In the Shallow End
Dan Johnson
been seeing from Apple for the past view years: They prefer
the shallow end.
The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply
an incremental backup program. It's claim to fame is a
whizzy- but terribly overwrought- UI. That UI is very Apple.
But that is the high point of Leopard so far. There are other
minor utilities, some no doubt welcome, bits of cross-app
integration and the like. This all has value but it's terribly,
embarassingly shallow.
It's a bit like Tiger in its emphasis on user-level utility
applets and such- but Tiger went deeper. Spotlight had
some filesystem-level components, where Time Machine
has not. Expose could only be done on a fully composited
desktop; but anybody can do virtual desktops.
Apple may be finding that you can only do so much in
the shallow end, but they may have no choice: getting
their lineup onto x86 today and x86-64 tomorrow may
be soaking up all their serious effort- leaving them
with just... Leopard.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> The Leopard preview really reinforces the pattern we've been seeing
> from Apple for the past view years: They prefer the shallow end.
>
> The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply an
> incremental backup program.
No, it's obviously somewhat more than that, since it also works with
apps, including apps which don't (only) store regular files in the file
system. There's obviously a whole infrastructure under there to allow
apps to support state saving and reverting in a standardized way. This
is fairly "deep".
> It's claim to fame is a whizzy- but terribly overwrought- UI. That UI
> is very Apple.
Meh. Core Animation (also arguably "deep") makes that sort of rich
interface pretty trivial, I guess. Like the iChat effects. It would be
absurd to spend serious amounts of development time doing that stuff for
one app, but if the OS gives it to you practically for free, why not?
> But that is the high point of Leopard so far. There are other minor
> utilities, some no doubt welcome, bits of cross-app integration and
> the like. This all has value but it's terribly, embarassingly
> shallow.
>
> It's a bit like Tiger in its emphasis on user-level utility applets
> and such- but Tiger went deeper. Spotlight had some filesystem-level
> components, where Time Machine has not.
I suspect it might. Do we have details on just how Apple is storing old
file revisions and such?
> Expose could only be done on a fully composited desktop; but anybody
> can do virtual desktops.
>
> Apple may be finding that you can only do so much in the shallow end,
> but they may have no choice: getting their lineup onto x86 today and
> x86-64 tomorrow may be soaking up all their serious effort- leaving
> them with just... Leopard.
Apple is also, in Leopard, extending Spotlight across the
network, which presumably involves some fairly basic rethinking of the
way file sharing works.
Then there's Objective-C 2.0. With garbage collection, among other
things.
Plus, there's Core Animation, and possibly other graphics engine
features that we haven't heard anything specific about but that were
expected to be switched on by default in Leopard, like Q2DE, which is
pretty significant.
And I have my suspicions about Dashcode. It seems awfully elaborate
just for making widgets. As I theorized when Dashboard itself was
announced, I think this might be Apple's way of slowly inching toward
greater use of web technologies on the desktop. Dashcode could be a
platform to test technologies which might eventually end up in Interface
Builder.
And there's probably a lot going on down in the kernel that Apple
doesn't really need to mention to anyone because it doesn't change
external interfaces.
--
"Those who enter the country illegally violate the law."
-- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005
Snit
12dkq35...@news.supernews.com on 8/10/06 7:00 AM:
> The Leopard preview really reinforces the pattern we've
> been seeing from Apple for the past view years: They prefer
> the shallow end.
>
> The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply
> an incremental backup program. It's claim to fame is a
> whizzy- but terribly overwrought- UI. That UI is very Apple.
Easy to use. Something to encourage average users to make backups. Clever
and well done, though perhaps the UI is resource intensive.
Yup, that is Apple.
>
> But that is the high point of Leopard so far.
One of the several high points they have talked about. And they have openly
admitted the have more to show.
> There are other minor utilities, some no doubt welcome, bits of cross-app
> integration and the like. This all has value but it's terribly, embarassingly
> shallow.
Did you expect a free flowing Champaign port on every machine?
> It's a bit like Tiger in its emphasis on user-level utility
> applets and such- but Tiger went deeper. Spotlight had
> some filesystem-level components, where Time Machine
> has not.
Time machines does.
> Expose could only be done on a fully composited
> desktop; but anybody can do virtual desktops.
>
> Apple may be finding that you can only do so much in
> the shallow end, but they may have no choice: getting
> their lineup onto x86 today and x86-64 tomorrow may
> be soaking up all their serious effort- leaving them
> with just... Leopard.
Did I give you enough attention?
--
€ Dreamweaver, being the #1 pro web design tool, is used by many pros
€ Different viruses are still different even if in the same "family"
€ OS X users are at far less risk of malware then are XP users
Wegie
you seem to be confusing shallow, with High Quality. There is a
difference. You are also only looking at the Client portion of the OS,
Leopard Server adds quite a bit on the Deep End, or if you are having
trouble seeing past the high quality graphics.
You might want to read over this link that explains Apple's approach to
the OS, compared to Microsoft's. Fairly interesting.
http://www.drury.net.nz/2006/08/09/mac-versus-pc/
--
.
Dan Johnson
news:znu-3519B7.2...@individual.net...
> In article <12dkq35...@news.supernews.com>,
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
>> The Leopard preview really reinforces the pattern we've been seeing
>> from Apple for the past view years: They prefer the shallow end.
>>
>> The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply an
>> incremental backup program.
>
> No, it's obviously somewhat more than that, since it also works with
> apps, including apps which don't (only) store regular files in the file
> system.
The reports so far indicate that it only backs up files. I have
not heard of any apps that "don't only store regular files" and work
with Time Machine.
Macworld's report on this indicated that if your document
files are too large to make a copy of every day, you should
redesign your document format to use multiple files (in
a bundle I suppose).
> There's obviously a whole infrastructure under there to allow
> apps to support state saving and reverting in a standardized way. This
> is fairly "deep".
Certainly there must be some way to obtain the old version
of your files, but that's not exactly rocket science; Time Machine
simply has them all in a directory on your backup device, with
hard links for the files that had not changed since the last
backup.
Very simple. Rather space-inefficient if you have large files
that change often, but certainly this will not be hard for apps
to get into.
>> It's claim to fame is a whizzy- but terribly overwrought- UI. That UI
>> is very Apple.
>
> Meh. Core Animation (also arguably "deep") makes that sort of rich
> interface pretty trivial, I guess.
There's not much info about CoreAnimation out yet, but from
the tidbits there are, I think that what this is, is an API to
manipulate the Quartz Compositor, thereby allowing 3rd
party developers to build stuff like Expose. This is the tool tha
tmakes the Whizzy UI possible for 3rd parties.
But the 'deep' part was done a couple of versions ago.
> Like the iChat effects. It would be
> absurd to spend serious amounts of development time doing that stuff for
> one app, but if the OS gives it to you practically for free, why not?
Yes, the iChat stuff was just integrating bits from other parts
of the OS, and some other products. But *a whole lot* of what
Apple showed is like that; hence the disappointment.
[snip]
>> It's a bit like Tiger in its emphasis on user-level utility applets
>> and such- but Tiger went deeper. Spotlight had some filesystem-level
>> components, where Time Machine has not.
>
> I suspect it might. Do we have details on just how Apple is storing old
> file revisions and such?
Yes. It's a directory structure which stores copies of your
files; but when a file does not change between versions,
it stores a hard link back to a previous version, saving
space.
Time Machine does periodic backups but only on a daily
schedule (or so it appears from screenies that have leaked).
This is a reasonable use of existing filesystem technologies
from Unix, but it won't handle large files well. Apple has
been moving for years now to storing things in many small
files, and Time Machine seems to reinforce that trend.
[snip]
>> Apple may be finding that you can only do so much in the shallow end,
>> but they may have no choice: getting their lineup onto x86 today and
>> x86-64 tomorrow may be soaking up all their serious effort- leaving
>> them with just... Leopard.
>
> Apple is also, in Leopard, extending Spotlight across the
> network, which presumably involves some fairly basic rethinking of the
> way file sharing works.
I see no evidence of basic rethinking. Putting Spotlight on the
network needs only some way to access a server's spotlight
implementation remotely. This is no great trick.
> Then there's Objective-C 2.0. With garbage collection, among other
> things.
They've released no details about this yet.
Integrating Sun's DTrace is swell, but it's Sun, not Apple,
that has 'gone deep'.
They might have implemented a really high quality garbage
collected memory, competitive with Java and .NET. Or they
might have implemented something more modest; we'll see.
> Plus, there's Core Animation, and possibly other graphics engine
> features that we haven't heard anything specific about but that were
> expected to be switched on by default in Leopard, like Q2DE, which is
> pretty significant.
I notice the Steve did not try to promise this; I infer there's
still doubt about whether Q2DE will be there. One way
this could be is that after all this time they *have* finished it-
and found it doesn't really make things any faster.
More surprising is that resolution independance was not
promised. Maybe they feel the app vendors are not ready;
maybe something went wrong with development and it is
still not demoable. But it would have been a spiffy, visually
attractive demo for the keynote, and I was surprised not to
see it.
> And I have my suspicions about Dashcode. It seems awfully elaborate
> just for making widgets. As I theorized when Dashboard itself was
> announced, I think this might be Apple's way of slowly inching toward
> greater use of web technologies on the desktop. Dashcode could be a
> platform to test technologies which might eventually end up in Interface
> Builder.
Now you too can experience the joys of Active Desktop! :D
But seriously, so far Dashcode seems to be an IDE for
widget development; it is just the thing Dashboard needed.
> And there's probably a lot going on down in the kernel that Apple
> doesn't really need to mention to anyone because it doesn't change
> external interfaces.
I would have thought that if they were going to fix the kernel,
Steve would have boasted of the performance gains they were
seeing.
OTOH, I see no compelling reason why Apple *should* fix
the kernel, and I expect they aren't.
Dan Johnson
news:C0FFDE9E.5918C%SN...@CABLE0NE.NET.INVALID...
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> stated in post
> 12dkq35...@news.supernews.com on 8/10/06 7:00 AM:
>> an incremental backup program. It's claim to fame is a
>> whizzy- but terribly overwrought- UI. That UI is very Apple.
>
> Easy to use. Something to encourage average users to make backups.
> Clever
> and well done, though perhaps the UI is resource intensive.
If it's done with Quartz Compositor it should be pretty
zippy. But easy to use? Well, we'll see.
>> But that is the high point of Leopard so far.
>
> One of the several high points they have talked about. And they have
> openly
> admitted the have more to show.
Steve's bizzare claim that he must keep all the good
features secret from MS lest they be copied is... well,
just silly. MS has no more time for copying; they
have slipped Vista already and they need to ship.
No. Whatever other features Apple has are either
in such poor shape that Steve could not demo them,
or in danger of being cut so that Steve dared not
promise them.
>> There are other minor utilities, some no doubt welcome, bits of cross-app
>> integration and the like. This all has value but it's terribly,
>> embarassingly
>> shallow.
>
> Did you expect a free flowing Champaign port on every machine?
No. But I expect Steve to show something interesting
for each release of OS X, something that isn't
commonplace on other OSes already.
This time, Apple went into the shallow end and
came back with features everyone else has already,
pretty much.
>> It's a bit like Tiger in its emphasis on user-level utility
>> applets and such- but Tiger went deeper. Spotlight had
>> some filesystem-level components, where Time Machine
>> has not.
>
> Time machines does.
There's no evidence of this yet, and the descriptions
I've read for how this thing works involve nothing more
exotic than hard links and fsevents.
[snip]
> Did I give you enough attention?
More! More!
Dan Johnson
news:44da9f85$0$34078$815e...@news.qwest.net...
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>>
>> Apple may be finding that you can only do so much in
>> the shallow end, but they may have no choice: getting
>> their lineup onto x86 today and x86-64 tomorrow may
>> be soaking up all their serious effort- leaving them
>> with just... Leopard.
>
> you seem to be confusing shallow, with High Quality. There is a
> difference. You are also only looking at the Client portion of the OS,
> Leopard Server adds quite a bit on the Deep End, or if you are having
> trouble seeing past the high quality graphics.
I don't see anything much in Leopard server; some new
server applications, sure, and more importnatly 64-bit
support, just like the client. Except for that, it's all in
the shallow end.
> You might want to read over this link that explains Apple's approach to
> the OS, compared to Microsoft's. Fairly interesting.
>
> http://www.drury.net.nz/2006/08/09/mac-versus-pc/
Insofar as this article is relevant at all, it agrees with me:
Apple's focus, he says, is on the apps, whereas MS is
focused on the OS as an integrated unit.
I say this is because the apps- especially small apps- are
where Apple's strengths are. They allow Apple to avoid the
'deep end' and focus on UI more than other products would.
Microsoft goes for the 'its all part of the OS' approach because
they are best at the 'deep plumbing', and integrating this into
their apps lets them expose this to the world.
Thus, Leopard has incremental backup with a whizzy UI,
but rather pedestrial technology underneath.
Vista is to expose the Shadow Copy Service to the users
through integration with the open file dialog and with
Explorer. But the UI is a list-view, but the technology
underneath is sexy.
Wegie
> Steve's bizzare claim that he must keep all the good
> features secret from MS lest they be copied is... well,
> just silly. MS has no more time for copying; they
> have slipped Vista already and they need to ship.
He wasn't referring to Vista 1.0 where they would have enough time to
copy Leopard's best features, but future versions of Vista, he said we
don't want to give them any extra time to copy our features. Which is
correct.
> No. Whatever other features Apple has are either
> in such poor shape that Steve could not demo them,
> or in danger of being cut so that Steve dared not
> promise them.
No. those features are up and running well enough to demo, you need to
watch the keynote and learn what steve said, not make stuff up.
--
.
Wegie
> > you seem to be confusing shallow, with High Quality. There is a
> > difference. You are also only looking at the Client portion of the OS,
> > Leopard Server adds quite a bit on the Deep End, or if you are having
> > trouble seeing past the high quality graphics.
>
> I don't see anything much in Leopard server; some new
> server applications, sure, and more importnatly 64-bit
> support, just like the client. Except for that, it's all in
> the shallow end.
Just as Apple wants it.
> > You might want to read over this link that explains Apple's approach to
> > the OS, compared to Microsoft's. Fairly interesting.
> >
> > http://www.drury.net.nz/2006/08/09/mac-versus-pc/
>
> Insofar as this article is relevant at all, it agrees with me:
> Apple's focus, he says, is on the apps, whereas MS is
> focused on the OS as an integrated unit.
Yes, but it illustrates the 2 approaches, one is quick, light and stable
and the other (Vista) is slow, monolithic and flawed. Which approach is
best? Most firms and people would choose the first.
> I say this is because the apps- especially small apps- are
> where Apple's strengths are. They allow Apple to avoid the
> 'deep end' and focus on UI more than other products would.
There is no sense they are avoiding anything "deep" as you incorrect
call it. They are just building and "operating system", and let the
"operations" ride on top. As it should be.
> Microsoft goes for the 'its all part of the OS' approach because
> they are best at the 'deep plumbing', and integrating this into
> their apps lets them expose this to the world.
No. Incorrect, they do this because they fear competition, so they abuse
their market monopoly by designing features so heavily tied to the OS,
that competitors cannot function. They have a dishonest nature, and
their OS strategy is a reflection of that.
> Thus, Leopard has incremental backup with a whizzy UI,
> but rather pedestrial technology underneath.
You seem fixated on Time Machine for some reason. Macs have had this
feature for years, yes the UI incorporates CoreImage, but it's typical
Apple, powerful PLUS easy to use.
> Vista is to expose the Shadow Copy Service to the users
> through integration with the open file dialog and with
> Explorer. But the UI is a list-view, but the technology
> underneath is sexy.
The technology doesn't matter, it just needs to smart, reliable, fast
and easy to use. That's something MS has no skill with. They tend to
design by committee, then use poorly skilled programs to craft code that
breaks with each iteration. It will be many years before MS has anything
close to Time Machine, and it will only work 1/2 as well as the OSX
Leopard version released in the spring.
ps: there is no such thing as "pedestrial".
--
.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> news:znu-3519B7.2...@individual.net...
> > In article <12dkq35...@news.supernews.com>,
> > "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> >
> >> The Leopard preview really reinforces the pattern we've been seeing
> >> from Apple for the past view years: They prefer the shallow end.
> >>
> >> The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply an
> >> incremental backup program.
> >
> > No, it's obviously somewhat more than that, since it also works with
> > apps, including apps which don't (only) store regular files in the file
> > system.
>
> The reports so far indicate that it only backs up files. I have
> not heard of any apps that "don't only store regular files" and work
> with Time Machine.
We saw a demo of one during the keynote: iPhoto. iPhoto stores files on
the disk, but also has a database which has to be kept in sync with
those files.
Now, of course, those database files are also ultimately files on the
disk... but when you get right down to it, everything is at some point.
[snip]
> >> It's claim to fame is a whizzy- but terribly overwrought- UI. That
> >> UI is very Apple.
> >
> > Meh. Core Animation (also arguably "deep") makes that sort of rich
> > interface pretty trivial, I guess.
>
> There's not much info about CoreAnimation out yet, but from the
> tidbits there are, I think that what this is, is an API to manipulate
> the Quartz Compositor, thereby allowing 3rd party developers to build
> stuff like Expose. This is the tool tha tmakes the Whizzy UI possible
> for 3rd parties.
>
> But the 'deep' part was done a couple of versions ago.
Your definition of "deep" frankly seems entirely arbitrary. This is like
me saying, well, everything Microsoft is doing with .NET now isn't
interesting, because they implemented the CLI years ago.
[snip]
> >> Apple may be finding that you can only do so much in the shallow end,
> >> but they may have no choice: getting their lineup onto x86 today and
> >> x86-64 tomorrow may be soaking up all their serious effort- leaving
> >> them with just... Leopard.
> >
> > Apple is also, in Leopard, extending Spotlight across the
> > network, which presumably involves some fairly basic rethinking of the
> > way file sharing works.
>
> I see no evidence of basic rethinking. Putting Spotlight on the
> network needs only some way to access a server's spotlight
> implementation remotely. This is no great trick.
It's something Microsoft wasn't sure they could manage for the first
release of WinFS. I'm not sure why, if you're willing to accept
Spotlight's local file system changes as "deep", you're not willing to
do the same for the changes it requires for network file systems.
> > Then there's Objective-C 2.0. With garbage collection, among other
> > things.
>
> They've released no details about this yet.
>
> Integrating Sun's DTrace is swell, but it's Sun, not Apple,
> that has 'gone deep'.
