Hey my brothers, just nailing the Theses on the thalo.net cathedral door now. This thread will be the place to discuss them.

Okay, I took the day off and read through the thesis. It makes a lot of good points. My first thought would be to edit it down a bit and link (or insert graphics) to specific examples. It's a tough read for the uninitiated (and even the initiated) because it's heavily theoretical stuff. We just need more examples.

After reading so much of that gold text I got a heavy dose of afterimage when looking at simple black and white text. You and Aqua mean to make me go blind.

I do very much like the preamble (I read the theses first). Well done. It covers all the major points. I could sign my name to that. The stuff that follows is weaker and is probably where it needs to shift from philosophical rants to nuts and bolts examples.

I take it that we're on the Protestant side. I just may change my hard drive name to Luther.

Bravo Thalo, Bravo

First off i've been reading this forum for quite awhile and not posting because, to be honest with you, you and the rest of the posters writing skills are pretty intimidating.

Being in graphics for 25 years and on the Mac since system 6 i'm very frustrated with X. Most of the people I work with won't upgrade but being loyal Mac users seem to feel guilty about it, they will have your theses in their mailboxes tomorrow, may help ease some of that guilt. Their still on 9, but me the head designer, the owners court artist just had to have a G5 to show off to clients. My dual boot G4 MDD dualGig went to an intern. Even after using X as much as possible since 10.1, and now working on a dual 2gig G5 I want that G4 back. And so on...

Anyway i figure the least I can do is spread your theses around and let you know that i agree, OS X can and probably will be great if you me and other X critics keep bitchin!

whew!! Feel better now. Again bravo

Napier

Thanks, brother Napier! And welcome.

Brother Brad, sorry man, I guess I was in a philosophical ranting mood, for a change bwahaha... because to me the problem is just so damned philosophical.

Hey, not that there ain't nuts and bolts examples. We go through those all the time. But to me, the Luther thing was more DOCTRINAL. It showed where the major fuckups were in the core ideaology. Highlighted the major wrong turns. In a Panther review, we can go through what's wrong with Panther. But some things, I think, had to be said this way. We have to get back to what's important. Look, I can poke holes in Panther all day long. But what really busts my butt is the big, pervasive, conjob that's going on. This is not just about a crappy product, it's about smelling crap and getting people to call it perfume.

It's about whether the personal computer is something that's sole purpose is to milk us; or if it's a tool for our use. I don't want the Mac Faithful to be the lambs led to the slaughter. I don't want software that doesn't friggin' WORK, and a computer company that downtalks and dumbs down its wares because it simply doesn't respect us, to be something we all just accept.

It irks me to think of Apple just sitting back with its feet on the desk and laughing at what goons we all are. We deserve much better than that. The geek aristocracy is the first thing that needs to go. That whole "we and our juicy chess club brains are superior to you, and you must fund our intellectual everest-spinning-gears-science fair projects." Nah-ah, sorry, time for these guys to get real.

Make a useful, intuitive product. Make it go. Make it lean and mean and user friendly. Stop bloating it with happy horseshit. Remember the AHIGs and start there.

Caving to marketeers has RUINED Apple. They were worthy of our loyalty, when their agenda was us. Now that their agenda is not us, they are crap meisters. Now they can exploit instead of serve. Now they can say quality schmality, and nobody will sound off.

The problem now, is that the user base is polarized. First, it's people with no clue, they are the ones lauding the Mac. The people using it at a squillionth of its potential. As a casual use/passive entertainment vehicle. Then come the geeks, who are all hopped up because it's what they are used to. They disdain GUIs, believe they are for the chimpy newbies, and sigh with relief as they pop the hood and CLI their little fingers off in the terminal. Nothing NEW happened to Unix, so they are happy. Mmmmm, safe, warm, status quoooo.... ahhhh.

Well, sca-rew that. Pro users, the Mac Faithful are paying the price. We are supposed to go out and buy new G-5s that do SQUAT as well as the legacy did, in a bloated, visually superabundant and nearly unusable system, for what? Somebody please tell me. Tell me how I'm supposed to sit back and look at wasted gigaflops... supposed to grin like a retard because I can play iTunes and make home digivids, while every hardcore pro app basically sucks the big one.

Where friggin' CUT AND PASTE goes belly-up... where stuff just simply STOPS. WORKING. Where it's NEVER worked, and I'm supposed to be adopting. Uh, yeah. How many years has it been? And uh, WHAT do we have to show for it? The legacy still kicks all of its lame butt for pro applications.

What we've gotten is big, splashy, gaudy, happy horseshit. Big gigantic newbie targets, rendered up the crap chute, animated looney tunes. All kinds of garbage to KEEP us down, KEEP us from getting work done.

