Though, to be honest, even Paint.net is missing a few features I'd like to see. (raster scaling/rotating/skewing, for example).
You might want to take another look-- I'm pretty sure it still doens't do skewing. But I'm 99% sure it does raster scaling/rotating, depending perhaps on what you mean by "raster." (Do you mean scaling/rotating without doing any smoothing? It'll do that. Or do you literally mean scaling/rotating bitmaps? It'll do that too.)
Select the filled-arrow "Move pixels" tool, then select your scaling quality from the menu in the toolbar ("Pixelated" is the one you want), then just draw the mouse at the corner. Left-click to scale, right-click to rotate... works for me. Looks like ass with no smoothing, but... works.
Now take a look at Inkscape on Windows or OS X... shocker! It's a piece of crap!
(Mostly due to them using GTK+, which is a piece of crap. But still.)
The point here is you're not going to build-up a reputation for usability if the majority of your users see the crappy version. (Even if Inkscape is amazing in GNOME, most people are using Windows or OS X so they see the crap version.) Even worse, you're going to tell people "hey try Inkscape, it's amazing!" and they'll try the crap version, and then think you're a filthy liar.
Proof: the last three iterations of Wii System Updates closed exploits used to run homebrew, but an ancient exploit that is still being used for piracy has remained untouched for that long (and counting).
Before you get into conspiracy theories, maybe that hole remains unfixed because a popular game relies on it and it's become a compatibility issue. There's also the slim possibility that Nintendo simply hasn't figured it out yet.
Tablet PCs are actually popular in one industry the iPad can never possibly take over from: healthcare.
Who knows, though, maybe healthcare software makers will start loading the iPad up with software and make it a viable competitor in that space. I doubt it though. More likely, the iPad will just inspire healthcare workers to prefer lighter tablets (like MSI's upcoming one) still running Windows instead of the heavier ones they carry now.
I'm not saying that Windows is some paragon of perfection, UI-wise. But in my opinion, the default Microsoft software set is more internally-consistent than the Apple set-- I mean, you buy a Mac and you get Garage Band, iPhoto, Time Machine, Finder, that awful real-time search interface in Finder... hell, how do you even know what a Mac app is *supposed* to look like?
Beyond that I'll shut up, since I haven't really dug into a version of OS X since 10.4, and maybe things have vastly improved. (I doubt it, but benefit of the doubt.)
It's just Javascript, it's pretty much read-only access to the DOM + a few event handlers. The trickiest part is how IE 5.5 handles event handlers, we have to do a bunch of workarounds so we can install them without stomping on existing ones, but that code's all written... so from there it's just knowing the DOM quirks, which are pretty easily worked-around.
Since it's *just* Javascript, we're compatible with modern browsers. Just makes the script more bloated, and there's quite a few code paths that modern browsers will never see.
And frankly, Safari on Mac's wacky-ass handling on INPUT fields (with no blur events on checkboxes or radios by default) is almost as much code to work-around. Oh and then there's Firefox's ass-backwards handling of fields set to "disabled"-- hey FF! "Disabled" means the user can't change the value! It doesn't mean disable ALL EVENT HANDLERS (AND ALL BUBBLING!!) And Firefox's strange habit of shoving blank text nodes all over the fucking DOM... if the text node is nothing but white-space, please just spare us ok!? Anyway...
And yah, if we were doing more DOM manipulation than reading values from it, I'd probably refuse to work on it until we dropped IE 5.5. Been meaning to bring up dropping 5.5 anyway, actually...
Personally, I'm more interested in functionality and flexible customizeability than absolute visual consistency, so having GTK
Considering how wrong GTK gets Open/Save dialogs *alone* in Windows... well, if you're interested in functionality, you should run screaming in the other direction is all I'm saying. Linux might be a different story.
I'd much rather them get the Open/Save dialogs correct in the first place than to utterly botch them, but give me the customizability to fix them myself! (If that's even possible.)
You're welcome to disagree with me, but it's not really fair to say I don't know what I'm talking about when I've used (and written software for) both OSes in question a significant amount of time.
What framework an application uses is usually obvious from the application's appearance, behavior and interaction with the rest of the system.
