post of the year!Think back to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and all that has happened since.
Mac clones: gone.
Icon garden: gone.
Beige boxes: gone.
Floppy disks: gone.
Multicolored logo: gone.
OS 9: gone.
Smiley faced Mac at startup: gone.
Windowshade: gone.
Customizable Apple menu: gone.
PPC: gone.
Single-button mouse: gone.
And every step of the way, people have dug in their heels and claimed that the essence of the Mac was gone and screamed that there was no way they could live without that. And yet, somehow the world kept turning and we all dealt with it. And somehow, the Mac just keeps getting better, despite Jobs' apparent disrepect for the past. Seriously, if the rounded menu bar disappeared with Leopard, would you be that bothered by it?
I like was Jobs said about that during hs interview with Walt Mossberg at D:-- (paraphrased) "That's the past and we don't want to live there." I love that.
My only gripe is that I hope this damn @#$%& annoying startup chime is on the kill list. I used to think it was cool back in the late 80s, but nowadays... meh.
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Leopard Development Roadmap Revealed?
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Just came back from vacations and checked Leopard's feature list. Although it doesn't look like a total breakthrough from previous iterations, it is a solid upgrade worth buying.
My main novelty highlights:
New Desktop with Stacks - excellent idea to find that file buried in some folder!
Finder with CoverFlow - another great way to check your files
Spaces - not a new idea, but Apple's implementation is probably gonna make us use it more often, like with Dashboard...
Time Machine - really useful for us with external drives
QuickLook - also very useful for previewing files...not a new idea, but Apple seems to get it right again!
Spotlight with Boolean operators - excellent!!!
All in all, Leopard looks promising...I can't wait to get my hands in it in October..!
My main novelty highlights:
New Desktop with Stacks - excellent idea to find that file buried in some folder!
Finder with CoverFlow - another great way to check your files
Spaces - not a new idea, but Apple's implementation is probably gonna make us use it more often, like with Dashboard...
Time Machine - really useful for us with external drives
QuickLook - also very useful for previewing files...not a new idea, but Apple seems to get it right again!
Spotlight with Boolean operators - excellent!!!
All in all, Leopard looks promising...I can't wait to get my hands in it in October..!
some of that stuff i know..but others like..mac clones, icon garden, windowshade and customisable apple menu? i have no idea what they are..and they sound cool, albeit old. can someone please tell me what they were? thanksss
the icon garden http://icongarden.jory.org/cgi-bin/icongarden.pl?lang=en&curpic=15 rather tacky if you ask me.
access to desktop has been critical in the past, and even current intel 10.4 system.
being able to touch the desktop with the cursor allows you to get control of a functional cursor if yr app is acting up and you get the Spinning Rainbow Beach Ball of Life.
have Safari open and maximized to the extent that it is up against the top system menu bar and the left edge of the screen. that little tiny rounded application curve is there for a purpose: position the cursor just right and you can touch the desktop and access finder.
rounded edges are there for more than to be different. they were needed.
being able to touch the desktop with the cursor allows you to get control of a functional cursor if yr app is acting up and you get the Spinning Rainbow Beach Ball of Life.
have Safari open and maximized to the extent that it is up against the top system menu bar and the left edge of the screen. that little tiny rounded application curve is there for a purpose: position the cursor just right and you can touch the desktop and access finder.
rounded edges are there for more than to be different. they were needed.
Believe me, it's very annoying...
I'm constantly booting Windows to play Counter Strike at 5 AM, and if someone is sleeping in my bedroom it immediately wakes them up...
It's like a Flash webpage that DOESN'T have a "Mute Sound" button
How hard would it be:
System Preferences, Startup Disk, Checkbox "Play Chime at Start Up", tick OFF!
As for Leopard, I'm hoping for a final true consitent UI, not iTunes 7 mixed with Aqua, if it's supposed to be a "unified" look then bring it all the way
And the new folder icons, not bad at all, personally, I like them better compared to the blue Aqua folders in Tiger, they're so "2000"
And I'll have no problem telling them apart in my 24" iMac, icon size = 68 px
makes me feel so proud being a mac user when I see majority of posts discussing UI tweaks and not 'stability' or 'security' issues like at winforums ...
