A Look at WWDC 2009 Build of Snow Leopard

[lamadude]

I still prefer windows explorer over the finder. Just the lay-out with the folders in the left column and the sub folders and files in the right column makes it much easier for me to browse to a certain file, or move files around.
(apple fanboys will now probably mention that I'm not "supposed" to know where my files are or move them around and just let OSX decide that, but I don't like that)

 

[soLoredd]

What? An Apple product that doesn't contain the features that they said it would??

At this point I don't see how the hell Apple is going to sell the everyday user on upgrading. Developers? Fine. New users? You won't know the difference. But, everytime I read these preview articles, something is missing or taken out or is no longer going to be included.

Snow Leopard is quickly becoming a simple response to Windows 7 and the never-ending childish debate between Apple and Microsoft.

What next? Are we going to see Justin Long telling John Hodgman "I'm a Mac and my hard drive shows twenty more gigabytes than yours. Har har!!"

 

[goosnarrggh]

it's kind of stupid to switch from base 2 to base 10. it actually IS base 2 and apple won't change that.

That's a man-made artificial distinction. As a matter of fact, sectors on a NAND Flash chip (for example) physically contain a (power-of-two + some overhead) number of bytes. For example, instead of 512 bytes (2^9), a typical NAND Flash sector (the smallest physically addressable and erasable space within the hardware structure) might contain 528 bytes. Of this space, filesystem formatting and error correction will take up some or all of these extra 16 bytes, leaving about 512 bytes available for data.

So you see, the power-of-two groupings are already quite arbitrarily chosen. In general, when you're talking about mass file storage, whether you choose to represent those bytes as being grouped together in base-2 sized clumps or base-10 sized clumps is not based on any physical reality. As long as the chosen definition is publicized clearly to the user, and deployed consistently within any given operating environment, I frankly don't care what definition they use.

(System RAM and NOR Flash, on the other hand, typically really does have a direct physical link to powers-of-two.)

 

[Consultant]

"Snow Leopard now counts data sizes in base 10. In the example shown a 320GB hard drive shows as 320GB as opposed to 297GB"

Haha uninformed fools win... At least there will be less "why is my HD only xyz size, can't find 10% of the size" threads.

 

[samr ali]

I'm looking forward to take advantage of your
And learn from your thoughts

 

[haravikk]

I don't like the difference to counting; hard-drive manufacturers should report the actual, base 2 (number system computers work in!) value for their drives, instead of falsely advertising a value you don't get. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, anything else is a lie intended to make you believe you're getting more than you actually are.

It's not going to change the fact that block-sizes will be measured in base 2, and that files must therefore fit within these blocks, so why make this change? It's stupid IMO, and I'll turn it off if there's a way to.

 

[HOMBRESINIESTRO]

I'm looking forward to take advantage of your
And learn from your thoughts

Wow, are you the voice I constantly hear in my head?

 

[lamadude]

I don't think the base 10 thing will clear up any confusion at all, now every program that you download online will be bigger than announced on the website you got it from, and a 700 mb file won't fit a 700 mb cd anymore

 

[Detektiv-Pinky]

In my language (Dutch) the spell correction is actually very accurate. BUT what I hate is the fact that you can't easily switch languages, as if everybody only ever writes in one language. My Dutch spell correction is totally useless when writing this comment on MR for example.

For this reason alone I use Firefox and MS Word rather than Safari and Pages, since they allow easy switching of the language used in the spell correction, a feature that every program where you often need to type should have.

You have to set spelling to 'multilingual'. In this case OSX determines the language you are typing in and corrects it accordingly. Works amazingly well...

 

[Padaung]

Can't you just drag "British English" to being above "English" in the International System Preferences pane to fix this?

I use "Australian English" and don't notice the spell checker being incorrect for me...

Thank you for explaining that! I wish all computers were correctly set up for the region they are actually sold in. If only I could get MS Office to default to British English too now - despite constantly changing the setting, whenever I open the app it has reverted to US English.

 

[HOMBRESINIESTRO]

750gb hard-drives (striped)

You actually seem to use some yet unknown bit-based measuring for the capacity of your harddrive.

