Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says GNOME is nice, KDE is fine and the forthcoming Looking Glass may be wonderful, but the best Unix desktop is the one in the Macintosh. Elsewhere Apple seeds Mac OS X Server 10.3.6 build 7R20 while Amazon leaks Mac OS X Tiger release date?
Mac Takes Honors as Best Unix Desktop; OSX Tiger Release Date
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
What about CDE!
will have support for the new Dual layer DVD writers.
I am also happy to announce that I have just gotten my GeForce 3 Ti for my Poor Old G4 Powermac (5 years old almost) and when I installed it it worked great (it is a flashed PC video card) the UI is much faster and more responsive for things like scrolling and moues and other things that may seem to the trained eye to be a touch laggy.
I became a Mac convert over the summer. For me, OS X marries my love of *NIX (albeit a new love — though I have fiddled with Linux distros from Redhat 5, Corel Linux, to Mandrake 10) with a sexy, easy to use UI that takes all the mystery out of using the power of *NIX.
I wish Linux all the best though and hope that some day it does catch up. Reading an article recently about IBM introducing “trust chips” (or something to that effect) made the rational very clear to me why we do need an open, and free OS — to make sure the interests of the user is never neglected. That being said, I wish I could code better to contribute to some of the UI projects to help bring Linux to the masses. Although, the politics make me want to kill sometimes…
Hopefully we can all have an intelligent discourse on the matter, keeping the subject matter relevant (i.e. Not about the hardware).
I’ve been using Unix PDP-11 on terminals, Dos, Windows and now Linux on PC. But I would like to buy my daughters a Mac, so that they don’t become too technical like me. Mac OS X has a sense of art and beauty. Let the user focus on creativity than usage of a rough OS.
Open source things are very good, as James stated above, they are also necessary, but the Mac people are artists and they must be credited for their work.
Well it started off ok… but the point where he shifts from actually talking about a *nix desktop to talking about application software was where it just got silly.
What office suite is installed has absolutely no effect on the ease of use of the user environment. After all, following this argument to its logical conclusion, I can categorically say that GNU/Linux will be much easier to use if Microsoft Office is released for it tomorrow.
But Mac OS X cannot be the best desktop as long as it only has a one button mouse! But Mac OS X cannot be the perfect desktop until it is ported to cheap Intel hardware!
(Sorry, but I had to beat the trolls.
Isn’t odd how the author of the eWeek article didn’t bring these points up? Perhaps it is because they are irrelevant for desktop environments not targetting geeks? In fact, the author even went as far as suggesting the complexities introduced for the power user are useless in the desktop. And while price didn’t come up, he seemed to be suggesting that the much more expensive Solaris and friends are the competition here, not so much Windows.
Office style and similar productivity programs are part and parcel of the “desktop” experience. (As opposed to doing things like samba, sql, or running a server.)
And while I used (and liked) Star Office on my PC, I daresay its UI had loads of cruft.
The only Open Source office application that had a UI that I really liked, Abi Word, was crippled by the fact that I could never get it to print. (I finked it on to my Mac.) And since I had neither time, know-how, nor desire to go rooting around at the command line to find out why and fix it, I had to ditch it.
If an aqua native version of OO or Abi Word comes out, I’d like to use them, but until then … ~sigh~ it’s “Mordorsoft” Office.
I wasted my money on Apple Works. I should have know better, cannot even import CSV files without resorting to extra cost “scripts”.
So I just am testing ThinkFree Office. This is MUCH better, it actually does import with no problems straight into an .xls file if I want it to, from a .csv file created by MySQL – without dropping data or doing other silly things.
Mind you I should have known the other famous “Works” that I owned years ago, was just as useless.
I have said since I started with OS X, that this is the O/S to make my machine, the GUI best-of-breed and Unix – without Microsoft. Bliss.
yeah, Applewoks is just kinda there for people who just need to type papers.
but did you know that entourage cannot even import .CSV or export .CSV!!!
I was pissed because I wanted to easily sync my hotmail account from my Entourage address book.
I have to agree with the author. I bought a Mac a year and a half ago and I’m so glad I did. I have used Windows, *BSD and Linux but they all fell short. The Mac does not as it has everything I need. It is the easiest, best looking OS I have ever used. It’s Unix based which was why I even tried it in the first place. I can use the Xcode development tools and DarwinPorts for free software.
But Mac OS X cannot be the perfect desktop until it is ported to cheap Intel hardware!
Think PearPC.
Jesus, I think any program incapable of reading/writing a simple .csv file is not worth a dime.
Syncing is a waste of time too.
I gave up trying to sync my Zaurus with Linux/Windows and I ain’t even tried with OS X. What I do is dump from MySQL to .csv files to my Zaurus and then use Grep, which is perfect for getting phone numbers and addresses on the go – it is quick easy and efficient. I have a lot of respect for the command line and especially piping commands. I also sometimes use Grep instead of the eye-candy way in OS X, because sometimes it is quicker and easier.
So to me any program that cannot read/write .csv sucks, and should never see the light of day, something to be ashamed of.
AppleWorks (or ClarisWorks) prior to version 6 was pretty good. It could read and write multiple formats. In fact, many Mac applications used the import and export filters which came with AppleWorks. And yes, that included CSV. Then came version 6.x and the once nice program lost a lot of its useful features. I believe it is what the computer industry calls an upgrade or progress. Oh well.
“if i had some capital, like a wheelbarrow full of money i would buy a new G5”
Thankfully the G5 doesn’t require a wheelbarrow full of money to buy.
Yeah many moons ago I had Claris Works, that did csv fine, but like I said any program that cannot do that is useless to me. So I have now ditched Apple Works. Thinkfree will take its place.
Come on, the latest release of OSX will have three competing UI themes. Tog has ripped on the dock ad infinitum as eye candy that only serves to cripple the functionality of the UI, and there are dozens of other quirks.
Okay, so there is an OS that can run bash and Photoshop? So can Windows NT via cygwin. SO WHAT?
Frankly GNOME can make the best case for UI consistency – Windows also has the multiple-themes issue. KDE comes a close second but is more consistent that OSX or Windows.
My problem is that the fanboi mentality of OSX has taken on a life of its own. No one is bothering to deal with glaring shortcomings because they are just far too overjoyed that there is a consumer OS that has a terminal.
What is it with this site. Everytime I come on here and anyone says anything against Linux you get a bunch of Zealots coming out of the wood work to explain why Linux kicks ass and everything else sucks.
I’ve used Linux for 10 years, I’ve used Mac OS X Panther for 1 at home I don’t use Linux anymore, so I suppose OS X won?
Anyway how about we just accept Tobi Lehman’s statements as fact and the rest of you don’t need to sit here and tell me how the Mac sucks because it:
1) Only has 1 Mouse Button
2) It’s not fully open source
3) It’s not ported to x86
4) It has no real package management
5) It has no market share
6) Apple are the Microsoft of PPC
7) I’m a ppc fanboy zealot in a cult
8) It’s too expensive
9) You can’t just open a terminal and use it as a UNIX box
10) You can’t just fire up X11 and use it as a UNIX box
11) Only a non-technical computer use would use a Mac
I’m sure I haven’t covered all of the bases.
/me puts on asbestos boots and sprays troll replellent
I’m waiting for E17 to go stable and hit the streets. Also next generation gnome/kde would even things out a bit.
// I am not proud of it, but I am not afraid to admit it. //
wtf? What shame is there in using Windows, especially 2000/XP?
Unless you’re a complete moron who can keep virii and spyware off his PC. It’s really not hard to do.
haha … i think the joke’s on me … that was sarcasm in your post, right Tobi?
