Being left-handed and right-wing, Crap Settling is nothing new to me. Instead of going out and buying a pair of left-handed scissors I use the more ubiquitous right-handed ones, although I look like an arthritic as I contort my fingers trying to use them. I used to golf left-handed with left-handed clubs when I was a kid. But the hell with trying to find decent left-handed clubs. I quickly learned to golf right-handed and I learn to do so very badly (although I still putt left-handed and am pretty good).

Let's face it. We all make compromises, either because we don't know better, are too lazy or have no taste. I have no taste in clothes or cars or even furniture. Those things are all utilitarian to me and I could care less. As long as they're comfortable I'm happy. But when it comes to computers, literature, music and even some art, I am a cultured son-of-a-bitch. I would sooner cut off my right (no wait – left) arm than Crap Settle with these things. So it is with a great sense of comradeship that I sympathize with you fellow Crap Settlers when it comes to OS X. Do we need to see through menus? No. Do we need clear, crisp fonts? Yes. Do some of you think these things don't matter? You betcha. You, dear sirs and madams, are Crap Settlers. The first step on the road to recovery is admitting it. I want you to admit it so the rest of us don't have to settle too. If you think Britney Spears is the cat's meow then that's no skin off my back. There is other music to buy. There are thousands of artists from which to choose. Your crap doesn't affect me. But when you defend the obvious crappy parts of OS X then you do affect me. You eventually leave me with no other choice but to move to Windows. Now, that wasn’t really what you had in mind, was it?

So, we have an obvious solution to this problem. Stop Crap Settling and listen to what Uncle Thalo says. Think of it as becoming more cultured. Think of it as doing something good for yourself, like taking an art history class or reading Moby Dick.

You can even think of it as "thinking different" if that will help.

Who's the authority on whats cultured and what isn't?

Also there are more than two choices for operating systems aside from Windows and Mac OS X. You have Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, a variety of web applications and more.

Our choices have never been more plentiful and increase as each day goes by. Each person is free to choose what they wish to use without entertaining the thought for one nano-second that their choice has any negative impact on your life whatsoever.

I have returned.

Welcome, brother NDPTAL! Nice to see you.

quote:

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Who's the authority on whats cultured and what isn't?

---

Me.

No, wait. You. No, wait, maybe there ain't no authority... just consensus. But perhaps there are just people with more developed crapdar.

When the choices are crap, or worse crap, that's not much of a choice. A smorgasbord of crap doesn't look appetizing, no matter how much is in it. First off, choosing BSD is like choosing OS X. And I don't see what you listed as PLENTIFUL choices. And you forgot the Mac legacy, OS 9, which as far as my industry is concerned, is STILL the only choice for Mac design pros.

Mac Faithful pro users in the design industry, ones who have spent years building a Mac-based infrastructure, don't have a lot of choices that aren't hugely expensive. OS X pulled the rug out from under us. Forces us to deal with a dumbed down, crappy OS that doesn't work.

If some people, let's call them X-Men, do decide to dive into the crap smorgasbord, and crap-settle. That does, I'm sorry to say, have a negative impact on the life and work of people who require better software. When the easy to impress are impressed, it gives Apple no wherewithall to improve anything. If dumbed down bullshit sells, that's what they'll continue to put out.

Lets delve deeper into this concept of a "crap settler".

Up until Windows XP I considered all previous versions of Windows to be crap. Yet the majority of the computing using population used Windows. So effectively 90% of the world had already settled for crap. If you believe as you do that OS X is crap as well, how can you possibly hope to appeal to those who are satisfied with OS X when Apple itself couldn't appeal to those hordes of Windows users?

In other words, your battle was lost before you even started fighting.

Now to take another twist on it, how do you know that is not YOU who is the crap settler? That YOU are not bringing down the quality of life for OS X users by witholding your support for the new Mac OS? Hmmm?

I have returned.

quote:

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Now to take another twist on it, how do you know that is not YOU who is the crap settler? That YOU are not bringing down the quality of life for OS X users by witholding your support for the new Mac OS? Hmmm?

---

Brother NDP,
I don't quite follow that. First off, I ain't withholding squat. All I'm doing is criticizing a weak, half-assed product that needs to be better. I own OS X, use it, and sadly endlessly beta test it. I would like nothing better than to adopt it, which is why I began using it the first hour of the first day of the first release of the first public beta. All that needs to happen is for it to become adequate for pro use. Superior to the legacy. I have been nothing but a staunch Apple advocate and fanatic since 1984.

Second of all, explain to me how supporting OS X --even if it's rotten--will somehow magically HELP Mac users. That's often part of the X-Man line of BS, and I'd really like to understand it better. I say crap-settling brings us all down... settling for software that doesn't work, does not, in my estimation, light any kind of a fire under Apple to increase quality. Saying "good enough" now, when it's so clearly and demonstrably crap, sends a message that Apple was right about us: we're chimps who care more about casual use than pro use. More about passive entertainment and eye candy than fully functional software.