I am sure Leopard will be worth every penny .. as for my wish list .. I would like leopard to introduce themes .. user made themes support ..
I am sure Leopard will be worth every penny .. as for my wish list .. I would like leopard to introduce themes .. user made themes support ..
corners round corners square what about this "could be delayed to early November" if it is November you know it will soon end up being late November.
If it's *that* annoying, then just mute the audio before doing a restart. If the volume is muted, the gong is gone. I use this feature every now and then if I must reboot during the night. It has never really bothered me, because it can be switched off when necessary.
For those complaining about the startup sound; just download the prefpane below (at your own risk, of course):
http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/index.en.html
You don't remember the clone wars?
There was a period of a few years where Apple allowed other manufacturers (Umax?) to make Mac clones. This ended abruptly when Steve came back.You also used to be able to drop shortcuts into your Apple menu. You could put in applications, or drop folders in and get a list of all its contents. It was kind of like the dock in that respect, or the Windows Start menu. I actually still miss that feature.
WindowShade, I believe, refers to the ability to triple-click on a window's title bar to make it "roll up" into only the title bar. Stickies still has this ability, if you want to see what that would have looked like.
Some of that list most noticeable the floppy disk I believe was removed before it should of. At the time it was removed there was no real alternative to moving files around. CD burners where still a new thing and they where very expensive at the time (along with the blank cd's if you could find them). USB ports where not on computers yet so that mint no flash drives. Hell Email and internet where still a new thing.
Now today floppies are a dead thing and it was the Flash drives and email that replace them but back in the day those things just where not there yet.
Sadly today I still have to use the old 3.5 inch floppies from time to time. Normally against my will but I have professors who are in the dark ages and want assignments turned in on them so yes I had to go to the office supply store the day the project was due and buy some floppy disk. It felt very very wrong.
There used to be a folder called Apple menu items where you could add things to the Apple menu. I had a folder with aliases to all my applications for example.
As for the clones, for a couple years in the 90s, Apple licensed the OS to other companies. Apple made a lot of mistakes along the way. First, they denied licenses to large companies like Gateway, IBM, and Compaq. The main companies they ended up giving licenses to where chip partner Motorola who had never sold a computer before, scanner maker umax who had also never sold a computer before, and a startup run by former Dell employees called Power Computing.
In essence, instead of growing the userbase, they fractured what he had into smaller pieces. To make things worse, the clone startups actually understood the then current market better than Apple who kept to their late 80s/ early 90s era "we'll give you what we want when we want to give it you at the price we determine" retail philosophy (even worse than now) when the market was changing to direct sales. The clones gave Mac users things like built to order options, compatibility with regular VGA displays, software bundles, and mostly everything else you could find on the PC side. They started taking massive marketshare away from the clueless Apple execs which lead, with Copeland operating system disaster, to the company being weakened enough for Steve and next to come through the door. Apple bought Power Computing for its direct sales expertise and choose not to renew the licenses for the other clone makers and sub -licensees. Motorola and Apple never did have the same relationship afterwards.
They could do this no problem but other none Apple apps wouldn't have 3d icons to start with.
I want: a) transparent menu bar optional b) corners on it back c) 3d dock optional d) folder icons optional..this wont happen so I'll change them with something else.
Hopefully some good will come of Leopards GUI; it may spawn lots of 3rd party GUI's out of desperate need. Personally I think OSX's look peaked with Panther (graphite version). Awesome, brilliant, perfect, and...inspired. Leopards GUI, for me, is not inspired. Just like Vista isn't inspired.
