Let me make it clear. I’m not a fan of Apple. I think that their products are overhyped, overpriced and underperforming. If you’re looking for a fair unbiased opinion, you’re looking in the wrong place. You’ve been warned. So, I was at Steve Jobs’ 2004 WWDC keynote yesterday, attempting to take pictures for OSNews (an amazingly hard task, by the way, which really explained why people pay big bucks for big lenses equipped with image stabilizers). UPDATE: Stop reading right there, I have rewritten & updated the article here.
Editorial Notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com
Not much to say about the Airport Express (nice little appliance, well thought, well executed, I found it funny that Steve Jobs would use the words “iTunes” and “lossless compression” in the same sentence). Not much to say about the iPod BMW connection (it’s ironic that iPod and iDrive don’t work together, and even though it’s unrelated the gray plastic bumper of the X3 looks cheap and out-of-place on a BMW). Not much to say about to 30-inch monitor (“wow”), nor about its price (“damn”).
Now, about some of the actual features of Tiger:
-Data syncing. Nice, maybe, but every single app needs to do some work, and I’m ready to bet that at least some of them won’t (who wants to bet that my default JPEG settings in Photoshop won’t migrate over). That’s also a domain where interoperability with the PC world would be crucially important but seems to be sorely missing.
-64 bit support. Nice for those who have G5s, maybe. For those of us stuck with ancient machines (the G4 kind, which Apple still sells today on their web site) there doesn’t seem to be any enhancement, and no indication that Photoshop CS will be able to use more than about 40% of the RAM on my 2GB dual G4).
-Dashboard. A plain, simple and blatant ripoff of Konfabulator. The kind that makes you think that software patents aren’t a bad thing after all. The kind that makes Steve Jobs look like a fool when the big banners for Tiger read “Redmond: start your photocopiers”. Shame on you, Apple, this kind of behavior really doesn’t make me want to give you any of my money, if all you do with it is drive your own developers out of business. That being said the way the accessories slide in view over the existing apps is probably nicer than having them on the desktop.
-Safari RSS. Not overly impressed. I’ve worked on RSS as part of my day job, and honestly what Apple did is really not a big deal. If they don’t improve the way they make RSS pages look (they currently all look the same), they’ll
have missed a big opportunity to really innovate. I’d much rather have learnt that they fixed some of the rendering bugs that Safari has, or that they did a better job at integrating PDF (actually, there’s absolutely no integration at all in 10.3, so anything will be better), or that they improved direct navigation to images, or many other things where Safari has a lot of margin for improvement.
-Automator. Once again not really impressed. That reminded me a lot of the Khoros image processing system which I used in college almost a decade ago, except that the Khoros system allowed for non-linear processing chains. Also not really impressed by how basic the UI was when entering parameters. There seemed to be no way to enter parameters in advance (a script that takes a while
to run can’t be left to run unattended if it needs parameters in the middle of its execution, and no way to specify that a given parameter would be used in
multiple places in the script.
-Spotlight. In 1997, as a Be developer, I got my hands on BeOS “Advanced Access” (also known as developer release 9). I wasn’t a Be engineer yet at the time. It was the first release that featured Dominic’s bfs filesystem instead of Benoit’s ofs filesystem. bfs was a major step forward from ofs, but not a revolution. It was natural evolution. Spotlight is an evolution of a similar
magnitude, which attempts to solve pretty much the same problem with a slightly different approach. Seeing Finder create complex queries gave me the illusion for a moment that BeOS’ Tracker had been ported to MacOS.
-Core Image. Discussing the issue with other engineers who are more familiar with the image-processing capabilities of current graphics cards, it very much sounds like Core Image isn’t gonna cut it for serious image processing
(support for floating-point pixel formats as source or destination of pixel shaders seems to pretty much not exist, which is a veyr big issue if the processing chain contains in the middle a filter that can’t or isn’t
implemented by Core Image, like a plain Median Cut noise-removal filter). I’m really curious to know how well Core Image will deal with very large images. Epson’s rumored $500 F3200 scanner is able to output images that
weigh 180 megapixels (4×5) or that are 21000 pixels long (6×17). With IEEE 754 pixel formats we’re talking about 2GB per image, the kind of size that only the most carefully written software will handle (Photoshop barely manages). We’re talking about file sizes that are unusual, but not exotic yet (exotic is a 30GB 8000dpi drum scan of an 8×10 sheet of film, and overkill is a 130GB 12000 dpi drum scan of a 9×18 sheet, typically cropped from 12×20), and I wouldn’t bet too much on Core Image until I can be sure that it has the ability to scale to such sizes. Core Video sounds like it has a lot more potential, as speed is a definite issue there, and the expected SNR and pixel
sizes that are expected in video are well within what I expect a GPU to be able to handle.
Then there was the usual reality-distortion field surrounding many things that Apple says, as usual. A few examples:
-Steve Jobs claimed that Apple’s LCDs are a reference in image processing, and that other manufacturers use panels that Apple rejects. I’ll start with only two words about image processing: “Sony Artisan”. If you really want two more words I’ll add “Lacie Electronblue”. As for the quality of the panels that Apple uses, I’m officially inviting Steve Jobs to my place so that he can compare himself the quality of the screen on my IBM thinkpad and on Eugenia’s Powerbook.
-Steve Jobs claimed that the only OS transition ever to happen in the PC world was that in 1995 when going from DOS with Windows 95. Sorry buddy, but the transition from Windows 3.1/95/98/ME to Windows NT/2000/XP was at least as big. Or maybe I’d actually say that the PC world is unique in that it is able to maintain such a level of compatibility that no sharp transition is needed. The
latest Windows is still able to run many 10-year-old applications. Most recent PCs can still run 10-year old DOS 6.22. By comparison compatibility in the Mac
world is a total disaster.
-Steve Jobs was quick to mention that there hadn’t been any major release of Windows since Windows XP (I really wonder what that “Windows 2003 server” thing was). Ignoring the case of the expensive server OS, he forgot to compare the cost of continuing to run the latest version of Windows and the latest version of MacOS on a PC and on a Mac both bought in 2001.
When I interview a candidate whose resume lists tons of different competencies, I very much like to pick one which I am familiar with and ask a few advanced questions, the kind that can only be answered with some real knowledge and/or experience in the domain. When I get an unsatisfactory answer, all I can assume is that the knowledge of the candidate in the other domains is going
to be as shallow. Similarly when I listen to Steve Jobs’ glorified sales pitch, I recognize a few areas where I have some level of competency, and my knowledge
in those areas makes me realize that MacOS isn’t the perfect operating system that Apple would like me to believe.
In summary, I don’t think that MacOS 10.4 is worth my $129 (or my $199 since I have multiple Macs, assuming that they maintain their policy about upgrade pricing). In my experience each upgrade on MacOS X comes with a lot of pain, lots of broken compatibility with at least some of the drivers and accessories that I can’t live without on MacOS, and I’m getting to the point where my Mac experience is stuck between a rock (continuing to use 10.3 and all its problems) and a hard place (upgrading to 10.4 and deal with all the new bugs and incompatibilities).
As a footnote, here are a few of my gripes with MacOS X:
-I find the hardware support to be very poor. 10.3 doesn’t have any kind of decent out-of-the-box support for my good Keytronic USB keyboard (it swaps some of the modifier keys), for my good Logitech USB mouse (it makes it
several times slower than it is supposed to be). Finder doesn’t burn to my external Sony firewire DVD-R. I can’t print a full-page letter picture if I tell the OS that I’m printing on letter paper and I have to pretend that I
have legal paper, which then causes quite some headaches when trying to center prints.
-serious glitches in the window management. Exposé get very seriously confused when used while some modal windows are on screen, e.g. while scanning with an Epson 3200 photo scanner from within Photoshop. Maximizing the driver window of the Minolta Dual IV while inside Photoshop renders it almost unusable if you don’t know some of the advanced keyboard modifiers that allow to interact with the window manager). I’ll add that some apps (like the aforementioned driver for the Epson 3200 scanner) have some serious graphical glitches.
-memory limitations in applications. Even though my dual G4 has 2GB of RAM, which Photoshop can perfectly detect, Photoshop doesn’t manage to use more than about 900MB of RAM. The rest of the RAM mostly sits there, unused (several hundred MB are unused, which is especially annoying when Photoshop is struggling with the hard drive to try to apply filters to 500MB images).
-poor multi-user support. Fast user switching is only available when displaying the user name in the menu bar (try to create a user named “Jean-Baptiste Quéru” and to enable fast user switching while using Photoshop CS on a 1280-pixel-wide screen and you’ll see what I mean). Also many applications don’t work well (or at all) when you’re not the primary user of the machine, and many applications can’t be installed at all if yo’re not the primary user, while other applications cannot be installed to be available to all users at the same time even when installed to the primary user.
-non-intuitive installs, and non-existent uninstalls. I’ve installed several instances of software that wouldn’t install automatically and needed some files to be moved around by hand. I’ve seen instances of software where an
upgrade to a newer version would not replace the older version but would actually live side-by-side, with no visual indication about which version was the newer one. There’s no uninstaller worth mentioning that can clean up after your /Library, /System or your personal ~/Library for certain apps.
-non-existent keyboard shortcuts. I really dislike how there doesn’t seem to be any way to dismiss certain alerts with the keyboard, or how there doesn’t seem to be a standard way to access with the keyboard menu items that don’t have a shortcut. I got really annoyed when I found no way to move a window with the keyboard (which would be quite handy when a window ends up in a spot where you can’t access its title bar with the mouse, e.g. underneath the Photoshop toolbar).
At the moment, MacOS irritates me so much that I don’t even want to use it any more, which means that I’m not really doing any photography. If Apple doesn’t solve those issues with Tiger (or if they do but create many new ones on the way) I have the feeling that I’ll go back to using my trusted old PC. It might be noisy and slow, but it just works much better for me. Your mileage may vary.
Oh, one last note. Before someone tells me that some of the problems I have come from application writers and not from Apple, let me tell you that I’ve walked the very same arrogant path when I was at Be, claiming that it was
possible to write clean applications for BeOS. As long as the OS makes it easier to write misbehaving code than to write well-working code, something is wrong with the OS itself and the blame cannot be passed on to the application
developers. Even worse, it doesn’t matter which API is the cleanest, which programming language is the most advanced, or any of those abstract qualities. If a small OS (in terms of market share) like MacOS has API that doesn’t look
like what most developers are used to, something is wrong (again) with the OS itself.