But hey, let me hazard a guess... you tell me if this is more or less the X-Man way of the world: OK, I throw in behind OS X, finished or not, good or not. I cheer for digikids, welcome them, and all that they represent for the platform with open arms. I suck it up and embrace eye candy and a terrible interface--NOT because I like it, or that it helps me get work done... but instead I suffer through it because altruistically it's good for casual users and newbies. Good for attracting switchers and digikids and thus expanding Apple's market share.

I pretend not to notice blurry fonts, or that large swathes of the operating system either are completely unfinished, or simply don't work. I pretend not to notice that applications that are "native" to OS X don't work as well or as fast as legacy apps. I adopt not based on what the operating system CAN DO FOR ME... but what I can do for Apple. I go ahead and take a stand that somehow, someday it'll get better. I take the performance hits, congratulate and apologize for every boneheaded rookie design mistake, swallow every transparent marketing ploy. Why? Because if I do, Apple will go places, baby. I'll cut Apple engineers every ounce of slack--noting how hardworking and self-sacrificing they are. How they miss their families. Who needs results? Mac users give A's for effort. It'll all pay off some day.

I'll throw good money after bad, and finance Apple's development. I'll endlessly pay upgrade prices, hoping that someday operating systems and apps will work together. They may not now, but hell, I have iTunes to listen to while they sort it all out. It's my responsibility to pay for software that doesn't work, because without that money, and without the hype and lie that the promise of OS X holds, development won't continue. So it's my job to put a brave and bold face on the situation. Instead of highlighting the system's flaws, we pretend they aren't there. It's a transitional period. Our work gets put on hold. It's more important for digikids to be happy.

Oh, not to mention geeks. Their happiness is important too. Their disdain for GUIs is part of what we have to swallow. When they bloat a GUI and make it a Romper-Room upscaled visually superabundant circus... we know that there's a powerful unix core underneath that they can always fall back on. Because they know the arcane language that drives it inside out. We simply MUST be certain that their jobs in IT are safe. Change unix too much, and we'll upset them. Make CLIs obsolete, and they'll be like fish out of water. So we have to balance attracting digikids and newbies, with keeping geeks safe and happy. What's familiar to them is way more important than what's familiar to the Mac Faithful.

After all, it's the Mac faithful and the legacy who are to blame for decreased market-share. Pro users are at fault for the niche market that became the signature of Apple computer. Graphics pros who depended on the Mac for their livelihood were, in effect, destroying it for a larger, dumber audience. Can't have that. The work we do is so far less important than giving happy horseshit to the masses, and giving geeks a NeXT retread with unix underpinnings to play around with.

We court geeks, we court digikids, make Apple a jillion dollars and THEN, maybe, Apple will get around to thinking about veteran pro users and throw us a bone? To thank us for pretending we liked the way the platform was heading.

Oh please.

The platform is heading to heck in a handbasket. Settle for crap now, settle for bloat, and bloat and crap is what we'll continue to get. Be OK with the digital hub/casual use supremacy, and it'll always reign supreme. Maintain the geek aristocracy, and there will always be knows and know-nots. Accept a GUI that's more about marketing than end user productivity, and marketing will be all it ever does.

Stand up for your friggin' selves. Learn to recognize that crap is crap. Ignoble agendas are not going to miraculously turn themselves around unless we DEMAND they do. Do what? A better job. Just because hacks and bangers and chimps are happy now, doesn't mean the whole user base has fallen for this con. The core Mac Faithful, the pro users, are not adopting. It's clear. It's not that they don't want to. It's that the quality of the product is not up to their standards yet. When it is, we'll adopt. We hold out, stand tough, demand quality, and we'll do NOTHING but raise the bar on the whole platform, ensure its success, and get a Mac worthy of being called a Mac.

I never left.

Hey, NDP. Good to see you. I have to first re-read what I wrote…it's been so long. Hope I didn't say anything particularly stupid.

Hey…that was a pretty good rant if I do say so myself. I saw this thread at the top after all this time and figured there was some kind of software error.

quote:

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Who's the authority on whats cultured and what isn't?

---

The Jerry Springer Show: uncultured. Masterpiece Theatre: cultured. After that, I admit there are some gray areas.

quote:

---

Up until Windows XP I considered all previous versions of Windows to be crap. Yet the majority of the computing using population used Windows. So effectively 90% of the world had already settled for crap.

---

Certainly XP is less crapful. But to the best of my understanding, the reason Windows won out was because the world was just waiting for a graphical OS to come to the forefront on an open hardware standard. Windows was jockeying with a number of competing contenders and they, for various reasons, won. The reached a certain point of critical mass where more software was being written for Windows than its competitors and it just ballooned from there. Looking back, Apple never had a chance to win that larger race unless they were prepared to let others build the hardware. Nothing has changed since then. They still make their own hardware. That leaves Apple as a niche player and I just don't see a significant niche for anything (particularly considering the price disparity) but a premium quality niche player. Unix's and Linux's are a dime a dozen out there. You gave some evidence of this yourself.