I hear a lot of people complain about how leopard doesn't look as good as past systems and certain features shouldn't have been changed. If you compare Apple to any other company that puts out new versions of the same product (like auto companies) you have to remember that they are always trying to appeal to new customers while at the same time trying to improve functionality. If you loved the appearance of an older OS, Apple already has you as a customer. Little changes like rounded corners are not going to get you to buy a PC, but making the OS more familiar to PC users might encourage the switch to Apple. If you talk to anyone who loves a certain type of car like a Mustang or Corvette, they will tell you exactly which year that car looked the best and how every model since then looks like crap.
only boring people who are stuck in the past, and apparently we don't want to live there
So yeah, after using Leopard for a couple of days, the road map makes 100% sense, especially concerning refinements in the Dock and the Menubar.
Like, some icons in the Menubar still have the white around them as if it was Tiger (which now looks completely gross and 2004 btw.) - the transparency is gorgeus, and no, you can not make it go away contrary to people who have said it was possible. They must have used a different Leopard. (10.6 alpha? :x)
The Dock however, has very poor performance, esp when you have magnification on and seems a bit over the top. Blue lights, the table, reflections... it's like a magic show. A little more subtlety would be welcome in this respect.
Also, the scrollbars will go or be modified in some way because the ones we have now don't even have anti-aliasing.
Anyways, I am super bummed out right now because Photoshop CS3 won't start and I am dreading my return to Tiger until October, which can't come sooner.
Functionally the new dock is not different to the old one either, it just seems like showboating to me. The current dock is simple and elegant and does everything you need it to. The blue dots look much harder to see compared to the black triangles.
Rounded corners? ROUNDED F&£$ING CORNERS?!!!!!!
Jeeez! I'm waiting with bated breath (although I know I'm wasting my time) for more killer secret features, and the most people can bitch about is having no rounded corners in the menu bar!!!!!!!!!!!!????
What's going on?!!
Jeeez! I'm waiting with bated breath (although I know I'm wasting my time) for more killer secret features, and the most people can bitch about is having no rounded corners in the menu bar!!!!!!!!!!!!????
What's going on?!!
I don't know what else I'd want, seriously. If they iron out all the bugs this is as close as any OS comes to perfect.
Maybe the majority of us are pretty satisfied with the new features in Leopard and realize that most of the improvements are going to be in the core OS itself and not flashy UI features?
Also, for those complaing about the Gong: That Gong is there for a very important reason. It lets you know that the computer is booting correctly and that basic hardware tests were passed. If you don't hear the gong, something is wrong.
Sticking it to the developers...again
All I can say is that Apple better get an enormous clue and release 64-bit Carbon. Without it, they won't get any major developer to port their stuff. No developer in their right mind would use Cocoa and Objective-C when all their stuff is in C++ and STL. Don't believe me? Why did Adobe announce that there won't be a 64-bit port of Creative Suite? Clearly they knew about it. Apple will lose serious face when 64-bit/Vista versions of Photoshop et al are released and Mac users are stuck w/ 32-bit versions.
All I can say is that Apple better get an enormous clue and release 64-bit Carbon. Without it, they won't get any major developer to port their stuff. No developer in their right mind would use Cocoa and Objective-C when all their stuff is in C++ and STL. Don't believe me? Why did Adobe announce that there won't be a 64-bit port of Creative Suite? Clearly they knew about it. Apple will lose serious face when 64-bit/Vista versions of Photoshop et al are released and Mac users are stuck w/ 32-bit versions.
Yep right...64 bit Vista, the version pretty much no one knows about? Or you mean one of the thousand versions of that flunked OS?
As Jobs better puts it: OS X will be offered in one basic version - 129 bucks. This also applies to "premium", "super", "ultimate" and whatever version you come up with.
Cocoa is the future in Apple's dev environment. If people use Carbon, this means they are either one of the two: lazy or stuck in the past.
That's an oxymoron there are only two kinds of people within any specialized field: the lazy ones and the creative ones. Lazy people are stuck in the past and the creative ones are creating the future.
Software development should be a form of art as it still was in the 80's. Today we have far too many overpaid engineers who don't have passion in writing a single line of code. I was one of them, so I know what I'm talking about.
Everyone should find his passion and do what he enjoys.