>
> They might have implemented a really high quality garbage
> collected memory, competitive with Java and .NET. Or they
> might have implemented something more modest; we'll see.
Probably soon, since I'd assume this is in the developer previews Apple
started dealing out on Monday.
> > Plus, there's Core Animation, and possibly other graphics engine
> > features that we haven't heard anything specific about but that were
> > expected to be switched on by default in Leopard, like Q2DE, which is
> > pretty significant.
>
> I notice the Steve did not try to promise this; I infer there's
> still doubt about whether Q2DE will be there. One way
> this could be is that after all this time they *have* finished it-
> and found it doesn't really make things any faster.
Except it does, even on systems with fairly fast CPUs and fairly slow
video. I posted benchmarks the last time we had this discussion.
> More surprising is that resolution independance was not
> promised. Maybe they feel the app vendors are not ready;
> maybe something went wrong with development and it is
> still not demoable. But it would have been a spiffy, visually
> attractive demo for the keynote, and I was surprised not to
> see it.
The feature itself has worked fine since Tiger; my guess is Apple is
still waiting on the apps.
> > And I have my suspicions about Dashcode. It seems awfully elaborate
> > just for making widgets. As I theorized when Dashboard itself was
> > announced, I think this might be Apple's way of slowly inching toward
> > greater use of web technologies on the desktop. Dashcode could be a
> > platform to test technologies which might eventually end up in Interface
> > Builder.
>
> Now you too can experience the joys of Active Desktop! :D
>
> But seriously, so far Dashcode seems to be an IDE for
> widget development; it is just the thing Dashboard needed.
>
> > And there's probably a lot going on down in the kernel that Apple
> > doesn't really need to mention to anyone because it doesn't change
> > external interfaces.
>
> I would have thought that if they were going to fix the kernel,
> Steve would have boasted of the performance gains they were
> seeing.
>
> OTOH, I see no compelling reason why Apple *should* fix
> the kernel, and I expect they aren't.
Apple has overhauled the kernel is basically every version of OS X. They
just don't talk about it so much.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
See, I can take exactly the same facts and paint a very different
picture.
Microsoft is interested in buzzword-compliant, technically complex
solutions, and largely uninterested in (or at any rate not good at)
end-user experience. The result of this is that Microsoft spend years
specifying and implementing elaborate technologies, which delay ship
dates, and boat the code base (and, of course, more code means more
bugs). And, because of Microsoft's weakness on UI, when these
technologies finally do hit the market, they up having very weak
real-world use cases.
Compare Spotlight and WinFS. They largely provide the same capabilities
to end-users, but WinFS is much more elaborate under the hood. Apple
probably began work on Spotlight 12-18 months before shipping it. It's a
simple technology with a limited scope, designed to solve a specific
real-world problem extremely well.
Microsoft first started promising something like WinFS (under a
different name) in 1993 for a 1995 release... and will fail to deliver
it yet again for Vista, 12 years later.
Have you been following the development side of the "Web 2.0" movement?
It's all about a rejection of traditional "enterprise" development
models, in favor of a faster, more iterative development model, and
"less software". The canonical example of this is the Ruby on Rails
application which serves the same function as the J2EE app... but has
fewer lines of code *in total* than the J2EE app has in its XML
configuration files.
I'm increasingly starting to see Apple vs. Microsoft through the same
lens. My take is, Microsoft is overcompensating for its early
quick-and-dirty design, and is now severely overengineering pretty much
everything.
imout...@mac.com
> I'm increasingly starting to see Apple vs. Microsoft through the same
> lens. My take is, Microsoft is overcompensating for its early
> quick-and-dirty design, and is now severely overengineering pretty much
> everything.
yeah; Apple is the chewing-gum and baling-wire approach of integrating
opensource functionality into the system.
This goes back to Next 1.0; where NeXT's whole approach was to ship a
buzzword-client front-end ("3M" monitor + OOP) over a straight C/BSD
implementation layer.
Microsoft has become the N-I-H Apple of the late 80s, early 90s; and
Win NT has become Pink.
Tom Elam
<daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
Pretty much everything in OS X has been a rehash of old technology.
Apple is not in the innovation business. Like the Japanese automakers
of the 1960s-80s they "borrow" technology and put a pretty face on it.
GreyCloud
> "Snit" <SN...@CABLE0NE.NET.INVALID> wrote in message
> news:C0FFDE9E.5918C%SN...@CABLE0NE.NET.INVALID...
>
>>"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> stated in post
>>12dkq35...@news.supernews.com on 8/10/06 7:00 AM:
>>
>>>The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply
>>>an incremental backup program. It's claim to fame is a
>>>whizzy- but terribly overwrought- UI. That UI is very Apple.
>>
>>Easy to use. Something to encourage average users to make backups.
>>Clever
>>and well done, though perhaps the UI is resource intensive.
>
>
> If it's done with Quartz Compositor it should be pretty
> zippy. But easy to use? Well, we'll see.
>
>
>>>But that is the high point of Leopard so far.
>>
>>One of the several high points they have talked about. And they have
>>openly
>>admitted the have more to show.
>
>
> Steve's bizzare claim that he must keep all the good
> features secret from MS lest they be copied is... well,
> just silly.
No it isn't. Many companies practice keeping secrets from their
competitors before releasing their products.
> MS has no more time for copying; they
> have slipped Vista already and they need to ship.
>
But if they see something in Leopard that will help sell Vista, they'll
copy it and delay their launch of Vista.
> No. Whatever other features Apple has are either
> in such poor shape that Steve could not demo them,
> or in danger of being cut so that Steve dared not
> promise them.
>
Just your speculation. So far, Apple has delivered and it isn't hard to
do under a unix o/s.
>
>>>There are other minor utilities, some no doubt welcome, bits of cross-app
>>>integration and the like. This all has value but it's terribly,
>>>embarassingly
>>>shallow.
>>
>>Did you expect a free flowing Champaign port on every machine?
>
>
> No. But I expect Steve to show something interesting
> for each release of OS X, something that isn't
> commonplace on other OSes already.
>
He did. Web Widgets for example.
> This time, Apple went into the shallow end and
> came back with features everyone else has already,
> pretty much.
>
Such as?
Time-machine? Not in the usual way it is done. Under VMS it is much
more difficult to do and the backups are usually elsewhere.
Spaces? Not in the usual way that is done say under CDE, HP/UX, or
Tru-64 UNIX. Added and extended functionality beyond the above mentioned.
Apple has made it simpler to do.
>
>>>It's a bit like Tiger in its emphasis on user-level utility
>>>applets and such- but Tiger went deeper. Spotlight had
>>>some filesystem-level components, where Time Machine
>>>has not.
>>
>>Time machines does.
>
>
> There's no evidence of this yet, and the descriptions
> I've read for how this thing works involve nothing more
> exotic than hard links and fsevents.
>
But you yourself do not have the inside skinny to know, so you are just
hoping and speculating that this isn't true.
--
Where are we going?
And why am I in this handbasket?
GreyCloud
Really? First M$ has to ship it first. More likely the next candidate
for being dropped because they can't come thru.
GreyCloud
An old adage: Unix won't keep you from doing stupid things, but Unix
will let you do clever things.
GreyCloud
> On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 07:00:14 -0700, "Dan Johnson"
> <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
> Pretty much everything in Vista has been a rehash of old technology.
> Microsoft is not in the innovation business. Like the Japanese automakers
> of the 1960s-80s they "borrow" technology and put a pretty face on it.
>
Corrections to your post.
Snit
MMOdnRYFBM85DEbZ...@bresnan.com on 8/10/06 1:05 PM:
Add to the above that Apple understand and uses to their advantage the idea
of releasing little bits and pieces at a time to help build excitement. It
works very well for them - look at all the rumor sites.
>
>>>> There are other minor utilities, some no doubt welcome, bits of cross-app
>>>> integration and the like. This all has value but it's terribly,
>>>> embarassingly
>>>> shallow.
>>>
>>> Did you expect a free flowing Champaign port on every machine?
>>
>>
>> No. But I expect Steve to show something interesting
>> for each release of OS X, something that isn't
>> commonplace on other OSes already.
>>
>
> He did. Web Widgets for example.
There were several things that are not commonplace in other OSs:
Time Machine: not only can a user get files back from the file system
metaphor, but also from the application where the file was "lost". Who else
does that? If anyone, do they do it in a way to draw users in? Not that I
know of.
ToDo Service: what other OS has this? Any?
Templates that allow for drag and drop addition of images, etc. Any other
OS doing that as a standard?
Video chats with "cool effects". Anyone else doing that as a standard?
Spaces: OK, virtual desktops has clearly been done before as a standard -
but Apple does have their own take on it. We shall have to see how well
this works and compares.
Spotlight: Sure, Beagle is trying to emulate OS X's file system / kernel
integration, but now OS X is taking it to the next level.
Accessibility: Does anyone do that as well as Apple? They get the concept
of ease of use, for all users, unlike any other (major) company.
Core Animation: who else has such services it their OS? Anyone?
>
>> This time, Apple went into the shallow end and
>> came back with features everyone else has already,
>> pretty much.
>>
>
> Such as?
>
> Time-machine? Not in the usual way it is done. Under VMS it is much
> more difficult to do and the backups are usually elsewhere.
>
> Spaces? Not in the usual way that is done say under CDE, HP/UX, or
> Tru-64 UNIX. Added and extended functionality beyond the above mentioned.
>
> Apple has made it simpler to do.
This is what Apple excels at - ease of use. They do have some hiccups with
that (ehem, Pages!) but generally they are excellent.
>
>>
>>>> It's a bit like Tiger in its emphasis on user-level utility
>>>> applets and such- but Tiger went deeper. Spotlight had
>>>> some filesystem-level components, where Time Machine
>>>> has not.
>>>
>>> Time machines does.
>>
>>
>> There's no evidence of this yet, and the descriptions
>> I've read for how this thing works involve nothing more
>> exotic than hard links and fsevents.
>>
>
> But you yourself do not have the inside skinny to know, so you are just
> hoping and speculating that this isn't true.
>
Time machine does work in a similar way as does the indexing... or at least
at a similar level. That is based on info I have read, at least.
--
€ Some people do use the term "screen name" in relation to IRC
€ Teaching is a "real job"
€ The tilde in an OS X path does *not* mean "the hard drive only"
Dan Johnson
> In article <12dm2g4...@news.supernews.com>,
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>> The reports so far indicate that it only backs up files. I have
>> not heard of any apps that "don't only store regular files" and work
>> with Time Machine.
>
> We saw a demo of one during the keynote: iPhoto. iPhoto stores files on
> the disk, but also has a database which has to be kept in sync with
> those files.
If the database is not too large, they can back it up as a unit;
restoring a photo just means re-importing it in the db.
Alternately they can break that DB up into files, so they
can do partial restores. This is what they did to make
Mail and iCal support Spotlight, so I wouldn't be
surprised to see them do that again.
> Now, of course, those database files are also ultimately files on the
> disk... but when you get right down to it, everything is at some point.
Yes. This mainly affects the granularity of restoration, and
space usage.
[snip]
>> There's not much info about CoreAnimation out yet, but from the
>> tidbits there are, I think that what this is, is an API to manipulate
>> the Quartz Compositor, thereby allowing 3rd party developers to build
>> stuff like Expose. This is the tool tha tmakes the Whizzy UI possible
>> for 3rd parties.
>>
>> But the 'deep' part was done a couple of versions ago.
>
> Your definition of "deep" frankly seems entirely arbitrary. This is like
> me saying, well, everything Microsoft is doing with .NET now isn't
> interesting, because they implemented the CLI years ago.
Hmmm. I'm drawing a line between "shallow" UI and
"deep" infrastructure. Is that so arbitrary?
[snip]
>> I see no evidence of basic rethinking. Putting Spotlight on the
>> network needs only some way to access a server's spotlight
>> implementation remotely. This is no great trick.
>
> It's something Microsoft wasn't sure they could manage for the first
> release of WinFS.
WinFS is not spotlight, and they haven't been able to
get WinFS out the door *at all*; even cutting the network
part of it was not enough.
> I'm not sure why, if you're willing to accept
> Spotlight's local file system changes as "deep", you're not willing to
> do the same for the changes it requires for network file systems.
I do not think there is any "network file system"; I think
there's a "Spotlight Server" which a remote computer can
use to submit Spotlight queries. This server can use the
normal Spotlight APIs to do its business.
>> > Then there's Objective-C 2.0. With garbage collection, among other
>> > things.
>>
>> They've released no details about this yet.
[snip]
>
> Probably soon, since I'd assume this is in the developer previews Apple
> started dealing out on Monday.
Indeed. So far the rumors I am reading make it sound
minor; a few bits of syntactic sugar. But the GC remains
unclear, and there may well be more than I know.
[snip]
>> I notice the Steve did not try to promise this; I infer there's
>> still doubt about whether Q2DE will be there. One way
>> this could be is that after all this time they *have* finished it-
>> and found it doesn't really make things any faster.
>
> Except it does, even on systems with fairly fast CPUs and fairly slow
> video. I posted benchmarks the last time we had this discussion.
Apple also had benchmarks, at the WWDC two years ago.
That doesn't mean it panned out in the end. Maybe they finished
it and it didn't benefit typical user patterns, however good the
benchmark numbers were.
Or maybe they couldn't finish it for some reason. Or maybe
they had to pull the team off it to work on the Intel Switch.
But it's hard to believe they'd not pad the Leopard Preview
with something this cool, if they could demo it or even
promise it. They really needed to have something.
>> More surprising is that resolution independance was not
>> promised. Maybe they feel the app vendors are not ready;
>> maybe something went wrong with development and it is
>> still not demoable. But it would have been a spiffy, visually
>> attractive demo for the keynote, and I was surprised not to
>> see it.
>
> The feature itself has worked fine since Tiger; my guess is Apple is
> still waiting on the apps.
No; this feature is *most certainly* not working in Tiger. Not
even for stuff like the Finder; visual glitches everywhere.
I expected it to be ready for Leopard, and a very welcome
enhancement it would be (even if Windows XP does have
it already).
I also guess that by now, the basic thing works but the apps
aren't there yet.
[snip]
>> I would have thought that if they were going to fix the kernel,
>> Steve would have boasted of the performance gains they were
>> seeing.
>>
>> OTOH, I see no compelling reason why Apple *should* fix
>> the kernel, and I expect they aren't.
>
> Apple has overhauled the kernel is basically every version of OS X. They
> just don't talk about it so much.
I think "overhauled" is too strong here; they have sometimes made
incremental improvements to it. Perhaps they will do so again;
the Steve never talks about this stuff, so we can't take his silence
this time as indicative of anything.
But there's no real need to fix it, and I'd expect that any such
work be one of the first things to go, when there is schedule
pressure.
Dan Johnson
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
>> Steve's bizzare claim that he must keep all the good
>> features secret from MS lest they be copied is... well,
>> just silly. MS has no more time for copying; they
>> have slipped Vista already and they need to ship.
>
> He wasn't referring to Vista 1.0 where they would have enough time to
> copy Leopard's best features, but future versions of Vista, he said we
> don't want to give them any extra time to copy our features. Which is
> correct.
Apple will have to ship this thing eventually; if they do so
around the time Vista ships, then MS will have all the time
they can could possible use to copy thing, if they want to.
>> No. Whatever other features Apple has are either
>> in such poor shape that Steve could not demo them,
>> or in danger of being cut so that Steve dared not
>> promise them.
>
> No. those features are up and running well enough to demo, you need to
> watch the keynote and learn what steve said, not make stuff up.
I don't recall him saying that exactly, but I would not believe
him if he had. Not with the demo they gave, and the ridiculous
excuses that made up so much of it.
Dan Johnson
news:MMOdnRYFBM85DEbZ...@bresnan.com...
> Dan Johnson wrote:
>> Steve's bizzare claim that he must keep all the good
>> features secret from MS lest they be copied is... well,
>> just silly.
>
> No it isn't. Many companies practice keeping secrets from their
> competitors before releasing their products.
Then they should not be having public demos of the
OS at all. But no, this is silly, Apple is all about
the RDF. They demoed their best stuff in previous
WWDCs, and back then MS did have time to copy
things.
>> MS has no more time for copying; they
>> have slipped Vista already and they need to ship.
>
> But if they see something in Leopard that will help sell Vista, they'll
> copy it and delay their launch of Vista.
No way. They won't delay Vista anymore if they can
help it. Missing the Christmas season was bad enough!
>> No. Whatever other features Apple has are either
>> in such poor shape that Steve could not demo them,
>> or in danger of being cut so that Steve dared not
>> promise them.
>>
> Just your speculation. So far, Apple has delivered and it isn't hard to
> do under a unix o/s.
Everything is easy for the man who does not have to
do it himself. :D
Apple may, perhaps, pull this thing out of the hole
and deliver something cool. But they can't be sure
they will do that, or they'd be promising and they'd
be demoing.
[snip]
>> No. But I expect Steve to show something interesting
>> for each release of OS X, something that isn't
>> commonplace on other OSes already.
>
> He did. Web Widgets for example.
That was from Tiger. And it wasn't even the
best thing in Tiger!
>> This time, Apple went into the shallow end and
>> came back with features everyone else has already,
>> pretty much.
>
> Such as?
>
> Time-machine? Not in the usual way it is done. Under VMS it is much more
> difficult to do and the backups are usually elsewhere.
This is just your basic incremental backup.
It's long overdue. But everybody, and I mean everybody,
has backup. Windows XP too.
The only thing that sets it apart (in a positive way) is the
whizzy UI for restoration.
> Spaces? Not in the usual way that is done say under CDE, HP/UX, or Tru-64
> UNIX. Added and extended functionality beyond the above mentioned.
Virtual desktops are commonplace on Unix, and there are many
UIs for managing them. Apple's is a little prettier, but not especially
radical.
> Apple has made it simpler to do.
Wouldn't go that for for Spaces. It's a pretty ordinary
Virtual Desktop utility.
[snip]
>> There's no evidence of this yet, and the descriptions
>> I've read for how this thing works involve nothing more
>> exotic than hard links and fsevents.
>>
>
> But you yourself do not have the inside skinny to know, so you are just
> hoping and speculating that this isn't true.
Yes. But if Maccies can hope and speculate that it's some kind of
radial breakthrough, I can hope and speculate that it is just what
it seems to be... incremental backup.
Dan Johnson
> See, I can take exactly the same facts and paint a very different
> picture.
One can always do that!
