More built-in games-Apple should add-in a nice Solitaire game to OS X (like on the iPod) and ReadyBoost.
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What should Leopard steal from Vista?
- Thread starter mcmuffy
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I do find myself using this feature relatively often when on Windows. Coupled with the much better drag and drop into dialog function in OS X, it would make a great combination.
If it can't be virtualization, it can't be native Windows, and it can't be API substitution, exactly what technique do you approve of?
That would be for Apple to decide. It can be native Windows btw, just one which doesn't require rebooting or running in virtualisation. It's called progress. I am sure Apple will come up with a way of doing this one day, without the need for the user to know what is going on. In other words, you click the app on the dock and it opens. (It would be like having a windows code-base built into OS X...sort of).
While I agree more/better samples are in order... MSDN (IMO) is not a great resource for figuring out how the API works. For me, it is counter-intuitive. I have to dig through topics just to get at references I want (even .NET could be better organized in this regard). API searching is horribly broken, and topics don't always make much sense, suffering from a lack of good topic documentation.
Half the time, I am better off using the built in metadata in .NET to figure out how to use something than going to MSDN. Conversely, the ADC docs when looking for an API are brief, but do what is described on the tin.
That would be for Apple to decide. It can be native Windows btw, just one which doesn't require rebooting or running in virtualisation. It's called progress. I am sure Apple will come up with a way of doing this one day, without the need for the user to know what is going on. In other words, you click the app on the dock and it opens. (It would be like having a windows code-base built into OS X...sort of).
There are three paths:
- Virtualization: Use the existing Windows codebase, running alongside OS X to allow Windows apps to run. Coherence mode a la Parallels can make this work even better. Classic uses this technique to an extent, virtualizing at a different level, but still virtualizing. If you want to use the existing Windows discs without rebooting... you have to virtualize Windows at some level, no way around it. You can virtualize the hardware, the kernel, or whatever, but it has to be done.
- Dual-Booting: Let Windows run on the hardware on its own. Bootcamp already does this. Having both OS X and Windows run 'on the hardware' at the same time is still Virtualization.
- API Emulation: This is the route Wine and Crossover Office takes, and is proving to be unsustainable. You get the advantage of the app running 'natively' within your OS without using virtualization, but you get the downside of API maintainence nightmares. Unless you have a team that is big enough to keep up with the changes being made by Windows (which is expensive), the app will eventually start fading into obscurity, as in a lot of cases, key apps will get ported faster than waiting for the latest patch to Wine or whatever. In a sense, this is extremely high-level virtualization, that doesn't require the original Windows discs.
The third one is the one you seem to suggesting and as stated above, not a great path for development to head down. It creates headaches that Virtualization is supposed to help solve, by not requiring a dev team reverse engineer millions of lines of code. (And it wouldn't really be native Windows, it would be an app running 'natively' without Windows)
Although there are a lot of things about Vista that bug me, I dig the "live icons". Would love to see something like that in the next iteration of OS X.
I think Virtualization is the future, but virtualization of the entire system and not just the CPU is going to take time. Parallels is really an astonishingly good program, if you consider how long it has been in development.
rather minor/not really needed things:
- Superfetch/readyboost: it would greatly reduce the app loading time, but the hdd access time would go up a lot. (for example it would reduce the slow first start speed from firefox)
- The layer from UAC that prevents other programs clicking the allow button: or does osx already has something that prevents applications "clicking the allow button" for you when it needs administrative rights?
- administrative tools: just look at for example the vista event viewer, its quite powerful (granted, it isn't that needed in osx than in windows
- finder/explorer: slideshow from folder without starting a new app, bars signaling free disk space, changing thumbnail size without opening a new window, also the addressbar is very nice in vistas explorer, it really would make things faster for me, ability to extract archives to another location... (actually pathfinder has most the things i need)
Comments:
- Superfetch might be interesting, (at least the pre-caching of apps anyways, background tasks already run 'nicely' and surrender CPU to foreground apps), but ReadyBoost won't gain us anything. Apple already has a couple answers to this. One is the kext cache, which turns loading kernel extensions at boot into a single sequential HDD read (where HDDs win over a flash drive), and multi-threaded boot tasks, which help stagger seeks on the HDD to reduce the impact on actual boot times. 10.4 already boots faster than Vista with ReadyBoost, and after booting ReadyBoost acts more like a cache which OS X supports in the file system by moving smaller, commonly accessed files into a 'hot zone' where seeks will be minimized. This lets OS X deal with 10-100x the number of files that Windows does with similar or better performance.
