Err, it seems the crystal sausage is finally doomed. Instead there is a flat graphite sausage.
Lion Preview in German Mag

Hey, I'll take it. Anything is better than the crystal sausages.

I wish they'd get rid of the stupid mixed-metaphor traffic light window widgets now. Those are so dated. The crystal details have got to go. Flat is the new 3D.

If you really want to see what Apple's up to, you have to go to the source.

I swear, these guys crack me up. They are so predictable. As brother Brad would say, they just throw spaghetti onto the wall and see what sticks. This time what's new and novel is the iPad, so what do they do? Take that and gear the ENTIRE OS around that limited functionality.

It was the same in the "iTunes" era. They got some success, so suddenly everything had to look and behave like that.

But the problem with this strategy, and they've done this time and time and time again, is what they end up doing is just adding another layer of useless interface to an OS that already has more than enough layers of useless interface.

I know I sound like a broken record here, but what this OS has needed from the start is SUBTRACTIVE PROCESS. In other words, a leaning and meaning... it's needed to be put on a diet. Take all the crap that's half-assed, and ditch it. Keep what works.

Make it USER customizable, but make it ONE GUI. Not twelve.

The most humorous thing is the proposed "Launchpad"... a home for your apps. An elegant, full screen display for all of your apps. Uh, you mean like the FINDER? Like Dashboard? Like Exposé? Like Spaces? The photo "Folders" is utterly insane (in the launchpad section). You see a black bar of launchpad "folders" (none of which LOOK like folders, the icons look like app icons)... and we see what's inside by means of a little popup dock-like icon.

So let me get this straight, right below that is the FUCKING DOCK... which does almost exactly the same thing (remember "Stacks"?)... I mean shit man, it's ridiculous. Now we have docks on top of docks. Folders on top of stacks on top of folders.

And none of it, none of it increases the EASE OF USE of the device. The original AHIGs are rolling over in their grave. I'm not looking forward to the day when "Housecat" will have yet another dock-like bar of happy horseshit, to increase the interface complexity.

Jesus Christ Apple, remember your Henry David Thoreau. Simplify, simplify. Look at the legacy interface and remember how TRULY elegant that was. Compared to the wasteful, multi-level romper room nonsense that replaced it. The complex over-rendered 3D icons are bad enough, but now we have at least four or five DISTINCT SERIES of interface icons that function in more or less the same way, with no integration or common sense in the graphical interface. In other words, a dashboard widget icon is an app, but behaves differently than a dock icon, or a finder icon, or a Launchpad icon.

When is enough going to be enough? O MacLash, where the hell are you? When is Apple going to realize that layers of interface is just, well, STUPID? Hammers don't need five handles. Interface for interface's sake just proves that the geek elite thinks we are chimps. That interface keeps us happy and stupid and barefoot, so we don't question their superiority.

Well, I question it. Elite snob fucktards. They have no interest in making computers more efficient and easier to use. It's all about conning the inferior species. Giving them shiny widgety crap to play with and be distracted by. It's a Big Brother tactic. Launchpad is at war with Dashboard. Launchpad has always been at war with Dashboard.

Freedom is the choice to say simple, streamlined, and monochrome is better. Black as a highlight color is better. Simple iconic icons are better. Crisp fonts for the interface are better. Being able to CHOOSE the look and feel of your interface is better.

"Launchpad."

That's funny. We're basically back to "At Ease" and the tiled Classic "Launcher."

Lion is out now. It is only $30 for you Mac Intel owners.

The Apple site says "available in July"

Lion is now available for download. I don't think BN can install Lion as he will loose the use of Rosetta.

Apple updated the MacBook Airs and the Mac Mini.

Now I have to save up to get a Mini.

They have a Server Mac Mini too. This could be an alternative for thalo.

Just read the arstechnica review. My god, how much of a fanboy does one have to be and not be able to call a piece of crap what it is ? Reading John Stokes going through hoops and bending backwards to hide his criticism politically correctly in little hints buried in piles of apple-apology - how sad. But then again he has to cater to his audience. How pathetic.

But he's too much of a techie not to spot the real bummers in OS X sans the "Mac" thing: After 11 years it's still running - or rather stumbling along - on a hopelessly deprecated file system from the eighties and Apple basically threw in the towel as to garbage collected Objective-C (you non-techies of course don't have a clue what that means. Basically it means that developers have to manage the memory allocations and deallocations of their programs - oh, sorry, "apps" for you Apple guys - themselves whereas all other modern frameworks like Java, C# or what have you have done away with that ten years ago). Obviously Apple's own library's contain so much hacked-together low-level C that the garbage collector pukes on them. Ah, well.

Fascinating. You can just put a lot of unnecessary, annoying glitz on a GUI, sell that as "innovation", spend the next ten years cutting the glitz away and sell the result again as "innovation" ten years later. Truly a marketing masterpiece. When Steve will be gone, who will be able to do that ?

Loved the part where he reviews the contact app.

The link to brother Jon's review

It's just hope it's not a continuation of the dumbing down process. Which is different from making something simple to use and intuitive.

I still don't see what the OS NEEDS, which is my broken-record cry for SUBTRACTIVE PROCESS. Meaning cut out the bad, keep the good.

Continuing to slather on layer upon layer of interface has never done this system any good.

Holy crap, did you see the pleather interface on the new version of Calendar? I swear, they are still able to make the veins in my neck squirt blood. That's about a hundred times worse than the brushed steel texture. I mean, it's a deal breaker. That's too fucking stupid and ugly to use.

Well, I have the Lion installed. Everything works fine so far. No more crystal sausages, GREAT. The new scrollbars are nice and very low-key,in fact a bit too much so.