Smoke, mirrors, broken promises. The interface has become nothing more than a big, honkin' DISTRACTION. An obstacle. Well, I say, time to start subtracting idiotic nonsense. Time to inject this pancreas-exploding sickeningly sweet eye candy with some insulin. Put it on a freakin' DIET. The whole flabby mess.

How can we adopt when the OS doesn't do its job? Where the interface doesn't follow orders or even make sense? Is one big junk-drawer of upscaled spinning-gear possibilities enough to hang the platform on? Come on.

I think Apple literally believes that Mac buyers are gimps, drooling and nose-picking and booger eating and waiting for our hugs. That we're sitting around NOT NOTICING that they can't do anything right. That the OS continues to grow, to get better by teaspoonfuls, but that it's STILL so not ready for primetime it's embarrasing.

It really is. Embarrasing. They should be ashamed at how weak this OS has always been. Its redeeming qualities are so few and far between as to be comical. Unless you are a total banger, a dilettante, there is NO WAY any pro can be happy with this system. Why? Because it can't handle anything but the most amateur workload. That has to end.

OS X has to be whipped into shape. Crap settlers and newbies can't be calling the shots in this development. It's got to be the pros, complaining their asses off. That's the only way the Mac will ever be great again. The detail sweaters need to get busy. We need a zero tolerance for crap policy. All of us. We need to stop making exuses for Apple and start holding them accountable. We have to stop paying money for dreams and promises and work-in-progress buggy half-assed betas.

Look, I can poke holes in Panther all day long. But what really busts my butt is the big, pervasive, conjob that's going on.

Agreed. I too think that it’s much more than just a behavioral problem subject to “just do these things and all will be well.” There’s also an ideological problem from which much of the crap flows. Still, many, many people will have trouble wrapping their heads around the ideological underpinnings of the theses without some graphical, clear examples. The Interface Hall of Shame comes to mind.

Unless we do that we’re in danger, as always, of being written off as just another ideology of the week. Pick and choose. One is as good as another and since Apple is making the computers I think I’ll just go with them. That sort of thing. You’ve pointed out rather well that we’re not anti-Apple. We’re for things making sense and working well in a coherent, minimalist way while allowing for the ability of people to goof up their computers as they will.

Where friggin' CUT AND PASTE goes belly-up... where stuff just simply STOPS. WORKING. Where it's NEVER worked, and I'm supposed to be adopting.

I’m not set up right now to run Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark, InDesign or GoLive in OS X. I’ve certified OS X for casual use according to our strict thalo.net standards but can go no further without plunking down a huge sum of money. You might attract some people with your excellent Preamble to the theses (I’ll re-read the theses and give it a second chance). But you should remember that many people haven’t been following the discussion that we’ve been having for years. It would help to delineate all those little annoyances you’re having in the pro apps. As you know, it is the nature of humans, particularly concerning computers, to change our habits to suit the computer. We work around crap all the time without giving it a second thought. We can easily conclude that nothing is wrong until it we are made to consciously acknowledge the extra steps we’re needlessly taking. It’s painful minutia, for sure, but I think we need equal doses of minutia and grand theory.

I am with Brad, I think the Theses are good, but some visual aids for the "gimps, drooling and nose-picking and booger eating and waiting for our hugs" might help them understand and rally around your cause. BTW, I could use some hugs. So could everyone here, no doubt.

Also, what is the plan to make Apple notice the problems? Is it going to be the passive, "we have written our Bible, they will come read it"? Or, are you going to metaphorically nail the Theses to the door of every priest in the Cupertino Cathedral?

A lot of the GUI elements are matters of taste, although the defense by the Mac pod people of things like the fuzzy, eye-straining screen fonts is pure crap-settling.

I keep saying that an OS based on the antique Unix system can never be the basis of a mass-market PC, and nothing has come along to change my opinion. Here's an excerpt from a post at MacFixIt:

<< matt_s
... Re: The Panther Poll Redux
11/28/03 06:56 AM Reply

<< I like 10.3.1, I find it to be fast and stable...a few quirks, to be sure, but a lot of those disappeared when I updated prebindings: terminal :
sudo update_prebinding -root / -force
then, restart, boot into open firmware & reset-nvram & reset-all. This seemed to clear up everything except some printing hiccups, and those took a little work but they're working fine right now. >>


So this is the sort of thing that has to be done to make Panther usable. Which means it will NOT be usable for average users who don't have the skill level of the online techie forum-posters.

How many times do our X-using friends keep telling us that you don't have to use the Terminal or the CLI to use OS X? And yet ALMOST EVERY solution to an OS X problem offered online--or, I hear, by Apple tech support--is "go to the Terminal" and type some bullshit gibberish. This is the great disconnect between the online X-Men and the mass-market of average people who are staying away from X-Macs by the millions.