Duh. Me stupid.
I sure hope that was sarcasm in tobi’s post
otherwise…
I think the author missed the point of gconf by a country mile. The whole point of putting advanced twiddly configuration options somewhere obscure to end users is that GNOME is following a philosophy of user-friendliness and simplicity which requires that said options be hidden. Given that this is the approach the author pines for later in the article, I’d say he really needs to read up on what Linux desktops are *doing*. Or what *is* he advocating? That taking all these options out of gconf and dumping them in a fifty page preferences GUI would somehow help end users? Or is he suggesting that the mere fact they exist somehow impairs GNOME’s usability? What’s his point?
no discussion about the osx desktop. not one. just mac this and mac that, sounds like people repeating a sales pitch.
i would agree that the osx desktop i have used and seen was a very nice visual interface, it shows the same thought in design as the company’s product casings. When i used the desktop though with os10.0.x, i missed the ‘finder’ that was present in o9.
By finder i mean the menu availble from the apple icon in the upper left corner which provided a list of all running applications and allowed the user to switch to the application they selected.
While I only occasionally used the old Mac OS, the old Apple menu was the first thing I wanted back. So I bought Fruit menu.
“So I just am testing ThinkFree Office.”
And you’ll soon discover that their spell checker can’t do contractions worth a damn. (It’s going to read “can’t” as “can” and “‘t”).
And if you c&p in text from another source, the spell checker will jump over it and the c&p’d text cannot be selected, so if you want to move it via a highlight and drag, you’re SOL. If you want to delete it, you have to backspace it out one.letter.at.a.time.
Both of these are what crippled it as an office suite for me.
I’ve been using OS X for the past 3 years and it keeps getting better and better. I just recently got a new pc this year and run XP for the first time. I still love X over it by a long shot.
That ligature ae character is called “ash”, but the hard-core English Language geeks know it’s really spelled “asc”. (FYI, in Old English, SC = SH)
But this is going to get on topic because …
To me a lot of Linux man and help pages are writen in the equvalent of the discussion I had with Charles about verb forms. They’re written from one specialist to another.
If you don’t know the jargon and have the technical background, they might as well be written in a foreign language.
Although this is improving, too many desktop Linuxes assume that the user knows the equvalent about Linux of what I know about the origins of English as a spoken and written language, or that they have the want and the time to learn it.
OS X is the *nix based desktop that doesn’t make you learn the equvalent of “Willelm cyngc gret ealle mine þegenas on Eoferwicscire Frencisce and Englisce freondlice” to let you get your work done, but thinks it’s cool if you do.
Since Apple launched MacOSX there have been written many ‘reviews’ of the new desktop and if I recollect correctly very few of them were real reviews. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and many others use ‘arguments’ like: nice, fine, wonderful & beautiful, words which say nothing about the subject. Availability of some applications should not be an argument. We can not and should not judge one desktop by a number and quality of applications available for the particular desktop.
The truth is that Apple, with introduction of MacOSX, has abandoned its own HIG and made some bad usability decisions like rounded maximise, minimise and close buttons (which even doesn’t show symbols ‘+’, ‘-‘ and ‘x’), too big application panel, photographic icons, and a usability disaster of a round-shaped scrollbar. Yes eye-candy sells good, but I don’t have my computer to look at it, I have it to do some work. And Apple’s insisting on its application menu on top of the screen is a special story.
Many people misunderstands why MacOSX desktop looks beautiful. It is not because of Aqua, photographic icons, and transparent panel, it is simply because MacOSX has Quartz and its drawing engine, and superb fonts.
Who exactly is Steven J Vaughan-Nichols? I mean…. one guy writes an article that basically says “I like OSX better than anything else”. He didn’t actually give many concrete examples of anything – which is fair enough in a way, maybe he just likes it better – but there are lots of people that like a particular environment better; he’s just another one.
Good stuff.
Well… that’s an opinion… who cares? I love KDE, it’s useful, it’s quite pretty, it’s free software and I can run it on a cheap PC. My opinion is as worthy as the author’s.
“And Apple’s insisting on its application menu on top of the screen is a special story.”
People have a grave misunderstanding of this feature. Just because you have come from a world where each window has (or can have) it’s own menu doesn’t mean it is the best (although you may be very used to it). The fact remains (and usability study, after usability study on this subject show) that it is a much more efficient means. There are two main reasons for this I am aware of:
1. The menu bar is always in the same place.
2. That place also happens to be the easiest place to get to on the screen – an edge. Because you cannot over shoot edge s with the mouse it is extreemly easy to get to the menu bar with a quick jerk of the mouse.
2. That place also happens to be the easiest place to get to on the screen – an edge. Because you cannot over shoot edge s with the mouse it is extreemly easy to get to the menu bar with a quick jerk of the mouse.
Indeed. Preliminary screenshots of Tiger would seem to indicate they’ve also fixed the Apple menu so that it’s inifitely wide to the left, as well as the top.
What people who don’t use a mac don’t realize about OS X is how truly simple it is to use (and yet you can have alot of control of the system as well, which was not true in OS 9)
What alot of people dismiss as “eye-candy” are often very useful and time saving features. The icons in the dock are usually much easier to recognize at a quick gland then any other “start menu” launchers like those found in Windows, Gnome, and KDE. The fact is it is easier to recognize an image then text. Expose is also often described as a fancy window switcher, but it is MUCH more. Because of the drag-and-drop facilities in OS X (also more advanced and integrated then any desktop I have used) expose is a great tool for working with files and importing files into various projects, while still being the best task switcher I have used – again because a image of the windows is easier to recognize then the title of the document/program.
These are just two of the more discussed features. There are also hundreds of small details which really make the desktop come off very polished. Things like how integrated the programs are with each other and the system(laregely due to the development environment apple has created), system wide spell checking, the ability to seemlesly encrypt your home folder, the columns view, finder sidebar, open/save dialogs which match the finder (column or list views, sidebar, etc), and the list goes on and on.
OS X is definately the best Unix desktop available…from a daily user of both Gnome and Mac OS X (and often use KDE and XFCE as well).
My problem is that the fanboi mentality of OSX has taken on a life of its own. No one is bothering to deal with glaring shortcomings because they are just far too overjoyed that there is a consumer OS that has a terminal.
who said OS X has no shortcomings?
It’s by FAR the best OS imo, but it DOES have it’s shortcomings.
have you used OS X for an extended period?
some people call it an hybrid because the osx kernel (it’s called xnu) does have a BSD layer, however xnu is (mostly) a mach kernel. Also unixes don’t the luxuries like the IOKit, in fact, unlike osx, beos or windows, unixes suck big time on asynchronous i/o (think desktop responsiveness).
Kernel preemption is also said to better than on unixes and therefore osx should have lower latencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/bsdcon02/ful…
“Linux hasn’t been a monolithic kernel since the mid 90’s. But you probably just wanted to use the word “monolithic”.
lol, after the flamewar with Tanenbaum, there’s no way linux will ever be anything but a monolithic kernel.
The author has a few factual errors:
“Under every bright, shiny Mac desktop beats a Unix heart named Darwin. Darwin, in turn, is built on top of Mach 3.0 operating-system services, which run on top of the 4.4 BSD Unix operating system.”
Not real familiar with the OS X underpennings, eh? In a perfect microkernel world, the real OS runs on top of it. Mach doesn’t run on top of BSD; BSD is supposed to run on top of Mach. However, Apple couldn’t really make it work that way. It turns out that they had to blur the line between the Mach microkernel and the BSD layer so much that their own documentation shows the two layers overlapping and equal.