About the Author
JBQ is a software engineer who used to work on BeOS in a previous life. He uses Windows XP and Mac OS X (no, he doesn’t use BeOS), and one of his hobbies is photography, which involves a lot of work in the digital darkroom.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
You seem to of had the complete opposite experience to me, I just upgraded to a PowerBook with 10.3 and I’ve a few little problems sure, but nothing major. Some of the apps I had may not of worked when panther first came out but that was some time ago now and everythings been updated since then so there’s been no problems to date.
You seem to be having rather less luck, I think Apple should offer you a place on their beta program!
I think the decision to replace the OS rather than keep API / ABI compatibility will probably be a better idea in the long run, otherwise the OS would be full of hacks for backwards compatibility and would slow down upgrades and additions. If you want to use older stuff there is always Classic.
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I think the move from 68K to PPC was a major achievement but I think the MorphOS team have actually done more. They had to not only completely reverse-engineer the OS (they never had the sources) but got it to work on completely different CPU and hardware architecture. Any one of those is a difficult task but to do all three simultaneously…
Here is my take on Tiger after watching the ‘Promotional Video’ by Steve Jobs. I expected to be underwhelmed since I am finding Panther to be near perfect already. However, I was pleasantly surprised. There are some significant improvements to usability that stood out. First was Spotlight. I frequently use search to find my files since they are scattered over several drives, especially in the case of my office computer (Quicksilver 733 Mhz). Although the speed of searching has improved in Os X over the different iterations, it is still woefully slow in comparison to Os 8 or Os 9. With Tiger, it now appears to be fixed. Moreover, one can do a global search that looks through all applications, including Mail, Address book etc. This is just what I need. Now one needs to just type in the word or even partial word in the global search menu on the Menu bar and ‘bam’ one gets the results. It is true, now you can probably do away with the finder and just dump all files in one folder, if you wish. I understand, that these search features are not new to Windows and Be Os users, but it does make life easier for Mac users, such as myself.
I also like the abiliity to audio or video conference with multiple users at the same time (using iChat) . Unfortunately, however, the people at the other end with whom I would like to conference/IM all use Yahoo Messenger. So I guess, at this point, it does not seem that useful to me.
SJ mentioned that making the Os 64 bit also speeded up 32 bit applications. Maybe, the author can elaborate on how this would be so.
I had another questions. Will Tiger still support Os 9 i.e can Os 9 be run along side Os X as we currently do with Jaguar and Panther?
I do agree with another comment by the author that sometimes it is quite hard to trouble shoot Os X and some things behave quirkily for no apparent reason. Sometimes these misbehaviors go away by themselves. For instance, my Airport connection suddenly dropped one morning. I had to turn off and turn on Airport to get it back.
Finally a comment about rip off of Konfabulator. What Apple has done is to provide an SDK for creating such widgets. I would thus imagine, that Konfabulator can still sell its widgets-apparently about 650 of them are now available on the Konfabulator website. While it may be a rip off, the situation may not be as bad as in the case of Watson. I may be wrong on this and this may signify the end of Konfabulator as we know it.
Cheers everyone.
——————
To borrow somebody’s recent saying on the web:
“While Redmond blogs, Cupertino codes!”
What would I expect from an engineer?
Do you want an engineer’s thoughts on OS X?
Engineering, technical thoughts?
Then read http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/
There are some really good coments on OS X…
Technical ones…
“And while i love konfabulator, i have to say that gDesklets, Karamba, and other Linux programs have been doing the same thing as konfabulator for much longer.”
Funny you should mention that, because karamba and gdesklets are just ripoffs of samurize (YES FOR WINDOWS!), only with more bloat, slower, and without any gui tools like samurize-config (but cli is better right?).
JBQ explicity gave a warning to his bias at the beginning of the article. Just like typical zealots, they attack the messenger and not the message.
If it’s 95% “there” for you then how do you make out that the other 5%–which “constantly annoy you”–didn’t got solved? Only 10 of the major changes were shown, it was said that more than 150 were made.
Apart from that I wouldn’t be grinding my teeth into the preview of on OS which won’t be shipped until summer next year. So let the people, who are lucky enough to get and actually use this version, look at it and hopefully provide some good feedback.
If you hate the Mac OS, so much, stop using it. You say you are stuck between a rock and a hard place (10.3 and 10.4), why don’t you go back to OS9? 9 is still a good reliable OS, and it probably functions well with all your 3rd party hardware.
Regarding your comments on moving from Windows 3.1 to 95 to 98 to 982e to ME to 2000 to NT (at least there aren’t two Mac OS’s that are the exact same except for the name) to XP to whatever, those are NOT major upgrades. It was however a major upgrade going from DOS to Windows; all Windows OS’s up to now, and including Longhorn, are based on DOS. the major Mac upgrade from OS 9 to OS X was HUGE. It went from Apple’s own OS base (I’m not sure what it was based on) to UNIX.
Go back to your Windows and your OS based on technology over 10 years old, and stop darkening the Mac world with you biased and unjust comments. (Nobody wants to hear them)
Just like your article certainly could’ve been better, OS X and OS X development tools could be better. And that’s why Apple has big releases like Panther and Tiger, and MS has XP and Longhorn. (Windows 2003 Server was not a client OS. Tiger is not a point release but neither is it a major, major overhaul like OSX 10.0 or Longhorn.)
So the question is: are those things that Apple is adding/changing in Tiger really things that would make the user’s or developer’s experience better? That’s the question your article should answer. But since you spend 1/3 of a page to make a big deal about what SJ says (his RDF or FUD), people who respond to your article will certainly make a big deal about what you say about what SJ says. So stick to the question.
So the one point you made with clarity (albeit a “footnote”) was that Tiger doesn’t fix any of the problems you have today with Panther, which is a valid point (unless it is fixed by the other 140 not-highlighted “features” – which we don’t know and that’s why your point is valid). Since you blame Apple vehemently for 2/3rds of a page for these problems, you force us to ask how many of these problems are the fault of Panther or Apple’s architecture and APIs, rather than the developer who unknowingly or intentionally chooses to do the wrong thing? Your article has a mix of both and an emotional attitude – leaving you open to criticism that you don’t know what you’re talking about and you hate the Mac. Over at Macintouch and Macfixit, people write all the time about Mac issues, many of them Apple’s fault, and no one rants or criticizes the criticism. But your attitude definitely riled people up.
The other point you made was that none of the highlighted features of Tiger impressed you. Some things were “nice, maybe” or borrowed from other apps/OSes. Some things would not be useful for high-end uses. So the best you could do for Tiger was “nice, maybe” even for 64-bit.
Even PC-sites (Scoble) or neutral-sites found at least one item that was “a significant addition for users/developers.” So that leads to questions about your overall credibility. Now, you may be neutral but combined with your attitude at the end, it’s hard for anyone to see it. If you had not included the second page, and if you had explained for each Tiger item, what was the gain for users/developers, and what was lacking (i.e., could be better because I’ve seen so-and-so in such-and-such a place already), people would’ve enjoyed and learned from your article. For example, your review of Spotlight was just a sort-of-comparison with Be Tracker. Instead, as an engineer, you could’ve told us how this compares with WinFS in Longhorn. Where does it fall short? Same for Automator, .Mac/iSync, Core Data, SQLite. (The last two you learn about at Apple’s site.) These technologies, when combined, go a significant way toward accomplishing the goals of WinFS but in a much more loose, distributed way. Is Apple’s method possibly better than MS’ monolithic top-down approach or will this “looseness” lead to problems later when developers don’t behave?
So I commiserate with you that nobody has fixed the problems you have on the Mac. I, too, have problems with the way certain things work on both Mac and Windows PC, and I learn to work around it, live with it, or find something else to use. Some have been fixed by 10.1.5, 10.2.8, or 10.3.3. But if Apple came out at WWDC and said, we’re fixing our USB driver issues, window management issues, multi-user support, and getting our developers to allocate memory and write installers/uninstallers properly, most people would’ve said that is a bug fix release. That’s not what 10.4 is about.
Hope your next article will be better, whether it is a major release, point release, or a bug fix. Thanks anyway for your thoughts and don’t get hung up on what Steve or Bill says. Have a great day!
>why don’t you go back to OS9
Our powermac does not work with OS9 and our Photoshop CS doesn’t work on OS9 either AFAIK. Plus, JBQ used the classic OS9 for years, he hates its inability to be stable.
“For example, he complains about no way to move windows with the keyboard. If he had ever tried to drag a window off screen, he would have realized that this action was impossible; the window snaps back.”
The problem was not that the window was off-screen, rather that it was entirely behind another (floating) window. If you have Photoshop CS and a Dual IV, make sure that you have the tool bar and option bar enabled in photoshop, start to scan, and maximize the scanner window. It’s entirely inside the screen, but behind a floater.
“Second, why attack a framework that appears to be designed as a way for developers writing general-purpose applications to get code for free on the grounds that it does not meet the needs of a specialty application?”
Because Jobs was fairly clear that he was hoping to get Adobe to use it in Photoshop, which (as an advanced Photoshop user who also formally studied image processing) sounds like a gross misreprentation of what such an API is really capable of doing on the current class of hardware.
“Why whine about greater 64-bit support?”
I don’t. I’m just worried that Apple’s natural push toward selling more hardware may come at the expense of solving problems on “older” current hardware. Sure, 64-bit is the real and only long-term answer to the problems of memory sizes, no contest, but that doesn’t solve my problems, not owning a G5 (nor a 64-bit version of Photoshop for that matter).
“Keyboard shortcuts- no problem here; I work almost exclusively with the keyboard.”
I don’t know how you do it – I haven’t figured it out yet.
“It seems that you have “MacOS doesn’t work like my Windows” syndrome. The Mac does many things differently.”
Actually, not really. I was an Atari ST user, then a Mac user, then a BeOS user before Windows became my primary OS. I’m fine with MacOS doing a few things differently because of very fundamental design decisions, but in some cases I consider the MacOS behavior to be gratuitously different, and not only from Windows. The speed of the mouse is one definite such example. I was aware of the high-level differences, and I live with them, not a problem. What really bothers me are the small details, the things that have become so intuitive to me that they annoy me each time, like not being able to dismiss alerts with the “Esc” key.
“without having first having researched the subject”
I have been using MacOS 10.3 on a fairly regular basis for the last year or so. The only desktop machine I use at home is that Mac, even though we have half a dozen PCs. MacOS is almost there, but just almost, collapsing a few hundred feet from the end of a triathlon, and (in my opinion) thrashing and making a lot of noise at the moment instead of crawling to the finish line.
“If it only allocates 900MB of RAM for itself, that is the only the fault of Adobe.”
