quote:

My workaround was to put a solid white band across the top of my desktop image. Fuck transparency. Looks way better.

Now that's a smart workaround. I'll do that too.

quote:

Um, I thought crystal sausages were gone??

Halfassed, really.

Finder is dog-slow, really? I can't believe that. On Ars it sez the finder was a little faster.
How fast are previews in column-view, esp. regarding quicktimes, mpegs, avi?

It seems this is one of the greatest feature of 10.5:



Well at least we now have a flexible icon-grid, 2007 whoa-hey!!

The arstechnica review is the worst review Mr. Stokes has ever dished out.

The truth is that Apple is killing OS X by not delivering 64-bit-Carbon. There will never be a 64-bit-Photoshop, 64-bit-Office, 64-bit-anything-professional for OS X, because all these applications are carbon. Does that sound like a bright future ?

Additionally, running 64-bit-applications on a 32-bit-kernel is an ugly ugly ugly hack that contradicts even Intel's own technical guidelines.

Here's what developers think about it:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/06/leopard_wont_su.html

OS X is a dead end. Forget about it.

And again we need third party devs to cure some of apples *you got no choice*-features:

opaque menubar:
http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/opaquemenubar/

make dock flat:
http://superpixel.ch/software/dockscrew/

I've definitely been experiencing slow Finder. It takes fucking forever for that stupid cover flow to fill in. Not worth it.

Remember, I'm on a G5 rather than an intel, too. I'm sure this is more pressure to get me to switch to a quad-core.

The icon grid is a double edged sword. The friggin' icon labels get elipsed, you can't read any of the stupid filenames if you set the grid too tight, or the icons too small (both of which I want to do).

I'm finding bugs and quirks left and right. Dock magnification not working between spaces (unless you refresh its memory by going to system preferences), the DVD drive ceasing to recognize a disc... windows not coming forward. Same old same old.

I do think the type rendering has been slightly improved. They toned down the technicolor anti-aliasing a bit. I tested this using blind-people-zoom, and sure enough, it's a bit smarter now. I certainly don't get color-effects on black type at actual size anymore. Lucida in the Finder looks much better in all its states... I can even use 10pt now and more or less read it. That's one load off my mind.

Stacks are OK, but again, I'm not experiencing any performance jollies. To me, Tiger was faster. Switching, I've taken a performance hit, except maybe with Spotlight, which is improved. All the people saying the Finder is faster, must have intels.

I'm a Monaco 9 in the Terminal guy too, and so believe me, I know how happy brother smithz is. Except I have to use graphite window widgets. Even his screenshot with the traffic light hurts my eyes.

Oh, another thing about the dock--HATE the new little candy button indicators that tell you which apps are running. Those are awful. The black triangle was better. And I hate the fuzzy drop shadow around everything. Makes the icons look blurry at small sizes, which is how I use them. So again, for me, I took a hit with the Dock. It's far less visible and attractive now than it was in Tiger.

My sense is, there's still WAYYYY too many interfaces going on here. And not much consistency. I'm livid about the scrollbars. Why should only iTunes get the good ones? Insanity.

But as always, I give the good with the bad. When a window is in the background, not the active window, it's friggin' BEAUTIFUL. Look at that, how the titlebar gradation gets lighter. That rocks. And when you select it, there's a pronounced difference between an active window titlebar, and those behind it. That's something I've been humping apple's leg for, for a long time. They finally did it.

Oh, you know the crapsposé thing where you can clear the windows off the desktop? Are you guys seeing a weird hard-edge shadow border? I don't remember that before. Fugly.

WAIT. HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE. You can't drag and drop into a folder in coverflow? HUH???? Are you kidding me? A nice big target like that, and you can't add things to a folder? There has to be some mistake. Is it just me, or is that a huge fucking mistake? I had a bunch of stuff on my desktop I wanted to put away in another folder. Happened to have coverflow on. I navved to where I wanted to go by typing the folder name. Then tried to drag the stuff into the cover flow folder. Nope. Fuuuuuck. Don't they test this stuff for usability? That one is just common sense. You have this lush interface with big targets, you can drag and drop a cover flow item to an app in the dock, you can double click to open... but if the cover flow item is a FOLDER, you can't drag anything into it? I'm laughing my ass off.

Column view by date? When was the first time I asked for that? How many years ago? Well, thank the maker... it can be done. You go to "View Options" in the Finder, and there's an "arrange by" dropdown. Ahhhhhhh.

