What's to keep them from slapping Linus himself with a subpoenia when he refuses to accept faulty kernel patches from IBM?
So far, he's refused an absolutely huge patch from an IBM team, there were two competing implementations and the IBM team lost out (LVM?). Anyway, the team acted with dignity and honour, and got to work immediately with helping the other team. So - they have no history of this whatosever wrt to Linux.
Anyway, the moment there was a patent problem with the kernel, there'd be a non-infringing implementation in within seconds.
Well _I_ wouldn't mod you down;) I understand your point, but I also disagree with your statement, it's no more "ridiculous groupthink" than the whole OSS movement and the prevelant view of it here.
Oh I don't know. I see plenty of comments bashing open source software these days. Sure, it used to be the same way, but nowadays saying you can't use the Gimp because it's not usable enough or whatever is usually modded up.
I think the reason you get mod'ed down is that your opinion is not stated in a way that directly addresses the statements (at least it was in this case).
Well often they are, but in cases like this yeah I went off on a tangent. There's not really a place you can put a rant, or let off steam, where it is on topic so it might as well be at least a little bit related. Anyway, I frequently point out flaws in peoples arguments esp when they are talking about Apple stuff, and often it gets modded up, but then 2 days later there is another story and all the comments are saying exactly the same thing, so I can't really be bothered doing it all over again.
Now you might have a disagreement with my facts, but you did not state it, instead you claim that those facts have nothing to do with it, and it's just groupthink.
That's because the facts are (as far as i'm aware) accurate. I'm sure they do ship more UNIX boxes than other manufacturers. And my rebuttal was - so what? Shipping a proprietary Unix doesn't make a company so special, Sun do this too but I rarely see stories about Solaris.
Well, you never countered my statements, you just dismissed them and proffered an opinion that can't be validated. That in many peoples books is a troll.
IMO a troll is a post that doesn't actually reflect the posters thoughts, it's just clearly designed to stir up a flamewar. Unfortunately the term has been widened on slashdot to mean anybody who gives an unpopular opinion without bulletproof arguments. It doesn't matter if the responses give relatively weak rebuttals, if 95% of your points are valid but the remaining point has a mistake in, some people consider you to be a troll.
I for one never mod down comments I don't agree with, posts that are actually are trolls (as posted by the wierdo losers who simply enjoy trying to get lots of responses on slashdot) deserve it for sure, and posts that are pure opinion without any attempt to back it up (aqua r0xors, or gnome armageddon etc) are flamebait.
One interesting test would be to see if these type of Apple articles appeared with their current frequency pre-OSX, if so, then your statement holds more water.
No, I never claimed they did, and my arguments weren't based on such a claim. Before Apple underwent their image makeover and adopted unix, they weren't cool. Now they are, and moderation has been severely warped because of it. But really that's all that changed, Apples business is fundamentally the same, simply using a POSIX compliant kernel and using various unix tools doesn't change anything really except peoples perceptions.
You never run more than one app? Or are you saying that threading on the OS you'd use is screwed up? On Mac OS X, threading is done at the Mach level, and it is dynamically shifted between processors.
Running more than one app doesn't utilise multiple processors, as 99% of the time if you're not interacting with an application it's simply sitting in an event loop waiting for input. The parent post was quite correct, SMP does bollocks all on most desktop machines, regardless of how many apps you run.
FYI the microkernel nature of MacOS hurts it more than it helps. Communication between processes carries a heavy overhead even on single processors, and if the two are on different processors that overhead is massively increased.
In fact CPU affinity algorithms will mean that if you have several desktop apps open, they'll probably be running on the same CPU anyway due to the comms overhead.
I've had single processes suck up 180% of the CPU while 40 other ones ran just fine on my box.
That's meaningless. How responsive the system feels has little to do with how many processors it has.
but thank you for letting me know it would be a regrettable thing to do if I ever upgrade my Linux server.
No, SMP can benefit servers far more than desktops, because servers are typically doing many many things at once. For instance Apache can distribute itself over the processors pretty well, and uses that to serve more requests simultaniously. It makes very little difference for standard desktop use unless you frequently put the machine under very heavy load.
All those 3GHz Intel boxes aren't any faster really, they just idle faster; that's not something to brag about.
That's pretty wierd logic. People prefer 3Ghz boxes on their desktops because when you need the machine to do something, you don't want to be hanging around waiting for it. No, very few people have machines that constantly utilise their processor, but when they DO utilise it, they want it to be as fast as possible.
Please point to a major manufacturer that offers two PCs that are similarly spec'd to the one Mac, with the addition of the high revving engine, for the same price. Note that being able to hobble parts together in your parent's basement doesn't make you a business on par with Apple.
This line is getting tired. 90% of people don't need the frankly bizarre components Apple put into most of its machines. I've never even seen a FireWire device, let alone used one, and I've not met anybody who has one either. If a PC user does for some reason want FireWire support, then they can buy that as an optional extra, instead of being force to pay for something that chances are they'll never use.
The last line is good. If you are able to build machines yourself, why is that not as good as buying a machine from Apple? You get exactly the specs you want, often (though not always these days) cheaper than you could buy in the shops. "Hobbling together in your basement" is a ridiculous view on it, it's more a case of getting the parts and slotting them together on your kitchen table in about an hour. If you can do it, why not? Apple doesn't have some secret fairy dust it sprinkles all over their boxes to make them special, if you know what you're doing you too can build an "integrated" box, with the hardware and software matching well.
I for one am getting rather sick of it, and I know many other people are too. Every single story about Apple it seems is just a bunch of posts saying "I have one and love them" or "I tried one for 5 minutes and want one but don't want to pay" or "MacOS X is Unix and it's open source wow cool aqua r0xors" +5 Insightful.
So people reply. "No, OS X isn't open source", "Yes, PCs are much faster and cheaper and yes, you can get high quality PCs too", or "No, MacOS is riddled with usability flaws" but they practically never get modded up, regardless of the validity of the post. If they do by some chance get high, you can bet that within an hour it'll be back down under a load of "Overrated" or even "Troll" mods.
In particular the attitude "it's unix, so it must be good" is a dumb one, yet people take it anyway. Unix isn't even that great, there are better OS designs floating around. Why is UNIX an end in itself?
So in that regard, they are much more meaningful than someone like Dell simply bumping the speed of their boxes.
No it's not more meaningful, Apple is fashionable and Dell is not. That's it. Apple making their machines slightly less slow is only news to people who fanatically follow the company, for which there are dedicated rumour sites.
I expect this'll get modded down. I've posted similar things before, and been modded as troll. Yeah, because I really am a professional troll, everybody knows that. The idea that everybody loves Apple because they, ooooh, used Unix and woweee, took some open source code to do it with, is just plain wrong - the difference is the ridiculous groupthink here means that dissenting opinions only rarely get seen.
Well that's interesting, because in a way it is just you, but in another way it isn't. Lemme explain.
