Comparing a Linux box and a Mac doesn't make any sense... they have so few uses in common. Text editing, Web serving, and learning Unix... is there any other field of endeavor where a Linux box and a Mac overlap?
I have Mac workstations and Linux servers. I can't imagine losing the ability to easily edit DV, work with media files in every format, make DVD's like floppies, just so I can trade a computer with an open source core OS and an incredible GUI and application platform for one that has an open source core OS. No knock to Linux implied or intended. I think it does Linux a disservice to compare it to Mac OS X... like it matters to Linux if it can do the things Mac OS X can do? No. Different uses, different priorities. It's only because both systems have displays and keyboards that they are compared at all. Do creative work on a Mac, build huge server and render farms with Linux. At all costs, avoid Windows. It is so straightforward.
Is that "Worldwide PC(-compatible) Shipments" or "Worldwide Personal Computer Shipments"? If it is the former, Apple won't even be included in these numbers... you see that all the time. If it is the latter, then they could very well be number 6, with 4.5% of the market.
Shit, who cares, though, really? Apple has been profitable for over three years, has billions of dollars in the bank, makes the most popular pro DV-editing software, the most popular consumer DV-editing software, has the world's most advanced general-purpose operating system which will soon be the highest volume Unix, had an application base of over 10,000 apps BEFORE they tripled their developer base over the past year, just won an Emmy for inventing FireWire and revolutionizing the way broadcast video is created, has the cheapest (by far) pro-level DVD authoring solution, and the only consumer DVD authoring solution that is worth using. Also, they make computers.
Microsoft and their cartel can ship a trillion eMachines boxes and none of the above would change.
I do love to see Dell and Compaq promoted on Slashdot, though. You know how some people want to call Linux "GNU/Linux"? How about "MS/Dell" and "MS/Compaq"? Ha ha. Compaq is the worst... they digested Digital, Alpha, and associated high-end Unixes, while charging Linux users for Windows. Now, THAT is how you get zero brand loyalty and get to watch your company's value disappear overnight. How much is HP/Compaq worth today? About as much as HP was worth a year ago.
Apple's got the most commercially viable open source product since Apache, and there are geeks who are still promoting MS/Dell? C'mon...
> BTW, what godaweful plugin do I need to look
> at the Mac OS screenshot? All I see is a blank
> square.
It's an interactive QuickTime movie, not a still image. You need QuickTime Player for Mac OS or Windows. There are still shots of Aqua on Apple's site as well.
(QuickTime is the Unix of multimedia, man... don't disrespect it. 99.9% of the video you have ever watched on a computer was QuickTime, even the stuff that was turned into RealPlayer or Windows Media Player streams or DVD video discs.)
The top-right of Pocket Windows is just a re-implementation of the Windows taskbar and its System Tray, but put up on the top of the screen, where it reminds one of the Mac's Menubar and System Menus. The menubar in Mac OS X just looks like a prettier, more colorful menubar from previous Mac OS versions (same clock, same system menus).
I agree that Windows XP looks a little too much like Mac OS X, though. I don't mind that, but I thought that naming the Windows XP interface "Luna" was about the weakest and most lame thing I had ever heard. Aqua, introduced in January 2000, and it's ugly step-sister Luna, barfed up in mid-2001. Sad. They are named like they are two products from the same company, which I guess is Microsoft's idea of innovation and competition. I think they should at least pretend to be original. The number of eye-rolls I saw when "Microsoft Luna" was announced!
Microsoft also copied the multiple Login panel from Mac OS 9 for Windows XP, and that would have been fine, too, except that they used the exact same rubber ducky picture as one of the user icons. I mean, there are only a handful of default user icons (the user is meant to drag in their own pictures, at least in the Mac version)... couldn't they do better than to also copy the user icons when they copied the feature? Sad. Now the duck has been replaced by big cats in Mac OS X.
There is still a lot of the theme technology from Mac OS 9 in Mac OS X. When artists complained that Aqua was too colorful, they added a "Graphite" theme to go with "Blue". Even though they are identical except for colors, these really are two themes. It's just that there is no theme interface for the user to add more themes, and no public documentation on "how to make Mac OS X themes". They could still open it up later, once people start to know what Mac OS X looks like, understand that it is different from Mac OS 9, and assume that a Mac is running Mac OS X no matter what it looks like. While 9 and X co-exist, it's important for X to look "like itself". They are getting tons of user feedback, and following that feedback quite closely... it helps if all the users are using the same GUI... it helps if Adobe doesn't have to hear from skinning enthusiasts about how their panels won't skin or whatever in their first Mac OS X app. There's enough to do already, with a complete rewrite of an OS.
A big problem that became evident with themes on Mac OS 8 and 9 (and maybe soon on Windows XP) is that they break really easily when you have a large and diverse GUI application platform that already exists before you start skinning the OS. Out of any ten Mac apps, you would find one or two of them wouldn't skin right because they had custom UI elements or design elements that were meant to go with the default look. I heard that Microsoft was trying to drop themes from Windows XP for this reason, but they are in there in some limited fashion, apparently.
The Aqua guidelines warn application developers not to assume that the GUI will always look like it does now, so Apple is trying to keep their options open for later. Maybe for Aqua II, and maybe for themes. With all the work they've done for Mac OS X, I think they probably could live with the idea of putting themes on hold for a while. Mac OS 8 was on the cutting-edge of skinning interfaces, but it also got to see a lot of the problems with the process. Mac OS X version 11 might be the place to work that shit out. They can sell a journaling file system to pros and themes to consumers and kids.
For me, I like two kinds of GUI interfaces: 1) totally native, following the OS guidelines to the absolute letter, fitting in with other apps, not distracting the user from their work, and 2) the exact opposite, where you have lots of creative graphics and you make a design and usability statement with them.
In other words, if Mozilla can't show native window elements, then I want it to have some far-out, cool-looking shit in the theme I'm using. An Aqua-like theme would be the last thing I want, unless it was so perfect that I didn't even know it was a theme.
If not for BSD, then Apple would probably have purchased a proprietary Unix as its core OS. It would not be as compatible with BSD as Mac OS X is, though, and all those BSD coders wouldn't be as overjoyed with their new iBooks or whatever. (The Mac is now an even better second computer to go with a BSD or other Unix desktop or network.)
Sharing digital stuff is not a zero-sum game. BSD is the Compatibility Fairy, spreading compatibility around by providing core stuff that you can build anything around and it will still be able to talk to other stuff. BSD licensed stuff is meant to be used by everyone, that's the point.
The most compatible part of Windows is its BSD TCP/IP stack. Is it good that Microsoft "stole" that code? Imagine how much better the Web would be if IE for Windows used Gecko. Then we would really have a compatible Web, and the Internet Appliance market would probably have a chance because they could put Gecko on top of a BSD TCP/IP stack and the Web would still "look like the Web" to a Windows user, with the same rendering that they see on Windows. You'd be able to run a Gecko-based browser on BSD and a page would look the same as on Windows. In these kinds of common areas, code that everyone can share without restriction really benefits everybody.
Now, when it comes to the distinctive graphical look of a software product that is the only competitor to Microsoft Windows in many, many markets and is just about to have its mainstream coming-out... is it really too much for Apple to ask theme designers not to rip off their stuff for a little while? Microsoft is going around cutting off air supplies and promising a complete IIS "re-write" by a year from now (yeah, right), and Apple is asking people to give them a break on Aqua while they try to lift a few more of us out of this Microsoft Morass(TM) 2001 that we're all in, with Code Red and Windows Media and C fucking backslash all over the place. Can't we give Apple a break and let them be the first one to introduce Aqua to Windows users?
I'm not defending lawyers or anything, and I know the guy in this article is skinning X-Windows, not Windows, but a guy who skins Windows XP to look like Mac OS X is not helping the free software community. Compare the proprietary components in Windows XP to their open Mac OS X counterparts and tell me which one you want your local artists and musicians running, which one you want your Grandma running. Even the BIOS-equivalent on the Mac is an IEEE standard, called OpenFirmware, which is also used by Sun and which has the cutest little Penguin icon that it uses to show bootable Linux volumes.
By the way... damn! Mac OS 10.1 is really good. Check it out! Everybody can find at least one feature in there that will make their jaw drop when they try it. For me, it was burning data DVD-R's like they were floppy disks (4.7GB floppies that cost $6 each and take 20 minutes to burn in the background). QuickTime performance is also really something, and DVD playback looks so real that you want to touch it. A sad note is that the rubber ducky icon from Mac OS 9's multiple login panel which somehow appeared in Windows XP's new multiple login feature is not in Mac OS X's multiple login... it has pictures of big cats such as pumas and cheetahs instead (Mac OS X internal code names). Sad to see the duck go from Mac OS 9 to Windows XP instead of to Mac OS X.