>
> Microsoft is interested in buzzword-compliant, technically complex
> solutions, and largely uninterested in (or at any rate not good at)
> end-user experience. The result of this is that Microsoft spend years
> specifying and implementing elaborate technologies, which delay ship
> dates, and boat the code base (and, of course, more code means more
> bugs). And, because of Microsoft's weakness on UI, when these
> technologies finally do hit the market, they up having very weak
> real-world use cases.
I don't think you are on solid ground here. MS's UI is, arguable,
not as good as Apple, but it's still pretty decent. There's much,
much worse out there. People can and do make good use of
MS's products, so it's not so bad as to be prohibitive.
But the elaborate technologies do reflect MS's vision of
Windows as the Universal OS. Since Windows must be
able to do it all, from the PDA to the supercomputer,
they prefer more robust technologies that can scale,
rather than ship something "good enough for consumers",
like Time Machine.
> Compare Spotlight and WinFS. They largely provide the same capabilities
> to end-users, but WinFS is much more elaborate under the hood. Apple
> probably began work on Spotlight 12-18 months before shipping it. It's a
> simple technology with a limited scope, designed to solve a specific
> real-world problem extremely well.
WinFS was much more ambitious. MS can and *did* ship
an enhanced search engine along the lines of Spotlight;
it's a free download even.
> Microsoft first started promising something like WinFS (under a
> different name) in 1993 for a 1995 release... and will fail to deliver
> it yet again for Vista, 12 years later.
It's a hard problem; it's not like anyone else has been able
to replace the filesystem. One of MS's strengths is that they
do tackle the hard problems; they don't always succeed but
when they *do* succeed, even partially, the world beats
a path to their door.
Sadly WinFS does not seem to be a succeess. But MS is
persistant, and I doubt not that they'll pick themselves up
and try again. Someday, maybe, they'll manage it.
> Have you been following the development side of the "Web 2.0" movement?
> It's all about a rejection of traditional "enterprise" development
> models, in favor of a faster, more iterative development model, and
> "less software". The canonical example of this is the Ruby on Rails
> application which serves the same function as the J2EE app... but has
> fewer lines of code *in total* than the J2EE app has in its XML
> configuration files.
There is much to be said for this; but nobody has ever
made these agile development techniques work at
Microsoft's scale yet.
> I'm increasingly starting to see Apple vs. Microsoft through the same
> lens. My take is, Microsoft is overcompensating for its early
> quick-and-dirty design, and is now severely overengineering pretty much
> everything.
Ah, well, perhaps so.
But MS has been doing *that* since the early nineties. It seems
to work for them.
Dan Johnson
>> Vista is to expose the Shadow Copy Service to the users
>> through integration with the open file dialog and with
>> Explorer. But the UI is a list-view, but the technology
>> underneath is sexy.
>
> Really? First M$ has to ship it first. More likely the next candidate
> for being dropped because they can't come thru.
They actually have already shipped it in Windows Server 2003.
That's a little pricey for consumer use, but the technology
*is* our there, in use today, and dropping it from Vista
would be strange indeed.
Wegie
> > He wasn't referring to Vista 1.0 where they would have enough time to
> > copy Leopard's best features, but future versions of Vista, he said we
> > don't want to give them any extra time to copy our features. Which is
> > correct.
>
> Apple will have to ship this thing eventually; if they do so
> around the time Vista ships, then MS will have all the time
> they can could possible use to copy thing, if they want to.
yes, but if apple pushes these top secret features out 6 months from
being seen, it will take 3 years to figure it out and ship a similar
version, so by default, it will push Vista 2.0 out by 6 months.
--
.
GreyCloud
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:MMOdnRYFBM85DEbZ...@bresnan.com...
>
>>Dan Johnson wrote:
>>
>>>Steve's bizzare claim that he must keep all the good
>>>features secret from MS lest they be copied is... well,
>>>just silly.
>>
>>No it isn't. Many companies practice keeping secrets from their
>>competitors before releasing their products.
>
>
> Then they should not be having public demos of the
> OS at all. But no, this is silly, Apple is all about
> the RDF. They demoed their best stuff in previous
> WWDCs, and back then MS did have time to copy
> things.
And which they did copy... for Vista. Remember, Jobs did say as such.
But then, Apple as a company can do as they wish. IBM doesn't do it
that way and what they used to say was "If it isn't for sale, it doesn't
exist".
Yet, M$ will promo a feature that doesn't exist yet and is not for sale
yet. Maybe they should keep quiet for a change and hone thier software
to work correctly before showing it off.
>
>
>>>MS has no more time for copying; they
>>>have slipped Vista already and they need to ship.
>>
>>But if they see something in Leopard that will help sell Vista, they'll
>>copy it and delay their launch of Vista.
>
>
> No way. They won't delay Vista anymore if they can
> help it. Missing the Christmas season was bad enough!
>
You never know. Vista could be delayed yet again.
>
>>>No. Whatever other features Apple has are either
>>>in such poor shape that Steve could not demo them,
>>>or in danger of being cut so that Steve dared not
>>>promise them.
>>>
>>
>>Just your speculation. So far, Apple has delivered and it isn't hard to
>>do under a unix o/s.
>
>
> Everything is easy for the man who does not have to
> do it himself. :D
>
It is just easier to do under Unix is all.
Using XCode seems to make the job quite a bit easier as well along with
using Objective-C.
> Apple may, perhaps, pull this thing out of the hole
> and deliver something cool. But they can't be sure
> they will do that, or they'd be promising and they'd
> be demoing.
We'll see next spring, won't we.
>
> [snip]
>
>>>No. But I expect Steve to show something interesting
>>>for each release of OS X, something that isn't
>>>commonplace on other OSes already.
>>
>>He did. Web Widgets for example.
>
>
> That was from Tiger. And it wasn't even the
> best thing in Tiger!
No, it was from Leopard, not Tiger,... we're talking about going to a
web site say like one of the weather animation sites and creating on the
fly a web widget to get you there and using only what you want of that
site. Tiger doesn't have that feature.
>
>
>>>This time, Apple went into the shallow end and
>>>came back with features everyone else has already,
>>>pretty much.
>>
>>Such as?
>>
>>Time-machine? Not in the usual way it is done. Under VMS it is much more
>>difficult to do and the backups are usually elsewhere.
>
>
> This is just your basic incremental backup.
>
> It's long overdue. But everybody, and I mean everybody,
> has backup. Windows XP too.
That was my main complaint... no backup software.
But this one goes a step further by making it easier to get a missing
file restored. Ever do it from tape?
>
> The only thing that sets it apart (in a positive way) is the
> whizzy UI for restoration.
>
Try using VMS backup/restore options from tape and you'll find that the
time-machine is like it but made easier to use .. and quicker.
>
>>Spaces? Not in the usual way that is done say under CDE, HP/UX, or Tru-64
>>UNIX. Added and extended functionality beyond the above mentioned.
>
>
> Virtual desktops are commonplace on Unix, and there are many
> UIs for managing them. Apple's is a little prettier, but not especially
> radical.
Except that you can re-organize what each space has in it without
disturbing your running program on the fly.
>
>
>>Apple has made it simpler to do.
>
>
> Wouldn't go that for for Spaces. It's a pretty ordinary
> Virtual Desktop utility.
>
No, it is a step up and beyond what you'll find under CDE as an example.
> [snip]
>
>>>There's no evidence of this yet, and the descriptions
>>>I've read for how this thing works involve nothing more
>>>exotic than hard links and fsevents.
>>>
>>
>>But you yourself do not have the inside skinny to know, so you are just
>>hoping and speculating that this isn't true.
>
>
> Yes. But if Maccies can hope and speculate that it's some kind of
> radial breakthrough, I can hope and speculate that it is just what
> it seems to be... incremental backup.
>
>
You'll have to go to Apples web site and watch the event to completion
to see what they are offering.
GreyCloud
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:MMOdnREFBM9lDEbZ...@bresnan.com...
>
>>>Vista is to expose the Shadow Copy Service to the users
>>>through integration with the open file dialog and with
>>>Explorer. But the UI is a list-view, but the technology
>>>underneath is sexy.
>>
>>Really? First M$ has to ship it first. More likely the next candidate
>>for being dropped because they can't come thru.
>
>
> They actually have already shipped it in Windows Server 2003.
>
But not on the desktop.
XP in itself doesn't have it.
I have no need of the server part.
> That's a little pricey for consumer use, but the technology
> *is* our there, in use today, and dropping it from Vista
> would be strange indeed.
>
It would be indeed. But after looking at the few blogs out there
written by disgruntled MS employees... it makes one wonder what is
really going on in there.
MS used to hold a lot of promise in the early 90s. Their products cost
less than anybody elses, but after a while after purchasing their
development tools back then, that their stuff just always fell short of
what you wanted it to do. Their last VS6.0 was pretty good actually.
For some reason they dropped their Fortran line. Now it is best to get
a good fortran compiler straight from Intel.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> news:znu-2FB11F.1...@individual.net...
> > See, I can take exactly the same facts and paint a very different
> > picture.
>
> One can always do that!
>
> >
> > Microsoft is interested in buzzword-compliant, technically complex
> > solutions, and largely uninterested in (or at any rate not good at)
> > end-user experience. The result of this is that Microsoft spend years
> > specifying and implementing elaborate technologies, which delay ship
> > dates, and boat the code base (and, of course, more code means more
> > bugs). And, because of Microsoft's weakness on UI, when these
> > technologies finally do hit the market, they up having very weak
> > real-world use cases.
>
> I don't think you are on solid ground here. MS's UI is, arguable,
> not as good as Apple, but it's still pretty decent. There's much,
> much worse out there. People can and do make good use of
> MS's products, so it's not so bad as to be prohibitive.
This is not always the case, sadly. Consider the fact that many people
in this newsgroup, despite the fact that virtually everyone here
probably know Windows better than 80% of the Windows-using population --
had no idea that Windows had a feature somewhat like Time Machine. If
Microsoft's implementation had the same interface as Apple's, it's very
unlikely that so few people would have known of its existence.
> But the elaborate technologies do reflect MS's vision of
> Windows as the Universal OS. Since Windows must be
> able to do it all, from the PDA to the supercomputer,
> they prefer more robust technologies that can scale,
> rather than ship something "good enough for consumers",
> like Time Machine.
This entire notion is nonsense, though. There's no meaningful
relationship between scalability and complexity. Some of the most
scalable technologies ever are also the simplest.
> > Compare Spotlight and WinFS. They largely provide the same capabilities
> > to end-users, but WinFS is much more elaborate under the hood. Apple
> > probably began work on Spotlight 12-18 months before shipping it. It's a
> > simple technology with a limited scope, designed to solve a specific
> > real-world problem extremely well.
>
> WinFS was much more ambitious. MS can and *did* ship
> an enhanced search engine along the lines of Spotlight;
> it's a free download even.
It's more similar in some respects to Sherlock's indexing, in that it
doesn't (as far as I can tell from Microsoft's material) automatically
index everything as soon as it's saved/updated. Which means it can't
really do live searches either.
And it's actually sort of an interesting case, because it was pretty
obviously a response to Google's desktop search software. That seems to
be when Microsoft leaves computer fairy land and actually starts solving
real problems: when someone else shows signs of moving in on them on
their own platform if they don't. The rest of the time they seem more
than content to construct their buzzword-compliant castles in the sky.
> > Microsoft first started promising something like WinFS (under a
> > different name) in 1993 for a 1995 release... and will fail to deliver
> > it yet again for Vista, 12 years later.
>
> It's a hard problem; it's not like anyone else has been able
> to replace the filesystem. One of MS's strengths is that they
> do tackle the hard problems; they don't always succeed but
> when they *do* succeed, even partially, the world beats
> a path to their door.
Except when it doesn't. It's not as if Microsoft has never had a failed
product.
> Sadly WinFS does not seem to be a succeess. But MS is
> persistant, and I doubt not that they'll pick themselves up
> and try again. Someday, maybe, they'll manage it.
>
> > Have you been following the development side of the "Web 2.0" movement?
> > It's all about a rejection of traditional "enterprise" development
> > models, in favor of a faster, more iterative development model, and
> > "less software". The canonical example of this is the Ruby on Rails
> > application which serves the same function as the J2EE app... but has
> > fewer lines of code *in total* than the J2EE app has in its XML
> > configuration files.
>
> There is much to be said for this; but nobody has ever
> made these agile development techniques work at
> Microsoft's scale yet.
It's not clear that there's any actual problem with that. It's just,
well, Microsoft is the only software company that operates at
Microsoft's scale, and they don't seem to have caught up with this
stuff. (Yet?)
> > I'm increasingly starting to see Apple vs. Microsoft through the same
> > lens. My take is, Microsoft is overcompensating for its early
> > quick-and-dirty design, and is now severely overengineering pretty much
> > everything.
>
> Ah, well, perhaps so.
>
> But MS has been doing *that* since the early nineties. It seems
> to work for them.
Does it? They were years late getting an NT kernel under their consumer
OS, and now they're years late with Vista.
Dan Johnson
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>> Apple will have to ship this thing eventually; if they do so
>> around the time Vista ships, then MS will have all the time
>> they can could possible use to copy thing, if they want to.
>
> yes, but if apple pushes these top secret features out 6 months from
> being seen, it will take 3 years to figure it out and ship a similar
> version, so by default, it will push Vista 2.0 out by 6 months.
I do not agree. If Apple would to ship Leopard *today*
with all the cool features in the world, still MS could not
start copying it- they'd have to spare developer time from
Windows Vista to do that. They wouldn't dare!
Snit
Vista SP1
--
€ Dreamweaver, being the #1 pro web design tool, is used by many pros
€ Different viruses are still different even if in the same "family"
€ OS X users are at far less risk of malware then are XP users
Dan Johnson
> Yet, M$ will promo a feature that doesn't exist yet and is not for sale
> yet. Maybe they should keep quiet for a change and hone thier software to
> work correctly before showing it off.
Or maybe not.
MS is very developer oriented; they know that if they can
get the apps built of Windows, users will use Windows.
And MS's transparency is much better for developers than
Apple's secrecy. That Apple even keep the Intel Switch
secret, and surprised developers with it, is very remarkable,
but it is also very, very hard on Apple's developers.
MS shows developers what it is doing far more. This is
embarassing in the .advocacy newsgroups since sometimes
their plans fail, but it makes it much easier for developers
to plan future releases than if they were kept in the dark.
[snip]
>> No way. They won't delay Vista anymore if they can
>> help it. Missing the Christmas season was bad enough!
>
> You never know. Vista could be delayed yet again.
It could, but MS will avoid that if at all possible.
Remember, Mac OS X is simply not that important;
it has excluded itself for vast chunks of the market,
and is tied to Apple's expensive hardware. It's
not that big a threat no matter how good the next
version turns out to be.
[snip]
>>>Just your speculation. So far, Apple has delivered and it isn't hard to
>>>do under a unix o/s.
>>
>> Everything is easy for the man who does not have to
>> do it himself. :D
>
> It is just easier to do under Unix is all.
No. Shipping features is not especially easier
in Unix.
But I must say that while I have heard many magical features
attributed to Unix in this newsgroup, I've never heard
Apple's recent string of featureful OS releases attributed
to it before!
> Using XCode seems to make the job quite a bit easier as well along with
> using Objective-C.
Easier than prior versions of XCode, perhaps.
XCode is widely derided as not ready for the big leagues;
it's performance is not there yet. It doesn't scale to large
projects. Perhaps XCode 3 will fix this.. when it ships.
Objective-C is an old and unlovely language, which
Apple is trying to make presentable. But they are rather
late to the game, and are now far behind the efforts
of Sun and Microsoft.
[snip]
>> That was from Tiger. And it wasn't even the
>> best thing in Tiger!
>
> No, it was from Leopard, not Tiger,... we're talking about going to a web
> site say like one of the weather animation sites and creating on the fly a
> web widget to get you there and using only what you want of that site.
> Tiger doesn't have that feature.
That's trivial; that's just a new widget, and a pretty simple
one too.
What's depressing is that Apple was reduced to demoing
that as a Great New Feature.
[snip]
>> This is just your basic incremental backup.
>>
>> It's long overdue. But everybody, and I mean everybody,
>> has backup. Windows XP too.
>
> That was my main complaint... no backup software.
> But this one goes a step further by making it easier to get a missing file
> restored. Ever do it from tape?
Yes. Perhaps Time Machine's UI will be the Best Restore UI
Ever. I haven't used it, and we've only seen it briefly. It's
awfully heavyweight and terribly whizzy, but it may work.
[snip]
>> Virtual desktops are commonplace on Unix, and there are many
>> UIs for managing them. Apple's is a little prettier, but not especially
>> radical.
>
> Except that you can re-organize what each space has in it without
> disturbing your running program on the fly.
Er, I have never used a virtual desktop utility that can't
do that. It'd be quite limiting not to have that.
[snip]
>> Yes. But if Maccies can hope and speculate that it's some kind of
>> radial breakthrough, I can hope and speculate that it is just what
>> it seems to be... incremental backup.
>
> You'll have to go to Apples web site and watch the event to completion to
> see what they are offering.
I have done that; it looks like incremental backup to me.
Notice that Apple emphasises the UI in the demos, and
they don't talk about the underlying tech. Notice that
they only ever restore individual files. Notice that they
never talk about the *backup* part, just the restore part.
[snip]
Dan Johnson
> Dan Johnson wrote:
>>>Really? First M$ has to ship it first. More likely the next candidate
>>>for being dropped because they can't come thru.
>>
>> They actually have already shipped it in Windows Server 2003.
>
> But not on the desktop.
> XP in itself doesn't have it.
> I have no need of the server part.
You'll get it, in Vista. The feature is done; it just needs
to be packaged with a desktop OS release.
>> That's a little pricey for consumer use, but the technology
>> *is* our there, in use today, and dropping it from Vista
>> would be strange indeed.
>
> It would be indeed. But after looking at the few blogs out there written
> by disgruntled MS employees... it makes one wonder what is really going on
> in there.
If you read only *disgruntled* employees, you'll get
a distorted view. MS, from my read, is a big company
with most of the usual big company management
problems.
That's not particularly surprising, nor does it imply
that MS will drop features for no reason.
> MS used to hold a lot of promise in the early 90s. Their products cost
> less than anybody elses, but after a while after purchasing their
> development tools back then, that their stuff just always fell short of
> what you wanted it to do. Their last VS6.0 was pretty good actually.
> For some reason they dropped their Fortran line. Now it is best to get a
> good fortran compiler straight from Intel.