<< But to the best of my understanding, the reason Windows won out was because the world was just waiting for a graphical OS to come to the forefront on an open hardware standard. >>

I always thought it was simply because Windows was running on "clone" computers that were cheaper than Macs. Macs were obviously better, but Windows was "good enough" for people to be willing to buy the cheaper machines until the sheer numbers just made them the standard.

If Apple had recognized the problem and reduced the premium that Macs cost over PC's, today Bill Gates would be asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

Of course, without the rivalry and competition, personal computers would not be as advanced as they are today (not counting the retrograde Unix in OS X, naturally).

Markle

quote:

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I always thought it was simply because Windows was running on "clone" computers that were cheaper than Macs.

---

Yes. I think that's the result of open hardware as opposed to proprietary. Admittedly my history is a little blurry, but I believe things really took off when (Compaq?) reversed engineered the IBM BIOS (or something like that). This then made possible the open hardware. Microsoft got on board quickly and aggressively with DOS (either before, during or after – or all three). Later this happened with Windows. Yep…good enough is often the ticket. Isn't that sort of based on the ol' 10/90 rule? 10% of a software program's features are used something like 90% of the time. I think that's the philosophy at Apple now. I do believe I remember reading something that Jobs said that addressed this very idea. Maybe you can pull a quote but I recollect that he said that they were going to be shooting for "good enough" and not get all anal over everything. Considering that it's been reliably reported that he gutted the interface specialists when he returned as Jobs II I think it's likely that he himself has drawn the wrong conclusions from history.

quote:

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If Apple had recognized the problem and reduced the premium that Macs cost over PC's, today Bill Gates would be asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

---

I believe at one point early on that Gates urged Jobs to allow other companies to license the OS. I'm pretty sure of this but I want to be careful not to start any more urban legends. I talked to a friend last week (he's a Windows Certified something or other) and he told me that Gates hired Jobs the second time around.

<< he told me that Gates hired Jobs the second time around. >>

HUH?!?

______________

Note to thalo, et al: In Sunday's L.A. Times there's a review of a book about the great humorist James Thurber (1894-1961). It contains this:

<< It's not surprising that a man of such large and gentle heart should have found the America of his declining years strident and unlovely. "This crapulating era," he called it. >>

This thread seemed as good as any to note this.

Markle

quote:

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he told me that Gates hired Jobs the second time around.

---

That wouldn't surprise me, since Microsoft bankrolled Apple at one point and bailed them out, right around the time of the second coming. Nothing surprises me at the highest levels of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These guys are all probably in bed together in some way.

"But hey, let me hazard a guess... you tell me if this is more or less the X-Man way of the world: OK, I throw in behind OS X, finished or not, good or not. I cheer for digikids, welcome them, and all that they represent for the platform with open arms. I suck it up and embrace eye candy and a terrible interface--NOT because I like it, or that it helps me get work done... but instead I suffer through it because altruistically it's good for casual users and newbies. Good for attracting switchers and digikids and thus expanding Apple's market share.

I pretend not to notice blurry fonts, or that large swathes of the operating system either are completely unfinished, or simply don't work. I pretend not to notice that applications that are "native" to OS X don't work as well or as fast as legacy apps. I adopt not based on what the operating system CAN DO FOR ME... but what I can do for Apple. I go ahead and take a stand that somehow, someday it'll get better. I take the performance hits, congratulate and apologize for every boneheaded rookie design mistake, swallow every transparent marketing ploy. Why? Because if I do, Apple will go places, baby. I'll cut Apple engineers every ounce of slack--noting how hardworking and self-sacrificing they are. How they miss their families. Who needs results? Mac users give A's for effort. It'll all pay off some day.

I'll throw good money after bad, and finance Apple's development. I'll endlessly pay upgrade prices, hoping that someday operating systems and apps will work together. They may not now, but hell, I have iTunes to listen to while they sort it all out. It's my responsibility to pay for software that doesn't work, because without that money, and without the hype and lie that the promise of OS X holds, development won't continue. So it's my job to put a brave and bold face on the situation. Instead of highlighting the system's flaws, we pretend they aren't there. It's a transitional period. Our work gets put on hold. It's more important for digikids to be happy.

Oh, not to mention geeks. Their happiness is important too. Their disdain for GUIs is part of what we have to swallow. When they bloat a GUI and make it a Romper-Room upscaled visually superabundant circus... we know that there's a powerful unix core underneath that they can always fall back on. Because they know the arcane language that drives it inside out. We simply MUST be certain that their jobs in IT are safe. Change unix too much, and we'll upset them. Make CLIs obsolete, and they'll be like fish out of water. So we have to balance attracting digikids and newbies, with keeping geeks safe and happy. What's familiar to them is way more important than what's familiar to the Mac Faithful.

