However, I found the capabilities of Preview.app to be steadily declining. Panther's Preview.app had a working fullscreen mode whereas Tiger's didn't. Tiger's Preview.app could edit PDF forms whereas Leopard's will neither show me what I have entered unless it's in the currently active field, nor will it save or print what I have entered.
Preview.app is good, but in some areas it used to be better.
I have no ssues with layered UIs. Layered UIs do convey the information that something else is there to be accessed.
As for TM, I guess it's not intended for users who are experienced enough to want partial backups but not research-inclined enough to read up on TM before accessing its pref pane. I rarely do read up on new OS X features before exploring them because until now I haven't seen a feature that wasn't easy to understand without documentation. I assumed that TM is no exception, which was wrong.
That certainly sounds like "better" short-term memory to me... increased speed without loss of accuracy.
Whether or not that is better depends on oter parameters, as well. SRAM is much faster than DRAM, yet modern high performance desktops rely on DRAM - because SRAM has a lower density than DRAM. Likewise, the chimpanzee brain could allocate more resources to short-term memory, on the expense of other functions our brains tend to emphasize. The result would be faster short-term memory that still wouldn't neccessarily be desirable for us.
The larger-backsize finding was actually met with exuberance by the international archaeological community, with butt expert and OBE Sir Mixalot exclaiming "I like big butts and I cannot lie".
"You get sprung", added Mixalot.
However, not all scientists applaud the finding, with polymath and host of the popular science show Infinite Solutions Mark Erickson criticizing that this finding will further reduce the scientific community's interest in tiny dinosaurs, which he describes as sadly overlooked.
There was, in the early nineties. It didn't work out and they had to re-release Classic Mexico. It was the biggest failure of the North American nation industry until the Crystal Canada fiasco.
One reason we Europeans sometimes react strongly toward the policies of the US (which all too often gets misinterpreted as anti-Americanism) is that there are many things we love and admire about the US, and that makes the disappointment painful. You'll castigate your brother much more than a total stranger. Europe and the US are in many ways brothers. We react to a brother.
It's even worse for Germans. After we screwed up the USA went to great lengths to take the rubble* and build a decent country out of it. When the Soviets sealed off Berlin the USA organized the legendary air bridge. The term "CARE package" was still commonly known in the 1990s (although I never got to see one, being born in the 80s). The USA were much of a father figure to the Germans. Seeing them become paranoid and violent like they are today is a bit like seeing your own father becoming pathologically violent. Especially since the one thing Germany was taught over and over during its formative years was that violence is a Bad Thing(TM).
* To be fair, much of the rubble was created by the USA in the first place; think Dresden.
Not quite. Given how much we suck up American culture like a sponge and how much our politicians immediately jumped on the anti-terrorism bandwagon, I'd say that we're not so good on civilization, either.
I'm not so sure. I bet there are people out there who find the US's rampant consumerism offensive enough to kill for.
There is, however, a difference between "they keep trying to sell us their way of life" and "they go around invading countries they don't like, causing civilians tuosuffer and fucking up everything so bad that even years after they're gone the country isn't stable". The first one is enough to piss off radicals. The second one pushes that sentiment into the mainstream and turns it into the kind of hate that keeps on burning for generations.
You're seriously telling me that telling users "there are no options to set" is better than telling them "there are options, but you can't currently set them because of X"? It would've been trivial for Apple to grey out the "Options" button and put a text above it that says: "You can fine-tune Time Machine once you've set up a volume for it to back up to." That way truly everyone wins, unlike in the current scenario where only people who don't care about exclusions get told that indeed there is support for them.
Seriously, hiding stuff from the user is not user-friendly. In the real world stuff doesn't magicaly disappear just because you can't use it at the moment, however the concept of availability indicators should be well known to anyone who has ever been to a public restroom. And it's easier to memorize that a greyed-out button can't be used than memorizing when a certain element is or is not there on an app-by-app basis.
If you want to convey in a user-friendly way that something can not be used right now and a greyed-out button alone is deemed inadequate then tell them that (and why!) it can't be used right now instead of just hiding it.