That's an odd non-sequitur. What are you getting at?
Snit
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:1Kmdnaz58sM5bkbZ...@bresnan.com...
>> Yet, M$ will promo a feature that doesn't exist yet and is not for sale
>> yet. Maybe they should keep quiet for a change and hone thier software to
>> work correctly before showing it off.
>
> Or maybe not.
>
> MS is very developer oriented; they know that if they can
> get the apps built of Windows, users will use Windows.
>
> And MS's transparency is much better for developers than
> Apple's secrecy. That Apple even keep the Intel Switch
> secret, and surprised developers with it, is very remarkable,
> but it is also very, very hard on Apple's developers.
>
> MS shows developers what it is doing far more. This is
> embarassing in the .advocacy newsgroups since sometimes
> their plans fail, but it makes it much easier for developers
> to plan future releases than if they were kept in the dark.
How is repeatedly spewing off about vapor-ware a benefit to developers?
>
> [snip]
>>> No way. They won't delay Vista anymore if they can
>>> help it. Missing the Christmas season was bad enough!
>>
>> You never know. Vista could be delayed yet again.
>
> It could, but MS will avoid that if at all possible.
>
> Remember, Mac OS X is simply not that important;
> it has excluded itself for vast chunks of the market,
> and is tied to Apple's expensive hardware. It's
> not that big a threat no matter how good the next
> version turns out to be.
What expensive hardware?
--
€ Things which are not the same are not "identical"
€ Incest and sex are not identical (only a pervert would disagree)
€ OS X is partially based on BSD (esp. FreeBSD)
Dan Johnson
>> I don't think you are on solid ground here. MS's UI is, arguable,
>> not as good as Apple, but it's still pretty decent. There's much,
>> much worse out there. People can and do make good use of
>> MS's products, so it's not so bad as to be prohibitive.
>
> This is not always the case, sadly. Consider the fact that many people
> in this newsgroup, despite the fact that virtually everyone here
> probably know Windows better than 80% of the Windows-using population --
> had no idea that Windows had a feature somewhat like Time Machine. If
> Microsoft's implementation had the same interface as Apple's, it's very
> unlikely that so few people would have known of its existence.
That's not because they don't know Windows has backup software.
It's because people are unsure what Time Machine is; many
have assumed it must be like Windows 2003's "Previous Versions"
feature, which XP does *not* have.
If Windows had backup with a Time Machine like UI,
people would still know it was a backup program, and
there would still be confusion about Apple's new
product at this point.
[snip]
> This entire notion is nonsense, though. There's no meaningful
> relationship between scalability and complexity. Some of the most
> scalable technologies ever are also the simplest.
I'm afraid this is not true. Highly scalable technologies are
usually more complex that nonscalable ones.
[snip]
>> WinFS was much more ambitious. MS can and *did* ship
>> an enhanced search engine along the lines of Spotlight;
>> it's a free download even.
>
> It's more similar in some respects to Sherlock's indexing, in that it
> doesn't (as far as I can tell from Microsoft's material) automatically
> index everything as soon as it's saved/updated. Which means it can't
> really do live searches either.
It does not do live searches, sadly, but it *does* auto-index
everything as soon as its saved. Remember, the Spotlight
technology to do that was cribbed from XP. MS had but
to put a UI on it.
(The UI is substantially similar to Spotlight, by the way;
just so you don't think MS never copies anything from
Apple!)
> And it's actually sort of an interesting case, because it was pretty
> obviously a response to Google's desktop search software. That seems to
> be when Microsoft leaves computer fairy land and actually starts solving
> real problems: when someone else shows signs of moving in on them on
> their own platform if they don't. The rest of the time they seem more
> than content to construct their buzzword-compliant castles in the sky.
MS seems to have trouble getting direction when their
competitors aren't moving. But they do release products at
such times, not "castles in the sky". Consider Clippy. :D
[snip]
>> It's a hard problem; it's not like anyone else has been able
>> to replace the filesystem. One of MS's strengths is that they
>> do tackle the hard problems; they don't always succeed but
>> when they *do* succeed, even partially, the world beats
>> a path to their door.
>
> Except when it doesn't. It's not as if Microsoft has never had a failed
> product.
When MS fails, they fail. But they are very persistant. They
are *still* trying to revamp the whole concept of the
file system.
I expect they'll pull this one off, someday.
[snip]
>> There is much to be said for this; but nobody has ever
>> made these agile development techniques work at
>> Microsoft's scale yet.
>
> It's not clear that there's any actual problem with that. It's just,
> well, Microsoft is the only software company that operates at
> Microsoft's scale, and they don't seem to have caught up with this
> stuff. (Yet?)
No, it's not just that. There are many large software
projects but agile development has so far been used
for the small ones. Perhaps someday these practices
will be scaled up enough, but you can bet that MS won't
risk *Windows* trying to do that!
[snip]
>> Ah, well, perhaps so.
>>
>> But MS has been doing *that* since the early nineties. It seems
>> to work for them.
>
> Does it? They were years late getting an NT kernel under their consumer
> OS, and now they're years late with Vista.
Well, they certainly take their time, but they do rather dominate
the industry, you know.
What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
During that time Apple has been running flat out to catch
up with OS X, and to no small effect too- but XP was so
far ahead of everybody else that it still hangs onto its
lead for the moment.
It really shows the value of the slow-and-steady development
effort that went into XP.
Snit
> What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
> OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
I welcome support of this claim.
Wegie
> It does not do live searches, sadly, but it *does* auto-index
> everything as soon as its saved. Remember, the Spotlight
> technology to do that was cribbed from XP. MS had but
> to put a UI on it.
Incorrect. Apple has been working on this ability since 1994. Don't you
remember the product called AppleSearch? It was a shipping product that
indexed your drive, contents of files and systems across a network and
(later the Web) and even worked on Windows boxes. Apple was doing this
LONG before Microsoft even thought about auto-indexing files.
Apple didn't cribbed anything from XP. XP came out long after Apple was
already doing this.
--
.
Wegie
> > You never know. Vista could be delayed yet again.
>
> It could, but MS will avoid that if at all possible.
>
> Remember, Mac OS X is simply not that important;
> it has excluded itself for vast chunks of the market,
> and is tied to Apple's expensive hardware. It's
> not that big a threat no matter how good the next
> version turns out to be.
Earth to Dan, Earth to Dan! Apple hardware is now CHEAPER than other PC
vendors. On the high end, Apple is $1000 less than Dell, in the server
space, Apple is $300 cheaper than 1U rack systems. And the low end,
Apple is $100 cheaper that any of the top vendors in the regular desktop
space. Only in the generic PC space is Apple and top tier PC vendors
more expensive. But the days of expensive Apple hardware are long gone.
--
.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> news:znu-53C581.2...@individual.net...
> >> I don't think you are on solid ground here. MS's UI is, arguable,
> >> not as good as Apple, but it's still pretty decent. There's much,
> >> much worse out there. People can and do make good use of
> >> MS's products, so it's not so bad as to be prohibitive.
> >
> > This is not always the case, sadly. Consider the fact that many people
> > in this newsgroup, despite the fact that virtually everyone here
> > probably know Windows better than 80% of the Windows-using population --
> > had no idea that Windows had a feature somewhat like Time Machine. If
> > Microsoft's implementation had the same interface as Apple's, it's very
> > unlikely that so few people would have known of its existence.
>
> That's not because they don't know Windows has backup software.
>
> It's because people are unsure what Time Machine is; many
> have assumed it must be like Windows 2003's "Previous Versions"
> feature, which XP does *not* have.
>
> If Windows had backup with a Time Machine like UI,
> people would still know it was a backup program, and
> there would still be confusion about Apple's new
> product at this point.
Um. What? What you're claiming here seems to have no relationship to
reality. Pretty much everyone (as far as I've seen) understands exactly
what functionality Time Machine has, even if there's some uncertainty
over the implementation details. It's on the Windows side where many
people seem to have no idea what functionality is available.
> [snip]
> > This entire notion is nonsense, though. There's no meaningful
> > relationship between scalability and complexity. Some of the most
> > scalable technologies ever are also the simplest.
>
> I'm afraid this is not true. Highly scalable technologies are
> usually more complex that nonscalable ones.
It's impossible to say anything meaningful when speaking in such vague
terms. And I think the meaning of "scalability" is somewhat vague in
general, actually.
But look at technologies like, say, HTTP, which began as an absurdly
simple technology for moving small documents between a handful of
computers, and with only minor changes is now used to push billions of
documents between hundreds of millions of computers.
Flexible, lightweight technologies often scale (in a couple of senses of
the word) far better than more complex technologies, which often
sacrifice generality for better performance under certain limited
conditions.
> >> WinFS was much more ambitious. MS can and *did* ship
> >> an enhanced search engine along the lines of Spotlight;
> >> it's a free download even.
> >
> > It's more similar in some respects to Sherlock's indexing, in that it
> > doesn't (as far as I can tell from Microsoft's material) automatically
> > index everything as soon as it's saved/updated. Which means it can't
> > really do live searches either.
>
> It does not do live searches, sadly, but it *does* auto-index
> everything as soon as its saved. Remember, the Spotlight
> technology to do that was cribbed from XP. MS had but
> to put a UI on it.
Err? OS X's file system notification is basically FreeBSD's kqueue. Has
nothing to do with Windows.
[snip]
> > It's not clear that there's any actual problem with that. It's
> > just, well, Microsoft is the only software company that operates at
> > Microsoft's scale, and they don't seem to have caught up with this
> > stuff. (Yet?)
>
> No, it's not just that. There are many large software projects but
> agile development has so far been used for the small ones. Perhaps
> someday these practices will be scaled up enough, but you can bet
> that MS won't risk *Windows* trying to do that!
Part of the new trend is building smaller software, so what you're
saying is somewhat tautological.
One shouldn't look at whether these techniques are being used to build
large software. One should look at whether they're being used to build
software that solves problems which would previously have been solved
with large software. And they clearly are.
> [snip]
> >> Ah, well, perhaps so.
> >>
> >> But MS has been doing *that* since the early nineties. It seems
> >> to work for them.
> >
> > Does it? They were years late getting an NT kernel under their consumer
> > OS, and now they're years late with Vista.
>
> Well, they certainly take their time, but they do rather dominate
> the industry, you know.
>
> What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
> OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
>
> During that time Apple has been running flat out to catch
> up with OS X, and to no small effect too- but XP was so
> far ahead of everybody else that it still hangs onto its
> lead for the moment.
>
> It really shows the value of the slow-and-steady development
> effort that went into XP.
Um. No?
Dan Johnson
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
>> It does not do live searches, sadly, but it *does* auto-index
>> everything as soon as its saved. Remember, the Spotlight
>> technology to do that was cribbed from XP. MS had but
>> to put a UI on it.
>
> Incorrect. Apple has been working on this ability since 1994. Don't you
> remember the product called AppleSearch? It was a shipping product that
> indexed your drive, contents of files and systems across a network and
> (later the Web) and even worked on Windows boxes. Apple was doing this
> LONG before Microsoft even thought about auto-indexing files.
Google searching turns up little, but what I find, doesn't make
this thing sound terribly like Spotlight. I'm not sold;
I'd think that if Apple had something like Spotlight years
ago, it would have been in widespread use, and people
would have been demanding it in OS X the way they
do springloaded folders.
[snip]
Dan Johnson
[snip- some astonishingly odd claims]
>> It does not do live searches, sadly, but it *does* auto-index
>> everything as soon as its saved. Remember, the Spotlight
>> technology to do that was cribbed from XP. MS had but
>> to put a UI on it.
>
> Err? OS X's file system notification is basically FreeBSD's kqueue. Has
> nothing to do with Windows.
No. kqueues are not adequate to implement this. Apple has
something called 'fsevents' to do this. Microsoft uses
a thing they call the Change Journal. At this level it
seems to me that MS's tech is better.
Both systems have a background indexing process that
uses plug-ins installed by applications to read files
and interpret them, thereby extracting metadata from
ordinary files. This is what sets these systems apart
from stuff like BeOS's indexed filesystem. This is
a major advance; but Apple and MS do this in
essentially the same way.
What Apple added to this is a superior UI.
[snip]
>> No, it's not just that. There are many large software projects but
>> agile development has so far been used for the small ones. Perhaps
>> someday these practices will be scaled up enough, but you can bet
>> that MS won't risk *Windows* trying to do that!
>
> Part of the new trend is building smaller software, so what you're
> saying is somewhat tautological.
I don't see how this is a "new trend".
> One shouldn't look at whether these techniques are being used to build
> large software. One should look at whether they're being used to build
> software that solves problems which would previously have been solved
> with large software. And they clearly are.
Are they?
More to the point, can these small products replace
Windows?
[snip- Windows is the best!]
>
> Um. No?
:D
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
Sherlock has offered content searching since, I don't know, 1998 or
something. It didn't update its index immediately, didn't find anything
except files, didn't do live searches, and couldn't index metadata,
though.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> news:znu-C41E3F.1...@individual.net...
[snip]
> >> There's not much info about CoreAnimation out yet, but from the
> >> tidbits there are, I think that what this is, is an API to manipulate
> >> the Quartz Compositor, thereby allowing 3rd party developers to build
> >> stuff like Expose. This is the tool tha tmakes the Whizzy UI possible
> >> for 3rd parties.
> >>
> >> But the 'deep' part was done a couple of versions ago.
> >
> > Your definition of "deep" frankly seems entirely arbitrary. This is like
> > me saying, well, everything Microsoft is doing with .NET now isn't
> > interesting, because they implemented the CLI years ago.
>
> Hmmm. I'm drawing a line between "shallow" UI and
> "deep" infrastructure. Is that so arbitrary?
Somewhat. I would say Core Animation, since it is, after all, an
operating system API, is on the infrastructure side, but you evidently
disagree.
[snip]
> >> I notice the Steve did not try to promise this; I infer there's
> >> still doubt about whether Q2DE will be there. One way
> >> this could be is that after all this time they *have* finished it-
> >> and found it doesn't really make things any faster.
> >
> > Except it does, even on systems with fairly fast CPUs and fairly slow
> > video. I posted benchmarks the last time we had this discussion.
>
> Apple also had benchmarks, at the WWDC two years ago.
>
> That doesn't mean it panned out in the end. Maybe they finished
> it and it didn't benefit typical user patterns, however good the
> benchmark numbers were.
>
> Or maybe they couldn't finish it for some reason. Or maybe
> they had to pull the team off it to work on the Intel Switch.
>
> But it's hard to believe they'd not pad the Leopard Preview
> with something this cool, if they could demo it or even
> promise it. They really needed to have something.
The entire point of the feature is that it's invisible; it produces
exactly the same results as software rendering. Not exactly great demo
material, compared with e.g. Core Animation.
> >> More surprising is that resolution independance was not
> >> promised. Maybe they feel the app vendors are not ready;
> >> maybe something went wrong with development and it is
> >> still not demoable. But it would have been a spiffy, visually
> >> attractive demo for the keynote, and I was surprised not to
> >> see it.
> >
> > The feature itself has worked fine since Tiger; my guess is Apple is
> > still waiting on the apps.
>
> No; this feature is *most certainly* not working in Tiger. Not
> even for stuff like the Finder; visual glitches everywhere.
The feature in the graphics engine works. Applications, including
bundled ones, aren't updated in Tiger.
Maybe we didn't see a Leopard demo because demoing it would require
revealing other Leopard features Apple doesn't want to show anyone yet.
(Like the new Finder that's likely in the works.)
[snip]
GreyCloud
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:1Kmdnaz58sM5bkbZ...@bresnan.com...
>
>>Yet, M$ will promo a feature that doesn't exist yet and is not for sale
>>yet. Maybe they should keep quiet for a change and hone thier software to
>>work correctly before showing it off.
>
>
> Or maybe not.
>
> MS is very developer oriented; they know that if they can
> get the apps built of Windows, users will use Windows.
>
> And MS's transparency is much better for developers than
> Apple's secrecy.
Transparency? You mean vapour-ware.
> That Apple even keep the Intel Switch
> secret, and surprised developers with it, is very remarkable,
> but it is also very, very hard on Apple's developers.
>
Not really. If you've studied XCode, you'd know that when you compile
the code, the code will detect which arch to run on. That's why it is
called universal binaries.
The fact that a company can keep a secret is quite common in industry.
> MS shows developers what it is doing far more. This is
> embarassing in the .advocacy newsgroups since sometimes
> their plans fail, but it makes it much easier for developers
> to plan future releases than if they were kept in the dark.
>
A different scenario for MS. For Apple it didn't matter. All the
developer needed to do was recompile his own code for intel versions.
The PPC will still run the universal binaries.
> [snip]
>
>>>No way. They won't delay Vista anymore if they can
>>>help it. Missing the Christmas season was bad enough!
>>
>>You never know. Vista could be delayed yet again.
>
>
> It could, but MS will avoid that if at all possible.
>
> Remember, Mac OS X is simply not that important;
> it has excluded itself for vast chunks of the market,
> and is tied to Apple's expensive hardware. It's
> not that big a threat no matter how good the next
> version turns out to be.
It is important if you want decent security.
That's why I switched from windows in the first place.
>
> [snip]
>
>>>>Just your speculation. So far, Apple has delivered and it isn't hard to
>>>>do under a unix o/s.
>>>
>>>Everything is easy for the man who does not have to
>>>do it himself. :D
>>
>>It is just easier to do under Unix is all.
>
>
> No. Shipping features is not especially easier
> in Unix.
Of course it is. Once you understand how unix works, the rest falls
into place. An idea, once figured out, usually comes to fruition faster
on Unix than it will in windows... especially when using Objective-C.
What we are seeing now are the modules being better utilized.
>
> But I must say that while I have heard many magical features
> attributed to Unix in this newsgroup, I've never heard
> Apple's recent string of featureful OS releases attributed
> to it before!
A matter of letting clever people do clever things, which Unix makes
possible.
There are some rather interesting development tools over at Sun as well.
>
>
>>Using XCode seems to make the job quite a bit easier as well along with
>>using Objective-C.
>
>
> Easier than prior versions of XCode, perhaps.
>
> XCode is widely derided as not ready for the big leagues;
> it's performance is not there yet. It doesn't scale to large
> projects. Perhaps XCode 3 will fix this.. when it ships.
That was taken care of in XCode 2.1. The core is Gnu compiler set...
and they've tightened it up quite a bit. It used to be that Suns C
compiler generated 45% better code, but not anymore.