On the Mac, Shift+click, Option+click, Command+click, and Control+click are common. It is easy. There are also modified drags, such as Command+Option+drag that creates an alias of a dragged file instead of moving it. You have one hand on the keyboard and it hits a modifier key, and you put your other hand on the mouse and click or drag as usual. Your right hand is used to doing this... that's all it has to do with the mouse is click or drag.
It is MUCH harder to do a Shift+right-click or some other combination where you have to choose something with both hands... that is when it starts to feel like "chording". The Windows thing where you can right-drag a file and see a context menu and choose Copy or Move is a nightmare... try explaining that to someone... people who have done it before often fumble through it.
New users typically just point and click in the menus and select items in the Dock and they can get by just fine that way. There is no need to even learn a double-click on the Mac if you don't want to... it is better to show the user to select an item and choose File > Open to get them started. Later, the double-click is easy to explain in the context of being a shortcut for "click, Open".
This debate always comes down to geeks wanting more buttons and non-geeks living in fear of having more buttons forced on them. Two, three, four, and five-button third-party mouses are ubiquitous... there's no need to foist the second mouse button on people who don't want it or need it. Just because some people map double-click to a middle button on a three-button mouse doesn't mean that's the best way for every user to do tasks that usually result from a double-click.
The last button-related decision Apple made was to remove the eject button from all Macs and make F12 the eject button. Before that, they removed the power button from the desktop keyboard and combined its functionality with the power button on the display. They want less buttons, less noise, less to explain to each new user. The display is filled with virtual buttons; the keyboard is a huge bank of buttons. Web pages are filled with buttons; apps have huge button bars or lots of floating panels. We have way too many buttons as it is. A modern computer looks like a 747 cockpit to a newbie.
> OS X relies on contextual menus for providing
> most of the functionality of the Dock
No, that's not true. Most of the functionality of the Dock is through clicking (running apps, switching between apps, un-minimizing windows) and dragging (adding apps to the Dock, moving apps around within the Dock). Some is through Command+clicking (shows original of Docked item), and some is through Control+clicking (shows a menu off of the item, or off the Dock divider).
The Dock makes perfect sense with a one-button mouse. It's not surprising when most of the people who can run OS X have one-button mouses.
> The following are some of the Dock tasks I use
> contextual menus for constantly:
>- Browsing the contents of a docked drive or
> folder in a heirarchical menu. This is a biggie.
> Without it, you have to open a new Finder
> window and browse from there.
A click-and-hold gets you this, too.
> - Emptying the trash
I do this by going File > Empty Trash in the Finder, or using the Command+Shift+Delete key shortcut. If you click on the Trash, the Finder even comes to the foreground.
> - Quitting programs
Command+Q! Or Command+Tab (cycle through running applications) and then Command+Q.
> - Turning dock hiding on and off.
Apple Menu > Dock > Turn Hiding On/Off or Command+Option+D.
> - Managing (raising & lowering) multiple windows
> belonging to an application from the application
> icon.
Again, a click-and-hold works just as well for most people. And each app has its own Window menu as well.
> Yes, I can always access these menus by control-
> clicking. But the point is, why should I have to use
> such a workaround when a simple, easy, and
> obvious solution exists?
Why do you think of it as a workaround? Because Windows doesn't do it that way? What mouse button do you push for a Command+click on the Dock? Is that just a workaround for the "missing" third button?
I might seem crazy about this stuff, but it is my pet peeve when geeks push geek stuff on non-geeks. It's like taking advantage of them. It's like buying your graphic artist wife an x86 Linux box because you're a Linux kernel hacker and "Macs are toys"... you are not doing her a favor. I have worked with lots of non-geek users, and I'm telling you: the majority of users who have right mouse buttons are not using their right mouse buttons, and the majority of people who don't have them aren't missing them. If you are going to use a two-button mouse, you are better off having to CHOOSE that mouse for yourself in order to answer a pressing need for a second button (such as a particular software app that you use, or an old habit) rather than having every user start out with two and ignore one, or hit the second one accidentally, or have to use context menus because the developer believes that you have a two-button mouse.
If you had to ship only one car transmission by default, a geek would say "ship standard" because standard is flexible, but if your goal is to get non-drivers driving (so many more non-computer users than computers users, even today, remember) then it is better to ship automatic and let people who "know what they are doing" get a low-cost ($5-$50) standard upgrade (a two or three button mouse).
Another aspect to this that hasn't been mentioned here is that Apple sells a lot of computers for use by kids. Think about creating one mouse that's usable by 4 year-olds and 60 year-olds and everybody in-between. Look at an Apple Pro Mouse and think about how a kid would use it... then compare to your average Microsoft mouse. Kids often can't get a finger onto each button comfortably. Think about it a bit. Apple's mouse is the default mouse for a whole platform, not just for one brand of computers.
> Chording is only going to be more difficult for them
> to learn.
"Chording" makes it sound hard, but it is quite common for a Mac user to know that Command+S is Save and Command+P is Print and Command+Q is Quit, etc. Command+click is common; Option+click is common; Shift+click is common; Control+click is common.
I could understand this debate if Apple still used ADB mouses and people were having to give up their Windows and X-Windows -style mouses to get a Mac. If you are happy with your current mouse and you use Windows, you can get a Mac and plug that same mouse right in and it will just work. Consider finding out how people have REALLY gotten along without a second mouse button for so long, though... you might discover new techniques that are unavailable on the less GUI-oriented platforms, such as a drag and drop where you didn't expect it, or a click-and-hold.
> Hello, have you ever used this little OS X program
> called the "Dock" without hitting the contextual
> menus? The Dock is practically useless without
> them.
You can click-and-hold on a Dock item to see its menu, or you can Control+click. My left hand is on the keyboard anyway, where I am very, very used to hitting Shift, Option, Command, and Control to modify keystrokes or mouseclicks. Command+click on a Dock item and the original item is shown in the Finder. Command+click on a System Menu allows you to drag it around or out of the menubar entirely. These things are more intuitive and fun than pop-up text menus.
> Further, are you telling me you don't use
> contextual menus on hyperlinks in your web
> browser? Don't browse the web much, do you?
No, I don't use those menus very often. If you want to open hyperlink in a new browser window in IE, Netscape, or OmniWeb on Mac OS X, you hold down Command while you click the link... very fast. If you want to download a link to disk, you Option+click on the link and it is downloaded to disk. If you want to save an image to disk, you drag it from the browser window and drop it into a folder. If you want to save a URL for later, just drag it from the titlebar of the browser window and drop it into a folder in the Finder. All of these things are very natural to me, and the direct manipulation is more enjoyable than picking from similar items in a pop-up text menu. No dialog boxes, no waiting. If I do want the context menu, it is also just a click-and-hold away, or a Control+click. So, I already have two ways to access this menu, and it is not the best way to access the features on the menu anyway, and you are saying I need another mouse button so that I have a third way to access this menu that I rarely use.
On the Mac, the pecking order for me is pull-down menus, keyboard shortcuts and modifiers, drag and drop, floating panels, and then context menus. I don't think I ever had to go to a context menu to get something that wasn't available any other way. If you are used to a pecking order of context menus, pull-down menus, keyboard shortcuts, floating panels, drag and drop, then maybe a right mouse button is a good thing for you. I don't think this is the case with the majority of Mac users, and neither does Apple, from what I've heard. If you don't like the Apple mouse, find one that fits your hand and has the right amount of buttons and away you go.
> Have you ever tried to use MS Office without
> contextual menus?
I wrote two 1000 page books in MS Word for Macintosh in 2000, and I used a one-button mouse. Everything I need is in the menus (which are always visible, and easy to quickly hit because you can't overshoot the top of the display) or in a floating panel. If it's not there, I can create a new panel or menu item if I want to, as well. I also do graphics and audio work with a one-button mouse, and the only time I miss the second button is with the pop-up toolbox in Cubase, but you can float it as well, and it also appears in a pull-down menu. It's just not worth making my fingers into a V again so that I can push two buttons on the mouse (I used Windows for quite some time, too, so I have logged my two-button mouse miles). The keyboard already has lots of buttons on it, and my left hand is always there... I'd rather press those. On desktop keyboards, Control is right at the bottom left corner and it is easy to Control+click. On notebooks, Fn is on the left, but it's still easy to hit Control.
