV... :(
Seriously, the state of the mac gaming market is a joke- unless you're big into emulators.
Likewise, I bought my machines for work, but all work and no play makes jack a dull boy.
Went from OS X server on a crotchety old blue G3 (upgraded to a g4/500 w/ a gig of ram) and a pile of firewire hard drives to debian on a cheapass x86 box with a 1tb SATA RAID. The box runs netatalk 2 and doesn't need to do anything else. Works perfectly.... and the PC and drives (with a stupid amount of ram, gigeth, etc) cost less than a base XServe.
I've been using macs daily since '98, and with the move to OS X, file sharing went from ACLs to unix permissions and suddenly there was no essential difference between using linux and using macos to the end user.... Since X came out and netatalk got useable, I've never had a compelling reason to use OS X on the server - but then, a server is (ime) a thing you set up once, lock up, and leave sitting in a rack until hardware dies. It probably helps that I'm a lot more comfortable with debian on the command line- it's easier to update and maintain a debian system without having to be at the box, in my experience.
But my job has no call for Serious Computers. So, YMMV.
Dude, if you want a unix that Just Works with a desktop that doesn't suck a golfball through a garden hose, your next hardware purchase needs to be a mac.
:P
And if OS X burns your ass, you can always install freenix on it.
Jebus. Apple prototyped PVR/ VOD boxes in the mid nineties, based on modified Quadra 605 and 610 mobos with bigass MPEG decoder boards strapped on. I have several of them.
Much like their swat at the video game market (Pippen), Apple has ALREADY DONE THE PVR. Just so happens that they've been there, done that, before it was "cool" to like Apple.
Yeah, you can get a hell of a lot more bang for that buck, but can you fit that bang up your bung?
I doubt it. You're paying for the size here, and if you don't need the size, then who cares what the price is?
Huh.
:)
I'll have to keep the bit about VLC in mind.
Like I said, I use Quicktime Pro as a professional tool, not an entertainment device- so I don't have much experience with longterm use of fullscreen. The Apple DVD player does the same thing (pops back to windowed when you focus something else), but you can turn that off so it'll run full in the background, which is really nice.
I have PS CS Mac and PS 5.5 installed on the same machine. (dual g5 w/ 2g ram)
.* Especially for saving biggish files. Oh, and running 5.5 in Classic gives me windowshading and borders around windows- neither of which are in CS. I can NOT work with minimizing to the dock- it shoots my workflow in the face. The transform tool pisses me off as well- I can see how it might be an "improvement", but gawd is it annoying (being used to the old one). The draw speed of the crap CS does with the pen tool is pathetically slow- I take a huge speed hit doing path traces in CS, when I can do 'em lickety split in 5.5. Realtime fill isn't really a useful feature for me, thanks.
I use PS 5.5 in Classic for hours every single day. It's so much faster than CS for so many things it's not even funny. I need the way it handles type, I totally HATE the interface changes in CS, Finder takes care of everything I'd need the file browser for... and man, CS is SLOW
And is it just me, or does Photoshop get more and more and more of Illustrator's features with every version? Is Adobe merging the apps or what? o_O
Problem is, 5.5 fits my workflow so damned well that the "changes" introduced with 6 and up aren't improvements, they're extremely compelling arguments NOT to upgrade. I can't see Adove rolling back features any time soon, so it looks like I'll be using Classic until Apple drops support for it.
About the only thing I've needed it for was the one time I screwed up and ran over the 99-layer limit of 5.5. Had to open the file in CS and optimize it before passing it back.
I've had similar problems with "improvements" to Illustrator and Microsoft office. The end result? I'm using modern hardware to run Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8, and Office 98.... and they're all a hell of a lot faster than their OS X equivalents (especially office), and they do everything I need. Nice to be running them on an OS that doesn't go down a few times a day that has a command line and a modern browser.
* Slow but it does a better job of talking to the OS. I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop 5.5 waiting for it to finish crapping its pants on a swap operation- I gladly put up with my time losses on swap in exchange for the ability to run 5.5 at very near the Speed Of Thought - something that CS just will NOT allow me to do.
Try it on a Mac.
Photoshop stopped being fast with version 6.
Dude, you're coming into Appleland well after the OS X bomb went off. Apple has been working passive-aggressively to get their users to drop cash on new kit for years, and they've been leveraging the OS to do this. To whit:
1. You can run OS 9.1 on the 6100 through early-mid G4s, though it has to be installed from CD in the x100s (instead of a patch update)
2. OS 9.2.X requires first-gen G3s or better, though you can hack it onto older gear with the right tools.
3. 10.0's official sysreqs were "G3 and up". Ditto 10.1 and 10.2. 10.2 introduced Quartz Extreme, which instantly obsoleted non-AGP macs and most mac video boards. And all iMacs and portables with less than 32 vram.*
4. 10.3 won't install on beige hardware. To run the current OS, you've got to be using a machine with New World roms (or hack the sucker on with XPostFacto).