>
> Objective-C is an old and unlovely language, which
> Apple is trying to make presentable. But they are rather
> late to the game, and are now far behind the efforts
> of Sun and Microsoft.
>
Does better than the windows APIs that are written in straight C.
I've already been there, and nowhere is anything in Visual Studio is
like Objective-C. I find it faster to get code out in XCode compared to VS.
> [snip]
>
>>>That was from Tiger. And it wasn't even the
>>>best thing in Tiger!
>>
>>No, it was from Leopard, not Tiger,... we're talking about going to a web
>>site say like one of the weather animation sites and creating on the fly a
>>web widget to get you there and using only what you want of that site.
>>Tiger doesn't have that feature.
>
>
> That's trivial; that's just a new widget, and a pretty simple
> one too.
But one the user can make for their own use, without having to check
thru Apples widget site for what you really want.
>
> What's depressing is that Apple was reduced to demoing
> that as a Great New Feature.
>
Depressing? I thought it was great. You want to know what depressing
is? Watching M$ demo their speech recognition software.
> [snip]
>
>>>This is just your basic incremental backup.
>>>
>>>It's long overdue. But everybody, and I mean everybody,
>>>has backup. Windows XP too.
>>
>>That was my main complaint... no backup software.
>>But this one goes a step further by making it easier to get a missing file
>>restored. Ever do it from tape?
>
>
> Yes. Perhaps Time Machine's UI will be the Best Restore UI
> Ever. I haven't used it, and we've only seen it briefly. It's
> awfully heavyweight and terribly whizzy, but it may work.
>
Of course it will work. Most end users, those that just buy a PC out of
the box, have no idea what a backup is. This will alleviate some
headaches for a lot of that type of user.
> [snip]
>
>>>Virtual desktops are commonplace on Unix, and there are many
>>>UIs for managing them. Apple's is a little prettier, but not especially
>>>radical.
>>
>>Except that you can re-organize what each space has in it without
>>disturbing your running program on the fly.
>
>
> Er, I have never used a virtual desktop utility that can't
> do that. It'd be quite limiting not to have that.
Have you ever used CDE?
>
> [snip]
>
>>>Yes. But if Maccies can hope and speculate that it's some kind of
>>>radial breakthrough, I can hope and speculate that it is just what
>>>it seems to be... incremental backup.
>>
>>You'll have to go to Apples web site and watch the event to completion to
>>see what they are offering.
>
>
> I have done that; it looks like incremental backup to me.
Got a better idea over incremental backup? In this case it is done
daily automatically, and is a good idea.
What does MS have in mind for Vista?
>
> Notice that Apple emphasises the UI in the demos, and
> they don't talk about the underlying tech. Notice that
> they only ever restore individual files. Notice that they
> never talk about the *backup* part, just the restore part.
>
The backup is automatic.
The underlying tech does not need to be demoed in this case... Unix is
the tech.
GreyCloud
>
> What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
> OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
Oh?!? Then why did I dump a brand new dual core pentium D from HP with
XP on it for an new iMac then? Because of the miserable security
offered by M$.
I could have had a Sun ultra-20, but opted for the iMac instead.
Spam zombies and malware is not my idea of fun.
GreyCloud
Simple. They've always hinted at equaling or going beyond what DEC had
offered in development tools, but never did. Another problem is that MS
has actually stagnated the market. Now that Apple is figuring it out,
things may again be competitive.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> news:znu-71014D.1...@individual.net...
> > In article <12doofp...@news.supernews.com>,
> > "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
[snip]
> >> No, it's not just that. There are many large software projects but
> >> agile development has so far been used for the small ones. Perhaps
> >> someday these practices will be scaled up enough, but you can bet
> >> that MS won't risk *Windows* trying to do that!
> >
> > Part of the new trend is building smaller software, so what you're
> > saying is somewhat tautological.
>
> I don't see how this is a "new trend".
Not sure in what sense you mean that. You mean you don't see this as a
trend, or you don't think it's new?
> > One shouldn't look at whether these techniques are being used to build
> > large software. One should look at whether they're being used to build
> > software that solves problems which would previously have been solved
> > with large software. And they clearly are.
>
> Are they?
>
> More to the point, can these small products replace Windows?
Windows? Not yet. Outlook & Exchange? Maybe, yes.
> [snip- Windows is the best!]
> >
> > Um. No?
>
> :D
--
Peter Hayes
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
> > Steve's bizzare claim that he must keep all the good
> > features secret from MS lest they be copied is... well,
> > just silly. MS has no more time for copying; they
> > have slipped Vista already and they need to ship.
>
> He wasn't referring to Vista 1.0 where they would have enough time to
> copy Leopard's best features, but future versions of Vista, he said we
> don't want to give them any extra time to copy our features. Which is
> correct.
Yeah right...
Microsoft will have its hands so full over the next couple of years
issuing security updates for Vista they won't have any time to
"innovate" from Apple or anyone else.
> > No. Whatever other features Apple has are either
> > in such poor shape that Steve could not demo them,
> > or in danger of being cut so that Steve dared not
> > promise them.
Leopard will certainly have to include a couple of so far unannounced
apps or Jobs will look somewhat foolish.
> No. those features are up and running well enough to demo, you need to
> watch the keynote and learn what steve said, not make stuff up.
I didn't see any of Jobs' "secret" apps and they certainly weren't
demoed.
--
Peter
Peter Hayes
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:MMOdnRYFBM85DEbZ...@bresnan.com...
> >
> > Time-machine? Not in the usual way it is done. Under VMS it is much more
> > difficult to do and the backups are usually elsewhere.
>
> This is just your basic incremental backup.
>
> It's long overdue. But everybody, and I mean everybody,
> has backup. Windows XP too.
>
> The only thing that sets it apart (in a positive way) is the
> whizzy UI for restoration.
It looked whizzy in the demo, but that was set up to restore a specific
file. What if you can't remember the name of the file? Now it's not so
whizzy.
And you need a second hard drive or it's just a glorified never emptying
recycle bin - or never emptying until such times as the drive fills up.
--
Peter
John C. Randolph
>
> The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply
> an incremental backup program.
Guess again. It's a backup facility based upon a journaling, versioned
filesystem. You're the one in the shallow end, sunshine.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
> What if you can't remember the name of the file?
Then you use the Spotlight index to look for it in older versions of
the filesystem, or just scan for changes in the folder where you think
it was. Really, they did their homework on this.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
> What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
> OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
No, what's incredible is that there are people who actually believe
what you just wrote above. You all really need to get out more.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
>> It does not do live searches, sadly, but it *does* auto-index
>> everything as soon as its saved. Remember, the Spotlight
>> technology to do that was cribbed from XP. MS had but
>> to put a UI on it.
>
> Incorrect. Apple has been working on this ability since 1994. Don't you
> remember the product called AppleSearch?
Actually, you're both wrong. AppleSearch wasn't integrated into the
filesystem as Spotlight is, and Microsoft's search technology was
predicated on keeping files in an RDBMS and requiring third-party
developers to use their schemas.
> Apple didn't cribbed anything from XP.
That statement is also not entirely correct: there are a few things
that Windows had first, which Apple then did far better. Fast
user-switching springs to mind.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
> Pretty much everything in OS X has been a rehash of old technology.
About like the Saturn Five was a rehash of the bottle rocket.
Can you point to any other company that implemented multi-threaded
OpenGL on a single GPU?
How about placing each window's backing store in texture memory on the
graphics card (Quartz Extreme, which MS is still trying to catch up
to)? Perhaps you can show another vendor who offers a motion graphics
tool with anything approaching the capabilities of Quartz Composer?
Don't even try to talk technology, Tom. You'd be out of your depth in
a puddle.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
>>> Spotlight had
>>> some filesystem-level components, where Time Machine
>>> has not.
>>
>> Time machines does.
>
> There's no evidence of this yet, and the descriptions
> I've read for how this thing works involve nothing more
> exotic than hard links and fsevents.
You haven't read descriptions of how it works, because the people who
attended the session explaining it are under NDA. Suffice it to say,
you're speaking from a limited frame of reference.
-jcr
ZnU
ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> wrote:
BTW: http://www.aeroxp.org/board/index.php?showtopic=5142 has some more
technical details about Leopard from someone at WWDC. It confirms
resolution independence as a Leopard feature.
John C. Randolph
> Objective-C is an old and unlovely language, which
> Apple is trying to make presentable. But they are rather
> late to the game, and are now far behind the efforts
> of Sun and Microsoft.
Wow. I'm used to seeing ignorance among the MS faction on this
newsgroup, but that really takes the cake.
Microsoft's effort in developing C# is simply to address their fear of
Java breaking their developers loose from the Win32 API. It's a very
poor knock-off of Java. The libraries they've built around it are a
symptom of their management and organizational incompetence, expressed
in the proliferation of poorly thought-out classes (known in OO
development circles as "lasagna code" for having too many layers).
Truth to tell, Microsoft barely even grasps the model-view-controller
paradigm.
Java itself had a good shot at becoming a decent language, but
Gosling's fear of the conservatism that killed NeWS drove him to make
it as familiar as possible to C++ developers, who are for the most part
not trainable after the brain damage of templates has set in.
The languages that have a possible claim to being better than Obj-C are
all open source efforts like Ruby, Smalltalk and Python.
Objective-C makes it possible for a company like Omni to have six
shipping apps with only 12 developers. Do the math.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
> If it's done with Quartz Compositor it should be pretty
> zippy.
The Quartz Compositor is the window server. Did you mean Quartz Composer?
-jcr
ZnU
ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> wrote:
> In article <12dpt1r...@news.supernews.com>,
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
> > "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> > news:znu-71014D.1...@individual.net...
> > > In article <12doofp...@news.supernews.com>,
> > > "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > >> No, it's not just that. There are many large software projects but
> > >> agile development has so far been used for the small ones. Perhaps
> > >> someday these practices will be scaled up enough, but you can bet
> > >> that MS won't risk *Windows* trying to do that!
> > >
> > > Part of the new trend is building smaller software, so what you're
> > > saying is somewhat tautological.
> >
> > I don't see how this is a "new trend".
>
> Not sure in what sense you mean that. You mean you don't see this as a
> trend, or you don't think it's new?
>
> > > One shouldn't look at whether these techniques are being used to build
> > > large software. One should look at whether they're being used to build
> > > software that solves problems which would previously have been solved
> > > with large software. And they clearly are.
> >
> > Are they?
> >
> > More to the point, can these small products replace Windows?
>
> Windows? Not yet. Outlook & Exchange? Maybe, yes.
Just to add a little more to this... another trend we've seen a lot of
recently (and one that's particularly part of the Ruby and Python
zeitgeist) is the value of creating frameworks by refactoring them out
of real-world applications, rather than from the ground up based on
theoretical first principles.
Apple appears to be doing a lot of this. Most of the Core* technologies
look something like this, as do Cocoa controllers, the new Image Kit,
the new latent semantic mapping API, the new RSS framework, etc.
This kind of approach is great for two reasons. First, if your
frameworks are extracted from real-world apps, they're probably
legitimately useful for writing real-world apps. Second, since you're
creating actual discrete *products* with the technologies involved,
there's much more incentive to actually get those technologies working
in a timely manor.
Microsoft notably does not appear to be following this model.
John C. Randolph
> another trend we've seen a lot of recently (and one that's
> particularly part of the Ruby and Python zeitgeist) is the value of
> creating frameworks by refactoring them out of real-world applications,
> rather than from the ground up based on theoretical first principles.
>
> Apple appears to be doing a lot of this. Most of the Core* technologies
> look something like this, as do Cocoa controllers, the new Image Kit,
> the new latent semantic mapping API, the new RSS framework, etc.
Well, the Core frameworks are independent projects pretty much from the
get-go, but their use in the apps at early stages does have a
considerable effect. Aperture was the first Apple product based on
Core Data and Core Image, for example.
-jcr
ZnU
John C. Randolph <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote:
> On 2006-08-11 20:33:16 -0700, ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> said:
> > another trend we've seen a lot of recently (and one that's
> > particularly part of the Ruby and Python zeitgeist) is the value of
> > creating frameworks by refactoring them out of real-world
> > applications, rather than from the ground up based on theoretical
> > first principles.
> >
> > Apple appears to be doing a lot of this. Most of the Core*
> > technologies look something like this, as do Cocoa controllers, the
> > new Image Kit, the new latent semantic mapping API, the new RSS
> > framework, etc.
>
> Well, the Core frameworks are independent projects pretty much from
> the get-go, but their use in the apps at early stages does have a
> considerable effect.
Interesting. Of course, extracting as you go (or just plain developing
the framework in conjunction with a serious real-world app that uses
it) has largely the same effect. Would it be fair to say this is a
common pattern at Apple?
> Aperture was the first Apple product based on Core Data and Core
> Image, for example.
--
ZnU
John C. Randolph <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote:
Word over on the Ars forums seems to be that Time Machine really is just
incremental daily backup with no file system magic and no real
versioning features. That is, if I save over the file I saved five
minutes ago, I can't get it back... I can only revert to the file I
saved yesterday, before the last time Time Machine backed up.
So, I'm quite thoroughly confused now.
It would be somewhat disappointing if Time Machine was merely
incremental backup, but having that built into the OS with an extremely
consumer-friendly interface would still be pretty useful.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice the Keynote file preview that
popped up when the old version of the file was being recovered? I'm not
aware of any infrastructure to support something like that in the
current version of OS X, so maybe there's some new system-level
previewing mechanism or something.
John C. Randolph
> In article <2006081121263931729%jcrnospam@nospammaccom>,
> John C. Randolph <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2006-08-11 20:33:16 -0700, ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> said:
>>> another trend we've seen a lot of recently (and one that's particularly
>>> part of the Ruby and Python zeitgeist) is the value of creating
>>> frameworks by refactoring them out of real-world applications, rather
>>> than from the ground up based on theoretical first principles.
>>>
>>> Apple appears to be doing a lot of this. Most of the Core* technologies
>>> look something like this, as do Cocoa controllers, the new Image Kit,
>>> the new latent semantic mapping API, the new RSS framework, etc.
>>
>> Well, the Core frameworks are independent projects pretty much from the
>> get-go, but their use in the apps at early stages does have a
>> considerable effect.
>
> Interesting. Of course, extracting as you go (or just plain developing
> the framework in conjunction with a serious real-world app that uses
> it) has largely the same effect.
Well, the frameworks and the Apps are developed by engineers in
different groups. The Apps are the "first customers" for the
frameworks, as it were. They don't get every change they might ask
for, though.
> Would it be fair to say this is a common pattern at Apple?
Yes, very much so.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
> In article <2006081118590364440%jcrnospam@nospammaccom>,
> John C. Randolph <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2006-08-10 18:37:45 -0700, "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> said:
>>
>>>>> Spotlight had
>>>>> some filesystem-level components, where Time Machine
>>>>> has not.
>>>>
>>>> Time machines does.
>>>
>>> There's no evidence of this yet, and the descriptions
>>> I've read for how this thing works involve nothing more
>>> exotic than hard links and fsevents.
>>
>> You haven't read descriptions of how it works, because the people who
>> attended the session explaining it are under NDA. Suffice it to say,
>> you're speaking from a limited frame of reference.
>
> Word over on the Ars forums seems to be that Time Machine really is
> just incremental daily backup with no file system magic and no real
> versioning features. That is, if I save over the file I saved five
> minutes ago, I can't get it back... I can only revert to the file I
> saved yesterday, before the last time Time Machine backed up.
You can set how often you want your system to checkpoint its state.
For most people, it would be daily. Keeping changes at a finer-grained
level than that is something that's more appropriate for an app to do,
since it knows what changes matter. (EG, you don't want to back up
temporary working files.)
> So, I'm quite thoroughly confused now.
All will become clear. ;-) If you want to know all about it right
now, join the Apple developer program at a level that gets you a
software seed key. Otherwise, sit tight till it ships.
-jcr
Sandman
ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> wrote:
> It would be somewhat disappointing if Time Machine was merely
> incremental backup, but having that built into the OS with an extremely
> consumer-friendly interface would still be pretty useful.
I think they even said so in the keynote, that it would be daily
backups.
> Incidentally, did anyone else notice the Keynote file preview that
> popped up when the old version of the file was being recovered? I'm not
> aware of any infrastructure to support something like that in the
> current version of OS X, so maybe there's some new system-level
> previewing mechanism or something.
Yeah, I saw that too and was surprised. Was it only a preview or did
he even interact with the keynote? With iChats keynote abilities,
maybe keynote support has been built in to the system in some way.
--
Sandman[.net]
John C. Randolph
> In article <znu-A35EF0.0...@individual.net>,
> ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> wrote:
>
>> It would be somewhat disappointing if Time Machine was merely
>> incremental backup, but having that built into the OS with an extremely
>> consumer-friendly interface would still be pretty useful.
>
> I think they even said so in the keynote, that it would be daily backups.
Daily by default. You can change that if you're more or less paranoid. ;-)
-jcr
ZnU
This makes a certain amount of sense, but it seems like the ideal
solution here would be a system-level technology with an API so apps
could keep it informed about which files were meaningful to back up.
I suppose that would be hard to implement if it had to work well with
apps that didn't use the API, though.
> > So, I'm quite thoroughly confused now.
>
> All will become clear. ;-) If you want to know all about it right
> now, join the Apple developer program at a level that gets you a
> software seed key. Otherwise, sit tight till it ships.
Bah. I'm making up my mind about whether or not I can justify buying a
Mac Pro. If I decide I can, I'll probably join ADC, since it would
basically pay for itself with the hardware discount coupon.
John C. Randolph
> This makes a certain amount of sense, but it seems like the ideal
> solution here would be a system-level technology with an API so apps
> could keep it informed about which files were meaningful to back up.
Gee, kind of like how spotlight notices changes in the filesystem and
calls your own spotlight importers for your file types?
Apple's done a lot of thinking about how to do this. Really.
-jcr
Snit
znu-DDAAAC.0...@individual.net on 8/11/06 11:56 PM:
I see ADC costs $500. With it the Mac Pro starts at $1,999 instead of
$2,400 (standard) or $2,299 (Edu).
