I can't believe your original post was sincere... it reads like one of those automatically generated complaint letters that whine without actually saying anything.
The symbols appear even when you mouseover the buttons on an inactive window. Once you've used it, if you imagine the symbols being on all the time, it seems like that would just be noise. This is not a Web site... you're going to spend your first hour getting familiar with which window button does what (if that) and then you're going to just click them without thinking.
Personally, I like the close button by itself, and the manipulation buttons on the other side, like in Mac OS 9, but you can't please everybody no matter what you do. Apple proved that they were listening to outside criticizm between DP3 and DP4 (I can actually remember who complained first on some of the UI features that have been changed), so they will probably continue to listen throughout the rest of the year as they do one or two more beta releases, including one public one. Apple's product line should look spectacular in January 2001.
Mac OS X is already better at running Mac OS 9 apps than Windows 2000 is at running Windows 95/98 apps. There's no lack of software. A huge majority of the apps already run fine, without modification.
Even if you limit to Carbon/Cocoa ("native") applications, we already have: IE 5, QuickTime 5, AppleWorks 6, the NeXT mail client, and most of the smaller apps that were included with Mac OS 9, such as Sherlock, Script Editor, and Stickies.
I know Be has a lot of useful software, but Macintosh and Windows are still in another league from everything else as far as the range and sheer number of apps from major vendors like Adobe and Microsoft. Mac OS X only adds to that by supporting apps from Mac OS 7/8/9, NeXTSTEP, Java 2, and BSD/Unix.
Mac OS X is great for everybody except Microsoft. It's going to continue to raise awareness of non-Windows computing, as well as Unix in general. It's a consumer OS that's very interoperable with standards and other Unix and Linux, BSD, etc.
> What? The sound? Video? Motherboard? > There are better peripherals out there. > What does that leave that "rocks"? That > pretty case?
Off the top of my head, here are some of the hardware features you get with a PowerMac that you don't usually find on a typical PC:
- 1 MB cache - can take up to 2 GB of RAM - CPU is smaller, takes less power, and doesn't need a fan - because it runs so cool, the (one) fan in the box is very small and quiet - two independent FireWire busses (400mbs each) - two independent USB busses (1.2mbs each) - wireless networking option for $99 extra - built-in 10/100 Ethernet - both VGA and digital video connectors - booting from any drive attached to your system, even FireWire (hold down the Option key while you boot, and you get a screen that shows an icon for each drive so you can choose one) - easy-access case exposes the whole mobo with one switch - built-in (non-Win) modem - three empty PCI slots (as much as you can get a PC with more slots, often you put a NIC, modem and SCSI/FireWire in there right away, while those are already built-in on the PowerMac) - nice styling and attention to detail (matching bezel for Zip drive, for example) - integration with the OS, so that hot plugging, power management and hardware detection are excellent, and the Apple System Profiler utility can give you a very detailed listing of your hardware - handles - on/off switch on the keyboard - high quality keyboard with a USB hub providing two ports for a mouse and a joystick - extraordinarily crappy mouse, good only as a conversation piece
There's a reason why there are so many happy Mac users: they make good stuff.
On the Mac, you use AppleScript for a lot of the things that you'd use a CLI for on other OS's, so there won't be some CLI awakening amongst Mac users. The non-GUI tasks you're thinking of are easily scripted, and scripts can even be created by recording your actions. It's a pretty good method for enabling non-programmers to automate repetitive tasks or control applications.
In short, you can use mouse actions and text input in Mac OS, just like in any other OS.
Re:Slow, slow, slow. Performance bottlenecks. Slow
on
Apple Delays Mac OS X
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· Score: 1
It's still full of debug code... how it eventually performs remains to be seen.
> DOS is Windows98, in about the same > way that sh, lilo, and libc together ARE linux.
