“I want to believe. Those words set up my review of Mac OS X 10.1 almost a year ago. Mac OS X began life as the last, best hope for Apple’s decade-spanning quest for a modern operating system. At first, it was enough for it to simply exist as a stable, feasible product strategy. But while developer releases revealed some very interesting technology, they also raised some red flags. The public beta was a warning shot across the bow of an anxious community of early adopters. The initial release reinforced the old Apple saying: “real artists ship.” Mac OS X 10.0 had arrived, but there were problems.” Read the review at ArsTechnica. Also, 19″ iMacs are on the way.
Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar Review at ArsTechnica
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I don’t know about you but I find Quartz Extreme horribly dissapointing. Ars mentions that it does not accelerate drawing (so its another blatent lie from Apple’s marketing department to call QE accelerated Quartz) just window compositing (eye candy). Also, the video-behind-transparent-window thing, though it seems impressive at first, means nothing since I’ve been able to do that on Win2k (with any modern NVIDIA card) for quite awhile now.
I told you people: the wintel world is always behind the times. =)
> Ars mentions that it does not accelerate drawing (so its another blatent lie from Apple’s marketing department to call QE accelerated Quartz) just window compositing (eye candy).
With QE enabled, I see a 2x fold better UI speed. But that does not make OSX’s UI fast. It is still slow when scrolling & resizing. I do not get that kind of perfrormance on scrolling/resizing with my other OSes on similar powered machines.
In the nonstop barrage of comments about how Quartz is so slow and how XP is so fast, people seem to forget that XP’s compositing engine sucks.
XP is using bitmasks for shaped windows. The result is a great deal of onscreen corruption when windows are moved:
These screen shots were taken on a 2GHz Pentium 4 with a GeForce 4 MX:
http://fails.org/xp/xp.png
http://fails.org/xp/xp2.png
http://fails.org/xp/xp3.png
I’m not a regular Windows XP user, but I noticed this corruption after about 10 minutes of using XP.
In all my time using Quartz, I’ve never had any display corruption occur.
So that’s basically what it comes down to, speed versus elegance, and people seem to have varying opinions in this department.
I’m not a regular Windows XP user, but I noticed this corruption after about 10 minutes of using XP.
In all my time using Quartz, I’ve never had any display corruption occur.
If download a proper driver for your videocard XP doesn’t display this behaviour… I’m using a ATI Radeon and the diplay is fine. With Xp it’s a lot quicker than xfree86.
If download a proper driver for your videocard XP doesn’t display this behaviour… I’m using a ATI Radeon and the diplay is fine. With Xp it’s a lot quicker than xfree86.
This is a result of using bitmasks and is not a driver issue. X exhibits the same behaviour with shaped windows. The solution is to use 8-bit alpha channels for everything. Making a window partly transparent fixes this behavior.
Here’s the same problem on a completely different system, 750MHz PIII with an ATI Rage 128:
http://fails.org/xp/xp.gif
It’s not a “blatant lie”. You quoted from the Ars article, but did you read it? Did you look at the friggin’ <eye_candy_for_idiots>diagrams</eye_candy_for_idiots>?
Quartz *is* accelerated – if you can’t follow a nicely laid out article like that, *with* visual aids for the impatient then just… use Win2K and smile. Don’t crap on other folks’ systems.
Jaguar isn’t slow for me, but I just develop on my X box – haven’t browsed the web in ages. And this is being submitted from a Win2K machine.
Windows 2000 Server – no frills, just works… but no unix infrastructure
I told you people: the wintel world is always behind the times. =)
Yeah, Wintel is behind by 1 inch. But Mac hardware is behind by over a GHz. If you say clock speed doesn’t matter, ok I’ll give you that. But why has it taken Apple so long to get DDR memory into their machines, and even now when it’s there the PowerMacs aren’t even using it to its full potential.
Personally I’d rather Apple improve on aspects that affect everyday computing rather than innovate on new ideas/features that I [personally] see as just novalties (it’s nice to have but can do just as well without it).
This was taken from the article:
“I actually ran tests with many more than 5 windows on top of the movie. In Mac OS X 10.1, the movie playback was pretty much shot after 5 windows were added. The movie actually stopped entirely (0fps) for a second or more several times, and the sound (which began dropping out with 4 windows) was completely broken up.
