Don't take this the wrong way but, is it that OS X is getting faster and faster or is it finally getting to the way it should have been written in 10.0? All these updates are nice and all, but this is the way that it should have been written in the first place. I'm not talking about adding features like Expose and stuff, I'm talking about responsiveness. Is it OS X getting faster because they are fixing the things that should have been fixed originally or is it that it is getting faster because they are adding new features? And is windows making your computer slower, or introducing new technologies and abilities that require faster processors and such? Luna is a new rendering engine for XP and has higher requirements than the ones found in 2k, ME, etc because it does more. Personally I think 10.0 should have been as responsive as 10.2. Apple controlled everything about the OS and hardware it would be running on, there wasn't an excuse to have to wait till 10.2 and 10.3 to get these speed improvements. It is impressive that XP can run on any random x86 hardware out there in a bajillion different combinations and run as well and as fast as it does. Just my $0.02. BTW I'm using Panther, Jaguar and XP Pro on my various computers.
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Well I started using MacOS X on 10.2.3 anyway so I am not able to comment on how bad 10.0 was (have heard it was very bad) the problem is though that 10.2 was a decent running OS. I mean XP was never as smooth responsive and fast on 1.4GHz and 384MB as 10.2 is on a bare minimum 12" PB. Maybe MacOS X should have been as fast as 10.3 is I dont know but this I do know:
I will give you that XP has a very different interface and all but it is all eye candy no practicality I always reverted back to the look of 2000 because I couldn't stand all these horribly miced and matched colors and all these oversized title bars and all. Now this is of course very subjective but I was running Win XP without the eye candy and it was slower and less responsive than 10.2 is on my PB.
And at the end of the day XP did not add that much more to 2000 functionality or extra stuff. Panther is adding quite a few things to Jag.
As a simple example you can see it on programs themselves. WMP 7 was faster and more responsive than 8 which in turn was faster than 9. And these are on faster machines not on the same machine. QT 5 was slower than 6 which was slower than 6.1 and now it is even faster.
As about the comment that XP runs on different machines I give them that and I think that on this part MS has done miracles it runs just about on any hardware you have as long as it is at least 1.6GHz and has 512MB with a decent 32MB graphics card on anything below that gets toooo slow too easily.
All I am trying to say is that I really don't know how much faster 10.0 should have been or how fast XP could have been all I am saying is that i spent 4 months ago 1800$ buying a 12" PB and now I feel that I can keep it unchanged if I wish running panther until I feel like to give it up and I dont think it will be soon at all. I went through 5 different Windows laptops in 6 years because they were tooooo slow as I was moving up the scale of Windows. To me that means that someone is putting effort on optimizing the performance of the OS when the other is barely patching one hole after the other when of course it is not busy to patch the hole of the previous patch.... My bf just called a couple of weeks telling me that what's up at MS and that the autoupdate has been downloading a couple of patches every day.... Sad very sad, with so much money and so much brain poiwer they should be shipping a lot more reliable products
Sorry I got carried away but 9 years under the fear of a constantly crashing OS can do nothing better for you... in 5 months I have restarted it once every two weeks mainly to install something and it has not crashed.... and counting...
I will give you that XP has a very different interface and all but it is all eye candy no practicality I always reverted back to the look of 2000 because I couldn't stand all these horribly miced and matched colors and all these oversized title bars and all. Now this is of course very subjective but I was running Win XP without the eye candy and it was slower and less responsive than 10.2 is on my PB.
And at the end of the day XP did not add that much more to 2000 functionality or extra stuff. Panther is adding quite a few things to Jag.
As a simple example you can see it on programs themselves. WMP 7 was faster and more responsive than 8 which in turn was faster than 9. And these are on faster machines not on the same machine. QT 5 was slower than 6 which was slower than 6.1 and now it is even faster.
As about the comment that XP runs on different machines I give them that and I think that on this part MS has done miracles it runs just about on any hardware you have as long as it is at least 1.6GHz and has 512MB with a decent 32MB graphics card on anything below that gets toooo slow too easily.
All I am trying to say is that I really don't know how much faster 10.0 should have been or how fast XP could have been all I am saying is that i spent 4 months ago 1800$ buying a 12" PB and now I feel that I can keep it unchanged if I wish running panther until I feel like to give it up and I dont think it will be soon at all. I went through 5 different Windows laptops in 6 years because they were tooooo slow as I was moving up the scale of Windows. To me that means that someone is putting effort on optimizing the performance of the OS when the other is barely patching one hole after the other when of course it is not busy to patch the hole of the previous patch.... My bf just called a couple of weeks telling me that what's up at MS and that the autoupdate has been downloading a couple of patches every day.... Sad very sad, with so much money and so much brain poiwer they should be shipping a lot more reliable products
Sorry I got carried away but 9 years under the fear of a constantly crashing OS can do nothing better for you... in 5 months I have restarted it once every two weeks mainly to install something and it has not crashed.... and counting...