After all, it's the Mac faithful and the legacy who are to blame for decreased market-share. Pro users are at fault for the niche market that became the signature of Apple computer. Graphics pros who depended on the Mac for their livelihood were, in effect, destroying it for a larger, dumber audience. Can't have that. The work we do is so far less important than giving happy horseshit to the masses, and giving geeks a NeXT retread with unix underpinnings to play around with.

We court geeks, we court digikids, make Apple a jillion dollars and THEN, maybe, Apple will get around to thinking about veteran pro users and throw us a bone? To thank us for pretending we liked the way the platform was heading.

Oh please."

Actually with the exception of some minor details (i.e. obviously the Classic Mac OS had clearer fonts on older monitors but this less of an issue as time goes on and people get newer monitors) this was the apologist mantra of Mac users pre-OS X. The Classic Mac OS was a pretty horrible OS technically speaking. It had to be hacked six ways from thursday in order to function properly (3rd party Extensions/Control Panels) wasn't very stable, couldn't multitask worth a snit, had a dearth of software....etc. Now that all of that has been remedied with the arrival of OS X Mac users are finally able to use their computers as they were truly meant to be used, fully.

As I continue at this late date to marvel over my double digit uptimes on my Powerbook (I reboot once every 2 months or so) and all the wonderful software that having UNIX(TM) underneath the hood has brought us I continue to have difficulty contemplating those who would seek to stand in the face of progress and turn back the clock. Fortunately progress waits for no one and the march of technological advancement continues unabated.

As for OS X's "pro-usage" qualifications its passing with flying colors and has continued to do so for some time now. If artistic organizations of every kind could put up and be productive with the archiac, crusty, inefficient unmodular design of that which was the Classic Mac OS, they are sure to be at least 10 times more productive with Mac OS X.

Then again, this could be indicative of something much larger. A schism in the creative industry itself. The old gaurd steadfastly refusing to acknowledge change and the young bloods adopting newer and better technologies such as Mac OS X without a second thought. The trend towards smaller, more individual and more independent design houses may have something to do with this. Much attention is paid to large firms' slow uptake of OS X while little is paid to the much larger impact of smaller purchases by smaller firms.

I'm sorry I haven't been around much. I switched industries and have been busy working my butt off in Real Estate. Could anyone tell me when this site was created and when the mass bannings, removings of postings began over at MacFixitForums? Whatever the dates are I would bet they were the watershed moments when the bulk of those reluctant to throw in their lot with OS X wisely made up their minds to embrace the future as it inevitably must be.

I have returned.

<< obviously the Classic Mac OS had clearer fonts on older monitors but this less of an issue as time goes on and people get newer monitors >>

Is there something tricky about screen fonts that requires newer monitors? So now we not only have to buy new computers to run OS X in other than slug mode, but we have to buy new monitors, TOO?!?!?!?!?

<< As I continue at this late date to marvel over ... all the wonderful software that having UNIX(TM) underneath the hood has brought us I continue to have difficulty contemplating those who would seek to stand in the face of progress and turn back the clock. >>

Believe me, having an OS that can run all that wonderful Unix(TM) software is not of the slightest interest, use, or value to the average users in the mass market that Apple has to have if its computer division is going to stay in business.

Using the Way-Back Machine to revive an OS from the 1960's doesn't look like progress to me. It doesn't look like "the future." It looks like a sign of desperation.

<< Could anyone tell me when this site was created and when the mass bannings, removings of postings began over at MacFixitForums? Whatever the dates are I would bet they were the watershed moments when the bulk of those reluctant to throw in their lot with OS X wisely made up their minds to embrace the future as it inevitably must be. >>

You'd lose that bet. Tech Issues at MFI forums (the successor to OS X Talk) is a ghost town. Check the bottom of the page over there any time to see how few readers, either registered or anonymous, are browsing the threads. They tried to make the posts more tidy, and ended up killing them. If "the bulk of those reluctant to throw in their lot with OS X wisely made up their minds to embrace the future" and convert to X, we'd be over there singing its praises instead of here, continuing to expose its failure.

After THREE YEARS of OS X, no more than 25% of Mac users have "thrown in their lot" with X. History will tell who was "embracing the future," and whether Apple even has one.

Markle

Newer monitors have nothing whatsoever to do with the suckiness of the font rendering in OS X. I have a 22" Cinema Display, and I'm one of the most vocal critics of bad font rendering. I also own a variety of large CRTs of pro quality, and I'd have to say that I find THEM more forgiving of OS X's crappy font rendering. Yeah, yeah, I've tried all the different smoothing schemes. "Better for CRTs" and so forth. All BS. The issue is that smoothing, or anti-aliasing has been dumbed down to gel with quartz routines. I've been through this a bazillion times, so... what the hell, I'll go through it again: The whole purpose of anti-aliasing in the days when it meant something to pros, was to RESOLVE LETTERFORMS. By that I mean, smooth jaggies using a variety of greyscale pixels, to soften edges, give the illusion of accurate type spacing, and so forth. The letterform was king. The foundry's vision of the type with respect to outline and spacing was the most important thing... getting each form to look as close to the way it was designed, considering the limitations of screen resolution.