5. 10.4 will be shipping on DVD. I'm sure there'll be a CD option as well, but if it's DVD only, that chops out a couple of generations of iMacs, some blue g3s, and some powerbooks, etc, etc.
It's only a matter of time until the OS requires Altivec- the entire product line has been G4 or G5 for awhile now, so I imagine Apple is going to drop support for G3 machines as fast as they can.
And it's not like they "drop" support per se (unless obviously, as with the 10.3 release)- they do it passive-aggressively, by introducing new features that require recent hardware to use.
Doesn't help that you need a dual G5 and 2g of ram to get the Photoshop performance OS 9 has on less than half the hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you on all other points. But no forced upgrades? Please. You should've seen the 68k -> PPC transition.
* Yeah, you can use OS X with less than 32vram but the difference between QE and non-QE on slower, ram-starved machines is obvious.
I find the CLI to be vastly superior for everything but dealing with large amounts of data. I just like having the ability to see what I'm working with on multiple levels at once, make irregular selections, etc. In this respect, an Apple gui is stupidly efficient for me.
As a Quicktime Pro user, all I can say is that the player is a piece of shit- it hasn't evolved much since 1999 and it really, REALLY needs to. Quicktime the API is GREAT for video work, I wouldn't use anything else, but for playback? omfgSUCK. I use VLC for everything and mplayer for whatever VLC doesn't handle- Quicktime (including Pro) doesn't believe in playlists, and VLC and MPlayer both have application-level volume control, whereas QTP implements on a per-file basis, which is 31 flavors of ghey.
For working with video, Quicktime Pro is pretty decent, though I try like hell to stay away from the player as much as possible. As an entertainment devices.... gag. It sucks. The ONLY area where Qucktime Pro has an advantage over VLC or MPlater for entertainment purposes is it'll go fullscreen on the monitor of your choice (both VLC and MPlayer pop fullscreen to the "root" window), it listens to the typical system keyboard shortcuts, and it's about as good as it gets for scrubbing or single-frame advance/rewind, which is something VLC and MPlayer both suck hard at.
Cracks me up that here we are in 2005 and you can't "go to" a specified time in any of these apps- you have to scrub close to where you want and let fly from there. You want precision? You have to dump into editing software and hope to hell the quicktime API can handle the video (it horks like a mother on a wide, wide variety of divx-variants).
... noteably from the standpoint that selecting a quicktime or other video file that Quicktime thinks it can deal with in column view causes the thing to thumbnail preview in the Finder, which flags the file as being IN USE. So if you're using something like Media100 (hardware accellerated video), and you select a media100 file in the finder, Quicktime shows a preview... you double-click to open the sucker and OH GUESS WHAT YOU CAN'T BECAUSE THE MEDIA100 HARDWARE IS IN USE BY ANOTHER APPLICATION.
So you either flip to list or icon view to select and open the godsdamned document, or you open it from inside the media100 software.
Finder, imo, is the one thing that needs SERIOUS improvement in OS X. I shouldn't be forced into using third party software* ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com ) just to have a useable system.
* Quicksilver keeps me very, very far away from the Finder. I like it that way.
I still love MacOS. I still WANT MacOS. But I've moved to OS X and I'm staying there for the following reasons:
:|
1. Quicksilver ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ )
2. "long" filenames.
3. The unix thing. I like the command line, dammit.
4. It doesn't crash six times a day.
5. It's orders of magnitude better for working with video.
"interface" isn't on the list and never will be. I'm no fan of the dock, and I don't like how "big" Aqua feels compared to Platinum- and Platinum felt kind of chunky compared to System Seven! The only major UI improvement in OS X is the file open-and-save dialogue being a system-level "widget"- I don't miss the application-specific dialogues of the MacOS era at all (though I'm still stuck with System Seven open and save for the version of photoshop that handles type the way I need type to be handled for the work I do).
I miss the cohesion of drag and drop, I MISS WINDOWSHADING, and I miss windows having grabbable borders. The lack thereof in OS X versions of Photoshop is a HUGE impediment to my workflow.