I was *not* exagerating, go to the store and look at the specs to run Terminator 2 Extreme edition on your PC, it says you need a 3 GHz, 512 megs RAM, at least 128 megs VRAM, 1600x1200, etc...not an exageration but pure black and white system specs on the DVD requirements...
Should have been
Give Apple a break! Please!
Has *anyone* *ever* migrated technologies from a well developed and long lived GUI operating system, and then decided to port all the core technologies over to a completely different Unix Based operating system, and simply slap it on top?
No! Apple is the first to even attempt such a thing.
Before OS X was released, Consumer Unix was an oxymoron.
Apple had to *recode* *everything* that had fit so well into os 9, but in a completely different environment. It's not like porting a program.
Keep in mind, the current rev should be considered semantically Mac OS X v 1.2.6, it was Marketing that decided to start with 10.0 instead of 1.0.
Please, 1.x Applications aren't always this well written, let alone Operating Systems, let alone Operating Systems having to be recreated from *scratch* and they had to figure out how to start porting this stuff over.
So come on, this could *not* have been done any other way.
You wanted Apple to wait until it was perfect? It's already more stable than Windows. Mac OS wasn't this well defined until much later. System 6 was nice. But System 7 invited complications, and 7.5 moreso, which really didn't get resolved well until 8.6.
This kind of stuff doesn't happen overnight, or in the span of two or three years.
So please, imagine trying to port the amiga GUI to a bsd ox, and retain all the wonderful features that Amigas have to offer, and then realize that Apple's OS X won't become a *mature* operating system by that stringent standard until it semantically reaches at least 2.0 (which per Apple Marketing would be Mac OS X 11.0?).
We are ending the OS9-OSX transition, but the OS X *is* still in transition itself. I doubt anyone else could have pulled this off faster. Especially not Microsoft.
Jaedreth
Give Apple a break! Please!
Has *anyone* *ever* migrated technologies from a well developed and long lived GUI operating system, and then decided to port all the core technologies over to a completely different Unix Based operating system, and simply slap it on top?
No! Apple is the first to even attempt such a thing.
Before OS X was released, Consumer Unix was an oxymoron.
Apple had to *recode* *everything* that had fit so well into os 9, but in a completely different environment. It's not like porting a program.
Keep in mind, the current rev should be considered semantically Mac OS X v 1.2.6, it was Marketing that decided to start with 10.0 instead of 1.0.
Please, 1.x Applications aren't always this well written, let alone Operating Systems, let alone Operating Systems having to be recreated from *scratch* and they had to figure out how to start porting this stuff over.
So come on, this could *not* have been done any other way.
You wanted Apple to wait until it was perfect? It's already more stable than Windows. Mac OS wasn't this well defined until much later. System 6 was nice. But System 7 invited complications, and 7.5 moreso, which really didn't get resolved well until 8.6.
This kind of stuff doesn't happen overnight, or in the span of two or three years.
So please, imagine trying to port the amiga GUI to a bsd ox, and retain all the wonderful features that Amigas have to offer, and then realize that Apple's OS X won't become a *mature* operating system by that stringent standard until it semantically reaches at least 2.0 (which per Apple Marketing would be Mac OS X 11.0?).
We are ending the OS9-OSX transition, but the OS X *is* still in transition itself. I doubt anyone else could have pulled this off faster. Especially not Microsoft.
Jaedreth
Well you could say Photoshop 3 should have been photoshop 4, The 1986 XJ6 should have been the 1991 XJ6. etc.
Really I think 10.0 should have been 10.2. 10.3 is extra
. I think Apple thought 10.0 should have been 10.1 and that's why 10.1 was a free upgrade.
And the Model T should have been the GT 40
All I can say is some of the folks on the Internet have absolutely no clue
Different versions of photoshop require different processing requirements, newer versions do more, they require more power. Mettalugical discoveries, etc prevented the 1996 car from being the 1991. Basically there were limitations on the technology of the time. 10.3 will run on the same hardware that 10.0 ran on, and 10.3 will be a whole lot faster. There is no new "discovery" that makes 10.3 run faster than 10.0. 10.3 is simply written better. Assembly is Assembly and C is C, its how you use it. There is no reason why the speed of 10.3 could not have been in 10.0 But anyways, we're here at 10.3 now, so this is kinda a useless argument.