Word and Excel were originally Mac-only, and you can still get around in them just fine with one mouse button. The Mac Business Unit knows that Macs have one mouse button. If you have habits that make it easier to work in Office with a second button, then use a mouse with a second button.
> Face it, contextual menus have become an integral
> part of the Mac UI, particularly under OS X. It only
> makes sense to provide the easiest and most
> natural way to access them - a right mouse button.
That is your opinion. I use a Mac everyday all day for writing, songwriting, audio production, and heavy graphics work. I rarely use context menus, and when I do, I prefer to just hit the Control key with my left hand and click with my right hand (the whole hand on an Apple mouse) rather than click a secondary mouse button with one finger. Your right hand just becomes a big clicker when it's on the mouse... it's transparent. Also, I find Apple's "no-button" mouse to be very easy to grasp and use without looking or adjusting... you grab the mouse and you can't go wrong... a little time and trouble saved each time you grab the mouse goes a long way.
Also, it is a fine-looking, quality mouse that doesn't need a mousepad and tracks really well. It is easy to clean the top of it because there are no cracks for dust or whatever else to get into. You just wipe the top and you are done. All-in-all, I prefer it. It's fast and it's hands-on and I never, ever click the wrong button.
Because with 10.1 its possible to run a Web browser in an entirely different memory space than you're running Photoshop. Even Classic apps benefit from OS X's memory management, too, so "Classic" itself thinks it has 1GB of RAM no matter how much you really have. You can set your Classic apps to take advantage of this.
Right now I'm running Word X, BBEdit for Mac OS X, IE X, QuickTime Player X, a couple of betas I'm under NDA for, and no classic apps. If I start up Photoshop in Classic, then Photoshop is running in its own space (albeit along with Mac OS 9). If IE goes down, Photoshop doesn't, and vice versa. This machine itself also has only crashed once in the last six months, too, and that was with 10.0.1 or so and the repeatable bug has been fixed.
For most people, just getting their always-running browser and email client native can make a big difference.
Final Cut Pro is a show-stopper for you, though, because it doesn't run under Mac OS X at all. Apple announced that Final Cut Pro X will ship in the fall, though. It is almost ready. What a system that will be... Final Cut Pro is an amazing story.
The nicest thing about running MS apps on a Mac is that they are just applications like any other... they don't run extra programs in the background or change the OS or crash Netscape. You drag an app from CD to hard disk to "install" it, and if you don't want to keep it, you Trash it and that's that. I always Trash Entourage because jazzy email is less important to me than suffering from MS email viruses (the most common Mac virus is an Outlook virus and the second most common is a Word virus). No installers or uninstallers, no files littered around the hard drive. Word is one icon, Excel is one icon, etc.
As for what's running at any one time, Mac OS X includes an app called ProcessViewer that will show you exactly what your system is doing. Word X seems to use only use process (in other words, no trickery and running when it shouldn't be or whatever). I don't know if that answers the question about stubs.
Word seems to work just fine. I don't know about the Aqua toolbars, though. Panels are just bearable in Aqua, but toolbars look fancy enough to decorate a stagecoach. Luckily, you can turn any toolbar into a panel, and the most common features are already on panels.
Word X also has new app and document icons, much better than the last version. (The app icon also has car keys hanging off it for the "test drive".)
This is a version of Word I could actually like, rather than just being forced to use it by a publisher. In some ways, though, it's a bit depressing to see how little change there is between Word 5 and Word 10. Geegaws come and go, but 90% of your actions in Word are about the same in 10 as in 5. Maybe that's just from the perspective of someone who knows how to work with text... perhaps it is much easier for new users, I don't know (templates and whatnot).
Maybe you are in the UK, where it became a free update after the government stepped in. Windows 98 to 98SE Upgrade was US$69. Then Windows Me (US$89) was so bad that Windows Magazine recommended to their readers that they don't use it at all.
If you are a 10.0 owner, all you have to do is walk into an Apple Store or other Mac dealer this weekend, and you can get a three disc 10.1 Upgrade set from them for free (maybe you have to give in the upgrade token from the 10.0 box or do some paperwork or whatever). Otherwise, you pay Apple $19.99 and they ship a three disc set and manual to your door by courier. You can use that three disc set to upgrade any Mac that's legally running 10.0.
Keep in mind, also, that both Mac OS 9.x and 10.x take care of minor updates themselves. People who are bitching about the $20 shipping/handling/media fee for a 10.1 three disc set have received numerous automatic updates (10.0.1, 10.0.2, 10.0.3, 10.0.4, a few Unixy security patches, more printer drivers, Classic stuff, an Apache fix or two) over the past six months. Every week/day/whenever the user wants, a little box pops up with new stuff and asks if it can download and install. Mac users are not getting screwed on OS updates, believe me.
Although there were things "missing" in 10.0, they are showing up late in 10.1, but they are also showing up much-improved in many cases. Mac OS 9's CD burning from the Finder has shown up late in 10.1, but now it also does DVD-R's, and it works seamlessly in the background. There are also a bunch of improvements that just come from user feedback. A really nice piece of work. I'm running it on a 2000 PowerBook G3/400 with 512MB of RAM, and it is really a pleasure to use.
Your MS Intellimouse works just fine on a Mac. You are the one who is being arrogant, assuming that you know how to make an iMac for Grandma better than Apple does. Survey after survey finds that the majority of Mac user are happy with the one button mouse. Survey after survey finds that most Windows users don't even use the second mouse button; a majority don't even know what it's for.
As for "fix the platform", you can navigate Mac OS X entirely using a stylus, even if the stylus has no buttons at all (you "tap" for a click). That's a feature, especially with so many artists using the platform. You can also navigate entirely with the keyboard, if you want to forgo a mouse altogether. You don't need to even double-click, because there is always a menu command (File > Open) and a keyboard shortcut (Command+O) that does the same thing. Further, voice commands are built in as well. This is not a broken platform or a broken UI, in fact, I think it is just the opposite.
> There's also no Forward Delete key, which frankly
> just sucks in this day and age.
What has this day and age got to do with it? I'm a writer and I managed to get out of the forward delete habit without even noticing when I got my first Mac. I found it to be easier to just use one kind of delete key instead of two. This is the kind of stuff that all adds up and enables you to see past the computer and get to your work. When I want to delete something, I just do it without thinking now, there's no need to decide which delete method/key to use (and you have to, at some level, decide which one to use every time).
If you really are hung up on forward delete, you can hold down Shift and press Delete to get a forward delete.
Windows has three main keyboard modifier keys (Shift, Alt, Ctrl) and two mouse buttons. Macs have four main modifier keys (Shift, Option, Command, and Control) and one mouse button. It works out to the same thing, because the single, straightforward "click" on the Mac is easy to execute in concert with a keyboard modifier key. Control+click, Option+click, Shift+click, Command+click are all easy to use and explain, regardless of left/right handedness, etc.
Mac OS X doesn't require you to use context menus. The Dock's menus can optionally be accessed with a right-click, but that is sensible shortcut for people who use a multiple-button mouse. You Control+click to see the menu, or Command+click to see the actual item that the Dock item refers to. You can also click-and-hold to get a Dock menu, and for most people this is just fine.
If you were running X-Windows on a Dell notebook, you'd have a much more serious problem, because X-Windows expects you to have three buttons. Mac OS X doesn't expect you to have more than one.
> THERE's the problem. If it were a $5 POS,
> no big deal, but you've already paid $60 for a
> hobbled, less functional mouse that you're just
> going to trash.
You are completely incorrect.
First, it's not hobbled... it's an excellent pointing device for Mac OS X, which only requires one button. Mac OS X has a pervasive context-sensitive menubar at the top edge of the screen... getting a second, limited, on-screen menu under your mouse cursor is just not that valuable. Mac users just slam the mouse cursor into the menubar and use the pull-down menus, which contain all of the options. Rather than right-click an item and choosing "Properties", you click on an item and choose File > Show Info from the pull-down menus (or press Command+I). Rather than right-clicking an image in a Web page and choosing "Save to disk", you just drag and drop the image from the Web browser window to the Finder (including Desktop) and it is saved as a file. All of the things that you may be used to doing with your second button have drag and drop or similar equivalents on Mac OS... the user uses their one mouse and one button to move things around instead of using a second mouse button to display a text menu. Think about which is the best use of a mouse. After using a Mac, you might be pissed at Microsoft for all the broken drag and drop features in Windows (if you are a Windows user).