The techies LOVE this sort of stuff. And Unix, after all, IS a CLI-based system. Apple has tried to graft a do-everything interface onto it (much more than the less-demanding Linux), but they can't take away its fundamental CLI-based nature. Which means that the computer studs will always have a bias to CLI/Terminal ways of doing things. They don't care if Apple computers aren't Macs anymore, they just love the pure computer geekiness of it all.

You can point out to them that in the 3 years of OS X, Apple's share of the computer market has continued to shrink, but they don't want to hear it. They think it's a wonderful thing every time Apple sells a G5 to an existing user willing to buy a new Apple box every year or two because the hardware requirements of OS X are so idiotically high as Apple tries to overcome by sheer brute force what it's inacapable of fixing by good programming...and what it's incapable of changing about the fundamental ancient nature of Unix itself.

Markle

[This message was edited by Markle on Wed December 03 2003 at 03:23 PM.]

Brother Markle, you're absolutely right.

I was thinking. I really don't fault computer studs/geeks for liking the CLI, being more comfortable with it... even poo-pooing the GUI. To each his own.

What makes me mental, is when it becomes an aristocracy. When, being based on arcana, something like geekiness becomes an engine for EXPLOITATION of the non-geek user base. As long as unix remains mysterious and arcane, as long as the operating system and platform favors mumbo-jumbo, with the emphasis off useful tools for EVERY FRIGGIN' USER, there will be knows, and know-nots. Add money and upgrades to the mix, with the knows PROFITING off the know-nots, and it's trouble.

Mac users have never been so much AT THE MERCY of anything before. So over a barrel. We're being asked, in a nutshell, to become geeks, in order to use a Mac to its potential.

Notice how I said "to its potential." Not OUR potential. ITS potential. Two different things. Because the emphasis has gone off you and me or joe blow getting OUR work done. It's now on other crap like market share and preserving aristocracies. No longer about putting computing power in the hands of the common man, but taking it away. Like why buy a hammer when carpenters are out of work?

The Mac used to put pro power in everybody's hands. Just by being easy to use. By cutting out all the bullshit. Now, if you want to use a Mac, you really have to embrace the bullshit. And even then, even if you embrace it, you're STILL only spinning your gears...uh, I mean wheels. The OS is still something so bloated and complicated, that the bullshit has you serving it, adjusting your behavior and workflows to ITS goofy quirks.

Lookit how much we nursemaid and crap-settle now. In the legacy days, we wigged out over crashes, but I remember NEVER feeling that the Mac was letting me down as much as it is now. I never felt like I was being taken for a ride, taken advantage of. OS 9 had issues, but because it was based on a clear, logical, intuitive interface, I was able to get a lot of work done.

Now? Puh-leez. After three years, this beast still can't make it through a day in the shredder. Three years of development, and the simplest thing brings it down. Worse, really important stuff, core functionality (cut and paste), stuff that NEVER had trouble in the legacy, is now just as likely to fail as more notorious things.

This minute, this very minute, I just clicked on a background window to bring it forward. It didn't come forward. It's showing as the active app, but is hidden behind another window. The Mac interface used to behave in predictable, logical ways. A click like that would have ALWAYS brought the window to the fore. Now crap like this, where it doesn't, happens all the time.

I'll hit buttons, and depending on what is going on, the buttons will do SQUAT. Click. Nothing. Drag. Nothing. Click again, nothing. The human outperforms the computer. Computers should be faster than me. My mousing should be GOD to this OS. Every click a commandment.

Now? Fuck, now I'll click and it's like Kitty (Panther) goes: sha! Yeahright? Whatever!

Um. Excuse me, Kitty, thalo be the boss. Not you. You're on my time. Kitty time is not acceptable.

Losing respect for the end user, is like a kid losing respect for its parent. Lookit what happens when kids think their parents are chimps, and begin to downtalk to them. The lawn never gets mowed.

In OS X, work isn't getting done. I've been trying to use this OS since the Public beta, and it downlets time after time, day after day. The amount of work I can get done in the legacy, which I'm supposed to abandon, is an order of magnitude greater than what I can do in a new operating system with new, updated software that I paid freakin' good money for. Bad.

Worse, I'll have to pay for the same software five times, keep upgrading, and it STILL won't surpass the legacy for stability, speed, responsiveness, intuitiveness, ease-of-use.

What gives? C'mon, what?

quote:

---

Notice how I said "to its potential." Not OUR potential. ITS potential. Two different things. Because the emphasis has gone off you and me or joe blow getting OUR work done. It's now on other crap like market share and preserving aristocracies. No longer about putting computing power in the hands of the common man, but taking it away. Like why buy a hammer when carpenters are out of work?

---

This is KEY to understand why OS X and Windows are essentially the same.
No, it's not the retarded and dysfunctional interfaces what makes them alike: it's this basic point made by thalo what made using a Mac worth every dollar. Now that's gone forever. Why even bother?