You are so wrong. Windows95, Windows98 and next year's WindowsME are DOS. That's what distinguishes them from Windows NT. They use eight character filenames for all kinds of things, they have no security, they're not multi-user, and they don't completely hide the hardware from the apps. It's SuperDOS, I grant you, but it's still DOS. Windows 95 was originally going to ship as an add-on to DOS, until they were "integrated" to kill off other brands of DOS. This was established in the Caldera lawsuit. During that trial, Caldera demonstrated Windows 95 running on Novell DOS.
Microsoft has been clear for years that DOS would be replaced by NT (which was originally OS/2, if you look at things from the Microsoft perspective). Ignore Microsoft's ever-changing product names and look at the upgrade paths:
DOS 5 > DOS 6/Windows 3.x > Windows95 > Windows98 > Windows ME
NT 3.1 > NT 4 > Windows 2000
Windows CE > Pocket Windows
Those are three separate operating systems, no matter how you slice it. They support vastly different ranges of hardware, and run a vastly different range of applications. Only half of the Win32 apps that are out there will run on Windows 2000, for example, while they all run on Windows98.
Mozilla for Mac OS X is going to be the BSD version with a Carbon interface. They were calling it "Fizzila" at one point. Not sure when it or Netscape 6 for Mac OS X will be ready.
IE is already Carbon and will be on Mac OS X from the start. There's also the Omni browser, which is Cocoa, and descended from NeXTSTEP... it's out in beta right now. Looks simly amazing under Mac OS X. Everything anti-aliased and very slick.
There may also be a basic Apple browser included in Mac OS X. They have a ton of HTML and XML going on in the OS, so who knows? Mac OS X will also include Apple's (Cocoa) email app (from NeXTSTEP), which people seem to either love or hate.
The iBook will give you five to six hours of real work. I plug mine in at night to charge, but the rest of the time I just use it without worrying about battery life or plugging in any cables. AirPort is really excellent. It really makes a difference when you just don't have to plug a portable into anything at all. Truly portable.
You're just trolling, but Adobe makes more than half of their money on their Mac products.
Re:iMovie's lack of features
on
iMovie For Free
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· Score: 1
You can play with audio and video tracks in QuickTime Pro (just copy and paste to mix and match them) and then export from QuickTime Pro as DV and put the DV files into iMovie's DV folder to continue working with them. Or just export the audio tracks as AIFF from anything you can open in QuickTime Pro.
As far as stability, I think iMovie is a Carbon app, so getting the newest CarbonLib from Apple (1.0.4 was just released) will probably help out. It's constantly being improved as Carbon and Mac OS X progress.
No, Mac users definitely use their computers for years longer than people typically use their Intel PC's. I'm constantly amazed at all the people I encounter with beige machines, and the iMac is almost two years old. Not just early G3's, either. Plenty of people are running Mac OS 8.6 or 9.0 on first generation PowerPC's that they bought in 1996 when 16MB of RAM was extravagant. I have a 1994 PowerBook running Mac OS 7.6 that surfs the Web and hooks up to our network fine, and it's got a 68000 CPU. It's got Word 5.1 and Netscape 4 on it and it's really quite a servicable machine.
Drop the X off... Mac OS 10 will replace Mac OS 9 (just like 9 did 8), so Darwin 1.0 is the core of Mac OS, which is definitely a mainstream operating system. This is not a new OS for servers or sysadmins; this is the new version of Mac OS, aimed squarely at consumers.
I believe QuickTime is a much bigger part of Mac OS than IE is a part of Windows. I've heard a few Mac OS programmers remark that when they first saw QuickTime for Windows they were amazed at the amount of the Mac OS Toolbox that was there in order to implement it.
Lots and lots of applications require QuickTime to run... they use it to display or import different types of media.
You can hot-plug FireWire, you can hook 64 devices together without a hub, the 4-pin cables (no power) can be made very thin and have really small connectors, all of the connectors are more durable (no little tab to break off), and the 6-pin cable provides power.
The no-hub thing is actually the biggest advantage. If you want to hook up an all-digital home theater system, you can't seriously ask a consumer to get a hub every time them add one too many devices. FireWire just lets you plug the next device into the last.
