Macs have used these since 1984, and every single application that can allow these operations uses the same shortcuts. It's completely in line with user expectations and is comfortable for single hand use (try control-V versus command-V to see what I mean).
So Windows uses control instead of command, and Linux copies the idea. That doesn't make it right or easy, and copying bad behaviour isn't going to win Apple any friends.
Of course, if you're really keen you can map those keys either in the keyboard control panel or the app itself (Microsoft apps use both, I think). You did know that you can add or override many shortcuts, didn't you?
Design flaw? You mean the same behaviour that's existed since 1984, unchanged and consistent across all OS revisions?
Sounds less like a design flaw and more like personal preferences. There are reasons that command-O is used instead of the enter key (more common action is renaming rather than launching) and I find Windows to be outside what I'd expect based on how people use Windows Explorer.
(It took someone at work to tell me that F2 goes to rename files. F2? Who thought that was obvious?)
"The Mac is supposed to be brain-dead simple. At least thats how it gets marketed."
And it's how it is.
Maybe it sucks for you as a developer, but for users, OS X is really simple and the apps are almost trivial to use.
The other day I took a few downloaded video files and created a DVD with a nice animated menu and two full movies. I'd never used iDVD before, but in ten minutes I'd got everything ready to burn.
That is as brain-dead simple as computing gets.
Apple market the *uses* of the Mac as simple. I've never seen them market the development for OS X as simple. Having said that, the technical docs I've read are generally pretty good, but my focus is on OpenGL and game-based development. I've found it pretty straightforward to get developing.
Well, if only they weren't such a bunch of rootkit-installing, lying scumbags wanting everything their own way and playing both sides of the music industry game (don't pirate our stuff, but we'll sell you the equipment to do it) then maybe I'd be more interested in buying their stuff.
Except every time I've compared their music or video products, they come out much more expensive and less functional than many other big brand name companies.
So yes, well done to Sony for admitting that they tried to deceive the world. Unfortunately that's still a nett negative - they lied and admitted it. A much better goal would be to *not* lie and *start out* by making good stuff. Funny that that never occurred to them.
Not since the earliest days of OS X (and I'm not so sure about that either). Unused apps soon go to sleep and sit there with no appreciable processor time (looks like 0.00% in top) and are paged out of physical memory completely. They don't impact performance in any way.
If the user launches a document or switches into the app, it pages back into RAM very quickly.
Sounds like you're thinking about pre-OS X behaviour to me.
Not that it's a good answer, but it's always been that way. That behaviour has existed since the Mac128K, and has never been any different. I think even Windows behaves the same.
It's not a bug at all. The issue is that it doesn't behave the way you want it to. A bug is something that's not functioning as it was designed to do.
The Zune compares to the iPod family in the same manner that Apple compares to the PC family.
One to many comparisons are made quite often and are almost always unfair.
The Zune has a tiny marketshare, but a better comparison would break down the iPods into type so we could see which iPod sells worse than the brown Zune. Apple would then (I imagine) fire the designer of that unit.
While I sympathise to some extent, you're fighting a lost battle. In fact, it's pretty much the same one that people who bemoan that the word "gay" no longer means happy lost years ago.
To 99.9999% of the world, Hacker == Cracker == bad person
I reckon they'll add lots more functionality through updates, but there are a few things to consider -
- why didn't they add the obvious things in the first release? Everyone seems to expect wireless syncing with the PC, and this is such a basic thing. Why wasn't it in there on day one?
- a poor first release will stay in people's minds long after the issues are fixed. People still remember the BSODs even though we don't see them any longer. Why make such a poor first impression?
The Zune has a lot of promise, but I don't see Microsoft as the company to fulfil that promise. They're too close to the media companies, as the $1 piracy fee to Universal shows.
Sorry I misconstrued your words, but I still don't see the effective difference to your example between the file system being incompatible and the operating system being incompatible. I also don't see why you believe Apple went out of its way to make the OS incompatible, when an alternative might be that the OS was never compatible and no-one ever expects it to be.