In Jaguar with Quartz Extreme enabled, the GPU really flexes its muscles. I actually kept adding transparent windows until I hit 25 and got bored. The framerate never dropped at all. Impressive!”
It’s not a perfect OS but it’s getting there.
– Mark
Hey,
I’m curious – which aspects of the OS will affect everyday computing that aren’t currently fully realized? I’m genuinely curious, as playing with so many OSystems has pretty much numbed me
I’d like to see the list, and then a place where they’re implemented correctly. I’ll even kick it off: contextual menus in OS X suck, hard. They don’t feel as if they’re part of the OS design, but instead something that was stuck in there. BeOS did the best job with this IMHO.
>>But why has it taken Apple so long to get DDR memory into their machines, and even now when it’s there the PowerMacs aren’t even using it to its full potential.<<
That is a question more suited for Motorola!
Good question TLFord,
New OS features will allow you to reach a never before achieved level of nerdness and to enhance your ability to waste even more of your life, allowing you to further withdraw yourself from the world! Once you get contextual menus that don’t “suck, hard” you’ll never have to leave your house. And once BeOS returns, we won’t even want to leave the computer to have sex again! Hell, install OpenBeOS directly into my brain! I don’t care! I love computers so much I’d do anything for them!!! I WISH I WAS A COMPUTER! It doesn’t tell me I’m too fat or too hairy or that I have no personality. (I wish I had real friends.. *crying*)
—
Christ, get a life people. Stop worrying about computers so fucking much.
> I’m not a regular Windows XP user, but I noticed this
> corruption after about 10 minutes of using XP.
What you’re looking at in these screenshots are programming errors in the Putty application. This has nothing to do with WinXP.
Yeah, Wintel is behind by 1 inch. But Mac hardware is behind by over a GHz.
Only 2 things the PCs have are games and more MHz. That’s about it.
Personally I’d rather Apple improve on aspects that affect everyday computing rather than innovate on new ideas/features that I [personally] see as just novalties (it’s nice to have but can do just as well without it).
Then why do these novelties become standards in the PC world after a couple of years? Remember Airport/802.11b and USB?
Someone’s as got to push the enveloppe further. And since Microsoft is too busy pushing Windows into the server arena, who do you think is going to do this? IBM? Sun? Dell?
Heck Apple is the only company that told me what Bluetooth is actually good for.
This is a result of using bitmasks and is not a driver issue. X exhibits the same behaviour with shaped windows. The solution is to use 8-bit alpha channels for everything. Making a window partly transparent fixes this behavior.
Dude these are drivers issues, try windows update or
the website from your card maufacturer, this is not normal.
Also try the classic mode for the start menu it’s faster.
Windows has redraw-problems since more than 10 years now. This is – to say it with Eugenias words: “The truth”.
Every one of you for sure know the following behavior:
If a applic in windows is very busy or locked in an I/O task for example, the app window is frozen and you can “rubber out” the window-content. This problem stays in Windows for more than 10 years now. Whatever Windows Version you take W3.0/3.1, W95/98/ME, WNT/2K/XP always the same shit. And that is because MS isn’t able to remove their redraw event out of the main-app event-loop. This is a real shame. BeOS, OS X or even AmigaOS has/had never such a problem. Even the refresh behavior in Windows is chaotic. The desktopicons or toolbars of windows on all Windows Boxes I use are often redrawn by suspicion. You notice this when Windows is under such a load that you can follow the gui redraw in slow motion. That means they don’t keep really track of the areas that needs a redraw. “Just send everyone an WM_REPAINT and forget the problem…” is what their developers probably think.
OS X may be slow in some gui things, but it’s gui system is much more elegant desingned than that crap Mr. Gates sells for years now. Apple have to improve thats clear – they know that too for sure and they have shown much improvment since OS X is public. Just wait and see.
In any case, OS X is for sure prove for everyday us.
Ralf.
Better keyboard shortcuts would make my life easier. Tabbing through controls in a window/dialog works in some places, and not others. It’s inconsistent. A computer optimized for Photoshop doesn’t do me any good. The performance has to be general purpose performance. SIMD technologies in a CPU is great but if it can’t accelerate double precision floats I have a hard time liking it. Most of these things on my mind are hardware related and not so much OS. I like to be able to swap out hardware, build a computer from scratch, that sort of thing. Components break down, even in a Mac. I don’t want to have to special order a component or bring it to a shop when I could have done it myself.
