In this day and age of iOS this and iPad that you’d nearly forget it, but the gadget maker from Cupertino actually makes personal computers and an accompanying operating system as well. It’s been nearly three years since the last substantial release, so it’s about time: Apple has just announced a press event titled ‘Back to Mac’, with a lion on the invite.
There’s no denying that the success of the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad and the operating system they run has had somewhat of an impact on Apple’s Macintosh business. Hardware refreshes came fewer and further in between, and the Mac OS X operating system hasn’t seen a proper release since October 2007 when Leopard was released. Snow Leopard tidied things up a bit in August 2009, but of course didn’t compare to the releases that came before it.
So, I’m actually relieved that Apple hasn’t forgotten about its desktop operating system, and has announced a press event for October 20 (two days before the European release of Fallout: New Vegas). The invite shows a lion, so it could be that Mac OS X 10.7 will be called Lion.
With most of Apple’s engineering force dedicated to the iOS and its related devices, it’s hardly a guess to say that we’ll see features from the iOS trickle back into Mac OS X 10.7. Technically, it could get as kinky as iOS applications running on Mac OS X – the iOS simulator included in the iOS SDK runs code generated for an x86 target.
On the less kinky side of the spectrum, I’m kind of assuming we’re going to see a resolution independent interface, but contrary to what many are hoping, I don’t think it’ll be touch optimised, and for a very simple reason: iOS is touch, Mac OS X is mouse. Touch on a desktop or a laptop machine is pointless.
I do hope we’ll see a serious overhaul of the UI, as it’s gotten a bit stale. I would also die for a decent file manager, as the Finder is still incredibly cumbersome, even after all these years, even after all these complaints from all over the web. It’d be nice for Apple to also take this opportunity to cease being a hypocrite by finally moving everything over to Cocoa – including iTunes. I can has non-crappy music player plskthnxbi?
What are you hoping for in a new Mac OS X release?
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I could swear Finder has been a native Cocoa app since Snow Leopard was released.
And? Did anyone claim otherwise?
Which according to the rules of English grammar can (and to me does) imply that Finder is not Cocoa-based.
Actually, I think Thom’s right here (even if he is a Fiona Apple fan). It does not at all imply that Finder is Cocoa-based.
An English vs American thing perphaps?
Nope just two separate sentences, one sentence complains about the crappy finder, the next talks about Apple moving the remainder of the apps to the new framework.
No, it is just crappy writing.
It took me a double take, since the writer expected the reader to be able to read his mind and figure out when in that paragraph he had decided to switch context. Apparently.
Edited 2010-10-13 20:49 UTC
What part of “moving everything to Cocoa” don’t you understand? (Instead of “moving it [Finder] to Cocoa”.)
Obviously, “everything” does not mean what you think it does.
The finder, among other things, is part of the “everything.” LOL.
Well, it’s sure not written best, but it means that
1/Everything should currently be Cocoa (cofee is bad anyway… Erm)
2/Parts of that “everything” are currently not Cocoa. That should be fixed.
Oh, and by the way Thom…
Sure ! The simplest way to get that is to remember that a music player is a program designed to play music. Kind of like VLC (love the newer QT releases of VLC).
If the software you use is designed to…
-Play music.
-Display random “cover flow” art reminding of Vista’s Flip3D.
-Pretend to generate your playlists for you.
-Act as a music store, using a web browser together with some proprietary tweaks so that you can’t access said store with your web browser of choice.
-Consciously violate the HIGs of every OS it runs on, hurting usability in an attempt to look better.
-Sync with every single multimedia device launched by Apple in the last few years…
-…using a proprietary protocol, so that you can’t use your software of choice to do that job…
-…and supporting the multiple tweaked versions of that protocol, successively created as people finally understood how sync worked and managed to access their device the way they want.
-Run various processes in the background that remain after it is closed, having unknown purpose except for one which is designed to tell you that you really should install Safari if you’re running Windows.
…then don’t complain if it does the job awfully when it comes to simply playing music. Software which does a lot always does it awfully
Edited 2010-10-14 07:45 UTC
Hence Microsoft Office…
It’s a matter of opinion…
As a whole, Office is okay as long as you don’t want compatibility between versions, small files, and PDF export (it can work, but is extremely broken). The ribbon interface, as much as its extensibility is poor and it wastes vertical space in times where wide screens make it more precious than ever, is an interesting interface from a usability point of view.