 

[Thiemo]

Why do I have this feeling that Apple is selling us a huge Beta-testprogram for just 29$?

This whole SnowLeopard thing feels so immature...

Well, you won't HAVE to buy it.

 

[FvL]

Finally...

Snow Leopard will use 10-based counting. After a while, Microsoft will follow and then the confusion will hopefully slowly disappear.

Please don't say "but computers use base-2". People usually don't.

 

[AidenShaw]

RAM will be interesting, that would have to show up as 4.096GB for example? Unless they leave it in GiB.

4 GiB is 4.294967296 GB

 

[lamadude]

You have to set spelling to 'multilingual'. In this case OSX determines the language you are typing in and corrects it accordingly. Works amazingly well...

Thx, but where can I select this? I can't find it anywhere.

 

[vandozza]

If only I could get MS Office to default to British English too now - despite constantly changing the setting, whenever I open the app it has reverted to US English.

This can be fixed too... I fixed it somehow, but I can't remember how.

Try www.macosxhints.com

Edit - I think if you fix one problem, you fix the other as well. IE set the default language in the International System Preferences, and Word uses this as the default dictionary language (I think...)

Maybe relates to this article - http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050204083233639&query=word+dictionary+language

 

[bdkennedy1]

I used it for a week on my iMac. File transfer speeds doubled on both my Mac Pro and iMac, including USB and Flash drives.

But I wouldn't describe it as "near final" I ran into a lot of bugs, and a handful of apps I use such as XLD, Max, Photoshop CS4 and Transmission didn't work correctly.

Since most shareware developers can't get their hands on a prerelease copy, it will be several months before they are able to update their applications.

 

[Detektiv-Pinky]

Well, you won't HAVE to buy it.

Well, I see it this way: If they really changed that much of the underlying code as they claim, there will be also a lot of bugs in the system. Which need to be ironed out through some heavy testing.
Has anybody actually seen and coded some of this OpenCL-magic?

I don't think that can be done completely behind doors - and Apple loves to keep stuff all to themselves until the last minute.

So I think the deal is the following: We (Apple) know it will be buggy. We keep on selling this anyway and it is you, the customer, who can test it for us. And please don't cry if anything breaks - we gave you such a good deal...

 

[dukeseb]

I don't like the difference to counting; hard-drive manufacturers should report the actual, base 2 (number system computers work in!) value for their drives, instead of falsely advertising a value you don't get.

yes lets do that and while were at it lets just break it down to the byte and wrap it around the box...... more numbers = less confusion

1,099,512,000,000

i would honestly laugh if i saw a drive on the shelf that said 931.7GB

 

[ibwb]

Snow Leopard will use 10-based counting. After a while, Microsoft will follow and then the confusion will hopefully slowly disappear.

Please don't say "but computers use base-2". People usually don't.

That's right -- the numbers should be formatted in a way that makes sense to the user. Who cares what the computer thinks?

The base-2 junk is nothing more than a geek shibboleth, implemented inconsistently since the Original Sin of calling 1024 a "kilobit" because it was "close enough". Networking speeds have been base-10 since the beginning, mass storage since the days of 20MB hard disk drives.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

I hope there's a way to change it to base 2, that's how it's supposed to be

Doesn't counting in base 10 go against what's actually there? Wouldn't that artificially inflate storage size?

Does that mean the upgrade from Leopard really only frees up 5.8 GBs of space rather than 6?

The base 10 thing is because Apple got sick of all the "why have I lost HD space??!!!" topics on MR

Does the change to base 10 give any sort of benefit? I don't understand why they changed that. I mean I know the hard drive manufacturers do it, but their reason is to make their hard drives look as big as possible.

I agree, using base 10 doesn't make any sense at all. That HD manufacturers use base 10 instead of base 2 is bad enough already.

The only reason I can see Apple doing this, is to make it look like your (e.g.) 8GB iPhone actually has 8GB of space. Whenever you download a file it will look bigger on your HD than indicated because they multiply the size.

And if you want to write something on a 700MB CD, all of a sudden your 680MB file won't fit anymore or will apple also enlarge the CD size?