But with ADC, options are cheaper, so picking:
2 2GHz CPUs
4 GB Ram (Assuming I go through Apple on this)
Dual 500 GB drives (again, same assumption)
ATI Radeon X1900
Modem (for faxing)
ADC = $3,438 + $500 = $3,938
EDU = $3,918
Assuming I go with those options (who knows, not getting a machine until
next summer) it may very well be worth the $20(!) to get the ADC Select
Membership and get any updates to the OS... heck, I can get my machine
before Leopard and get it sent to me... also get:
* OS X Server... cool to play with - I would like to see it
* Access to pre-release software
* Two "personalized one-on-one consultations with Apple¹s
Developer Technical Support engineers" (Not sure I would use it)
* Um... what else is likely to be of value to me?
Hmmm, I also want a iSight camera... but the EDU saving are $5 better ($129
vs. $134).
Thanks for the heads up on ADC, had not looked into that in a long time.
--
€ Dreamweaver, being the #1 pro web design tool, is used by many pros
€ Different viruses are still different even if in the same "family"
€ OS X users are at far less risk of malware then are XP users
Snit
2006081200061151816%jcrnospam@nospammaccom on 8/12/06 12:06 AM:
From what I can see of Tim Machine it works just fine on the file level, but
different apps can make use of it and set what files should not be backed
up, get their own interface (such as with Finder, iTunes, etc.)... as John
said, much like with Spotlight.
--
€ Professionals are not beginners in their field
€ Dreamweaver and GoLive are web design applications
€ Photoshop is an image editing application
Dan Johnson
> In article <12dpric...@news.supernews.com>,
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> Sherlock has offered content searching since, I don't know, 1998 or
> something. It didn't update its index immediately, didn't find anything
> except files, didn't do live searches, and couldn't index metadata,
> though.
Well, everyone had some kind of searching. The
big difference is the UI; XP has a really terrible
one involving a cross between a wizard, a cartoon,
and a dog. Tiger has a really good one that
MS is now copying.
But the technical implementation of the search
engine is qutie similar, once you get past that.
To wit:
o Windows XP started out with an indexing service
that speeds up it's search UI.
Searching may be done with an index created by
a background service. This service detects changed
files using the Change Journal feature of NTFS, and
reads them with plug-ins called "IFilters". These
convert the content of the file into indexable
metadata. Only content so converted can be seen
by this search engine.
o Mac OS X Tiger offered an index service that
speeds up its search UI.
Searching may be done with an index created by
a background daemon. This service detects changed
files using the fsevents feature of Darwin, and
reads them with plug-ins called "Spotlight Plugins".
These convert the content of the file into indexable
metadata. Only content so converted can be seen
by this search engine.
For comparison, consider a different approach
of the 'better search' idea:
o BeOS offered indexed metadata as a filesystem
feature, which speeds up its search UI.
Each app would write indexed metadata to the
filesystem when it saved a file. This was done
separately from the file content, but at the same
time. The indexes were updated directly and
immediately, not by any background process.
The search engine had no access to the files at all;
it used only the metadata left for it by apps.
Dan Johnson
> In article <12dn8sq...@news.supernews.com>,
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>> > Your definition of "deep" frankly seems entirely arbitrary. This is
>> > like
>> > me saying, well, everything Microsoft is doing with .NET now isn't
>> > interesting, because they implemented the CLI years ago.
>>
>> Hmmm. I'm drawing a line between "shallow" UI and
>> "deep" infrastructure. Is that so arbitrary?
>
> Somewhat. I would say Core Animation, since it is, after all, an
> operating system API, is on the infrastructure side, but you evidently
> disagree.
I am not sure about CoreAnimation. It may indeed be
deep; or it may just be publishing some of the deep
work done in Jaguar to developers somewhat belatedly.
So naturally I post before this becomes clear, so
I can put the worst spin on it. You can thank me
later. :D
[snip]
>> But it's hard to believe they'd not pad the Leopard Preview
>> with something this cool, if they could demo it or even
>> promise it. They really needed to have something.
>
> The entire point of the feature is that it's invisible; it produces
> exactly the same results as software rendering. Not exactly great
> demo material, compared with e.g. Core Animation.
The change is supposed to be mere performance, yes.
But Apple has never been afraid to demo that. Performance
bake-offs are a regular feature of Steve's keynotes.
Even if it isn't ready for that, they could have promised it.
They promised 64-bit app support, and that's not visible,
either.
[snip- resolution independant UI]
>> No; this feature is *most certainly* not working in Tiger. Not
>> even for stuff like the Finder; visual glitches everywhere.
>
> The feature in the graphics engine works. Applications, including
> bundled ones, aren't updated in Tiger.
I don't know what you mean here; Quartz has long been able
to do scaling. But even things like the title bars and menu
bars do not draw right today in Tiger, if you use this feature;
this is UI framework stuff, not apps.
> Maybe we didn't see a Leopard demo because demoing it would require
> revealing other Leopard features Apple doesn't want to show anyone yet.
> (Like the new Finder that's likely in the works.)
Remotely possible. It may be that none of the apps they
did show support resolution independant UI yet. Yes
I would have thought something could be arranged for
a demo. At least still screenies carefully cropped. You
could probably manage that with todays Tiger
implementation.
OTOH, had they a new Finder they could show, I think
they'd have shown it. I don't buy the "MS will delay Vista
*again* just to annoy Apple" line.
Dan Johnson
Odd that Steve did not even mention this. It has more
important to both users and developers than, say,
64-bit app support.
It may be that Apple is still not sure they won't have
to cut it, so they didn't promise it.
I wonder how well it works in the Leopard preview. If
it's still in the state it was in Tiger, then they probably
do expect to cut it.
Or maybe they didn't want to point out any area where
Windows XP retains its lead. Windows has had this for
years, after all. :D
Yet this is something that needs developer support to
work; you'd expect Apple to try to drum up this support
at the keynote, to get the word out to developers not
attending the conference.
Dan Johnson
> Dan Johnson wrote:
>> And MS's transparency is much better for developers than
>> Apple's secrecy.
>
> Transparency? You mean vapour-ware.
Well, the two go together. But developers find it
very hard to change directions as fast as Apple
would have them do so. Microsoft gives them a
lot more lead time.
>> That Apple even keep the Intel Switch
>> secret, and surprised developers with it, is very remarkable,
>> but it is also very, very hard on Apple's developers.
>>
> Not really. If you've studied XCode, you'd know that when you
> compile the code, the code will detect which arch to run on.
> That's why it is called universal binaries.
I have studiend- and used XCode, and I know how this works.
And that is not how.
You check some checkboxes in XCode and it then compiles
your program twice, once emitting PowerPC and once x86
output. (And twice more if you want to add 64-bit supports, too!)
These binaries are merged, so you get one file for each target's
output, containing both kinds of executable code.
When a user launches the resulting program, the loader
selects which binary to actually use depending on the
processor it runs on. It prefers, I believe, native over emulated
code, then 64-bits over 32-bits. If necessary the loader will
start Rosetta, and off you go.
It's called "Universal Binaries" because you get a binary that
runs on any architecture.
But the fly in the ointment is the compilation step; you
compile your source *twice*, and get two different
outputs. In C, C++ and Objective-C there's a lot of wiggle
room in the language definition, and the compiler can
produce quite different behaviors for the different
versions.
> The fact that a company can keep a secret is quite common in industry.
It is. Doesn't mean its a good idea though.
[snip]
> A different scenario for MS. For Apple it didn't matter. All the
> developer needed to do was recompile his own code for intel versions.
> The PPC will still run the universal binaries.
This is not all a developer needs to do. Even for the
simplest cases, you have to test and debug on the new
architecture. The behavior of your program is changed
by the compiler when it targets a new architecture.
Compilers are allowed to do this for performance
reasons, but its very awkward for porting. More
recent langauges (Java, C#, etc) nail down behavior
much more strictly precisely because of this problem.
[snip]
>> No. Shipping features is not especially easier
>> in Unix.
>
> Of course it is. Once you understand how unix works, the rest falls into
> place.
No. I've programmed on Unix professionally, and I didn't
like it much. Unix, qua Unix, provides very little in the
way of applications serves.
> An idea, once figured out, usually comes to fruition faster on Unix than
> it will in windows... especially when using Objective-C.
> What we are seeing now are the modules being better utilized.
I see; you imagine that Mac OS X is good precisely and strictly
because it is Unix like. That's mistaken; Apple has added
a *large* amount of value to the basic Unix-like architecture.
A lot of it is really NeXT's code, but it still helps.
Normal Unixes do not use Objective-C but C, or C++ if you
are lucky. They do not have a framework like Cocoa,
never mind all the stuff Apple has added. There's stuff in
there that even Windows hasn't got.
I tend to think that overall, programs written to Cocoa will
ship features easier than those written to Carbon, or for
that matter Win32. But this is not a Unix thing; it's a
NeXT thing.
The advantage here is mostly that the "native language" of
Cocoa is Objective-C, and the "native language" of
nearly everybody else is just C. There's a productivity-sapping
impedance mismatch if you use any other language but the
native, even a closely related one (like C++ on Windows
say).
[snip]
>> XCode is widely derided as not ready for the big leagues;
>> it's performance is not there yet. It doesn't scale to large
>> projects. Perhaps XCode 3 will fix this.. when it ships.
>
> That was taken care of in XCode 2.1. The core is Gnu compiler set... and
> they've tightened it up quite a bit. It used to be that Suns C compiler
> generated 45% better code, but not anymore.
No, the issue is not the performance of the generated programs,
but the speed of the IDE *itself*. It bogs down on large
projects. It is slow to open files, slow to edit files.
Heck, even on small projects the code-sense they have
is terribly slow.
>> Objective-C is an old and unlovely language, which
>> Apple is trying to make presentable. But they are rather
>> late to the game, and are now far behind the efforts
>> of Sun and Microsoft.
>
> Does better than the windows APIs that are written in straight C.
Ya. This is one key advanage they have on Windows;
you *can* program Windows in C++, Ob jective-C, C#,
or many many other languages, but there will always be
a translation layer in your way, causing problems.
But even so these enhanced langauges are worth it. And
MS is working on the problem; the version of .NET that
will ship with Vista will offer its own UI support that
won't just wrap Win32, and that's the biggest remaining
piece they don't have yet. This will make C# much more
competitive, and it's pretty good even now.
> I've already been there, and nowhere is anything in Visual Studio is like
> Objective-C. I find it faster to get code out in XCode compared to VS.
Objective-C is a strength because it's the native language
for Cocoa, and C-based APIs will always be at a
disadvantage next to that.
But C# *as a language* is much nicer than Objective-C:
It's got:
o Constructors
o Namespaces
o Nested Classes
o Abstract Methods & Classes
o Sealed Methods & Classes
o Attributes
o Delegates
o Events
o Properties
o Operator Overloading
o Foreach Loops
o Safe Switches
o Generics
o Closures
o Generators
o Fixed blocks
Plus a syntax that isn't a crawling horror for the sewers
of hell, much stronger typesafety, and it generates 'safe'
code by default. And it uses the more popular
Simula cast-and-dispatch semantics.
Much of this will seem rather pedestrian to, say,
Java 1.0 users- but Objective-C hasn't got any of
that stuff.
Objective-C has:
o Categories
o Class Methods
o Selectors
And it uses the less popular (and slower) Smalltalk
dynamic dispatch semantics.
In short, it's Cocoa that makes Objecive-C
worthwhile.
[snip- web clipping widget]
>> What's depressing is that Apple was reduced to demoing
>> that as a Great New Feature.
>
> Depressing? I thought it was great. You want to know what depressing is?
> Watching M$ demo their speech recognition software.
That's entertaining! *Especially* when it breaks. :D
[snip]
>> Yes. Perhaps Time Machine's UI will be the Best Restore UI
>> Ever. I haven't used it, and we've only seen it briefly. It's
>> awfully heavyweight and terribly whizzy, but it may work.
>
> Of course it will work. Most end users, those that just buy a PC out of
> the box, have no idea what a backup is. This will alleviate some headaches
> for a lot of that type of user.
Unless Apple will sell their new Macs with two disks
each, they still won't know, and won't be helped.
Time Machine requires a second disk of some kind to
backup to. Slick UI, but the hard problem remains
unsolved: how do you handle backup for very naive users
who don't know about it, and wouldn't care if they did?
[snip]
>> Er, I have never used a virtual desktop utility that can't
>> do that. It'd be quite limiting not to have that.
>
> Have you ever used CDE?
No, but I understand it's a crawling horror.
I last used virtual desktops years ago, on Sun
boxes. I could do this then- it involved dragging little
wireframe proxies for the windows between little
proxies for the virtual desktops.
I forget which window manager this was, though.
[snip]
>> I have done that; it looks like incremental backup to me.
>
> Got a better idea over incremental backup? In this case it is done daily
> automatically, and is a good idea.
> What does MS have in mind for Vista?
They have incremental backup there too, of course.
They also propose to bring Windows Server 2003's'
Previous Versions feature to Vista.
Each time you save the previous version of the file is
retained, and can be recovered. There's a way to get
deleted files back, too. The old copies are stored
on a per-block basis, so its uses less space, and it
does not need a separate backup media.
The UI is done with list views and isn't terribly whizzy,
but it is available today in Windows Server, and will
be in a Vista near you soon! :D
>> Notice that Apple emphasises the UI in the demos, and
>> they don't talk about the underlying tech. Notice that
>> they only ever restore individual files. Notice that they
>> never talk about the *backup* part, just the restore part.
>
> The backup is automatic.
> The underlying tech does not need to be demoed in this case...
> Unix is the tech.
You got a Unix fixation there.
I do not know what they are using for backup
exactly; I wouldn't be surprised to learn it just
the old open-source backup tools.
If so, you could demo them, but it would be a yawn,
so it is no wonder they didn't.
Dan Johnson
> Dan Johnson wrote:
>> What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
>> OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
>
> on it for an new iMac then? Because of the miserable security offered by
> M$.
You believe Apple's propaganda; but hey, that's what it's
for, selling Macs.
Windows XP was, at its initial release, not so secure-
but no worse than Mac OS X is today. Heaven knows
that's not *good*, but users don't seem to care.
MS has done much to improve XP since then, but
that effort isn't 5 years old, so it does support my
claims too well.
Apple, on the other hand, has assiduously spread
disinformation to the gullible, telling them that there's
some magic pixy dust called "Unix" that they sprinkle
on Mac OS X, and that this makes it secure.
None of that is actually true, but the technically ignorant
sometimes believe this stuff.
[snip]
Dan Johnson
> Dan Johnson wrote:
[snip- MS drops Fortran]
>> That's an odd non-sequitur. What are you getting at?
>
> Simple. They've always hinted at equaling or going beyond what DEC had
> offered in development tools, but never did.
What are these wonderful DEC development tools you
refer to? When I used VMS- many years ago in my misspent
youth- the development tools were not impressive at all.
Anyway, it still seems a non-sequitur. MS has dropped
a very old language- Fortran- for a shiny new one- C#. This
seems to suggest forward motion on their part.
> Another problem is that MS has actually stagnated the market.
I do not think MS can be blamed for Apple mistakes,
nor those of the Unix vendors. If Apple did not produce
great products sooner, that's *Apple's* fault. They wasted
a lot of time and effort producing not much in the mid
nineties.
> Now that Apple is figuring it out, things may again be
> competitive.
They already have. This starting in the mid-nineties with
Sun's Java.
This is an excellent development. Microsoft is at its best
when competing with other vendors. During the period that
MS was unchallenged, they spent their time animating ordinary
office products with a perverse unlife. [1]
And Apple's more recent efforts are also welcome. They are
shallow, as I said, but if nobody is trying to top Window's
UI, then that UI won't improve much.
[1] Clippy!
Dan Johnson
> In article <12dpt1r...@news.supernews.com>,
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>> > Part of the new trend is building smaller software, so what you're
>> > saying is somewhat tautological.
>>
>> I don't see how this is a "new trend".
>
> Not sure in what sense you mean that. You mean you don't see this as a
> trend, or you don't think it's new?
Either, really. Most software being done is small projects,
but that has been true for many, many years. I see no change
here.
I do not even see that the rise of formal agile methods is
much of a trand. I suppose one may say that the rise in
formal methods of all sorts is a trend, though.
And I always throught "Web 2.0" was in references
to the use of AJAX technologies, which tend to favor
*larger* and *more complex* web-pages. I had not
heard that agile methods were assocated with this.
[snip]
Dan Johnson
"John C. Randolph" <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote in message
news:2006081116421116807%jcrnospam@nospammaccom...
> On 2006-08-10 07:00:14 -0700, "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net>
> said:
>>
>> The poster child here is "Time Machine", which is simply
>> an incremental backup program.
>
> Guess again. It's a backup facility based upon a journaling, versioned
> filesystem. You're the one in the shallow end, sunshine.
No way. If it was this, it would not need (or use) a separate
backup media, and it would be able to back up more often
than once a day.
Window's "Previous Versions" feature can already do this;
but Time Machine cannot.
It's incremental backup. A fine thing, and long overdue, but
definitely in the shallow end.
Dan Johnson
> On 2006-08-11 07:25:46 -0700, Wegie <he...@northere.com> said:
>> Incorrect. Apple has been working on this ability since 1994. Don't you
>> remember the product called AppleSearch?
>
> Actually, you're both wrong. AppleSearch wasn't integrated into the
> filesystem as Spotlight is, and Microsoft's search technology was
> predicated on keeping files in an RDBMS and requiring third-party
> developers to use their schemas.
You are thinking of WinFS, which never shipped and, it
now appears, never will.
I was talking about the Indexing Service in Windows XP,
which has shipped. The UI is a crawling horror, but the
core idea- extracting metadata from documents using
plugins- is in there.
>> Apple didn't cribbed anything from XP.
>
> That statement is also not entirely correct: there are a few things that
> Windows had first, which Apple then did far better. Fast user-switching
> springs to mind.
There are lots of things Windows has done that Apple has
tried to improve upon, sometimes with success. Spotlight
is the shining example here, where the UI is such an
improvement, it's a revelation.
Fast user switching is one that Apple cribbed from XP,
but I don't see that Apple's version is so much better,
really.
It's not anything like the difference between the Indexing
Service and Spotlight.
Dan Johnson
news:2006081123273829560%jcrnospam@nospammaccom...
> On 2006-08-11 23:11:49 -0700, ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> said:
> You can set how often you want your system to checkpoint its state. For
> most people, it would be daily. Keeping changes at a finer-grained level
> than that is something that's more appropriate for an app to do, since it
> knows what changes matter. (EG, you don't want to back up temporary
> working files.)
The screenies that have leaked out, here:
Show the Time Machine settings, and they do not show
such an option. You can control when the backup occurs,
but it is always daily.
It might be nice if it could be set to 'hourly', mind. With
Spotlight, this might not be unbearable slow. But this
will still be incremental backup.