“Today’s Mac desktop comes from decades of a different design philosophy, where ease of use is all.”
No. OS X is almost purely based on NeXT. I used to know a guy who worked in Human Interface Group. They were targeted for extinction within the first couple months of Jobs’ Second Coming. Many of them were able to secure transfers to other groups before HIG was terminated, but they were later let go as some of them were continuing to espouse MacOS philosophies in a NeXT OS world.
As far as the Aqua interface itself, it is a pale comparison to the useability of MacOS 9.x. I’ve been using Macs since 1994 (System 6) and the only thing that makes me cuss faster than OS X is Windows. Hmmm…is opening a new window in Finder done with Apple-Shift-N or Apple-N? Ooops, I created a folder. Ok, which little ball minimizes the window? Ooops, I hit the close one by accident. I don’t know if it is still true (I stopped trying to like OS X with 10.2), but it used to be you could open two windows in an application, open a third window in a second application, click on one of the first two windows to bring it to the front, have the windows layer such that App1 Window1/App2 Window1/App1 Window 2 and then close App1 Window1 but instead of App2 Window2 being foremost, App1’s remaining window would leap in front of App2’s window and be foremost. Completely inconsistent.
Security in OS X? Get real. Check out
http://www.dialectronics.com/logon.jpg
It’s an image of a scenario I managed to figure out to add a UID 0 account without even logging on. Turns out that UID 0 accounts don’t appear in Control Panels->Accounts, just NetInfo Manager (which is rarely known to most users).
After much frustration, I left OS X long behind. I spend my time with MacOS 9 and OpenBSD w/ Enlightenment (I’m in the process of moving to NetBSD). There are a couple features in MacOS that I can’t replace (like turning off anti-aliasing in any and all applications that think it is useful), but I’ve gained a few features in Enlightenment that I can’t live without (like the pager, a whole lot cheaper than a 30″ monitor but twice the real estate).
OS X is not worth it.
But Mac OS X isn’t posix certified. it’s cute, but rather useless. It’s not like they couldn’t afford the fees involved. but hey. keep selling non posix stuff as “superior”. I’m first to admit though, despite my personal views on what I think are good things and bad things about the OS, it’s not Windows, and yes…
I would like to see better from such expensive software. I use other OS’s because I just like what I do with them.
You get spoiled with expectations, I guess.
I do talk to members of many communities. Sure, my primary OS, BeOS isn’t posix certfied, but I have been given assurances by Haiku people that they have someone in charge of working for Posix Certification.
So.. just to let you know. 🙂
“f an aqua native version of OO or Abi Word comes out, I’d like to use them, but until then … ~sigh~ it’s “Mordorsoft” Office. ”
Your prayers have been heard:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11511
It’s not too bad. I after all am Using NeoOffice/J (http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php) which is a Java port of OpenOffice and it runs much better on OS X than the “official” one. No need to fire up X11, Japanese input works, you can doubleclick documents in the Finder or in Mail to directly open them etc. The interface is ugly though.
[quote]If an aqua native version of OO or Abi Word comes out, I’d like to use them, but until then … ~sigh~ it’s “Mordorsoft” Office.[/quote]
Why is AppleWorks never considered? Apple set the standard for suites back in the 80s with this package and it continues to be made. Please explain why AW is continuously ignored.
thanks,
Rob
just FYI, you can launch any GTK+2 based app without anti-aliasing using the GDK_USE_XFT variable. eg:
$ GDK_USE_XFT=0 gedit
will launch gedit with no anti-aliasing. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent for other toolkits, sorry.
“Just because you have come from a world where each window has (or can have) it’s own menu doesn’t mean it is the best (although you may be very used to it).”
How do you know which (desktop) world I have come from? You are implaying that I come from Windows world. Wrong. Actually, my first computers were Macs. Unfortunatelly I spent a lot of money on my Macs and never got what I had paid for. Macs were always a big trouble to me: hardware problems, software problems, unexpected freezes, unexpected crushes, software incompatibilities, one-buttoned mouse etc. etc. I remember that all my friends who used Macs had the same kind of problems. Always.
And today an Apple computer is a piece of furniture IMHO. A nice piece of furniture. And expensive one. Very expensive.
When they replace those funny windows buttons so I can see which one is close and which one is minimise then we can talk about the desktop and usability. When they replace that funny aqua-rounded scrollbar button so I can easily grab it with mouse pointer then we can talk about the desktop and usability.
“The fact remains (and usability study, after usability study on this subject show) that it is a much more efficient means. There are two main reasons for this I am aware of:
1. The menu bar is always in the same place.
2. That place also happens to be the easiest place to get to on the screen – an edge. Because you cannot over shoot edge s with the mouse it is extreemly easy to get to the menu bar with a quick jerk of the mouse.”
Yes, that’s true when you have only one application opened. But let’s say I have two applications on my screen and only one menu which belongs to the focused application. I want to go directly to the menu from the non-focused app. Ups, where is it? The other applications doesn’t have any menu? Oh, I have first to focus the unfocused application and then move mouse to the new menu. And tell me please which usability study shows that that kind of action is faster than moving your mouse cursor directly to the unfocused application’s menu? No “quick jerk of the mouse” will help you here. And, please, don’t tell me that I can use keyboard switches to focus windows. I can’t. I have only one arm and I exclusively use my mouse.
2) It’s not fully open source
PowerPC plataform is open ‘source'(specs, CHRP) and the OS itself is opensource also (Darwin)
3) It’s not ported to x86
Darwin, the os, has
4) It has no real package management
Silly.. There’s no need for it.. U drag it, and it’s installed. Move to the trash it’s deleted.
6) Apple are the Microsoft of PPC
???
Put links where your mouth is
8) It’s too expensive
err… no it’s not..
9) You can’t just open a terminal and use it as a UNIX box
What the **** are you talking about? Darwin has a terminal.
Eh??
10) You can’t just fire up X11 and use it as a UNIX box
Again, WTF r u talking about..
Oh yeah.. Coz none of the unices need to launch an Xserver..
BTW, X11 is a protocol not a program.
11) Only a non-technical computer use would use a Mac
Yeah.. Like virginia tech, or the math departmant and the IT ppl in my school..
I find just funny when I read : “Mac sux because, they have just one button mouse”. Well… you can buy a new mouse with 24 buttons if you want! Not because it was in the box you have to use it. No one in the PC side keep the cheap mouse (with 2 buttons and 1 wheel) sold with their computer, they buy a new one.
@wygiwyg :
if you want a fast focus, use Exposé. You don’t need the keyboard to use it (work when your mouse is in screen coners)
have you ever remotely ssh logged into a server machine in bengladesh
Where is “bengladesh”? Would that be somewhere near Bangladesh? But to answer your question, no. I have never used my Gentoo Linux machine to ssh into another computer outside of my own home.
I frequently ssh from my Powerbook to my office machine when I’m at home. My Powerbook is running OS X and my office machine is running Gentoo. No problems there.
Obviously, the OP is someone who has never used a Mac and thinks he’s an 31337 h4xor because he can type emerge in a command line. Using Gentoo does not make you a computer expert and suddenly know your system better.
“But let’s say I have two applications on my screen and only one menu which belongs to the focused application. I want to go directly to the menu from the non-focused app. ”
The fact is for most users this is a very uncommon occourance (actually for most users this is senario would occur zero times) and the the extra efficiency in the significantly more common operation makes up for the extra time spent on a less often task.
Your implication that users would think that no menu exists for a given application just because it is not visible is also very erroneous – if I’m in microsoft word and I want to change a setting on the music I am listening to the most obvious solution is to first switch to that application and then change settigns for it.
