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OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Developer Preview 2 Seeded to Developers

Not sure why everyone seems to be against trying Developer Previews for general users with the necessary experience?

Honestly there is no real way you could screw up your Mac, the only harm I see is data loss If you haven't yet backed up your system..
 
Eric S. said:
Sorry, no. As recently as Snow Leopard's release Apple was touting such new OS features as Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, Quicktime X, and full 64-bit support. And this was right up front in marketing the OS release, not as a "developer's interest" afterthought. Do we see any such OS advancement in Lion or Mtn Lion?
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Snow Leopard touted those features because it had nothing much else going for it, not consumer demoable new features I mean. The core new features concerned developers only. Which consumer do you think knows what Open CL is or GCD does? Those are API's, and API's are stuff developers are interested in.

And yes, Lion included more new API's than Snow Leopard did. So, for developers, there was tons of new stuff in Lion.
 
Btw, I don't want to sound like a cliche but, Safari is extremely fast on this release. DP1 Safari was basically the same as Lion 5.2 Safari.

But the Safari in DP2 is different. It still says 5.2, but it's working extremely snappy. They changed the way Safari web contents work I think. A loading tab doesn't seem to have any effect on the browsing speed on the part of the tab which has loaded already. Also, there's a cute loading animation now :)
 
iBug2 said:
Snow Leopard touted those features because it had nothing much else going for it, not consumer demoable new features I mean. The core new features concerned developers only. Which consumer do you think knows what Open CL is or GCD does?
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Me. I'm not a developer and I find those OS features a hell of lot more exciting than some GUI change. Who cares what color sliders are?

Those are API's, and API's are stuff developers are interested in.
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According to you, I guess. But I think a lot of people care about the underlying technology. Actually I'll disagree with your characterization of those as APIs, as if that's all they are (64-bit support isn't even an API). They may have API components for developers, but they're really core OS technologies that promise benefit all users. That's what makes them interesting to me.

And yes, Lion included more new API's than Snow Leopard did. So, for developers, there was tons of new stuff in Lion.
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Such as?
 
Eric S. said:
Me. I'm not a developer and I find those OS features a hell of lot more exciting than some GUI change. Who cares what color sliders are?



According to you, I guess. But I think a lot of people care about the underlying technology.
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Those are not features. You can find them interesting, but they don't change anything unless some developer actually uses them. How many apps do you know which actually uses Open CL? The API has been sitting there since 2009 yet the apps that actually use it are quite rare. And a lot doesn't mean majority. Yes you can find many geeks like me that actually care about under the hood changes, but the majority of Apple users don't.

Eric S. said:
Such as?
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There were more than thousand new API's that came with Lion. Can't even start to list them because I don't know all about them either. But OpenGL 3 was a big plus for Lion. It should have been ready for SL, but Apple was way too slow on that. And GL3 support is as important as Open CL imho.
 
iBug2 said:
Those are not features. You can find them interesting, but they don't change anything unless some developer actually uses them. How many apps do you know which actually uses Open CL? The API has been sitting there since 2009 yet the apps that actually use it are quite rare. And a lot doesn't mean majority. Yes you can find many geeks like me that actually care about under the hood changes, but the majority of Apple users don't.
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Well, that's really not the point I was making. The point is that core OS improvements are something Apple once considered valuable to invest resources on, but the focus seems to be more on consumer eye candy at this point.

There were more than thousand new API's that came with Lion. Can't even start to list them because I don't know all about them either.
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OK, well I guess that sums it up.
 
Eric S. said:
Well, that's really not the point I was making. The point is that core OS improvements are something Apple once considered valuable to invest resources on, but the focus seems to be more on consumer eye candy at this point.
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Guess that proves how far OS X have come.
 
Eric S. said:
Well, that's really not the point I was making. The point is that core OS improvements are something Apple once considered valuable to invest resources on, but the focus seems to be more on consumer eye candy at this point.
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No. The only reason you actually "heard" about Open CL or GCD was because when Apple demoed SL, they didn't have any consumer oriented features, so they actually talked about API's.

And Snow Leopard was the only example where that happened. It's not like Apple actually talked about new API's when they were marketing for Leopard or Tiger or Panther or Jaguar. Because those had consumer oriented features like Time Machine or Quartz etc and that's what you saw on their web page for marketing.

