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Nov 19, 08 - 10:59 am Comment from: Ouate de Phoque

d'ya think!

Most telling bit of the article:
Russell went on to defend Vista, specifically its ability to "run on a very wide-ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable," he said. "Apple doesn't do that." No they don't. Neither do they waste time pumping themselves up with faint praise.

Ives speaks of the difficulty of the pruning process necessary to good design.
Jobs speaks of the continuing need to stay tightly focused in your direction as a company.

Microsoft can't seem to understand where to direct their incredible pool of talent, power and money. What a waste.

Nov 19, 08 - 11:42 am Comment from: G4Dualie

Russell went on to defend Vista, specifically its ability to "run on a very wide-ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable," he said. "Apple doesn't do that."

There's part of the problem right there. When you start believing your own manufactured BS, you know you have gone off the reservation.

What's not lost on Russell's boss is the fact that Mac users enjoy a "premium" experience over wide-ranging set of systems, including phones!

Nov 19, 08 - 12:01 pm Comment from: DLMeyer

Windows MUST support a very wide-ranging set of systems ... the hardware starts at half the price of the least expensive Mac and runs to twice the price. Apple only has to deal with the quarter of the price spectrum at the upper end of the consumer spectrum. Still, that would be covered by two?, three?, versions of Vista. And one version of OSX.
Focus is the key to minimizing spaghetti code, which also helps to minimize bugs and security holes. Apple is actually featuring this process with Snow Leopard, an update which consists mainly of stripping PPC code out of the current version. A version my wife will have to wait for, seeing as I won't be upgrading my Dual G5 immediately. <grrr!>

As a Mac and iPhone user, I'm appalled. Since we are all elitists and better than everyone else, why don't we restrict all Apple products to only Apple Retail Stores. Steve can raise the prices up even more (say $1299 for an entry level iPhone and $4000 for a Mac Mini)..... We don't need a big market share with margins like that....

Again, since we're so cool, let's do what we can to keep the riff raff out..

WOW ... this guy Russell is sure playing semantics by avoiding the fact that if you want a premium experience you need premium hardware. By trying to be everything to everyone, they are nothing !
We in the Apple world know that we must upgrade to an Intel Mac if we choose to run Snow Leopard when it's released in 2009. We can simply buy a new computer or continue running our older G5s & G4s until they give up the ghost. That's the nature of technology.

"run on a very wide-ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable," he said. "Apple doesn't do that."

Eh... that's debatable. I have a 4+ year old iMac G5 that runs Leopard very smoothly. While not quite "minimally capable", it is running the full OS, not a stripped-down OS.

Nov 19, 08 - 01:42 pm Comment from: Ugh.

Vegas guy.

More like Jealous Guy.

Anyone who trolls with a post like that has serious inferiority complex issues.

@Ugh.
I don't think Vegas Guy has a complex, just actual inferiority.

I'm running tiger on 8 year old imacs here at our school and they run just fine for what we need them to do. There isn't an 8 year old windows box in the county that is still running any version of any windows - they obsolete so fast.

Nov 19, 08 - 03:29 pm Comment from: MacAngus

I'm running Panther on a bunch of 1999 iMac G3s, so I think that's fairly generous of OS X.

Nov 19, 08 - 03:40 pm Comment from: Macintosher

@ed Stephan

Actually, I have a Windows 98 box bought in 1998 that still runs. But it doesn't connect to the internet and it doesn't do much, so I dare say it doesn't really count.

I switched from that to XP to Mac. The Mac was the best change by far. I'm happy.

Microsoft = Masters of Deceit

I'm running Leopard on a Macbook Pro here. In almost every way it's inferior to Vista.