Excuse me, you are not trying to tell me that having two applications open at the same time is something that would almost never happen to normal users, are you? And wanting to do something in the application menu isn’t uncommon too, or is it?
Sorry, I just don’t understand what you are trying to say here?
Not at all! If you didn’t read the original post i was responding to, what I’m saying is that it is very uncommon for a user to want to use functions of one program while they are in another without first switching to that program. You will find that even in systems where menues are children of the windows that a vast magority of users will first switch to the given application, then select the menu option they want, and then swich back to their original application.
Simply put the vast magority of users wil never try to access the menu on the non-focused application. It’s just not the way the human brain works!
“And, please, don’t tell me that I can use keyboard switches to focus windows. I can’t. I have only one arm and I exclusively use my mouse.”
A few suggestions on OS X for this which are both from a usability sense superious to Gnome/KDE/Windows:
1. Expose – In particulare you can set corners of the screen to triger expose events. For example if I move my mouse to the lower left corner (which as I mentioned in a previous post edges are the easiest place on the screen to reach, second only by cornes since they are effectively two edges) to the expose feature for all windows.
2. As much flak as the Dock gets it is really a better solution then the “task bar clone’s” for switching applications. Graphical representations for applications are far easier to recognize and are a much larger area to ‘hit’ with the mouse then shorter, text based representations fro switching appications.
And for those of us lucky enough to have two hands, the command-tab swticher for os x is also one of the best, again because of it’s use of graphics to represent each application.
There is certainly room for improvement still in OS X in all these categories and I could pick it apart in many ways….however it still must be admited that OS X has a much greater focus on the user and as such has resulted in a much finer crafted desktop experience.
Oh please, just because Apple does it that way doesn’t mean the human brain works that way, that’s just ridiculous. From my experience with using computers myself and from watching other people use computers I’m pretty sure that it is a very common task.
Now you can probably very well argue that the advantages that have already been mentioned far outweigh these problems, but to simply decree that there aren’t any problems, that users don’t do that and that the human brain doesn’t work this way is simply lame.
And about the dock, from using OSX for quite some time now I can honestly say I still don’t like it. It’s flashy and all but it certainly does have it’s shortcomings. Just watch someone who has never used it get confused over where his applications are if he minimzes them, or hides them if you want to know what I’m talking about.
Finally on a general note, I can really understand that a lot of people like OSX and think that it’s the best desktop out there. I don’t really agree with that, but that’s probably in a large part due to personal tastes and experiences. What I never understood is why it is so hard for people to acknowledge, that OSX like any other OS isn’t perfect and has it’s share of usability problems. Instead we get to read articles and postings in discussion like this that simply assume that OSX has to be the best and perfect, without even trying to argue for their point. That’s annoying, to say the least.
Coming in as the 7-somethingth post, I likely won’t say anything that someone hasn’t already stated, but here goes…
If Mac boxes were cheaper, they would be much more of a choice then they are now. With such expensive hardware being required to run the OS, its no surprise that Mac’s are now pertaining to less market share then Linux.
KDE is very good for power users, but the person writing the article seems to overlook the simplicity of GNOME for less knowledgable users.
Its usability is at least on par with OS X today (I use both daily, OS X at school, GNOME at home). All OS X offers is eye candy, and that hardly qualifies it as a good desktop environment. Besides, gDesklets and enhancements being worked on in Xorg make it only a matter of time until this is on par too.
With IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat and now Ubuntu (with Mark Shuttleworth’s millions) behind the open source offerings, and all targeting GNOME primarily, its easy to see that it will only be a matter of time until the UI features are there too.
I would challenge anyone to go out and find something technically supperior about OS X. The only thing OS X is winning with right now is eye candy, and with the about $1,000 I saved on the hardware, eye candy is something I can live without.
GNUstep ? The free software Mac OS X?
http://www.gnustep.org/
http://www.linuks.mine.nu/gnustep/
I really hope Linux developers start spending more time on polishing up the desktop and improving its help systems and documentation. In the meantime, while Linux and KDE make up my preferred desktop, I think there can be really no question that the best Unix desktop for most users is Mac OS X and Aqua.
What does the Auth.. know about how much time is being spend.
When he speaks about Linux developers, did he meant all the
distributions?[i]KDE is being developed independendly from
any Linux distribution.So what is the Linux desktop?
In my opinion the article had better dealt with the difference
between KDE,GNOME and the-mac-OsX-desktop.
The fact remains (and usability study, after usability study on this subject show) that it is a much more efficient means.
I wasn’t aware there were multiple studies into the single menu bar.
That place also happens to be the easiest place to get to on the screen – an edge. Because you cannot over shoot edge s with the mouse it is extreemly easy to get to the menu bar with a quick jerk of the mouse.
Actually the easiest place to get to on the screen is the spot right under the mouse cursor (NeXT took advantage of this), followed by the corners, followed by the edges.
Apple’s single menu bar has its merits – as does menu-in-window. Ironically, though, it’s not very good for one of the things MacOS is famous for – multiple screens. Its advantage also decreases as screen resolution goes up (thus the menu gets further away from the average mouse cursor position).
As much flak as the Dock gets it is really a better solution then the “task bar clone’s” for switching applications. Graphical representations for applications are far easier to recognize and are a much larger area to ‘hit’ with the mouse then shorter, text based representations fro switching appications.
The biggest problem with the Dock (by default, it is somewhat salvagable with customisation) – and the main reason it sucks compared to Windows Taskbar (and some of its derivatives) – is that everything on it *moves* continuously. This is primarily the result of the flashy grow/shrink graphical effect you get as you scrub the mouse across the Dock and the way it is centred on the screen.
The other problems are that it doesn’t “obviously” show the difference between running and non-running applications, that switching to a specific window (the typical task-switching operation) is a time-consuming and fiddly process, that the demarcation between different functions (task switching vs “activating” things) isn’t immediately obvious and that it doesn’t behave like pretty much every other part of the UI with regards to what things in it represent (primarily seen through drag & drop operations).
Expose “fixes” some of these problems (brilliantly I must say) by moving the burden of task-switching away from the Dock, basically relegating it to a quick-access bar – but that doesn’t change that the Dock is a terrible task-switching UI element. It’s exhibit A in Apple’s shift away from usability as the primary driver of their UI, replaced by flashy graphical effects.
And for those of us lucky enough to have two hands, the command-tab swticher for os x is also one of the best, again because of it’s use of graphics to represent each application.
Apple’s CMD-tab switcher is awful because it switches between *entire applications* when the typical task-switch action wants to switch between *windows* (a la Windows’ alt+tab). Again, this is largely nullified by Expose, but it still sucks.
There is certainly room for improvement still in OS X in all these categories and I could pick it apart in many ways….however it still must be admited that OS X has a much greater focus on the user and as such has resulted in a much finer crafted desktop experience.
Compared to what ? Certainly not MacOS Classic and IMHO not Windows. The OS X UI is first and foremost a marketing tool – it takes quite a bit of customisation, often with third-party tools to make it really usable. It’s a bit like those UIs you see in movies (eg: Minority Report). Sure, they *look* cool, but using them constantly would be a nightmare (obviously OS X isn’t *that* bad, but you get the idea).
Thanks! That fixed a lot of problems with Galeon, which has been the wbe browser I’d been using. I would still like this turned off in gpdf, but this was definately a major improvement! Thanks again!
tim
I would challenge anyone to go out and find something technically supperior about OS X.