1. I grok the three button mouse. PPC linux installs, however, don't seem to like powerbooks. At ALL. This is pretty damned irritating. The physical hardware has one mouse button. :P
:) OS X sucks ass in terms of interface consistency- on the Mac platform, this peaked with MacOS 8.6 and Quicktime 3. (Quicktime 4 introduced the Metal look, Sherlock 2 was the second app to use it, then along came iTunes, etc, etc.) The OS X Finder really, really sucks IME. Gnome beats it in a few respects, but only because Gnome is starting to get close to the classic MacOS spatial finder, which is still better than the OS X finder. (the sidebar in 10.3 is nice, but dear gods does list view SUCK)
2. You seem to think that by ripping on linux, I think MacOS is perfect. Not so.
Virts are nice. Regardless of virts, I run multiple monitors when I need more real estate. X-windows isn't exactly awesome at multi-head.
Focus Follows Mouse can suck my ass. I'm an artist- the LAST thing I need is a terminal window popping into focus when I'm panning between photoshop windows. Blows things all to hell. It's great if you live in browsers and terminals, don't get me wrong- but for creative apps... AUGH.
Case sesnsitive filesystem? GIMME. I WANT I WANT. One of the reasons why all of my servers are linux- strip off the desktop and give me a choice between darwin and debian and I'll take debian in a heartbeat.
... all you have to do is say "I CAN FIX THAT!" and have more of a clue than the person with the broke gear.
:P
Considering the number of retards and windows installs in the world, this is fairly easy to do.
Computer "repair" is a lot like plumbing... the difference is that you don't see everyone who's plunged a toilet calling themselves a plumber and billing out 50$ an hour. Real plumbers know their shit and get paid accordingly- likewise, a real pc tech who actually knows their shit is earning their paycheck without breaking much of a sweat.
The problem is finding competent people. It's reasonably easy to tell if your plumber doesn't know shit, but if you're not some degree of geek, you'll get totally snowed by "computer repair"- though if you're some degree of geek, you don't need one.
I want a decent file browser, useable (system-wide) drag and drop, homogenized toolkits (none of this "three apps, three different looks" bullshit), a friendlier clipboard (I got a powerbook here, this whole THREE BUTTON MOUSE!!!!! thing is killin' me!), a non-shitty default aesthetic that doesn't compell me to change everything out of its sheer ugliness, a useful offline help system, CAREFULLY THOUGHT OUT CONSISTANT AND TESTED CONFIGURATION MENUS and.... (pause for breath) everything else MacOS had in 1994. Which so far only MacOS and OS X seem to have.
:|
Windows still hasn't caught up and freenix "desktops" are still catching up to windows. 32-bit icons and font smoothing are candy things.... and unfortunately, they're a hell of a lot easier to impliment than Basic Functionality.
I've heard about "OMFG OS X PEE DEE EFF!!!!!11111" for years. YEARS I SAY.
I print tiffs from photoshop. I'm not really a document kind of guy. I've run off some ebay invoices from textedit a couple of times, but that's been it. I've never dicked with pdfs in OS X.
So just for the heck of it, I hit Apple-P (PRINT) in Safari on this article. Got a list of shared printers three floors above my head, and options to [ PREVIEW ] [ SAVE AS PDF ] and [ FAX ]*. Saved off the article as an 11 page pdf and opened it up in Preview for a skim. Smooth.
PDFing in OS X is a completely transparent process- it's an option in the print menu, which is in turn present in damned near every application under the "File" menu. None of this obnoxious "Office Toolbar" crap.
* I imagine FAX capability would be damned handy for some people.
... then it's malware. Period.
Also why I don't use symantec products- one too many command line hunt-and-kills for my liking.
From TFA:
Mac OS 8 and 8.5: These 1997 and 1998 releases are as dead as Windows 95, thanks to their own lack of USB support --
Bull.
8.0? Yes. 8.1 shipped with the RevA iMac, 8.5 with the RevB- MacOS has had full, solid USB support since 8.5- enough to run the basics. Keyboard, mouse, zip drive, scanner, trackballs... hard drives, SCSI adapters, printers... I was running all this shit under 8.5 well before the 8.6 update was released.
Aside- Stability-wise, 8.6 is still the most stable release of MacOS I've ever used. If you can stomach IE5 or Mozilla 1.0 and aren't using the box for music (SoundApp is as stable as it gets for mp3 playback, pre-iTunes), 8.6 will do ya fine- especially on beige machines.
Also aside- the article author has such a giant juicy pants-bulge for USB that he's obviously forgotten that loads of PCs still ship with PS/2, parrallel and serial ports... and that there are still shipping devices that use 'em.