Sadly, yes, but only because most frameworks are awful. For example, GTK+ looks like an total alien on every OS except Linux. Java, likewise, is crappy on everything.
But it shouldn't be that way.
Every Windows app advertises whether it's.NET or not. Right in the system requirements and installer - "Requires.NET Framework X.Y" and the installer makes it very obvious that when the right version isn't present, it's going to be installed.
You're confusing "feature" and "system requirement."
The Apple developers put Cocoa on their *features* page..net apps put.net on their *system requirements* page. Apples to oranges.
No they aren't. There are a lot of visual cues which will hint at whether an app is.NET or regular Win32,
My point is that since neither OS could run the apps I wanted to (Classic apps), and since OS X usability is now on the same level as Vista usability, I might as well use Vista if only so I have so many more apps (and games) available to me. The logic here isn't difficult...
Call us back when you've had to write reams of code to put backward-compatibility hacks into your programs just to support an already-tiny, ever-decreasing, perpetually-complaining, and ultimately unpleaseable audience of people who refuse to upgrade their systems. We'll see how relative "whine" is when you're the one writing the code.
Yah. I maintain a 15k line Javascript application that's compatible with IE 5.5. IE 5.5. And we're not wussing-out using any of those frameworks or anything, either. Nor are we skimping on testing. Sure, it's not a desktop app, but believe me I know exactly what the score is.
Suck it, Mr. Trying-To-Make-Me-Look-Like-A-Hypocrite-Guy.
Speaking as a user, Cocoa most certainly is a feature.
If you're an end-user and you know what Cocoa *is*, that means Apple screwed up somewhere. What framework an application uses is an implementation detail.
The Windows world doesn't advertise an app as being ".net!" because it doesn't freakin' matter....net apps are the same as Win32 apps. The only reason there's a difference in OS X is because Apple has always treated Carbon as a second-class citizen, since they just didn't give a crap about UI anymore.
The Mac experience is built around the idea of consistency.
Dude.
You're talking to a Mac Classic user. Back then, yes, consistency mattered. Now? Now there's no consistency. None. Nada.
OS X took that and flushed it down the crapper, from when they decided to ship both chrome and aqua windows.
Windows 7 is significantly more consistent, UI-wise, than newer versions of OS X. If consistency is something you care about, you should be using Windows. There was a time when Apple was the only good place to go for us rare users that valued usability, but that time is long-passed. Mac has gone downhill while everybody else is racing upwards, and there's no real noticeable difference anymore.
Me too! Also, I have a long memory, and I'm still pissed at all the Classic apps I couldn't run in 10.2.
I switched to Vista, when it came out. Despite the complaints (which mostly applied to laptops anyway), Vista ran like a champ on a relatively cheap $700 desktop-- as a former Mac users, the thought that a $700 computer runs just as well as the $1800+ tower you're moving off of is mind-blowing. From there, I've upgraded to Windows 7 and never going back.
Actually, I might buy another Mac simply because I think their laptop hardware is better-built. But I'd almost certainly run Windows 7 on it.
(Anybody tried that, and can comment on how well the Mac's trackpad works in a Windows 7 world? Is it a pain in the ass to right-click?)
Where do you guys get this $300 number? I keep seeing it on Slashdot... are you just assuming that Windows 7 costs the same as previous Windows versions? Are you assuming that people are buying the "new install" copy even though they're just going to upgrade? ($179, BTW, not even close to $300.)
But the process of writing software doesn't happen without developers. And the messier and kludgier a codebase is, the harder it is to get devs to work on it.
Yah, I get that.
What I'm really trying to do is appeal to their professionalism and maybe get open source developers to take a little bit more pride in their work. Probably not going to work in a community that doesn't understand the difference between "development" and "coding," but I'll try anyway.
If nothing else, I still have a G5 with 10.4 on it myself. (Admittedly, I haven't turned it on in awhile.)
Supporting legacy systems isn't just a matter of how long it takes code to compile, there's issues with maintainability,
Well, a new API could make the codebase easier to maintain, but that doesn't affect the end-user. (Unless you're admitting that the codebase was impossibly-difficult to maintain before the new API came out.)
as well as speed and performance.
