Review of Tiger from an end user’s perspective: likes and dislikes discussed.
Kaiwai’s Review of Tiger
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Sorry about the dual post. I don’t know how that happened.
@Hobbs:
“They invented and established Firewire standards. ”
And who still cares about firewire? It is dying anyway.
“They popularized the use of wireless (802.11) by adopting these standards early. ”
No, they didn’t. Face it, what company like Apple with its minuscule market share adopts or tries to popularize is really unimportant. Those who really popularized wifi was laptop makers like Toshiba.
“They support next generation agreed upon standards for video and audio (H.264 and AAC). ”
Which is again unimportant because audio is ruled by mp3 and wma formats.
“They created a kick-ass browser and gave the core of it away. ”
Wow, you must be total Apple zealot if you believe that. Let me englighten you: they took (no, not created) already existing browser core, added simplistic GUI and it proved to be enough for fanboys to drool over it. And they certainly didn’t give away anything – you can view Apple as a little parasite on OSS community.
“You can’t please all the people all the time. OSS zealots, please leave this discussion thread and let the Mac people provide feedback on Tiger, so that other Mac folks can determine what Tiger can do for them.”
You should be interested in the company you buy from and if they are honest. It’s not just the product in isolation.
I’m concerned but witholding judgement on Apple at this time.
If what you say is true, why are you harping about Apple if its market share is so miniscule and what it does -does not matter?
What are you doing in this forum about Tiger which does not affect you or the OSS since Apple is not of any importance to you?
Why do you care what Apple users say?
Ah, Gregor, sugar. You’re quoting me on my quote by anonymous. I don’t use the words evil with regards to operating systems, even one as evil as Windows.
*wicked grin*.
The important thing about this is not whether the OSS community got their part of the bargain.
The post is on Tiger. Tiger offers great features in a non-obtrusive way. This is done with elegance and in a balanced way. That is the important part. It’s tidy, efficient, responsive and offers new ways of using your computer without going into histrionics.
You know why I like working with an Apple so very much?
It’s not popping up messages that I have unused icons on my desktop.
It’s not popping up a gimmick that tells me I’m writing a letter [oh, was that what I was doing? Quick, hand me the Alzheimer pills, I’m having an episode] and that I have to click away.
It doesn’t come nagging me about updating my virus definitions.
Yes, there is some eye candy, but it’s not as if you have to watch a movie, and you can turn it off if you don’t like it.
OS X is like a butler holding up a silver tray with a phone, just in case you need to make a call. Only the phone is a boatload of functionality and the butler is modest enough to stay out of your face when he’s not needed.
Windows tells me it lost connection when I unplugged the network cable [no more network connection? You’re kidding me! Do you think it could have anything to do with the fact that I disconnected the cable?].
The Windows taskbar. Have you ever seen such a sad implementation. It’s like uncle Bob whose pissing himself at the wedding and everybody is looking the other way wishing he’d just sink through the floor.
You still press the start button to stop the computer. But hey, in Longhorn it looks like now it’s going to be blue!
It looks dated and it’s not aging well, my friends. Mac OS X is like a master piece in the making, every iteration better than the last one.
You, the user, are cordially invited into the chateau and left to discover all the marvels in its nooks and crannies with friendly assistance should you happen to need a nudge in the right direction.
Tiger feels nice, quiet, warm and hospitable and it leaves you time enough to admire the attention to detail that its loving creators put into the effort of presenting it to you.
You really should allow the rapture to take root and abandon yourself blissfully to this industrial work of art.
“…too bad the comments are mucked up by ralph the OSF fun boy”
Hm, I don’t even know what OSF is, but you are right, I sure am a fun boy.
I do of course realize that my comment didn’t address the main part of the article, however I reacted to a part of the article that caught my attention. The problem was that my comment was critical of Apple, which almost immediately led to angry and insulting posts. And I’m sorry, I simply wasn’t in the mood to let these kind of posts go unanswered, and others seemed to feel equally provoked by this kind of reaction.
Btw., my comment has already been reviewed, in case you didn’t notice.