...motorcycles were for assholes who wanted to drive a ghetto blaster AND show off their tattoos at the same time.
Of course, I live in Pittsburgh, so my view of things is probably skewed.
I'm fine with 60 on some displays, but I prefer 85. The fun part is when you start dealing with multiple monitors, and those monitors are different size and different manufacturer CRTs. Two different model trinitrons at 85hz, you might see some lines through one or the other or both - frequently going one way up one monitor and the other way down the other.
To combat this, I run my work system at 85hz and 100hz (2x21") and my home system at 70hz/60hz/75hz (15"/20"/15")- oddly enough, I have no problems with 60hz on my 20"... though on everything else I can simulate an LSD flashback just by crunching an ice cube.
... but it CAN see ME, and it's stabby.
Or rather, I can see it, but I don't really process the fact that I can until the headache sits in. I'm fine with a fixed rez and frequency monitor (typically 1280x1024x85hx), but going through a protracted period of switching, like you'd do with finding optimal video card settings for a video game, gives me one hell of a headache.
Middle of last week I thought I was getting a migraine from the Splenda-laced drink I was enjoying, but it turned out to be Halo- 60hz on a display my brain was used to taking in at 85. Stabby-stabby-stabby!
And what am I going to watch when Speakeasy is experiencing a Network Service Event (aka downtime)? What the hell am I going to back up my video, music, and work files to? HDDs don't last forever. DVD's a great storage medium. It's okay for movies, but hey- I've been ripping my DVD video to DIVX. I've found it handy to keep the optical drive free.
:P
I'm not interested in 4398573489 commentaries, cast and crew bios (imdb is much more thorough...), FX production documentaries, Making Of documentaries, etc, etc. That shit all started to blend together well before LOTR shoved the "extras" thing straight into overkill. The few movies I really want to see extras on (Repo Man, Dark Star) are light on 'em.
If Apple could do for selling movies what they've done for selling music, I'd be on that shit in a heartbeat- cheap entertainment I can back up and view whenever I get bored. No problem.
DVD's great for extended bouts of offline, or if you're one of those consumers with the Ultra Mega Home Theater, but video viewing is tied fairly tightly to my computer useage, so hey- broadband video delivery is right up my alley.
But I'll be burning it off to DVD-R for backup and offline storage, kthks.
... is that these "specific formats" typically consist of a 200 song playlist. There were a hell of a lot more hit singles in the 80s- nevermind hit albums or hit artists.
:-| And College Radio can't get the OMFG TECHNO OMFG GANSTA RAP OMFG HIPPY MUSIC out of their systems either.
I listened to the local Clear Channel Alternapop Earcock a couple of days ago for the first time in months... in a thirty minute span, I didn't hear anything I haven't heard a few hundred times before, and years previously. Last I checked, Radiohead has written more songs than "Creep"- but you wouldn't know it to listen to these asshats.
When I got to this town (Pittsburgh) in 1997, there was a Jazz station parked at 104.{5|7}. It was nice and I listened to it quite a bit... until one day it magically Changed Format to hiphop/r&b. Just like that. A few years later and that frequency is a black hole of Rod Stewart / Michael Bolton-esque soft rock.
Radio's great when you're in the serviced demographic- if you're noti, it's a vast, staticy wasteland.
I'm in the WTF boat myself.
:-)
But then, I stopped listening to radio years ago- I pull my weather from the *.gov, and get everything else through iTunes and the internets. I once heard podcasting described as "an audio blog"- my response was something along the lines of "just what I want to hear- more talk radio."
Blogs have given us a few million Spider Jerusalem wannabes- podcasting and cheap cams will give us a few million Edison Carter wannabes. While technology has decimated the entry barrier and given any medium to anyone with enough motivation to make a try for it, it's done nothing to make it easier to sort through the crap and find the good stuff (example- webcomics. Finding a good webcomic that's not run by someone who's even better at marketing is a crapshoot).
Stern, Limbaugh (sp?), et. al. irritate the everloving crap out of me- if I wanted a cult-of-personality circlejerk I'd buy a TV and watch the local news. Those jackoffs can't seem to get their faces off of billboards, and they look a few notches up the percieved quality scale from all of the radio "personalities" splattered across same. Stern went to XM- that's good, he can stay there. I don't miss him. If podcasting is similar, then I'm so far out of the demographic that I'm orbiting pluto.
If I really want talk radio, I can pipe an infobot or eliza through a speach synthesizer and be done with it.
.. that for every FREE service or software available on the internet, there's ALWAYS somebody who whines about how it lacks this-or-that feature? :|