Foomoe, if that’s how you really feel, you’re in the wrong forum dude.
CatBeMac: That is a question more suited for Motorola!
Nope. I question why Apple still uses Motorola chips. Apple is in the desktop computer business, but Motorola is in the embedded computing business. The 2 companies have different strategies and business plans so they don’t always see eye to eye.
Ronald,
I do appreciate Apple for introducing new technologies, but they just aren’t getting a solid footing before moving on to newer things. Microsoft is well estabilshed in the business market, so they are now moving forward with Internet technologies as one of their business plans. At the same time they also have the resources to push a new hardware platform – the tablet PC. Without getting into who’s products are better, if you look at Apple and Microsoft as just 2 companies, Apple is no doubt the innovator and creative one. But Microsoft is the one that’s capitalizing on their user base, granted some of their practices are illegal, but in this day and age no one really knows who’s a cheat and who is not. This is simpily my opinion: Microsoft exists every where I go, so I’ll never have trouble finding work or resources.
Also try the classic mode for the start menu it’s faster.
sorry desktop properties.
You know what?
I am really happy that apple uses Moto’s CPUs. Because they consume very less power than Intel’s or even AMD’s. I don’t like CPUs that needs a 70dB turbo fan or get so hot (when the turbo fan fails) that they burn immediately. I don’t like hardware that gets so hot that you burn your fingers when you touch your PC’s inventory (like 10000rpm Harddisks). Most of my computers run 7×24 and I don’t like those hotspots in the cases. The whole hardware is more prevented form damage if the temperature stays on a low level.
Example:
The fans in the new dual G4 Macs stop all when the system as no load for some time. I don’t talk about sleep-mode, that happens when the system is online.
I like this much more than the pseudo fast ulta high clocked but nearly burning x86 CPUs.
Ralf.
I’ve never understood why people bicker about this, trying to convert Mac people to Windoze or vice versa.
I use a Mac because it works better for me. My 500 MHz G3 is fast enough, so I am not interested in spending money to get something faster, so there’s no advantage to buying a PC. I could get a faster CPU, on a Mac, PC, Sun or Alpha, but I don’t care.
If all I did was play FPS and other high-power games, I’d probably have a PC. But I don’t. I use my computer for coding (and lots of it), ircing, email, web browsing, document viewing and editing and playing music. I probably would’ve been fine on a 300 MHz G3 for what I do, even under OS X. For coding (I use Squeak) though, I do appreciate the relative speed of a 500 MHz G3 though.
I see Apple as a company that is interested in giving users features and applications that improving their users’ computing experience, often features that their users don’t know about themselves. Most PC companies and Microsoft are interested in giving people a little bit more of what they already have- slightly faster CPUs, RAM, etc. In all my years as a user of DOS and Windows on PC hardware, I never was really surprised (in a good way) by something MS or a hardware company handed me, but with Apple’s stuff, I do.
Like others have stated in this thread and throughout history, it comes down to elegance vs. speed. I could be using a 2.4 GHz Win XP machine, have oodles of CPU speed at my disposal, but with a system (in a very all-encompasing way) like that, I won’t actually be working any faster or more elgantly than on a 300 MHz G3 Mac. What good is that kind of speed?
Every one of you for sure know the following behavior:
If a applic in windows is very busy or locked in an I/O task for example, the app window is frozen and you can “rubber out” the window-content. This problem stays in Windows for more than 10 years now. Whatever Windows Version you take W3.0/3.1, W95/98/ME, WNT/2K/XP always the same shit. And that is because MS isn’t able to remove their redraw event out of the main-app event-loop. This is a real shame.
Yes, this is so true and one of my biggest annoyances with Windows. After booting Windows it redraws the desktop icons about 5 times before it’s ready for you to use. During shutdown or a program exiting windows just randomly grab and lose focus, sometimes for a half a second. You sit in front of a Windows machine and wonder WTF is going on, as an orgy of bad redraws and focus grabbing ensues. Is there something wrong with my system? No, this behavior is completely normal.
BeOS, OS X or even AmigaOS has/had never such a problem.
This is one of the nice parts of Quartz as well. Drawing is handled by the applications themselves, in a separate thread, and everything is nicely abstracted from the programmer.