I concede this, but I doubt it's significant. (Again: unless the code was a complete mess before.) Nothing 10.4 did made the user's hardware any faster, and there's no reason to believe that the libraries Apple added are faster than the ones Mozilla was using before. (They might be, but you can't just *assume* they are.)
I imagine that the userbase that uses Firefox with 10.4 is small enough, and the issues with supporting it big enough, that it makes sense to drop support.
True. The reason I brought up the developer line is that I've seen a lot of open source projects, especially on Mac, drop old technologies like a hot-potato time and time again. There are tons of apps I stopped getting updates to, apparently punishment for the heinous crime of owning a G5 computer a full 6 months after Apple switched to x86.
Let's face it, if your development staff is: 1) Volunteer 2) Really, really excited about technology They're not going to want to use an "old" API or IDE, even if it's only 3 years old. They're not going to want to get their PPC computer out of the closet to QA. (Assuming they even QA in the first place.)
Hell, the Mac software community used to point out "Cocoa!!" as a feature. And got pissy with me when I told them that Cocoa isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail and your users don't give a flying crap.
If left to their own devices, the *only* OS support you'd offer is "whatever the very latest is, until the next one comes out." That's why support needs to be a managerial decision, and why it needs to be data-backed. It's also something that's likely to slide unless there's enforcement.
Maybe Mozilla's done the user research and they know that they're not dropping many users, but just from reading the comments in this Slashdot thread, I think they may be dropping more users than they realize.
Is your political position really *so weak* that you have to engage in a legal battle to prevent someone who honestly feels the opposite way from talking about it for 30 seconds? Seriously, is the pro-choice movement run by 5-year-olds? Adults usually are ok coping with people who have other opinions.
I'm pretty neutral in the debate, being single and male.
Oh yah it's so emotional when people who don't exist but were invented by a giant corporation in a bid to get more of your money get married and have kids in France apparently.
I will say this: considering the ad's budget was so low, it was effective. No actors, no props, no locations, no dialog, no ADR... hell no camera, probably.
The question here is, should Mozilla continue to duplicate the efforts of Apple to provide compatibility with people running older systems?
The answer is: Mozilla should have a very clear policy about backwards compatibility and follow it to the letter. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't currently have that.
Barring that, the answer should be: Until Apple actively does something to break the older "deprecated" code in Firefox, they should support older OSes. From another reply, it sounds like a new version of the Java plug-in Apple is releasing will meet this criteria. Also, being Apple, this is going to happen every 3 years anyway.
Here's what should *not* determine when to end support: "I'm a programmer and working with this old API is soooo painful and my compiles take a few seconds longer! Whine!"
Or in other words, support decisions should *never* be made just based on developer preferences. The purpose of writing software is to serve your users. Either you're a professional developer and you deal with the slightly older APIs/compilers to serve your users, or you're a hack.
More to the point, what the hell gigantic change could Apple have possibly made to 10.5 to make 10.4 support some kind of giant anchor weighing everything down? Seriously?
Either: 1) Someone's exaggerating and the 10.4 code is actually very small, or 2) That's a gigantic WTF from Apple and they should be called on it.
Normally I'd get pissy over removing support for something that's not really that old, but I guess Mac users are used to that and don't care... so... bully for Mozilla.
The real problem is... if this is the case, why isn't Paypal telling their CUSTOMERS about it? Hell, they could (potentially) get a lot of support against the government if their customers start writing representatives... and in any case, just suspending service with no reason or excuse given is rotten customer service.
Every big company eventually has an administrative problem which will affect customers, you can't really fault them for that. But the customer service reaction here is terrible.
Yes, but MacTCP never shipped *with* the OS. You could get it from Apple's FTP site, or from your local friendly retailer, but the fact remains that System 7 didn't have a TCP/IP stack. (7.5 did, in the form of Open Transport, as you say.)
What's the deal with commenting on posts right before comments are closed? Are you trying to make sure nobody else can get the last word?
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly, what you're calling a misfeature is what many would call click-to-focus. Click to focus needless requires extra clicking
I'll take ALL of those wasted milliseconds times ten over accidentally typing in the wrong field because I bumped my mouse.
You say "extra clicking" like tapping a mouse button is equivalent to a 4 hour forced march with 30lbs of equipment.