The basic problem with debates (more like flamefests) like this is that people really suck at measuring speed. In fact, after psychological studies [1] showed just how bad people were at quantifying and comparing speed, and how easily those impressions were influenced, eye witness testimony severely lost face in the legal system, and in fact is now somewhat counter-intuitively considered to be very unreliable, especially for car accidents.
For instance, sometimes estimate of the speed of a car could be altered by changing one or two words of the question quite a lot, I think up to over 10mph.
This problem is especially acute in this scenario because you have a whole TRUCKLOAD of people who desperately want to think the Mac is fast. They have paid over the odds for it, so when people say Macs are slow that hurts, and people don't want to believe it. So, their perception of speed warps. If you were to put a PC and a Mac side by side and compare actual processing tasks the difference would be obvious, but as people rarely do that, it's more a case of "oh well i tried it last week and this feels faster" so obviously there's a lot of wiggle room.
So, basically your impressions of how fast the Mac is compared to your P4 tells us nothing. Apple realise just how subjective computer speed is, and pulls out all the stops to make its customers believe the machines are fast. Firstly there was the whole Mhz Myth thing, which was technically dubious to start with.
Now OS X uses a lot of psychological tricks to make it feel faster than it otherwise would. There's nothing wrong with that of course, it's all good stuff, but for instance the fact that graphics are done synchronously, so avoiding the tearing and swap popping you see on Windows and Linux, and the fact that there is lots of animation etc all combine to make it feel fast.
Well, if all you do is write letters in a word processor or browse the web all day, that's fine. For people who actually do make demands of their system though, there is simply no substitute for raw computing power - the difference between feels fast and is fast can be disguised, but only to a certain extent.
Rant: why on earth does a totally subjective impression of speed get modded up anyway? If I said, "My P4 2GHZ feels a lot faster than my iMac. I guess MHz does make a big difference" it'd be modded down, rightly so. It adds nothing to the debate. Stuff like speed, looks, even "quality" are so completely personal that it's interesting only in a casual way, if that.
[1] I was going to be a smart alec and give a reference here to a study, but can only remember that it was done by a woman who's last name began with E. Oh well. The course was fun, clearly I didn't remember much of it though:)
For one, PowerPC chips can outperform Intel chips at the same clock rate, but they only do so reliably (as far as I'm aware) if you start using stuff like AltiVec. Most stuff can't be optimized in this way, but a few things can. So, if the Intel chips did outperform the PowerPC chips in a particular benchmark, then some people would just jump up and down and claim it's not fair because AltiVec wasn't used, or something. I've seen this before.
Secondly, testing clock-for-clock is interesting in an academic sense only. The subjective speed of a system can be affected by so many things, slight performance differences at the same clock rate make very little difference.
Anyway, I'm sure you're aware of all of this, but there are so many confounding factors it'd be very hard to get undisputable results.
SWF allows programs to hook into the Windows API message queue system, and many many apps use this to achieve special effects, and control things that.NET doesn't directly expose. They did try using GTK to start with, but that solution was quickly found to not work well, just like Wine originally used Tk and dropped it.
Basically, what these pages show is that Mono is less like Wine
Well it's both. Windows apps will still be written using System.Windows.Forms and they will need Wine to emulate them unfortunately. Mono/Linux apps will use the Gnome or KDE.net bindings, and they won't integrate as nicely into Windows.
Unfortunately Wine and the SWF effort are currently being screwed around by threading issues, and the new glibc also messes things up even more, so until the threading situation is sorted out I doubt we'll be seeing Windows.NET apps run on Linux.
Re:But what I am rellay looking forward to...
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
(The 'save this process' trick is a way to have a set number of Konqueror processes stay alive after you quit the last Konqueror window. This way, the next time you click on the Konqueror icon, it re-uses the last process that was open, which is a nice little hack that makes Konq appear to launch faster when it's not actually launching at all.)
So.. just like Internet Explorer then?:) [duck]
Well, it seems like a good idea, but why not just shove it into kdeinit and be done with it?
Re:Is KDE trying to be Windows?
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
A quick scan through the new features is almost like reading about the new features introduced in a previous version of Windows. Is KDE simply trying to be 'more like Windows', which in turn would make KDE a much more familiar 'interface' for newbies to use? If so, then that's great and I'm sure that it will help increase its use amongst the masses.
I think partly that's due to the style in which the new features guide was written. It sounded very much like promotional material to me.
KDE is pretty close to Windows (except better) yeah, there are other desktops if you'd rather avoid that. The default GNOME2 desktop is less like Windows for instance. Bear in mind for all its faults the Windows UI isn't actually a bad one, so it makes sense for KDE to use this as the basis for their work. I think from reading the lists though it's often a case of "How shall we do this? We could do it this way, that way or this other way? Which is best?" and it turns out the best is the way windows does it too.
KOOL! Keramik is the best looking theme I have ever seen in my whole life. People are bored with Mac OS X. KDE can deliver something much cooler than apple. Let's face it - who thinks that Aqua looks cool? Not many.. not anymore. We've got used to it and now it looks boring.
Well, personally I think the Aqua widgets look better than the Keramik ones (if you ignore the stripes! argh!). However, I prefer the Mist theme for GTK2 above all those, they look good, clean, and imho pretty sophisticated. They look good while avoiding being theme overkill. It's completely personal opinion though, these things always are. I think Keramik is a bit fat.
You raise a good point wrt theming though. Sure, everybody thought Aqua was cool when it first came out, and I guess many still do, but looks are about fashion and taste, and fashion changes. I remember when Windows 95 came out I thought it looked brilliant!
Now everything supports theming, new "in" styles come and go like anything. I know you can hack theming support onto MacOS, but without actual support from Apple that's all it is, a hack. I wonder if that's really a good idea in the long run. Maybe they'll introduce charged for visual styles, to give value add.
Mono's impact will ultimately depend on who ends up controlling it. Microsoft could adopt Mono as a kind of super standard of its own. Or Mono could end up in the hands of a rival like IBM that could use it to undermine Microsoft's power.
That quote makes no sense. Mono is free software yes? How can it end up in the hands of anything. It's X11 licensed now iirc, which unfortunately means it could be hijacked, but as there is already a.NET implementation I don't think that matters.
Anyway, Miguel is the coolest guy. I wasn't at all sure about Mono to begin with, but reading the arguments he put forth and talking with him and the rest of his team on IRC has convinced me that he's got the right idea. It's basically a win/win situation, we need a.NET implementation for running Windows apps in future, and if we can use it for writing good apps ourselves then so much the better. I have yet to hear concerns about patents that are actually concrete.
I work for a real company. I can't use an unsupported operating system. I can't upgrade every machine every year.
They want you to move to Advanced Server, which is subscription based. This makes good business sense from their perspective. I should think that they ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that the cost of keeping support for their community-level distro was too high, even with the RHN. They're now after the very big companies, the kind who are easily willing to pay the Advanced Server cost.