Expose (both the concept itself and the underlying technology). Indeed, the whole Quartz system is probably best-of-breed at the moment, although its lack of network-transparency (in practice, I assume, rather than principle – I’d find it hard to believe anyone would be dumb enough to create a display system in this day and age that didn’t have network transparency as part of its spec) is something of a weakness with the accelerating shift towards semi-thin clients.
Self contained applications (eg: Mail.app).
Cocoa.
There’s probably a few other minor bits and pieces, but I’d say those are the major technical “superiorities” of OS X.
“Expose (both the concept itself and the underlying technology).”
Actually, OS X’s interface was so cluttered they had no choice but to develop this.
“Self contained applications (eg: Mail.app).”
A feature of MacOS for a decade.
“Cocoa.”
Apple didn’t even bother to rename the methods from their NeXT roots (NX_*). You could have had OS X like features eight years ago. OS X brings nothing new to the table.
Actually, OS X’s interface was so cluttered they had no choice but to develop this.
I imagine it had more to do with OS X’s atrocious window managament and task-switching facilities – you could hardly call the OS X interface “cluttered” (compared to what ? An empty screen ?).
“Self contained applications (eg: Mail.app).”
A feature of MacOS for a decade.
“Cocoa.”
Apple didn’t even bother to rename the methods from their NeXT roots (NX_*). You could have had OS X like features eight years ago.
Oh, I doubt that. [Lack of] Processing power alone would have made it impractical – if not impossible – to do all the cool stuff OS X does today 8 years ago. Hell, a top end dual G5 can barely run OS X responsively with more than a trivial load.
OS X brings nothing new to the table.
The question asked wasn’t what was new (although personally I’d consider Expose to be a significantly large evolutionary leap to classify as “new”), but what was better.
err, sorry ? superior fonts in X ? gimme a break.
Please visit your local optician and watch out for CRISP fonts.
OS-X font technology is nice and can handle various font-formats, but the rendering is still blurry and not top-notch. Plus the users has NO control over the fonts, besides the smoothing-level. Kindergarten.
If you started with OS-X i would say OK, he’s used to that blurry chaos and doesn’t know anything better of effective. Or do you use 14pt fonts all the time?
OS-X wastes too much screen estate, fonts are still blurry and offer bad readability at small sizes (below 8 point or so) and the whole interface sports annoying lags and hickups. Sure it may looks cozy and sweet, esp. for n00bs, but i can’t do HALF of the stuff i do in OS9 in the same time.
In os-x i always need MORE clicks to do the same crap as in OS9.
Apple’s CMD-tab switcher is awful because it switches between *entire applications* when the typical task-switch action wants to switch between *windows* (a la Windows’ alt+tab). Again, this is largely nullified by Expose, but it still sucks.
Why not use CMD-tilde ? Most applications respond to this key combination to cycle through windows within an application. Fair enough, not all apps respond to this OS X convention, but it’s the app developers fault if it doesn’t.
err, sorry ? superior fonts in X ? gimme a break.
Please visit your local optician and watch out for CRISP fonts.
OS-X font technology is nice and can handle various font-formats, but the rendering is still blurry and not top-notch. Plus the users has NO control over the fonts, besides the smoothing-level. Kindergarten.
If you started with OS-X i would say OK, he’s used to that blurry chaos and doesn’t know anything better of effective. Or do you use 14pt fonts all the time?
I think you’ll find that is called Anti Aliasing, blurring the fonts edges, its supposed to be like that and actually looks better on the screen then crisp edges
Why not use CMD-tilde ? Most applications respond to this key combination to cycle through windows within an application. Fair enough, not all apps respond to this OS X convention, but it’s the app developers fault if it doesn’t.
Because it suffers the reverse problem of only switching between windows in the *same* application.
Task switches are – generally – between different windows of different applications. For example, copying & pasting some text from a document to an email, or flipping back to a terminal window to run some commands.
Moving from an arbitrary window of one application to an arbitrary window of another application – probably the most frequent form of task switching undertaken – is the slowest thing to do in OS X (without Expose). You either have to Cmd-TAB to the right application, then Cmd-~ to the right window, or you need to right-click on the application’s Dock icon (with its pop-up delay) and select the window from the window list.
The other thing that annoys me no end about Cmd-Tab is that when you switch to a particular application, it raises *all* of that application’s windows above everything else. This is traditional MacOS behaviour, but IMHO it’s inefficient and disruptive to workflow (it annoyed me just as much in Classic MacOS).
“Expose (both the concept itself and the underlying technology).”
Expocity.
“the whole Quartz system is probably best-of-breed at the moment”
Eh… Its features are being implemented, as stated in my original post. Quartz basically implements all the graphical subsystems that enable the eye candy. Not something that should be taken into effect when studying usability as it adds nothing.
“Self contained applications (eg: Mail.app).”
GNUStep has a mail.app… Evolution is far better. I am not really sure what you mean by “Self contained” though, Mail.app just uses Carbon last I checked.
“Cocoa.”
I prefere GTK to Cocoa.
“There’s probably a few other minor bits and pieces, but I’d say those are the major technical “superiorities” of OS X.”
I don’t think so.
“I imagine it had more to do with OS X’s atrocious window managament and task-switching facilities – you could hardly call the OS X interface “cluttered” (compared to what ? An empty screen ?).”
OS X makes it impossible to have more than a few windows open before it becomes difficult to find what one is looking for. Add to the mix the ability to have the same directory/folder open in multiple windows and there’s a reason people are buying 30″ monitors.
” ‘Apple didn’t even bother to rename the methods from their NeXT roots (NX_*). You could have had OS X like features eight years ago.’ ”
“Oh, I doubt that. [Lack of] Processing power alone would have made it impractical – if not impossible – to do all the cool stuff OS X does today 8 years ago.”
Then spend some time reading up on NeXT OS. There’s a reason a significant number of OS X developers came from NeXT backgrounds.
” Hell, a top end dual G5 can barely run OS X responsively with more than a trivial load.”
So the lack of responsiveness is not a negative criteria?
” ‘OS X brings nothing new to the table.’ ”
“The question asked wasn’t what was new (although personally I’d consider Expose to be a significantly large evolutionary leap to classify as “new”), but what was better.”
Your argument is inherently flawed. For something to be better than what already existed, it must bring something new to the table. To argue otherwise would be to conclude that the NeXT OS interface was better eight years ago and is still so now. Other than eye candy, OS X’s UI is no different than NeXT’s.
I imagine it had more to do with OS X’s atrocious window managament and task-switching facilities – you could hardly call the OS X interface “cluttered” (compared to what ? An empty screen ?).
Mac OS X’s desktop almost ensures the user has many Windows for each application, its a side effect of having toolbars seperate from apps. Maybe you don’t see it as a bad thing, but it certainly makes for a big ol’ mess.
Oh, I doubt that. [Lack of] Processing power alone would have made it impractical – if not impossible – to do all the cool stuff OS X does today 8 years ago. Hell, a top end dual G5 can barely run OS X responsively with more than a trivial load.
He didn’t say it was practical, he said it was possible. It certainly was too.
You state another major point here though, Quartz drains a lot of processing power. Those eye candy features blog down the overall interface, thus why most could care less about it.
The question asked wasn’t what was new (although personally I’d consider Expose to be a significantly large evolutionary leap to classify as “new”), but what was better.
And you failed to state anything other then eye candy that was valid.
The _only_ benifit over GNOME that OS X has is eye candy.
Eye candy makes the OS far less responsive, and adds nothing substantial to the usability of the OS.
The _only_ benifit over GNOME that OS X has is eye candy
… and Display PDF, and Quartz Extreme, and professional applications.