As I wrote in an earlier post, with one line of code using a standard API I can allocate more than 1GB of RAM on my Windows XP box (almost exactly 1.1GB to be precise), and I still consider this to be poor. In my opinion as a software engineer who likes low-level OS issues, a modern OS running on 32-bit CPUs today should allow applications to use 2 to 3GB of RAM simultaneously without too much trouble (it doesn’t necessarily have to be trivial, but it doesn’t have to be awfully hard either), and a well-thought system would even be able to allow to use more than 4GB of RAM, though obviously not all of it would be addressable at the same time. As an engineer with some experience in kernel programming, I can tell you that the concepts involved aren’t hard, and that if Adobe has some trouble with the feature it would be in Apple’s best interest to send a few people from Cupertino to San Jose to make sure that Adobe gets it right.
“When Tiger comes out call the manufacturer of your third party equipment and find out what their support is/will be for the new OS.”
Yes. Like Iogear suddenly finding out the their USB2 card which was working OK under 10.2 suddenly doesn’t work under 10.3, and deciding that they wouldn’t support that card under 10.3.
“Discussing the issue with other engineers who are more familiar with the image-processing capabilities of current graphics cards, it very much sounds like Core Image isn’t gonna cut it for serious image processing (support for floating-point pixel formats as source or destination of pixel shaders seems to pretty much not exist, which is a veyr big issue if the processing chain contains in the middle a filter that can’t or isn’t implemented by Core Image, like a plain Median Cut noise-removal filter).”
Image UNITS, Image UNITS. Apple is providing a base set of units. Units are perfectly extensible and user/developer codeable. Have a filter or effect that doesn’t have its own unit already, then create it and it will always be available.
When Core Audio was introduced, there were fewer Audio Units and hardly any to zero third party units. Now there are many more and hundreds upon hundreds of third party audio units.
I see no reason to believe that Core Image is going to remain just 40 or so effects.
I initially intende the article to go in either my short-term or long-term blog (probably the latter), under the title “My thoughts on …”. When Eugenia saw that I was writing something she asked me if she could publish it on OSnews, and she picked the final title.
Honestly I wrote very little of it with an engineer’s eye (except for the part about Core Image). Most of it was meant to be a “grain of salt” to Jobs’ presentation, coming from someone who selfishly would like to see a few very small improvements in his current MacOS experience instead of grand plans for huge features, and from someone who has used enough systems in the past to recognize a few of the “we’re the first ones to do this” new features as being slightly improved versions of what other people had done before.
This is a conjecture. Since the new displays can be hung on a wall, it looks like they can be used as TVs. With something akin to AirTunes, (AirTV?) in conjunction with wireless Firewire, it may soon be possible to send video wirelessly from your computer to the screen. Notice that the displays have both USB 2 & firewire connections. Looks like Apple will achieve the integration between the PCs and the entertainment center sooner than later.
For what’s its worth– my 2¢
Touché. I deserved that.
I’m sarcastic by nature, even moer so when I’m tired, irritated, or (worse) both.
I run 10.3 on a dual G4 and I have no problem accessing more than 900 GB of memory in Photoshop CS. Not sure what your problem is, but sometimes when problems occur and Apple and Photoshop both say it is possible and a feature… it’s worth trying to troubleshoot it rather than saying its impossible because the OS encourages developers to write bad code but in WIndows it’s one line of code.
“If you were unbiased you would point out the small problems you have with your Windows software.”
Sorry, I don’t have time for the small problems, there are way too many of them (buggy drivers, serious issues between IE and Acroread, or between XP, MSVC6 and PurifyPlus. Viruses galore and antivirus galore. Terminal services, laptops and multiple-montors. Obscure way to associate extensions with applications, multi-instance vs single-instance vs hybrid applications, etc…).
Sadly I have to use the thing for work, so I am forced to live with all those issues.
Hello JBQ,
Regarding the behavior you are observing with Photoshop CS, it seems that Photoshop is working as designed. Although Photoshop sees the all 2GB of your physically installed RAM, as expected, Photoshop will never be able to grab the full 2GB even if you specify 100%. This is because the percentage that you specify in preferences is a percentage of *available* memory after the system and other apps grab their allocation. In other words, the % of RAM you set is a limit, rather than an actual allocation like we had in Mac OS 9.x. So if you have 2 GB physical memory installed but only 880MB free, Photoshop can only take the specified percentage of 880MB before going to the scratch disk.
This behavior is discussed at length in Adobe’s Photoshop forums. Here’s a Google cache if you aren’t a member.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=3bb3cccf…
“… Most of it was meant to be a “grain of salt” to Jobs’ presentation, coming from someone who selfishly would like to see a few very small improvements in his current MacOS experience instead of grand plans for huge features, and from someone who has used enough systems in the past to recognize a few of the “we’re the first ones to do this” new features as being slightly improved versions of what other people had done before.”
If you had written this as the preface to your article, you would’ve saved yourself a lot of abuse. Mac fanatics know that SJ exaggerates for effect; no need to tell them!
And has there ever been Mac software from Apple that hasn’t been built on something else (since MacWrite/MacPaint/ MacDraw)? But even if others have done it before, Mac users believe passionately that when it is done again on the Mac, it will be done better (or done right); so that the “average user” will be able to happily use it. Apple doesn’t have the cash for basic research; it’s forte is taking some idea or implementation and making it better from the user’s perspective: either easier-to-use because it focuses on the user’s task at hand, easier-to-understand because it uses user language not tech language, cooler-to-look at.
>So if you have 2 GB physical memory installed but only 880MB free
I fail to see how only 880 MB is free if only PS and OSX is loaded.
“JBQ, what kind of apps have you installed where you had to place files in various places by hand? I haven’t run into that yet. Thanks!”
The driver for my Minolta Dual IV scanner was one such case. Silverfast SE for my Epson 3200 Photo was another (worse) example (in that case Eugenia had to install the software, register it, then copy the registration file to my home directory because it wouldn’t run through the process with my user).
From the Apple HI Guidelines…
Esc (Escape)
The Esc (Escape) key basically means “let me out of here.” It has specific meanings in certain contexts. The user can press Esc in the following situations:
* In a dialog, instead of clicking Cancel
* To stop an operation in progress (such as printing), instead of pressing Command-period
* To cancel renaming a file or an item in a list
* To cancel a drag in progress
Pressing Esc should never cause the user to back out of an operation that would require extensive time or work to reenter. When the user presses Esc during a lengthy operation, display a confirmation dialog to be sure that the key wasn’t pressed accidentally.
“JBQ, some of your complaints are completely unfair and silly. Microsoft does not make “out-of-the-box” drivers for a HUGE amount of hardware. As an engineer, I can’t believe you really think it’s a good idea that *one* company should make drivers to support *all* the related products other companies make.”
Correct, Microsoft instead works closely with hardware vendors to be sure that the Windows CD contains the relevant drivers, and makes the updates available through Windows Update. They have enough power to force that on hardware vendors.
“That there is not as much 3rd party support for Apple is directly related to the amount of market share Apple has. I’m sure you know this, yet you flame Apple for this?”
I’ve walked the same shoes while at Be. We had to to an awful lot of work to get soem kind of decenet hardware support, which Microsoft doesn’t have to do as the hardware vendors do it for them.
It’s one thing to not support certain arcane PCI cards. I don’t expect all of them to be supported, especially if they cover a function that a standard Mac already has. It’s another to have issues with standard USB keyboard or mice, or firewire CD burners. I can live with the former, but the latter leaves a bitter taste.
Why do people rip on Apple for having new OS releases every year? People say they are ripping people off for charging $130 every year to update and Microsoft doesn’t do that. You all forget that Microsoft gets money for every copy of XP installed on a new computer. Apple doesn’t get anything for putting their OS on their computers. So in reality Microsoft is raking in the money but you people accuse Apple of stealing people’s money. It’s just that Microsoft doesn’t have to update the OS every year like Apple has to.
“Why do you, the author, state that you are unable to make a fair assessment of Apple’s offerings? Are you unable to try?”
I didn’t try to, nor did I claim that I tried. I could have tried, but the results would have been at best poor because I don’t use MacOS enough (nor its competitors other that Windows XP) to be able to get a fair and complete opinion of the improvements that Tiger may bring.
–I fail to see how only 880 MB is free if only PS and OSX is loaded.
I’d check top to see what is running and may be taking up memory.
c’mon man! you’ve got an Apple Macintosh with MacOS X. Enjoy. At least you’re virus free! Live and let die. I wonder how many people would love to have a Mac and can’t afford it. Exposé is beautiful, MacOS X is beautiful, DOck is amazing… enjoy what you have. Imagine if you had to use OS/2 like I had to do @ IBM for 3 years!
🙂
Relax, I’ve just been erased (sic)
Martin.
“I found it funny that Steve Jobs would use the words “iTunes” and “lossless compression” in the same sentence”
Why is that funny? Have you ever seen a hash check fail with apple lossless?
I don`t believe so, lol. And compression/decompression is much faster than with .flac, with about the same compression rate.
There is nothing taking up memory. I got PS with an medium size image open, Safari, Activity Monitor and OSX and all are taking up 600 MBs of “real” memory. Now, if I try to open another really big image with PS, it will only use between 800 and 900 MBs of RAM. There is a missing 500 MBs.
Allocating a mere 1GB of memory is no problem with a simple malloc() call. 1,5 are no prob either. My PB refuses to do 2GB though. The 1/1,5GB get allocated on VM (I only have 768MB of memory and some apps running).
“Why is that funny?”
Primarily because my (limited) exposure to iTunes was through the iTunes music store, and I got the feeling that Jobs was showing ITMS as the primary way to get songs into iTunes (that’s the subjective impression I got by watching his presentation). My limited experience seemed to show that ITMS only offered 128kpbs rips, and at $10 per album I would very much expect to get a better quality. I listened to some of the samples and wasn’t impressed by the sound quality (so far I’ve never been impressed by the audio quality of just about any stereo audio below 160 or 192 kpbs – similarly I prefere DTS tracks to AC3 tracks on my DVDs, they seem to “fill the space” more).
So, I found it funny that in the context of listening to music purchased on ITMS the link from iTunes to the Airport was less likely to be a limiting factor than the lossiness of the ITMS compression.
Yet, the elast loss the better I feel, and if Apple was smart about the feature they send the stream of raw AAC data directly to the Airport Extreme where it gets decoded.
Once in a while, every 3 mos, the dumb crowd of users, regardless what OS they are using, should be straighten out.
Instead of verbal abuse, they should thank you for telling Apple what’s wrong and not working. Instead, you get an avalanche of insults from these idiots, such stupidity.
thanks again, frenchie!