It's Tuesday here, and I'm about to go to work. This isn't my best thinking moment so you'll have to pardon me if I'm missing an obvious point.
(penny drops) Do you mean the hardware DRM used to lock OS X to the Apple-branded x86 machines? If that's the case then I agree about the 'going out of their way' bit, but you can still save the disk (from the dead Mac) pretty easily with a second Mac or a PC plus MacDrive.
A good and valuable use of Wi-Fi would be to allow users to buy music from the iTunes Music Store using only the iPod. The process would go something like this:
* enable wireless purchasing on your iTMS account using their iPod's serial number to help avoid hackery. This is a one-off task, and should be a simple preference on the iTMS account. * go about your normal day, see an ad on a banana for some band, decide to try one of their tracks * find a hotspot * select 'iTunes Music Store' from the iPod's main menu * wait as it syncs * scroll through the band names looking for the one you want * select the band name, go into sub-menu of albums * select the album, go into sub-menu of songs * select the song and either add it to the trolley or purchase it straight away
All of the 'find the song' work is exactly how we use the iPod to find a song, the only difference being we're in the music store and not our own collection.
When the user next syncs to their Mac or PC, the newly purchased track is authorised on that computer and iTunes downloads it from the music store automatically (avoiding a copy from the iPod to the computer) or just copies it from the iPod.
Wireless needs a good use or it's just a pointless gimmick. Access to the online store would be a real feature.
You stated that Apple 'deliberately made [the file system] incompatible.' They started with HFS back in '84 and stuck with it ever since. I think they could do more for compatibility, but you're stating intention where none may exist.
If your Mac is dead, you can plug the hard drive into a PC and use a program like MacDrive to access it. It's simple and I've done it several times. Maybe Microsoft and Linux are at fault for not supporting HFS+ out of the box?
Jef Raskin was one of the Xerox PARC people behind the GUI, which he claimed started with his thesis "The Quick-Draw Graphics System." Many of the GUI concepts were in that thesis, I believe (haven't come across a copy yet).
Raskin was hired on with Apple, and kicked off the Macintosh project. After a little while, Jobs took over the project and steered it in a different direction.
It's probably worth casting an eye over this page (http://jef.raskincenter.org/published/holes.html) or the Wikipedia article if you're curious.
Quick check in iTunes: 6080 songs from the CD collection, including 132 iTMS DRM'd songs and videos
That's a bit over 2% of the total music I'd have to transcode (via CD burning) if I went to another music player. Not even worth factoring into a decision.
This sort of ratio is common to everyone I know who buys from the iTMS (actually, I'm above average for this group). The vast majority of the music out there comes from CDs, and that's the way we like it.
But hey! Facts shouldn't stop DRM jerking your knee about. Go for it! Apple lock-in! Oooh! Scary! Bad!
Your logical error here is to assume that the existence of marketing denies the existence of features.
Apple clearly market the hell out of the iPod. We see ads everywhere. I'm expecting ads on bananas soon (well, maybe not here in Australia where they're $16/kilo).
But they've got a lot of substance behind that marketing. I've seen people pick up and iPod and figure it out in a few seconds. They master it in under a minute, with no coaching, no manuals, just by playing with it.
The online store is similarly easy, as is the iTunes software. It's all so easy, so streamlined that people just "get it".
Apple do a lot of marketing to get that message out, but from what I've seen and experienced, the marketing is based pretty solidly in reality.
I'm guessing you've never seen an American film, particularly from the detective or film noir genres. It's a standard line ("listen sunshine, you'd better tell me..."). Maybe you're not familiar with US culture though.
You hear about people with no imagination, no real dramatic urge, no understanding of motivations beyond the purely physical but you never really expect to meet them.
And then you post.
Not only did you fail to actually understand what you were watching, you tell everyone that you just don't have a clue.