> Why should someone pay for a player to > view QT?
You don't pay for the player. It's free. You can pay $29 to switch on the authoring features, so that you can convert different media types, save or export any movie in a number of formats, and cut and paste any format in and out of movies.
You always see people in some forum asking how they can convert an MP3 to WAV, or a MIDI file to WAV, or convert image formats to one another. QuickTime Pro does all this stuff.
> What's the likelihood anyone would pay > for an enhanced Quicktime? Or an > enhanced Real Player.
QuickTime Pro is one of the best softwares you'll ever come across. $29 and all the authoring features are enabled, and you can cut and paste 50 different multimedia types, including MP3, between movies and do all kinds of things. It's a great value. Plus, the same keys have worked since at least QuickTime 3, and they've added a lot of features since then.
The Libertarian Party has been continually in favor of electronic rights, a free internet, crypto rights, etc. They've been working to get rid of a lot of the penalties that the gov't now uses in the Drug War: assets forfeiture, paid informants, conspiracy charges that put you away forever. All of these things are now moving into the new realm of "Internet Terrorism". It won't be long before the Kevin Mitnick thing is outdone. They're just building the hysteria right now so that the public will happily believe that the gov't is saving them from the terrible hackers.
Just reading the LP platform is time well spent. First time I read it, I kept waiting for the hypocrisy, but it just isn't there.
You don't own the ideas... everyone just agrees to grant you a temporary monopoly on your ideas so that you can make some money off them. The idea is to make it advantageous to release your ideas into the wild.
The reason this idea has become so unpopular lately is the time scale. The laws haven't caught up to Internet time at all. The other reason is the rampant corporatism and croneyism, like Disney getting the copyright law changed so that Mickey Mouse doesn't become public property.
But really, this has nothing to do with the iMac trade dress thing. Essentially, these companies were making counterfeit iMacs in order to fool people who are ignorant about computers into mistakenly buying their machines instead of the iMac. If you can defend that... well, okay.
> Ummmm, not to know it or anything, but there > aren't many laptops that DONT support an > external monitor...
The PowerBooks can use an external monitor in one of two ways, though. Either mirroring the internal display, to put on a presentation, for example, or as more screen real estate, in other words, dual displays.
They also have an S-Video out that you can plug onto a TV monitor or a camcorder or whatever.
> Also, no one has yet shown any numbers for the > actual performance of OS X-- remember the beta > version crashed the OS when you tried to use > CGI on a web server?
I believe what you're referring to is that there was a bug in one of the CGI apps that came with OS X Server that caused some sort of problem. If you weren't using that script, no problem. If you disabled that script, no problem.
As far as stability, this is not a new OS. The NeXT stuff has been around for years and the people involved with it, starting with Avie Tevanian, are top-flight. Of course there will be bugs to work out, but it's Mach 3.0 and BSD 4.4 at its heart. Should be pretty good.
> but a perfect OS that works its perfection on > hardware available from a single supplier has > the odds stacked against it from the start.
Stacked against it doing what? Taking over the world? Only Windows and Linux want to do that. Apple is happy. Apple users are happy. What's the problem?
There are about a thousand little subtleties that add up to making it a good user experience. The way the icons drag and the sounds they make feels very real. The single menubar is fantastic... after just a short while muscle memory starts to find the commands for you. If you want File > Save you can do it without looking, and you can move the cursor to the top of the screen very quickly because you can't overshoot.
Other things that add up to a good user experience are pervasive drag and drop and cut and paste, and key shortcuts that are consistent.
I was worried a bit about some of the new UI elements until I used OS X. It's truly excellent as well, although it's not finished by any stretch. It's much more Mac than it looks. Going from 9 to X feels like going from version 9 to 15, but it's still the same platform, although very much a new OS, if you know what I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe your original post was sincere ... it reads like one of those automatically generated complaint letters that whine without actually saying anything.