As per the Google link earlier, Photoshop will not grab whatever RAM is allocated to it. Only what is necessary. Opening a large file will do nothing to test whether or not PS can access 2GB of RAM.
As I noted earlier, I routinely have Photoshop accessing well over 1GB but have not seen it reach all the way up to 2GB yet either.
“but you’re a Terrible Journalist.”
I’ll take that as a compliment. I never tried to be. I just wrote down a few notes for my blog and it grew up into being an OSnews article.
“BTW, where are the Photos?”
They sucked
Seriously, the place was much darker than I had anticipated, and even when pushing my gear to its limits I’d have needed at least 5 times as much light to get decent pictures. I wasn’t helped by the fact that in many cases the projected background was brighter than the people walking in front of it – it ended up being somewhat clipped out in some cases.
Some of them, mostly unedited and unretouched, are in Eugenia’s report. By the time I edit them and work on them a bit there might be (maybe) a half-dozen 800×600 pics.
– There is nothing taking up memory. I got PS with an medium size image open, Safari, Activity Monitor and OSX and all are taking up 600 MBs of “real” memory. Now, if I try to open another really big image with PS, it will only use between 800 and 900 MBs of RAM. There is a missing 500 MBs.
When you execute a PS action and notice the scratch disk being accessed, what does TOP report?
What is the percentage set to? 70%
There are and will always be two extremes:
– the people who will defend the platform to death, even if that involve sayings silly thing and doing false assements.
and
– the people who will critize the platform the same way the others defend it
We all know why this review got published, and it’s high comment numbers certainly do not reflect anything else than contestation.
Truth is that a point of view can be respected and discussed, but certainly not this way, like, “the point of view of the engeener”. No. It’s JBQ, Eugenia’s man review, and should be only published and discussed this way.
Then only the (legitim imho) flaming would be nonsense
Well, you have a point here, higher compression rate would be nice at the itms (heck, actually {i}having{/i} an itms would be even nicer, now that I think about it).
Thats one thing I don`t like about apple: Everything is very easy and real eye candy and very stable, but they don`t give you that many choices about most things. Steve Jobs just thinks he knows what`s right for everybody (often he {i}is{/i} right, I might add).
damn tags
As I wrote in an earlier post, with one line of code using a standard API I can allocate more than 1GB of RAM on my Windows XP box (almost exactly 1.1GB to be precise), and I still consider this to be poor.
What I don’t understand: Since you call yourself an engineer and you are having access to a Mac, I would expect that you try the same malloc() for the theoretical max amount of virtual memory on OSX as you did on Windows (it should be even the same line of malloc() code).
Blindly believing that your PS problem must be Apples fault and not Adobes is a very single sided approach. Have it every occured to you that Adobe probebly roll their own PS optimized memory management? Or that the same probleme may exist on the Windows plattform?
If the your 900MB limit is for real, I cannot imagine how other company manage to provide really memory hungry software for OSX (e. g. Oracle).
Besides, I would expect that Apple, with years of experience in OS developement – also knows how to implement a standard malloc() to get a decent amount of RAM: on 32Bit OSes, you get the same theoretical maximum amount of 4GB of virtual adress space in almost every OS and – depending on the VM implementation – a somewhat lower amount in real (I can’t find the link just now but I read somewhere that it’s around ~2GB on Windows and ~3.5 GB on OSX)
Nothing against critic as long as it is fair. But if you don’t treat all sides equal, don’t expect people to be happy with your “comments”. It’s hardly worth discussing about your speculations/rants…
“Blindly believing that your PS problem must be Apples fault and not Adobes is a very single sided approach. Have it every occured to you that Adobe probebly roll their own PS optimized memory management?”
Yes, it’s very blind and very single sided, relying on quite a few bits of intuition.
Actually, maybe that’s the core of the problem: maybe Photoshop’s “optimized” memory management is not “optimized” for what I want to do (a machine for which I paid big $$$ to get 2 CPUs and 2GB of RAM, and on which I only want to run photoshop to process one image at a time, which sometimes happens to be a big image).
I write memory managers and memory management code for a living (with quite some emphasis on image handling), and I’m aware of quite a few reasonably easy solutions that yield decent results. The issue of photoshop sharing memroy with the rest of the system is very close to those that I encounter at work. Those are not very hard problems.
I’m curious to know if you have test driven any of the better G5’s. My 1.8 Dual is a joy, and I’ve only run into problems with 10.3 once or twice, both solved.
I bought a QS 733 G4 some years back, having swallowed the Apple whole, used it and OS X for a while, and wound up selling that on ebay for only $120 bucks less than I paid for it. It just did not have it, either in the hardware dept. or the OS dept. I went back to XP.
When Apple announced the G5, with a modern bus speed I figured I would try again, after all I only lost $120 bucks the first time. So far I have to say OS X beats XP all to hell for everything except gaming, and at age 41 I’m to slow to twitch with the youngsters anyways. The G5 is a great leap forward from the G4 – and IMO the combo of the two leaves Wintel very much in second place, and I still have my Windows box, which is a AMD 3000+. But I dont use it very often, only for games. Anything serious I do on the mac.
I’m not a Apple fanboy as I have tried to make plain thru that history above, but I think you are harder on Apple than they deserve. Linux is no alternative for me as after 25 years computing I *dont* want to futz around tinkering with OS’s and kernals. I just want to sit down and do what I want to do, when I want to do it. The G5 and OS X is closer to letting me do that than Windows is at this point in time.
The whinning about Dashboard being a copy of Kanfabulator is crap. If you want to argue it Dashboard is a copy of Konfabulator, fine. But in that case I would have to argue that Konfabulator is a copy of Object Desktop by Stardock, which has been around a long time.
Things like Dashboard are a logical evolution of what an OS should be able to do.
Linux has it now, Windows does the same with Object Desktop…hell a carefully crafted html based Wallpaper on Windows can do the same thing…I have used a Flash based wallpaper.
Dashboard and Konfabulator are not really all that new.
“I’m curious to know if you have test driven any of the better G5’s”
Well, to the extent that a test drive doesn’t really tell you how a car is going to behave on a racing track, or in cold mountain weather, yes, I have tested G5s. They are just as “fast enough for normal desktop use” as my G4 as far as I can tell. I’ve never had access to a G5 loaded with enough RAM and with a good scanner and photoshop installed, so that I have had no opportunity to produce a fair comparison in the domain that matters to me.
Speed isn’t really a huge concern as far as pure CPU-bound tasks are concerned. Yes, median-cut filter on 550MB pictures takes a while, but I don’t do it often enough to justify spending thousands of dollars in a new machine. I’m more annoyed by the slowness of the healing brush, which (judging by the noise of the hard drive) isn’t limited by my CPUs. Honestly today I’d most likely be looking at an x86 machine if I were to buy a new PC, but there are many other ways I can think of to spend the $3000 or so that a good current machine costs.
“Linux is no alternative”
Don’t get me started about Linux. Where MacOS is 95% there, most competing linux-based solutions are 5% there.
“Things like Dashboard are a logical evolution of what an OS should be able to do.”
Absolutely. I have nothing against the feature (actually I think that it’s really cool, and well executed). I am weary of the Apple game where Apple gloats about being the first doing something even when soemthing very similar has been done before and make fun of other OS vendors that copy Apple features.
Let Apple play fair (acknowledge that they copy or improve on other people’s code or ideas, or stop making fun of features that Windows copies from MacOS) and it’ll be fine with me.
Your more recent comments have been quite insightfull. I totally agree with you on the mouse speed issue. You’d think that would be *really* easy to change too. There are third party drivers that repair the slow mouse, but I can’t really justify paying $25 USD just to have something that should have been there in the first place. Supporting basic windows keyboards might also be a nice touch that would be easy to implement, so I do agree with you there as well, now that you’ve explained your position. Forgive my incorrect assumptions about your thoughts.
The photoshop memory limitation is interesting. I’m wondering if this is a darwin limitation, carbon limitation, or cocoa limitation. I only have 1GB of ram here, so I can’t really test it. Have you tried writing a short ‘malloc 1.5 gig’ type program in the shell?
A.K.H., amen! We had to buy “USB Overdrive” to get past the OSX mouse limitation! This is something extremely important –mouse speed and acceleration– and Apple’s solution (albeit better on Panther) it is still a far cry even from X11’s.
I’m absolutely shocked that Steve Jobs (it wasn’t on his watch) or anyone else through the first 45 messages didn’t mention the Mac transition from 68000 processor serious to PowerPC series. This was almost completely transparent to Mac users other than hearing the new CPU chips were faster than the old ones. The OS didn’t change for users. But it was just as dramatic in the lack of huge issues as was Win 9x to NT/2000/XP.
As far as reading past the 45 message. I’m disgusted with both sides.
Note that I use EIGHT different OSs for at least 2 hours each week just to keep a sort of balanced view of all of them. Yes I have my OSs I like more. I’m not telling which. But SHAME SHAME SHAME on both sides of this. JBQ’s article was an unprofessional mess and so were most of the responses. Both sides should go to their rooms and think about what they wrote.
As an electrical engineer I have had to learn software development and hardware development. There is one thing that I have learned in this discipline. Any kind of development is an excercise in compromise. How do you keep everyone happy, you don’t. Is OS X the perfect OS, no. What it does seem to do is to capture the average user’s imagination and excites them about using a computer. I have used every flavor of Windows and I use an iBook at home. I am aware of many of OS X’s limitations but I have to to tell you that though spending $100+ on an OS is a bit much I gladly spend it because I see improvement versus windows where the development seems to be at a stand still. Yes Longhorn will be an improvement but people want gratification now. Worry about today, for tomorrow will take care of itself.
I think I’ll stick to my Dual AMD K7MP system running WinXP/Linux for now. Nothing in either Apple or PC camps has caught my attention enough to justify an upgrade. Am I growing up or is the pace of technology really just a marketers wet dream offering hollow promises?
XP for audio and games and Linux for wanting computing that is open but doesn’t have the apps I need to be a sole contender on my system. Gnome 2.6 is nice though but a user environment is not enough, I need apps.
While the ability to write such diatribe or dribble is our birthright hear in the U.S.
Please don’t waste any oxygen writing crap like that.
First of all to the turd that calls the Mac people trolls. WTF?
I’m not a troll, you don’t know me or any of the other Mac users replying to this guys dribble. As a systems admin and network engineer (was a Windoze MCSE). I can punch holes in this guys arguments and offer a dual of sorts.
I will meet the author and offer up some cash to prove him wrong, bring your Mac with all of it’s issues, problems etc, If I can’t get it to work with all of the gear you stated in your article with OS X 10.3.4, I will give you $1,000.00 cash. That’s right one thousand big ones, and if I can fix it, you have to write a 1000 word essay stating how much you like Mac’s and how bloated Windoze really is. Easy trade off, because I know I’ll win.