Though, to be honest, even Paint.net is missing a few features I'd like to see. (raster scaling/rotating/skewing, for example).
You might want to take another look-- I'm pretty sure it still doens't do skewing. But I'm 99% sure it does raster scaling/rotating, depending perhaps on what you mean by "raster." (Do you mean scaling/rotating without doing any smoothing? It'll do that. Or do you literally mean scaling/rotating bitmaps? It'll do that too.)
Select the filled-arrow "Move pixels" tool, then select your scaling quality from the menu in the toolbar ("Pixelated" is the one you want), then just draw the mouse at the corner. Left-click to scale, right-click to rotate... works for me. Looks like ass with no smoothing, but... works.
It is possible, take a look at inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org/
Now take a look at Inkscape on Windows or OS X... shocker! It's a piece of crap!
(Mostly due to them using GTK+, which is a piece of crap. But still.)
The point here is you're not going to build-up a reputation for usability if the majority of your users see the crappy version. (Even if Inkscape is amazing in GNOME, most people are using Windows or OS X so they see the crap version.) Even worse, you're going to tell people "hey try Inkscape, it's amazing!" and they'll try the crap version, and then think you're a filthy liar.
Proof: the last three iterations of Wii System Updates closed exploits used to run homebrew, but an ancient exploit that is still being used for piracy has remained untouched for that long (and counting).
Before you get into conspiracy theories, maybe that hole remains unfixed because a popular game relies on it and it's become a compatibility issue. There's also the slim possibility that Nintendo simply hasn't figured it out yet.
Tablet PCs are actually popular in one industry the iPad can never possibly take over from: healthcare.
Who knows, though, maybe healthcare software makers will start loading the iPad up with software and make it a viable competitor in that space. I doubt it though. More likely, the iPad will just inspire healthcare workers to prefer lighter tablets (like MSI's upcoming one) still running Windows instead of the heavier ones they carry now.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
I'm not saying that Windows is some paragon of perfection, UI-wise. But in my opinion, the default Microsoft software set is more internally-consistent than the Apple set-- I mean, you buy a Mac and you get Garage Band, iPhoto, Time Machine, Finder, that awful real-time search interface in Finder... hell, how do you even know what a Mac app is *supposed* to look like?
Beyond that I'll shut up, since I haven't really dug into a version of OS X since 10.4, and maybe things have vastly improved. (I doubt it, but benefit of the doubt.)
It's just Javascript, it's pretty much read-only access to the DOM + a few event handlers. The trickiest part is how IE 5.5 handles event handlers, we have to do a bunch of workarounds so we can install them without stomping on existing ones, but that code's all written... so from there it's just knowing the DOM quirks, which are pretty easily worked-around.
Since it's *just* Javascript, we're compatible with modern browsers. Just makes the script more bloated, and there's quite a few code paths that modern browsers will never see.
And frankly, Safari on Mac's wacky-ass handling on INPUT fields (with no blur events on checkboxes or radios by default) is almost as much code to work-around. Oh and then there's Firefox's ass-backwards handling of fields set to "disabled"-- hey FF! "Disabled" means the user can't change the value! It doesn't mean disable ALL EVENT HANDLERS (AND ALL BUBBLING!!) And Firefox's strange habit of shoving blank text nodes all over the fucking DOM... if the text node is nothing but white-space, please just spare us ok!? Anyway...
And yah, if we were doing more DOM manipulation than reading values from it, I'd probably refuse to work on it until we dropped IE 5.5. Been meaning to bring up dropping 5.5 anyway, actually...
Personally, I'm more interested in functionality and flexible customizeability than absolute visual consistency, so having GTK
Considering how wrong GTK gets Open/Save dialogs *alone* in Windows... well, if you're interested in functionality, you should run screaming in the other direction is all I'm saying. Linux might be a different story.
I'd much rather them get the Open/Save dialogs correct in the first place than to utterly botch them, but give me the customizability to fix them myself! (If that's even possible.)
You're welcome to disagree with me, but it's not really fair to say I don't know what I'm talking about when I've used (and written software for) both OSes in question a significant amount of time.
What framework an application uses is usually obvious from the application's appearance, behavior and interaction with the rest of the system.