I don't know everything, so maybe I'm missing the point but I really don't agree with this and I'd like someone to explain me a single benefit (except for Apple making their HDs look bigger than they really are).

it's kind of stupid to switch from base 2 to base 10. it actually IS base 2 and apple won't change that.

however, the fact that most users still think 1024 = 1000 may have driven apple to that step...

its really funny that all u guys are freaking about this.... its really not that big a deal..... and itmay be the first step to getting other os's to do the same.... personally i look forward to my TB drives showing 1TB rather then 931MB

I don't think the base 10 thing will clear up any confusion at all, now every program that you download online will be bigger than announced on the website you got it from, and a 700 mb file won't fit a 700 mb cd anymore

guys guys GUYS! All Apple is doing is trying to change and ignore standards, much like they didn't use standard monitor cables. I really hope Apple changes this, or better yet, they get sued out of this world... there's no way they are above standards, but they think they are. Down with base 10. Bah!

 

[Machinima]

That's just completely wrong all the way around.

No its not, install Ubuntu like ive done tens of times this week and see for yourself, its one of the only operating systems i know what insists you leave some swap file space.

 

[twoodcc]

looking forward to the final release. i sure hope that it's released in september with no delays, if it's ready

 

[intel]

What don't you like about the Finder versus Windows Explorer?

Are you serious?? The list is huge, i feel as if you are trying to make me write an essay, the list is that big.
Lets get some things clear, the left side of the finder window is complete genius in it's simplicity and elegance. The right side of the window leaves much to be desired.

Widows has a clear address bar in a very intuitive position, where you would expect it consistent to the browser. Minor issue but still worth mentioning.

Windows has space available on drive in a clear graphical and easy to read written size of drive and free space.

Windows shows the how many files are selected and dinamically updates the size of the selected items in a neat little description down at the bottom. Finder only shows how many items are selected and how much space is available. If you select 6 folders in finder, and you get info wanting to find out if they all will fit on your usb pen drive, 6 info windows clutter your screen and you have to manually calculate and add the size of all the folders. Seriously, that is total BS.

Windows has selection folder/file attribute assign, simply select file/folders, rightclick properties, click readonly, ok, and you're done. In finder, you have to do each individual get info window separately as they pop up.

Don't get me started with automatic clean up in finder, it's ridiculous. It should be set by default. As well as folders to be neatly aranged first then files, it just makes more sense.

Say you have 30 video files and you want to rename the last one... you can start to rename but you can't finish because finder cancels the rename to refresh the icon list even if its not refreshing or accessing the file you are trying to rename. you have to wait until every file is read and a thumb is generated every time that folder is opened.

This is something that really pisses me off, say you want to move one folder from one location to another drive. You option click and move folder. That's all well and good... but for some unforseen problem... priveleges to some files or network connection problems disconects or times out, the folder move is stopped. You go to move the folder again.... and the first lot that you started moving gets deleted, and data loss happens right there, YOU DON'T EVEN GET THE OPTION TO APPEND OR UPDATE. IT'S DELETE YOUR MUCH NEEDED DATA, OVERWRITE OR NOTHING. Don't say that you should copy and delete, that's an extra step that no end user should ever have to worry about like the french dude said about Microsoft's defrag. Sorry but microsoft at least got this right. and it can be done. IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE.

I have bought everything apple. From apple monitor, mac pro, macbook pro, iphone, ipod, ipod hifi speakers, apple tv, and apple 30 inch cinema display, i love all things apple, i used to be a windows user up until 3 years ago.

At this stage, MICROSOFT WINDOWS EXPLORER RUNS CIRCLES AROUND FINDER THEN PISSES ALL OVER IT, LAUGHS AT IT THEN DEFACATES ALL OVER IT. FINDER HAS LESS FUNCTIONALITY THAN WINDOWS 95'S VERSION OF WINDOWS EXPLORER.

I'm sorry but that's how i feel about finder and how i lost a lot of data. Please, friken append or update and don't just delete the frikin folder.

 

[tdream]

The base 10 thing is going to bring more confusion, but people will side with whoever makes them feel right. So apple user bought his 1TB drive and sees the full 1TB with OSX and not anything else, Apple is right, Apple makes him/her feel better. Apple wins...