Lion gets back on that track and talks about consumer oriented stuff for marketing, because it has them. I don't think there's any need for confusion on this. If Snow Leopard had stuff like Time Machine, you probably wouldn't hear about GCD or Open CL unless you logged to the developer library and checked the new API's. Which you can probably do for Lion as well if you are that interested about the under the hood changes. But you don't seem to be unless they are on the title page for the OS.
 
iBug2 said:
I'm not saying Leopard as a release was less impressive than Lion. It certainly was impressive because it packed the biggest amount of consumer features for any OS X release. But as an OS, Lion is much better than Leopard.
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We can't compare leopard with lion, too long a generational gap, but we can compare lion to snow leopard, and besides lion fixing a few important security issues, I think a lot of people will argue that lion is a worse os than sl. Certainly lions adoption numbers despite it being pimped with icloud (my sole reason for upgrading to lion) and forcing a lot people to upgrade just to sync their devices, and despite it keeping a low price for updates, are still way behind sl. Mission control, monochromatic ui choices, versions, iOS elements, iOS looking applications, are at the very best dubious choices that a lot of people intensely dislike and I have yet to see a feature that people almost universally like and think it makes their computing lives much better in lion.

Lion has also been a very buggy release, and more often than not a slower os than sl. It's broken compatibilities with smb servers based on apple dropping the gpl 3 samba and writing their own buggy smb2 protocol, and it still didn't address one of os x biggest shortcomings that of resolution independence. You take simple things such as the finder and it seems nothing really enabling or creative has been done about it since leopard. And you still have that unruly monster of a content manager iTunes which is in dire need of some re-imagining.

Lion is simply not a good progress for os x, the things that make it a good os are the ones that made leopard a good os and for that matter snow leopard, lion's main strenghts are leopards strengths, and some underlying sl tech, and the things that make it a bad os are mostly "features" of lion. And it's a sham that mountain lion is touted for a reminders and notes app a la iPad and for a growl like notifications service a la iOS (a la android to be exact because we can all remember what iOS notifications looked like before...)..
 
Eric S. said:
The only confusion I noted here was from the person who said "OS X has matured by the time of Tiger and most stuff that came after that were less impressive."
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It was. Every upgrade until Leopard brought way too much under the hood changes that effected overall system responsiveness, 3rd party hardware support and general speed improvements. After Tiger all we got (we as users, not as developers) was new functionality like Time Machine, and while some of them were amazing, like Expose, some of them were rather gimmicky. But starting with Leopard, there were no significant improvements on the responsiveness or resource management of the OS. So if you compare Lion to Tiger, you'll find much less difference than if you compared Tiger to OS 10.0, which was barely usable. And that's quite normal because a fresh OS has a lot of ground to cover.
 
iBug2 said:
some of them were rather gimmicky.
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I can't understand how you fail to see that the lions are the most gimmicky releases of os x ever. You used such an apt word but you applied it to the wrong os x release. Lion hardly has any features that are not gimmicks.:)
 
blow45 said:
We can't compare leopard with lion, too long a generational gap, but we can compare lion to snow leopard, and besides lion fixing a few important security issues, I think a lot of people will argue that lion is a worse os than sl. Certainly lions adoption numbers despite it being pimped with icloud (my sole reason for upgrading to lion) and forcing a lot people to upgrade just to sync their devices, and despite it keeping a low price for updates, are still way behind sl. Mission control, monochromatic ui choices, versions, iOS elements, iOS looking applications, are at the very best dubious choices that a lot of people intensely dislike and I have yet to see a feature that people almost universally like and think it makes their computing lives much better in lion.

Lion has also been a very buggy release, and more often than not a slower os than sl. It's broken compatibilities with smb servers based on apple dropping the gpl 3 samba and writing their own buggy smb2 protocol, and it still didn't address one of os x biggest shortcomings that of resolution independence. You take simple things such as the finder and it seems nothing really enabling or creative has been done about it since leopard. And you still have that unruly monster of a content manager iTunes which is in dire need of some re-imagining.

Lion is simply not a good progress for os x, the things that make it a good os are the ones that made leopard a good os and for that matter snow leopard, lion's main strenghts are leopards strengths, and some underlying sl tech, and the things that make it a bad os are mostly "features" of lion. And it's a sham that mountain lion is touted for a reminders and notes app a la iPad Amd for a growl like notifications service a la iOS (a la android to be exact because we can all remember what iOS notifications looked like before...)..
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Lion to me isn't a worse OS than SL. You will find a lot of people argue that Lion is a worse OS, but its adoption is the fastest one so far. Whether adoption is a good indicator of customer satisfaction is another matter though. But you have no idea what the majority of the users like or dislike. All we know is what people dislike on these kinds of forums, which don't really mean much. Couple hundred geeks arguing here won't change what millions of consumers think about the OS they use.