Right now it appears to be incremental backup with
rather limited configuration choices, but a slick UI.
Very Apple. :D
>> So, I'm quite thoroughly confused now.
>
> All will become clear. ;-) If you want to know all about it right now,
> join the Apple developer program at a level that gets you a software seed
> key. Otherwise, sit tight till it ships.
Sit tight? That's no fun!
Dan Johnson
news:mr-36DDE9.08...@individual.net...
> In article <znu-A35EF0.0...@individual.net>,
> ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> wrote:
>
>> It would be somewhat disappointing if Time Machine was merely
>> incremental backup, but having that built into the OS with an extremely
>> consumer-friendly interface would still be pretty useful.
>
> I think they even said so in the keynote, that it would be daily
> backups.
Yes, but they didn't dwell on that. :D
>> Incidentally, did anyone else notice the Keynote file preview that
>> popped up when the old version of the file was being recovered? I'm not
>> aware of any infrastructure to support something like that in the
>> current version of OS X, so maybe there's some new system-level
>> previewing mechanism or something.
>
> Yeah, I saw that too and was surprised. Was it only a preview or did
> he even interact with the keynote? With iChats keynote abilities,
> maybe keynote support has been built in to the system in some way.
I don't think he interacted, but if I understand how this works
right, it should be possible to interact. The keynote file is
just a keynote file, with hardlinks used to avoid (some)
duplicate data being stored. Hard links are highly transparent,
so Keynote should be able to open its 'old version' directly.
Now, what would be very cool- and possible with this tech-
would be to open the keynote file *then* activate Time
Machine and go back, seeing each version's data in keynote
itself.
The Whizzy UI lends itself to this kind of thing.
Keynote will need some intelligence to avoid saving changes
back to the backup media, mind, but that would seem to be all
that you'd need to do. The ability to copy data from the past and
paste it into the present could be very handy.
Dan Johnson
> On 2006-08-11 18:40:09 -0700, "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net>
> said:
>
>> Objective-C is an old and unlovely language, which
>> Apple is trying to make presentable. But they are rather
>> late to the game, and are now far behind the efforts
>> of Sun and Microsoft.
>
> Wow. I'm used to seeing ignorance among the MS faction on this newsgroup,
> but that really takes the cake.
>
> Microsoft's effort in developing C# is simply to address their fear of
> Java breaking their developers loose from the Win32 API.
Sure thing. Doesn't make Objecive-C more competitive.
> It's a very poor knock-off of Java.
It's an excellent knock-off of Java!
> The libraries they've built around it are a symptom of their management
> and organizational incompetence, expressed in the proliferation of poorly
> thought-out classes (known in OO development circles as "lasagna code" for
> having too many layers).
The framework is a very nice class library. It displays
rather less of the lasagna nature than Java's standard library,
due to the use of events mostly.
But they are both good.
> Truth to tell, Microsoft barely even grasps the model-view-controller
> paradigm.
They may or may not, but they are not using either form
of it. That's not a sin; many applications do not require
this sort of thing, and it would be a mistake for force
developers to use it.
> Java itself had a good shot at becoming a decent language, but Gosling's
> fear of the conservatism that killed NeWS drove him to make it as familiar
> as possible to C++ developers, who are for the most part not trainable
> after the brain damage of templates has set in.
It's a common problem. You learn your first langage, and then-
Then that's just the way the world works for you.
Its very hard to get your brain around any other way of doing
things. The second language is, therefore, the hardest; and
many programmers never get over that hump.
Your comments leave me thinking that maybe you have
this problem, only with some other language than C++.
> The languages that have a possible claim to being better than Obj-C are
> all open source efforts like Ruby, Smalltalk and Python.
From this selection, I imagine you don't use, like, or understand
type systems. Yet many other people do, and much effort has
gone into improving this tool, at both Microsoft and Sun.
> Objective-C makes it possible for a company like Omni to have six shipping
> apps with only 12 developers. Do the math.
It is probably the very smallness of the organization which
makes this possible, less than the language.
To the extent that the tools, rather than the people, are
the reason for this performance, it's Cocoa, not
Objective-C, that makes the greater contribution.
Dan Johnson
I mean the compositor, in the window server.
Look at the Time Machine UI; you have it sliding the
desktop off the screen and replacing it with The Final
Frontier as a backdrop. You have a stack of windows
animating rapidly and showing various degrees of
opacity.
This is *exactly* what the compositor is good for.
This of how similar the animated effects are to
Expose.
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> news:znu-C0AC56.1...@individual.net...
> > In article <12dpt1r...@news.supernews.com>,
> > "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> >> > Part of the new trend is building smaller software, so what you're
> >> > saying is somewhat tautological.
> >>
> >> I don't see how this is a "new trend".
> >
> > Not sure in what sense you mean that. You mean you don't see this as a
> > trend, or you don't think it's new?
>
> Either, really. Most software being done is small projects,
> but that has been true for many, many years. I see no change
> here.
>
> I do not even see that the rise of formal agile methods is
> much of a trand. I suppose one may say that the rise in
> formal methods of all sorts is a trend, though.
>
> And I always throught "Web 2.0" was in references
> to the use of AJAX technologies, which tend to favor
> *larger* and *more complex* web-pages. I had not
> heard that agile methods were assocated with this.
What "Web 2.0" means tends to depend on what specific blogs one reads
regularly <g>. AJAX is part of of it, but this doesn't conflict with the
'simplicity' message that's also certainly there, because AJAX can
actually make both user interfaces and implementations simpler if it's
used correctly. And AJAX is a very simple, light-wight technology
compared with traditional ways of implementing GUIs (in desktop
applications).
ZnU
"Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
> news:znu-C3DFBE.1...@individual.net...
[snip]
> OTOH, had they a new Finder they could show, I think
> they'd have shown it. I don't buy the "MS will delay Vista
> *again* just to annoy Apple" line.
This is Apple we're talking about; they're pretty nuts about secrecy.
And new Finder UI isn't something they'd have to show to developers,
since it doesn't really have any impact on third-parties.
Well, we'll see. I'm sure Jobs knew exactly the kind of hype he'd stir
up mentioning that Apple was withholding "top secret" features, and I
doubt he'd have said it if they didn't have *something* impressive
coming along.
Snit
> In article <12drh9s...@news.supernews.com>,
> "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>
>> "ZnU" <z...@fake.invalid> wrote in message
>> news:znu-C3DFBE.1...@individual.net...
>
> [snip]
>
>> OTOH, had they a new Finder they could show, I think
>> they'd have shown it. I don't buy the "MS will delay Vista
>> *again* just to annoy Apple" line.
>
> This is Apple we're talking about; they're pretty nuts about secrecy.
> And new Finder UI isn't something they'd have to show to developers,
> since it doesn't really have any impact on third-parties.
>
> Well, we'll see. I'm sure Jobs knew exactly the kind of hype he'd stir
> up mentioning that Apple was withholding "top secret" features, and I
> doubt he'd have said it if they didn't have *something* impressive
> coming along.
If he does not he can use Time Machine to go back and not say it. :)
--
€ Things which are not the same are not "identical"
€ Incest and sex are not identical (only a pervert would disagree)
€ OS X is partially based on BSD (esp. FreeBSD)
Lars Träger
> OTOH, had they a new Finder they could show, I think
> they'd have shown it. I don't buy the "MS will delay Vista
> *again* just to annoy Apple" line.
Well, there are people who say they will have to delay it anyway...
--
Lars T.
Lars Träger
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:-OGdnY_Y-I_AZEHZ...@bresnan.com...
> > Dan Johnson wrote:
> >> And MS's transparency is much better for developers than
> >> Apple's secrecy.
> >
> > Transparency? You mean vapour-ware.
>
> Well, the two go together. But developers find it
> very hard to change directions as fast as Apple
> would have them do so. Microsoft gives them a
> lot more lead time.
Well, they certanly have more time to adopt to WinFS.
--
Lars T.
Lars Träger
> "John C. Randolph" <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote in message
> news:2006081123273829560%jcrnospam@nospammaccom...
> > On 2006-08-11 23:11:49 -0700, ZnU <z...@fake.invalid> said:
> [snip- Time Machine]
> > You can set how often you want your system to checkpoint its state. For
> > most people, it would be daily. Keeping changes at a finer-grained level
> > than that is something that's more appropriate for an app to do, since it
> > knows what changes matter. (EG, you don't want to back up temporary
> > working files.)
>
> The screenies that have leaked out, here:
>
> http://techpedia.org/a/90
>
> Show the Time Machine settings, and they do not show
> such an option. You can control when the backup occurs,
> but it is always daily.
Well, that Preference Pane says "(c) techpedia.org 2006", so I guess
that's their version of Time Machine.
--
Lars T.
GreyCloud
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:-OGdnY_Y-I_AZEHZ...@bresnan.com...
>
>>Dan Johnson wrote:
>>
>>>And MS's transparency is much better for developers than
>>>Apple's secrecy.
>>
>>Transparency? You mean vapour-ware.
>
>
> Well, the two go together. But developers find it
> very hard to change directions as fast as Apple
> would have them do so. Microsoft gives them a
> lot more lead time.
MS has to... their tools take more time to develop apps.
So what if the source is compiled twice? You have the Gnu compiler that
can do it. And the time spent isn't that much. It used to be that
VS6.0 could do the same for other archs as well, but then most of those
archs supported better o/ses and NT lost out... like what happened to
the Alphas that DEC sold. No one wanted NT because they had better
o/ses for these archs, like OpenVMS or Tru-64 UNIX and better tools.
I've found that VS C and the MS APIs are quite cumbersome to deploy
compared to the better written NSFoundation libs, etc.
>
>
>>The fact that a company can keep a secret is quite common in industry.
>
>
> It is. Doesn't mean its a good idea though.
You'd be surprised at how much is kept secret and what is kept secret in
the larger corporations. They have their reasons.
>
> [snip]
>
>>A different scenario for MS. For Apple it didn't matter. All the
>>developer needed to do was recompile his own code for intel versions.
>>The PPC will still run the universal binaries.
>
>
> This is not all a developer needs to do. Even for the
> simplest cases, you have to test and debug on the new
> architecture. The behavior of your program is changed
> by the compiler when it targets a new architecture.
>
I've never encountered that problem. That's where the Gnu compilers
come in and make life quite a bit easier. So far, compilation of Linux
source for an old VAX was very straight forward, as was doing the same
for PPC. There were a few snags, but these don't take that much time to
figure out.
> Compilers are allowed to do this for performance
> reasons, but its very awkward for porting. More
> recent langauges (Java, C#, etc) nail down behavior
> much more strictly precisely because of this problem.
>
> [snip]
>
>>>No. Shipping features is not especially easier
>>>in Unix.
>>
>>Of course it is. Once you understand how unix works, the rest falls into
>>place.
>
>
> No. I've programmed on Unix professionally, and I didn't
> like it much. Unix, qua Unix, provides very little in the
> way of applications serves.
>
If you have, you'd have known why it is easier to do in UNIX compared to
Windows NT and its later revisions.
>
>>An idea, once figured out, usually comes to fruition faster on Unix than
>>it will in windows... especially when using Objective-C.
>>What we are seeing now are the modules being better utilized.
>
>
> I see; you imagine that Mac OS X is good precisely and strictly
> because it is Unix like. That's mistaken; Apple has added
> a *large* amount of value to the basic Unix-like architecture.
>
Of course they have. But at the bottom is still Unix, and everything
else has to fit into that paradigm.
> A lot of it is really NeXT's code, but it still helps.
>
> Normal Unixes do not use Objective-C but C, or C++ if you
> are lucky. They do not have a framework like Cocoa,
> never mind all the stuff Apple has added. There's stuff in
> there that even Windows hasn't got.
I know. That's why the vast majority of Unixes use Motif and CDE as a
base. I've seen some pretty powerful tools from Sun and DEC in the past.
Apple just extended their libs thru careful thinking. Then one can
build on top of them to make better apps quicker.
>
> I tend to think that overall, programs written to Cocoa will
> ship features easier than those written to Carbon, or for
> that matter Win32. But this is not a Unix thing; it's a
> NeXT thing.
Of course it is. But all of these libs and extensions have to work
inside the paradigm of Unix.
Could NextStep libs or the Foundation libs work better and easier to
develop in NT or XP?
>
> The advantage here is mostly that the "native language" of
> Cocoa is Objective-C, and the "native language" of
> nearly everybody else is just C.
And Objective-C is just an extension to C. You still get all the
benefits of C. The extensions are simple but powerful.
> There's a productivity-sapping
> impedance mismatch if you use any other language but the
> native, even a closely related one (like C++ on Windows
> say).
>
You'll find the windows APIs all C at the bottom. I've yet to run into
any C++ APIs there, but you can use C++ code to use these APIs.
Still a PITA.
> [snip]
>
>>>XCode is widely derided as not ready for the big leagues;
>>>it's performance is not there yet. It doesn't scale to large
>>>projects. Perhaps XCode 3 will fix this.. when it ships.
>>
>>That was taken care of in XCode 2.1. The core is Gnu compiler set... and
>>they've tightened it up quite a bit. It used to be that Suns C compiler
>>generated 45% better code, but not anymore.
>
>
> No, the issue is not the performance of the generated programs,
> but the speed of the IDE *itself*. It bogs down on large
> projects. It is slow to open files, slow to edit files.
>
> Heck, even on small projects the code-sense they have
> is terribly slow.
I haven't run into that problem with XCode 2.1.
Could it be my G5?
>
>
>>>Objective-C is an old and unlovely language, which
>>>Apple is trying to make presentable. But they are rather
>>>late to the game, and are now far behind the efforts
>>>of Sun and Microsoft.
>>
>>Does better than the windows APIs that are written in straight C.
>
>
> Ya. This is one key advanage they have on Windows;
> you *can* program Windows in C++, Ob jective-C, C#,
> or many many other languages, but there will always be
> a translation layer in your way, causing problems.
>
> But even so these enhanced langauges are worth it. And
> MS is working on the problem; the version of .NET that
> will ship with Vista will offer its own UI support that
> won't just wrap Win32, and that's the biggest remaining
> piece they don't have yet. This will make C# much more
> competitive, and it's pretty good even now.
>
No, new programs take longer to develop and can be another source of new
bugs.
>
>>I've already been there, and nowhere is anything in Visual Studio is like
>>Objective-C. I find it faster to get code out in XCode compared to VS.
>
>
> Objective-C is a strength because it's the native language
> for Cocoa, and C-based APIs will always be at a
> disadvantage next to that.
>
> But C# *as a language* is much nicer than Objective-C:
> It's got:
> o Constructors
> o Namespaces
> o Nested Classes
> o Abstract Methods & Classes
> o Sealed Methods & Classes
> o Attributes
> o Delegates
> o Events
> o Properties
> o Operator Overloading
> o Foreach Loops
> o Safe Switches
> o Generics
> o Closures
> o Generators
> o Fixed blocks
>
All well and swell, but if everything that Apple produces is done with
Objective-C works and is easy to develop, there will be less of an
inclination to use C#. If C# is so good, then Intel would have develped
a C# compiler. All they have so far is C, C++, and Fortran 2003.
It would be nice to use C#... sort of like Java, which Apple includes
anyway. I just don't see how C# can fit in with what Apple already has.
> Plus a syntax that isn't a crawling horror for the sewers
> of hell, much stronger typesafety, and it generates 'safe'
> code by default. And it uses the more popular
> Simula cast-and-dispatch semantics.
>
That should be interesting to look into.
> Much of this will seem rather pedestrian to, say,
> Java 1.0 users- but Objective-C hasn't got any of
> that stuff.
>
> Objective-C has:
> o Categories
> o Class Methods
> o Selectors
>
> And it uses the less popular (and slower) Smalltalk
> dynamic dispatch semantics.
>
This is where the slow down occurs on most Mac apps.
> In short, it's Cocoa that makes Objecive-C
> worthwhile.
>
> [snip- web clipping widget]
>
>>>What's depressing is that Apple was reduced to demoing
>>>that as a Great New Feature.
>>
>>Depressing? I thought it was great. You want to know what depressing is?
>>Watching M$ demo their speech recognition software.
>
>
> That's entertaining! *Especially* when it breaks. :D
>
I still can't figure out how they could go and demo something that
someone else at least didn't try it out first in advance before the show
in the same auditorium tho.
> [snip]
>
>>>Yes. Perhaps Time Machine's UI will be the Best Restore UI
>>>Ever. I haven't used it, and we've only seen it briefly. It's
>>>awfully heavyweight and terribly whizzy, but it may work.
>>
>>Of course it will work. Most end users, those that just buy a PC out of
>>the box, have no idea what a backup is. This will alleviate some headaches
>>for a lot of that type of user.
>
>
> Unless Apple will sell their new Macs with two disks
> each, they still won't know, and won't be helped.
>
A possibility here would be at least a dialog asking if the user wants
to back up his data and allow the user to insert a DVD or CD. And then
instruct what to write on the disk at least.
> Time Machine requires a second disk of some kind to
> backup to. Slick UI, but the hard problem remains
> unsolved: how do you handle backup for very naive users
> who don't know about it, and wouldn't care if they did?
>
If it was done automatically, it won't be a problem. Transparent
backup. In the old VMS days, we had a second hard drive and installed a
mirroring program.
> [snip]
>
>>>Er, I have never used a virtual desktop utility that can't
>>>do that. It'd be quite limiting not to have that.
>>
>>Have you ever used CDE?
>
>
> No, but I understand it's a crawling horror.
>
It isn't as bad as they say it is. It has gone thru the rigours of
complaints and fixes. It isn't elegant, but it serves the professional
world adequately. There are even websites that host tutorial
programming of Motif on CDE.
> I last used virtual desktops years ago, on Sun
> boxes. I could do this then- it involved dragging little
> wireframe proxies for the windows between little
> proxies for the virtual desktops.
>
> I forget which window manager this was, though.
>
Sounds like OpenLook.
It has been a while since I used that one.
> [snip]
>
>>>I have done that; it looks like incremental backup to me.
>>
>>Got a better idea over incremental backup? In this case it is done daily
>>automatically, and is a good idea.
>>What does MS have in mind for Vista?
>
>
> They have incremental backup there too, of course.
>
> They also propose to bring Windows Server 2003's'
> Previous Versions feature to Vista.
>
> Each time you save the previous version of the file is
> retained, and can be recovered. There's a way to get
> deleted files back, too. The old copies are stored
> on a per-block basis, so its uses less space, and it
> does not need a separate backup media.