Anywho, 10.3 is very cool, I'm liking Expose a lot. It is true, it becomes second nature after using it for a while. I find myself moving my mouse to the upper right corner of the screen on my Jaguar computer and then I blink a few times and go "Oh wrong OS".
I think they could improve fast user switching a little tho. While it looks very cool, I don't like how it takes more space in the bar at the top of the screen. It fits your whole user name there. What I would have liked to see was a button that would bring up a pseudo login screen over the current desktop, kinda how it does if you have a password now. Then you could choose the user and switch from there. That would make my day. Or even have it as a option on the mighty blue apple menu.
Anywho, 10.3 is very cool, I'm liking Expose a lot. It is true, it becomes second nature after using it for a while. I find myself moving my mouse to the upper right corner of the screen on my Jaguar computer and then I blink a few times and go "Oh wrong OS".
I think they could improve fast user switching a little tho. While it looks very cool, I don't like how it takes more space in the bar at the top of the screen. It fits your whole user name there. What I would have liked to see was a button that would bring up a pseudo login screen over the current desktop, kinda how it does if you have a password now. Then you could choose the user and switch from there. That would make my day. Or even have it as a option on the mighty blue apple menu.
It's a rule of OS's (except windows) that code is revised and optimized during revisions, which makes it run faster. This is nothing new. It's taken Apple... what, 5 years of tinkering to get OS X this good? So you're saying that they shouldn't have released OS X at all until now...
These things take time. Creating an OS is not an easy task, I'm surprised OS X Beta was as stable as it was...
pnw
I agree, but your comment isn't limited to OSs, however it does require the developer to give a sh*t, which explains the situation with MS. As far as OS X getting to this point: It would have taken even longer if it had not been out in the real world being excercised, analyzed and otherwise pounded on.
He's not exaggerating. An extra presentation of the movie is included with this DVD, I believe on a separate disc, but it could be the feature itself. It's a specially encoded WMP9 HD file. It's a test of Microsoft's codec to display High-Definition level footage (at least 720p instead of the 480p found on current DVDs). Also, remember that WMP9 is a variant of MPEG-4 encoding, which is much more efficient than the MPEG-2 standard used for normal DVDs.
Therefore, it's not so surprising that they could fit the entire movie, in HD, with surround sound. However, that high-res an MPEG-4 based file really DOES require high system specs. That's a LOT to decode.
--Matt
So for all of you Panther testers out there...how complete do you judge Panther to be right now as far as stability/performance/feature-wise? Is it over the halfway mark? Possibly close to final cadidate? Or do you feel it have a lot of work yet? Just curious...it's pretty cool to follow the developement of a new OS from first alpha up to GM and see how much it can change in a short amount of time.
Yes....except for Windows because Microsoft can never do anything right.
Apple didn't write OS X from the ground up, Darwin and BSD had been through many many revisions before you get the OS that you had today or even at 10.0. Before even OS X Server 1.0. It had been in development for YEARS before it was released. You're telling me that in the labs, Aqua wasn't running as slowly as it was in the field? You've gotta be kidding me. Other bugs would have been found and fixed as it was installed on a more diverse hardware platform. Things such as Finder are the basic parts of OS X. I never said that they shouldn't have released OS X till now, I'm saying that the Finder speed, responsiveness in windows and such should have been part of the 10.0 release. Jaguar runs fine on a computer without QE, why couldn't this have been optimized when it was first written? It doesn't take a field test to see that it runs slow. Yes Apple has taken 5 years....5 years (as you say) to give a finder that is responsive enough for most people. I know creating an OS isn't an easy task, I've had to make a basic one in my Operating Systems class.If your OS Can run at an acceptable rate on your current machines, what incentive would a developer have (one who also benefits from hardware sales) from making the OS as optimized as it can be for older hardware?
The kinds of OSes you speak of are ones mostly Open Source, where the goal of the project isn't to make it run faster because you want to make it optimized, but rather to get recognition in the open sourced community for finding an algorithm that works 5% faster than the previous one.
As for the stability of Panther, I've actully had 0 crashes since I installed. Some wierd things I did notice were that if I use VLC, and play a movie....no audio. I play the same movie in MPlayer and I get audio, but the video is choppy. If I use Jaguar to play it, its fine on both. Also it seems that if I choose my buddy list from the iChat menu on the toolbar, it brings up that registration screen for iChat when you enter your info. My info is entered, but I have to click through it to get the buddy list.