Second, you don't pay $60 for the mouse when you get it with a system. You can sell an Apple Optical Mouse on eBay and get $40 for it, which is likely more than you actually paid for it with a system. Use the $40 to buy whatever mouse you like. Any USB mouse works with Mac OS X. eBay can be operated with one mouse button on a Mac, so you will make it until the auction closes. If it was just a $5 POS mouse, all you would have is a $5 POS mouse, a non-biodegradable waste of space that you'd replace with a decent mouse later anyway. A good USB optical mouse is so compatible and has no moving parts... it will last so long and get so much use that it will be almost free.
Honestly, it is CLASSIC for a person to get their first Mac after using Windows, complain about the one-button mouse, get out their old Windows USB mouse with two buttons, use that for a while, realize that they haven't hit the second button in three months, and go back to the Apple mouse, which you just cup in your hand and click with your palm... very ergonomic. I did it, my wife did it, my brother did it. We all use Apple's mouse now. Try it and you'll see that there's more to it than meets the eye. Maybe you will even like it.
I don't know whether the G5 rumors are true, but it's worth noting that The Register ran almost the exact same stories about Motorola last year, except that it was the G4e taping out and going first silicon and set to ship in PowerMac's "this January". The G4e-based PowerMacs were announced in January 2001 and shipped a month later.
The 64-bit part is not surprising and not hard to believe because the Power architecture was 64-bit from the beginning. They always planned to go to 64-bits in a timely fashion with the PowerPC. The 64-bit PowerPC apparently runs 32-bit code natively, and nothing in OS X touches the hardware except the kernel (a modified Mach kernel), so maybe a new kernel is all that's needed to go 64-bit initially, with developers shipping apps with 64-bit binaries in them later to optimize things (Mac apps can contain multiple binaries, and the OS chooses the right one depending on the machine).
I also heard somewhere that Apple has been very involved with the design of the G5, and I'm sure that pumping up the MHz, even at the cost of some performance per clock, was a pretty high priority. You can't expect to educate the world about Intel's empty MHz, so you have to get your numbers in line with their numbers, unfortunately. The G4 is a truly amazing chip, doing many common media tasks in no time at all, but the problem is that you basically have to use one to know that, because the MHz sounds small next to an x86 chip, and many people don't care that the pipelines and power consumption is also correspondingly small. Also, many people seem to think that Altivec is a band-aid like MME or something, or that Altivec is rarely used, when in reality, if your app needs CPU power (graphics, video, audio, etc) then it has long since started using Altivec, and long since supported dual CPU's. If every Intel mobo had an MPEG decoder on it, apps would use that, too.
I think Microsoft's hardware people aren't really behind USB 2... XBox has USB 1.0 and FireWire on it and it won't even ship until November, so putting USB 2 into Windows XP might suggest that XBox's USB is not state-of-the-art. I presume that Microsoft's new set-top boxes have FireWire like most TiVo-style stuff... they may have an interest in slowing USB 2 down in order to keep convergence centered around FireWire.
We used to think that Microsoft would like USB 2 because it (unlike FireWire) requires that a PC be present in order for it to operate. Microsoft's answer was to start building set-top boxes, game consoles, and handhelds... now they want FireWire interoperability as much as anybody. (Or so they would like us to think... )
> The problem is that contextual menus play
> a large role in the OS X interface
The only place they are important is on the Dock, and they can be accessed with a click-and-hold, just like in a Web browser. The right-click that also shows them is the "other" way to get them, if you prefer a two-button mouse.
> You can either provide additional buttons, or
> you can resort to chording. Which do you think
> people are going to have an easier time with?
People are used to chording, especially on the Mac, where there are more keyboard modifier keys (more physical keys on the keyboard). Command+O is the shortcut for Open, and Command+click is the shortcut for context menus. You can explain context menus to a Mac user like this: "hold down the Control key and click on the item that you want to control; a context menu will appear with options that are specific to the item."
I use my Apple one-button mouse for Web surfing, email, and writing. It doesn't need a mouse pad and it is relaxing to use it because you can click with your whole hand. I have a three-button Wacom mouse that came with my graphics tablet, and I use that sometimes when I'm drawing. The tablet has programmable buttons for Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. so I don't use the right mouse-button that much anyway.
You can plug five or six mouses into a Mac and it's happy to let you use whichever one is under your hand. It's amazing how big an issue non-Mac users think this is. It's like "Apple ships computers with only one display!"... yeah, but you can add four more to a tower machine if you want to, and the people who want to do that buy four PCI video cards and four displays and they don't complain. It's not an issue.
> For once, an Apple product is actually a better
> value than its competition.
Actually, what's exceptional in this case is that the Apple product has a lower STICKER PRICE than the competition. Their products are often a greater VALUE than the competition for many users (features, TCO, quality, ease of use, support).
> 2. The trackpad has only one button. You can map
> other keys (e.g. function keys) to emulate additional
> buttons, but it's annoying.
Note that Macs have more keyboard modifier keys than most PC's. You can map all kinds of Command key shortcuts in Linux without changing the function of Shift and Control and Option (alt). Your standard three-button USB mouse will work fine, of course, even in Mac OS.
> 3. Battery life is 50% longer than the competition.
Actually, it's more like 100% longer... 5 hours on the iBook and 2.5 on most PC notebooks.
> If I could get a computer with the form factor of a
> Sun Classic and stackable HDs using the same form
> factor, using a simple bus extender, then I would
> go for it.
This exists today. A stack of FireWire hard drives connects to a computer with one cable, because each hard drive is connected to the next one with a short cable. To add a drive, place it on top of the stack and plug a short cable between it and the last drive. Or plug a camcorder into the last drive to capture video.
Some FireWire hard drives also have a third port on top, designed to plug into another similar drive stacked on top of it. The popularity of FireWire as a standard (many manufacturers) and its cheap cables and hot-plugging takes some of the steam out of the stackable plug, though.
> So whoever had hardware first is irrelevent,
> unless it's apple, right:)? FWIW, the 1997-era
> deskpros came with Win9x stock. NT was an
> upgrade.
Only a geek would care who had USB hardware first. Yes, obviously, Intel did; they created USB. To get from there (dead ports on PC's) to here (vast USB peripheral market) they needed somebody to say "I second that". Who bet the farm on USB other than Apple? Even Intel's mobos just added USB without removing even the PS/2 port. Apple showed off the iMac in early 1998 and it had a USB keyboard and mouse and no legacy ports. USB peripherals came in iMac colors for years.
You can add PC-style serial or parallel ports to a Mac, by the way, through USB or PCI. There is an iMac stand that plugs into USB and features all kinds of geeky ports.
It's pretty widely acknowledged that Intel couldn't get USB off the ground because of lack of support from both Microsoft and their box-makers. Intel put USB on their motherboards (starting with Pentium Pro systems, I believe), so the ports showed up on boxes from many manufacturers, but they were non-functional without software support. That is almost worse than not including them at all, because they caused a lot of confusion. Apple's iMac not only had functioning USB ports, it also lacked legacy ports, so every iMac purchase also counted as a person who was "in the market for USB peripherals". They sold millions of iMacs, and that's why the first generation of USB peripherals were all iMac-colored. I recall buying a USB hub in 2000 and having a choice of "Mac colors" (translucent blue, red, green, etc.) or (for the first time in my experience) "PC style" (solid beige) which made me laugh thinking of all the translucent blue peripherals I'd seen around beige boxes lately.
I bought an IBM workstation in 1998, and it had USB ports on it, but had rubber plugs in the ports and a sticker next to them that said something like, "Use pending OS support". The mouse and keyboard that came with the system were both PS/2-style, and it also had a "joystick" port somewhere, and the modem hooked up to a COM port, and the printer to a parallel port. In early 1999 I replaced that machine with a PowerMac G3 (the blue iMac-styled one) that had USB ports that worked, a USB keyboard and mouse, and the printer and scanner hooked up via USB as well. The printer I bought had USB, PC-parallel, and Mac-serial connections, but it only worked at that time on USB if you were using a Mac. The Mac box also had FireWire ports, even then.
The transition from Mac-serial to USB was so much easier on the user on the Mac side than the transition from PC-serial to USB was for PC users. When Apple introduced USB, they killed on-board serial; when they introduced FireWire, they killed on-board SCSI. Both times, third parties stepped right in with serial-to-USB and SCSI-to-FireWire converters for users who bought new Macs and wanted to use old peripherals. Users knew to make their next external hard disk a FireWire model and their next joystick a USB model because those were the "new" ports, each having over 10 times the bandwidth of the built-in ports they replaced, and both being hot-pluggable, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing a Linux box and a Mac doesn't make any sense ... they have so few uses in common. Text editing, Web serving, and learning Unix ... is there any other field of endeavor where a Linux box and a Mac overlap?