What anti-aliasing has BECOME under quartz, is just a one-note feature, simply mushing up the ENTIRE outline of a font equally, fuzzing it with a HALO of grey pixels, so there is a kind of baseline smooshiness to every font at a variety of sizes (remember, Quartz likes to biggify and smallify stuff, that's what Apple thinks we want, lots of zany stretching and shrinking for entertainment purposes).

Anyway, what happened next, was that ANYONE who knew shit about type was flipping out at how bad things looked. ESPECIALLY on the stupid stripes of Aqua. Since the whole idea of anti-aliasing in the first place was to BRING OUT letterforms, putting them on friggin' stripes, where the anti-aliasing pixels MATCHED EXACTLY the grey of the stripes, caused letterforms to lose definition and contrast (hence readability), edges would "die" as we say in the biz.

So what did Apple do then? Get rid of stripes? Surely you jest! No, stripes are so fucking important, that they tricked out the anti-aliasing routines of quartz to include WARM and COOL pixels. What I call technicolor anti-aliasing. Use your digital color meter utility as a kind of zoom tool, and you'll see it in action. Remember, these are Black fonts on a GREY striped background. But what do you see? Right, the colors, the colors.

Now, it does take a certain smartness in the routines to figure out when to sink or bring forward a font edge. Remember, visually warm, saturated colors tend to advance, cool, less saturated colors tend to recede. I would NORMALLY be impressed by the attempt to handle picking out font edges with color. Photoshop does a marvelous job at this, very smart in the way it reads what's going on colorwise beneath a font, reads the color of the font, and composites.

Unfortunately, Aqua interface fonts have had this whole technicolor routine written for them for one reason and one reason alone: STRIPES. They are not smart enough for anything else. Additionally, they've only done it for a very small number of fonts: Lucida. Meanwhile, they don't work. If you're on a Cinema display or other flatscreen, pull a menu down and look at any sequence of verticals. You get the color anti-aliasing impacting each other in unfortunate ways, making for artifacts. Check out that screwy orange halo. Turns cyan when highlighted (in graphite anyways). People, these are MISTAKES.

These are things that reveal where Apple's priorities are. Not in making letterforms resolve GLOBALLY (can't choose your own Interface fonts... Apple has kept control of these); but as an attempt to work with stripes, meaning THEY are more important than smart anti-aliasing routines. In other words, the LOOK of this particular eye candy, is more important than function. What we're seeing is workarounds for the wrong reasons. Type clarity was not the mission... it's all been cobbled around Aqua and Quartz, to look a certain way for digikids and newbies, who don't notice things like the type rendering doesn't work. They see smooth and blurry, and assume it's smart. Just because it's not jaggy. But literally, it's nearly as DUMB as if it were jaggy.

It's not that OS 9 has clearer fonts on older monitors. It's that the anti-aliasing routines are not Quartz-dependent. They have a totally different mission: resolving letterforms. All letterforms, every font. And spacing. And when you set an anti-aliasing threshold, you can be sure that the font spacing of NON smoothed fonts won't be ruined. You have the best of both worlds, pixelated at small sizes, and smoothed at large. Plus, in the interface, you can choose your own fonts.

In Aqua/Quartz, EVERY FRIGGIN' THING gets the smoothed treatment. The WORLD is anti-aliased, whether it needs it or not. There's a "blur-zone" a halo around everything. And it's all equal. When that's really not the best way to font-smooth. It's a facile way, because quartz needs it to be easy, or it'd be even slower. When you set your anti-aliasing threshold, Quartz STILL SMOOTHS... it merely shaves off anti-aliasing pixels. That's more evidence of cobbling... of stupid intent, because it adds another process. Quartz has to deal with everything the SAME WAY. It's routines are as much there for icons as type. Because they want change-o stretch-o genie sucking and all that. Again, the special effect is more important than clarity, contrast, and readability. Quartz sucks at monospaced, pixelated fonts... struggles with them. When they are the easiest thing in the world for a computer to deal with. But Apple hasn't yet figured out a way to deal with fonts under the non-smoothed thresholds. In effect, they have to design NEW FONTS around the possibility that somebody might want to turn smoothing off. Why? To preserve spacing, to control how fonts look when you strip off vertical arrays of anti-aliasing pixels. They've cobbled their way through Lucida, but notice how you can't CHOOSE your Finder fonts.

You can get some idea of how this all works mathematically, by horsing around with the RIDICULOUS RIDICULOUS "Smooth Images" checkbox in Universal access. That's the dumb quartz effect layed over zoom... you can think of it as the same gradation as the drop shadows around every window. Turn Smooth images off, and you'll see technicolor anti-aliasing.