Last time I tried, Word was very good. I hate the way it implements styles and find the OO way of doing it much more powerful, apart from that I find it superior to most other software I’ve used on on several points.
PowerPoint is good enough for the job too. I’ve got nothing against it. But I only use the basic functionality, maybe they tried to make it do too much in the most complex parts and completely broke them.
I don’t use Excel, but according to those who use it around me it’s broken on many aspects. The functions have a name which varies from one language to the other, making tutorials language-dependent. Random number generation is completely wrong too, as a bit of statistical analysis of what’s supposed to be noise can quickly reveal.
But most important is that globally, apart when you only want to putting numbers and words in a table and do very simple calculations (like in accountancy), it’s hard to find something Excel is really good at. It tries to work on every single aspect of statistics and ends up being average to bad everywhere. You need proprietary extensions like XLSTAT if you want to do any serious data processing in Excel. That’s maybe its sole good side : it’s extensible.
I don’t use nor know someone who uses the rest of Office, so I can’t say a lot about it. But based on those main components, Office is again not that bad when you are part of the target audience of each software.
Then maybe you were talking about Office for Mac, and then there’s sure a lot more to hate about it. Microsoft are not very kind when they make software for a competitor’s OS…
I know what Thom meant ;-), I was just pointing out that it was written in a rather crappy fashion. Not a big deal, since I assume English is not his native language.
But if a big chunk of the comments have to be about discussing a specific paragraph and its meaning, it should be a simple indication that the writing style for this article wasn’t the easiest to parse.
I tend to have a chuckle from most of Thom’s articles, they perpetuate the old style from Eugenia of trying to hard with the style, because I assume the technical substance simply isn’t there.
Gosh, I happen to have the same feeling about your comments. You zoom in on a potentially troublesome sentence because I assume you lack the “technical substance”.
Hmph.
I’m English and read it the same way as the American; the way Thom intended it to read.
Perhaps it wasn’t the best flowing paragraph, but it wasn’t poor English either.
n.l.o said:
I thought so too at first; I read that blurb and thought to myself “but isn’t Finder finally Cocoa now?” Then I read it again, a bit slower:
That’s one sentence, which completes a thought, namely that Finder still sucks. No mention of Cocoa.
Emphasis is added by me to show that this thought is exclusive from the previous sentence.
Conclusion: Read slowly and it makes proper sense. I direct that towards myself too, of course.
—–
(Edited to add quote from parent so this all makes some kind of sense.)
Edited 2010-10-13 22:25 UTC
The also makes no difference. It should be a separate paragraph. Consider:
“David Cameron isn’t a good prime minister. I also don’t think we should have voted labour back in.”
Why? It’s part of the same thought process (ie niggles with OS X).
Having a seperate paragraph for a sole sentence would have been more disjointed in my opinion
The Snow Leopard Finder is Cocoa. Prior versions were written in Carbon to demonstrate to Adobe, Microsoft, etc, that Carbon was useable. catfooding, so to speak
An announcement of an i7 based Macbook Pro would be nice as my almost 3yr old 4,1 model is getting a bit long in the tooth now.
Um, there is already an i7 based MB-Pro…
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC373LL/A?mco=MTc0Njg1ODE
Only available in 15″ in the UK, no good to me, but thanks for the link I wasn’t aware of this model at all.
Or one get what one want for a price one is willing to pay and install the os one want anyway.
I’m blessed enough to be able to buy what I want.
I’d like to see something happen with AFP. Anyone doing network homes over AFP feels the pain.
TFS:
Touch does make sense on a netbook or “netvertible” like Lenovo S10 3t:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/lenovo-ideapad-s10-3t-review/
I would be surprised if more computers were not like that in the future. The fact that windows 7 and Ubuntu still suck at touch (yeah, I’ve tried Maverick on it – it’s not yet good enough) allows Apple to compete effectively in that space, especially when they have lots of guys working with touch anyway.
I could envision using 12″ laptop in the same way.
I would be surprised if apple would risk cannibalizing their iPad sales with a convertible laptop/tablet right now though. They aren’t going to be pushing into the convertible laptop space until someone else makes one that doesn’t quite suck so much and threatens their tablet sales.
I don’t think it would be cannibalization necessarily. Mac doesn’t run iOS apps, and the form factor of convertible is “heavier”, with (probably) bigger screen.