... like it matters to Linux if it can do the things Mac OS X can do? No. Different uses, different priorities. It's only because both systems have displays and keyboards that they are compared at all. Do creative work on a Mac, build huge server and render farms with Linux. At all costs, avoid Windows. It is so straightforward.
I have Mac workstations and Linux servers. I can't imagine losing the ability to easily edit DV, work with media files in every format, make DVD's like floppies, just so I can trade a computer with an open source core OS and an incredible GUI and application platform for one that has an open source core OS. No knock to Linux implied or intended. I think it does Linux a disservice to compare it to Mac OS X
> Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide PC Shipments
... you see that all the time. If it is the latter, then they could very well be number 6, with 4.5% of the market.
... they digested Digital, Alpha, and associated high-end Unixes, while charging Linux users for Windows. Now, THAT is how you get zero brand loyalty and get to watch your company's value disappear overnight. How much is HP/Compaq worth today? About as much as HP was worth a year ago.
...
Your post doesn't tell us anything.
Is that "Worldwide PC(-compatible) Shipments" or "Worldwide Personal Computer Shipments"? If it is the former, Apple won't even be included in these numbers
Shit, who cares, though, really? Apple has been profitable for over three years, has billions of dollars in the bank, makes the most popular pro DV-editing software, the most popular consumer DV-editing software, has the world's most advanced general-purpose operating system which will soon be the highest volume Unix, had an application base of over 10,000 apps BEFORE they tripled their developer base over the past year, just won an Emmy for inventing FireWire and revolutionizing the way broadcast video is created, has the cheapest (by far) pro-level DVD authoring solution, and the only consumer DVD authoring solution that is worth using. Also, they make computers.
Microsoft and their cartel can ship a trillion eMachines boxes and none of the above would change.
I do love to see Dell and Compaq promoted on Slashdot, though. You know how some people want to call Linux "GNU/Linux"? How about "MS/Dell" and "MS/Compaq"? Ha ha. Compaq is the worst
Apple's got the most commercially viable open source product since Apache, and there are geeks who are still promoting MS/Dell? C'mon
> BTW, what godaweful plugin do I need to look
... don't disrespect it. 99.9% of the video you have ever watched on a computer was QuickTime, even the stuff that was turned into RealPlayer or Windows Media Player streams or DVD video discs.)
... couldn't they do better than to also copy the user icons when they copied the feature? Sad. Now the duck has been replaced by big cats in Mac OS X.
> at the Mac OS screenshot? All I see is a blank
> square.
It's an interactive QuickTime movie, not a still image. You need QuickTime Player for Mac OS or Windows. There are still shots of Aqua on Apple's site as well.
(QuickTime is the Unix of multimedia, man
The top-right of Pocket Windows is just a re-implementation of the Windows taskbar and its System Tray, but put up on the top of the screen, where it reminds one of the Mac's Menubar and System Menus. The menubar in Mac OS X just looks like a prettier, more colorful menubar from previous Mac OS versions (same clock, same system menus).
I agree that Windows XP looks a little too much like Mac OS X, though. I don't mind that, but I thought that naming the Windows XP interface "Luna" was about the weakest and most lame thing I had ever heard. Aqua, introduced in January 2000, and it's ugly step-sister Luna, barfed up in mid-2001. Sad. They are named like they are two products from the same company, which I guess is Microsoft's idea of innovation and competition. I think they should at least pretend to be original. The number of eye-rolls I saw when "Microsoft Luna" was announced!
Microsoft also copied the multiple Login panel from Mac OS 9 for Windows XP, and that would have been fine, too, except that they used the exact same rubber ducky picture as one of the user icons. I mean, there are only a handful of default user icons (the user is meant to drag in their own pictures, at least in the Mac version)
There is still a lot of the theme technology from Mac OS 9 in Mac OS X. When artists complained that Aqua was too colorful, they added a "Graphite" theme to go with "Blue". Even though they are identical except for colors, these really are two themes. It's just that there is no theme interface for the user to add more themes, and no public documentation on "how to make Mac OS X themes". They could still open it up later, once people start to know what Mac OS X looks like, understand that it is different from Mac OS 9, and assume that a Mac is running Mac OS X no matter what it looks like. While 9 and X co-exist, it's important for X to look "like itself". They are getting tons of user feedback, and following that feedback quite closely ... it helps if all the users are using the same GUI ... it helps if Adobe doesn't have to hear from skinning enthusiasts about how their panels won't skin or whatever in their first Mac OS X app. There's enough to do already, with a complete rewrite of an OS.
A big problem that became evident with themes on Mac OS 8 and 9 (and maybe soon on Windows XP) is that they break really easily when you have a large and diverse GUI application platform that already exists before you start skinning the OS. Out of any ten Mac apps, you would find one or two of them wouldn't skin right because they had custom UI elements or design elements that were meant to go with the default look. I heard that Microsoft was trying to drop themes from Windows XP for this reason, but they are in there in some limited fashion, apparently.
The Aqua guidelines warn application developers not to assume that the GUI will always look like it does now, so Apple is trying to keep their options open for later. Maybe for Aqua II, and maybe for themes. With all the work they've done for Mac OS X, I think they probably could live with the idea of putting themes on hold for a while. Mac OS 8 was on the cutting-edge of skinning interfaces, but it also got to see a lot of the problems with the process. Mac OS X version 11 might be the place to work that shit out. They can sell a journaling file system to pros and themes to consumers and kids.
For me, I like two kinds of GUI interfaces: 1) totally native, following the OS guidelines to the absolute letter, fitting in with other apps, not distracting the user from their work, and 2) the exact opposite, where you have lots of creative graphics and you make a design and usability statement with them.
In other words, if Mozilla can't show native window elements, then I want it to have some far-out, cool-looking shit in the theme I'm using. An Aqua-like theme would be the last thing I want, unless it was so perfect that I didn't even know it was a theme.
If not for BSD, then Apple would probably have purchased a proprietary Unix as its core OS. It would not be as compatible with BSD as Mac OS X is, though, and all those BSD coders wouldn't be as overjoyed with their new iBooks or whatever. (The Mac is now an even better second computer to go with a BSD or other Unix desktop or network.)
... is it really too much for Apple to ask theme designers not to rip off their stuff for a little while? Microsoft is going around cutting off air supplies and promising a complete IIS "re-write" by a year from now (yeah, right), and Apple is asking people to give them a break on Aqua while they try to lift a few more of us out of this Microsoft Morass(TM) 2001 that we're all in, with Code Red and Windows Media and C fucking backslash all over the place. Can't we give Apple a break and let them be the first one to introduce Aqua to Windows users?
... damn! Mac OS 10.1 is really good. Check it out! Everybody can find at least one feature in there that will make their jaw drop when they try it. For me, it was burning data DVD-R's like they were floppy disks (4.7GB floppies that cost $6 each and take 20 minutes to burn in the background). QuickTime performance is also really something, and DVD playback looks so real that you want to touch it. A sad note is that the rubber ducky icon from Mac OS 9's multiple login panel which somehow appeared in Windows XP's new multiple login feature is not in Mac OS X's multiple login ... it has pictures of big cats such as pumas and cheetahs instead (Mac OS X internal code names). Sad to see the duck go from Mac OS 9 to Windows XP instead of to Mac OS X.
Sharing digital stuff is not a zero-sum game. BSD is the Compatibility Fairy, spreading compatibility around by providing core stuff that you can build anything around and it will still be able to talk to other stuff. BSD licensed stuff is meant to be used by everyone, that's the point.
The most compatible part of Windows is its BSD TCP/IP stack. Is it good that Microsoft "stole" that code? Imagine how much better the Web would be if IE for Windows used Gecko. Then we would really have a compatible Web, and the Internet Appliance market would probably have a chance because they could put Gecko on top of a BSD TCP/IP stack and the Web would still "look like the Web" to a Windows user, with the same rendering that they see on Windows. You'd be able to run a Gecko-based browser on BSD and a page would look the same as on Windows. In these kinds of common areas, code that everyone can share without restriction really benefits everybody.
Now, when it comes to the distinctive graphical look of a software product that is the only competitor to Microsoft Windows in many, many markets and is just about to have its mainstream coming-out
I'm not defending lawyers or anything, and I know the guy in this article is skinning X-Windows, not Windows, but a guy who skins Windows XP to look like Mac OS X is not helping the free software community. Compare the proprietary components in Windows XP to their open Mac OS X counterparts and tell me which one you want your local artists and musicians running, which one you want your Grandma running. Even the BIOS-equivalent on the Mac is an IEEE standard, called OpenFirmware, which is also used by Sun and which has the cutest little Penguin icon that it uses to show bootable Linux volumes.