WWDC's build for me ran great. 7b28 however tends to have several apps crashing. I noticed that if i copy several files from a firewire drive to my local HD (3+ GB's), finder will bomb out during the copy and only part of the transfer occurs.
Finder will also randmoly crash while working in other windows. It will recover itself and open a new window, even though I was using the finder windows.
My system is an iMac 600 with 512 MB. Anyone with similar experiences?
Finder will also randmoly crash while working in other windows. It will recover itself and open a new window, even though I was using the finder windows.
My system is an iMac 600 with 512 MB. Anyone with similar experiences?
The best evidence that in 10.0 it was not possible to have the responsiveness of 10.2 is that 10.0 was not as responsive as 10.2 is. Of course 10.0 should have been faster, of course! But it was not possible given the resources and the situation they were in at that time.
There, now do you feel better?
iSync Crashes SyncServer
Did 2 clean installs and iSync crashes SyncServer. Anyone else have this problem?
Did 2 clean installs and iSync crashes SyncServer. Anyone else have this problem?
Panther & the Classic environment
Does anyone here know if Panther will have the Classic environment or not? The reason I am asking is because the PowerMac G5's don't have Mac OS 9 installed (and you can't install it since they can't boot Mac OS 9 either).
Does anyone here know if Panther will have the Classic environment or not? The reason I am asking is because the PowerMac G5's don't have Mac OS 9 installed (and you can't install it since they can't boot Mac OS 9 either).
Yes it has classic.
And this build needs a lot more work on it before it's done. Regular crashes and freakiness. And now an iSync that won't work because it says it has expired.
And this build needs a lot more work on it before it's done. Regular crashes and freakiness. And now an iSync that won't work because it says it has expired.
iCal can now be used as a scheduler
New cool feature in iCal in panther,
as a reminder you can have a file to be opened, instead of the beep and message.
Think applescript.... and we eventually have got a nice cron like scheduler.
bad news... in 7b28 I could not get it to work... and still no link with birthdays in AddressBook
New cool feature in iCal in panther,
as a reminder you can have a file to be opened, instead of the beep and message.
Think applescript.... and we eventually have got a nice cron like scheduler.
bad news... in 7b28 I could not get it to work... and still no link with birthdays in AddressBook
Perhaps you're right. I never found 10.0 to be unacceptably slow; however faster is always better isn't it.
The thing with X is that it's future proofed us to a huge extent. We get Expose, fast user switching, content-showing dragged windows (that sort of thing), pretty much for free because of Quartz. We get security, functionality, networking (+ network sharing) because of BSD, literally for free.
We also get a whole lot in X that is not part of the OS (but most people see as being the OS). Web browsing, eMail, iChat, Finder etc. Much of that comes because of Apple's support of standards and use of open source technologies.
What I was trying to say in my previous post, is that Apple is addressing the issues with X, whereas issues with Windows are not being addressed by Microsoft.
Let's take the window rendering engines, Windows hasn't changed since the start (although it has been improved on). Luna is the name of the "theme" not the rendering engine. Longhorn will apparently include Quartz-Extreme functionality and I'm sure that this will boost Windows. Quartz though is a completely amazing peice of technology that is not matched on any other OS. It brought slowness, but it also brought power. The slowness is being addressed and has in 10.1, 10.2 and now in 10.3.
Looking at Finder, yes things changed between classic and X, but despite what a lot of "usability" gurus say, many of these things are not detrimental to usability. The browser-like interface introduced in X can work well, it has in Windows for years. Panther is reintroducing spatial Finder capabilities which addresses all the issues, I doubt MS would address these types of issues. I've seen no evidence that they are even aware this is a problem; however Longhorn, from what I've seen, seems to be emphasising search as the primary interface, instead of hierarchy traversal. That will be interesting, and I guess we'll see how much better, or worse, that makes Windows Explorer.
All in all though, MS relies on greater computing power, whilst even though Apple now has this to the nth degree, it does not seem to be forgetting to optimise. Can MS say the same thing?
henryblackman,
Sorry to smash the flow from your great post.
I have a problem, I upgraded (archive and install) to 7B28 over 7B21 and it changed my admin account to standard, now I can't do any admin tasks because I don't know the admin username or password.
That includes deleting files, copying files, using certain system preferences, startup disk...
...any tips anyone?
AppleMatt
Sorry to smash the flow from your great post.
I have a problem, I upgraded (archive and install) to 7B28 over 7B21 and it changed my admin account to standard, now I can't do any admin tasks because I don't know the admin username or password.
That includes deleting files, copying files, using certain system preferences, startup disk...
...any tips anyone?
AppleMatt