>
> The UI is done with list views and isn't terribly whizzy,
> but it is available today in Windows Server, and will
> be in a Vista near you soon! :D
>
I liked the versioning numbers that VMS used on files...
XYZ.COM;1 XYZ.COM;2 XYZ.COM;3 etc. After you are done with a project
and are happy with your results, you can do a PURGE on your account
which will delete all the earlier ones except the latest.
>
>>>Notice that Apple emphasises the UI in the demos, and
>>>they don't talk about the underlying tech. Notice that
>>>they only ever restore individual files. Notice that they
>>>never talk about the *backup* part, just the restore part.
>>
>>The backup is automatic.
>>The underlying tech does not need to be demoed in this case...
>>Unix is the tech.
>
>
> You got a Unix fixation there.
>
You can count on it. Everything has to run ontop of Unix.
> I do not know what they are using for backup
> exactly; I wouldn't be surprised to learn it just
> the old open-source backup tools.
>
I wanted to, but Apple left out one important item I haven't gotten an
adequate answer to: which device name do I use with the dump command.
Once that is known, scripts can be written to do just about anything you
want.
> If so, you could demo them, but it would be a yawn,
> so it is no wonder they didn't.
>
Well, we all know the purpose of a dog and pony show is for.
--
Where are we going?
And why am I in this handbasket?
John C. Randolph
>
> To the extent that the tools, rather than the people, are
> the reason for this performance, it's Cocoa, not
> Objective-C, that makes the greater contribution.
I see that your lack of understanding is very deep, indeed.
Objective-C is what makes the Cocoa library possible. There were
several attempts to replicate Cocoa in other languages, and the results
weren't pretty, to say the least.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
> Sit tight? That's no fun!
Better than guessing at details, arguing against yoru guesses, and
looking like an idiot. You don't know what you're talking about, so
quit while you're behind.
-jcr
John C. Randolph
Dude, I was AT the conference. You don't know what you're talking about.
-jcr
GreyCloud
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:-OGdnY7Y-I-jZ0HZ...@bresnan.com...
>
>>Dan Johnson wrote:
>>
>>>What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
>>>OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
>>
>>Oh?!? Then why did I dump a brand new dual core pentium D from HP with XP
>>on it for an new iMac then? Because of the miserable security offered by
>>M$.
>
>
> You believe Apple's propaganda; but hey, that's what it's
> for, selling Macs.
>
> Windows XP was, at its initial release, not so secure-
> but no worse than Mac OS X is today. Heaven knows
> that's not *good*, but users don't seem to care.
>
I'd say that the end user does care when problems start showing up.
The Seattle Times had an excellent article on how their PCs started to
slow down due to malware and such. Some just tossed out their cheap
Dells and purchased new ones without knowing why.
I've yet in three years now never had to put up with any of the XP woes
that have plagued the end user.
> MS has done much to improve XP since then, but
> that effort isn't 5 years old, so it does support my
> claims too well.
The problems are still cropping up. Last I heard this year a nasty
problem occured in the UK where one guy commandeered over 100,000 PCs to
do his spamming, known as spam zombies. I've yet to hear of this
problem on any Macs.
>
> Apple, on the other hand, has assiduously spread
> disinformation to the gullible, telling them that there's
> some magic pixy dust called "Unix" that they sprinkle
> on Mac OS X, and that this makes it secure.
It isn't their ads or propaganda, it is from using other systems like
Sun, DEC, HP/UX, etc that have given proof. Yet one can just google for
"Microsoft XP malware" or such and get thousands of hits on these
problems. It seems more that it is M$ that is spreading their own brand
of propaganda saying how secure they are, yet that is far from the truth.
>
> None of that is actually true, but the technically ignorant
> sometimes believe this stuff.
>
The trully technically ignorant should go buy a good UNIX programming
book and find out why UNIX does not get viruses.
GreyCloud
> On 2006-08-11 18:57:24 -0700, "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net>
> said:
>
>> What's really remarkable is that XP is *still* the best desktop
>> OS overall, even now, 5 years after its release.
>
>
> No, what's incredible is that there are people who actually believe what
> you just wrote above. You all really need to get out more.
Actually, when you read other professional IT news, you'll find words
like PeeCees, Windwoes, etc. and their laughing at windows. Plus the
never ending news reports of the latest windows flaw and the never
ending necessity to download the latest M$ patch. I've never had any
problems with OS X, Sun Solaris, or DEC OpenVMS. Just MS Windows.
Dan Johnson
I dunno about this. My understanding is that AJAX is
the use of client-side Javascript, accessing back-end
data presented as XML. Instead of having links
between pages, you have a page that rewrites itself
using the DOM.
This can provide a nicer UI, but it's certainly a lot more
complex than conventional web pages with links.
But "Web 2.0" is such a fuzzy concept that I can't argue
much; most people seem to use the term to mean, simply,
"What I want the web to be like".
John C. Randolph
Dan,
I don't think you're at a technical level that would allow me to fully
explain this to you. You don't use the compositor to implement
effects. In fact, it's rather unusual to use it drectly at all.
Read this:
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/overview.html
and this:
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/quartz/quartzcomposer.html
The Time Machine UI is implemented using Core Animation, and several
Quartz Composer elements, including a particle system for the star
field, sprites to show the windows on the timeline, etc.
-jcr
Dan Johnson
>> OTOH, had they a new Finder they could show, I think
>> they'd have shown it. I don't buy the "MS will delay Vista
>> *again* just to annoy Apple" line.
>
> This is Apple we're talking about; they're pretty nuts about secrecy.
> And new Finder UI isn't something they'd have to show to developers,
> since it doesn't really have any impact on third-parties.
That did not stop them showing off Tiger's "New Finder";
The New Apple is all about manipulation perception, about
excellence in public relations. But that has not, in the past,
meant *absolute* secrecy, right up to release; it has meant
complete control over timing and presentation.
In the past, Apple has annouced these things in a 'big bang'
at a Steve Jobs Keynote. That seemed to work for them.
Why would they hold the keynote, pretend to preview Leopard,
but actually hold back all the good stuff?
I think he showed what he had. It's a simple explaination,
and it also explains all the MS bashing and such.
> Well, we'll see. I'm sure Jobs knew exactly the kind of hype he'd stir
> up mentioning that Apple was withholding "top secret" features, and I
> doubt he'd have said it if they didn't have *something* impressive
> coming along.
He has never had any trouble stiring up the hype. I think
he said that to deflect attention from the rather lame
preview he was about to give.
Dan Johnson
news:1hjz3z1.1dhv2cs39efdfN%Lars.T...@epost.de...
> Dan Johnson <daniel...@vzavenue.net> wrote:
>> Well, the two go together. But developers find it
>> very hard to change directions as fast as Apple
>> would have them do so. Microsoft gives them a
>> lot more lead time.
>
> Well, they certanly have more time to adopt to WinFS.
That is why it was such a big deal when MS dropped
it. For MS's long lead time to help, the info has to be
accurate; for Vista it wasn't entirely so.
Still, they do try, and it is to be hoped that the *rest*
of the roadmap MS put out there will come true.
GreyCloud
> "GreyCloud" <mi...@cumulus.com> wrote in message
> news:-OGdnYnY-I9TZ0HZ...@bresnan.com...
>
>>Dan Johnson wrote:
>
> [snip- MS drops Fortran]
>
>>>That's an odd non-sequitur. What are you getting at?
>>
>>Simple. They've always hinted at equaling or going beyond what DEC had
>>offered in development tools, but never did.
>
>
> What are these wonderful DEC development tools you
> refer to? When I used VMS- many years ago in my misspent
> youth- the development tools were not impressive at all.
>
Their languages were complete and well documented. Their libraries were
complete and well documented without leaving anything out that one might
want. Ex: you can open a file as indexed and key on anything you want
to do. Back then MS never had anything like it. You had to roll your
own custom database back then. I could also mix language very easily
under VMS. All I had to do was link all the object modules together to
make a complete program from using the various strengths of each
language. Their stack frame was standardized, unlike what MS had pushed
out where some languages you had to futz with the stack first.
What was the deal in MS Fortran where you had to use [HUGE] or [LARGE]
or [SMALL] and other non standard labels? Then they had to preface a
call saying that the subroutine was in pascal. I never had to do this
in vms. DEC made it dirt easy.
> Anyway, it still seems a non-sequitur. MS has dropped
> a very old language- Fortran- for a shiny new one- C#. This
> seems to suggest forward motion on their part.
>
Intel just wrote Fortran 2003. There is a very good reason to use
fortran where numeric accuracy has to be kept and flagged when you lose
that accuracy. That was the purpose of many languages on one main frame
in the older days. Each language had its own strengths and weaknesses.
>
>> Another problem is that MS has actually stagnated the market.
>
>
> I do not think MS can be blamed for Apple mistakes,
> nor those of the Unix vendors. If Apple did not produce
> great products sooner, that's *Apple's* fault. They wasted
> a lot of time and effort producing not much in the mid
> nineties.
>
Let me put it a different way. Back before IBM made the PC, there were
many micro-computer makers that were rolling out some nice machines that
could do multi-user/multi-tasking at a low cost. Then along came the
IBM PC. Everybody jumped over there due to Big Blues influence.
Everybody was hoping for some of that mainframe technology to filter
down to the PC... it never happened. Every one waited a decade for MS
to come out with a multi-tasking o/s that never showed up. By then most
of the other vendors died out leaving the public with MS-DOS. That's
what I mean by stagnation.
The industry was pushed back a decade and shouldn't have happened.
>
>> Now that Apple is figuring it out, things may again be
>>competitive.
>
>
> They already have. This starting in the mid-nineties with
> Sun's Java.
>
> This is an excellent development. Microsoft is at its best
> when competing with other vendors. During the period that
> MS was unchallenged, they spent their time animating ordinary
> office products with a perverse unlife. [1]
>
In this case, MS went out of their way to derail Java by incorporating
their own changes to Java... which led to a lawsuit.
> And Apple's more recent efforts are also welcome. They are
> shallow, as I said, but if nobody is trying to top Window's
> UI, then that UI won't improve much.
>
There should be a diversity of UIs out there to suit various needs. I
doubt one will be a panacea for all.
> [1] Clippy!
>
Don't forget their dog.
Dan Johnson
> Dan Johnson wrote:
>> But the fly in the ointment is the compilation step; you
>> compile your source *twice*, and get two different
>> outputs. In C, C++ and Objective-C there's a lot of wiggle
>> room in the language definition, and the compiler can
>> produce quite different behaviors for the different
>> versions.
>
> So what if the source is compiled twice?
I just explained. Let me try again.
The programs are in C, or C++, or Objecive-C. All
these langauges allow a lot of leeway in they
way a program is compiled. This is for optimization;
optimizations that can change the behavior of the
program are allowed, within some limits.
If you compile your program twice for two
different achitectures, you cannot be certain
you hvae the same behavior in both results. It
is probably mostly the same, and perhaps the
differences won't matter.
But you gotta test; and having testing, you will
almost certainly have to debug. There's too much
that can go wrong to expect that nothing will.
The art of portable C is the art of tolerating these
differences.
Even if your program works on Windows, it's
not enough: you are probably compiling with MS's
compiler. It will produce different output than
GCC, though for the same instruction set. So
even a highly portable program will need testing
after being transfered to XCode.
[snip]
> I've never encountered that problem. That's where the Gnu compilers come
> in and make life quite a bit easier. So far, compilation of Linux source
> for an old VAX was very straight forward, as was doing the same for PPC.
> There were a few snags, but these don't take that much time to figure out.
Quite a lot of effort goes into writing portable C you
can do that. It is posisble to write C than compiles
for many targets; but it is difficult to do.
[snip]
>> No. I've programmed on Unix professionally, and I didn't
>> like it much. Unix, qua Unix, provides very little in the
>> way of applications serves.
>
> If you have, you'd have known why it is easier to do in UNIX compared to
> Windows NT and its later revisions.
Not at all. Win32 is much richer than the 'generic'
Unix API. Don't confuse Unix with Mac OS X! Apple
has added a great deal.
[snip]
>> I see; you imagine that Mac OS X is good precisely and strictly
>> because it is Unix like. That's mistaken; Apple has added
>> a *large* amount of value to the basic Unix-like architecture.
>
> Of course they have. But at the bottom is still Unix, and everything else
> has to fit into that paradigm.
No. Mac OS X's userspace does not fit the Unix paradigm
terrible well. Most things aren't files; programs are quite
large and are not connected with pipes. Binary data is
prefered\ to text files.
Cocoa and Carbon do not have the Unix Nature, if I
may put it so.
[snip]
> I know. That's why the vast majority of Unixes use Motif and CDE as a
> base. I've seen some pretty powerful tools from Sun and DEC in the past.
> Apple just extended their libs thru careful thinking. Then one can build
> on top of them to make better apps quicker.
Apple's libraries are *not* extensions of CDE or Motif,
thank Steve!
[snip]
> Of course it is. But all of these libs and extensions have to work inside
> the paradigm of Unix.
> Could NextStep libs or the Foundation libs work better and easier to
> develop in NT or XP?
Yes, I should think so. Not by much, but...
There's nothing in Cocoa or Carbon that prohibits
proper memory exhaustion handling; it's just that
OS X is too Unix like to report this condition. NT
can do it, though.
[snip]
>> There's a productivity-sapping
>> impedance mismatch if you use any other language but the
>> native, even a closely related one (like C++ on Windows
>> say).
>
> You'll find the windows APIs all C at the bottom. I've yet to run into
> any C++ APIs there, but you can use C++ code to use these APIs.
> Still a PITA.
There are some C++ APIs, for all that. DirectX is like
that. So is GDI+. But it's mostly C.
[snip- C# features]
> All well and swell, but if everything that Apple produces is done with
> Objective-C works and is easy to develop, there will be less of an
> inclination to use C#.
Objective-C works poorly on Windows; no support
from MS, and no frameworks to speak of.
> If C# is so good, then Intel would have develped a C# compiler. All they
> have so far is C, C++, and Fortran 2003.
Why would Intel want to develop a C# compiler? They've
got MS for that.
> It would be nice to use C#... sort of like Java, which Apple includes
> anyway. I just don't see how C# can fit in with what Apple already has.
I don't imagine it will. They should do what they are doing-
upgrading Objective-C.
But they are far behind at this point. That language
stagnated for too long.
[snip]
>> And it uses the less popular (and slower) Smalltalk
>> dynamic dispatch semantics.
>
> This is where the slow down occurs on most Mac apps.
I feel the biggest slowdown for Cocoa apps is the
memory allocator. One hopes the new allocator
they will provide for Objective-C 2.0 will
be fast. It would make a big difference.
The messenger is slower the virtual dispatch,
but it's not *that* slow, and Objective-C supports
ordinary function calls when you need them,
and various other tricks. But it's really hard to
avoid the allocator.
[snip]
>> That's entertaining! *Especially* when it breaks. :D
>
> I still can't figure out how they could go and demo something that someone
> else at least didn't try it out first in advance before the show in the
> same auditorium tho.
Oh, they certainly tried it out. It no doubt worked *that*
time. Bugs are touchy things, and they don't always
happen consistently.
Just like Apple surely tried out Time Machine before
the keynote, and iPhoto didn't freeze *that* time.
[snip]
>> Unless Apple will sell their new Macs with two disks
>> each, they still won't know, and won't be helped.
>
> A possibility here would be at least a dialog asking if the user wants to
> back up his data and allow the user to insert a DVD or CD. And then
> instruct what to write on the disk at least.
This does not seem compatible with Time Machine's UI;
the thing is supposed to back up 'invisibly', with no
user effort. So it "just works". Seems laudable as
far as it goes.
[snip]
> If it was done automatically, it won't be a problem. Transparent backup.
> In the old VMS days, we had a second hard drive and installed a mirroring
> program.
Sure thing. You can do that now with Windows if you
have a second drive. But the users who most need
this, the users who don't back up conscienciously.. in
other words the large majority of users... they don't
have a spare disk.
[snip]
>> I forget which window manager this was, though.
>
> Sounds like OpenLook.
> It has been a while since I used that one.
It was qutie a bit like what Apple proposes with
Spaces, though of course wireframes are much less
pretty than having the actual window, scaled down.
[snip]
>> The UI is done with list views and isn't terribly whizzy,
>> but it is available today in Windows Server, and will
>> be in a Vista near you soon! :D
>
> I liked the versioning numbers that VMS used on files...
> XYZ.COM;1 XYZ.COM;2 XYZ.COM;3 etc. After you are done
> with a project and are happy with your results, you can do a
> PURGE on your account which will delete all the earlier ones
> except the latest.
The technology appears to be rather like VMS's
system, but the UI is different. And if there's a purge
command, I know nothing of it.
[snip]
Steve Carroll
John C. Randolph <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote:
> On 2006-08-12 22:01:32 -0700, "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net>
> said:
>
> > "John C. Randolph" <jcr.n...@nospam.mac.com> wrote in message
> > news:2006081119245882327%jcrnospam@nospammaccom...
> >> On 2006-08-10 18:37:45 -0700, "Dan Johnson" <daniel...@vzavenue.net>
> >> said:
> >>
> >>> If it's done with Quartz Compositor it should be pretty
> >>> zippy.
> >>
> >> The Quartz Compositor is the window server. Did you mean
> >> Quartz Composer?
> >
> > I mean the compositor, in the window server.
> >
> > Look at the Time Machine UI; you have it sliding the
> > desktop off the screen and replacing it with The Final
> > Frontier as a backdrop. You have a stack of windows
> > animating rapidly and showing various degrees of
> > opacity.
> >
> > This is *exactly* what the compositor is good for.
> >
> > This of how similar the animated effects are to
> > Expose.
>
> Dan,
>
> I don't think you're at a technical level that would allow me to fully
> explain this to you.
It's not really required to accomplish the goal Dan has set for himself
in coming to this newsgroup;)
> You don't use the compositor to implement
> effects. In fact, it's rather unusual to use it drectly at all.
>
> Read this:
>
> http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/overview.html
>
> and this:
>
> http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/quartz/quartzcomposer.html
>
> The Time Machine UI is implemented using Core Animation, and several
> Quartz Composer elements, including a particle system for the star
> field, sprites to show the windows on the timeline, etc.
>
--
Heck, OS X is not even partially based on FreeBSD - Snit
Sandman and Carroll are running around trying to crucify trolls
like myself - Snit
I am a bigger liar than Steve - Snit