Look, I have no doubt this stuff will eventually get smarter. Stripes get fainter, anti-aliasing routines get SLOWLY better... but not because X-Critics are saying "good enough"... nah-ah, because they're saying this sucks, what're you guys trying to pull?

Pros have to complain more about the font rendering. I can't do it alone, though lord knows I try. And universal access? That zoom should be like the zoom in Photoshop when you hit smooth. That's smart zooming and anti-aliasing. The intent for every font is outline integrity at scale. Letterforms should be resolved that way, clearer and clearer with scale... if what you are trying to do is help blind people read them.

Brother thalo,

You may have said all this before but I don’t think you’ve said it all quite so well.

I haven’t looked at all this as closely as you have - obviously. What you say seems to make perfect sense. No doubt you could, as you often say, "prove it in a court of law." Actually, that’s what I’d like to see. I’d like to see some sort of technical refutation or explanation by the people who wrote these quartz routines. It seems to me that if you are correct (and to some extent we can trust the evidence of our own eyes) then this is the smoking gun. It’s proof of the cutting of corners, of sloppiness, of facileness and of the dumbed-down DigiKid intent of this OS.

<< Look, I have no doubt this stuff will eventually get smarter. Stripes get fainter, anti-aliasing routines get SLOWLY better... >>

You still have hope, don't you, thalo? After three years of this shit, and the glacial, reluctant, grudging, pulling-teeth rate of change, you have to be a real optimist at heart to think it's ever going to be good enough while we're still young enough to enjoy it.

Markle

P.S. Sometimes I think Adobe could dial down the text anti-aliasing in PDF documents a notch, too.

LOL, brother Markle. Sure, I got hope. Unfortunately I don't gots much else. Listen, it's GOT to be good enough while I'm still young (er, relatively speaking... our membership at thalo.net finally is greater than my age)... there's no other way. This is a fight I can't lose. It can end in a draw, with me digging in with OS 9. But it can't end in failure with me switching platforms. Not and not cost me a fortune I don't have.

But one of the real reasons I have hope is that I know pro users are going to mobilize. The software just isn't good enough. Time and again that's being proven. Apple has duped only some of the people. OK, it's people they NEED... but they aren't doing anything for the core legacy user base. We are being totally ignored, or given lip service. There is a whole mac-based industry who won't crap-settle. It ain't just me. I can afford to play wait-and-see right now, because adopters clearly don't have an advantage over non-adopters. In order for that to change, the OS has to get better. When I see enough advantage to adopt, I certainly will. But Apple hasn't sold me yet. And holy crap, I used to be the soft sell of all time, I mean I didn't wait a friggin' WEEK to buy new. Now, I'm gunshy, my wallet is in lockdown. That's how bad this OS is.

If FORCED to adopt, eventually, it'll be on a very small scale. Just to keep my hand in. UNLESS OS X becomes pro-capable, it's not going to be any fleet of G5s. No way. No jumping at new generations of hardware, or latest software upgrades. I'll do just enough... only open up and embrace, when the platform is embraceable. I'll work on the hardware and software combos where I get the most work done. Right now, I can't picture that being driven by OS X. If that happens, great. All is forgiven, I go back to my destiny of Mac Evangelist.

Even now, I don't friggin' HATE Apple. I love them. I hate Aqua... and I strongly, strongly dislike OS X. I despise shoddy, sloppy, perma-beta software. I hate the digital hub strategy... I hate the abandonment of pro users. I hate the smarmy marketing bullshit. I hate seeing people duped and conned. But of course I see WHY it's happening this way. I can't blame Apple for being in trouble, trying to do it all on the cheap. But what I can do, is call attention to the lax attitude with respect to quality, and the reaming of the pro user base. Sooner or later, Apple will see which side of the bread gets the butter. I could be wrong, but iPods aren't high end CPUs. You have to sell a lot more iPods.

As I've mentioned in the past, Adobe bolloxed and dumbed down its own PDF aa routines IN ORDER to become compatible with Quartz's. I'm convinced of that. There was a shitstorm at the beginning because Adobe stuff looked like crap in preview. Damn straight they should be dialed down a notch. I use Acrobat 4 in 9, because the routines are better. But still, it's always been about small type. The proportion of the letterform to its anti-aliasing zone gets more egregious with smallitude. It makes sense, but we don't have to like it. In an interface, we can balk... because we're used to being able to pixelate when the scale drops. But basing EVERYTHING on smooth, like a PDF, which is what Quartz is up to (that was the whole idea)... is the issue. Then, I'd argue, there needs to be some next generation SMARTER anti-aliasing routine (dumbing down is the current solution, but was the wrong one), or else, some kind of threshold, where tiny fonts get dealt with differently to maintain readability at smaller sizes. OR, TFT resolution has to go through the roof.