However, pushing to this direction would (again) give Apple something Microsoft doesn’t have, and create a *real* value proposition for owning a Mac (currently, benefits of Mac are mostly imaginary/subjective, apart from not needing a virus scanner).
(currently, benefits of Mac are mostly imaginary/subjective, apart from not needing a virus scanner)
Actually, the reasons why I bought a MacBook(anecdotal, but still, a reference):
– Aperture
– Motion
– Final Cut Pro
– Logic Pro and GarageBand
– My girlfriend uses it without difficulty
I also use Maya (but the interface feels horrible, while on Windows it is good enough) and Adobe Suite, which are ok or better on Windows, but the Apple suite is killer. There is nothing like GarageBand or Logic Pro on Windows.
Indeed, GarageBand is a nice piece of multitrack software. I tend to prefer REAPER for heavy work, but it’s clearly not targeted at the same public at all, and manages to make audio sequencing somewhat easy.
In fact, if I remember well, Logic and GarageBand have some link at the engine level. It’s the UI and exposed features which are different.
I’m VERY excited about having a resolution independent user interface. There aren’t any that exist yet, right? I mean, besides having SVG icons and wallpapers.
I’m not interested in more applications switching to a brushed metal theme. I loved the original Aqua theme, with the striped lines. The brushed metal theme looks so boring to me. Maybe there will be a new theme.
In regards to hardware, maybe they will do something super duper crazy, like they did by not including a floppy drive in the past, and not include a disc drive on the Apple desktop computers.
Anyway, as for me, I’m happily using GNU/Linux + Window Maker. (based on the NeXTSTEP GUI)
Windows 7 when running WPF apps is resolution independent… (But, the majority of Windows apps are GDI, not WPF, and they get raster scaled. At least it’s not like on WinXP, where fonts and a few UI elements get bigger, and nothing else changes, and the layout is broken.)
You mean optical disc? I think you still need CD/DVD – for music and movies. I’d like to see no hard drives. They’re hot, slow, bulky and unreliable. Storage should be solid state.
Regarding software: One thing that is long overdue is the ability to rip DVDs and put them in a playlist. You should be able to store all your movies and play them when you want – without having to search for a DVD and worry about if it’s going to jerk and skip because it’s scratched or dirty. You should be able to select a movie in the playlist and it plays instantly – no menu or stupid FBI warning or other BS that you can’t skip through.
Of course, this will never happen. The movie industry want to force you to watch stuff you can’t skip through and they want the physical media to get scratched so you have to buy it again. (and of course, Apple want you to buy movies through iTunes)
I’d rather they ditch the Optical disc. I rarely use it, and would rather have an external drive for the few times I need to use it.
That would allow them to have 2 HDs. One would a SSD for speed, and the second could a standard HD for all the storage requirements required.
Or two HDs in RAID config etc!
It would be nice to ditch the optical disc (I hate optical discs), but only if they offered a cheap matching external optical drive. (are Apple optional extras ever cheap?) If you’ve already got an external optical drive, you don’t need it, but it should be available if you don’t.
I don’t use optical discs often either, but I don’t have an external optical drive and I still buy Compact Discs and DVDs.
Edited 2010-10-13 19:43 UTC
Why a matching drive, just get a compatible third-party USB drive. Those are quite cheap.
Unreliable ? I’m genuinely curious about this claim : have SSD finally got past mechanical hard drives in terms of reliability ?
Because yes, I know, no mechanical parts and everything, but every storage medium lasting more than 30 years which I know of (paper, clay, marble, tapes, optical disks if stored with extreme care, records, MiniDisc) requires mechanical parts somewhere in the writing or reading process.
In the specific case of SSD, last time I heard about them, they had some serious issues : sudden death by cremation after a few months in a way that’s similar to early low-end USB pen drives was still common, and the ones who did survive had an issue that only let them issue a very limited number of writes per NAND chip, requiring complex algorithms at the OS level to make them live reasonably long (like the strange filesystem of the EEEPC 701). Are these now fixed ?
Edited 2010-10-13 19:46 UTC
Using an OCZ Vertex Turbo for more than a year and still slick as snot! NO cremation here!
That’s a nasty simile.
The problem with SSDs today is the price/performance and price/storage ratios suck. An affordable SSD is slow, small and prone to early failure. And by affordable, I mean they are still twice the cost of a faster, larger mechanical drive. A model like yours, at $150 for 30GB it is just plain silly. Sure it may live almost as long as a cheap HDD, and I’m sure it’s a good deal faster, but for $150 I can buy three 250GB HDDs and RAID them for speed or redundancy.