Here's one for you - the alliance forced the Shadows and the Vorlons to actually look at their actions for a moment. The presence of the ancient races plus Lorien (most importantly, as they respected Lorien above all others) highlighted their pettiness. They were giants in the playground, kicking sand in the faces of babies. Finally they saw that and realised that they'd stayed long past their time. Throughout the previous few series there were many hints that both races had stayed around to guide and help the younger races, that they could have gone beyond the veil long ago.
But you took the pivotal moment ("Get the hell out of our galaxy"), completely misunderstood it and posted how you thought it was, like, so lamerz.
Maybe they should've fought for the Universe, like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Oh - that's right! Luke managed to turn Vader using only words and his pain. The violence was a sideshow to the story. Perhaps they should've fought to the end like Ender and the Buggers in Ender's Game. Except... yes! Ender felt guilty for killing the race and that was a source of great drama in the book, setting the stage for the later and more complex books. Maybe they should've battled like... well, you might be starting to see the outline of a point here, your lack of subtlety notwithstanding.
A fight to the end was utterly pointless. If you can't see that, then all the subtlety and plot will forever be lost on you. Just watch more episodes of Dragonball Z and you'll get your violence fix without having to engage your brain or any emotive function whatsoever.
Unfair? Rude? Damn right! I'm ten years past tired of bozos who look for the fight against the big boss dude at the end of a film, who were raised on Doom and Duke Nukem and use that as a benchmark for character development. You post how disappointed you were, but clearly you *fundamentally* missed the point. After watching four years worth of the series, that's just sad. It's not that I'm a B5 fan-boy who feels personally attacked by your post, but that you seem like someone who would listen to Mozart and say "too many notes" or would read the sonnets of Shakespeare and ask why they didn't rhyme on every second line like a real song.
Unfair? Rude? Damn right! I'm tired of people who miss the most obvious of points, the ones that take literally four *years* to hammer home.
When another series builds up through many episodes into powerful and emotional events such as the torture of G'Kar, then I'll accept your point. Until then, all I see are Soapies In Space or Comic Book Characters in Space. That's not to say B5 was completely above that sort of thing, just that when it soared it was light years above most Sci Fi, and it soared a lot.
We clearly disagree, and that you refer to Diablo as a RPG shows you clearly haven't played a real RPG. Like NetHack, it's a dungeon crawler. Sadly it never had the variety of NetHack, Angband or many variants. It's just dull. Levels full of one type of monster or (shock gasp!) two! The excitement was just... never there.
Nice that you enjoyed it though. It was very popular, but as someone who likes a lot more substance I found it boring. I'm clearly out of step with the gaming community.
Diablo started as a turn-based game, but the team made a (very good) decision to go real-time. I read an interview with the devs some years back.
I playeed Angband, a nethack variant set in the First Age of Middle Earth. Well, sort of set then.
Diablo randomly generates levels. Angband randomly generates levels. Diablo randomly generates a level full of monsters, including a handful of 'boss' monsters. Angband does the same, but the special levels are far harder and can contain many 'boss' monsters. Diablo has a range of randomly-generated items scattered through the level and left behind by monsters. Angband has the same. Diablo has a very limited range of items and monsters. Angband has many times more.
After thoroughly playing Diablo one and two, I got the feeling that it was "Angband lite" - prettier but with less substance. I sold my copies of D1 and D2 and returned to Angband. I was much happier, although I was forced to imagine more.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use control-C/V/X/Z ?
Because that's a terrible idea!
Macs have used these since 1984, and every single application that can allow these operations uses the same shortcuts. It's completely in line with user expectations and is comfortable for single hand use (try control-V versus command-V to see what I mean).
So Windows uses control instead of command, and Linux copies the idea. That doesn't make it right or easy, and copying bad behaviour isn't going to win Apple any friends.