Even the refresh behavior in Windows is chaotic. The desktopicons or toolbars of windows on all Windows Boxes I use are often redrawn by suspicion. You notice this when Windows is under such a load that you can follow the gui redraw in slow motion. That means they don’t keep really track of the areas that needs a redraw. “Just send everyone an WM_REPAINT and forget the problem…” is what their developers probably think.
I think these are all results of inherent problems with the Win32 API… it’s just so low level it becomes difficult to use effectively.
OS X may be slow in some gui things, but it’s gui system is much more elegant desingned than that crap Mr. Gates sells for years now. Apple have to improve thats clear – they know that too for sure and they have shown much improvment since OS X is public. Just wait and see.
Apple has done a wonderful job with Quartz. It may take a few years and new hardware before its performance reaches “tolerable” levels in everyone’s opinion, but I, for one, am glad they decided to do the job right, even if people complain about the performance. I’d much rather have it render things slower and properly instead of faster with corruption.
Dude these are drivers issues, try windows update or
the website from your card maufacturer, this is not normal.
Also try the classic mode for the start menu it’s faster.
No, these are NOT DRIVER ISSUES. I’m using the WHQL certified version 30.82 drivers downloaded directly from Nvidia. I suppose I could download the Detonator 40 drivers, but obviously the drivers aren’t obsolete… they’re dated August 7th, 2002.
Yes I could use “classic mode” and that would probably solve the problem, but as I said, that’s not my machine and I don’t use XP on a regular basis. Whenever I use an XP machine it’s usually configured with Luna as that’s the default, and I have to deal with this annoying screen corrupting. It’s quite irritating.
It’s no secret that after Windows NT 3.51, there has not been one version of Windows that doesn’t have massive paint bugs. Windows XP is the worst of the bunch.
And in all these years, there are still very significant resource limitations. Try setting Internet Explorer for each browser to run in a separate process and see how many copies of IE you can open before Windows gets very unstable — basically the whole system goes to hell. It doesn’t matter how much video ram you have, how many physical ram, disk space, etc. Windows GDI limits are a fault of the weak-minded idiots that Microsoft calls software developers.
There is not ONE video driver for Windows that doesn’t have memory corruption bugs. And since all the drivers run in kernel space now, you will have memory corruption on every Windows box — the more you use the video driver, the more corruption you will have.
In NT 3.51, video drivers did not run at kernel space. And this version of NT was not only faster than 2000/XP, it was much more reliable as well.
Bascule is absolutely right. Every Windows machine I’ve owned for the past 11 years has had paint and other GDI bugs, often serious. It is the fault of the morons at Microsoft that write the software.
Yes I could use “classic mode” and that would probably solve the problem, but as I said, that’s not my machine and I don’t use XP on a regular basis. Whenever I use an XP machine it’s usually configured with Luna as that’s the default, and I have to deal with this annoying screen corrupting. It’s quite irritating
It’s pretty easy in XP login as another user and use your own defaults, that takes even less time than bitching about it…
Does MacOSX have multiple users already?
Yes, it does. Heck, MacOS X 9 had multiple users.
That’s all.
–JM
In the nonstop barrage of comments about how Quartz is so slow and how XP is so fast, people seem to forget that XP’s compositing engine sucks.
Excellent post. I absolutely hate Windows XP for that very reason. Unless Microsoft fixes this, Windows 2000 will be as far as I go with them.
>In the nonstop barrage of comments about how Quartz is
> so slow and how XP is so fast, people seem to forget that
> XP’s compositing engine sucks.
Excellent post. I absolutely hate Windows XP for that very reason. Unless Microsoft fixes this, Windows 2000 will be as far as I go with them.
Do you know more about this? I am not running XP but used to run the beta. The theming engine seems to be a big performance killer. The redrawing also seemed quite weird at times. Even now, on Windows .NET Sever, I see some slow drawing of the menu and tool bars when starting IE 6.0. Similar effects happen in Windows Media Player (a piece of software with a weird interface).
What was the point of developing Quartz anyway? I can’t imagine that translucent terminal windows are reason enough. What was their original intent of achieving with Quartz and for what purposes? It was a lot of effort. Granted, it looks cool, but…
In response to AUT’s question, Why Quartz?
Why not Quartz?