Granted, that’s a desktop solution; for a laptop SSD makes a little more sense, though again I can’t seem to justify the price vs. performance gain. I guess it all comes down to whether you’ve got money to waste on incremental gains.
As to the longevity issue, I don’t see it as that big of a deal. By the time a decent SSD starts dropping capacity, the replacement cost will have gone down significantly.
I think with laptops it make more sense to have a home server to auto-backup to in case something happens. An SSD isn’t going to help if your laptop is stolen.
Well I was speaking mainly of the speed gains an SSD can give over a traditional drive; there are very few laptops on the market that support any kind of data redundancy internally, and those few behemoths hardly qualify for the “laptop” moniker. I agree with you though; no matter what type of storage you have in your portable, you should have a reliable backup, multiple if possible.
My only laptop is a netbook, and the few important files I work with on it stay in my Dropbox account and are also copied to an external USB drive daily. My world wouldn’t end if I lost any computer files; I’m old school and still have paper records of things like invoices for contract work, taxes and vital records. I also have DVD archives of digital photos going back to 1999.
That said, losing current data such as music projects and recent digital photos would be a headache I’d rather not suffer, hence the multiple backups, online and offline.
Yea I know and I agree with your comment about the ratios. I’m saying for reliability no single drive should be trusted so no one should buy an SSD for that reason. It’s actually cheaper to buy a 250gb Scorpio + a 1TB home server than a 250gb SSD.
I disagree, strongly. A good SSD is the number one component I add whenever putting together a new PC. Nothing improves the overall user experience more. If I have to buy a slightly cheaper CPU and/or graphics card to afford it, that is an easy and obvious sacrifice as far as I’m concerned.
For example, from a cpu and gpu standpoint my girlfriends computers is quite a bit higher speced than mine, but since I have an SSD my computer feels so much faster. Everything just starts faster and responds faster. I’ll probably go so far as to say that I’m never buying another computer without an SSD.
There are have been numerous SSD drives that had higher than average fail rates.
I put my SSD on ebay after being unimpressed with the speed boost. With Win7 and Vista common programs are already cached to the memory and cold boots are rare. I felt much safer after putting my Scorpio blue back in. I’ve seen 5400 RPM drives go 10 years and the power draw isn’t much different.
So yea SSDs are overrated for typical use. A 5400RPM Scorpio can read at over 50mb/sec. They are not the same drives that laptops came with 5 years ago.
Yea, if you are using a ssd for a boost in peak transfer io rates, you’ll always be disappointed. SSD is awesome for reducing seek times. I don’t blame anyone from being confused however, there were and still are some ssd manufacturers that don’t understand this. There have been some SSD’s sold that are tuned so much for peak transfer that the seek times are actually worse than traditional drives.
Edited 2010-10-14 18:22 UTC
If you get more than 5 or 6 years out a platter-based hard drive, you’re doing good….and lucky.
Solid state is where it’s at, and where it needs to go. And they need to leave the SATA interface behind, or seriously pump the limit past the theoretical and into the nominal.
5 years isn’t abnormal for a brand name 5400RPM drive.
There are after all 7200RPM server hard drives that have a 5 year warranty.
Yeah, I really don’t get the spindle hate. I have an SSD boot drive just because the lack of appreciative seek delay is so nice, but I also still have a massive HDD raid-5 for storage. I’ve rarely had a spindled drive go bad.
I know all the hdd failure horror stories, and I’ve had to replace my fair share of /other peoples/ drives, but its almost always caused by poorly ventilated cases with the drives being cakes in dust. Or they were deathstars :p
I have 15+ year old drives working fine. My IBM XT has its original 20mb hdd still that runs like new. We just, in the past year, started having hdd failures in out IBM netvistas at work that I have been replacing this year anyways. They all had IBM Deathstar drives and the machines are 10-11 years old.
I definitely do NOT trust all these “eco” and “green” drives… because spinning up and down constantly is a good idea *rolls eyes*
So far I haven’t had any HDD crash on me.
Sisters laptop did though, after getting dropped onto the table.
I’ve had plenty of drives, and I mean plenty, that have lasted more than 10 years. it’s easily in the dozens. Hard drives aren’t that fragile. I have 80G drives around here that I bought in 2003, ticking right along, I have given away dozens of machines with old 40s and 60s and 100s as boot drives that are still going strong.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, that 5 or 6 years is not unrealistic.