I am not going to point out the flaws Windows has, it would take up too much time and not worth the effort, one point is… lets see 78% of all malwares, Viri, Trojans etc written for WINDOWS! Compared to the 3% to OS X, and 2% of that is the *nix side.
While OS X is not perfect it is far, far superior to Windows, wait a minute…
Is that the rumor of LONGHORN? HAHAHA in 2006 and Microshaft is yet again borrowing off of someone elses innovation, the Aqua interface, yeah that’s like the pot calling the kettle black. Gee thanks Micro$haft
Go ahead and use the IBM Stinkpad with Winblows and all of the stability it has to offer, I will continue to support over 150 users in a mixed environment 60/40 Mac/Wintel.
But my servers are staying OS X Server (Unix based) not that bloated carcass Viri infected IIS, getting attacked, not even close to Apache OS.
Nough’ said
“-64 bit support. Nice for those who have G5s, maybe. For those of us stuck with ancient machines (the G4 kind, which Apple still sells today on their web site) there doesn’t seem to be any enhancement, and no indication that Photoshop CS will be able to use more than about 40% of the RAM on my 2GB dual G4).”
That’s an Adobe issue, go file a bug with them.
“-Dashboard. A plain, simple and blatant ripoff of Konfabulator. The kind that makes you think that software patents aren’t a bad thing after all. The kind that makes Steve Jobs look like a fool when the big banners for Tiger read “Redmond: start your photocopiers”. Shame on you, Apple, this kind of behavior really doesn’t make me want to give you any of my money, if all you do with it is drive your own developers out of business.”
And Safari, FireBird, Mozilla and IE are rip offs of Mosaic. How about TCP/IP stacks, remember when they were sold by small ISV’s? Go cry elsewhere, how come the Omni Group jumped for joy when Apple implemented WebCore and JavaScript core into the OS rending their backend work on OmniWeb pointless? The answer is easy they no longer had to worry about working on the plumbing and could concentrate on building something useful on top of it instead. The Konfabulator guys would be doing the same thing if they were smart, no more having to try and troubleshoot the Konfabulator engine which at best spikes the CPU and at worst can lock up your box.
“-Spotlight. In 1997, as a Be developer, I got my hands on BeOS “Advanced Access” (also known as developer release 9). I wasn’t a Be engineer yet at the time. It was the first release that featured Dominic’s bfs filesystem instead of Benoit’s ofs filesystem. bfs was a major step forward from ofs, but not a revolution. It was natural evolution. Spotlight is an evolution of a similar magnitude, which attempts to solve pretty much the same problem with a slightly different approach. Seeing Finder create complex queries gave me the illusion for a moment that BeOS’ Tracker had been ported to MacOS. “
We’re not a Be complainer are we? One of the people who thinks that Apple should have paid $250M for an unfinished OS which couldn’t print when it was offered as a replacement for Copland? Apple bought in the talent and said make this work, did anyone say that it hadn’t been done before? Nope. Shouldn’t they do it becuase it’s been done before? Nope.
“-Steve Jobs claimed that the only OS transition ever to happen in the PC world was that in 1995 when going from DOS with Windows 95. Sorry buddy, but the transition from Windows 3.1/95/98/ME to Windows NT/2000/XP was at least as big. Or maybe I’d actually say that the PC world is unique in that it is able to maintain such a level of compatibility that no sharp transition is needed. The latest Windows is still able to run many 10-year-old applications. Most recent PCs can still run 10-year old DOS 6.22. By comparison compatibility in the Mac world is a total disaster.”
So what? No one promised you that you could run ten year old apps on anything, and I’ll take advancements over decades old compatability cruft any day of the week. Desktop crap isn’t mission critical and users don’t need to run OpenVMS.
Need to run something ten years old, run it on an OS which supports the product, run it in emulation, run it wherever, but don’t expect people to support ever shitheel’d app ever written.
“-Steve Jobs was quick to mention that there hadn’t been any major release of Windows since Windows XP (I really wonder what that “Windows 2003 server” thing was). Ignoring the case of the expensive server OS, he forgot to compare the cost of continuing to run the latest version of Windows and the latest version of MacOS on a PC and on a Mac both bought in 2001.”
The admins trying to run Exchange on it are wondering what that Windows 2003 Server thing is as well. Bring this up again when they release SP1 and don’t cause their admins to revert to Win2K Server due to it’s instability.
“When I interview a candidate whose resume lists tons of different competencies, I very much like to pick one which I am familiar with and ask a few advanced questions, the kind that can only be answered with some real knowledge and/or experience in the domain. When I get an unsatisfactory answer, all I can assume is that the knowledge of the candidate in the other domains is going to be as shallow. Similarly when I listen to Steve Jobs’ glorified sales pitch, I recognize a few areas where I have some level of competency, and my knowledge in those areas makes me realize that MacOS isn’t the perfect operating system that Apple would like me to believe.”
That would be because Steve Jobs is a sales guy and not an engineer. I’m sure he’s disappointed that a guy on OS News wouldn’t hire him based on his keynotes.
“-memory limitations in applications. Even though my dual G4 has 2GB of RAM, which Photoshop can perfectly detect, Photoshop doesn’t manage to use more than about 900MB of RAM. The rest of the RAM mostly sits there, unused (several hundred MB are unused, which is especially annoying when Photoshop is struggling with the hard drive to try to apply filters to 500MB images).”
And you filed the bug with Adobe, or do you prefer to just bitch your problems away on websites?
“If a small OS (in terms of market share) like MacOS has API that doesn’t look like what most developers are used to, something is wrong (again) with the OS itself.”
So it should look like the Win32 API then? Because that’s what most developers are used to.
Lets face it, you’re a “Be complainer”.
Go buy another PC and stop whinging about things you won’t even file a bug report for. God forbid any of the rest of us would have a choice of what OS we chose to run.
So what should i say when i read such article. I really don’t understand how people with such article can succeed to publish something in osnews.
Of course we can discuss about everything, and everything should be discussed in a reasonable manner. But if a guy comes up (and saying that he is an engineer does not make him smarter than us, …anyway) with such articles where everything that Apple does is shit, sorry how can we take this guy seriously.
This guy does not even have a copy of Tiger in his hands (i think!!) so how can he judge, how can he say anything about something that he did not try, and just saw in a video? What does he know about CoreImage/video, Spotlight, the 64 bits support, etc…..
What can of issues is he talking about? Sorry i don’t have them. He has problems with photoshop, why is he blaming Apple?
Osx does not prevent any application to use as much memory as it wants…..If one application can not not use more than a certain quantity of memory, that’s the a problem of the application. This guy should read a little bit more about osx, and read the developper documentation about Darwin……
And is he so negative with Tiger? The advencement made in Tiger are quit impressive, and i am really surprised that this guy can not recognize the work of Apple.
So we should think now that this guy is obviously better than Apple’s engineers, and much much smarter!! Ok so bring us something man!!! Can you do better than trolling on internet. Can you do better than OsX…..
You hate so much what Apple is doing, so please stay away from here or bring us some interesting stuff……
Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X is a major transition. Try taking XP and changing it’s core to UNIX. Hmmmm. Would be pretty major, no?
Well, that’s the scale of the transition from Windows 9x to NT/2k/XP. The transitions from DOS to Windows 3.x and Windows 3.x weren’t exactly trivial, either, although they weren’t quite that major.
Has Windows changed it’s core since Win95 or NT? Please inform me if I’m wrong.
You are wrong. It changed its core *with* NT. DOS and NT based Windows are *completely different OSes*, they just have nearly identical APIs, excellent ABI compatability and similar interfaces. It is a testament to Microsoft’s efforts at legacy support that the transition was so relatively painless people are arguing that it must have been “trivial”.
Apple are about ten years late to the “major transition” party – Microsoft started in 1993 with NT 3.1. Considering how much more powerful machines are today and that they had a nearly identical model to work from (Microsoft with Windows) it’s disgraceful – although not entirely surprising given Apple’s attitudes towards legacy support – that it was handled so poorly.
Ever wonder why it will be 2006-2007 before Longhorn gets released? Hmmm. Sorry Buddy.
Despite what the marketdroids are trying to tell you about Longhorn, it is *not* a major transition on the order of OS9 -> OS X or Win9x -> NT. It’s not a new OS, although it is a major revision – a reasonable comparison would be NT4 -> Windows 2000.
It’s funny when a site called “OS News” sends someone to cover a major OS announcement who clearly doesn’t pay attention and who clearly hasn’t bothered to do his homework.
I say this as a sysadmin who works with Mac OS, Windows, and Unix boxes. This writer is clueless and doesn’t even accurately report what was announced. There was some very cool stuff and there was some “yawn” stuff. But this guy doesn’t know enough about relevant topics to even understand which is which.
I don’t need your cash (well, I wouldn’t mind more money, but I won’t take it).
Let’s get started:
-when I copy JPEGs from my 10D’s memory card to my Mac, using Finder, reading through a Lexar Firewire compact flash reader, Finder doesn’t orient the pictures correctly when displaying the thumbnails (it displays all the pictures horizontally, even the ones that were shot verticlally). iPhoto has the same problem (I don’t normally use it, but I double-checked). Photoshop has no problem, nor does Canon’s own application, so I know that the orientation data is correctly recorded in the files.
-I have 2 USB2 cards from IOgear, one with an ALI and one with an NEC chipset. Get both of them to work in 10.3 at least as well as they worked in 10.2 (they don’t have to work at the same time, but doing so gives extra credit).
-Get Photoshop to use about 1700MB of RAM on my 2GB dual-G4.
Am I allowed to use more than 1000 words for the essay? There are so many things that suck in Windows that I’m afraid to run out of space! (I use Windows almost constantly, so I’ve had quite a few issues with it).
Couldn’t we also say that Konfabulator was a Desk Accessories rip-off?
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Desk_Ornam…
As for the names being too long in the switch menu, a quick search on macupdate gives:
http://winswitch.wincent.com/
Do you know what is HCI? Its Human Computer Interface. If the software developer like Adobe did not did their job good enough and frustrated you, please do not blame it on any OSes, not only Mac OS X.
Btw, why are you still using your Apple machine? You should had forgot to wrote this soar, aren’t you?
You can download a copy of “Apple HCI Guidelines” and see whether Adobe did their job well or otherwise, ditch Adobe and get some other tools.
Please save your pitty time and next time think before you write, you are wasting bandwidth and server HDD space. Look at the bashing replied… at this moment is 156 comments shouting at your stupidity.