That's where we're heading IMHO. Someday. I can feel it. That could be killer for pros. I'd adopt that in an instant, Aqua or no Aqua (preferably no)... Give me actual size small type that's as crisp as the printed page, and even I won't give a rat's ass about kiddy goofy happy horseshit special effects. Well, maybe I would, but you get the idea. Software has to work, but whenever there's a quantum leap like that, it's a good thing. These days, Apple pretends quantum leaps... thinks showoffy stuff fools us. But they're not fooling pros. Super-res TFTs they couldn't cheeze through. That would be some serious stuff.

Pros, especially print pros, NEED stuff like that. That's what we respond to. Stuff that works BETTER, does more. Things that make designing easier and better (and faster of course), clearer to visualize. We want our finished pieces to not be a surprise... which is why we are obsessed by color calibration, type resolution, and the like. When our screens truly approximate our work, with no speed or performance hits, and no huge surprises on press, we will have arrived. Designers want as little bullshit between brain and final finished job as possible. With casual use, the bullshit itself is the entertainment. Like here.

Trouble is, that pro agenda has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple's current casual use chimp-market-share-increasing agenda. Apple is not thinking like pros, because they can't deal with the scrutiny and the microscope the Mac Faithful put them under. It's much easier to impress the easily impressed. Right now, the high end of the Mac, the G5, is nothing but a kicked-up iTunes player. A casual use machine with pro power, but with which you can't do all that much pro work well. It'll be impressive with iLife, but some of us have a work life. Look at that G5 ad, it takes place in a HOME... the user who gets blasted through the walls, is a KID. It's daytime, and mom is home with the dog, so that's a casual use environment, not necessarily a pro studio or a service bureau. That's Mac as stereo, passive entertainment. Not a tool. Similar site gag to that famous speaker ad, where a guy sits down to listen to tunes, and they turn on the wind machine.

More true confessions.

I just inherited an old Windows laptop that was not being used. It's got a very nice 13.3" 1024x768 TFT screen. I think it's a 333 MHz AMD processor, 64 MB of RAM (whoopee!). It's running Windows 98 SE. It should be the typical Windows piece-of-shit. Actually the laptop itself is of a very restrained design and it's entirely black. This thing should not be running circles around my similarly equipped iBook with OS X.

In 98 there's a defragmenter built in. The GUI is fast and responsive and fairly customizable (even added my home-made "Apple" menu 'toolbar' to the task bar). The task bar is easier to use than the Dock and doesn't get in the way. I set up my internet account from scratch painlessly. I loaded drivers for my Logitech mouse and USB Zip without a problem. Outlook Express 5 is lean and mean and is does exactly what it's supposed to do. By contrast I've always found Mail to be a pain in the ass. Most of all I found that Internet Explorer 5, and the whole internet experience, even in Windows 98, puts OS X to shame. Whether it's Explorer or Safari on the Mac, I got so tired of bad and/or enforced anti-aliasing and having entire areas of the screen suddenly going blank and needing to be refreshed. The multimedia on this thing ain't bad either. I downloaded a bunch of updates (yes – including a bunch of security updates) and got WMP 9 running on this thing. It ran a movie just fine although I'm pushing the hardware just a bit.

Of course, we all know that 98 doesn't have the stability of the NT line, but so far so good. It's been pretty solid although the installer for the Explorer 6 update keeps crashing so I guess I'm stuck in 5. And it doesn't like to be put in "Standby" mode. That's not very good, especially for a laptop.

The fonts are crisp and clear and they can be changed, although there isn't much of a reason to do so since everything is very readable and functional to begin with. I loaded Photoshop 6 on it and it even passed Thalo's "squiggle" test. This thing is no speed demon but I ran the "Lighting Effects" filter and it was brisk and painless. What's my point?

2003 – 1998 = 5 years. OS X can't do many of the things that operating systems (even other than the legacy Mac OS) were handling years ago.

I have an old beater Windows laptop too. A dull grey Toshiba that I hauled out of the garbage and tinkered with. Pentium III, had '95 on it, but I used the VPC disk of 2K I had and figured out how to upgrade the operating system (was a beast, compared to trying to do similar things on a Mac--don't try this at home.)... The only thing wrong with it is a few dead pixels on the screen, and a worn out battery.

I don't have much software for it, a few stupid games... I mostly use it to test web sites (faster than XP in VPC), and just to horse around with and see how the other half lives. But it surfs WAYYY better than a Mac. Web sites like Windows machines, there's no doubt about that. The games run smoothly enough. I put Quark on it (only because Quark disks come with the Windows version on them), and it seems to run not too bad at all. Surprisingly not suckorama. This baby actually COMPETES with OS X, certainly on the level of interface and file managment performance, definitely web surfing, definitely app stability... and hello? it's a friggin' dinosaur. Come on, a PIII? Older than my dp 500 G4, and a perfectly usable machine.

