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That Windows dialog is horrible. Why is there so much info? Are the file size and image dimensions really helping me decided whether or not I want to delete it? And it has the classic Windows "Yes" and "No" buttons (instead of having something useful like Cancel and Delete). If that dialog pops up, you have to squint your eyes and look all over until you see "Delete ..." in the upper left corner, then take a second to make sure "Yes" actually means "Delete". And if you want to cancel, should you hit "No" or the X in the top right?

That OS X dialog IS NOTHING like that Aero dialog.

Weird. When I ask someone a yes/no question, I expect a yes/no response.

Do you understand what I mean?
[Cancel] [Process Question]
 
I doubt that the Mac is getting the type of multi tasking that you see with the iPhone, more likely it's getting the option to suspend something in the background, but for everything else, life goes on as normal (eg I can batch stuff in an application whilst I continue surfing, reading mail, watching porn etc).

As for the crippled multi tasking on an iPhone - it's a phone for heavens sake. The BIGGEST problem that all smartphones are suffering from is battery - batteries are not able to cope with the demands of the modern phone.

If you let people multi task properly, the phone would eat its battery alive. And we've all seen bad programming (cough...flash) which given half a chance will kill your battery in 15 seconds stone dead just to show you some crappy ad.

So a phone does need a sensible trade off when it comes to multi tasking, and both Apple and Google (with Android) made a very sensible choice to put battery before true background multitasking.

I wasn't saying there's not justification for single task oparation on a phone. I just think it would be a bad move to bring that type of thinking to an admittedly more powerful machine.
 
This will be interesting. The issue that I see concerns ancillary data. I really dislike how the iphone handles application data, but it is--at the very least--consistent. You delete the app, you delete the data.

I haven't had the occasion to see how MAS works with deleting, but I can't imagine it doing anything similar, and that creates a rift, in my opinion.
 
Summary - correct the OP please

  • Positioning of apps without click and hold WORKS.
  • Drag and Drop in Trash WORKS.
  • This kind of un-installation works for all apps, not just MAS apps.
  • Contextual menus don't work. Popups arise in any situation.
 
So you're saying we should go back to Mac OS Classic cooperative multi-tasking ?

Hello ?

The 80s called, they want their computing paradigms back. Cooperative multi-tasking makes sense on ressource limited architectures. Even the iPhone/iPad like devices are far from "ressource limited". We had pre-emptive multi-tasking on much less capable devices (think 386s with 8 MB of RAM).

Never said anything about cooperative multi-tasking.

iOS is not cooperative multi-tasking. It's fully pre-emptive.

I'm talking about intelligent pre-emptive multitasking with API's that allow the Apps to make intelligent decisions removing the burden from users to "clean up" after apps they have launched but aren't using.

I'm talking about Apps that are, to the user, ALWAYS instantly available in exactly the same state that they left them in.

That's what the big deal about this auto-save / resume / versioning stuff is about.
 
Weird. When I ask someone a yes/no question, I expect a yes/no response.

Do you understand what I mean?
[Cancel] [Process Question]

Yes and No are suitable: agreed. But if I don't wish to read the context, I can just click on delete without reading anything.

When I use windows, there are some dialogue boxes where I need to read a paragraph but it would have been much easy if they placed the final call in those two/three options. Seems logical and intuitive. :|
 
So you're saying we should go back to Mac OS Classic cooperative multi-tasking ?

Hello ?

The 80s called, they want their computing paradigms back. Cooperative multi-tasking makes sense on ressource limited architectures. Even the iPhone/iPad like devices are far from "ressource limited". We had pre-emptive multi-tasking on much less capable devices (think 386s with 8 MB of RAM).

Obviously the guy you replied to did not know anything he was talking about. Apple's resume function on Lion does not break the multitasking we have on SL anyway and it's just a nice addition.
 
LOL! Yeah... and I remember crashing faster than you click your mouse on those systems. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a mess. But of course... most things were back then. how far we've come.

Uh ? You say the crashing is somehow related to pre-emptive multi-tasking and yet you talk about Windows 3.0 and 3.1 which had... cooperative multi-tasking ? :confused:

I was talking about Unix systems on 386s (think BSD, think SCO UnixWare, think early Linux). Those had true pre-emptive multi-tasking and they didn't "crash faster than you click your mouse". (heck, my first DOS computer had no mouse and I don't think it ever crashed).

Crashing has nothing to do with the type of multi-tasking.

I think what he is saying is that programs that are actually doing work in the background can continue running, while those that aren't can suspend iOS style. That is how Lion works. It brings the benefits of both iOS & Mac OS.

What's working ? Is a program that's sitting in its idle loop waiting on a listen() operation not working ? Is a program that's firing a heartbeat every X seconds not working ?

Are we that ressource limited that we need to suspend these programs and have system level services to do these tasks, which the programs will register with on launch ? What's the benefit of a system level service vs the program doing it itself ?

Let's face it, it's not like a program sitting in the background is digging into the CPU much with a idle loop...
 
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Never said anything about cooperative multi-tasking.

iOS is not cooperative multi-tasking. It's fully pre-emptive.

I know it is, unfortunately, the userspace APIs don't allow 3rd party apps to profit from that. You can't just write code and hope the process scheduler will happily deal with you (as any modern, pre-emptive OS scheduler does). No matter what, your apps gets sent messages to suspend itself and the frameworks are built in a way that if you don't intercept these to "background" certain tasks using a certain limited API to do so, the defaults kick in and you get sent to oblivion.

It's pre-emptive cooperative multi-tasking if you will. It's limiting. This is a "Truck" OS. I don't need limits on truck. If I wanted limits, I'd drive a car, to use the Steve analogy. ;)

I'm talking about intelligent pre-emptive multitasking with API's that allow the Apps to make intelligent decisions removing the burden from users to "clean up" after apps they have launched but aren't using.