- Vista needs this because as an admin user, it does not request a password, meaning that a malicious app could elevate a process and cause it to elevate automatically, since all you need is a button press. On OS X, you still need a password to elevate. A malicious app would need to know your password in order to elevate, even though it can automate the user interface. If a malicious app on either platform gets your password though, you are f----d, separate UI layer or not. So, while it is a nice to have sort of feature, on OS X, it would protect an app from spoofing an elevation dialog more than it would prevent an app from automatically elevating itself.
- The log files are there in OS X, and the Event Viewer is really just a glorified version of a log viewer. It would be nice to have a little more powerful access to the system logs in Console though (app logs are already pretty good, IMO). I find myself doing a little too much searching by hand in system.log from time to time because it is a catch-all for a lot of garbage.
- This is one thing Vista is doing better right now... discoverability of some of these features. Almost everything you say is accessible in OS X, but it tends to be hidden to some extent. Go To is available (and accepts any valid URL that the Finder can navigate to), you can use Command-Click on the titlebar to navigate upwards in the tree, and so on. The Finder is the weak link IMO.
I agree, but the point I was making is that the poster I was responding to was believing in a "Secret Option D" that doesn't exist if you go by the definition of the tech jargon.
Apple had that back in OS 8x and 9x, with an arguably better implementation of that feature than MS Windows of that time.
That feature is built into OS X, it depends on the each application's developer if they decide to utilize it or not. Also, transparency started off in the Linux World, it was not a development or innovation of Microsoft.
I have to agree with the API search issue, although I have found that the best way around that is to use google, which most always leads you to the correct MSDN page.
I am not sure if this is by design on google's part to stick it to MS, or just a very good coincident.
Max
Uh, no one claimed it was...And it's not like Linux invented transparency in the first place.
Not true, you can have an admin account without a password. To check I just went and changed my password to nothing and now all that is needed to confirm security boxes/sudo attempts is just a single key press, enter.
An easy way to lock the computer. On my Win XP Pro computer, I just hit WinKey+L and it locks it. Screensaver password is crap because it activates whenever the screensaver goes on. Switching users allows other people to control the computer, just not my account. I want to be able to completely lock my mac by a simple keypress.
changing the color of the desktop
o... and having a BUILT IN specialty bootcamp(like an upgraded CrossOver Mac) that is compatible with most windows software and games! Without paying MicroSoft a dime!
And please, screw vista. They should steal stuff off xp, because it's the best.
o... and having a BUILT IN specialty bootcamp(like an upgraded CrossOver Mac) that is compatible with most windows software and games! Without paying MicroSoft a dime!
And please, screw vista. They should steal stuff off xp, because it's the best.
Sort of reverse but i feel apple needs to release the OS X Server admin tools for windows. Being the tools are only for OS X prevents a lot of IT industries from getting a nice X-Serve. It would also be nice to have MMC running on the mac to connect to windows servers.
Other tools they could include is a nice SNMP performance/monitoring/alerting system for your servers.
Other tools they could include is a nice SNMP performance/monitoring/alerting system for your servers.
i love it how windows in vista fade in and out. i'm a sucker for eye candy. it's shameful.
That's the one thing I can think of. They have nice eye candy. We have a better interface than Vista, so if Apple added more eye candy, it would be very awesome.
I never said you can't have an admin account with an empty password, I said that you need a password to elevate. Any admin account without a reasonably secure password is suicide these days, considering there are plenty of ways to elevate yourself once you know the right password. Vista doesn't protect you from this very well, either.
Virus compatibility.
I am so damn sick and tired of always been the odd one out at the office when everyone is talking about that new virus that is recking havoc around the world, and all I can add is "oh, yeah, well just the other day I was running the beta of joost and it had an error, so before anything could happen the OS killed the app"