“The _only_ benifit over GNOME that OS X has is eye candy
… and Display PDF, and Quartz Extreme, and professional applications.”
Ah, good to know that Display PDF and Quartz Extreme don’t fall in the eye candy department but are of themselves great usability features…
Ok, I’ve read a little about MacOS X in the past and tried to make the “switch” from x86/Linux to Mac OS X.
First getting hardware for OS X: As I have a very nice 17″ Samsung TFT Monitor I was searching for a PPC without a monitor. The cheapest new PPC without a build-in monitor was about EUR 2200.- here in the Austrian Apple Webstore (which was to much for me). Second try, looking for a used PowerMac on ebay. There was a PowerMac G4/733 which looked very nice except the logicboard was broken. So I went to the next Apple dealer and asked for a new logic board. The cheapest one was a “replacement part” logic board for a little more than EUR 300.-. Come on, EUR 300.- for a new mainboard is really a joke, you get a great x86/Athlon board for about EUR 120.-. Next try, a used PowerMac G4/400 for about EUR 450.-. Everything seemed fine so I bought it.
My conclusion is that a Apple Computer is not more expensive than a x86 PC if there is no existing PC on your table, but it is really expensive when you try to switch from x86 and want to reuse your e.g. Monitor. Also upgrading a PowerMac is much more expensive than x86 is (e.g. a Sonnet Processor Upgrade to 1,4 GHz for a G4 costs about EUR 400.-, 3rd party DVD-Writers are not supported). One the other side a PowerMac doesn’t loose it’s value as fast as a x86.
MacOS X itself is a nice looking OS which was always very stable, but also had it’s downsides (e.g. try to burn a iso image with OS X without third party software). Nothing more, nothing less.
Coming to an end, OS X was nice to try, but the PowerMac G4/400 was to slow (compared to my Athlon 2400+). So I ended up selling the PowerMac again on ebay.
, good to know that Display PDF and Quartz Extreme don’t fall in the eye candy department but are of themselves great usability features…
I figured that point would be jumped on, but I’m not talking about a simple transparancy effect or an animation.
You could use a simple black screen with monospace fonts if you want, but a windowing environment is accepted by most as an improvement, a technological advance even.
You don’t think it’s advantageous that all rendering is done as a PDF document? Sure makes it easy for all applications to produce PDF files. Quartz Extreme allows the Graphics card to accelerate all drawing of the user interface. That is a technological improvement, an advance. If you don’t think so then please express your concern attempting to bring the same thing to X Windows. I’m not knocking Linux, I think it’s great. But OS X does have some advantages right now.
I think we are talking about different things here. My point is not that these things aren’t great technologies, they are of course, but they don’t say anything about the usability of a system in themselves.
-> I think you’ll find that is called Anti Aliasing, blurring the fonts edges, its supposed to be like that and actually looks better on the screen then crisp edges
sure, it’s the AA, but this can be done in a zillion ways, besides this the current size of the rendered letters directly affects the results.
have a look: http://smithz.org/x/DesktopFontsOS9vsOSX.gif
Please note the small snippet from a linux-desktop at the bottom. It offers IMHO a much cleaner font than e.g. Apples Lucida Grande, the Letters fit nearly perfect into the pixel-grid AND are smooth. Just watch the letters with a magnifier and compare to os-x.
Especially at small sizes the differences of rendering quality between 7,8,9 pt are obvious. This is of course a common phenomenon, at smalls sizes the bars, shapes, lines of a char doesn’t fit easily into the pixel-grid.
Because of this I want MORE control over the fonts, the sizes used systemwide and so on. The OS-X on default just scales along which leads to sometimes hard-to-read lettering. Of course i want to disable anti-aliasing, i know it IS possible but it leads to inconsistency hell. You get mixed AA and non-AA fonts. As long Apple doesn’t widens up the font-preferences it will be inconsistent all the way.
And btw, after deactivating AA the resulting bitmap-fonts in OS-X are a shame! Spacing fucked, Letters mediocre…
Eat the Apple or die.
this is a shot of my apple standard font settings, doesnt seem to bad
http://www.taylor19.karoo.net/pic1.jpg
Expocity.
Which isn’t hardware accelerated in linux. it isn’t live-updating. it isn’t setup to use the corners of the screen for efficient drag and drop. it isn’t even officially part of gnome yet so very few people use it, and lastly it requires the xorg composite extension which isn’t even enabled by default in xorg 6.8.. not to mention 6.8 is so new even gentoo doesn’t have it in the stable tree yet.
Eh… Its features are being implemented, as stated in my original post. Quartz basically implements all the graphical subsystems that enable the eye candy. Not something that should be taken into effect when studying usability as it adds nothing.
Being implemented and not nearly done are two different things. quartz extreme exists today. hell, it existed two years ago in jaguar. not only is X way behind but it’s not even close to having something similar in full production. when cairo and glitz are running on every gnome desktop, then i’ll consider gnome “caught up” to quartz extreme. that moment is at least 1 year off, and that’s being conservative. Qt 4 has a much more likely chance of seeing the light of day in a years time. i’d consider that a good thing if KDE didn’t have such horrible usability to begin with.
and one more thing i want to say about comments like this. do not attack something just because it’s better. usability implications aside, quartz extreme can do a lot more (rendering wise) than X can. it’s a problem. acknowledge it, and improve it. but stop attacking it just because you don’t have it.
GNUStep has a mail.app… Evolution is far better. I am not really sure what you mean by “Self contained” though, Mail.app just uses Carbon last I checked.
I’ve used Evolution, Mail.app, and GNUMail. Mail.app is the only one that handles IMAP properly. if you don’t know what i mean, then perhaps you haven’t used it. And no, Mail.app is fully cocoa.
I prefere GTK to Cocoa.
while i think C is a great language, it is missing a lot of things that obj-c has. the biggest thing that comes to mind, if you’re talking about interfaces, is dynamic binding. this is sort of one of those “if you don’t know what it means go look it up” sort of things. my obj-c tutorial explains it fairly well i think (look at the section which discusses the id type. http://www.otierney.net/objective-c.html). also, gtk is a GUI library. period. no more, no less. Cocoa is the name for the entire openstep api including the foundation classes and the appkit classes. there’s more to it than that, including things like threading and io. it’s much more comparable to Qt than gtk. but, as just strictly a gui to gui comparison, cocoa wins hands down. glade is no where near as powerful as interface builder in mac os x (which is free btw with the xcode tools. just incase you think it costs money). it’s possible using IB to write a safari based web browser using 0 lines of code in IB. the same cannot be said for glade.
I don’t think so.
you sir are an arrogant fool. at least i acknowledge that linux makes a far better server than my mac. i KNOW the strengths and weaknesses of my systems. as should you. mac, technologically, is far superior to linux as a desktop right now. linux is far superior as a server. does that make one better than the other? no. but it DOES make os x a better desktop, and it does make linux a better server. choose your tools wisely and use them were appropriate
Until three months ago, I had never used Windows for any length of time — just Macs, at home and work, OS 6-9 and X. Then I got a new job and was assigned a Win 2k laptop.
One of the biggest adjustments has been using the task bar vs. the dock. For me, at least, the task bar works well as long as you don’t have too many windows open. But I tend to have lots of windows open, so the task bar has all those little file icons in it and that makes it crowded and difficult to find things when I want to switch between windows.
The dock, OTOH, doesn’t automatically have an icon for every open window and therefore doesn’t get crowded. And because I’m used to switching between apps to switch between windows, the dock works better for me than the task bar for this chore. Plus, you can right-click an app’s dock icon to get a contextual menu of the app’s open windows and select one.
