Minor Changes to Sherlock, iDisk

[MacRumors]

Apple is working behind the scenes with minor changes to their services.

Yesterday, a glitch in Sherlock was noted on Page 2, where a "You need to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3 or later" error screen would appear for Jaguar users.

MacTeens found that Sherlock's urls were changed to 10.2 specific versions (from movies.xml to movies_10.2.xml).

Also noted today is that iDisk is now case sensitive -- meaning two files, differing only by their capitalization may reside in the same folder ("Hello" and "hello").

Previous notes about this here.

 

[Brent Turbo]

Wow, I almost care about this!

 

[reyesmac]

Yet another reason to fork over more cash.

It looks like there will be no new sherlock channels for Jaguar users. I wonder how much better the Panther channels will be compared to the ones that are there now.

 

[mangoman]

Just bought .mac. The sync feature IS worth the price to me, but iDisk is WAY TOO SLOW (and my connection speed rocks!).

So here's to fixing that (raises toast).

 

[Squall15]

Looks like we are finally getting there Panther is just around the corner. I'm getting pretty excited because I'm not ordering a G5 until they ship with Panther. I think it's silly to by a new Mac just to have to format it in a month. It takes about 2 weeks to get a computer to the point where you feel like it's customized andd ready to go. I'm not going to do that twice.

 

[uberska]

case sensitive-case insensitive war

This may have been posted before. I'm not sure. I got it from a friend.

http://www.birdhouse.org/macos/beos_osx/redux.html has some reasoning behind the case sensitive-case insensitive war. ( Look under the heading "Apple's way makes sense" ). The articles likes Apple's old way of doing it.

The full article talks of a person's journey from BeOS, to Windows, to Linux, and then finally to OSX. It it a pat on the back to any OSX user and a good read for any non-OSX user. It can be found at http://www.birdhouse.org/macos/beos_osx/.



---------------------------

FIRST POST! FIRST POST!...o, wait...this isn't slashdot

 

[Powerbook G5]

These minor updates seem to foreshadow the near arrival of Panther. The fact that they seem to be setting up Sherlock and iDisk to work with Panther's way of doing things seem to be like the final polishing touches on getting things ready for the final release. If the things they are doing now are these small changes, then the big stuff is possibly completed.

 

[jaedreth]

Big changes finishing

Yes, they're probably be entering the Final Candidate stage soon. And tighten up everything left...

Jaedreth

 

[Pedro Estarque]

Re: Big changes finishing

why would anyone need a case sensitive idisk
Apple is really going crazy if they are not giving you the option to choose

 

[Compufix]

There have been rumors of a case-sensitive option in formatting in the new OSX....so maybe this ties in some how...

 

[jaedreth]

Case sensitive

Come on peoples! Case sensitivity is not the end of the world! Most people won't even notice it.

Who but Unix geeks will actually name files paper1.txt *and* Paper1.txt *and* PAPER1.txt? Most people have their habitual capitolization habits, like all lowercase, proper sentence case, all capitols, and haphazard... Those who get confused, those few who actually notice, will call Apple support and it will be their problem. We all are mature and experienced enough to deal with it. And if people want to *migrate* existing UNIX customers to Mac OS X, their stuff *requires* case sensitivity, this is *one* of the reasons I was saying Mac OS X is not a *mature* or *robust* UNIX based operating system. This was one of my major complaints, and they addressed it. Go Apple!

Jaedreth

(Or did you think that Apple could attain the other 95-98% without converting UNIX customers?)

 

[Powerbook G5]

I for one am happy for the move. People don't seem to understand that this is an option...if you don't want to format your partition to case sensitivity, then don't, and if you don't want two different files named paper1 and Paper1, then don't name them that way. It's that simple. This is just another feature that Apple is adding that makes OS X that much more flexible and appealing to other users. I am happy and hope they continue to find things to chance, improve, and add to OS X to make it the best OS it can be.

 

[Pedro Estarque]

Re: Case sensitive

OK, as long as apple drops the consumer market and becomes another UNIX company.
But don't tell me the average user won't be bothered with that cause they will.
Lets say you want to find the file "My File.doc", and then you search for "My file.doc" what do you get? not found.
Users have been used not to care for capitalization for as long as they can remember. It MUST be an option, and the default MUST be insensitive.
You could have a sensitive file system and an insensitive Finder which seems to be the best option

 

[Powerbook G5]

Isn't that what Windows does? I've never seen the point in having it both ways like that. And if you do a search, I am sure that Finder can easily display both files so you can choose the one you need. Case sensitive files cannot be that difficult to use, it seems like basic common sense to me. But as said before, it is an option and the default is insensitive, so in order to exploit sensitivity, you have to make the choice yourself and repartition HFS+ for it, and if you do that, you must have the sense to know how it works.

 

[Pedro Estarque]

Originally posted by Powerbook G5
Isn't that what Windows does? I've never seen the point in having it both ways like that. And if you do a search, I am sure that Finder can easily display both files so you can choose the one you need. Case sensitive files cannot be that difficult to use, it seems like basic common sense to me. But as said before, it is an option and the default is insensitive, so in order to exploit sensitivity, you have to make the choice yourself and repartition HFS+ for it, and if you do that, you must have the sense to know how it works.

But idisk's default is now case sensitive, and thats the problem

 

[Powerbook G5]

If you are uploading your files to it and they are all formatted the way you want them to be, would that make a difference?