Of course, if you're really keen you can map those keys either in the keyboard control panel or the app itself (Microsoft apps use both, I think). You did know that you can add or override many shortcuts, didn't you?
Design flaw? You mean the same behaviour that's existed since 1984, unchanged and consistent across all OS revisions?
Sounds less like a design flaw and more like personal preferences. There are reasons that command-O is used instead of the enter key (more common action is renaming rather than launching) and I find Windows to be outside what I'd expect based on how people use Windows Explorer.
(It took someone at work to tell me that F2 goes to rename files. F2? Who thought that was obvious?)
"The Mac is supposed to be brain-dead simple. At least thats how it gets marketed."
And it's how it is.
Maybe it sucks for you as a developer, but for users, OS X is really simple and the apps are almost trivial to use.
The other day I took a few downloaded video files and created a DVD with a nice animated menu and two full movies. I'd never used iDVD before, but in ten minutes I'd got everything ready to burn.
That is as brain-dead simple as computing gets.
Apple market the *uses* of the Mac as simple. I've never seen them market the development for OS X as simple. Having said that, the technical docs I've read are generally pretty good, but my focus is on OpenGL and game-based development. I've found it pretty straightforward to get developing.
Well, if only they weren't such a bunch of rootkit-installing, lying scumbags wanting everything their own way and playing both sides of the music industry game (don't pirate our stuff, but we'll sell you the equipment to do it) then maybe I'd be more interested in buying their stuff.
Except every time I've compared their music or video products, they come out much more expensive and less functional than many other big brand name companies.
So yes, well done to Sony for admitting that they tried to deceive the world. Unfortunately that's still a nett negative - they lied and admitted it. A much better goal would be to *not* lie and *start out* by making good stuff. Funny that that never occurred to them.
Classy, so classy.
Lots of apps cause OS X to slow down?
Not since the earliest days of OS X (and I'm not so sure about that either). Unused apps soon go to sleep and sit there with no appreciable processor time (looks like 0.00% in top) and are paged out of physical memory completely. They don't impact performance in any way.
If the user launches a document or switches into the app, it pages back into RAM very quickly.
Sounds like you're thinking about pre-OS X behaviour to me.
Not that it's a good answer, but it's always been that way. That behaviour has existed since the Mac128K, and has never been any different. I think even Windows behaves the same.
It's not a bug at all. The issue is that it doesn't behave the way you want it to. A bug is something that's not functioning as it was designed to do.
... and he'd be writing the petition, sending it out, chasing up other dead people and generally making a lot of beaurocratic noise.
Good call, SharpFang.
The Zune compares to the iPod family in the same manner that Apple compares to the PC family.
One to many comparisons are made quite often and are almost always unfair.
The Zune has a tiny marketshare, but a better comparison would break down the iPods into type so we could see which iPod sells worse than the brown Zune. Apple would then (I imagine) fire the designer of that unit.
While I sympathise to some extent, you're fighting a lost battle. In fact, it's pretty much the same one that people who bemoan that the word "gay" no longer means happy lost years ago.
To 99.9999% of the world, Hacker == Cracker == bad person
I reckon they'll add lots more functionality through updates, but there are a few things to consider -
- why didn't they add the obvious things in the first release? Everyone seems to expect wireless syncing with the PC, and this is such a basic thing. Why wasn't it in there on day one?
- a poor first release will stay in people's minds long after the issues are fixed. People still remember the BSODs even though we don't see them any longer. Why make such a poor first impression?
The Zune has a lot of promise, but I don't see Microsoft as the company to fulfil that promise. They're too close to the media companies, as the $1 piracy fee to Universal shows.
Sorry I misconstrued your words, but I still don't see the effective difference to your example between the file system being incompatible and the operating system being incompatible. I also don't see why you believe Apple went out of its way to make the OS incompatible, when an alternative might be that the OS was never compatible and no-one ever expects it to be.