Ashame yourself!
Regarding your comments on moving from Windows 3.1 to 95 to 98 to 982e to ME to 2000 to NT (at least there aren’t two Mac OS’s that are the exact same except for the name) to XP to whatever, those are NOT major upgrades.
DOS based Windows (3.x, 9x, etc) to NT based Windows (NT4, 2k, XP) is a *major* upgrade. They are completely different OSes at fundamental levels and outside of an API, ABI and UI, have practically nothing in common.
Even DOS+Windows 3.x to 9x is a reasonably major change.
It was however a major upgrade going from DOS to Windows; all Windows OS’s up to now, and including Longhorn, are based on DOS.
You are clueless. Windows NT 3.x, NT4, 2k and XP are not even remotely related to DOS.
the major Mac upgrade from OS 9 to OS X was HUGE. It went from Apple’s own OS base (I’m not sure what it was based on) to UNIX.
It was “based” on MacOS because it *was* MacOS.
Go back to your Windows and your OS based on technology over 10 years old, and stop darkening the Mac world with you biased and unjust comments. (Nobody wants to hear them)
Firstly, DOS is closer to twenty-five years old than ten.
Secondly, NT started development in 1988, although it was heavily influenced by VMS, which is much older.
Thirdly, your rant is pretty funny considering the “UNIX base” of OS X is 30-odd year old “technology” originally meant to be a much simpler and more limited version of the “real” OSes of the time. The heritage of Unix isn’t especially prestigous – it’s every bit a “good enough” solution that Windows is.
“RE: you said you are…
By Eugenia (IP: —.osnews.com) – Posted on 2004-06-29 18:10:10
>so why do you use it if you dislike it ?
Because he happens to have Photoshop CS for the Mac only.”
Isn’t Photoshop overkill for what you guys are doing? Good gravey, you can download free editors for any platform under the sun.
“By arielb (IP: —.nyc.rr.com) – Posted on 2004-06-29 18:07:23
JBQ is not a typical “Windows” user. He was an engineer for BeOS.”
Not impressed.
“we guys are doing??”
This is for JBQ’s photography, NOT for osnews. I use PaintShopPro 5 or Gimp for OSNews, they are good enough for the limited things we need for osnews.
But JBQ *needs* photoshop and its 16bit per pixel support for his personal photography hobby.
>Not impressed.
Probably you would be if you were more clueful over the things he has worked on over the years: from kernel development to games and graphics development.
Maybe, if Amelio bought Be in place of Next, you’ll see Gassee talking at the WWDC.
be aware Eugenia that half these people do not know who JBQ is (to you or the computer world) so when they say things about him, they are speaking out of ignorance.
I know how much it must suck for you to read some of these comments on here though…. some make me cringe.
Sounds to me like you found exactly what you went looking for. You wanted to look for what was bad about OS X and so you found it. This article is a waste of time as it could be a template for deriding any OS. An engineers thoughts on Windows, an engineers thoughts on Redhat, an engineers thoughts on FreeBSD and on and on.
Bill
“As for the names being too long in the switch menu, a quick search on macupdate gives”.
Thanks. Not perfect (I’d like it to take no space – I’m picky sometimes but I can be flexible if I really want) but probably good enough. That didn’t exist when I needed it most, though (i.e. when trying to get the scanner drivers to work after upgrading to 10.3), and at this point I don’t need it enough to risk my sanity over it.
It is ammusing that you criticise things like Automator for not being advanced enough, when in fact it is designed specifically not to be. You want something more advanced, learn applescript, that’s what it’s there for.
CoreImage it is a DISPLAY framework, that manipulates what is rendered to the screen in realtime, handling image sizes larger than the display resolution and depth is irrelavent.
Memory limitations in Photoshop have almost nothing to do with the OS, every process gets a virtual address space they can use, and OSX will manage the page faults when you run out of physical memory. If Photoshop doesn’t use it all then it’s because Adobe wrote it that way.
Being able to write badly behaving code is a feature of any language, that universally applies to any platform, if the developer chooses not to use the appropriate API’s she deserves what’s coming to her.
You want hardware support? Buy hardware that’s supported! It’s the same with any OS.
Perhaps you should stick with what you (think you) know best, and leave the criticism to people who know their craft and are actually interested in improving the landscape. There is nothing constructive about your criticism.
Go and play with windows.
“Isn’t Photoshop overkill for what you guys are doing? Good gravey, you can download free editors for any platform under the sun.”
Well, let’s say that Photoshop has about a dozen critical features that I’d have a hard time living without.
Its cropping tool is exemplary. Even though somewhat limited, its support for 16-bit per channel is better than just about any application, especially on the Mac. It supports Adobe RGB. It does a great job processing raw digital camera files. I can’t live in the digital darkroom without the healing brush or without its curves/histogram controls. It does a great job at handling color profiles. Its various selection tools are quite amazing, as well as its layer and channels support. I pretty much need all of that. And I’m not even using third-party filters, which could increase one’s dependency over photoshop a whole lot. It outputs really nice JPEGs.
So, no, so far I haven’t found any cheaper alternative that really came close, especially on the Mac. On PC Picture Window Pro does OK, but by the time you factor in the extra cost of the various tools that come built-in with photoshop (e.g. Capture One DSLR) the price different shrinks quickly.
>I’ve installed several instances of software that wouldn’t install automatically
>and needed some files to be moved around by hand
Is this Apple’s problem? Or the problem of the author of the application?
>Is this Apple’s problem? Or the problem of the author of the application?
Apple’s, for not providing a well understood framework and not endorsing its developers to use installation techniques rather than simple compressed files or disk images.
I obviously did a very poor job at expressing what I think about Steve Jobs’ presentation of Tiger yesterday. Maybe I should have written it in French.
I don’t think that many of the features are as bad as some people think that I think they are (Please re-read that sentence) (Please re-read it again).
What I disliked is how Steve Jobs showed most of them as being “first time ever” features, or “total innovations”, whereas a number of them are similar to things that have already been done in other places by other people (or sometimes by the same people, I’d suspect).
What I disliked is how Steve Jobs probably overhyped the capabilities of some of the new features (e.g. hoping that Adobe will re-write Photoshop to use Core Image makes a big assumption about the suitabilitity of Core Image for Photoshop).
Now, I do not have a definite answer about whether Apple has paid more attention to backward compatibility in 10.4 than they had in 10.3. I do not have a definite answer about whether they paid attention to the people who want to be able to use the exact same keyboard and mouse on all their machines. I do not have a definite answer about whether they’ve improved the way scanner drivers get installed/uninstalled. I do not have a definite answer about whether they’ve improved their support for firewire CD drives. I do not have a definite answer about whether they’ve improved paper handling when printing. I do not have any definite answer to any of those questions. It’s probably too early for ranybody to know the answers to all of those, and the people who know the answers to some of those probably can’t tell (and it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good it they did, as none of those will be available for 6 months anyway).
As a user almost satisfied with MacOS 10.3, what I’d like to hear is “we’re going to release a 10.3.X version where we have fixed 90% of the issues that have been reported to us, where hardware support has been expanded, where backward compatibility has been improved”.
What I disliked is how Steve Jobs showed most of them as being “first time ever” features, or “total innovations”, whereas a number of them are similar to things that have already been done in other places by other people (or sometimes by the same people, I’d suspect).
Well, this is basically typical salesman behaviour to attract ignorant buyers. It happens everywhere, by everyone trying to sell stuff, and is almost always equally infuriating to anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with the technology in question.
When most salesmen start speaking, it’s less stressful to just tune out, because even if they *are* deeply knowledgable about the topic at hand, they can’t really express that, because they’re aiming their sales pitch at the typical consumer, not the educated buyer.
They all do it to some degree. Steve is perhaps a bit more, ummm, “out there” than some others, but he’s hardly the only one and, to be blunt, it’s his *job* to sound like that.
Tuck chicken, you are a jerk and an ashame of the mac community. You obviously did not even read his comments where he explains a few things.
drsmithy, you mean to tell me that Longhorn is based on the same kernel (core) that XP runs on today? If that’s the case, then Wintel users will be in a bigger world of hurt. Sorry to hear that if it is the case…..NOT!
BTW, an earlier post did point out the transition from 68K to PPC. That was an extraordinary accomplishment and was an intermediary step before the real transition to OS X began. Also, I wouldn’t brag to much on the fact that Redmond started their transition back in 1988. You see what the average wintel user is stuck with nowadays…security and virus problems out the ying yang. Time for a rewrite if you ask me but according to you, it won’t be. Too bad for you.
One thing, to all those suckers that like to bash us so-called Mac fans or zealots. Since when does pointing out inaccuracies and refuting them with fact make us some kind of troll? Facts are facts. Get informed.
One last thing, JBQ, talking man to man. You should not have Eugenia posting for you. Doesn’t look good.
>You should not have Eugenia posting for you
And what exactly this means, £$%£$%£$%?
JBQ was writing about it last night, I saw that it was more than 3 paragraphs and I asked him if we could post it, and he said yes (I had not read it until this morning).
JBQ does not have access to the osnews database, as he is not an editor on this site, so he could not post it by himself anyway. You need to get your facts right.
“By Eugenia (IP: —.osnews.com) – Posted on 2004-06-30 00:51:17
>Not impressed.
Probably you would be if you were more clueful over the things he has worked on over the years: from kernel development to games and graphics development.”
Nope.
Why are you (JBQ) are you fixing with this problem of Photoshop. Again there is no limitation of adressing the memory in Osx (the maximum memory which can be adresses depends wether it is a 32 bits or a 64 bits system). If Photoshop can not adress the need of memory that you need, ok,…. please as an engineer go and submit the problem to Adobe. Adobe decided this limitation of Photoshop, that’s their problem. Not Apple’s one.
And everyone can say whatever he wants about any system. But not like this, please, with two pages of personal attacks against Apple, Jobs, and everything about what Apple is doing. That’s simply ridiculous.
If Spotlight (of course similar ideas exist since BeOs, but the implementation and the look and feel in osx seems different to me), Ichat, CoreImage/Video, etc…are not a breakthrough, ok that’s your point of view, but is it a reason to be so negative in two pages of text????
And i really disagree about many of the statements that you have made. You simply generalize all the problems that you may have had with some devices or applications. That’s simply not correct and not reflecting the image of an engineer. You talked about backward compatibility of windows, i disagree. Windows xp broke many applications, windows server 2003 broke many applications, windows xp SP2 seems to breake a lot of applications.
So what are talking about?
Your article just sounds like anti-Apple statement, with no valid arguments at all. It is not reflecting the reasonnable and balanced point of view that a software engineer should have. I am sorry!!!!