There’s something missing here : for a good lifetime comparison, you need to specify the lifetime of the two compared elements. Again, apart the mechanical part thing (which is not yet proven right), I’ve yet to see an argument about why SSDs should last longer.
Though maybe affordable SSDs are a bit young for having good statistical data about that already.
Also, all the hard drives I’ve owned until now have lasted more than 5 years. The latest one started to fail episodically after 6 years of heavy use. The old one in the Amstrad PC1512 of my youth still works after more than 15 years, but well… It’s not been used for some times.
Edited 2010-10-14 05:26 UTC
There’s already tons of software for ripping DVDs. (I use DVDFab on Windows – I’m sure Macs have something similar available.) Of course, this will never come bundled with the OS, for obvious reasons. (It’s technically illegal, at least in the US.)
Handbrake, open source, fast, easy, runs on OS X
I predict they have resolution independence, and high density screens in their laptops.
I like the original Mac OS X stripped theme best too. I don’t like all this grey scale.
I am really afraid that they might jump all the latest OS hypes from the mobile world:
– tight integration social network with the desktop, mixing your contacts with everything you do all the time.
– high dependence on cloud services, moving everything out of the users control, and render the computer “useless” when offline.
– touch interface.. can’ really imagine how that can be useful on a computer. Pointing straght forwards for hours WILL get tiresome, especially if your writing a 2000-words document, or sitting in front of the computer all day for actual work.
– and although Apple already have told they would not introduce it; Appstore with signed apps as the only means of distribution.
Lets hope they get it right. If they do all of the above I will loose interest. There is a time and a place for such features, its called an ipad, and is a huge success on its own.
Edited 2010-10-13 19:00 UTC
Apple doesn’t have a social network or cloud of its own, and it is not their interest to help the competion by enabling better integration with Google or Microsoft owned services (not adding their generel distrust of anything Not-Invented-Here). So if this was the new features then THE main announcement would be a new social network, cloud service, or sucking up to Zuckerberg (but doesn’t Google own a large part of Facebook, though?)
Actually they have both, but neither is comparable to the non-Apple alternatives.
For the cloud, they offer MobileMe, which is extremely overpriced for what you get, and is tightly integrated with their products alone.
As for a social network, that’s what Ping is supposed to be, though again it falls short and is highly vertical: A feature of their media player software that is tied to their music store. Not to mention, they were snubbed by Facebook at the Ping launch because they tried to break the rules.
I really am looking forward to the event so I can hopefully see something Mac or OS X related. OS X is the only part of Apple I truly like these days.
Wow so Apple hasn’t totally given up on OS X!
…Or maybe they will announce they are killing OSX.
Music I’d play before the event: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” 😛
Looking forward for that. It will be a good occasion to check some of my theories about Apple, iOS, and the Mac OS ecosystem for validity.
Jesus christ i almost threw up laughing..
I hate to ask a probably dumb question, but what is that quote referring to? I’m drawing a blank.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jesus-christ-its-a-lion-get-in-the-ca…
my take on the most probable features:
-GameCenter for OSX
-App store for OSX
-Brings more iOS lookoing developper APIs to OSX
-Better power managment
-Better document sharing with iOS
-Use iOS devices as a touchpad (officially)
-iOS emulator (worthless exept for things like notes software without exports)
-Better printer managment (Air print and/or proper zeroconf print and/or both)
-“revolutionizing” integration with apple TV
-full 64bit (this time)
-drop core duo support
-100% cocoa, remove carbon from OSXI (teaser)
-drop aqua for terra or whatever the theme in iTunes for Windows is
New hardware:
-wireless printer ports (iOS based, but screenless) or integration with airport-x/wireless itunes gizmo
-mac book air
…..-better battery life
…..-new form factor
…..-thiner
…..-tablet iOS mode (probably not)
This is mostly realistic, no fancy prediction here. Incremental update to make OSX more mature. At this point, OSX would be more mature / stable than Win7, but less advanced. OSX or OSXI will become the legacy line in about 5 years (replaced with book like dual touch screen iOS devices, the future of netbooks/notebooks), spending more money right now does not make sense. Apple hate buttons and mouse, it is not a bad thing. In most case, keyboard+touch is better, more intuitive and more flexible. I prefer Linux, but OSX is my secondary OS, when I need to be mainstream. The files/windows/data management is terrible, but the OS is quite simple.