I don't know, I'm not good enough as business to see what they're trying to do here, but I suspect that they'll be moving from a model where the community does most of the work so the product is cheaper model, to a it costs similar to competing products but you get more bang for your buck.
What I do know is that Red Hat haven't come this far by being run by idiots. This move is clearly pissing off some of their customers, but possibly they're positioning themselves more to target the kind for whom Advanced Server is small change. This comment on LWN is telling: "It's likely that the drop in good will be less than the savings in support costs".
It's business. Don't like it? Then use Debian I guess.
This is one big step away from getting a solid foothold on the desktop.
Well they don't really care about the home user desktop yet. They have said this in as many words. They continue to develop Redhat Linux despite it not making them all that much money, because it's the foundation for everything else, and because the more people using linux and developing for it the better.
I use redhat 8 at work. I couldn't give a rats ass about support, I know the deal - Red Hat give me a fine OS, even mail me when there are security updates, for free. I don't have to do anything in return (although as i now develop for linux i guess I am anyway). That's the way it works. If I actually need support, then I can pay for it. I don't, so I'm happy.
Nobody is being forced to upgrade you realise? I know people who still use 7.1 but upgraded and tweaked so it's just as advanced as Phoebe is. 8 won't stop working the day it goes EOL.
I think the poster was pointing out that unless you have expensive tools it's much much harder to write Windows software.
.NET is changing that now by repairing some of the worst brain damages of the Windows API, but for instance nobody in their right mind would try to create an ActiveX control using GCC. Have you seen how much code the wizards in Delphi and visual Studio spit out? You'd have to be insane to try and right all that by hand.
Secondly, MS provides you with a UI to install, configure, and troubleshoot video card problems. If KDE or Gnome has something like that, I've yet to find it. Strike 2 against Linux.
Every distro I've tried has such a GUI. KDE and GNOME themselves don't provide it, the distro plugs it in, so if you didn't see one then either you were using a distro meant for users who don't mind text files, or you didn't look hard enough.
Only, to fix a problem like that, you better know your way around shell.
Do you have any idea at all how difficult it is to use the registry? Even advanced users get it wrong. How many times in PC magazines have you seen the answer to a question start with "Well, first back up your registry, editing the registry is dangerous...."
I know I have loads of times.
The registry is an utterly huge mess of undocumented magic keys whos meaning may or may not be obvious from the name or location. It's organized in a way that must have made sense to those guys at Redmond, there are lots of inter-folder linkages done manually, and it takes forever to search.
Users find registry editing, which is all too often necessary, hard. But people edit text files all the time. Sure, so if you use kate instead of kword there's no bold button, big deal. It's still a lot easier than the closest equivalent on Windows.
I'm a Systems Analyst. My job is to make my company's products usable. If that's not credibiilty enough to let you know when something's broken from the user-end point of view, then you are ready to be promoted to Mindless Linux Zealot.
What kind of an attitude is that? I'm a Systems Analyst, so if you don't agree with me you're a mindless zealot?
That's a bloody arrogant attitude. Let me tell you this, I have done my time on tech support which most definately involves more dealing with frustrated and unhappy end users, and out of restoring Windows to a working state when things go wrong and restoring Linux, Linux wins every single time. Problems inflict all operating systems, to pretend that if something doesn't work in Windows it's an isolated case that isn't Microsofts fault is ridiculous.
(sigh) Yes. There are loads of X11 servers for Windows. XFree86 is even free. It doesn't come bundled with the OS because unlike OS X, Windows is not full of geek sysadmins who want access to all their old apps.
How about the best page-layout software? Hmm, mostly need a Mac for that, huh?
Define best. Well, actually don't, I know jack all about page layout software. Nonetheless, choosing an OS because the app you need is only available on that platform basically says it's all about to go downhill. You should be choosing a platform on its own merits, but of course unless you're talking about Linux distros that doesn't happen.
Okay, well I'm sure Windows will work great with my Firewire-based A/D audio rack... Oh look, all the Windows users on the discussion sites report not having any luck all, and are either giving up on the hardware or buying a Mac for their studios. Hmm... Sounds like there are some things you can't do with Windows after all.
And? There's a whole truckload of stuff you need Windows for.
Accessing corporate custom apps (timesheets etc)
Having access to all the latest hardware. FireWire A/V racks notwithstanding, 99% of the world is more interested in the latest video cards, the latest toys etc
Running the huge amount of Windows only software out there. XML-Spy is one of the best xml editors out there. No mac version, no Windows version.
Games. Brushing it off as "some" games is a slight exagguration.
There is one reason, and one reason only, why Windows continues to dominate the desktop market, and that's the vendor lock-in we all suffer from the ever changing ".doc" format of MS-Word.
The Word document format has been almost completely reverse engineered for years now. The difficult part is actually implementing all those features now we know how to read them.
Windows is dominant thanks to inertia, thanks mostly to Win32 apps needing Windows (until wine is better), due to restrictive anti-competitive practices and so on. Believe me, in January 2003 the.doc format is the least of our problems.
Eep! If the default settings are broken, and 80% of users use the default settings, then there is no 'only' about it.
Could somebody PLEASE explain exactly what has broken in KDE BlueCurve? Everytime somebody mentions this I have asked what exactly broke, and so far haven't got any satisfactory answers, only links to a page on mosfets site (for those who don't know, mosfet is hardly the most reliable source around). People keep mentioning "breakage", other than the UI tweaks I'd like more info on this.
Microsoft is smart not to be releasing Office for Linux. In many ways, it's the only application (Suite of applications) that makes them relevant in the business world. It's what keeps "asses in the seats" as far as keeping their Operating Systems in such wide deployment.
Really???
In that case if I were Microsoft I'd be worried, because they don't need to port Office to Linux, the Wine team have done it already. I haven't used Word or Excel, but IE6 which isn't even a supported app works great!
They need to run Office, and if they need to run Office, then they need to be running Windows!
Well, no, they don't. See above.
That's a laugher. Anybody remember Corel? Loki? If history is any indicator, I think the case can be made that anyone choosing to produce Linux software (for the desktop) will perish.
Considering Loki were killed by massive financial mismanagement and even fraud, I think that line is a little old. Redhat are doing OK, and they've publically stated they're going for the desktop next.
Yes... and no. I'm a big anti-theme guy actually, just on principle; I saw the horror that Kaleidoscope wreaked on too many Mac labs.
Well, I'm for themes as long as I like them:) Unfortunately there's no accounting for taste. In a corporate/lab environment I'd probably lay down some ground rules for themes, but for home use I don't really care.