First, it must be pointed out that Quartz isn’t translucent windows, the genie effect and other eye candy. Quartz is the compositing system of Mac OS X’s GUI. As such, it is a large part of OS X’s GUI. Quartz isn’t these effects any more than the GDI in WinXP is the Luna theme or fading menus. Quartz is basically a PDF screen. Apple choose this “Display PDF” system for reasons similar to why NeXT choose their Display PostScript system of graphics. There are a number of reasons, and sure, being able to create nice looking graphics, easily, is part of it. Doing fancy alpha blends, or dynamic resizing of icons (like in the dock) is relative easy to do in Quartz, compared to more labour intensive compositing systems. Quartz means programmers spend more time implementing features than they do working around a low-level display system.
This is a result of using bitmasks and is not a driver issue. X exhibits the same behaviour with shaped windows. The solution is to use 8-bit alpha channels for everything. Making a window partly transparent fixes this behavior.
The screenshots shown have nothing to do with alpha. Windows XP and X both use the classic overlapping window model where “damaged” areas of the screen are fixed by the application owning the window. When this doesn’t happen instantaneously, you get these artifacts. MacOS X solves this problem by double buffering everything. Fresco and PicoGUI solve it by keeping data about the application’s current appearance in the window server instead of relying on the app to redraw itself.
Why not Quartz?
Well, I don’t have anything against Quartz. I was just curious about why they chose it. I guess the NeXT heritage has a lot to do with it. Maybe QuickTime is another reason. They probably needed Quartz’ abilities to integrate all these different display engines.
Of course I know that translucent windows, for example, are not what Quartz is, but it is what the user sees. And that is what counts.
Microsoft is going to implement some sort of 3D desktop rendering engine as well. I wonder if they get rid of those artifacts that the other posts have mentioned.
Apple wasn’t the first to use OpenGL to render GUIs. There have projects specifically designed for that of course, like 3dwm… Fresco and PicoGUI both have OpenGL rendering backends.
PicoGUI’s OpenGL video driver is still experimental at this stage (more important things to hack on…) but it was written far before I knew about Quartz Extreme. It maps picogui’s usual bitmaps to OpenGL textures, accelerates _all_ drawing with OpenGL, there’s even a debug mode that lets you move the camera. It renders truetype fonts using the video card’s trilinear filtering to antialias them.
But the coolest part is that a subset of the OpenGL API is made available to both applications and the picogui theme engine. This means that you can, entirely in picogui’s theme language, write 3D/animated/translucent objects. Some examples:
Theme with OpenGL code:
http://picogui.org/sshotdetail.php?index=62
OpenGL accelerated rendering, (and fonts) in camera debug mode:
http://picogui.org/sshotdetail.php?index=60
Nobody argues the Apple had the first GL powered desktop. But Microsofts one is still vaporware and the others are allmost nonusable geek projects. Apple adopted the first usable and serious incarnation of an GL powerd GUI.
Thats all – nothing less and nothing more.
Ralf.
What you’re looking at in these screenshots are programming errors in the Putty application. This has nothing to do with WinXP.
That may be true, but if it is there are many buggy programs out there. I have seen this exact behavior in Office XP, Windows Explorer, IE, and several other Microsoft apps that I commonly used. I also got sick of Windows Explorer occasionally repainting the screen slowly and poorly when I expanded folders or changed the view in any way.
Because of the poor graphics in XP, I have gone back to using Windows 2000.
Why would they want to phrase out the 15″ ones? If I was Apple, I would lower the price. Why? Currently, iMacs is currently out of reach from most potential customers. The average price of retail PCs sold is about $800-900 (there was this IDC statistics…), and none of Apple modern hardware ever reached that price.
Ronald: I told you people: the wintel world is always behind the times. =)
We were having 19″ LCDs for ages :-P. (Just not in all-in-one machines, it has been proven that these machines just, well, flop).
Bascule: XP is using bitmasks for shaped windows. The result is a great deal of onscreen corruption when windows are moved:
I noticed the application you use there is not optimized for Windows NT’s framebuffer. Photoshop 6.0 had the same problems, but in 7.0, I don’t see it. Opera, this happens all the time, never happened once on IE. I think it is the applications’ fault.
I could be wrong, though.
CattBeMac: That is a question more suited for Motorola!
No one forced Apple to go to bed with Motorola. Heck, they would be probably better off sticking with IBM and G3s. Sure, no AltiVec, but as time goes one, things would improve :-).
Foomoe: Christ, get a life people. Stop worrying about computers so fucking much.