The symbols appear even when you mouseover the buttons on an inactive window. Once you've used it, if you imagine the symbols being on all the time, it seems like that would just be noise. This is not a Web site ... you're going to spend your first hour getting familiar with which window button does what (if that) and then you're going to just click them without thinking.
Personally, I like the close button by itself, and the manipulation buttons on the other side, like in Mac OS 9, but you can't please everybody no matter what you do. Apple proved that they were listening to outside criticizm between DP3 and DP4 (I can actually remember who complained first on some of the UI features that have been changed), so they will probably continue to listen throughout the rest of the year as they do one or two more beta releases, including one public one. Apple's product line should look spectacular in January 2001.
Mac OS X is already better at running Mac OS 9 apps than Windows 2000 is at running Windows 95/98 apps. There's no lack of software. A huge majority of the apps already run fine, without modification.
Even if you limit to Carbon/Cocoa ("native") applications, we already have: IE 5, QuickTime 5, AppleWorks 6, the NeXT mail client, and most of the smaller apps that were included with Mac OS 9, such as Sherlock, Script Editor, and Stickies.
I know Be has a lot of useful software, but Macintosh and Windows are still in another league from everything else as far as the range and sheer number of apps from major vendors like Adobe and Microsoft. Mac OS X only adds to that by supporting apps from Mac OS 7/8/9, NeXTSTEP, Java 2, and BSD/Unix.
Mac OS X is great for everybody except Microsoft. It's going to continue to raise awareness of non-Windows computing, as well as Unix in general. It's a consumer OS that's very interoperable with standards and other Unix and Linux, BSD, etc.
> What? The sound? Video? Motherboard?
> There are better peripherals out there.
> What does that leave that "rocks"? That
> pretty case?
Off the top of my head, here are some of the hardware features you get with a PowerMac that you don't usually find on a typical PC:
- 1 MB cache
- can take up to 2 GB of RAM
- CPU is smaller, takes less power, and doesn't need a fan
- because it runs so cool, the (one) fan in the box is very small and quiet
- two independent FireWire busses (400mbs each)
- two independent USB busses (1.2mbs each)
- wireless networking option for $99 extra
- built-in 10/100 Ethernet
- both VGA and digital video connectors
- booting from any drive attached to your system, even FireWire (hold down the Option key while you boot, and you get a screen that shows an icon for each drive so you can choose one)
- easy-access case exposes the whole mobo with one switch
- built-in (non-Win) modem
- three empty PCI slots (as much as you can get a PC with more slots, often you put a NIC, modem and SCSI/FireWire in there right away, while those are already built-in on the PowerMac)
- nice styling and attention to detail (matching bezel for Zip drive, for example)
- integration with the OS, so that hot plugging, power management and hardware detection are excellent, and the Apple System Profiler utility can give you a very detailed listing of your hardware
- handles
- on/off switch on the keyboard
- high quality keyboard with a USB hub providing two ports for a mouse and a joystick
- extraordinarily crappy mouse, good only as a conversation piece
There's a reason why there are so many happy Mac users: they make good stuff.
On the Mac, you use AppleScript for a lot of the things that you'd use a CLI for on other OS's, so there won't be some CLI awakening amongst Mac users. The non-GUI tasks you're thinking of are easily scripted, and scripts can even be created by recording your actions. It's a pretty good method for enabling non-programmers to automate repetitive tasks or control applications.
In short, you can use mouse actions and text input in Mac OS, just like in any other OS.
It's still full of debug code ... how it eventually performs remains to be seen.
> DOS is Windows98, in about the same
> way that sh, lilo, and libc together ARE linux.
You are so wrong. Windows95, Windows98 and next year's WindowsME are DOS. That's what distinguishes them from Windows NT. They use eight character filenames for all kinds of things, they have no security, they're not multi-user, and they don't completely hide the hardware from the apps. It's SuperDOS, I grant you, but it's still DOS. Windows 95 was originally going to ship as an add-on to DOS, until they were "integrated" to kill off other brands of DOS. This was established in the Caldera lawsuit. During that trial, Caldera demonstrated Windows 95 running on Novell DOS.