Quick: tell me if you're browsing Slashdot with anything other than RGB 0,0,0 for text and 255,255,255 for white.:)
Awww, come on! Not fair! I did suggest Taco provide an XML feed a while ago, so people could apply their own transforms to it. I know if I did I'd make the background light grey, because I have indeed found that grey is easier (from working on emacs, where you can change the background colour). But white looks cleaner and more modern, so website designers normally use it. Note that my autopackage site uses grey for the text background.
Maybe I'm on crack, or my computer is.. but on my XP system, every time I launch a new browser window, or save an attachment, the UI blows through whatever's under it for a good 2 seconds.
Blows through? If you mean that the borders appear and then the content, yeah, that's because on Windows the program is responsible for drawing its own GUI. That has certain advantages, like keeping memory use down, and in the old days it was faster too, but if there is a lot of swapping going on it can cause the gui to fill itself in visibly.
Anyways, this has already gotten long. Sorry if it seems like I'm ranting, I just enjoy the discussion. Cheers.
No probs, I do too, nice to be able to talk about OS X without flames flying high.
If you have so many icons on the dock, that probably implies that the UI needs a better way to organize icons. I don't recall if the dock has drawers, but I'm pretty sure the closest equivalent to a start menu is the Finder (which has ui issues of its own). I have something similar to the dock at the top of my screen, it's just the gnome button (start menu), some app launcher icons and the lock screen/log off buttons. I only put the most frequently used stuff there though, for the rest the menu, or just typing in the name is usually good enough.
Do we 'login' to our office building? No we use some form of key, be that a tumbler lock or a swipe card.
Well as you said, yes, often people "log in" to buildings using pin numbers, when security actually matters.
Just because something exists in the physical world doesn't mean it's better. Locks can be stolen easily. Short of torture or trickery, passwords are much harder to steal, which is why we use identity/password for almost anything important, such as cash machines.
MacOS was a bit different because a lot of its users were more the creative type, and I'd argue that the Mac interface is more 'transparent' to most people, which is why a large number of people who just want to get the job done like Macs.
Hardly, they're all based on the same metaphors at the end of the day, developed at Xerox. The idea of the desktop, the menu, the folder. All these things are metaphors basically because in the period when the GUI was designed, metaphors were fashionable. If something wasn't a metaphor it wasn't happening.
Of course, in the interests of flexibility and power we routinely break these metaphors. Real world folders can't contain an infinite number of things, nor can they contain other folders. A "desktop" cannot be instantly cleared in real life. A file can't contain sound. And so on.
Metaphors are only useful up to a point, they can be and should be broken when it'd actually be beneficial, otherwise you're punishing the majority because a small minority can't extend their mental model of how it works.
Why do we enforce the filesystem concept - aren't we smart enough yet to have data stored on disk indexed so that fuzzy queries like "where is the sales report" can work - Google can do it for the web, why can't we do it for the file system?
Well we can do, for instance try Find Fast or on Linux "locate" (that doesn't do metadata unfortunately). They aren't particularly great implementations, but they do work. Better stuff will come with Storage+ and ReiserFS I guess.
But I think my point is that so far most computer interfaces have been built by computer engineers that have a certain way of looking at the world.
Yeah, it's mostly a pragmatic one. Art usually models real life, computers don't, because otherwise we'd impose completely arbitrary restrictions on what we can do with the technology. If computers had been designed by "normal people" they'd probably be only able to do one thing at once, would be ridiculously insecure and limited to peoples preconceptions of what technology should be, as opposed to what it can be.
You were close. Cheap karma does not come from saying you want a Mac.
Karma comes from saying you would like a Mac, but they are Too Expensive.
You know, because nobody has ever pointed that out before. +1, Insightful!
Yeah, I should have added a "I know I'll get modded down for this but..." clause at the beginning.
The moment that post went up to +5, it was immediately brought down as overrated. Get over it Apple mods, modding down an alternative opinion is not what mod points are for, ok? They are for a) modding down the obvious garbage (nat portman trolls etc) that get posted here and b) modding up interesting posts.
Unfortunately the trend around here for way too long now has been, anything that criticises Apple is either troll, flamebait, or overrated. On the other hand, saying Macs are cool, or they look good, or "I'd buy one but they're too expensive" is worthy of +5.
Yeah, this is a rant. I carry on posting what I think because I don't post my opinions here to get karma, I've been at the limit for ages, I do it to tell it like it is. If that pisses off some people then so be it.
Too bad the mod system is so frequently abused in this way - if you read the FAQ it's meant to bring the interesting posts up, not bring down ones you don't agree with.
Anyway enough bitching. My points were imho valid, if people who don't like to see their new investment criticised can't take it, tough on them. I'll see them in M2.
The 'big titlebars' thing is a myth. Somehow, the larger antialiased system font used in Aqua (Lucida Grande 12pt) makes people think the window bars are bigger, but not so. Booting classic real quick will show you that they're the same size.
I'm pretty sure I did a comparison when I first got access to XP and found they were bigger. You can change the size of the titlebar to something smaller however. I might be wrong, I've seen some pretty wierd optical illusions already today.
I have to admit, I laughed at the comment about the stripes... especially ending it with 'option to make it a gradient or something.'
Ok ok! That was just an example. I meant, you can't change it to anything else. Anyway, I know some people who really like gradient based themes. I don't so much, prefer the flat look personally, but whatever floats your boat yes?
The stripes in Aqua do have a purpose; they denote negative space. I've found that this is very useful for 'clicking off' an item to remove focus.
No, they are there for branding basically. In any UI it should be pretty obvious what will be interactive and what won't be. Buttons, menu bars, check boxes. These things are interactive. Everything else isn't. If your gui has some kind of control that it isn't obvious whether it'll do something or not when clicked, it's a bad gui.
Anyway, the concept of "negative space" is a bit warped. The title bars also have stripes, as does the top menu bar, but they all do things when clicked.
It doesn't stand out because there is no progress going on in the screenshot.
Unfortunately, it gets the balance exactly wrong, it doesn't stand out enough to be clear exactly what it is, and it stands out too much to just be instantly ignored. Time spent glancing at something in a gui and thinking "what is that? is it important?" is time wasted, and bad UI design.
The bar on the right side of the left pane is an empty scrollbar; this is done so your text is not popping 12-pixel gaps when appearing/disappearing while resizing. It keeps the text more readable.
I don't really understand... the empty scrollbar was on a list view, the items didn't stretch all the way across, so it wouldn't be popping in and out. Quite why you'd be trying to read text while resizing a window is beyond me, and useless UI elements, especially when it's not obvious what they are, are distracting.
I'd say the main problem with XP is the hackneyed half-MDI interface they cling to, but that's just me.
Amen to that. MDI should be dead already.
Windows used gray because MS had no interest in making the UI look like anything else for a long time (basically until OS X shipped).
Considering the new XP look was under development before OS X came out, I think you'd need to back that assertion up with some evidence.
It's not inherently easier on the eyes... in fact a lack of contrast can have the opposite effect. The default grey of webpages gone by had more to do with a lack of background tag than any 'web usability' effort.