 

[leenoble]

searching

Why would saving files in a case sensitive fashion affect searching?
I'm sure typing in fILenAmE in the search panel is still going to find files called filename.
The ONLY people this will affect are those people working on an existing, already saved before document who accidentally choose 'Save As...' from the File menu and THEN proceed to delete the file name WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN PLACED IN THE SAVE DIALOG BOX FOR THEM and replace it with AN IDENTICAL FILENAME WITH A LiTtLe CapiTalIsATion dIFFeReNCe. FCOL, it's not a very likely scenario.

 

[zim]

Re: searching

Originally posted by leenoble
Why would saving files in a case sensitive fashion affect searching?
I'm sure typing in fILenAmE in the search panel is still going to find files called filename.
The ONLY people this will affect are those people working on an existing, already saved before document who accidentally choose 'Save As...' from the File menu and THEN proceed to delete the file name WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN PLACED IN THE SAVE DIALOG BOX FOR THEM and replace it with AN IDENTICAL FILENAME WITH A LiTtLe CapiTalIsATion dIFFeReNCe. FCOL, it's not a very likely scenario.

I agree, I don't think that this will change searching, in fact, I think that it will make the os search capabilities stronger. I am sure that there will be a way to specify case sensitive searches and non case sensitive searches.

I honestly don't think that anyone will even notice. As it is, you can save more the one file with the same name, just put it in another location how would this confuse things more to a newbie? I don't think it would.

 

[steveh]

Re: Re: Big changes finishing

Originally posted by Pedro Estarque
why would anyone need a case sensitive idisk

It might be nice if you're working with U*ix systems much.

 

[Pedro Estarque]

Apple is obviously dropping the "user friendly" paradigm with such a choice.
Its not bad to attract UNIX users, I for one would probably benefit a lot from it ( I love GIMP for example ), but not at the expense of switching the company's focus.
User friendliness MUST be a priority for the company that invented the GUI.

 

[zim]

Originally posted by Pedro Estarque
Apple is obviously dropping the "user friendly" paradigm with such a choice.
Its not bad to attract UNIX users, I for one would probably benefit a lot from it ( I love GIMP for example ), but not at the expense of switching the company's focus.
User friendliness MUST be a priority for the company that invented the GUI.

Personally I do not see how something like this would impact usability. Like I said in my last post, it is possible to have multiple files of the same name and type throughout your hard drive located in various directories. The people who are going to get confused by this are the ones that get confused when they make a second folder called images on their desktop when one already is present in their documents folder or maybe they used photoshop and photoshop sent the image to the last location they saved and yet they forgot to look and see where that was. The only people who I see this creating an issue for is those who rely on the hearing aspect of the os, how will the os create a vocal difference between images and Images.

I think that this is one of those topics that shows up in the rumors and gets blow way out of the water when it isn't a big deal.

 

[Powerbook G5]

I agree, I mean seriously, who could get confused over this? If you are seriously unable to deal with it, then don't use case sensitivity, it's as simple as that. I am sure the majority of Mac users aren't going to have a nervous breakdown if they realize you could save a file as file1 and File1...

 

[simX]

Re: Minor Changes to Sherlock, iDisk

Originally posted by Macrumors
Also noted today is that iDisk is now case sensitive -- meaning two files, differing only by their capitalization may reside in the same folder ("Hello" and "hello").

I know for a fact that iDisk's have been case sensitive for a while now: not typing in the exact capitalization for a homepage.mac.com URL would result in the page "not being found". I don't know if you could have two similarly-spelled, but differently-cased files in the same directory before, but the iDisk has been case sensitive for a while.

It's kind of annoying, actually.

 

[Snowy_River]

Re: Re: Case sensitive

Originally posted by Pedro Estarque
...
Lets say you want to find the file "My File.doc", and then you search for "My file.doc" what do you get? not found.
...

This is rediculous. Of course searching and sorting are going to maintain their current functionality. They will (most likely) be completely case insensitive. (I agree that this may well give rise to the possibility of case sensitive searching as an option, but certainly not by default.)

I really think this whole case sensitive business is being drastically over reacted to...

However, I can think of one example of ending up with multiple similarly named files in the same directory, which could lead to some confusion. Consider, I write a letter to my uncle John and save it as "Letter to John" in my documents folder. Two months later, I write another letter to him, saving it as "letter to John", again in my documents folder. Some time after that, I go looking for one of the letters, and I find that there are two that, to me, look identical. So, I'm forced to open them, or check their creation/modification dates to determine which one I'm really after.

Now, it has be suggested that Apple could incorporate a "similar name" warning into the save routine. This might be a good idea, but I'd hope that they'd also include a "Don't show this warning again" for those who like naming files with similar names...

Anyway, my two cents is that this isn't a big deal. This doesn't mean that we're loosing user friendliness, or that the sky is falling. It really just means, IMO, that we're gaining compatibility, which I have a hard time seeing as a bad thing...

 

[ImAlwaysRight]

Originally posted by Squall15
...I'm not ordering a G5 until they ship with Panther. I think it's silly to by a new Mac just to have to format it in a month. It takes about 2 weeks to get a computer to the point where you feel like it's customized andd ready to go. I'm not going to do that twice.

Well, you better order NOW because Panther is suppose to ship mid-Sept. and a new G5 dual 2.0 order takes 2 months to arrive. I placed my order the end of July and my system is not expected to arrive until early Oct. so I'm pretty sure I'll be getting Panther on it.