Apple is in trouble if Windows stuff has that kind of shelf life, while OS X has no shelf-life whatsoever. Those guys are getting their money's worth. Until OS X, I used to think we did too. I think one thing is that Windows revs come out of the box more resolved. They feel more thoroughly tested and better conceived. Hey, I still think that Windows is a cheap Mac ripoff, way overcomplicated... but now holding it up against OS X, Ol' 2k looks just way less goofy and choked with BS. It should be the Mac that's leaner and meaner and cooler. They went dumbdown, when they should have gone minimal. Minimal is the future, not eye candy. Restful Not Retarded.

But for me, it's still the legacy that has the most on the ball. The stuff I crap-settle for and put up with in 9, is like nowhere near as nut-driving as what I have to suck up and choke down in X. DGMW ("Don't Get Me Wrong"), the veins on my neck feel like they are going to squirtgun blood when I crash the legacy, but those moments happen less when I'm booted there. When I'm in OS X, it's like living the nightmare every second. I can't wait to get the hell out of it. It's like that scene in A ClockWork Orange... right when Alex realizes he can't turn away or close his eyes, and friggin' SHRIEKS. You know what I'm saying O my brothers?

<< 2003 - 1998 = 5 years. OS X can't do many of the things that operating systems (even other than the legacy Mac OS) were handling years ago. >>

Well, when you consider that the Unix core of OS X is from around 1968, and you do the math, you find that W98 is 30 years younger than the heart of X. So none of this is surprising, The fact is that any OS of the last 8 years or so could run any of the apps we use today AS LONG AS SOMEONE PROGRAMMED THEM TO BE COMPATIBLE. It isn't that OS 8 or 9 CAN'T do the newer things, it's that the newer things are just not being written for them. It's planned obsolescence on Apple's part, laziness or disinterest on the part of other programmers.

As for web surfing being better on any modern flavor of Windows than on X, we've talked about this before. It's pretty bad on 8.6, too...and using AOL for Mac sure doesn't help in MY case. The web is supposed to be platform-independent, but it's not. Too many public websites are optimized for Windows. It's as simple as that. It's a crime, but it's the reality. Anything un-Windows suffers, whether it's X, 9, or 8, and probably Linux (I'm surmising) and whatever other non-Windows OS's there are.

OS X sucks for a myriad of other reasons, but it's not unique in the un-Windows world in having trouble with the web.

Let's face it. With the Mac devolving, new user base shrinking into insignificance, incompatibility with much of the all-important internet, it's getting harder and harder to justify not just throwing in the towel and joining the rest of the world.

Markle

I have observed for some time the declining patronage of the Tech Issues forum but I believe that is mainly due to those happy and satisfied with OS X moving on to other less militant and negative websites such as MacNN, MacAddict.com, and ArsTechnica. By the time the moderators at MacFixitForums were finally able to remove the troublemakers and stop them from ruining the site for everyone else it had been too late.

Much is said about Unix being an old OS from the 60's but what is wrong with that? Some would have you believe that any of the original code designed back then is in actual usage today. Unix is first and foremost a philosophy of software design that has stood the test of time. Its resilience and usefulness will be with us for decades to come. That it is the underpinnings of our new battle ready operating system is a benefit not a negative.

As Apple repositions itself to fortify its niche markets this naturally will leave the old gaurd embittered and outraged over a sense of "abandonment". The so-called "Pro" users cannot understand the Digital Hub philosophy or the DigiKids focus.

What the old gaurd does not understand is that even if this thalo.net website's membership reached 2000 users they would STILL be outnumbered by those satisfied with OS X. As for only 25% of all Mac users using OS X that is of no grand signifigance. Macs are expensive afterall and last a long time. Our upgrade cycles are much longer than on the Windows side. Add to that fact that most people only upgrade their operating system when they BUY A NEW COMPUTER and its very easy to see why adoption has the "mere appearance" of being less than anticipated.

As the rest of the Mac world moves on and continues to enjoy that which the Steven hath giveth us this lone and singular enclave of rebellion continues to fester and stew. The outrageous insurgency of the "Whiner Niners" will only result in their continuing irrelevancy, moreso this mentality of "OS X + Unix bad, co-operatively multiasking poorly designed classic Mac OS GOOD" simply confuses newcomers to the Mac world. Recent switchers to Mac World via OS X simply cannot comprehend how anyone would prefer the pre-OS X OS's. Its like asking for LESS functionality!

P.S. I do not like to call you guys Whiner Niners even though I coined the term but I can't think of anything else. Have you guys come up with your own moniker yet? If not I have another, better one. The Maquis. As you may or may not know the Maquis were French resistance fighters during WWII (Real Stuff). The Maquis were also Federation citizens who rebelled against the Federation when their worlds were given to the Cardarssians as a treaty concession to prevent further war (Star Trek stuff). I like the word Maquis because it sounds like "Mac ees" or Mac enthusiasts, which all of us X-Men or Maquis are.

I have returned.