No, too much contrast on screen is harsh on the eyes. Yes, too little can be bad as well (though for some people high/low contrast can make a big difference), but there was indeed a reason grey was chosen as the background colour, and it's because the early days of the web were dominated by technical articles, and grey was known to be less harsh on the eyes for extended periods.
Personally speaking, the problem with XP is the huge chunks of UI that get 'blown through' each other all the time. I hated that on Mac OS Classic, and I still hate it in Windows. Makes your computer seem sloooow.
Blown through? Do you mean when you can see the UI repainting when the system is under load? I don't really know what you are talking about here...
At least Aqua never ever does that, what with the double-buffered display and everything.
I suspect you're talking about the synchronous display system OS X has. Yes, nice isn't it. It does have disadvantages as well bear in mind (namely direct drawing speed when not using graphics accelerators i believe).
I diagree. The Aqua interface is good for marketing, and dragging the computer-using public kicking and screaming into a bold new world...
Well, if the discussion has now digressed into the actual UI as opposed to themes, I have to point out that the Aqua gui has some of the worst usability booboos around. The dock is a usability nightmare for instance, and the constantly shifting top menu bar removes any usability advantages such a system might have once had. There are many other such problems with OS X, that I will go into if you want.
That's funny. If ound just the opposite to be true. The first couple weeks I used OS X, I found the gui to be kind of obnoxious and intrusive. Then, once I started using it for serious work I found it to be incredibly functional.
I think we're talking about different things. I suspect you are referring to the UI quirks that the Mac is famous for, like their own keyboard, one button mouse, apps don't close on exit etc.
Once you get used to them, they don't seem so obnoxious anymore. They aren't actually any more usable or productive, I have yet to see any evidence for that, in fact I have seen some saying it is less usable which I think is amusing, but I was talking about the Aqua widget theme in particular rather than the Mac UI as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
So far, he's refused an absolutely huge patch from an IBM team, there were two competing implementations and the IBM team lost out (LVM?). Anyway, the team acted with dignity and honour, and got to work immediately with helping the other team. So - they have no history of this whatosever wrt to Linux.
Anyway, the moment there was a patent problem with the kernel, there'd be a non-infringing implementation in within seconds.
Oh I don't know. I see plenty of comments bashing open source software these days. Sure, it used to be the same way, but nowadays saying you can't use the Gimp because it's not usable enough or whatever is usually modded up.
I think the reason you get mod'ed down is that your opinion is not stated in a way that directly addresses the statements (at least it was in this case).
Well often they are, but in cases like this yeah I went off on a tangent. There's not really a place you can put a rant, or let off steam, where it is on topic so it might as well be at least a little bit related. Anyway, I frequently point out flaws in peoples arguments esp when they are talking about Apple stuff, and often it gets modded up, but then 2 days later there is another story and all the comments are saying exactly the same thing, so I can't really be bothered doing it all over again.
Now you might have a disagreement with my facts, but you did not state it, instead you claim that those facts have nothing to do with it, and it's just groupthink.
That's because the facts are (as far as i'm aware) accurate. I'm sure they do ship more UNIX boxes than other manufacturers. And my rebuttal was - so what? Shipping a proprietary Unix doesn't make a company so special, Sun do this too but I rarely see stories about Solaris.
Well, you never countered my statements, you just dismissed them and proffered an opinion that can't be validated. That in many peoples books is a troll.
IMO a troll is a post that doesn't actually reflect the posters thoughts, it's just clearly designed to stir up a flamewar. Unfortunately the term has been widened on slashdot to mean anybody who gives an unpopular opinion without bulletproof arguments. It doesn't matter if the responses give relatively weak rebuttals, if 95% of your points are valid but the remaining point has a mistake in, some people consider you to be a troll.
I for one never mod down comments I don't agree with, posts that are actually are trolls (as posted by the wierdo losers who simply enjoy trying to get lots of responses on slashdot) deserve it for sure, and posts that are pure opinion without any attempt to back it up (aqua r0xors, or gnome armageddon etc) are flamebait.
One interesting test would be to see if these type of Apple articles appeared with their current frequency pre-OSX, if so, then your statement holds more water.
No, I never claimed they did, and my arguments weren't based on such a claim. Before Apple underwent their image makeover and adopted unix, they weren't cool. Now they are, and moderation has been severely warped because of it. But really that's all that changed, Apples business is fundamentally the same, simply using a POSIX compliant kernel and using various unix tools doesn't change anything really except peoples perceptions.
Running more than one app doesn't utilise multiple processors, as 99% of the time if you're not interacting with an application it's simply sitting in an event loop waiting for input. The parent post was quite correct, SMP does bollocks all on most desktop machines, regardless of how many apps you run.
FYI the microkernel nature of MacOS hurts it more than it helps. Communication between processes carries a heavy overhead even on single processors, and if the two are on different processors that overhead is massively increased.
In fact CPU affinity algorithms will mean that if you have several desktop apps open, they'll probably be running on the same CPU anyway due to the comms overhead.
I've had single processes suck up 180% of the CPU while 40 other ones ran just fine on my box.
That's meaningless. How responsive the system feels has little to do with how many processors it has.
but thank you for letting me know it would be a regrettable thing to do if I ever upgrade my Linux server.
No, SMP can benefit servers far more than desktops, because servers are typically doing many many things at once. For instance Apache can distribute itself over the processors pretty well, and uses that to serve more requests simultaniously. It makes very little difference for standard desktop use unless you frequently put the machine under very heavy load.
All those 3GHz Intel boxes aren't any faster really, they just idle faster; that's not something to brag about.
That's pretty wierd logic. People prefer 3Ghz boxes on their desktops because when you need the machine to do something, you don't want to be hanging around waiting for it. No, very few people have machines that constantly utilise their processor, but when they DO utilise it, they want it to be as fast as possible.
Please point to a major manufacturer that offers two PCs that are similarly spec'd to the one Mac, with the addition of the high revving engine, for the same price. Note that being able to hobble parts together in your parent's basement doesn't make you a business on par with Apple.
This line is getting tired. 90% of people don't need the frankly bizarre components Apple put into most of its machines. I've never even seen a FireWire device, let alone used one, and I've not met anybody who has one either. If a PC user does for some reason want FireWire support, then they can buy that as an optional extra, instead of being force to pay for something that chances are they'll never use.
The last line is good. If you are able to build machines yourself, why is that not as good as buying a machine from Apple? You get exactly the specs you want, often (though not always these days) cheaper than you could buy in the shops. "Hobbling together in your basement" is a ridiculous view on it, it's more a case of getting the parts and slotting them together on your kitchen table in about an hour. If you can do it, why not? Apple doesn't have some secret fairy dust it sprinkles all over their boxes to make them special, if you know what you're doing you too can build an "integrated" box, with the hardware and software matching well.