I also like how I can drag folders into the dock and right-click them to get a contextual menu of their contents, as well as drag files into these folders. If anyone knows of a way to replicate this in Win 2k, please let me know, because it’s a dock feature that I really miss and would love to have from 8 to 5.
And, I must say, I don’t like how Win has menus at the top of every window. Just seems to clutter things up and forces me to think for moment as to which menu bar I need to click on to get something done, whereas with the Mac OS I can go right to the top of the screen without thinking.
All this said, I realize that my preference for the Mac OS stems at least in part from having used Macs for so long and the resulting ingrained habits.
Mac OS X’s desktop almost ensures the user has many Windows for each application, its a side effect of having toolbars seperate from apps. Maybe you don’t see it as a bad thing, but it certainly makes for a big ol’ mess.
wow you are a troll. first off, the only apps that have toolbars separate from the app that i know of in os x are microsoft office and adobe pro apps. every, and i do mean every, other app i’ve used on the mac has a connected toolbar. despite that i think the reason they separate the toolbar is good: it means that instead of every excel window and word window having duplidated toolbars, they can all share one toolbar. this is a similar philosophy to mac’s shared menu bar. it REDUCES screen clutter, and it makes the system more “multi-window” oriented to encourage not maximizing every single window like your average gnome/kde/windows users do. mac is all about multitasking and productivity. with expose it makes it easier to manage all those windows as well. one nice perk of separating the toolbars is when you use expose, the toolbars fade out. thus expose can make each window slightly larger instead of having to waste that space to a toolbar that might now be visible on the screen 10 times.
He didn’t say it was practical, he said it was possible. It certainly was too.
You state another major point here though, Quartz drains a lot of processing power. Those eye candy features blog down the overall interface, thus why most could care less about it.
Repeat after me: i know that quartz extreme is hardware compositied, thus all “eye candy” operations are done entirely through the near-idle GPU thus wasting hardly any system resources. repeat this 5 times until you get it through your thick skull. things like true transparency, shadows, vector scaling window operations (like expose or minimizing a window) are done through the GPU. you are not wasting system resources. you’re taking advantage of resources that aren’t even being used to their full potential. we get all these visually pleasing and often useful animations for FREE. useful you say? yes. when you use expose, there’s a transition animation that shows you where all the windows came from, and where they are now. so when you use expose you can see the windows move into their tiled position thus making it easier to see which window you want to click on. you get all this power without scratching the CPU thanks to all the heavy lifting being done in the GPU. when you minimize a window, you get a nice animation showing you the new location of the window as you minimize it, thus giving you a visual cue to where the window is after the fact. the “useless eye candy” everyone likes to insult mac for is often rooted in a useful usability after effect. you’re just too busy insulting us for having a better looking desktop environment to realize that these animations and effects often have a use and that they don’t slow our machines down as we do it.
//
// I am not proud of it, but I am not afraid to admit it. //
wtf? What shame is there in using Windows, especially 2000/XP?
Unless you’re a complete moron who can keep virii and spyware off his PC. It’s really not hard to do.//
What’s the point in having to keep te system clean by hand, when you could use a *nix OS that doesn’t collect that trash in the first place. Not to mention stability. OSX still sux. But it’s better than Windows.
I just bought a powerbook, and i think its great, i mean most linux program have been ported thanks to the fink project. so people here who are complaining about a non-comercial app for burning cd;s why dont they install fink and install the apps they want ?
OSX looks great, although it like alot of memory , which isnt a big deal has it manages it well from what i can see.
Well I have a G4 450 MhZ AGP also secondhand. I added memory up to 1GB,
it has 2 internal hd and one extra as backup in an ext firewire box. I got a secondhand Samsung Syncmaster 700p. I got ThinkFree Suite.
I agree the Mac seems expensive. On the other hand, I now have the easiest machine I have ever owned when it comes to opening the tower and replacing memory, hard-disks, graphics card and so on. This design is perfect in comparison to the average PC tower. OS X eye candy is fine and then via Fink one has the Unix world – what a wonderful tool Apple have created in one box.
I certainly won’t go back to a PC.
>> MacOS X itself is a nice looking OS which was always very stable, but also had it’s downsides (e.g. try to burn a iso image with OS X without third party software). Nothing more, nothing less.
Fire up Disk Utility drag iso to side panel, press BURN. Just because you don’t know how to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means you don’t know how to do it.
“Fire up Disk Utility drag iso to side panel, press BURN. Just because you don’t know how to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means you don’t know how to do it.”
Now if that isn’t userfriendly.
Just look how hard the same thing is in gnome:
Right click on iso and choose burn.
Drag ISO to toast ICON in dock, press burn.
This Linux versus the world thing is getting a little old.
Oh no a commercial app!
Sorry, I thought the issue here was the best unix desktop and the article was about OSX, KDE and Gnome. But if you feel offended by someone pointing out that Gnome might actually do something right or god forbid something better than OSX I’ll stop now.
dude, you can upgrade that sucker. get a 1GHz Sonnet upgrade from newegg and get a Dual layer DVD burner (you will need to use pachburn until OS X nativly supports the new dual layer drives)
I have no problem with Linux I use it every single day. It’s a great OS, but it can’t compare at all to OS X as a UNIX desktop. The commercial application support makes OS X much better imho. If all you need is open source apps to get what you want done that’s all well and good.
Myself I need commercial applications for stuff I want, and I don’t want to use Windows. IMHO OS X mixes what’s best with Windows (Applications) with what’s best in Linux (UNIX tools). I don’t buy in to the everything needs to be free arguement at all.
My personal opinion of the article itself is it was pointless flamebait with no real information. People should just use what they want, just don’t tell me that OS X and Linux on PPC hardware are comparable they aren’t. As for the desktop UNIX thing use what you want.
/me goes back to playing Call of Duty on his G5
OR, you could mount the image, open up finder and press the burn button next to it
“don’t mind them, they’re all just Jealous that Apple has a four year head-start on a usable and elegant unix desktop with fully-integrated real drag-and-drop
”
From wikipedia.org:
“Mac OS X is the latest version of the Mac OS operating system for Macintosh computers. Developed and published by Apple Computer, it provides the stability of a Unix operating environment and adds popular features of the traditional Macintosh user interface. The operating system was first commercially released in 2001.”
it’s now October, 2004. How does 2001 -> Oct 2004 = 4 years?
oh, and btw, debman, would that work for ISOs that don’t contain standard PC-readable data – audio discs, Playstation discs (oops! here comes the Copyright Police!) etc? genuine question.
yes. as long as the data is formated in an ISo image it will burn them.
in fact, OS X will create iso images (it is called a master image but you can change the extension to .iso with out modifying the file at all and it burns in any application.
it’s now October, 2004. How does 2001 -> Oct 2004 = 4 years?
The OS X public beta was available September of 2000.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-245652.html?legacy=cnet
“Availability of some applications should not be an argument. We can not and should not judge one desktop by a number and quality of applications available for the particular desktop.”
Why not?
Come on Free as in B33R.. Information is Free… Excuse me while I vomit
People like Linux because it is FREE as in I am to cheap to pay for anything that they cannot D/L. Then they will tell you why should I pay for it when:
1 So many people contributed who didn’t get paid, so why should I pay
2 I could code something better
3 I don’t need the CD
4 Information should be free
5 I am saving the environment by not buying the CD (I heard that one)
Linux people are the people you take out to eat and they order water and pull out Kool Aid packets to put in the water because they are to cheap to buy a soda.
Expocity.
Is not as good (technically _or_ practically). Not to mention it’s still beta.
Its features are being implemented, as stated in my original post.