It just has that slightly unfinished feeling, menus detached from the applications and placed along the top of the screen wasting the space whether you want it or not and requiring a lot more mouse movement to get to while working in the app, a dock which doesn't show everything you've got running or allow easy selection of all open windows with a single click, or even easy access to programs you want to use occasionally but not have in your face the whole time, dialogs which don't pop up in the middle of windows, but that the developer has unattractively placed butting up to title like a roller blind, a mix of icon styles and window visuals even in the core OS, a feeling that things haven't moved on much visually from the first Macs even though graphics hardware is now much more powerful, a strange mix of flat 2d graphics (for example menus) and pseudo 3d shaded buttons, dialogs with no simple single key press to accept an dismiss rather a need to mouse to a tiny and dangerous red looking close button to accept and save changes, a finder which is just that bit more awkward to do everything in than Vista's explorer, a feeling that controls and window and dialog layouts just look unbalanced, and the need to go to one tiny point on each window to drag and resize it. Your mouse/trackpad hand sure gets a workout running Leopard, roving all over the screen to perform tasks that require minimal mouse movement in Vista. Safari is almost unusable as a web browser.

In all it's a strange mishmash of an operating system. Overall I found the lack of coherency disturbing from a company which prides itself on it's design skills. It's hard to see how anyone regards it as superior.

The spinning beachball of death, that's a lot more common than any Vista crash.

If I wanted a second rate interface on top of a Unix style OS, I could always go to Linux...

It's fairly clear that Mac OS X is all hype, no substance, slower to achieve just about every task and ugly along with it.

Nov 19, 08 - 05:03 pm Comment from: Greg L

The U.S. should put the Apple Mac and OS X on the munitions list of goods that can not be exported. We already don’t export the F-22; it’s too advanced. We are only willing to export the F-35, which can’t fly as high, has a bigger radar cross-section, and isn’t nearly as maneuverable. Thus, we keep the F-22 so we maintain a strategic advantage and don’t put vital how-to information in the hands of allies, where it might leak to enemies.

We should do the same with all forms of Windows and the Mac. We allow export of Windows but keep OS X to ourselves. If we’re going to sell out all our manufacturing to China (because our trade negotiators are fucking nitwits) and are going to have “information and technology” as our saving grace, why make it easier for the competition?

@Review
Two things: I'm surprised you didn't piss and moan about the punctuation keys and the space bar being too far for you to reach or maybe it is the OS that is making your rambling style difficult to read. Secondly, did you just get your MacBook Pro over the weekend?? It seems like it because a lot of the problems you mention are handled by changes in the Preferences. I'll give you one tip, you figure out the rest of them yourself. . . .or get your parents to help you. Have something running that you use a lot but it doesn't show up in the dock?? Open the Applications folder and drag the icon to the dock - there it is and, if it has a white arrow pointing at it, you know it is open. One click and you are back in that program.

Twit!

Greg doesn't get it.

Posted from my iPhone

Nov 20, 08 - 01:37 am Comment from: ken1w

I love this line from the linked article

> "I think we have made a mistake in equating 'running Vista well' with a 'premium experience,'" Russell continued in his e-mail.

So when Vista is "running well," it is NOT meant to be a "premium experience"? What kind of an experience is it meant to be? Low end and tacky...?

If Snow Leopard is released any time in 2009, Windows 7 will be two (maybe three) iterations behind Mac OS X.

@ Review

I run Leopard and Vista Ultimate on a Santa Rosa MBP, and I can think of many ways vista is inferior. The first thing that comes to mind is the hot my laptop gets when Vista is running. Both fans come on full blast during normal web surfing -- in the same situations Leopard doesn't even get one fan to kick in.

I recently deleted my Vista Recycle Bin. Why the hell is that even allowed? Go ahead and try it - click on the Recycle Bin and scroll down to Delete. Poof. It's gone. I had to do a Google search to find out how to get it back. There's more but I don't want to bore everybody.

Now that I've cited examples, why don't you do the same? Or should we just take your word because you know better than the rest of us?