Ralph, you have to consider that some Mac people are raving lunatics so say what you want but consider that some Mac users take things a little too personal so its like arguing with an idiot almost.
P.S. I agree with you that Apple CAN do more for the open source community and should but Apple in my book has NEVER been a generous company.
Tiger: Everything seems to be working fine
Mail: Imported all mailboxes. Send and receive mail: OK
FileMaker Pro 5.5, Canvas 9.0: Opened files fine.
Overseer, Tea Timer: work as expected. Tea Timer quits at the end of timing. (Did the same in Panther).
Classic: Applications:CricketGraph and MacPlasmap: work as expected
Dashboard: looks like my graphic card does not support the ripple effect, otherwise works well. I like the Dictionary widget
No problems with KeyChain or Safari.
No crashes otherwise.
Spot light indexed most of the HD quite quickly. Search results displayed lickety-split: impressed. Probably still indexing my pdf files.
Overall a solid upgrade with no issues (except for having to reboot during installing thinking that computer had stalled: but no worse for the wear).
Conclusion: surprisingly, no issues after upgrade with version 10.4.0.
Only gripe: don’t like the Mail toolbar.
Way to go Apple!
Do you want me to be even more anal about this, or are you really that dense? (Dense also being used as slag here…but I think you can grok what I’m saying. Don’t know grok? Look it up.)
Oh, I get it. You’re just being a (place something insulting to you here). You’re not really concerned about having a conversation on the subject. Trolling is a nice hobby. I’ll feed you so you don’t starve…
I really don’t know of many companies where the employees all go down to the soup kitchen on Sundays to feed the homeless or throw wads of cash from their castles down to the peons below, but I don’t hold it against them. I do know Apple has charitable support in place – probably for tax benefits – but probably also because Jobs himself is a bit of a past hippie.
To suggest that Apple isn’t acting in the “spirit” of OSS is pretty naive. Do you want it spelled out: They’re only using OSS to further their products cheaply. It’s a very BIG loophole with the license – one that could be plugged up if KDE wanted to. Apple is doing the minimum required by law to appease the license. That said though, Apple does have Open Source programs of their own – some of which are under their own open source license. Apple is not on KDE’s development team, they do make code that furthers the project and it is submitted back to the community to use. What do you want – Get over it. To act in the spirit of something is a pretty abstract concept – in black and white terms, they’re either upholding the license or their not. And in Apple’s case – they are.
BTW, How do you look something up? I’m not familiar with the phrase “look it up”.
Ah, Gregor, sugar. You’re quoting me on my quote by anonymous. I don’t use the words evil with regards to operating systems, even one as evil as Windows
Yeah I know it wasn’t your comment. I used the old reply (RE:) to topic subject line and your name was in kawai’s subject line. I’ll switch to the @posters_name format you people are using to be more clear next time. It’s all good.
Thanks for calling me sugar.
I guess I was quoting Anonymous (IP: —.nrockv01.md.comcast.net) and not kawai. Just clearing that up. I wish anonymous posters would at least pick a handle to use.
“Which you fail to address what I said on numerous occasions. If KHTML think that they’re being dealt unfairly, why don’t they add a clause to their licence that would force Apple to work more closely with KHTML?”
It would be counter productive. The code would be difficult to integrate and be used in other projects, thus harming both KHTML itself and other projects that have done nothing wrong.
Apple isn’t acting in good faith. That’s the problem…not the letter of the licence. I hope they change.
If you need it spelled out, you don’t know much about OSS.
How would it be counter productive? it would simply be putting the spirit of the licence in the licence itself as to ensure that there is no ambiguity.
If you add a clause requiring that all code submitted to KHTML must be in a certain format and able to be merged into the cvs tree with minimum difficulty, then you’d find that Apple would have to comply, they would offer cleaner patches that will allow easier merging of the changes they’ve made.
For the regular contributors, it would be business as usual, the only one affected would be Apple – end of story.