Edited 2010-10-13 20:44 UTC
good list!
I do recon we might see the mundane but useful apps like Mail and iCal get a hefty facelift.
Also my money is on a new ‘social’ app to try to merge Ping/facebook/twitter or at least making social networking seamless within the OS itself
Do you think we might see something like Oracle Beehive integration ?
In order for Apple to push further into the Desktop and Mobile space they are likely to need more business oriented apps and I guess its also something that can differentiate the iPhone from all its clones (since Oracle and Google aren’t exactly best buddies at the moment).
They are coming out with a new version of the Nano called the “Nano-Nano”. It is the size and shape of a button, and can actually be used as a shirt button. It has a built-in buttonometer that detects both its position on the shirt, as well as the buttoned or unbuttoned status. It tailors the music to this status. If it is the top button and it is buttoned, it plays classical music. If it is the third button and it is unbuttoned, then it plays smooth jazz.
I hope the lawyers don’t read this.
There is a variant called the “Nanoo Nanoo” that can detect the presence of chest hair, and subsequently all the voiceover controls will sound like Robin Williams.
..CoreTeleport API.
As mundane as it may sound, the feature I want in OS X the most is to make that damn cut command in the Finder actually do something! Why can’t I cut and paste files like I can in *every* other major GUI environment? The command is there in the menu, it has cmd+x assigned… but it doesn’t freaking do anything! Make it work, Apple. This bit, at least, is not rocket science.
The feature I’d like next is an option to completely disable those metadata files on non-HFS+ volumes. I’m sick of my thumbdrives and sd cards getting polluted with .DS_Store, .Trashes, etc. Sure, I can turn off .DS_Store for network shares with a PList edit, but that only stops .DS_Stores (all the other dot files still get created and only for network shares. My external drives still get cluttered with that crap, and I hate it, especially when it decides to do ._ files for *every* file in that folder! Aaaaarrghhh! I know about Blue Harvest, but that’s a reactive approach and besides I equate that to AppZapper, i.e. having to pay for a feature that should be part of the os.
Personally, I consider 10.6 a substantial release, far more important than 10.5, since it actually included under the hood enhancements and technologies that will carry the system into the future.
That said, looking forward to 10.7.
Hoping we’ll see support for OpenGL 3, it’s about time Apple.
Also, resolution independence, trim support for SSDs.
Edited 2010-10-14 02:50 UTC
I totally agree with you. It is amusing how most people consider 10.5 to be a more substantial release than 10.6. The work Apple did on SL was pretty amazing from a technical point of view.
I also think that OpenGL 3 + res independence + trim support for SSDs are a good bet for 10.7. Also, I think one of the most logical steps for 10.7 is sandboxing the entire OS. The advent of GCD in SL makes it very feasible. It will give OS X huge advantages over windows.
Decent IPv6 support would be nice.
– DHCPv6 client support
– RFC 5006 – IPv6 Router Advertisement Option for DNS support
– No broken IPv6 resolving when CNAMEs are involved.
And this all out of the box please
Oh!? Just when Microsoft were perfecting their clone, you want to change the goal posts? I’ve been using Windows 7 for about 2 or 3 months now – it seriously wants to be Aqua in feel (if not look.)
Finder – seriously, is my favourite file manager of all time, save the later Tracker versions in BeOS. I admit, I came through OpenStep, so I was so, so happy to see the column view in Finder. The old Finder, from OS 9 and earlier was AWFUL to use. Windows Explorer – HATE! The first thing I do in XP is turn on “Classic” look and close the idiotic tree view. I’d far rather have two windows than use the tree view. The column view is the ultimate extension of two windows.
Thom – you are not a software engineer, by admission. Let’s put this in to perspective – I have a book written in Chinese, you need to translate it in to Dutch on your own. Okay – you could do that. Now, imagine I then said, that I had other 10 books after that one was finished.. some were in Chinese, some were in Japanese, and one was in Bulgarian. Sure, with infinite resources, you could do them all. It’s not trivial though. It’s not going to be a 5 minute job now, is it? If it was a case of changing a few scripts and recompiling, I think that would have happened by now. Cocoa and Carbon are about as close in nature as Chinese is to Dutch. The only thing they have in common is that they are both ultimately using C in some way (Carbon is written in C, Cocoa is mostly written in Objective-C, with some C elements.) Can I suggest you do a little research before making sweeping statements?