"Open the Applications folder and drag the icon to the dock "

That'd work if I could drag the whole applications folder to the doc, but I cant. If I add every application, then I end up with a dock full of crap whether the app is running or not. And even then, when the app is running it's a two step process, click on the app, then go to it's window menu (a whole screen's worth of mouse moving away) to find the window, unless of course it's minimized in which case Apple deems it worthy of being shown in the dock. But the point is there's no one quick way to jump straight to any running window with one mouse click. Yes, I know about expose, but it's still a two step process, hit a key then find the window.

Just give me a start menu, some small quick launch buttons for apps I want to be one click away and something along the bottom of the screen which shows me what's running and allows me to choose each and every window of that application with a single click.

Sorry, the taskbar and start menu solidly beat the dock for actual functionality and ease of use. But you know that dock sure is pretty (while being pretty useless).

As a general rule there's a lot more mouse movement and mouse clicks required under Mac OS X to get anything done.

"Both fans come on full blast during normal web surfing"

Both fans on my MBP come on when it's "asleep" in it's case. and then it gets REALLY hot. But some genius at the Apple store tells me that's a known hardware issue and they'll replace it, just bring it in. I'm also glad my multitouch trackpad now kinda works better with the latest firmware update.


I wish my Mac's only problem was that the fans came on when the CPU gets used, or that I deleted the icon for my recycle bin from the desktop.


I'm sorry, it's just not possible to accidentally delete the recycle bin in Vista.

Firstlyl what did you think delete was going to do? Once you chose Delete, what was unclear about the message which came up telling you you were about to delete the recycle bin and telling you how to get it back if you wanted it back? Why did you click Yes in that confirmation dialog without reading it? How much more could Microsoft have done to help you avoid that problem? Pop up a second dialog asking you if you'd accidentally hit Yes in the first one, and telling you again how to get it back if you wanted it back? Perhaps a 3rd dialog in case you accidentally hit yes twice in a row? perhaps get you to type a little confirmation string like the MDN word to be really sure?

For me one message box explaining what I'm about to do and asking me if I'm sure is enough. Putting a full explanation of how to get it back in that box is nice too.

Even if you totally ignored the warning that you were deleting the recycle bin and clicked yes to wanting to do it, and didn't remember the instructions in that confirmation box that told you how to get it back later if you changed your mind, who would have even guessed that you would use the personalization section of the control panel to get it back? Who would have guessed that right mouse on the desktop followed by personalize, followed by choosing change desktop icons would get it back.

Here's a hint for windows, you'll usually find that right clicking on things (including the desktop) brings up a menu of things you can do with that thing, you know, kinda like the Mac now does for many things.

You can probably bring up some things to hate with Vista, but in terms of core structure of the UI and the desktop and coherency and design of the UI, Vista is a long way ahead.

And since you're such an expert on removing trash bins, how do I get that trash bin off the dock?

@Review

You can't get out the trash bin!

For starting occasionally programs which you don't want in the dock, just use spotlight (command+space) write the program name and hit return!

But You see too many wrongs things in Leopard that doesn't exist.. I think you are a Windows drug addicted with now possible recover... just use windows and be happy!!

cheers,
JP

@Review
I have no trouble dragging the Applications folder (or the whole Macintosh HD for that matter) to the dock. Perhaps you can explain what problem you are having?

Much of your intervening observations are aesthetic in nature, and there was a market for the lime green Pinto, so to each his own. The rest of your objections, save one, can be put down to frozen abstraction fallacy (if it doesn't work like what I'm used to, its wrong).

As for deleting the Trash from the Dock there is a post on CocoaTech which has that information. Unlike Vista, in OS X it is hard and technical to do something that for 99.99% of users is monumentally stupid, as you yourself point out. By the way the Google search that led me to that result (on the first results page) was "Remove Trash from Dock".

The trick is if you drag Applications from the sidbar to the dock, it just vaporises the one in the finder and you have to go put it back (using as equally an arcane process (which is to say not very arcane) as to put your recycle bin back under Windows. If you drag it from Spotlight it doesn't work either. both of those would seem to be quite obvious ways to achieve the job.