Sadly, yes, but only because most frameworks are awful. For example, GTK+ looks like an total alien on every OS except Linux. Java, likewise, is crappy on everything.
But it shouldn't be that way.
Every Windows app advertises whether it's .NET or not. Right in the system requirements and installer - "Requires .NET Framework X.Y" and the installer makes it very obvious that when the right version isn't present, it's going to be installed.
You're confusing "feature" and "system requirement."
The Apple developers put Cocoa on their *features* page. .net apps put .net on their *system requirements* page. Apples to oranges.
No they aren't. There are a lot of visual cues which will hint at whether an app is .NET or regular Win32,
Really? Like what?
My point is that since neither OS could run the apps I wanted to (Classic apps), and since OS X usability is now on the same level as Vista usability, I might as well use Vista if only so I have so many more apps (and games) available to me. The logic here isn't difficult...
Call us back when you've had to write reams of code to put backward-compatibility hacks into your programs just to support an already-tiny, ever-decreasing, perpetually-complaining, and ultimately unpleaseable audience of people who refuse to upgrade their systems. We'll see how relative "whine" is when you're the one writing the code.
Yah. I maintain a 15k line Javascript application that's compatible with IE 5.5. IE 5.5. And we're not wussing-out using any of those frameworks or anything, either. Nor are we skimping on testing. Sure, it's not a desktop app, but believe me I know exactly what the score is.
Suck it, Mr. Trying-To-Make-Me-Look-Like-A-Hypocrite-Guy.
Speaking as a user, Cocoa most certainly is a feature.
If you're an end-user and you know what Cocoa *is*, that means Apple screwed up somewhere. What framework an application uses is an implementation detail.
The Windows world doesn't advertise an app as being ".net!" because it doesn't freakin' matter... .net apps are the same as Win32 apps. The only reason there's a difference in OS X is because Apple has always treated Carbon as a second-class citizen, since they just didn't give a crap about UI anymore.
The Mac experience is built around the idea of consistency.
Dude.
You're talking to a Mac Classic user. Back then, yes, consistency mattered. Now? Now there's no consistency. None. Nada.
OS X took that and flushed it down the crapper, from when they decided to ship both chrome and aqua windows.
Windows 7 is significantly more consistent, UI-wise, than newer versions of OS X. If consistency is something you care about, you should be using Windows. There was a time when Apple was the only good place to go for us rare users that valued usability, but that time is long-passed. Mac has gone downhill while everybody else is racing upwards, and there's no real noticeable difference anymore.
Me too! Also, I have a long memory, and I'm still pissed at all the Classic apps I couldn't run in 10.2.
I switched to Vista, when it came out. Despite the complaints (which mostly applied to laptops anyway), Vista ran like a champ on a relatively cheap $700 desktop-- as a former Mac users, the thought that a $700 computer runs just as well as the $1800+ tower you're moving off of is mind-blowing. From there, I've upgraded to Windows 7 and never going back.
Actually, I might buy another Mac simply because I think their laptop hardware is better-built. But I'd almost certainly run Windows 7 on it.
(Anybody tried that, and can comment on how well the Mac's trackpad works in a Windows 7 world? Is it a pain in the ass to right-click?)
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Home-Premium-Upgrade/dp/B002DHLUWK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1265647046&sr=8-1
Where do you guys get this $300 number? I keep seeing it on Slashdot... are you just assuming that Windows 7 costs the same as previous Windows versions? Are you assuming that people are buying the "new install" copy even though they're just going to upgrade? ($179, BTW, not even close to $300.)
But the process of writing software doesn't happen without developers. And the messier and kludgier a codebase is, the harder it is to get devs to work on it.
Yah, I get that.
What I'm really trying to do is appeal to their professionalism and maybe get open source developers to take a little bit more pride in their work. Probably not going to work in a community that doesn't understand the difference between "development" and "coding," but I'll try anyway.
If nothing else, I still have a G5 with 10.4 on it myself. (Admittedly, I haven't turned it on in awhile.)
Supporting legacy systems isn't just a matter of how long it takes code to compile, there's issues with maintainability,
Well, a new API could make the codebase easier to maintain, but that doesn't affect the end-user. (Unless you're admitting that the codebase was impossibly-difficult to maintain before the new API came out.)
as well as speed and performance.