It means, a so-called engineer, does not need someone else to post comments in his defense. That’s what it means. I also think the author and this site has lost it’s cred. Sort of like Thurrott, Dvorak, Enderle, and Ulanoff. Ignorant MS and PC lovers. JBQ and people like him get frozen out. Meaning, dismissed, ignored, not visited or read. FUD does that.
I would have to agree with some others here. Get off the Mac platform and stick with the PC. If you dare!
Apple is responsible for the engineering quality of third-party applications on mac os x in exactly the same way as Kodak is responsible for JBQ’s pictures printed on Kodak film, Sony is responsible for Rush Limbaugh’s statements played on a Walkman, and OS News is responsible for the comments of Apple aficionados to JBQ’s piece.
Which is to say, it is not responsible. It is up to the author, whether she work on canvas or print or video or any other media, platform, or forum, to see to the quality of her own work.
Jim
Half of these comments seem to be that you expected the CEO not to give a sales pitch. Of course he does, and while he may be slicker than other CEOs at it, its exactly what you expect from a Keynote. Bear in mind if you want real technical information, there is the other 90% of WWDC.
Automator? Sure its limited, but it supports automation system wide, and is easy to use. Your criticism seems to utterly miss the purpose.
Spotlight – your criticism again misses one of the most important parts, which is a standard system wide way of enabling search in all content, not just file metadata. Its as if file metadata searching is the only bit Be had, so its the only bit thats acknowledged.
Core Image – criticising it for not being a professional Photoshop competitor for all applications is just absurd. Its about ubiquity of quality graphic effects, not competing with Photoshop for people that need to edit 500 MB images.
And half the counterings of Steves salesmanlike distortion are worse than the example allegedly countered. Calling security on app installs “a problem with multi-user support”? Blaming Apple for very Photoshop specific issues? Crowing about how windows xp can still run dos 6.2.2 apps, but ignoring macs still running many mid-80s apps in Classic?
It just seems like you are looking for problems as hard as you can, then drawing unwarranted conclusion (making your decision on whether to buy based on a sales pitch months in advance of release? When even waiting until the end of WWDC would give you much more info?). The issues here are as much emotional as technical, and “a Disgrunted users thoughts on Steve Jobs” would be a more honest title for the article as presented.
PS though the point about long user names for fast user switching support was a good one.
>>I’m sorry, but the transition between windows 98 and >>windows 2000/XP is just not big. The only major things >>that changed were in the backend. New kernel, improved >>stability. No major changes in the GUI. Just a little >>bit of cleaning up. I mean, win2k was a nice update, but >>far from a revolution like dos->windows or macos9->>>macosx. I think you are seriously overestimating >>your “knowledge in the field”.
Anonymous, you obviously have no idea as to the inherant differences between WindowsNT (NT/2000/XP/2003) and Windows9X (95/98/ME). These are VERY different operating systems, and your casual remark that “only” the backend has changed is a ridiculous comment to make.
The backend is the part of the operating system YOU WANT changed. If you ever have to support these operating systems, you will learn to appreciate this fact.
Do some study.
Actually, Apple as an OS vendor does have a responsibility in the quality of the final product. The quality of the underlying framework has a direct influence on the quality of the result.
About the photography example: the quality and characteristics of Kodak’s products are directly involved in the final quality and characteristics of a print. A print from Kodak Max 800 on consumer paper in a Kodak 1-hour minilab has little chance of competing with a print on IlfoChrome from Fuji Velvia 50, all else being equal (i.e. exposures taken in identical conditions).
About the Walkman example: The quality of the power regulators, DAC and amplifiers has a direct influence over the quality of the output.
OSnews: The quality of the articles has a direct influence over the quality of the subsequent discussions (with my opinion article being a prime example)
Back to the computer world: the quality of a browser has a direct influence over the quality of the display. One of the keys to success in the browser world is the ability of the browser to render markup that deviates from the rules, or (to put it another way), the successful browsers are the ones that make it easier to write markup that works well enough.
So, in my opinion and experience, the quality of the operating system has a direct influence over the quality of the final product. If an operating system can’t move data fast enough from/to the hard drive, the final quality of any app that needs fast IO will be lowered (if for some reason the IO architecture of MacOS only allowed writing 1MB of data per second, the quality of photoshop will be severely impaired as it will take 10 minutes to save any of my big pictures).
Nice to see some lowdown on apple by the powers that be. Thanks.
I regularly see lots of apple criticism being modded down, if not drowned out by the mac zealots.
As a long time apple and mac user (started on apple II+ in 81 and the mac in 84), I was a loyal customer until 1999. apple got my last dollars in 2003.
Before 1999, I only played with windows and dos based PCs on occasion in schools, at work, or at friends. I have since toyed with linux a bit but nothing beyond that.
I was also a longtime buyer of game consoles. Decided to finally try out a windows PC with my own money in 1999 using win98 for gaming. I found it to be about equal to the 8 series of mac os in reliability and stability. I was very impressed with software choices, hardware choices, and the prices. I learned to add my own upgrades….cheaply.
I then moved to a second pc with a dell laptop running win98 in 2000 and then win2k in 2001. it got upgraded to xp pro in the summer of 2003.
I moved my desktop pc to xp in the spring of 2002. win98 ran more efficiently from 99 to 2002 than the sad mac, bombed out os 8 and 9 that I was running on my mac. Bombs were so common that a save became the norm after any change to any file.
My last mac was purchased at the end of 1998. a g3 desktop that I continually upgraded with ram, new cpu, new voodoo and ati vid cards, each and every point release of the mac os, usb and firewire cards, and scsi additions.
As I went step by step with these upgrades on a pc and a mac simultaneously with both the os, software, and hardware, I grew disillusioned with apple and third parties that produce products for the mac. I got to see what both offered at the same time and apple lost handily.
Upgrades for the mac in hardware came slower. They cost more, even from companies like ati that made nearly identical products for both platforms. Many times upgrades were simply not made for the mac.
My mac model was to be fully supported with os x. it was not. Apple was sued and they settled and are now giving money back to users that had been lied to. Dvd playback with hardware decoder in my mac…nope. Quartz extreme even with a 32mb ati nexus 128, nope.
Meanwhile I watched as on the pc side, pcs sped ahead of apple in bus speeds, cpu speeds, ram speeds, video card choice and power, etc etc etc.
I started with the os x beta and did each upgrade at every point release of x up to 10.2.8. I can testify to the nightmare of printer support in early os x. I can testify to the near non existent support of scsi in early os x (this after mac users had invested huge sums in scsi for as long as anyone can remember), I can testify to the constant broken drivers and apps at each point release of the in my opinion still fully beta os x right through my last gasp at 10.2.8. 10.3 was not officially supported on my mac and I gave it away. It and every book, every piece of software, every mac only peripheral all went to a mac using friend. Same friend and many others (not the 18-22 yr old newbie mac user that got one to go to college and has no reference points) all can testify to these os x nightmares. Many of them have downgraded to early versions of os x when they got fed up with the trials of moving forward with apples 4 yr public yet retail beta plan that costs about $129 annually to participate in.
Os x was neat. It was novel. I at one level thoroughly enjoyed checking out the new kid on the block. But the bottom line is I would have much preferred it remain much more like the classic os, but with the supposed added stability of unix. The new file system I appreciated as it was more explorer like. Massive eye candy that made it run turtle slow even on the best hardware was not appreciated. Having to buy third party apps to make it more like os 8 or 9 (asm or fruit menu) or to turn off eye candy was not appreciated.
Meanwhile I have now been on xp pro for about 2.5 years and it is utterly reliable. It was cheap and remains so. everything I throw at it runs hardware wise….even initio scsi cards made for mac.
Yes I upgrade the os constantly. Yes I am vigilant about security. Yes, by doing so I have not been taken by any garbage that floats around the internet.
Apples prices stink. Their choices stink. Their office suite, appleworks is a dinosaur. Their repair permissions after any work on the machine is ridiculous. Their delays in product releases are wearisome. Their over glorification of simplistic apps for simple consumers (ilife apps) is boring. Their outsourcing of manufacturing has lost them the edge in hardware quality that they owned for as long as I can remember.
Apple died in the mid 90’s and we are just looking at a ghost now.
The fact remains that over 75% of all macs sold still run slow g4 cpus with slow ram and slow system busses with ridiculously underpowered video cards and they cost a fortune because some marketing genius has convinced a few million people in the richest countries that a pretty case and a flashy os is all that matters in computing now.
Apple is tired and is running out of breath. Who in their right mind would pay $2200 for a 20” imac with a 1.25ghz g4 and 167mhz system bus? Its so unbelievable I think I need to wake up.
we could go on all night, but its not needed. the zealots believe. the rest of us are switching from mac to pc at about 1% annually. the new simply dont even consider mac in any appreciable numbers.
the game is over.
It’s not that you critizied Macs and OS X it’s the way you went about it. Like you have some kind of vendetta against Apple. Would it of hurt to be more professional about it or was that asking to much. I had only used PC’s my whole life and still do until recently when I wanted to check out OS X so I bought an iBook. I do enjoy it but it takes getting use to coming from the Windows world. It seems your biggest gripe with OS X is that it’s not Windows. If you want Windows then use Windows or use both like I do depending on the kind of task I need to do. I could go through Windows and nit-pick flaws just like you did. One that pops to mind is the hideous performance of the add/remove programs applet in the control panel. There are plenty more. What do you have to say about that? I’m not a Mac Zealot but I am a Mac User and a PC User and critizism is fine but I have to say your attitude sucks. You don’t seem like a very plesent person to be around. So Grow Up!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PS – Yes Macs are over-priced and over-hyped but so is a BMW, Mercedes, or a Lexus but it still doesn’t mean they aren’t very good products. And yes Jobs can be annoying sometimes but he is just passionate about what he does, that’s all.
“Half of these comments seem to be that you expected the CEO not to give a sales pitch. Of course he does, and while he may be slicker than other CEOs at it, its exactly what you expect from a Keynote.”
Let’s say that I have a deep disdain for liars. The features are cool, interesting, and it’s innovative to see such features move from either the lab or from niche/fringe competitors into the mainstream. But, honestly, listening to Steve Jobs’ speech reminded me of Al Gore saying that he had invented the Internet. Everybody applauses but those who know a bit about the subject wonder how much they can trust the rest of the speech.
“Spotlight – your criticism again misses one of the most important parts, which is a standard system wide way of enabling search in all content, not just file metadata. Its as if file metadata searching is the only bit Be had, so its the only bit thats acknowledged.”