Apps aren't intelligent (artificial intelligence ain't quite there yet). If I have apps open, there's a reason and I want them to stay open. I'm not CPU/memory limited enough to warrant dumping these to some kind of swap space and prevented from sitting in their idle loop, waiting on their input.

Taking control away from the user is in the end dumbing down the experience. This is what most folks are afraid of with all these features.

I'm talking about Apps that are, to the user, ALWAYS instantly available in exactly the same state that they left them in.

They can only be instantly available if they stay resident in RAM. If they are swapped out, then they need to be swapped back in.
 
Weird. When I ask someone a yes/no question, I expect a yes/no response.

Do you understand what I mean?
[Cancel] [Process Question]
Better options would have been [Cancel][Understood], maybe...

I find that verbs in button text are MUCH easier to understand. Particularly I notice Excel, which seems to often have really long dialog explanations and then a Yes/No choice at the end. So I have to read the whole long thing to figure out what the question is, instead of just seeing options "Delete" or "Keep" or "Use .xls" or whatever might be the actual question.

I find verb button texts to be far superior for usability.
 
This article is misleading. It doesn't uninstall anything. Just removes the app from LaunchPad list.
 
PEOPLE:
It's just a popover box allowing you to delete an app... it's not over simplification, it allows the user to easily delete an app.
 
But my iPhone is far more limited than my first Windows PC in that regard. Even with Windows 95 I could go from one app to another while letting the other on load in the background. iOS freezes everything. If I want a video to upload on Facebook, I have no choice but to keep the app open until it's done. On my PC, I can start the upload and then move on to other things while the process is completing.

I find moving to non-true multitasking as a step backward, not a step forward. As you said, out systems capabilites are able to do so much more. I can be playing a computer game, hit the Windows key, and open a media player and never see a drop in performance. Why limit your computer to one task at a time? Kind of defeats the point of multi-core processors.

I upload large videos all the time on my iPhone, in the background. This has been built in since multitasking was introduced (if an app you are using doesn't do this, that's the developers fault).

Weird. When I ask someone a yes/no question, I expect a yes/no response.

Do you understand what I mean?
[Cancel] [Process Question]

Dialogs are not read top-to-bottom, left-to-right. You read the buttons first, then the title bar (if easily visible), then you'll scan the text, then if you absolutely must you'll waste seconds of your valuable life actually reading the whole text in sentence form. Since the "Delete file" text is nearly invisible in that screenshot, that dialog will be read like this:

[Yes][No]
Bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla Recycle Bin?
Bla bla bla bla bla
Bla bla bla bla bla
Bla bla bla bla bla

Which is fine if you meant to bring up the dialog, but what if you brought it up accidentally? Many users get in the habit of always clicking Yes and OK. Buttons that will have destructive actions should be labeled clearly with what will happen.
 
Great news, i just wish they would scan my apps and link them to the app store if i downloaded else where, i mean at least for free apps :(
 
Windows pop ups are always confusing, I agree.

I guess this is helpful, but for me, I'll probably do it the old way, because I'm so used to it.
 
I feel the same way. I just want to delete an app that delete all of the junk that comes with it. Just moving it to e trash does not do that. Some programs have an uninstall and some don't. That's more confusing for people.


This concept might seem alien to a lot of MacRumours users, but being a 'switcher', the method of deleting any app on OS X currently seems very ad hoc. I've been a mac user now for about 4 years and yet the idea of having to delete an app by dragging it to the trash seems very... strange. You never know if you've deleted ALL of that program.

Microsoft have managed to get one thing right in Windows. A specific tool (Add/Remove Programs) to delete a program. That's something that I genuinely feel is lacking in OS X and this idea of clicking and holding in LaunchPad makes sense. It's imple enough: most users who own an iPhone will have no trouble in adopting this method. And what's more, it makes it instantly accessible to anyone who uses a mac. In addition, it goes a step further than Microsoft. It avoids making more novice users from having to delve in to a complex window of settings. A step in the right direction? I think so!

So personally, I think this is a very simple yet very effective change to make to OS X and should be a welcome sign of the things to come in Lion!
 
Microsoft have managed to get one thing right in Windows. A specific tool (Add/Remove Programs) to delete a program. That's something that I genuinely feel is lacking in OS X and this idea of clicking and holding in LaunchPad makes sense. It's imple enough: most users who own an iPhone will have no trouble in adopting this method. And what's more, it makes it instantly accessible to anyone who uses a mac. In addition, it goes a step further than Microsoft. It avoids making more novice users from having to delve in to a complex window of settings. A step in the right direction? I think so!

So personally, I think this is a very simple yet very effective change to make to OS X and should be a welcome sign of the things to come in Lion!

That's probably the most unreliable function in Windows. It's an afterthought that was pieced together when they realised they can't count on sw developers to provide an uninstall app for their sw
 
I guess that's way easier than dragging it to the trash?

People may have already been over this, but dragging an app to the trash doesn't always clean up the mess it leaves. There are preferences files, cache and other things that may be sitting in the User or System libraries, and not in the "package" hidden behind the app icon.
 
Deletes not Uninstalls...

Hello,

As was already mentioned this feature just deletes (and only apps from the Mac App Store it seems) not uninstalls an app along with its related files. To find out more or to ask any questions just visit my site below. All the best!

Reggie Ashworth
AppDelete Developer
www.reggieashworth.com
 
Also forgot to say, isn't the Library folder hidden by default in Lion? For the standard user, why would you want to delete the files that you don't even know that are there?
 
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