It's Tuesday here, and I'm about to go to work. This isn't my best thinking moment so you'll have to pardon me if I'm missing an obvious point.
(penny drops) Do you mean the hardware DRM used to lock OS X to the Apple-branded x86 machines? If that's the case then I agree about the 'going out of their way' bit, but you can still save the disk (from the dead Mac) pretty easily with a second Mac or a PC plus MacDrive.
A good and valuable use of Wi-Fi would be to allow users to buy music from the iTunes Music Store using only the iPod. The process would go something like this:
* enable wireless purchasing on your iTMS account using their iPod's serial number to help avoid hackery. This is a one-off task, and should be a simple preference on the iTMS account.
* go about your normal day, see an ad on a banana for some band, decide to try one of their tracks
* find a hotspot
* select 'iTunes Music Store' from the iPod's main menu
* wait as it syncs
* scroll through the band names looking for the one you want
* select the band name, go into sub-menu of albums
* select the album, go into sub-menu of songs
* select the song and either add it to the trolley or purchase it straight away
All of the 'find the song' work is exactly how we use the iPod to find a song, the only difference being we're in the music store and not our own collection.
When the user next syncs to their Mac or PC, the newly purchased track is authorised on that computer and iTunes downloads it from the music store automatically (avoiding a copy from the iPod to the computer) or just copies it from the iPod.
Wireless needs a good use or it's just a pointless gimmick. Access to the online store would be a real feature.
You stated that Apple 'deliberately made [the file system] incompatible.' They started with HFS back in '84 and stuck with it ever since. I think they could do more for compatibility, but you're stating intention where none may exist.
If your Mac is dead, you can plug the hard drive into a PC and use a program like MacDrive to access it. It's simple and I've done it several times. Maybe Microsoft and Linux are at fault for not supporting HFS+ out of the box?
Jef Raskin was one of the Xerox PARC people behind the GUI, which he claimed started with his thesis "The Quick-Draw Graphics System." Many of the GUI concepts were in that thesis, I believe (haven't come across a copy yet).
) or the Wikipedia article if you're curious.
Raskin was hired on with Apple, and kicked off the Macintosh project. After a little while, Jobs took over the project and steered it in a different direction.
It's probably worth casting an eye over this page (http://jef.raskincenter.org/published/holes.html
Quick check in iTunes:
6080 songs from the CD collection, including
132 iTMS DRM'd songs and videos
That's a bit over 2% of the total music I'd have to transcode (via CD burning) if I went to another music player. Not even worth factoring into a decision.
This sort of ratio is common to everyone I know who buys from the iTMS (actually, I'm above average for this group). The vast majority of the music out there comes from CDs, and that's the way we like it.
But hey! Facts shouldn't stop DRM jerking your knee about. Go for it! Apple lock-in! Oooh! Scary! Bad!
Your logical error here is to assume that the existence of marketing denies the existence of features.
Apple clearly market the hell out of the iPod. We see ads everywhere. I'm expecting ads on bananas soon (well, maybe not here in Australia where they're $16/kilo).
But they've got a lot of substance behind that marketing. I've seen people pick up and iPod and figure it out in a few seconds. They master it in under a minute, with no coaching, no manuals, just by playing with it.
The online store is similarly easy, as is the iTunes software. It's all so easy, so streamlined that people just "get it".
Apple do a lot of marketing to get that message out, but from what I've seen and experienced, the marketing is based pretty solidly in reality.
I'm guessing you've never seen an American film, particularly from the detective or film noir genres. It's a standard line ("listen sunshine, you'd better tell me..."). Maybe you're not familiar with US culture though.
Maybe it is just a foot in the door, but I'd say that's a poor tactical move.
Customers aren't wowed by it, it's nice and does a competant job, but doesn't build a level of excitement.
The second generation Zune won't get a solid chance if people's memories of the first-gen were bland.
Simon, I think you put a lot of effort into answering a troll.