I concede this, but I doubt it's significant. (Again: unless the code was a complete mess before.) Nothing 10.4 did made the user's hardware any faster, and there's no reason to believe that the libraries Apple added are faster than the ones Mozilla was using before. (They might be, but you can't just *assume* they are.)
I imagine that the userbase that uses Firefox with 10.4 is small enough, and the issues with supporting it big enough, that it makes sense to drop support.
True. The reason I brought up the developer line is that I've seen a lot of open source projects, especially on Mac, drop old technologies like a hot-potato time and time again. There are tons of apps I stopped getting updates to, apparently punishment for the heinous crime of owning a G5 computer a full 6 months after Apple switched to x86.
Let's face it, if your development staff is:
1) Volunteer
2) Really, really excited about technology
They're not going to want to use an "old" API or IDE, even if it's only 3 years old. They're not going to want to get their PPC computer out of the closet to QA. (Assuming they even QA in the first place.)
Hell, the Mac software community used to point out "Cocoa!!" as a feature. And got pissy with me when I told them that Cocoa isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail and your users don't give a flying crap.
If left to their own devices, the *only* OS support you'd offer is "whatever the very latest is, until the next one comes out." That's why support needs to be a managerial decision, and why it needs to be data-backed. It's also something that's likely to slide unless there's enforcement.
Maybe Mozilla's done the user research and they know that they're not dropping many users, but just from reading the comments in this Slashdot thread, I think they may be dropping more users than they realize.
I don't get the issue over that ad.
Is your political position really *so weak* that you have to engage in a legal battle to prevent someone who honestly feels the opposite way from talking about it for 30 seconds? Seriously, is the pro-choice movement run by 5-year-olds? Adults usually are ok coping with people who have other opinions.
I'm pretty neutral in the debate, being single and male.
Oh yah it's so emotional when people who don't exist but were invented by a giant corporation in a bid to get more of your money get married and have kids in France apparently.
I will say this: considering the ad's budget was so low, it was effective. No actors, no props, no locations, no dialog, no ADR... hell no camera, probably.
The question here is, should Mozilla continue to duplicate the efforts of Apple to provide compatibility with people running older systems?
The answer is: Mozilla should have a very clear policy about backwards compatibility and follow it to the letter. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't currently have that.
Barring that, the answer should be: Until Apple actively does something to break the older "deprecated" code in Firefox, they should support older OSes. From another reply, it sounds like a new version of the Java plug-in Apple is releasing will meet this criteria. Also, being Apple, this is going to happen every 3 years anyway.
Here's what should *not* determine when to end support: "I'm a programmer and working with this old API is soooo painful and my compiles take a few seconds longer! Whine!"
Or in other words, support decisions should *never* be made just based on developer preferences. The purpose of writing software is to serve your users. Either you're a professional developer and you deal with the slightly older APIs/compilers to serve your users, or you're a hack.
What's the significance of this? Why should I care? Article neglected to mention that.
"Oh wow, Google registered a domain name and now they're using it. THAT IS DEFINITELY NEWSWORTHY!!!"
More to the point, what the hell gigantic change could Apple have possibly made to 10.5 to make 10.4 support some kind of giant anchor weighing everything down? Seriously?
Either:
1) Someone's exaggerating and the 10.4 code is actually very small, or
2) That's a gigantic WTF from Apple and they should be called on it.
Normally I'd get pissy over removing support for something that's not really that old, but I guess Mac users are used to that and don't care... so... bully for Mozilla.
The real problem is... if this is the case, why isn't Paypal telling their CUSTOMERS about it? Hell, they could (potentially) get a lot of support against the government if their customers start writing representatives... and in any case, just suspending service with no reason or excuse given is rotten customer service.
Every big company eventually has an administrative problem which will affect customers, you can't really fault them for that. But the customer service reaction here is terrible.
Don't forget that they issue credit cards as well.
Yes, but MacTCP never shipped *with* the OS. You could get it from Apple's FTP site, or from your local friendly retailer, but the fact remains that System 7 didn't have a TCP/IP stack. (7.5 did, in the form of Open Transport, as you say.)
What's the deal with commenting on posts right before comments are closed? Are you trying to make sure nobody else can get the last word?