Encouraged by your comments that it is actually possible to do, I found if you actually open the drive, and grab the folder, you can drop it there. But it's still a poor substitute for the hierarchical, learning start menu.

"The rest of your objections, save one, can be put down to frozen abstraction fallacy"

No, I think the above shows that it doesn't work how I'd expect. There is no similar Windows action to "drag a folder to the Dock", but if you can drag an application to quick launch, you can do it from anywhere you find that application be it explorer, the start menu,the desktop, desktop search, even the file->open box from an application, not from only one place.

That's what I mean about rough edges and incompleteness in Mac OS X. You try what seems obvious and it doesn't work.

I tried two obvious ways to achieve the task, and had to go try a 3rd less obvious way, which I only tried because someone told me that it was actually possible to achieve. That's not good UI design!

And that kind of experience pervades Mac OS X.

To get rid of an icon on the dock you expect me to:

1. Copy your Finder from CoreServices to /Applications using Path Finder (you will need to authenticate). Next, use the Finder to rename the Path Finder to Finder. Then copy the re-named Path Finder to CoreServices.
2. Repair permissions and re-boot.
3. Next into the Path Finder resources folder and copy the file /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/PathFinder.icns to a temporary folder like the desktop. Rename it to FinderIcon.icns.
4. Move your new FinderIcon.icns to /System/Library/CoreServices/Core Types.bundle/Contents/Resources/. Replace the existing FinderIcon.icns with the new Path Finder one.
5. Delete the file /Library/Caches/com.apple.dock.iconcache.xxx (x represents some number that will be different for each user.
6. Repair permissions and re-boot.

Right click, delete, followed by answering Yes I'm sure under Vista is looking really friendly compared to all that.

The one time a year I accidentally delete something, I'll be happy to go through a menu to undelete it. So can someone tell me the magic sequence of mouse clicks, drags, drops or settings to make the trash go away?

@Review

Okay, seriously--why are you using OSX? And equally seriously, why are you posting here to complain about it? _If_ you're here for advice, it's been given to you, and fairly clearly at that.

But it sounds like the "issues" you're having are because OSX doesn't behave the way you expect it to--and you expect it to behave like Windows. It's not Windows. For those of us here who choose to use OSX, it behaves pretty much like we expect it to (pretty much; there are inconsistencies, that's true, but they're generally minor--i.e., iTunes doesn't 'minimise' the way other OSX apps do, but instead collapses to a small control window).

It sounds like you greatly prefer Windows Vista. Good. Why did you buy a Macbook Pro, then? Only to install Vista? Obviously you're on a limb here if you expect courtesy (which you've gotten), but you don't seem willing to follow the good advice you've been offered.

Here's a little more advice--sell the Macbook Pro, buy a Viao, use Vista, and be content. It seems to suit the way you think and work more appropriately.

And then stop trolling. Until then, drag just your Applications folder from a Finder window (_not_ the Sidebar, genius) to the right-hand side of your Dock, learn how to use it, stop whining, and get some real work done.

MDN word: "Lost," as in, "This guy is so completely lost he deserves Vista."

@Review
"To get rid of an icon on the dock you expect me to:. . . . . .blah, blah, blah, blah. . . . ."

No, I expect you to click on the icon in the dock and drag it to the trash. POOF! It is gone!! Need it back?? Open the Applications folder, click on the desired icon and drag it to the dock. Magic!!!

Your problem is that you are so Windows conditioned that it is far too difficult to imagine that things can be and are a helluva lot simpler. Quit trying to apply techniques used with Windows and start from scratch. Suck it up, admit you are just being stubborn, that you think you know "there is a better way" and visit the Apple site and go through some of the tutorials. Here's one to begin with:
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/

"you don't seem willing to follow the good advice you've been offered. "

Like what? hack my finder and dock using some hairy instructions from an OS version a couple of revs back? I'll stay with the lower risk option of being annoyed by the Trash Can.