Microsoft has been clear for years that DOS would be replaced by NT (which was originally OS/2, if you look at things from the Microsoft perspective). Ignore Microsoft's ever-changing product names and look at the upgrade paths:
DOS 5 > DOS 6/Windows 3.x > Windows95 > Windows98 > Windows ME
NT 3.1 > NT 4 > Windows 2000
Windows CE > Pocket Windows
Those are three separate operating systems, no matter how you slice it. They support vastly different ranges of hardware, and run a vastly different range of applications. Only half of the Win32 apps that are out there will run on Windows 2000, for example, while they all run on Windows98.
Mozilla for Mac OS X is going to be the BSD version with a Carbon interface. They were calling it "Fizzila" at one point. Not sure when it or Netscape 6 for Mac OS X will be ready.
... it's out in beta right now. Looks simly amazing under Mac OS X. Everything anti-aliased and very slick.
IE is already Carbon and will be on Mac OS X from the start. There's also the Omni browser, which is Cocoa, and descended from NeXTSTEP
There may also be a basic Apple browser included in Mac OS X. They have a ton of HTML and XML going on in the OS, so who knows? Mac OS X will also include Apple's (Cocoa) email app (from NeXTSTEP), which people seem to either love or hate.
The iBook will give you five to six hours of real work. I plug mine in at night to charge, but the rest of the time I just use it without worrying about battery life or plugging in any cables. AirPort is really excellent. It really makes a difference when you just don't have to plug a portable into anything at all. Truly portable.
You're just trolling, but Adobe makes more than half of their money on their Mac products.
You can play with audio and video tracks in QuickTime Pro (just copy and paste to mix and match them) and then export from QuickTime Pro as DV and put the DV files into iMovie's DV folder to continue working with them. Or just export the audio tracks as AIFF from anything you can open in QuickTime Pro.
As far as stability, I think iMovie is a Carbon app, so getting the newest CarbonLib from Apple (1.0.4 was just released) will probably help out. It's constantly being improved as Carbon and Mac OS X progress.
Mac OS 9 will be replaced by Mac OS X (10) this year. This is just a new version of Mac OS, and Mac OS is certainly a mainstream operating system.
This is very obviously the OS for the iMac, which is as mainstream a computing device as you're going to find.
No, Mac users definitely use their computers for years longer than people typically use their Intel PC's. I'm constantly amazed at all the people I encounter with beige machines, and the iMac is almost two years old. Not just early G3's, either. Plenty of people are running Mac OS 8.6 or 9.0 on first generation PowerPC's that they bought in 1996 when 16MB of RAM was extravagant. I have a 1994 PowerBook running Mac OS 7.6 that surfs the Web and hooks up to our network fine, and it's got a 68000 CPU. It's got Word 5.1 and Netscape 4 on it and it's really quite a servicable machine.
Drop the X off ... Mac OS 10 will replace Mac OS 9 (just like 9 did 8), so Darwin 1.0 is the core of Mac OS, which is definitely a mainstream operating system. This is not a new OS for servers or sysadmins; this is the new version of Mac OS, aimed squarely at consumers.
I believe QuickTime is a much bigger part of Mac OS than IE is a part of Windows. I've heard a few Mac OS programmers remark that when they first saw QuickTime for Windows they were amazed at the amount of the Mac OS Toolbox that was there in order to implement it.
... they use it to display or import different types of media.
Lots and lots of applications require QuickTime to run
You can hot-plug FireWire, you can hook 64 devices together without a hub, the 4-pin cables (no power) can be made very thin and have really small connectors, all of the connectors are more durable (no little tab to break off), and the 6-pin cable provides power.
The no-hub thing is actually the biggest advantage. If you want to hook up an all-digital home theater system, you can't seriously ask a consumer to get a hub every time them add one too many devices. FireWire just lets you plug the next device into the last.