About bugginess, I think Snow Leopard was buggier than Lion for me, at least upon release. I had more issues with SL's 3rd party kext support on launch than I had with Lion, but that's just my personal experience. Lion doesn't really break anything other than Expose, which I loved, but adds a lot of new stuff, which can be quite useful. For example I hated auto save at first but now I love it, and I don't even know why we didn't have it all these years. I miss Expose, which is probably the only thing I miss from SL. Everything other than Expose is working better on Lion. SL's Finder didn't have cut/paste (with command+c and command+alt+v), and that's a feature I demanded since Tiger, and finally got on Lion, which saves me a lot of time on Finder, maybe it's the feature that saves me the most time. Finder overall is much more stable compared to SL Finder as well, much less crashes. Working with many external drives have been more stable on Lion as well.

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blow45 said:
I can't understand how you fail to see that the lions are the most gimmicky releases of os x ever. You used such an apt word but you applied it to the wrong os x release. Lion hardly has any features that are not gimmicks.:)
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Really? You think Front Row or Photo Booth weren't gimmicky? Both those were front page features. I think full screen apps is a much useful feature than both of them. They didn't come with Leopard, I think it was Tiger that introduced those features, but to me, they were more gimmicky than any Lion features you can think. Well, maybe less gimmicky than Launchpad but I'll give you only that.
 
blow45 said:
and it still didn't address one of os x biggest shortcomings that of resolution independence.
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To be fair, resolution independence still sucks on Windows too due to third party developers. But yeah, I'm also more interested in the under-the-hood changes than a couple of new apps. And of course productivity improvements, like improvements to Finder.
 
Mr. Wonderful said:
To be fair, resolution independence still sucks on Windows too due to third party developers. But yeah, I'm also more interested in the under-the-hood changes than a couple of new apps. And of course productivity improvements, like improvements to Finder.
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Well, share works in Finder and in many Apple apps now, so you can share anything directly to services like Flickr or vimeo or whatever. If that's the kind of thing you do a lot, that'll save you some time for sure.
 
At the risk of blowing my NDA this has me alarmed

I haven't seen this posted in ADC forums and no mention of it but under "Mail, Contacts & Calendars" does any one see categories in Chinese in such names as :

mail.qq.com

www.126.com

mail.163.com

I'm a legit member and got the latest build on my MacBook Pro for testing, not my main Mac Pro. This seems odd, especially as my fans were full blast on boot. I'll upload a pic in a sec, just freaked out that something is amiss.
 
@bug. Lion might have cut and paste, and mountain lion will have editable save windows, both very very welcome and overdue, but I remember a time when Redmond was starting their photocopiers...

In terms of gimmicky, not only launchpad is gimmicky, but iPad looking apps like calendar and contacts that offer less functionality than their counterparts are gimmicky, Mission control too is much more gimmicky than functional, and I would argue that reopening where you left off and versions, all of them pretty much defaults are also more gimmicks than anything else, but that's debatable.

Photo booth was a silly little program, hardly a main os feature. Front row was just fine, what was gimmicky in that, a nice clean interface to turn your mac into a media consumption device with a remote, much loved, and much missed. It was functional and not gimmicky because it catered for a real need, to do away with the complex os interface and with a small easy to use remote to play a few songs, movies, podcast from your mac which doubled as a media centre. What's apple's solution to that now? Use a remote app on the iPad and share the library via home share but with podcasts appearing unsorted and the mac still using the dead boring iTunes interface? They took front row away and didn't replace it with anything really. The apple tv is for well, tvs, but what's there for media playing on the mac? Plex media server is pretty good, btw.

Mr. Wonderful said:
To be fair, resolution independence still sucks on Windows too due to third party developers.
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Agreed. :) Although I didn't expect apple would altogether avoid addressing this once again. We know it's problematic, we know it's not that easy to implement but a least offer some options to say make a few ui elements and their fonts scalable, the menu bar, safari elements, mail elements, get info pop ups and cmd click pop ups. Can anyone over the age of fourty read safari boomarks or for that matter easily use safari's address and search bars?
 
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