“How would it be counter productive? it would simply be putting the spirit of the licence in the licence itself as to ensure that there is no ambiguity. ”
I’ve already answered this. In my second sentence that you even quoted;
**** The code would be difficult to integrate and be used in other projects, thus harming both KHTML itself and other projects that have done nothing wrong. ****
Why? Because a change in the current licence would not be compatable with other software. Do I need to spell it out in excessive detail? Are you just jerking me around or do you really just not get it?
**** If you need it spelled out, you don’t know much about OSS. ****
How is adding an admendment to the license going to make it incompatible? it won’t, so *please* stop with the rubbish. They have the legal means at their disposal, they choose *NOT TO* utilise them. They only have themselves to blame, no one else.
If you want something, you have to *EXPLICITLY* state it in the license – spirit will *NOT* hold *ANY* water.
“If you want something, you have to *EXPLICITLY* state it in the license – spirit will *NOT* hold *ANY* water.”
It’s not as simple as you propose. As you MIGHT be TEACHABLE, I’ll be nice and spell it out for you;
* Licence #1 has a clause that states “no more restrictions may be added to this licence” (or some other clause that seems harmless enough but is there for an explicit reason; good licences don’t have cruft).
* Project A and B use Licence #1.
* Project B decides to use Licence #2 — the same licence as #1 but with the clause “can not be used by hate groups”. That’s a good idea, right? Who wants to support hate groups?
* Project A now can not legally use or share code in Project B. To do so — or even to be exposed to any new code in Project B — may open Project A to lawsuits.
Why is this the case? Project A still uses Licence #1 with the “no restrictions” clause. If Project A wants to use Project B code, they have to switch to Licence #2…and then check any other libraries or code they use. If the other libraries and code still use Licence #1, they have to get ALL THE OTHER PROJECTS TO CHANGE TO LICENCE #2!
Why not just use Licence #2, then? Who likes hate groups? Do hate groups include departments of war/defense? Do they include political groups some people support (such as both sides of the abortion debate)?
That mess is why Licence #1 has the clause about “no more restrictions”. (See the follow up comment with one additonal thought on this.)
Add in a specific extention to the licence used by KHTML and the same mess starts. It unnessarily punishes everyone in an attempt to legislate that Apple do the right thing.
In contracts — and that’s one thing I deal with a few times a week even though I’m in IT and not in contracts — 1/2 the value is in the what the paper says and the other 1/2 is in the good will of those involved.
In the case of Apple, they aren’t acting in good faith. Why, I can’t say, though it looks to be either cultural (they don’t know how dumb it is) or intentional (they think they are being clever…but aren’t).
There are generally 5 categories of licences, the first 3 are referred to as ‘open source’;
1. Public domain; No restrictions or behavior. Can turn this into closed source #4.
2. Liberal with few restrictions; BSD or X11 use this. Basically, there is a clause that asks for attribution. Can turn this into closed source #4.
3. Share and share alike; GPL is the most famous. Usually what people mean when they say ‘an open source licence’ though the public domain, BSD, and X11 also qualify as OSS. Can _NOT_ turn this into closed source #4.
In general, the share licences say ‘you can use my legos toys but you can’t glue the pieces together if you give them to someone else’. It’s a licence focusing on distribution, not personal use. This is typically where the “No further restrictions” clause pops in as restrictions can either restict other people’s right to use or even see the code or to share it with others who may want to see or modify the code.
4. Closed source; A blanket for many diverse licences with no source provided.
5. Restricted source; Source is available, though it can not be shared between projects and in some cases it is ‘for review only’ and can’t be used. Some of Microsoft’s Shared Source licences are like this, though not all…some of MS’s licences are more like #3. Typically this requires a Non Disclosure Agreement to be signed. Restricted source that allows modification usually allows public domain or BSD/X11 licenced code to be included since they do not have the clause that prevents additional restrictions.
Both #3 and #4 are vast pits of complexity…though #3 is dominated by the GPL making things simpler; GPL code can be mixed with other GPL code w/o question. #4 has no code, though the limits can prevent things like sharing benchmarks (database companies) or cause deployment headaches and licence servers for multiple projects.