By the way
Yes, I also think "chording" is better.
... that's all it has to do with the mouse is click or drag.
... that is when it starts to feel like "chording". The Windows thing where you can right-drag a file and see a context menu and choose Copy or Move is a nightmare ... try explaining that to someone ... people who have done it before often fumble through it.
... it is better to show the user to select an item and choose File > Open to get them started. Later, the double-click is easy to explain in the context of being a shortcut for "click, Open".
... there's no need to foist the second mouse button on people who don't want it or need it. Just because some people map double-click to a middle button on a three-button mouse doesn't mean that's the best way for every user to do tasks that usually result from a double-click.
On the Mac, Shift+click, Option+click, Command+click, and Control+click are common. It is easy. There are also modified drags, such as Command+Option+drag that creates an alias of a dragged file instead of moving it. You have one hand on the keyboard and it hits a modifier key, and you put your other hand on the mouse and click or drag as usual. Your right hand is used to doing this
It is MUCH harder to do a Shift+right-click or some other combination where you have to choose something with both hands
New users typically just point and click in the menus and select items in the Dock and they can get by just fine that way. There is no need to even learn a double-click on the Mac if you don't want to
This debate always comes down to geeks wanting more buttons and non-geeks living in fear of having more buttons forced on them. Two, three, four, and five-button third-party mouses are ubiquitous
The last button-related decision Apple made was to remove the eject button from all Macs and make F12 the eject button. Before that, they removed the power button from the desktop keyboard and combined its functionality with the power button on the display. They want less buttons, less noise, less to explain to each new user. The display is filled with virtual buttons; the keyboard is a huge bank of buttons. Web pages are filled with buttons; apps have huge button bars or lots of floating panels. We have way too many buttons as it is. A modern computer looks like a 747 cockpit to a newbie.
> OS X relies on contextual menus for providing
> most of the functionality of the Dock
No, that's not true. Most of the functionality of the Dock is through clicking (running apps, switching between apps, un-minimizing windows) and dragging (adding apps to the Dock, moving apps around within the Dock). Some is through Command+clicking (shows original of Docked item), and some is through Control+clicking (shows a menu off of the item, or off the Dock divider).
The Dock makes perfect sense with a one-button mouse. It's not surprising when most of the people who can run OS X have one-button mouses.
> The following are some of the Dock tasks I use
... you are not doing her a favor. I have worked with lots of non-geek users, and I'm telling you: the majority of users who have right mouse buttons are not using their right mouse buttons, and the majority of people who don't have them aren't missing them. If you are going to use a two-button mouse, you are better off having to CHOOSE that mouse for yourself in order to answer a pressing need for a second button (such as a particular software app that you use, or an old habit) rather than having every user start out with two and ignore one, or hit the second one accidentally, or have to use context menus because the developer believes that you have a two-button mouse.
... then compare to your average Microsoft mouse. Kids often can't get a finger onto each button comfortably. Think about it a bit. Apple's mouse is the default mouse for a whole platform, not just for one brand of computers.
... you might discover new techniques that are unavailable on the less GUI-oriented platforms, such as a drag and drop where you didn't expect it, or a click-and-hold.
> contextual menus for constantly:
>- Browsing the contents of a docked drive or
> folder in a heirarchical menu. This is a biggie.
> Without it, you have to open a new Finder
> window and browse from there.
A click-and-hold gets you this, too.
> - Emptying the trash
I do this by going File > Empty Trash in the Finder, or using the Command+Shift+Delete key shortcut. If you click on the Trash, the Finder even comes to the foreground.
> - Quitting programs
Command+Q! Or Command+Tab (cycle through running applications) and then Command+Q.
> - Turning dock hiding on and off.
Apple Menu > Dock > Turn Hiding On/Off or Command+Option+D.
> - Managing (raising & lowering) multiple windows
> belonging to an application from the application
> icon.
Again, a click-and-hold works just as well for most people. And each app has its own Window menu as well.
> Yes, I can always access these menus by control-
> clicking. But the point is, why should I have to use
> such a workaround when a simple, easy, and
> obvious solution exists?
Why do you think of it as a workaround? Because Windows doesn't do it that way? What mouse button do you push for a Command+click on the Dock? Is that just a workaround for the "missing" third button?
I might seem crazy about this stuff, but it is my pet peeve when geeks push geek stuff on non-geeks. It's like taking advantage of them. It's like buying your graphic artist wife an x86 Linux box because you're a Linux kernel hacker and "Macs are toys"
If you had to ship only one car transmission by default, a geek would say "ship standard" because standard is flexible, but if your goal is to get non-drivers driving (so many more non-computer users than computers users, even today, remember) then it is better to ship automatic and let people who "know what they are doing" get a low-cost ($5-$50) standard upgrade (a two or three button mouse).
Another aspect to this that hasn't been mentioned here is that Apple sells a lot of computers for use by kids. Think about creating one mouse that's usable by 4 year-olds and 60 year-olds and everybody in-between. Look at an Apple Pro Mouse and think about how a kid would use it
> Chording is only going to be more difficult for them
> to learn.
"Chording" makes it sound hard, but it is quite common for a Mac user to know that Command+S is Save and Command+P is Print and Command+Q is Quit, etc. Command+click is common; Option+click is common; Shift+click is common; Control+click is common.
I could understand this debate if Apple still used ADB mouses and people were having to give up their Windows and X-Windows -style mouses to get a Mac. If you are happy with your current mouse and you use Windows, you can get a Mac and plug that same mouse right in and it will just work. Consider finding out how people have REALLY gotten along without a second mouse button for so long, though
> Hello, have you ever used this little OS X program
... very fast. If you want to download a link to disk, you Option+click on the link and it is downloaded to disk. If you want to save an image to disk, you drag it from the browser window and drop it into a folder. If you want to save a URL for later, just drag it from the titlebar of the browser window and drop it into a folder in the Finder. All of these things are very natural to me, and the direct manipulation is more enjoyable than picking from similar items in a pop-up text menu. No dialog boxes, no waiting. If I do want the context menu, it is also just a click-and-hold away, or a Control+click. So, I already have two ways to access this menu, and it is not the best way to access the features on the menu anyway, and you are saying I need another mouse button so that I have a third way to access this menu that I rarely use.
... I'd rather press those. On desktop keyboards, Control is right at the bottom left corner and it is easy to Control+click. On notebooks, Fn is on the left, but it's still easy to hit Control.
... it's transparent. Also, I find Apple's "no-button" mouse to be very easy to grasp and use without looking or adjusting ... you grab the mouse and you can't go wrong ... a little time and trouble saved each time you grab the mouse goes a long way.
> called the "Dock" without hitting the contextual
> menus? The Dock is practically useless without
> them.
You can click-and-hold on a Dock item to see its menu, or you can Control+click. My left hand is on the keyboard anyway, where I am very, very used to hitting Shift, Option, Command, and Control to modify keystrokes or mouseclicks. Command+click on a Dock item and the original item is shown in the Finder. Command+click on a System Menu allows you to drag it around or out of the menubar entirely. These things are more intuitive and fun than pop-up text menus.
> Further, are you telling me you don't use
> contextual menus on hyperlinks in your web
> browser? Don't browse the web much, do you?
No, I don't use those menus very often. If you want to open hyperlink in a new browser window in IE, Netscape, or OmniWeb on Mac OS X, you hold down Command while you click the link
On the Mac, the pecking order for me is pull-down menus, keyboard shortcuts and modifiers, drag and drop, floating panels, and then context menus. I don't think I ever had to go to a context menu to get something that wasn't available any other way. If you are used to a pecking order of context menus, pull-down menus, keyboard shortcuts, floating panels, drag and drop, then maybe a right mouse button is a good thing for you. I don't think this is the case with the majority of Mac users, and neither does Apple, from what I've heard. If you don't like the Apple mouse, find one that fits your hand and has the right amount of buttons and away you go.
> Have you ever tried to use MS Office without
> contextual menus?
I wrote two 1000 page books in MS Word for Macintosh in 2000, and I used a one-button mouse. Everything I need is in the menus (which are always visible, and easy to quickly hit because you can't overshoot the top of the display) or in a floating panel. If it's not there, I can create a new panel or menu item if I want to, as well. I also do graphics and audio work with a one-button mouse, and the only time I miss the second button is with the pop-up toolbox in Cubase, but you can float it as well, and it also appears in a pull-down menu. It's just not worth making my fingers into a V again so that I can push two buttons on the mouse (I used Windows for quite some time, too, so I have logged my two-button mouse miles). The keyboard already has lots of buttons on it, and my left hand is always there
Word and Excel were originally Mac-only, and you can still get around in them just fine with one mouse button. The Mac Business Unit knows that Macs have one mouse button. If you have habits that make it easier to work in Office with a second button, then use a mouse with a second button.