People come here to talk about computers, and that’s what he is doing.
Ronald: Only 2 things the PCs have are games and more MHz. That’s about it.
Let’s see…. we have faster RAM and FSBs, we have professional graphics cards like ATI Fire and NVidia Quaddro4, we have a lot of applications (much more than the Mac, trust me), we have DVD+RWs (argably the winning standard – picked by Microsoft and HP for Mt. Rainer, would be included in Longhorn, would be pushed as replacement for floppies.)…
Ronald: Then why do these novelties become standards in the PC world after a couple of years? Remember Airport/802.11b and USB?
802.11 was used with Windows workstations in corporations way before Airport existent. USB arrived on PCs before Macs, and became standardize when Intel forces it and Microsoft placed support for it.
Ronald: Heck Apple is the only company that told me what Bluetooth is actually good for.
People used BlueTooth on PCs before Apple thought of the idea. heck, if you buy one of the IBM laptops, you don’t need that USB adapter.
Ralf.: This is a real shame. BeOS, OS X or even AmigaOS has/had never such a problem.
I remember I could “rubber out” the contents of BeZilla when it crashed on beOS 5 Personal…
Ronald: I am really happy that apple uses Moto’s CPUs. Because they consume very less power than Intel’s or even AMD’s.
You aren’t comparing with current generations of AMD and Intel (especially Intel) processors… or are you?
(Besides, when Apple picked Motorola, Intel and AMD were far behind – things have changed.)
Bascule: Yes, this is so true and one of my biggest annoyances with Windows. After booting Windows it redraws the desktop icons about 5 times before it’s ready for you to use. During shutdown or a program exiting windows just randomly grab and lose focus, sometimes for a half a second
Yeah, I know what you mean, I never really understood it. When I log in, the background would appear, than dissapear, than the icons appear, then the background appear.
AUT: Microsoft is going to implement some sort of 3D desktop rendering engine as well. I wonder if they get rid of those artifacts that the other posts have mentioned.
This is not due till Longhorn (NT 6.0). That’s three years from now. That would be a wait too long for Bascule…. I think.
What you’re looking at in these screenshots are programming errors in the Putty application. This has nothing to do with WinXP.
I’d say they’re design flaws in XP. It’s obvious it can render windows without sending redraw events to the applications, but it only does so if the windows are transparent. Why does it even send redraw events to the applications anymore? It should just store a buffer that the application draws to, then assemble these buffers into what is presented to the user. To get back to the subject at hand, OS X, you’d have to go out of your way to design an application that renders corrupted.
Windows XP and X both use the classic overlapping window model where “damaged” areas of the screen are fixed by the application owning the window. When this doesn’t happen instantaneously, you get these artifacts.
This particular problem only appears with shaped windows which use a bitmask.
MacOS X solves this problem by double buffering everything
No, MacOS X solves this problem by having the applications draw into a shared memory buffer and then compositing what you see from these buffers, i.e. applications don’t process redrawing, the server does.
Micah Dowty: Apple wasn’t the first to use OpenGL to render GUIs. There have projects specifically designed for that of course, like 3dwm… Fresco and PicoGUI both have OpenGL rendering backends.
Fresco uses SDL instead of OpenGL when using GGI because currently it is faster than OpenGL – after all, we aren’t doing any gee-whiz eye candy or anything like that….
I know fresco doesn’t normally use OpenGL, just as PicoGUI doensn’t normally use OpenGL.. but I though there was an kit that handled OpenGL accelerated output if you want to use it.
Buffering everything would be the way MacOS X handles the problem. The drawback to this is usually a huge memory footprint.
To clarify.. this is what I meant by “double buffers everything” above, but I was unclear.
Having the apps draw into offscreen buffers that are composited effectively double buffers per-window, instead of full screen.
>>I remember I could “rubber out” the contents of BeZilla when
>>it crashed on beOS 5 Personal…
It looks like your knowledge about software, programming, and techniques is very little. When an app crashes all threads are and event-loops are gone. There is absolutly NO chance that the window gets a redraw because the app redraws itself at that program has died.
But in normal condidtions, when business runs as usual and window refresh is choppy, it is a bad implemented gui design. And that is was Windows has.
Ralf.
>>Buffering everything would be the way MacOS X handles the >>problem. The drawback to this is usually a huge memory >>footprint.