Thank you for the very extensive reply.
Yes, you have bought up the issue regarding restrictions, but with that being said, one would have first challenge whether the added amendment constituted to being an added restriction on the licence.
Apple would have to go off to course and establish that the licence change would detrimentally restrict them further than what would be deemed as appropriate.
For obvious reasons they can’t give out things bit by bit as it would disclose code of products not yet released, but I am sure, there can be a compromise. One also has to take into account the amount of work they had to do to get it converted over to ObjC++ so that people can programme using it on MacOS X; like I said, would it be possible to use the ObjC++-a-fied version in KDE?
Make sure you read the post titled ‘One more comment on Licences’ before continuing.
——————————————-
“Yes, you have bought up the issue regarding restrictions, but with that being said, one would have first challenge whether the added amendment constituted to being an added restriction on the licence.”
If a clause would restrict Apple, it would be a restriction…game over.
“Apple would have to go off to course and establish that the licence change would detrimentally restrict them further than what would be deemed as appropriate.”
???
“For obvious reasons they can’t give out things bit by bit as it would disclose code of products not yet released, but I am sure, there can be a compromise. One also has to take into account the amount of work they had to do to get it converted over to ObjC++ so that people can programme using it on MacOS X; like I said, would it be possible to use the ObjC++-a-fied version in KDE?”
1. They are only required (by licence) to provide code to the reciepients of the binary if the recipients ask.
2. The code must be provided at the time the binary is provided if asked.
3. Not sharing updates in a usable way is abusive as it is against the spirit of the relationship; no licence is violated. Like the guy who hangs out at the all you can eat bar and gobbles up the shrimp as soon as it appears for hours on end, while talking about supporting local businesses and what a great guy he is.
Point being: Other groups — including quite large companies like HP, IBM, Sun, … — can do it on much more complext projects. What makes Apple so special that they can’t pull it off?
I’m leaning toward ‘They are doing it intentionally.’ It’s either that, or they are inept or just sloppy as a development group.
But you have failed to answer the question relating to ObjC++
I don’t think that the actions of Apple are intentiional, just a failure to realise the complexities of merging large amounts of code from one project into another; from one programming language into another.
Like I said on my site, the ideal circumstances would be for their KHTML team to work in tandem with KHTML, then all these problems wouldn’t exist.
“But you have failed to answer the question relating to ObjC++”
Actually, I did. To be absolutly clear: Apple knew the state of the source code, just as IBM, Sun, Netscape/AOL, Dell, HP, and a variety of other companies did when they adopted external projects or cleaned up what they had internally and made it open source.
“I don’t think that the actions of Apple are intentiional, just a failure to realise the complexities of merging large amounts of code from one project into another; from one programming language into another.”
Yet, they are getting into a pattern. I’m not saying this isn’t simply lazyness, though it looks more and more like they have the means and not the interest to do what so many other companies have done (see list above). They are acting like the guy scarfing down shrimp; they pay the entry fee, are playing by the written rules, but aren’t playing fair.
“Like I said on my site, the ideal circumstances would be for their KHTML team to work in tandem with KHTML, then all these problems wouldn’t exist.”
The KHTML group that Apple *SHOULD BE ACTING LIKE THEY ARE A PART OF* has a standard test and code policy. If Apple wants to do the right thing they can act like so many other companies and work with the group instead of being the shrimp guy.
If they don’t change, I’ll have to consider it entirely intentional and my view of Apple will change as well. Right now, I’m concerned.
Keep in mind that on open source project, the size of the company or the status outside of the project matters not one bit. Indivudual efforts or company efforts that end in usable source are all that matters. That’s why IBM’s people are well respected on projects but not necessarily outside of them. Even Microsoft gets a positive reaction for specific projects that are indeed open source.
What matters most is how well you work with others and what you can bring to play with. Even Linus can be replaced, and he knows it. He gets respect by his actions and his results. Apple has not made it easy to play with the toys they work on; they aren’t helpful so they aren’t gaining respect.