I’m still waiting for Microsoft to produce Office in .Net or even any large non developer apps. The only major app I use regularly that they’ve written in .Net is SQL Server Management Studio. It’s all very easy for a layman to whine about these things, but practically speaking, you need to consider all of the implications. Before you hard on about “Adobe” and “Microsoft” and Cocoa, yes, Photoshop is not a trivial app, but it’s far less trivial that an operating system. Generally, the quality of OS X (as in QA and testing) out performs Adobe and Microsoft’s Mac products by volumes.
I don’t know what you do to your systems, but I run iTunes on Mac and Windows EVERY day and have never had any issues, not for years. Back in the iTunes 7 era, there were a few hiccups, but that was so long ago I dont even remember what they were. I’m actually running iTunes as I type this.. zero issues. My system is only a Core 2 duo, 2.2GHz, it’s not “new” and it’s not pimped out or anything. I think you’re making a big deal about it because you have personally don’t like the model iTunes uses. I don’t share this, I’m not alone.
Itunes is not an operating system. Also it is a far simpler program than photoshop.
Since when is iTunes the entirety OS X? You, sir, are an idiot. Thom, at least, was speaking of OS X in general. But, hey, what do I know, right? I’ve only done the exact “porting” exercise in question for a commercial product, so yeah it’s all really simple stuff. Like banging square plugs in to round holes easy.
Square plugs and round holes ? Reminds me of something about those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world… A long time ago…
Clearly you missed the point of my Statement. Let an Idiot spell it out for you:
You said that porting an operating system is not trivial, that is true (despite the fact that cocoa only applies to UI frameworks) .
I said Itunes is not an operating system, therefore far easier to port. What is stopping apple from doing so?
Adobe managed to port photoshop extremely quickly and yet Apple failed to do so on finder ’till snow leopard (finder isn’t an operating system, merely the desktop shell).
I see several possible explanations :
1/Apple doesn’t care much about OSX anymore, now that they can see how much of a bigger cash cow iPods and iOS devices are. I’ll see how right this is at this event.
2/They tried to distort the role of iTunes so horribly that they more or less reproduced Microsoft’s move to integrate their web browser everywhere : in OSX, iTunes could have a much larger role internally than we can see, and be linked to a shitload of system libs, many of which have nothing to do with music, which makes porting it to another toolkit a nightmare.
Have you ever ported a Carbon app to Cocoa? It would be harder than porting an app written in Win32 API C (straight C, calling the Win32 API directly) to C# using WinForms.
What does iTunes have to do with porting all Carbon elements of OS X to Cocoa? iTunes is NOT an integral part of OS X, unless you had not noticed.
No, no they didn’t. It took them almost 10 years.
Then porting Itunes should be easier. I’m not saying it is easy but I doubt it is comparable to photoshop. We get version after version of Itunes that is carbon based, I bet itunes 11 will still be carbon. They keep adding features to itunes; features that are adding to the “porting tax” if they ever move to cocoa.
See what happened with QTX. It is modern but completely devoid of features (compared to QT7), simply because they couldn’t develop the features in time due to the cruftiness and complexity of the QT codebase.
There aren’t that many carbon apps left. But Itunes is a prime example of an app that could benefit from cocoa. It isn’t a piece of framework but it is part of OSX.
Adobe did the majority its porting development between versions. It took them 10 years because they were coasting on carbon and originally apple promised them that it would be maintained. They dropped it because apple is dropping further development of carbon.
Uh? What?
Seriously, sometimes I feel the IQ dissipate when I visit these forums.
I am still trying to figure out how Thom’s measures time, given that 10.6 came in 2009. Maybe he lives in the future and it is already 2012 in his part of the world?
I don’t intend to spend cash on new hardware, since I have already done that this year in order to accommodate Windows 7. I’d certainly buy and use OS X if I could install it on my hardware, but in no way am I going to buy new hardware, which is essentially the same as the one I have, in order to run OS X.
I am looking for the possibility to configure the system. The idea that the folks at Cupertino won’t let me resize the system font despite using a 1920×1080 screen doesn’t sit well with me.
I know it’s not in their genes (remember the desktop pattern thing back in the 80’s?) but I won’t buy and use a Mac unless that has happened.
Oh, and yes, truly mind-blowingly fast boot time. They said the 64-bit move made things faster… why doesn’t it show in the boot time?