Sadly there's no logic you can bring to the table that it won't respond to with mindless abuse.
For the rest of us, there were some interesting tidbits in your posts. Thanks!
Wow.
You hear about people with no imagination, no real dramatic urge, no understanding of motivations beyond the purely physical but you never really expect to meet them.
And then you post.
Not only did you fail to actually understand what you were watching, you tell everyone that you just don't have a clue.
Here's one for you - the alliance forced the Shadows and the Vorlons to actually look at their actions for a moment. The presence of the ancient races plus Lorien (most importantly, as they respected Lorien above all others) highlighted their pettiness. They were giants in the playground, kicking sand in the faces of babies. Finally they saw that and realised that they'd stayed long past their time. Throughout the previous few series there were many hints that both races had stayed around to guide and help the younger races, that they could have gone beyond the veil long ago.
But you took the pivotal moment ("Get the hell out of our galaxy"), completely misunderstood it and posted how you thought it was, like, so lamerz.
Maybe they should've fought for the Universe, like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Oh - that's right! Luke managed to turn Vader using only words and his pain. The violence was a sideshow to the story. Perhaps they should've fought to the end like Ender and the Buggers in Ender's Game. Except... yes! Ender felt guilty for killing the race and that was a source of great drama in the book, setting the stage for the later and more complex books. Maybe they should've battled like... well, you might be starting to see the outline of a point here, your lack of subtlety notwithstanding.
A fight to the end was utterly pointless. If you can't see that, then all the subtlety and plot will forever be lost on you. Just watch more episodes of Dragonball Z and you'll get your violence fix without having to engage your brain or any emotive function whatsoever.
Unfair? Rude? Damn right! I'm ten years past tired of bozos who look for the fight against the big boss dude at the end of a film, who were raised on Doom and Duke Nukem and use that as a benchmark for character development. You post how disappointed you were, but clearly you *fundamentally* missed the point. After watching four years worth of the series, that's just sad. It's not that I'm a B5 fan-boy who feels personally attacked by your post, but that you seem like someone who would listen to Mozart and say "too many notes" or would read the sonnets of Shakespeare and ask why they didn't rhyme on every second line like a real song.
Unfair? Rude? Damn right! I'm tired of people who miss the most obvious of points, the ones that take literally four *years* to hammer home.
Feel free to flame me and mod me down to -5000.
who?
When another series builds up through many episodes into powerful and emotional events such as the torture of G'Kar, then I'll accept your point. Until then, all I see are Soapies In Space or Comic Book Characters in Space. That's not to say B5 was completely above that sort of thing, just that when it soared it was light years above most Sci Fi, and it soared a lot.
Ah. Someone who responds to every sentence.
We clearly disagree, and that you refer to Diablo as a RPG shows you clearly haven't played a real RPG. Like NetHack, it's a dungeon crawler. Sadly it never had the variety of NetHack, Angband or many variants. It's just dull. Levels full of one type of monster or (shock gasp!) two! The excitement was just... never there.
Nice that you enjoyed it though. It was very popular, but as someone who likes a lot more substance I found it boring. I'm clearly out of step with the gaming community.
Diablo started as a turn-based game, but the team made a (very good) decision to go real-time. I read an interview with the devs some years back.
I playeed Angband, a nethack variant set in the First Age of Middle Earth. Well, sort of set then.
Diablo randomly generates levels. Angband randomly generates levels.
Diablo randomly generates a level full of monsters, including a handful of 'boss' monsters. Angband does the same, but the special levels are far harder and can contain many 'boss' monsters.
Diablo has a range of randomly-generated items scattered through the level and left behind by monsters. Angband has the same.
Diablo has a very limited range of items and monsters. Angband has many times more.
After thoroughly playing Diablo one and two, I got the feeling that it was "Angband lite" - prettier but with less substance. I sold my copies of D1 and D2 and returned to Angband. I was much happier, although I was forced to imagine more.