I for one am getting rather sick of it, and I know many other people are too. Every single story about Apple it seems is just a bunch of posts saying "I have one and love them" or "I tried one for 5 minutes and want one but don't want to pay" or "MacOS X is Unix and it's open source wow cool aqua r0xors" +5 Insightful.
So people reply. "No, OS X isn't open source", "Yes, PCs are much faster and cheaper and yes, you can get high quality PCs too", or "No, MacOS is riddled with usability flaws" but they practically never get modded up, regardless of the validity of the post. If they do by some chance get high, you can bet that within an hour it'll be back down under a load of "Overrated" or even "Troll" mods.
In particular the attitude "it's unix, so it must be good" is a dumb one, yet people take it anyway. Unix isn't even that great, there are better OS designs floating around. Why is UNIX an end in itself?
So in that regard, they are much more meaningful than someone like Dell simply bumping the speed of their boxes.
No it's not more meaningful, Apple is fashionable and Dell is not. That's it. Apple making their machines slightly less slow is only news to people who fanatically follow the company, for which there are dedicated rumour sites.
I expect this'll get modded down. I've posted similar things before, and been modded as troll. Yeah, because I really am a professional troll, everybody knows that. The idea that everybody loves Apple because they, ooooh, used Unix and woweee, took some open source code to do it with, is just plain wrong - the difference is the ridiculous groupthink here means that dissenting opinions only rarely get seen.
Well that's interesting, because in a way it is just you, but in another way it isn't. Lemme explain.
The basic problem with debates (more like flamefests) like this is that people really suck at measuring speed. In fact, after psychological studies [1] showed just how bad people were at quantifying and comparing speed, and how easily those impressions were influenced, eye witness testimony severely lost face in the legal system, and in fact is now somewhat counter-intuitively considered to be very unreliable, especially for car accidents.
For instance, sometimes estimate of the speed of a car could be altered by changing one or two words of the question quite a lot, I think up to over 10mph.
This problem is especially acute in this scenario because you have a whole TRUCKLOAD of people who desperately want to think the Mac is fast. They have paid over the odds for it, so when people say Macs are slow that hurts, and people don't want to believe it. So, their perception of speed warps. If you were to put a PC and a Mac side by side and compare actual processing tasks the difference would be obvious, but as people rarely do that, it's more a case of "oh well i tried it last week and this feels faster" so obviously there's a lot of wiggle room.
So, basically your impressions of how fast the Mac is compared to your P4 tells us nothing. Apple realise just how subjective computer speed is, and pulls out all the stops to make its customers believe the machines are fast. Firstly there was the whole Mhz Myth thing, which was technically dubious to start with.
Now OS X uses a lot of psychological tricks to make it feel faster than it otherwise would. There's nothing wrong with that of course, it's all good stuff, but for instance the fact that graphics are done synchronously, so avoiding the tearing and swap popping you see on Windows and Linux, and the fact that there is lots of animation etc all combine to make it feel fast.
Well, if all you do is write letters in a word processor or browse the web all day, that's fine. For people who actually do make demands of their system though, there is simply no substitute for raw computing power - the difference between feels fast and is fast can be disguised, but only to a certain extent.
Rant: why on earth does a totally subjective impression of speed get modded up anyway? If I said, "My P4 2GHZ feels a lot faster than my iMac. I guess MHz does make a big difference" it'd be modded down, rightly so. It adds nothing to the debate. Stuff like speed, looks, even "quality" are so completely personal that it's interesting only in a casual way, if that. [1] I was going to be a smart alec and give a reference here to a study, but can only remember that it was done by a woman who's last name began with E. Oh well. The course was fun, clearly I didn't remember much of it though :)
For one, PowerPC chips can outperform Intel chips at the same clock rate, but they only do so reliably (as far as I'm aware) if you start using stuff like AltiVec. Most stuff can't be optimized in this way, but a few things can. So, if the Intel chips did outperform the PowerPC chips in a particular benchmark, then some people would just jump up and down and claim it's not fair because AltiVec wasn't used, or something. I've seen this before.
Secondly, testing clock-for-clock is interesting in an academic sense only. The subjective speed of a system can be affected by so many things, slight performance differences at the same clock rate make very little difference.
Anyway, I'm sure you're aware of all of this, but there are so many confounding factors it'd be very hard to get undisputable results.
SWF allows programs to hook into the Windows API message queue system, and many many apps use this to achieve special effects, and control things that .NET doesn't directly expose. They did try using GTK to start with, but that solution was quickly found to not work well, just like Wine originally used Tk and dropped it.
Well it's both. Windows apps will still be written using System.Windows.Forms and they will need Wine to emulate them unfortunately. Mono/Linux apps will use the Gnome or KDE .net bindings, and they won't integrate as nicely into Windows.
Unfortunately Wine and the SWF effort are currently being screwed around by threading issues, and the new glibc also messes things up even more, so until the threading situation is sorted out I doubt we'll be seeing Windows .NET apps run on Linux.
So.. just like Internet Explorer then? :) [duck]
Well, it seems like a good idea, but why not just shove it into kdeinit and be done with it?
I think partly that's due to the style in which the new features guide was written. It sounded very much like promotional material to me.
KDE is pretty close to Windows (except better) yeah, there are other desktops if you'd rather avoid that. The default GNOME2 desktop is less like Windows for instance. Bear in mind for all its faults the Windows UI isn't actually a bad one, so it makes sense for KDE to use this as the basis for their work. I think from reading the lists though it's often a case of "How shall we do this? We could do it this way, that way or this other way? Which is best?" and it turns out the best is the way windows does it too.
Well, personally I think the Aqua widgets look better than the Keramik ones (if you ignore the stripes! argh!). However, I prefer the Mist theme for GTK2 above all those, they look good, clean, and imho pretty sophisticated. They look good while avoiding being theme overkill. It's completely personal opinion though, these things always are. I think Keramik is a bit fat.
You raise a good point wrt theming though. Sure, everybody thought Aqua was cool when it first came out, and I guess many still do, but looks are about fashion and taste, and fashion changes. I remember when Windows 95 came out I thought it looked brilliant!
Now everything supports theming, new "in" styles come and go like anything. I know you can hack theming support onto MacOS, but without actual support from Apple that's all it is, a hack. I wonder if that's really a good idea in the long run. Maybe they'll introduce charged for visual styles, to give value add.
That quote makes no sense. Mono is free software yes? How can it end up in the hands of anything. It's X11 licensed now iirc, which unfortunately means it could be hijacked, but as there is already a .NET implementation I don't think that matters.
Anyway, Miguel is the coolest guy. I wasn't at all sure about Mono to begin with, but reading the arguments he put forth and talking with him and the rest of his team on IRC has convinced me that he's got the right idea. It's basically a win/win situation, we need a .NET implementation for running Windows apps in future, and if we can use it for writing good apps ourselves then so much the better. I have yet to hear concerns about patents that are actually concrete.