Let’s say that for both Spotlight and BeOS queries to work, the applications must provide indexable data for the search engine to feed on. In BeOS this was done by adding arbitrary meta-data to files, whereas it seems that Spotlight is using a different approach (I’d guess, some sort of API/plugin system that allows the indexer to get a list of keywords for a given file) (I have to make a few assumptions here about the way Spotlight works). We’ll see how the two systems compare (e.g. how Spotlight manages to distinguish between songs written by a certain person against songs sung by that person).
“Core Image – criticising it for not being a professional Photoshop competitor for all applications is just absurd.”
It’s not if you hear what Steve Jobs said about it. Had Steve Jobs said that Core Image was going to solve the imaging issues of 98% of the applications out there instead of implying that this would be capable of supporting the specific needs of Photoshop, I wouldn’t have any complaint about the presentation (because the feature is really really neat, both from an end-user and from a technical point of view).
“Calling security on app installs “a problem with multi-user support”?”
I don’t think that I mentioned anything about the security on app installs (though I did notice a certain level of confusion between app installs that would be private to a user vs the ones that would be shared by all users. My problems with multi-user support are e.g. the fact that The driver for my Epson 3200 scanner can’t seem to remember that Photoshop CS supports 16-bit images when I use it, whereas it does when Eugenia does. Or how Eugenia can register certain applications but I can’t. I’m fine having the system request an admin password when installing things that can affect all users. That’s a normal sign of a healthy multi-user system. I’m not fine having the system prevent regular users from doing certain actions that would have absolutely no impact on other users.
“Crowing about how windows xp can still run dos 6.2.2 apps, but ignoring macs still running many mid-80s apps in Classic?”
[sarcasm] well, I guess that I need to start looking for classic versions of all the apps that I use, because 10.3 might have preserved compatibility with those when it broke compatibility with the many 10.2 apps that I had. Windows XP can run certain DOS apps, but more importantly it can run the immense majority of Win2000 and Win98 apps.
“Bear in mind if you want real technical information, there is the other 90% of WWDC.”
I didn’t have the time nor the money to attend those.
“a Disgrunted users thoughts on Steve Jobs” would be a more honest title for the article as presented.
If you want to see it that way, yes. I was too tired yesterday and should not have written in the body of the articles the list of the issues I had (or had had) with 10.3. I just knew that if I didn’t somebody would ask, so I wrote them as a misjudged pre-emptive move. Maybe I would want to call it “A user’s thoughts about how much Apple seems to take care of their users’ basic needs”.
Let’s see. Have you tried running OS X on newer model Mac. No. Case closed. Everyone knows that trying to run OS X on an usupported machine doesn’t always work. It may, but there are no guarantees, especially with an upgraded CPU card stuck in it. Oh, and BTW, there is such a thing called a G5. Get up to date. Panther runs just fine on my nearly 4 year old iMac 450 with a G3 CPU. It runs great on my 1 yr old 12″ PowerBook. OS X IS UNIX and AAPL stock is doing quite well lately. Not bad for a ghost. You should be commended on your attempt at spreading FUD though. From your comments, we should all be able to run XP on a 486. Doh!!
drsmithy, you mean to tell me that Longhorn is based on the same kernel (core) that XP runs on today?
Yes. Well, I’ve certainly not read anything (credible) to suggest otherwise.
If that’s the case, then Wintel users will be in a bigger world of hurt.
Why ? The NT kernel is an excellent piece of work.
BTW, an earlier post did point out the transition from 68K to PPC. That was an extraordinary accomplishment and was an intermediary step before the real transition to OS X began.
It wasn’t an “intermediate step”, it was a completely independent operation that happened because the 68k platform ran out of steam – “OS X”, as anything more than a faint whiff of vapourware, didn’t even exist. Apple were damn lucky not to have to do it again when Motorola dropped the ball with the G4, too, although they would have been in an infinitely better position to do it with OS X than they were with MacOS Classic.
The 68k -> PPC transition is actually a good comparison of how to do it “right” and compares well with the DOS -> Windows -> NT transitions, which were similarly smooth. While it was incredibly ugly from an underlying technology perspective (practically the entire OS was running via VMWare-esque hardware emulation in the early days, and even as late as MacOS 9 some parts of the OS were still 68k code running under emulation) about the only major user-visible impact was the atrocious performance of the “new” PPC machines compared to the “old” 68k machines.
Some of us speculate the reason it was so transparent was because Steve Jobs had nothing at all to do with it. Steve’s contempt for his customers with regards to legacy support (really, for anything related to not doing it “his way”) is always apparent.
Also, I wouldn’t brag to much on the fact that Redmond started their transition back in 1988.
Uh, it’s not bragging, it’s stating a fact – and the transition didn’t really start in anger until NT4 (ca. 1996) and wasn’t really viable for the consumer market until XP.
Of course, Microsoft had much more reason to do it earlier – DOS wasn’t exactly cutting edge, and early versions of Windows weren’t particularly flash either.
You see what the average wintel user is stuck with nowadays…security and virus problems out the ying yang.
Largely to do with users doing silly things and the marketshare of the platform.
Time for a rewrite if you ask me but according to you, it won’t be. Too bad for you.
No need for a rewrite whatsoever. The fundamental design and architecture is excellent, most (OS-related) problems come from poorly chosen default settings (eg: lots of open network services by default) and/or legacy support sacrifices (most of the Win32 and DOS APIs). These are easy to fix from a technical point of view, they just break a lot of existing stuff – something Microsoft is loathe to do (and Apple, at least under Steve, happy to do). *That* is why Longhorn is such a big deal, because so much legacy support is being thrown away.
One thing, to all those suckers that like to bash us so-called Mac fans or zealots. Since when does pointing out inaccuracies and refuting them with fact make us some kind of troll? Facts are facts. Get informed.
I am quite informed, thanks very much. And the Mac zealot dribble in this discussion – what little of it isn’t simply ad hominem attacks – is mostly *un*informed and far from factual as is the hallmark of Mac zealots who know of little outside the Apple/Steve Jobs RDF.
Reading JBQ’s comments I found myself mostly nodding. With regards to Steve Jobs, he is simply another showman with a sales pitch and a convenient memory. With regards to OS X they are similar sorts of gripes that I have with it.
OS X is a nice OS, I quite like it and my shiney new iBook is great. However, it’s far from the holy grail and it still has many flaws. It’s primary security advantage is its obscurity.
>Have you tried running OS X on newer model Mac.
A 1 year old dual G4 1.25 GHz is far from being “old”.
“Why are you (JBQ) are you fixing with this problem of Photoshop.”
Because that’s what I bought a Mac for. That’s the only application I care about on the Mac, I do everything else on my IBM laptop. I bought a 2GB Mac with a ton of hard-drive space for the explicit purpose of running photoshop and driving my scanners and printers. I bought a 10.2-compatible USB2 card for that explicit purpose (doesn’t work with 10.3). I bought a firewire DVD burner for that explicit purpose (doesn’t work with 10.3 either). All the issues I’ve had with my Mac were all related to my desire to run Photoshop, use a mouse and a keyboard, scan and print. Nothing else.
Speaking of Photoshop, I finally found a way to make it use more than 880MB of RAM. After triple-checking the settings to make sure that, yes, I had told photoshop to use 100% of the available space to no avail, I decided to delete all of Photoshop’s settings files, and boom when I launched photoshop again it was able to use a more reasonable amount of RAM (1.72GB, i.e. 86% of my memory). I’m happy Turns out that the issue may or may not have been a MacOS issue. I probably will never know.
Eugenia, my comment was directed at the person using a 1998 model Mac and complaining that it didn’t work like a 2004 Mac. Clearly unreasonable expectations.
“Let’s see. Have you tried running OS X on newer model Mac. No. Case closed. Everyone knows that trying to run OS X on an usupported machine doesn’t always work. It may, but there are no guarantees, especially with an upgraded CPU card stuck in it. Oh, and BTW, there is such a thing called a G5. Get up to date. Panther runs just fine on my nearly 4 year old iMac 450 with a G3 CPU. It runs great on my 1 yr old 12″ PowerBook. OS X IS UNIX and AAPL stock is doing quite well lately. Not bad for a ghost. You should be commended on your attempt at spreading FUD though. From your comments, we should all be able to run XP on a 486. Doh!!”
no not case closed. my mac was officially supported through 10.2.8. it had the same issues with all third party stuff removed and in its stock configuration.
as a mac user with many mac friends i saw the same results over and over on each of the new generations of mac over the years during apples 4 yr beta tryout.
bouncing icons and spinning beachballs still dance before my eyes even on current macs. its not a gui, its a gooey molasses.
no fud here, just long time experienced users trials and tribulations.
let tiger fix the problems and see apple lop off about 33% of their price and i would buy mac again. but we all know they cant do it or they wouldnt come close to that paltry return they get on $6 billion in annual sales.
What is this about Windows being compatiable with previos versions. When I upgraded to XP my CD Buring Software no longer worked and the company that made it (Philips) never released an update so I had to buy Nero. Also my all-in-one printer didn’t print correctly with the Windows 2000 version of the software which they (Canon) acknowleged but they did eventually release an update a long time after XP had been out.
Eugenia, The guy running OS X on Old HW.
“Eugenia, my comment was directed at the person using a 1998 model Mac and complaining that it didn’t work like a 2004 Mac. Clearly unreasonable expectations.”
utterly unreasonable is the expectation that mac users have to buy brand new macs and only $2000 + dual g5 models to get decent results out of their investment.
or that they have to pay $129 annually to fix major problems in the os.
you clearly still have the upgrade hook in your mouth.
I support close to 400 Macs ranging from iMac G3 to Xserves and do not seeing many spinning wheels of death. The ones that I see are mostly network related. I’m not saying OS X is perfect but your experience is definitely not the norm.
I have a PowerMac 8500 with a 375 MHz G3, 160 MB of RAM, & 16 MB VRAM with 10.2.8 by way of Xpostfacto and it runs just fine. Of course I don’t do video editing on it but for surfing the internet or just playing around with UNIX it is great. The floppy drive doesn’t work in OS X but the zip, cd burner, USB card, ethenet, sound, ABD all work fine and anything I plug into the USB port works. Amazingly it just gets faster with every OS update and Panther flies but I will wait for Xpostfacto to go final b/c it has bugs. I don’t think you can say Windows Updates keep getting faster on older hardware now can you?
You probably missed the fact that I run Panther on a close to 4 year old iMac. Less than 200 (Extra Ram) not 2000+. Thank you.
Oh, please! Don’t take your ball and go home!
Tell ya what, we’ll ALL convert to Windows just. for. you.
Doug