"(_not_ the Sidebar, genius) "

Now what's stupid about that, I see a thing that when clicked on opens the folder I want, the finder lets me drag it around, it just doesn't do what you'd expect when you'd drop it.

And even if that's stupid, how is it stupid to find it with spotlight and try and drag that object which after all, opens as a folder in the finder if you click it in spotlight.

Why does dragging only one of these things, which at first glance is identical to all the other things I tried to drag, the right thing to do?

That's what I mean by unfinished and lack of consistency

"Only to install Vista? "

Not, it has XP, Visa, Linux and Mac OS X on it now. So I got it to run every OS I need to run. When it comes to UI and ease of use, Mac OS X is fighting it out there for 3rd or 4th place with Linux. It doesn't even match up to XP well.

"No, I expect you to click on the icon in the dock and drag it to the trash."

Ok, I'm still trying to drag the trash to the trash to get rid of the trash... Your advice is not that helpful...

"Magic!!!"

Try it on your Mac, I don't think you'll be able to drag the trash to the trash either.

"Quit trying to apply techniques used with Windows"

Sure, once I stop expecting the obvious to work, and get used to having to learn the right trick to get the simplest stuff done, and get used to all the extra clicks and mouse movement, me and Mac OS X will probably get along just fine.

How annoying is the single corner drag requiring two actions (a window move followed by a resize) to move anything but the bottom right corner? Very annoying when you know there's a faster way implemented in every other OS.

How annoying is the activate the app then have to still find the window that you need to do all the time, very when you're used to a faster way, immediately reactivating the one you want (yes I know about expose, it's not the same).

How annoying is having the application menu detached from the application when you want to click on an application window to activate it then immediately use the menu, slow slow slow, more unnecessary mouse movement and mouse clicks, when you know there's a better way.

Frankly I have yet to find something in Mac OS X that I'd miss on other operating systems. Can people think of anything?

@Review
"Ok, I'm still trying to drag the trash to the trash to get rid of the trash... Your advice is not that helpful..."

One click on the trash can will give you the option of "Open" or "Empty Trash". I've gotten you this far, see if you can figure out the rest on your own. If you are referring to eliminating the Trash can altogether, I can't help you there because, well, it is there for a reason and easy to empty once you learn how.

Either you are some smart ass, well versed in OS X troll winding everyone up just for shits 'n grins or you actually ARE an absolutely, friggin' hopeless moron! If you've got so many complaints, why are you even bothering to use OS X? If you need it so badly, then put forth some effort to properly learn it and quit making yourself look and sound like a fool.

". If you are referring to eliminating the Trash can altogether,"

Duh, Finally you get it. I have no use for a trash can cluttering up my dock. I want to get rid of it without having to hack the OS.

You seem to be the fool who's taken reading half a dozen posts to understand I don't want to empty my trashcan (duh how hard could that be) but rather that I don't want a trash can on my dock.

"put forth some effort to properly learn it and quit making yourself look and sound like a fool."

Exactly what criticisims I've levelled are not valid? Don't you wish you could size a window from any edge?

"If you've got so many complaints, why are you even bothering to use OS X"

Surely you can think of at least one reason someone might be forced to use OS X?

Anyway it's interesting to use it and see that the much vaunted OS X emperor has no clothes.

@Review
If your single concrete objection to OS X, that does not reduce to a matter of preference or aesthetics, is the inability to remove the Trash icon from the dock easily (again, something that is monumentally stupid), I am pleased.

If you find yourself in a Mac OS X POW camp, forced to use a superior operating system against your will, hang on, I am sure the Redmond stürmtruppen are planning a rescue mission at this very moment.

Though I was unaware that OS X had ascended to the imperial purple, what with the 9.5% market share and all, why would an operating system need clothes?