Why would anything think the menubar needed to be transparent?

I wouldn't mind a transparent menubar if there would be a decent appearance pref-panel to control this and many other UI-Prefs. C'mon Apple we're humans with different likes and dislikes.
No, we're not chimps!

Thalo, perhaps your finder is slow because of Spotlight re-indexing the whole catalog. AFAIK Spotlight is doing this once you installed Leopard (or Liger ..err Teopard)

The problem with you guys is you just don't get it.

Steve makes you jump through hoops to switch to a new architecture with 64-bit-processors and then delivers an OS that unfortunately runs a 32-bit-kernel and doesn't contain the one framework that nearly all professional applications use in 64 bits.

And you discuss round menu corners.

Ah well.

Right now i just don't care about the innards of OS X. I need my apps (photoshop, quark, etc) to work NOW.

Besides i think i get it. It just don't matter to me right now. What can i do? OS X is still the smallest evil to me. Linux? Impossible in a pre-press DTP workspace like mine. Windows? Crap either.

Everyone has different needs, please remember that!

We haven't discussed round menu corners YET, bitch :P Never mind.

quote:

OS X is still the smallest evil to me.

LOL. I'd like to see that on the shrink-wrapped box. But overall it sounds like all of you are getting along fairly okay. I think some of you did a "dirty" install, installing over your old system. Did that go well?

How fast are previews in column-view, esp. regarding quicktimes, mpegs, avi?

Smithz, I don't know if I have the other two things, but avi-movies (I have only small ones) open and play instantly in QuickLook. Very nice: select and hit the space bar. Up till now everything I've clicked on (in column- or icon view)has opened instantly in QuickLook.

Brad, I did that dirty install and had no problems. Before switching, first I threw out my Unsanity stuff, though.

Thanks for the info, Yabor. I might, when I get a copy, try a dirty install over my 10.3 which I have on a hard drive. (10.4 is my primary system.) That's how I do it. I leap frog.

quote:

Right now i just don't care about the innards of OS X. I need my apps (photoshop, quark, etc) to work NOW.

That's exactly how I feel. I understand brother klappy's rage... but as I've said many times in the past, I don't care if it's a 32 bit kernel, a 64-bit kernel, kernel KLINK, or a kernel of creamed fucking CORN, if the thing works, and is intuitive, I just don't care about the geek crap. Until it gets in my way.

What I respond to is the interface. I think most real heavy pro USERS of the Mac feel the same way. Stuff has to be intuitive, it has to work, and the design has to make sense. A transparent title bar doesn't make sense. Transparent menus don't make sense. All the atmospheric and drop shadow effects mean absolutely SQUAT if nothing makes sense.

The active window thing is the first time--THE FIRST TIME, MIND YOU--that the stupid eye candy has been used for a fucking REASON. To distinguish active window from everything else. That's what we need across the boards with Leopard.

All the Dock shadows do right now, is fuzz up the overdesigned dock icons. They literally look like warm steaming crap at the smallest size (which is the size I want them). Who CARES about reflections or shadows there. I'd rather see what the stupid icons ARE. Oh sweet merciful tittyfucking christ, that spinning gears system prefs icon is terrible. You can't even tell what it is small.

It's better if you put the dock on the left or right. Then it's just a stupid transparent grey surround (inconsistency).But I like it better than the "new improved dock." But if you switch to the right, then fanned "Stacks" don't really work... you HAVE to display them as a grid.

I did a dirty install like brother yabor, but I FORGOT to throw out "Application Enhancer" which was one of those things that allowed haxies like ShapeShifter to work. Who the hell knows if it screwed me.

I've already had Quicktime give up the ghost on me on two occasions. But I do have "Flip4Mac" installed, to view avis and wmvs and so forth. Most vids seem to play fine though.

Right now, I'd have to say Leopard is worth it for the Spotlight improvements (thank GOD I can finally search emails in Mac Mail), and font rendering improvements.

Played around with Time Machine. My biggest criticism: you can't use a drive on a shared machine for backup. I wonder why not? I picture being able to back up on my OS X server. Nope. Right now I can't even play with it, because I don't have a drive big enough and empty enough to back up my crap. Another instance where I'm feeling muscled in to buying an intel Mac, where conceivably I could put three big 500 gig hard drives in it.

The interface of time machine is kind of this gay space-skin, where you're warping through space. It's friggin' HUGE on the 30 inch monitor. It's fairly intuitive, letting you wheel back to previous states, but oh my god, the interface is an eye roller if ever I saw one.