Not giving even a hint that the object in question even exists is not user friendly; it first confuses users who are looking for it (as in my case) and later it might confuse them by suddenly appearing out of nowhere. The solution to clunky user interfaces is not to hide everything that is not absolutely vital to doing what you perceive to be the next logical step. The solution is to make sure that the UI is understandable; that involves not only avoiding completely unexpected things but also explaining what's going on. I'm absolutely positive that providing a small twenty-word blurb about why something is greyed out is much more user-frienly than hiding it from the users's eyes and hoping he doesn't notice.
There's a difference between eliminating uneccessary things and assuming that the user will be confused beyond help by having both a "select backup volume" and a "change settings" button in the UI. System Preferences is there to change settings, so I think it's fair to assume that when a preference pane doesn't show you settings and doesn't give you an obvious way to expose those settings there are, in fact, no settings to be made. The way the Time Machine pref pane is presented to the user upon visiting it for the first time strongly suggests that TM supports exactly two settings: Where to backup to and whether to backup at all.
Seriously, the whole "this button doesn't make sense to use if condition X is not met" thing has been figured out twenty years ago. They invented the concept of disabling widgets for that case and it has worked rather well.
Right now, when making a web app, I have to create PHP scripts that generate SQL queries, crunch the data, and then output HTML and possibly client-side Javascript. What a pain in the ass - there's at least 3 languages involved and really the whole thing is a mother to debug.
As opposed to your proposal, wherein you's use PostScript, Java and SQL? HTML, PHP and CSS each serve different functions and you're not going to get rid of one of them without sacrificing presentation, dynamic content or database storage.
Also, do you seriously propose replacing PHP with Java? I mean, Java has a nice class library, but compared to PHP it's absurdly cumbersome. Python, okay. Ruby, okay. But I very much doubt that developing web apps in Java is going to get much easier and I'm absolutely positive that 99% of all casual web developers don't want to have to deal with the massive pain of setting up an application server and deploying JSP in it?
Yeah, an all-Java (or Dotnet) web would be cleaner, but you'd also get rid of a whole lot of hobbyists who just want to write a website, not link together two XML files, an XSLT transform and a subclass of XMLMarkupGeneratorBean just to get "Hello World" on the screen.
As for the menubar: Someone else gave me the tip, too. Half-good, but not quite perfect (perfection would be a System Preferences setting).
As for excluding TM directories: I never got to the point where I could. Since TM doesn't display the options button until you have given it a volume it can backup to I assumed that there were no such optinons, not having given TM one, since I assumed that it'd want to backup everything. Vicious circle.
I didn't mean to imply they were. It's possible to freeze (not kernel panic, btw) Leopard, but you need a faulty/incompatible kext, which would bring down any OS. Apart from that (and those rendering issues) it's stable.
So does VMWare and that works. VMWare's kexts just happen to be a bit more robust (I suspect it might be due to the fact that Parallels uses FUSE; MacFUSE is sensitive to OS versions).
Hey, given OS X 10.3 and 10.4, losing one of the most convenient functionality (hierarchical Dock folders) is somewhere in the vincinity of being a major disaster. OS X has been rock solid for quite some time now, so nitpicking is where it's been at for years. (Although I did manage to reliably take down Leopard, that was due to a faulty Parallels install.)
If you don't feel like waiting, why not try out Quay [brockerhoff.net] which brings back hierarchical popup menus for the Leopard Dock without hacking or modifying any system
It does have the same problem the various Dock replacements have: I have to pay some third party money in order to get back functionality that Apple used to provide in all previous iterations of OS X.
Similarity #1: Initially, under Leopard Parallels would completely freeze the system. Don't know why, but reinstalling it fixed that. Apart from that I see mainly application-level instability (however, I do occasionally encounter UI rendering errors and app-level crashes, especially in "Leopard only" versions of apps).
Similarity #2: It runs everywhere, but that doesn't mean everyone wants it. The transparent menubar is just awful and there's not even a way to turn it off. A good case of "just because it sounds good on paper doesn't mean everyone will love it".
Similarity #3: I agree with him on this one insofar as the small glowing dots are quote hard to see. The rest is not that bad.
Similarity #4: Didn't notice this one, either. Then again, I don't see many SMB shares so I wouldn't know either way.
Similarity #5: As I don't have the space for a full machine backup I didn't touch Time Machine yet.