> Why should someone pay for a player to
> view QT?
You don't pay for the player. It's free. You can pay $29 to switch on the authoring features, so that you can convert different media types, save or export any movie in a number of formats, and cut and paste any format in and out of movies.
You always see people in some forum asking how they can convert an MP3 to WAV, or a MIDI file to WAV, or convert image formats to one another. QuickTime Pro does all this stuff.
> What's the likelihood anyone would pay
> for an enhanced Quicktime? Or an
> enhanced Real Player.
QuickTime Pro is one of the best softwares you'll ever come across. $29 and all the authoring features are enabled, and you can cut and paste 50 different multimedia types, including MP3, between movies and do all kinds of things. It's a great value. Plus, the same keys have worked since at least QuickTime 3, and they've added a lot of features since then.
The Libertarian Party has been continually in favor of electronic rights, a free internet, crypto rights, etc. They've been working to get rid of a lot of the penalties that the gov't now uses in the Drug War: assets forfeiture, paid informants, conspiracy charges that put you away forever. All of these things are now moving into the new realm of "Internet Terrorism". It won't be long before the Kevin Mitnick thing is outdone. They're just building the hysteria right now so that the public will happily believe that the gov't is saving them from the terrible hackers.
Just reading the LP platform is time well spent. First time I read it, I kept waiting for the hypocrisy, but it just isn't there.
Libertarian Party
You don't own the ideas ... everyone just agrees to grant you a temporary monopoly on your ideas so that you can make some money off them. The idea is to make it advantageous to release your ideas into the wild.
... well, okay.
The reason this idea has become so unpopular lately is the time scale. The laws haven't caught up to Internet time at all. The other reason is the rampant corporatism and croneyism, like Disney getting the copyright law changed so that Mickey Mouse doesn't become public property.
But really, this has nothing to do with the iMac trade dress thing. Essentially, these companies were making counterfeit iMacs in order to fool people who are ignorant about computers into mistakenly buying their machines instead of the iMac. If you can defend that
> Sometime in the middle part of this century
What century are you living in?
> Ummmm, not to know it or anything, but there
> aren't many laptops that DONT support an
> external monitor...
The PowerBooks can use an external monitor in one of two ways, though. Either mirroring the internal display, to put on a presentation, for example, or as more screen real estate, in other words, dual displays.
They also have an S-Video out that you can plug onto a TV monitor or a camcorder or whatever.
> Also, no one has yet shown any numbers for the
> actual performance of OS X-- remember the beta
> version crashed the OS when you tried to use
> CGI on a web server?
I believe what you're referring to is that there was a bug in one of the CGI apps that came with OS X Server that caused some sort of problem. If you weren't using that script, no problem. If you disabled that script, no problem.
As far as stability, this is not a new OS. The NeXT stuff has been around for years and the people involved with it, starting with Avie Tevanian, are top-flight. Of course there will be bugs to work out, but it's Mach 3.0 and BSD 4.4 at its heart. Should be pretty good.
> but a perfect OS that works its perfection on
> hardware available from a single supplier has
> the odds stacked against it from the start.
Stacked against it doing what? Taking over the world? Only Windows and Linux want to do that. Apple is happy. Apple users are happy. What's the problem?
There are about a thousand little subtleties that add up to making it a good user experience. The way the icons drag and the sounds they make feels very real. The single menubar is fantastic ... after just a short while muscle memory starts to find the commands for you. If you want File > Save you can do it without looking, and you can move the cursor to the top of the screen very quickly because you can't overshoot.
Other things that add up to a good user experience are pervasive drag and drop and cut and paste, and key shortcuts that are consistent.
I was worried a bit about some of the new UI elements until I used OS X. It's truly excellent as well, although it's not finished by any stretch. It's much more Mac than it looks. Going from 9 to X feels like going from version 9 to 15, but it's still the same platform, although very much a new OS, if you know what I mean.