What is a huge memory footprint nowadays? We are not talking about PDA software. 1024x768x32 takes about 6MB of (uncompressed) memory. If all double buffered windows take maybe 64MB (compressed) – who cares?
If that is the price for correct and flicker-free redrawn windows, I will for sure invest that 10.-EUR for that extra memory.
Ralf.
Are we going to have a new iMac every twelve months with a new, larger screen?
Here’s an idea Apple, market a consumer level machine with just an AGP slot and a drive bay for optical media. I know you make a lot of money selling ‘stylish’ all-in-one units with writable DVDs and widescreen LCDs, but not all consumers need this.
How about a box (doesn’t have to be beige) with some expandability but without the ‘pro’ pricetag?
I know, you could market it as the Cube; this time with a competitive price.
p.s. Check out these guys for some ideas:
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1661
At times like these, it can be *real* embarressing. Is talking out of your ass like this? 🙂
Anyway, Micah, Fresco’s rendering depends on the console, like GGI and DirectFB and so on. Right now, in Fresco, only SDL works.
I think the ars technica review nailed down the biggest problem of Apple with OS X: They desperately want to create something different from the classic MacOS for pure marketing reasons. Now, the classic MacOS doubtlessly has the best User Interface out there as far as simplicity, consistence and usability are concerned. I’m regularly working with Windows boxes, MacOS and fiddling with Gnome/Linux, and the classic MacOS is still the leader of the pack. So, if you need to create something that’s different from something as refined as the ‘classic’ GUI just for the sake of being different, if you reject all the great stuff in there just because you want something ‘new’, you end up with the OS X-GUI. What a shame.
The classsic OS has a really outdated and uggly UI design! It’s design has the charme of the late eighties. Beside this, they had to do something with their OS. The used techniques in Classic stand at the level were Windows 3.1 stands. Without the drastic OS change they would get in deep trouble. I often wonder how Apple managed to stay alive with OS 8.x/9.x that long time. Mac OS X is for sure not about marketing. There are a lot apps coming to the Mac that are simply impossible without OS X (Oracle for example). I often don’t understand why many old Mac guys holding tight like crazy on an OS that has reached end of life. Sure not all apps are ported already – just wait a little bit. They improve OS X constantly. Guys, OS X is out to market for 16 months now and they have thrown everything old away and started from scratch. What do you expect? Such a product has to mature and that is a question of time – there is no way to hurry this up.
By the way – I can ensure you with OS 9 you can not make any Windows user to switch to the Mac. With OS X you can.
Ralf.
I think the ars technica review nailed down the biggest problem of Apple with OS X: They desperately want to create something different from the classic MacOS for pure marketing reasons.
Apple has been trying to dump MacOS for over a decade. It’s krufty and the limitations of the original design had been pushed way beyond any sanity points.
Ralf.: The classsic OS has a really outdated and uggly UI design!
What you seem to be complaining is the looks, something that Apple could fix without changing the UI. It is possible to implement Aqua’s looks with Platinum’s tried and tested UI.
Ralf.: The used techniques in Classic stand at the level were Windows 3.1 stands.
In terms of looks and eye candy, maybe. In terms of ease of use, Platinum stands headlength over the rest, especially OS X.
Ralf.: Mac OS X is for sure not about marketing.
If it isn’t, I would suggest Apple shareholders to sell.
Ralf.: There are a lot apps coming to the Mac that are simply impossible without OS X (Oracle for example).
So, from uglinest you have come to technical capiblities. It is possible to have Platinum over OS X – heck, this was done with early versions of Rhapsody.
Ralf.: Guys, OS X is out to market for 16 months now and they have thrown everything old away and started from scratch.
And they thrown away their most important software related asset (Platinum’s UI) and got a mishmash of Platinum and OpenStep which isn’t even consistent to begin with.
Ralf.: What do you expect? Such a product has to mature and that is a question of time – there is no way to hurry this up.
I don’t expect Mac OS X to instantly mature, neither is the guy you are replying to. It is possible to use OS 9’s UI (add Aqua’s looks and eye candy, and it would be it), and solve one of OS X’s most major problem.
Ralf.: By the way – I can ensure you with OS 9 you can not make any Windows user to switch to the Mac. With OS X you can.
The person you are replying to didn’t imply that. He implied that OS 9 has a better UI than OS X.
http://www.lafcpug.org/feature_osx_tools.html