Yeah, but some of the problems with Leopard stem from nothing but poor design choice. Like the $DEITY-awful transparent toolbar and the fact that you can't turn that POS of. Thank you, Apple, for mandating that the upper 30 pixels of all wallpapers have to be uniformly bright if I want to actually use that menubar. Even though the menubar is only 20 pixels tall, the damn lookit-me-I'm-Vista blur effect means that if you just blnk the top 20 pixels you still get parts of the wallpaper shining through.
Or stacks. Stacks would be somewhat tolerable if they had left in some way to get back the old hierarchical menu navigation. But no, one of the most useful aspects of the Dock had to go, because Spotlight Is The Only True Application Launcher. And nobody ever put anything besides/Applications in their Dock, especially nothing with more than thirty files or even subfolders. Uh-huh.
Stuff like that is very unlikely to be fixed by Apple because that would mean killing off part of the new Leopard look. Apple will waltz on confidently, leaving users to buy third-party Dock replacements and apps that put blank windows under the menubar.
One thing I have noticed, the Intel systems I use crash (and have other bugs), but the PowerPC systems I have (including one at the very low end of Leopard supported systems) are stable.
I noticed that even with Tiger (even thaugh Tiger didn't crash, there I had slowdowns, app-evel issues etc). OS X/PPC just runs better than OS X/Intel.
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Sexology.
However, I found the capabilities of Preview.app to be steadily declining. Panther's Preview.app had a working fullscreen mode whereas Tiger's didn't. Tiger's Preview.app could edit PDF forms whereas Leopard's will neither show me what I have entered unless it's in the currently active field, nor will it save or print what I have entered.
Preview.app is good, but in some areas it used to be better.
Whiyh, by the way, Preview.app does by default. However, it obviously doesn't run on Windows.
Because you obviously never need to print anything, especially not forms that aren't consiered valid if not adhering to the standard layout.
I have no ssues with layered UIs. Layered UIs do convey the information that something else is there to be accessed.
As for TM, I guess it's not intended for users who are experienced enough to want partial backups but not research-inclined enough to read up on TM before accessing its pref pane. I rarely do read up on new OS X features before exploring them because until now I haven't seen a feature that wasn't easy to understand without documentation. I assumed that TM is no exception, which was wrong.
Zounds! You managed to discover the little joke I snuck into my otherwise completely honest and factual post.
The larger-backsize finding was actually met with exuberance by the international archaeological community, with butt expert and OBE Sir Mixalot exclaiming "I like big butts and I cannot lie".
"You get sprung", added Mixalot.
However, not all scientists applaud the finding, with polymath and host of the popular science show Infinite Solutions Mark Erickson criticizing that this finding will further reduce the scientific community's interest in tiny dinosaurs, which he describes as sadly overlooked.
There was, in the early nineties. It didn't work out and they had to re-release Classic Mexico. It was the biggest failure of the North American nation industry until the Crystal Canada fiasco.
* To be fair, much of the rubble was created by the USA in the first place; think Dresden.
Aiaiai, I'm a Soviet butterfly
Red, red and red, people's worker in the sky...
You're seriously telling me that telling users "there are no options to set" is better than telling them "there are options, but you can't currently set them because of X"? It would've been trivial for Apple to grey out the "Options" button and put a text above it that says: "You can fine-tune Time Machine once you've set up a volume for it to back up to." That way truly everyone wins, unlike in the current scenario where only people who don't care about exclusions get told that indeed there is support for them.
Seriously, hiding stuff from the user is not user-friendly. In the real world stuff doesn't magicaly disappear just because you can't use it at the moment, however the concept of availability indicators should be well known to anyone who has ever been to a public restroom. And it's easier to memorize that a greyed-out button can't be used than memorizing when a certain element is or is not there on an app-by-app basis.
If you want to convey in a user-friendly way that something can not be used right now and a greyed-out button alone is deemed inadequate then tell them that (and why!) it can't be used right now instead of just hiding it.
Not giving even a hint that the object in question even exists is not user friendly; it first confuses users who are looking for it (as in my case) and later it might confuse them by suddenly appearing out of nowhere. The solution to clunky user interfaces is not to hide everything that is not absolutely vital to doing what you perceive to be the next logical step. The solution is to make sure that the UI is understandable; that involves not only avoiding completely unexpected things but also explaining what's going on. I'm absolutely positive that providing a small twenty-word blurb about why something is greyed out is much more user-frienly than hiding it from the users's eyes and hoping he doesn't notice.