They want you to move to Advanced Server, which is subscription based. This makes good business sense from their perspective. I should think that they ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that the cost of keeping support for their community-level distro was too high, even with the RHN. They're now after the very big companies, the kind who are easily willing to pay the Advanced Server cost.
I don't know, I'm not good enough as business to see what they're trying to do here, but I suspect that they'll be moving from a model where the community does most of the work so the product is cheaper model, to a it costs similar to competing products but you get more bang for your buck.
What I do know is that Red Hat haven't come this far by being run by idiots. This move is clearly pissing off some of their customers, but possibly they're positioning themselves more to target the kind for whom Advanced Server is small change. This comment on LWN is telling: "It's likely that the drop in good will be less than the savings in support costs".
It's business. Don't like it? Then use Debian I guess.
Well they don't really care about the home user desktop yet. They have said this in as many words. They continue to develop Redhat Linux despite it not making them all that much money, because it's the foundation for everything else, and because the more people using linux and developing for it the better.
I use redhat 8 at work. I couldn't give a rats ass about support, I know the deal - Red Hat give me a fine OS, even mail me when there are security updates, for free. I don't have to do anything in return (although as i now develop for linux i guess I am anyway). That's the way it works. If I actually need support, then I can pay for it. I don't, so I'm happy.
Nobody is being forced to upgrade you realise? I know people who still use 7.1 but upgraded and tweaked so it's just as advanced as Phoebe is. 8 won't stop working the day it goes EOL.
Every distro I've tried has such a GUI. KDE and GNOME themselves don't provide it, the distro plugs it in, so if you didn't see one then either you were using a distro meant for users who don't mind text files, or you didn't look hard enough. Only, to fix a problem like that, you better know your way around shell.
Do you have any idea at all how difficult it is to use the registry? Even advanced users get it wrong. How many times in PC magazines have you seen the answer to a question start with "Well, first back up your registry, editing the registry is dangerous...."
I know I have loads of times.
The registry is an utterly huge mess of undocumented magic keys whos meaning may or may not be obvious from the name or location. It's organized in a way that must have made sense to those guys at Redmond, there are lots of inter-folder linkages done manually, and it takes forever to search .
Users find registry editing, which is all too often necessary, hard. But people edit text files all the time. Sure, so if you use kate instead of kword there's no bold button, big deal. It's still a lot easier than the closest equivalent on Windows.
I'm a Systems Analyst. My job is to make my company's products usable. If that's not credibiilty enough to let you know when something's broken from the user-end point of view, then you are ready to be promoted to Mindless Linux Zealot.
What kind of an attitude is that? I'm a Systems Analyst, so if you don't agree with me you're a mindless zealot?
That's a bloody arrogant attitude. Let me tell you this, I have done my time on tech support which most definately involves more dealing with frustrated and unhappy end users, and out of restoring Windows to a working state when things go wrong and restoring Linux, Linux wins every single time. Problems inflict all operating systems, to pretend that if something doesn't work in Windows it's an isolated case that isn't Microsofts fault is ridiculous.
(sigh) Yes. There are loads of X11 servers for Windows. XFree86 is even free. It doesn't come bundled with the OS because unlike OS X, Windows is not full of geek sysadmins who want access to all their old apps.
How about the best page-layout software? Hmm, mostly need a Mac for that, huh?
Define best. Well, actually don't, I know jack all about page layout software. Nonetheless, choosing an OS because the app you need is only available on that platform basically says it's all about to go downhill. You should be choosing a platform on its own merits, but of course unless you're talking about Linux distros that doesn't happen.
Okay, well I'm sure Windows will work great with my Firewire-based A/D audio rack... Oh look, all the Windows users on the discussion sites report not having any luck all, and are either giving up on the hardware or buying a Mac for their studios. Hmm... Sounds like there are some things you can't do with Windows after all.
And? There's a whole truckload of stuff you need Windows for.
There is one reason, and one reason only, why Windows continues to dominate the desktop market, and that's the vendor lock-in we all suffer from the ever changing ".doc" format of MS-Word.
The Word document format has been almost completely reverse engineered for years now. The difficult part is actually implementing all those features now we know how to read them.
Windows is dominant thanks to inertia, thanks mostly to Win32 apps needing Windows (until wine is better), due to restrictive anti-competitive practices and so on. Believe me, in January 2003 the .doc format is the least of our problems.
Could somebody PLEASE explain exactly what has broken in KDE BlueCurve? Everytime somebody mentions this I have asked what exactly broke, and so far haven't got any satisfactory answers, only links to a page on mosfets site (for those who don't know, mosfet is hardly the most reliable source around). People keep mentioning "breakage", other than the UI tweaks I'd like more info on this.
Really???
In that case if I were Microsoft I'd be worried, because they don't need to port Office to Linux, the Wine team have done it already. I haven't used Word or Excel, but IE6 which isn't even a supported app works great!
They need to run Office, and if they need to run Office, then they need to be running Windows!
Well, no, they don't. See above.
That's a laugher. Anybody remember Corel? Loki? If history is any indicator, I think the case can be made that anyone choosing to produce Linux software (for the desktop) will perish.
Considering Loki were killed by massive financial mismanagement and even fraud, I think that line is a little old. Redhat are doing OK, and they've publically stated they're going for the desktop next.
Well, I'm for themes as long as I like them :) Unfortunately there's no accounting for taste. In a corporate/lab environment I'd probably lay down some ground rules for themes, but for home use I don't really care.
Quick: tell me if you're browsing Slashdot with anything other than RGB 0,0,0 for text and 255,255,255 for white. :)
Awww, come on! Not fair! I did suggest Taco provide an XML feed a while ago, so people could apply their own transforms to it. I know if I did I'd make the background light grey, because I have indeed found that grey is easier (from working on emacs, where you can change the background colour). But white looks cleaner and more modern, so website designers normally use it. Note that my autopackage site uses grey for the text background.
Maybe I'm on crack, or my computer is.. but on my XP system, every time I launch a new browser window, or save an attachment, the UI blows through whatever's under it for a good 2 seconds.
Blows through? If you mean that the borders appear and then the content, yeah, that's because on Windows the program is responsible for drawing its own GUI. That has certain advantages, like keeping memory use down, and in the old days it was faster too, but if there is a lot of swapping going on it can cause the gui to fill itself in visibly.
Anyways, this has already gotten long. Sorry if it seems like I'm ranting, I just enjoy the discussion. Cheers.
No probs, I do too, nice to be able to talk about OS X without flames flying high.
If you have so many icons on the dock, that probably implies that the UI needs a better way to organize icons. I don't recall if the dock has drawers, but I'm pretty sure the closest equivalent to a start menu is the Finder (which has ui issues of its own). I have something similar to the dock at the top of my screen, it's just the gnome button (start menu), some app launcher icons and the lock screen/log off buttons. I only put the most frequently used stuff there though, for the rest the menu, or just typing in the name is usually good enough.