> Face it, contextual menus have become an integral
> part of the Mac UI, particularly under OS X. It only
> makes sense to provide the easiest and most
> natural way to access them - a right mouse button.
That is your opinion. I use a Mac everyday all day for writing, songwriting, audio production, and heavy graphics work. I rarely use context menus, and when I do, I prefer to just hit the Control key with my left hand and click with my right hand (the whole hand on an Apple mouse) rather than click a secondary mouse button with one finger. Your right hand just becomes a big clicker when it's on the mouse
Also, it is a fine-looking, quality mouse that doesn't need a mousepad and tracks really well. It is easy to clean the top of it because there are no cracks for dust or whatever else to get into. You just wipe the top and you are done. All-in-all, I prefer it. It's fast and it's hands-on and I never, ever click the wrong button.
> if I'm in Classic all day, why upgrade.
... Final Cut Pro is an amazing story.
Because with 10.1 its possible to run a Web browser in an entirely different memory space than you're running Photoshop. Even Classic apps benefit from OS X's memory management, too, so "Classic" itself thinks it has 1GB of RAM no matter how much you really have. You can set your Classic apps to take advantage of this.
Right now I'm running Word X, BBEdit for Mac OS X, IE X, QuickTime Player X, a couple of betas I'm under NDA for, and no classic apps. If I start up Photoshop in Classic, then Photoshop is running in its own space (albeit along with Mac OS 9). If IE goes down, Photoshop doesn't, and vice versa. This machine itself also has only crashed once in the last six months, too, and that was with 10.0.1 or so and the repeatable bug has been fixed.
For most people, just getting their always-running browser and email client native can make a big difference.
Final Cut Pro is a show-stopper for you, though, because it doesn't run under Mac OS X at all. Apple announced that Final Cut Pro X will ship in the fall, though. It is almost ready. What a system that will be
The nicest thing about running MS apps on a Mac is that they are just applications like any other ... they don't run extra programs in the background or change the OS or crash Netscape. You drag an app from CD to hard disk to "install" it, and if you don't want to keep it, you Trash it and that's that. I always Trash Entourage because jazzy email is less important to me than suffering from MS email viruses (the most common Mac virus is an Outlook virus and the second most common is a Word virus). No installers or uninstallers, no files littered around the hard drive. Word is one icon, Excel is one icon, etc.
... perhaps it is much easier for new users, I don't know (templates and whatnot).
As for what's running at any one time, Mac OS X includes an app called ProcessViewer that will show you exactly what your system is doing. Word X seems to use only use process (in other words, no trickery and running when it shouldn't be or whatever). I don't know if that answers the question about stubs.
Word seems to work just fine. I don't know about the Aqua toolbars, though. Panels are just bearable in Aqua, but toolbars look fancy enough to decorate a stagecoach. Luckily, you can turn any toolbar into a panel, and the most common features are already on panels.
Word X also has new app and document icons, much better than the last version. (The app icon also has car keys hanging off it for the "test drive".)
This is a version of Word I could actually like, rather than just being forced to use it by a publisher. In some ways, though, it's a bit depressing to see how little change there is between Word 5 and Word 10. Geegaws come and go, but 90% of your actions in Word are about the same in 10 as in 5. Maybe that's just from the perspective of someone who knows how to work with text
> 98->98SE was $5 shipping/handling/media
Maybe you are in the UK, where it became a free update after the government stepped in. Windows 98 to 98SE Upgrade was US$69. Then Windows Me (US$89) was so bad that Windows Magazine recommended to their readers that they don't use it at all.
If you are a 10.0 owner, all you have to do is walk into an Apple Store or other Mac dealer this weekend, and you can get a three disc 10.1 Upgrade set from them for free (maybe you have to give in the upgrade token from the 10.0 box or do some paperwork or whatever). Otherwise, you pay Apple $19.99 and they ship a three disc set and manual to your door by courier. You can use that three disc set to upgrade any Mac that's legally running 10.0.
Keep in mind, also, that both Mac OS 9.x and 10.x take care of minor updates themselves. People who are bitching about the $20 shipping/handling/media fee for a 10.1 three disc set have received numerous automatic updates (10.0.1, 10.0.2, 10.0.3, 10.0.4, a few Unixy security patches, more printer drivers, Classic stuff, an Apache fix or two) over the past six months. Every week/day/whenever the user wants, a little box pops up with new stuff and asks if it can download and install. Mac users are not getting screwed on OS updates, believe me.
Although there were things "missing" in 10.0, they are showing up late in 10.1, but they are also showing up much-improved in many cases. Mac OS 9's CD burning from the Finder has shown up late in 10.1, but now it also does DVD-R's, and it works seamlessly in the background. There are also a bunch of improvements that just come from user feedback. A really nice piece of work. I'm running it on a 2000 PowerBook G3/400 with 512MB of RAM, and it is really a pleasure to use.
> stop the arrogance, and fix the platform.
Your MS Intellimouse works just fine on a Mac. You are the one who is being arrogant, assuming that you know how to make an iMac for Grandma better than Apple does. Survey after survey finds that the majority of Mac user are happy with the one button mouse. Survey after survey finds that most Windows users don't even use the second mouse button; a majority don't even know what it's for.
As for "fix the platform", you can navigate Mac OS X entirely using a stylus, even if the stylus has no buttons at all (you "tap" for a click). That's a feature, especially with so many artists using the platform. You can also navigate entirely with the keyboard, if you want to forgo a mouse altogether. You don't need to even double-click, because there is always a menu command (File > Open) and a keyboard shortcut (Command+O) that does the same thing. Further, voice commands are built in as well. This is not a broken platform or a broken UI, in fact, I think it is just the opposite.
> There's also no Forward Delete key, which frankly
> just sucks in this day and age.
What has this day and age got to do with it? I'm a writer and I managed to get out of the forward delete habit without even noticing when I got my first Mac. I found it to be easier to just use one kind of delete key instead of two. This is the kind of stuff that all adds up and enables you to see past the computer and get to your work. When I want to delete something, I just do it without thinking now, there's no need to decide which delete method/key to use (and you have to, at some level, decide which one to use every time).
If you really are hung up on forward delete, you can hold down Shift and press Delete to get a forward delete.
Windows has three main keyboard modifier keys (Shift, Alt, Ctrl) and two mouse buttons. Macs have four main modifier keys (Shift, Option, Command, and Control) and one mouse button. It works out to the same thing, because the single, straightforward "click" on the Mac is easy to execute in concert with a keyboard modifier key. Control+click, Option+click, Shift+click, Command+click are all easy to use and explain, regardless of left/right handedness, etc.
Mac OS X doesn't require you to use context menus. The Dock's menus can optionally be accessed with a right-click, but that is sensible shortcut for people who use a multiple-button mouse. You Control+click to see the menu, or Command+click to see the actual item that the Dock item refers to. You can also click-and-hold to get a Dock menu, and for most people this is just fine.
If you were running X-Windows on a Dell notebook, you'd have a much more serious problem, because X-Windows expects you to have three buttons. Mac OS X doesn't expect you to have more than one.
> THERE's the problem. If it were a $5 POS,
... it's an excellent pointing device for Mac OS X, which only requires one button. Mac OS X has a pervasive context-sensitive menubar at the top edge of the screen ... getting a second, limited, on-screen menu under your mouse cursor is just not that valuable. Mac users just slam the mouse cursor into the menubar and use the pull-down menus, which contain all of the options. Rather than right-click an item and choosing "Properties", you click on an item and choose File > Show Info from the pull-down menus (or press Command+I). Rather than right-clicking an image in a Web page and choosing "Save to disk", you just drag and drop the image from the Web browser window to the Finder (including Desktop) and it is saved as a file. All of the things that you may be used to doing with your second button have drag and drop or similar equivalents on Mac OS ... the user uses their one mouse and one button to move things around instead of using a second mouse button to display a text menu. Think about which is the best use of a mouse. After using a Mac, you might be pissed at Microsoft for all the broken drag and drop features in Windows (if you are a Windows user).
... it will last so long and get so much use that it will be almost free.
... very ergonomic. I did it, my wife did it, my brother did it. We all use Apple's mouse now. Try it and you'll see that there's more to it than meets the eye. Maybe you will even like it.