There's a difference between eliminating uneccessary things and assuming that the user will be confused beyond help by having both a "select backup volume" and a "change settings" button in the UI. System Preferences is there to change settings, so I think it's fair to assume that when a preference pane doesn't show you settings and doesn't give you an obvious way to expose those settings there are, in fact, no settings to be made. The way the Time Machine pref pane is presented to the user upon visiting it for the first time strongly suggests that TM supports exactly two settings: Where to backup to and whether to backup at all.
Seriously, the whole "this button doesn't make sense to use if condition X is not met" thing has been figured out twenty years ago. They invented the concept of disabling widgets for that case and it has worked rather well.
Also, do you seriously propose replacing PHP with Java? I mean, Java has a nice class library, but compared to PHP it's absurdly cumbersome. Python, okay. Ruby, okay. But I very much doubt that developing web apps in Java is going to get much easier and I'm absolutely positive that 99% of all casual web developers don't want to have to deal with the massive pain of setting up an application server and deploying JSP in it?
Yeah, an all-Java (or Dotnet) web would be cleaner, but you'd also get rid of a whole lot of hobbyists who just want to write a website, not link together two XML files, an XSLT transform and a subclass of XMLMarkupGeneratorBean just to get "Hello World" on the screen.
As for the menubar: Someone else gave me the tip, too. Half-good, but not quite perfect (perfection would be a System Preferences setting).
As for excluding TM directories: I never got to the point where I could. Since TM doesn't display the options button until you have given it a volume it can backup to I assumed that there were no such optinons, not having given TM one, since I assumed that it'd want to backup everything. Vicious circle.
I didn't mean to imply they were. It's possible to freeze (not kernel panic, btw) Leopard, but you need a faulty/incompatible kext, which would bring down any OS. Apart from that (and those rendering issues) it's stable.
So does VMWare and that works. VMWare's kexts just happen to be a bit more robust (I suspect it might be due to the fact that Parallels uses FUSE; MacFUSE is sensitive to OS versions).
Hey, given OS X 10.3 and 10.4, losing one of the most convenient functionality (hierarchical Dock folders) is somewhere in the vincinity of being a major disaster. OS X has been rock solid for quite some time now, so nitpicking is where it's been at for years. (Although I did manage to reliably take down Leopard, that was due to a faulty Parallels install.)
Interesting. I never would've found out because the pref pane doesn't show you the options button until you have selected a backup volume.
Similarity #1: Initially, under Leopard Parallels would completely freeze the system. Don't know why, but reinstalling it fixed that. Apart from that I see mainly application-level instability (however, I do occasionally encounter UI rendering errors and app-level crashes, especially in "Leopard only" versions of apps).
Similarity #2: It runs everywhere, but that doesn't mean everyone wants it. The transparent menubar is just awful and there's not even a way to turn it off. A good case of "just because it sounds good on paper doesn't mean everyone will love it".
Similarity #3: I agree with him on this one insofar as the small glowing dots are quote hard to see. The rest is not that bad.
Similarity #4: Didn't notice this one, either. Then again, I don't see many SMB shares so I wouldn't know either way.
Similarity #5: As I don't have the space for a full machine backup I didn't touch Time Machine yet.
Yeah, but some of the problems with Leopard stem from nothing but poor design choice. Like the $DEITY-awful transparent toolbar and the fact that you can't turn that POS of. Thank you, Apple, for mandating that the upper 30 pixels of all wallpapers have to be uniformly bright if I want to actually use that menubar. Even though the menubar is only 20 pixels tall, the damn lookit-me-I'm-Vista blur effect means that if you just blnk the top 20 pixels you still get parts of the wallpaper shining through.
/Applications in their Dock, especially nothing with more than thirty files or even subfolders. Uh-huh.
Or stacks. Stacks would be somewhat tolerable if they had left in some way to get back the old hierarchical menu navigation. But no, one of the most useful aspects of the Dock had to go, because Spotlight Is The Only True Application Launcher. And nobody ever put anything besides
Stuff like that is very unlikely to be fixed by Apple because that would mean killing off part of the new Leopard look. Apple will waltz on confidently, leaving users to buy third-party Dock replacements and apps that put blank windows under the menubar.