Stacks and Spaces are OK, so far I don't have too much of a problem with them, except that they are more interface, when what OS X needs is less.

My biggest issue is the Finder. Cover flow is useless to me because it's way too slow to fill in the previews. Pretty much unusable. Column view set to "view by date modified" is working for me.

quote:

Originally posted by thalo:

quote:

Right now i just don't care about the innards of OS X. I need my apps (photoshop, quark, etc) to work NOW.

That's exactly how I feel. I understand brother klappy's rage... but as I've said many times in the past, I don't care if it's a 32 bit kernel, a 64-bit kernel, kernel KLINK, or a kernel of creamed fucking CORN, if the thing works, and is intuitive, I just don't care about the geek crap.

I just imagine a guy sitting in a car with quadratic wheels who keeps on telling himself over and over again

i - don't - care - until - it - gets - in - my - way !

while he keeps jumping up and down in his car.

Hawhaw, Klappy you're priceless.
So, tell us the glorious alternative solution to OS X?
And well for that up-and-down jumping we have some anti-shock device built-in so we don't notice the quadratic wheels while driving. Hey, that's a quite nice analogy to OS X!

brother klappy's pretty much made up his mind that OS X is a total dead end. I still think complaining is the answer to inciting the MacLash.

I suppose I am jumping up and down in my car, and I'm pointing the blame primarily at an interface that I think sucks, but it's because interfaces and design is what I know. If I was a gearhead, I know I'd see it differently.

What I do know, is that wherever you place the blame, the software has NEVER worked right. It's never been a smooth ride. I've never fired up any version of OS X and just had it do what I wanted it to do, or what I think it was intended to do, without some flakiness or screwed up behavior, or slowness, or counterintuitive nonsense.

The fact of the matter is, if the programming is weak, fine... start yelling at the fuckwad engineers who are slacking off, or the fuckwad middle managers who are preventing them from doing their job to the best of their ability.

But the DESIGN sucks. The overdesigned bullshit eye candy is clearly, clearly bad for this operating system. I was just noticing today, how I actually LIKE the new "flat" folder icons... I mean SO much better than the ridiculous Aqua ones. And yet there's a folder, sitting on my desktop, I click once to select it. UGH. Holeeeee Crap, are you kidding me? Just because it's EASIER to do a surround rather than mask to an icon, doesn't mean it looks good. Au Contraire. Looks awful. The Mac has ALWAYS been able to mask to icon shapes, uh, until now. Now they take the fucking lazy, stupid way out. And the highlighted state of something as ubiquitous as a folder looks like total crap. It's just silly.

Icon masking and labeling just has to change. We've taken a giant step backward there. And it's just laziness. Icons on the DOCK mask, darken, when you select them, why not elsewhere?

They don't highlight in the graphical part of cover flow. That's another interface mistake. Only in the list below. But there should be visual feedback that a folder is selected. It's an AHIG. Sorry, it's fun to have this graphical special effect, but to really be usable as a file browser on a personal computer, it has to be more than the similar effect on iTunes. Folders are a very different animal than album cover art.

quote:

Folders are a very different animal than album cover art.

Heretic! Unbeliever! A witch! A witch!

quote:

Originally posted by thalo:
brother klappy's pretty much made up his mind that OS X is a total dead end. I still think complaining is the answer to inciting the MacLash.

I suppose I am jumping up and down in my car, and I'm pointing the blame primarily at an interface that I think sucks, but it's because interfaces and design is what I know. If I was a gearhead, I know I'd see it differently.

What I do know, is that wherever you place the blame, the software has NEVER worked right. It's never been a smooth ride. I've never fired up any version of OS X and just had it do what I wanted it to do, or what I think it was intended to do, without some flakiness or screwed up behavior, or slowness, or counterintuitive nonsense.

The fact of the matter is, if the programming is weak, fine... start yelling at the fuckwad engineers who are slacking off, or the fuckwad middle managers who are preventing them from doing their job to the best of their ability.

But the DESIGN sucks. The overdesigned bullshit eye candy is clearly, clearly bad for this operating system. I was just noticing today, how I actually LIKE the new "flat" folder icons... I mean SO much better than the ridiculous Aqua ones. And yet there's a folder, sitting on my desktop, I click once to select it. UGH. Holeeeee Crap, are you kidding me? Just because it's EASIER to do a surround rather than mask to an icon, doesn't mean it looks good. Au Contraire. Looks awful. The Mac has ALWAYS been able to mask to icon shapes, uh, until now. Now they take the fucking lazy, stupid way out. And the highlighted state of something as ubiquitous as a folder looks like total crap. It's just silly.