> no big deal, but you've already paid $60 for a
> hobbled, less functional mouse that you're just
> going to trash.
You are completely incorrect.
First, it's not hobbled
Second, you don't pay $60 for the mouse when you get it with a system. You can sell an Apple Optical Mouse on eBay and get $40 for it, which is likely more than you actually paid for it with a system. Use the $40 to buy whatever mouse you like. Any USB mouse works with Mac OS X. eBay can be operated with one mouse button on a Mac, so you will make it until the auction closes. If it was just a $5 POS mouse, all you would have is a $5 POS mouse, a non-biodegradable waste of space that you'd replace with a decent mouse later anyway. A good USB optical mouse is so compatible and has no moving parts
Honestly, it is CLASSIC for a person to get their first Mac after using Windows, complain about the one-button mouse, get out their old Windows USB mouse with two buttons, use that for a while, realize that they haven't hit the second button in three months, and go back to the Apple mouse, which you just cup in your hand and click with your palm
I don't know whether the G5 rumors are true, but it's worth noting that The Register ran almost the exact same stories about Motorola last year, except that it was the G4e taping out and going first silicon and set to ship in PowerMac's "this January". The G4e-based PowerMacs were announced in January 2001 and shipped a month later.
The 64-bit part is not surprising and not hard to believe because the Power architecture was 64-bit from the beginning. They always planned to go to 64-bits in a timely fashion with the PowerPC. The 64-bit PowerPC apparently runs 32-bit code natively, and nothing in OS X touches the hardware except the kernel (a modified Mach kernel), so maybe a new kernel is all that's needed to go 64-bit initially, with developers shipping apps with 64-bit binaries in them later to optimize things (Mac apps can contain multiple binaries, and the OS chooses the right one depending on the machine).
I also heard somewhere that Apple has been very involved with the design of the G5, and I'm sure that pumping up the MHz, even at the cost of some performance per clock, was a pretty high priority. You can't expect to educate the world about Intel's empty MHz, so you have to get your numbers in line with their numbers, unfortunately. The G4 is a truly amazing chip, doing many common media tasks in no time at all, but the problem is that you basically have to use one to know that, because the MHz sounds small next to an x86 chip, and many people don't care that the pipelines and power consumption is also correspondingly small. Also, many people seem to think that Altivec is a band-aid like MME or something, or that Altivec is rarely used, when in reality, if your app needs CPU power (graphics, video, audio, etc) then it has long since started using Altivec, and long since supported dual CPU's. If every Intel mobo had an MPEG decoder on it, apps would use that, too.
I think Microsoft's hardware people aren't really behind USB 2 ... XBox has USB 1.0 and FireWire on it and it won't even ship until November, so putting USB 2 into Windows XP might suggest that XBox's USB is not state-of-the-art. I presume that Microsoft's new set-top boxes have FireWire like most TiVo-style stuff ... they may have an interest in slowing USB 2 down in order to keep convergence centered around FireWire.
... now they want FireWire interoperability as much as anybody. (Or so they would like us to think ... )
We used to think that Microsoft would like USB 2 because it (unlike FireWire) requires that a PC be present in order for it to operate. Microsoft's answer was to start building set-top boxes, game consoles, and handhelds
> The problem is that contextual menus play
... yeah, but you can add four more to a tower machine if you want to, and the people who want to do that buy four PCI video cards and four displays and they don't complain. It's not an issue.
> a large role in the OS X interface
The only place they are important is on the Dock, and they can be accessed with a click-and-hold, just like in a Web browser. The right-click that also shows them is the "other" way to get them, if you prefer a two-button mouse.
> You can either provide additional buttons, or
> you can resort to chording. Which do you think
> people are going to have an easier time with?
People are used to chording, especially on the Mac, where there are more keyboard modifier keys (more physical keys on the keyboard). Command+O is the shortcut for Open, and Command+click is the shortcut for context menus. You can explain context menus to a Mac user like this: "hold down the Control key and click on the item that you want to control; a context menu will appear with options that are specific to the item."
I use my Apple one-button mouse for Web surfing, email, and writing. It doesn't need a mouse pad and it is relaxing to use it because you can click with your whole hand. I have a three-button Wacom mouse that came with my graphics tablet, and I use that sometimes when I'm drawing. The tablet has programmable buttons for Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. so I don't use the right mouse-button that much anyway.
You can plug five or six mouses into a Mac and it's happy to let you use whichever one is under your hand. It's amazing how big an issue non-Mac users think this is. It's like "Apple ships computers with only one display!"
> For once, an Apple product is actually a better
> value than its competition.
Actually, what's exceptional in this case is that the Apple product has a lower STICKER PRICE than the competition. Their products are often a greater VALUE than the competition for many users (features, TCO, quality, ease of use, support).
> 2. The trackpad has only one button. You can map
... 5 hours on the iBook and 2.5 on most PC notebooks.
> other keys (e.g. function keys) to emulate additional
> buttons, but it's annoying.
Note that Macs have more keyboard modifier keys than most PC's. You can map all kinds of Command key shortcuts in Linux without changing the function of Shift and Control and Option (alt). Your standard three-button USB mouse will work fine, of course, even in Mac OS.
> 3. Battery life is 50% longer than the competition.
Actually, it's more like 100% longer
> If I could get a computer with the form factor of a
> Sun Classic and stackable HDs using the same form
> factor, using a simple bus extender, then I would
> go for it.
This exists today. A stack of FireWire hard drives connects to a computer with one cable, because each hard drive is connected to the next one with a short cable. To add a drive, place it on top of the stack and plug a short cable between it and the last drive. Or plug a camcorder into the last drive to capture video.
Some FireWire hard drives also have a third port on top, designed to plug into another similar drive stacked on top of it. The popularity of FireWire as a standard (many manufacturers) and its cheap cables and hot-plugging takes some of the steam out of the stackable plug, though.
> So whoever had hardware first is irrelevent, :)? FWIW, the 1997-era
> unless it's apple, right
> deskpros came with Win9x stock. NT was an
> upgrade.
Only a geek would care who had USB hardware first. Yes, obviously, Intel did; they created USB. To get from there (dead ports on PC's) to here (vast USB peripheral market) they needed somebody to say "I second that". Who bet the farm on USB other than Apple? Even Intel's mobos just added USB without removing even the PS/2 port. Apple showed off the iMac in early 1998 and it had a USB keyboard and mouse and no legacy ports. USB peripherals came in iMac colors for years.
You can add PC-style serial or parallel ports to a Mac, by the way, through USB or PCI. There is an iMac stand that plugs into USB and features all kinds of geeky ports.
It's pretty widely acknowledged that Intel couldn't get USB off the ground because of lack of support from both Microsoft and their box-makers. Intel put USB on their motherboards (starting with Pentium Pro systems, I believe), so the ports showed up on boxes from many manufacturers, but they were non-functional without software support. That is almost worse than not including them at all, because they caused a lot of confusion. Apple's iMac not only had functioning USB ports, it also lacked legacy ports, so every iMac purchase also counted as a person who was "in the market for USB peripherals". They sold millions of iMacs, and that's why the first generation of USB peripherals were all iMac-colored. I recall buying a USB hub in 2000 and having a choice of "Mac colors" (translucent blue, red, green, etc.) or (for the first time in my experience) "PC style" (solid beige) which made me laugh thinking of all the translucent blue peripherals I'd seen around beige boxes lately.
I bought an IBM workstation in 1998, and it had USB ports on it, but had rubber plugs in the ports and a sticker next to them that said something like, "Use pending OS support". The mouse and keyboard that came with the system were both PS/2-style, and it also had a "joystick" port somewhere, and the modem hooked up to a COM port, and the printer to a parallel port. In early 1999 I replaced that machine with a PowerMac G3 (the blue iMac-styled one) that had USB ports that worked, a USB keyboard and mouse, and the printer and scanner hooked up via USB as well. The printer I bought had USB, PC-parallel, and Mac-serial connections, but it only worked at that time on USB if you were using a Mac. The Mac box also had FireWire ports, even then.
The transition from Mac-serial to USB was so much easier on the user on the Mac side than the transition from PC-serial to USB was for PC users. When Apple introduced USB, they killed on-board serial; when they introduced FireWire, they killed on-board SCSI. Both times, third parties stepped right in with serial-to-USB and SCSI-to-FireWire converters for users who bought new Macs and wanted to use old peripherals. Users knew to make their next external hard disk a FireWire model and their next joystick a USB model because those were the "new" ports, each having over 10 times the bandwidth of the built-in ports they replaced, and both being hot-pluggable, too.