But they aren’t _yet_. The question asked wasn’t about what might happen in 5 years, it’s about what’s happning _now_.
GNUStep has a mail.app… Evolution is far better. I am not really sure what you mean by “Self contained” though, Mail.app just uses Carbon last I checked.
Precisely what I said – applications that are self contained. To install, copy or uninstall a typical OS X application, you just move its icon around – everything the app needs is contained within its .app directory.
I prefere GTK to Cocoa.
And…?
Mac OS X’s desktop almost ensures the user has many Windows for each application, its a side effect of having toolbars seperate from apps. Maybe you don’t see it as a bad thing, but it certainly makes for a big ol’ mess.
Of course, it also means you only have a *single* toolbar and menu for multiple windows, reducing clutter.
Again, I’d like to know what you’re comparing to that makes you call OS X’s interface “cluttered”.
He didn’t say it was practical, he said it was possible. It certainly was too.
Somehow I doubt the graphical effects of OS X – Expose in particular – would be possible on a 200Mhz Pentium Pro with 16MB of RAM and a 4MB S3 968 video card (fairly cutting edge 8 years ago).
Even so, it’s still completely irrelevant to the question, which was: “find something technically supperior about OS X”. Compared to its contemporaries, these *are* things OS X is superior at.
You state another major point here though, Quartz drains a lot of processing power. Those eye candy features blog down the overall interface, thus why most could care less about it.
Argh. *Couldn’t* care less.
And you failed to state anything other then eye candy that was valid.
Expose isn’t eye candy, it’s a significantly functional piece of UI design.
Self contained applications have nothing to do with eye candy.
Cocoa has nothing to do with eye candy.
You’ve clearly demonstrated a) that you’ve not used OS X for any length of time, b) you can’t address the issues objectively and c) you can’t even hold a consistent position.
OS X makes it impossible to have more than a few windows open before it becomes difficult to find what one is looking for.
Untrue today. Expose makes it trivial.
Then spend some time reading up on NeXT OS. There’s a reason a significant number of OS X developers came from NeXT backgrounds.
I’ve used NeXT. I don’t recall it being anywhere near as graphically or CPU intensive as OS X.
So the lack of responsiveness is not a negative criteria?
Uhhh, yes… Who claimed it wasn’t ?
Your argument is inherently flawed. For something to be better than what already existed, it must bring something new to the table.
False. It merely has to perform some existing function _better_. My 2002 VFR800 brings nothing new of any note to the table compared to a 2001 model, but it makes more than enough incremental improvements to be a whole lot better.
To argue otherwise would be to conclude that the NeXT OS interface was better eight years ago and is still so now.
Your logic is, well, illogical.
Other than eye candy, OS X’s UI is no different than NeXT’s.
OS X’s UI is significantly different. To claim otherwise indicates you have used neither. Not to mention, the original question was not limited to UI.
Well anyways… Everyone from the OS X community should at least give some thanks to coders for linux, if it wasent for them, our beloved OS X would be only half as great as it’s now. Thanks also to the BSD team for letting us use your layers for command line support.
OS X still kicks linux’s but =)
” ‘OS X makes it impossible to have more than a few windows open before it becomes difficult to find what one is looking for.’ ”
“Untrue today. Expose makes it trivial.”
Patches on top of bandaids. Rather than return to proper human interface guidelines, Apple had to implement something to make the existing UI useable.
” ‘Then spend some time reading up on NeXT OS. There’s a reason a significant number of OS X developers came from NeXT backgrounds.’ ”
“I’ve used NeXT. I don’t recall it being anywhere near as graphically or CPU intensive as OS X.”
Which would imply that NeXT was more efficient in providing virtually the same user experience. The file manager is the same (a return to the “Finder” experience came after massive protest from users), NeXT had a dock, NeXT was heavy on eye candy icons, and much of the way of doing things in OS X is based on how it was done in NeXT.
” ‘So the lack of responsiveness is not a negative criteria?’ ”
“Uhhh, yes… Who claimed it wasn’t ?”
You did: ” Hell, a top end dual G5 can barely run OS X responsively with more than a trivial load.” If the question is the best Unix desktop, either responsiveness is or is not a criteria. On the one hand, you state responsiveness is slow, even on the top end G5. On the other hand, omnivector claims that the GPU handles the eye candy stuff and responsiveness is not a problem.
” ‘Your argument is inherently flawed. For something to be better than what already existed, it must bring something new to the table.’ ”
“False. It merely has to perform some existing function _better_. My 2002 VFR800 brings nothing new of any note to the table compared to a 2001 model, but it makes more than enough incremental improvements to be a whole lot better.”
That only means that the 2002 model is “better” than the 2001 model. It does not mean that motorcycling as a whole has been improved, or that the 2002 model is demonstrably better than other pre-existing models. You could argue that water cooled V-4s demonstrably improved motorcycling, but altering the compression ratio and dampening rates for a smoother ride does not bring anything new to the table. Neither does OS X, and I argue that it does not match the user experience available five years ago.
” ‘Other than eye candy, OS X’s UI is no different than NeXT’s.’ ”
“OS X’s UI is significantly different. To claim otherwise indicates you have used neither. Not to mention, the original question was not limited to UI.”
Actually, I find that many defenders of OS X are former NeXT users. I have used it briefly. I failed to see how it improved over MacOS as it was at the time. I’m not a casual user, either. I’ve written software for Macs (everything from Control Strip modules to high speed ATM networking code), implemented database systems that handled a million transactions a month, and experimented with bootloaders and kernels for *BSD systems.
The question was about UI, as in “the best Unix desktop.” I’ve found that Enlightenment meets or exceeds the user experience of OS X (and certainly does not suffer from responsiveness issues on a 400MHz G4). I’ve also found that OS X does not meet nor exceed MacOS 9.x. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to like a system, so if I find myself cussing within a few minutes, it’s out the door. As I’ve said earlier, the only thing that makes me cuss faster than OS X is Windows.
Why should OS X users give thanks to Linux coders exactly?
What’s the best desktop is I think a very personal experience. If a majority finds OS X (maybe we should say Quartz & Aqua) to be the best desktop, it’s just the opinion of a majority, and doesn’t belittle other desktops. Being presently a OS X user, I must say thet I am overall satisfied with it. Not having used Gnome or KDE* in two years, I don’t know if they are, or not, better.
I think we can at least agree that OS X is a very good desktop. We can also agree that it has room for improvement. I personnally think it has a lot of room for improvement. Maybe someday I’ll write some blurb about what should be, in my opinion (as a user, since I’m not a UI or usability expert) my perfect desktop.
Third party apps have solved some of the problems. Good! But I agree with the critics, it would have been better if it wasn’t necessary t install those third party apps just to have back the functionnality that previous Mac OS had.
Exposé has also solved some problems. But, even if it is a damned fine piece of work, it, too, has room for improvement. For example, it would be great if the very useful shortcuts that allow navigation between all the windows (Ctrl – F4) and between one application windows (Cmd – < and Cmd – > – I have a French Keyboard, so it may be different for you: cmd-tilde doesn’t work for me) worked in Exposé. It would be great too if Ctrl – Tab gave you access, for each app, to a submenu (like Ctrl-click in the dock) to allow you to chose which window you want in front (maybe some sign that there are more than one window, and possibility to open and navigate that submenu with arrows?). These are just some examples of things that I think would enhance the OS X experience.
* There is a little KDE feature I regret sometimes: the little contextual menu displayed when you released your mouse at the end of a drag and drop (does that exist yet?), giving you choice between copy, move, or link the file: no different behaviour, no additionnal shortcut to learn. That was good.