(Rememeber how 10.3 was supposed to be “user-centric”? Ha-ha-ha. Please.)

Liar.

I don't think UNIX is the main issue here. I think it's the lack of innovation. There are not many MAC advantages over Windows. Macs don't have the edge they once had. Macs are a bit more stable than Windows, a bit easier to use, a bit more elegant, a bit more consistent, a bit more cute, blabla, Everything is a bit. Bits don't cut it, we need loads of radical change. Apple is resting in its laurels and selling us a farce on "innovation". Yea a mac works fine, looks good. So does the competition. We need a breakthrough.

Thalo.net formula for creating condescending terminology:

1) Start with a sentence, such as "Boy, he really screwed the pooch on that one!"
2) Reverse the subject verb and noun, add a hyphen: "Pooch-Screwer"
3) Apply liberally to long-winded manifestos: "The Pooch-Screwers of the world would have you believe..."
4) Bask in glow of smug self-righteousness.

quote:

---

Yea a mac works fine, looks good. So does the competition. We need a breakthrough.

---

Only the competition works better, runs faster, and costs less.

A Dual G5 can't even resize a window or scroll a webpage without lagging. Or get any respectable framerates for old games like UT2003 or Quake.
The whole internet experience on a PC is so ridiculously superior that I'd throw my G4 into the wall and buy a cheap Dell P4 with HT and monitor for $699 and be with it.

If we were on par with the Wintel world in price, performance and SW availability then the only thing that could differentiate and justify an Apple box would be the GUI's efficiency and ease of use.

But no. We don't have that either.

quote:

---

A Dual G5 can't even resize a window or scroll a webpage without lagging.

---

WTF are you talking about? My dual G4 does it just fine in both Safari and Phoenix and kicks ass in the games I play on it as well...

If you do a cost comparison on higher end units (note that i do not mean iMacs and other lower end but higher priced units compared to their PC competition) you'll find the Macs match up very well to the competition.

peace out

<< Three years of development, and the simplest thing brings it down. >>

Even worse--OS X development began in 1997...SIX years.

Not counting the fact that NeXT went back to the 80's, and Unix goes back to the 60's.

Maybe it's just impossible.


Markle

<< Macs are a bit more stable than Windows, a bit easier to use, a bit more elegant, a bit more consistent, a bit more cute, blabla, Everything is a bit. Bits don't cut it.... >>

Excellent! A new perspective on the subject.

These bits aren't enough to motivate non-Mac people to overturn their computing lives. And the majority of the Mac user base not on OS X has been abandoned by Apple. Maybe this is one of the reasons that every quarter, the Mac's market share is a bit lower.


Markle

About one part on the these where Thalo talks about icon tinting being too hard for Apple engineers, Thalo I suggest you get rid of that. I'm your x-critic son, so listen. First off, Apple couldn't transpose a feature from OS9 untouched, they had to bring it back changed, to justify its omission for so long. Whether change was good or not, the change was there, like everything else in Aqua, change for mere change.

Secondly, icon tinting looks ok on generic humble-color icons but bad, real bad on custom icons. So I actually like the change, I just don't like the implementation.

So it's not that they couldn't, or that they chose the easy way out. In fact they chose the hardest way out because they had to deal with icon highlighting which resulted in a mess of inconsistency among views.

At any rate, that reference to Apple engineers should disappear, it's laughable, especially to X-zealots.

Sorry, brother Trif, I stand by what I said.

Icon tinting: they can't do it, and they took the easy way out.

It's all about the masking, and anti-aliasing. It's the same problem a lot of apps are having with the TYPE... getting the halo effect. It's a compositing issue. Roundrects are easier for the system to mask and composite than more complex shapes. If you look at UI feedback highlighting, it's been DUMBED DOWN by making everything fit into a roundrect, a transparency layer BEHIND the icon image. Likewise, labels are only text labels because they can fit them into a consistent roundrect SHAPE... instead of carefully around the edges of all kinds of different custom shapes where more could go wrong.

If they tinted icons, they could probably do a color BEHIND the icon, in the roundrect, as they do in the command-tab array; but then it would look HIGHLIGHTED--to lay a layer of "transparent" color OVER the icon is tougher because the mask has to be right... and masking over aliased, i.e. semi-transparent stuff like soft edges, is harder. Trust me, every rounded corner on every roundrect mask you see in every icon in OS X is a function of laziness.

So Apple took the "easy way out" by doing a *simpler* icon hilight than a more complex masked one. Isn't this what you've been preaching? Simpler? Less resources? Faster?

I for one like the new icon highlighting; it makes for a clear target, and no confusion with custom icons or conflicting desktops/folder backgrounds.