Well as you said, yes, often people "log in" to buildings using pin numbers, when security actually matters.
Just because something exists in the physical world doesn't mean it's better. Locks can be stolen easily. Short of torture or trickery, passwords are much harder to steal, which is why we use identity/password for almost anything important, such as cash machines.
MacOS was a bit different because a lot of its users were more the creative type, and I'd argue that the Mac interface is more 'transparent' to most people, which is why a large number of people who just want to get the job done like Macs.
Hardly, they're all based on the same metaphors at the end of the day, developed at Xerox. The idea of the desktop, the menu, the folder. All these things are metaphors basically because in the period when the GUI was designed, metaphors were fashionable. If something wasn't a metaphor it wasn't happening.
Of course, in the interests of flexibility and power we routinely break these metaphors. Real world folders can't contain an infinite number of things, nor can they contain other folders. A "desktop" cannot be instantly cleared in real life. A file can't contain sound. And so on.
Metaphors are only useful up to a point, they can be and should be broken when it'd actually be beneficial, otherwise you're punishing the majority because a small minority can't extend their mental model of how it works.
Why do we enforce the filesystem concept - aren't we smart enough yet to have data stored on disk indexed so that fuzzy queries like "where is the sales report" can work - Google can do it for the web, why can't we do it for the file system?
Well we can do, for instance try Find Fast or on Linux "locate" (that doesn't do metadata unfortunately). They aren't particularly great implementations, but they do work. Better stuff will come with Storage+ and ReiserFS I guess.
But I think my point is that so far most computer interfaces have been built by computer engineers that have a certain way of looking at the world.
Yeah, it's mostly a pragmatic one. Art usually models real life, computers don't, because otherwise we'd impose completely arbitrary restrictions on what we can do with the technology. If computers had been designed by "normal people" they'd probably be only able to do one thing at once, would be ridiculously insecure and limited to peoples preconceptions of what technology should be, as opposed to what it can be.
Yeah, I should have added a "I know I'll get modded down for this but..." clause at the beginning.
The moment that post went up to +5, it was immediately brought down as overrated. Get over it Apple mods, modding down an alternative opinion is not what mod points are for, ok? They are for a) modding down the obvious garbage (nat portman trolls etc) that get posted here and b) modding up interesting posts .
Unfortunately the trend around here for way too long now has been, anything that criticises Apple is either troll, flamebait, or overrated. On the other hand, saying Macs are cool, or they look good, or "I'd buy one but they're too expensive" is worthy of +5.
Yeah, this is a rant. I carry on posting what I think because I don't post my opinions here to get karma, I've been at the limit for ages, I do it to tell it like it is. If that pisses off some people then so be it.
Too bad the mod system is so frequently abused in this way - if you read the FAQ it's meant to bring the interesting posts up, not bring down ones you don't agree with.
Anyway enough bitching. My points were imho valid, if people who don't like to see their new investment criticised can't take it, tough on them. I'll see them in M2.
I'm pretty sure I did a comparison when I first got access to XP and found they were bigger. You can change the size of the titlebar to something smaller however. I might be wrong, I've seen some pretty wierd optical illusions already today.
I have to admit, I laughed at the comment about the stripes... especially ending it with 'option to make it a gradient or something.'
Ok ok! That was just an example. I meant, you can't change it to anything else. Anyway, I know some people who really like gradient based themes. I don't so much, prefer the flat look personally, but whatever floats your boat yes?
The stripes in Aqua do have a purpose; they denote negative space. I've found that this is very useful for 'clicking off' an item to remove focus.
No, they are there for branding basically. In any UI it should be pretty obvious what will be interactive and what won't be. Buttons, menu bars, check boxes. These things are interactive. Everything else isn't. If your gui has some kind of control that it isn't obvious whether it'll do something or not when clicked, it's a bad gui.
Anyway, the concept of "negative space" is a bit warped. The title bars also have stripes, as does the top menu bar, but they all do things when clicked.
It doesn't stand out because there is no progress going on in the screenshot.
Unfortunately, it gets the balance exactly wrong, it doesn't stand out enough to be clear exactly what it is, and it stands out too much to just be instantly ignored. Time spent glancing at something in a gui and thinking "what is that? is it important?" is time wasted, and bad UI design.
The bar on the right side of the left pane is an empty scrollbar; this is done so your text is not popping 12-pixel gaps when appearing/disappearing while resizing. It keeps the text more readable.
I don't really understand... the empty scrollbar was on a list view, the items didn't stretch all the way across, so it wouldn't be popping in and out. Quite why you'd be trying to read text while resizing a window is beyond me, and useless UI elements, especially when it's not obvious what they are, are distracting.
I'd say the main problem with XP is the hackneyed half-MDI interface they cling to, but that's just me.
Amen to that. MDI should be dead already.
Windows used gray because MS had no interest in making the UI look like anything else for a long time (basically until OS X shipped).
Considering the new XP look was under development before OS X came out, I think you'd need to back that assertion up with some evidence.
It's not inherently easier on the eyes... in fact a lack of contrast can have the opposite effect. The default grey of webpages gone by had more to do with a lack of background tag than any 'web usability' effort.
No, too much contrast on screen is harsh on the eyes. Yes, too little can be bad as well (though for some people high/low contrast can make a big difference), but there was indeed a reason grey was chosen as the background colour, and it's because the early days of the web were dominated by technical articles, and grey was known to be less harsh on the eyes for extended periods.
Personally speaking, the problem with XP is the huge chunks of UI that get 'blown through' each other all the time. I hated that on Mac OS Classic, and I still hate it in Windows. Makes your computer seem sloooow.
Blown through? Do you mean when you can see the UI repainting when the system is under load? I don't really know what you are talking about here... At least Aqua never ever does that, what with the double-buffered display and everything.
I suspect you're talking about the synchronous display system OS X has. Yes, nice isn't it. It does have disadvantages as well bear in mind (namely direct drawing speed when not using graphics accelerators i believe).
I diagree. The Aqua interface is good for marketing, and dragging the computer-using public kicking and screaming into a bold new world...
Well, if the discussion has now digressed into the actual UI as opposed to themes, I have to point out that the Aqua gui has some of the worst usability booboos around. The dock is a usability nightmare for instance, and the constantly shifting top menu bar removes any usability advantages such a system might have once had. There are many other such problems with OS X, that I will go into if you want.
I think we're talking about different things. I suspect you are referring to the UI quirks that the Mac is famous for, like their own keyboard, one button mouse, apps don't close on exit etc.
Once you get used to them, they don't seem so obnoxious anymore. They aren't actually any more usable or productive, I have yet to see any evidence for that, in fact I have seen some saying it is less usable which I think is amusing, but I was talking about the Aqua widget theme in particular rather than the Mac UI as a whole.