Icon masking and labeling just has to change. We've taken a giant step backward there. And it's just laziness. Icons on the DOCK mask, darken, when you select them, why not elsewhere?

They don't highlight in the graphical part of cover flow. That's another interface mistake. Only in the list below. But there should be visual feedback that a folder is selected. It's an AHIG. Sorry, it's fun to have this graphical special effect, but to really be usable as a file browser on a personal computer, it has to be more than the similar effect on iTunes. Folders are a very different animal than album cover art.

You know how i felt when i read the arstechnica review ?

Sad.

As a former user of MacOS, i just felt sad. Look at those stupid identical-looking folders in the dock. Look at these stupid little, almost invisible orbs in the dock. Look at the stupid translucent menu-bar. Look at the stupid windows with the widgets still where you can reach them hardest.

Sad.

And now i'm gonna read the dock-part again for a jolly good laugh.

I suppose technological expertise is a matter of degree. At one time in my nefarious past I worked as an electronic engineer for a large medical imaging company. My duties involved system integration and some circuit board design.

During my time there I was continually surprised at how little the programmers knew about the equipment. Some did, but some knew nothing at all and, mind you, some of them were working on very low level system programming. Pretty amazing. I couldn't for the life of me imagine how in the world they could program the device without knowing at least the machine's basic architecture. How do you tell the machine what to do when you have no idea what it can do or how it does it?

Some of the programmers didn't even know how to operate the equipment they were programming. There was more than one occasion where a programmer would make an emergency call to me saying he has been trying everything to get his system to respond without success and I would have to make the long trek from R&D to the programming area only to plug the system into the wall and turn it on for him. Sounds made up, but it's not.

But it is all a matter of degree. While I was designing circuit boards and integrating sub systems designed by others into the equipment a particle physicist could accuse me of having no idea of what I was doing because I didn't know what the electrons and other sub atomic particles were doing, and he would be right. But, I didn't give a damn as long as I could get the circuits boards to do what I wanted and the system to behave the way I wanted it to. I knew exactly what I was doing at the level I was working.

So yeah, thalo's right, and klappy's right, and I'm right, and the particle physicist is right. I suppose a theoretical physicist could chime it and tell us all that none of us, including him, know what we are talking about because there is no way to know. He would be wrong. You don't need to know everything to know what you know.

That Ars Technica review gave an example of how transparent the menubar was at one point in development. That's gotta be a symptom of some deep psychological problem...or it's symptomatic of a deep spiritual quest by the typical yutes of today. They are no doubt driven to look deeply through and behind things, never satisfied with the surface level, alway looking for the hidden meaning of life, for the very essence of things.

Either that or they're just jerking off to special effects for their own sake.

So yeah, thalo's right, and klappy's right, and I'm right, and the particle physicist is right. I suppose a theoretical physicist could chime it and tell us all that none of us, including him, know what we are talking about because there is no way to know. He would be wrong. You don't need to know everything to know what you know.

I agree completely, HH. Well said. I mean, there are a whole lot of perspectives in any big project such as an operating system, not to mention the perspective of the bottom line of the company. But back in bygones days of the original Mac there was some brilliant technical expertise. And there was a hierarchy of purpose, at least among some. The idea was to make the computer as simple as possible for the end user. Everything was subordinated to that idea -- in theory, at least. And everything (including profits) was to flow from that one idea. They still had to make a computer that was affordable. And they wanted the outside case of the computer to be stylish (that seemed to be Jobs' main influence). And, yeah, ultimately the idea was to make money, and perhaps even to change the world. But they started with the core idea that computers were too geeky and to hard to use for the average person.

When looking at Leopard, what does anyone suppose Apple's purpose is? To see how many colors and bouncing things will fit on a computer screen at one time? To burn out people's retinas? To make the interface of a computer as mind-numblingly stupid as can be? But Apple is making money hand-over-fist, so I bow to their superior ideology. What they are doing is working.

--

I do like the look of the flatter folders. As soon as they tilted those things sideways way back in some version of 8 or 9 of the Classic OS, it spelled trouble. It made for a smaller target and it was just gratuitous eye candy. Odd as it may sound, a completely flat, high-contrast folder would be preferred. And there's no reason it couldn't be made attractive.