What I really like a lot is the ability to go full screen with one's apps. This feature makes Lion worth it (24 euros) for me.

Also there is less garishness overall, more black-and white icons, and the menubar has a black border underneath, which is an improvement--there's still a shadow but it's much less irritating.

Of course there's still no freedom for the user to customize the interface.

Looking forward to Mountain Lion, or even Sea Lion.

I think Sea Lion is going to be great.

Let me get this correct the scroll bars are now to low-key.

Talking about cats look what has been dragged in broeder klappy greetings. How is Ubuntu treating you?

The question is when does BN start scheming how he can set up an external boot Lion drive so he can give it a spin without wiping out his Rosetta access.

No Intel CPU here so no big cat for me.

Here's a scrollbar in Safari:

Lion scrollbar. The thing is hardly visible.

The scrollbars on this small window in which I'm now typing, are fine.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: yabor,

What about the scroll bars in Finder windows?

Are they still crystal sausages?

If they are not I think Apple should add in an option for crystal sausage scroll bars.

I still hate the traffic light metaphor. Never liked it. Always thought it was too much of a mixed metaphor, semiotically. To me, it reads "stop, caution, go" and that has nothing to do with window function. The first thing I do when trying to customize the Mac OS, is turn off the stupid blue and go graphite.

I'm actually glad the scrollbars were redesigned, I'm glad they've gone more monochrome. They need more of that.

But the linen texture is ghastly, so is the leather texture of Calendar. It's the same exact mistake they have made in OS X over and over and over and over again. They go skin happy, and the do these horrible stupid textures to try and show how cool they are, and they become the most mockable, uncool, horrible things about the interface. Skins like that should be optional. Newbies and digikids might love that stuff, pros hate it.

Another mistake they keep making is going soft-shadow happy. The shadows are re-fucking-diculous. Way too much.

The whole interface could benefit from more clean, 2-D graphical design. Siracusa pointed to a few legacy design elements, and STILL those things hold up next to the overdesigned travesty of Aqua.

Another mistake that won't die, even when we thought we put a stake through its heart is TRANSPARENCY. That screenshot of safari's download popup made me groan. When will these retards learn?

What I'm most curious about, are the "gestures"... brother yabor, did you have to get a trackpad to take full advantage of Lion?

It's so funny how Apple is touting the ability to go full screen with an app is so great. Another cave in to Windows. It should have been that the zoom (plus sign) widget had this functionality. It's never worked right. Now how do they justify having both the plus sign and the full-screen widget? I'm honestly perpelexed.

Good riddance crystal sausages. Should have happened in Snow Leopard. The iTunes scroll bars are nice, why couldn't we have had those?

Here are the things I think would improve the Mac OS INSTANTLY:

1. Ability to change and select interface fonts.
2. Ability to remove gay interface skins and textures
3. Ability to choose DARK text highlight colors, such as black, and have the type drop out to white.
4. Change the window widgets to something cleaner and better designed.
5. Ability to control transparency of all interface elements or turn it off entirely
6. Change all overdesigned 3-D icons to cleaner, simpler, and more monochrome versions. If you use color in icons, use it to show that apps are running or docs are open
7. Remove redundant interface options. Have one cohesive interface instead of seven competing interfaces.

quote:

What I'm most curious about, are the "gestures"... brother yabor, did you have to get a trackpad to take full advantage of Lion?

Actually I think I'll go buy a trackpad. Rico endorsed it, so it'll be fine. Also actually, I've been using the old Leopard mouse since the batteries ran out on the Magic one--I can't seem to get round to buying new batteries.

I like the linnen texture. It's very easy on the eyes, and the color is spot on.

Did I mention that the Lion seems to be a bit snappier than Snow Leopard?

I also long for a 2-D interface with icons for adults.

Howdy. To answer a question from above, still running Ubuntu on my Mac mini G4 happily, i honestly never had a more hassle-free OS. Apple introducing their App-Store in 2011, Wow. Been using that in Ubuntu for free since forever. Difference is, Ubuntu has a clean packaging system underneath and allows you to dig in via the package manager if you wish to. No "You don't need to do that, trust us" here. Ah, well.

So it's back to black and white Icons in Os X and the crowd is cheering. You can't make that up. Great Job, Steve. And they "reinvented" the scroll bar. Holy me. After 20+years of GUI-Design, at long last Apple finds out how a scroll bar should work. First and only requirement: It has to look and behave different to the last time we reinvented it so we can sell it as a "feature".

As for installing Lion from whatever medium you wish, there's lots of how-to's on the net already. Basically Apple just stores all the downloaded stuff somewhere you don't see it (repartitioning your HD unasked and without prompting in the process, allocating about 1 gig of hd space - how cute) and pretends it's not there, which instantly turns it into Apple-magic (How do they dooooooo that, Scooter ?).
There's also some info on how to install Lion on "unsupported" (by Apple) Hardware, since there's no reason (apart from Apple's planned obsolesence shenanigans) why it wouldn't run on an "unsupported" (by Apple) Core 2 Duo, for instance. Just google OSINSTALL.MPKG, that's where the gods in Cupertino decide what holy hardware they allow their OS to run on and what not.
Hilarious.

The biggest headache i see for Apple going forward (And John tries to drive that point home, too hidden beneath his back-bending) is that Developers are just sick of Apple releasing half-baked API's, forcing them to integrate them and killing them again two releases later. "Resume application", the "New document Model", the ass-backwards new "security" measures (so we have a central privileged daemon process that all the other processes have to go through to get things done - the next bottleneck in OS X, and all to keep users from having to simply type their password when necessary - noooo, we don't want them to have to do that, now do we, Steve?) and "Version control" being cases in point. Axing garbage-collected ObjC means devs are so hopelessly unproductive on OS X (and iOS for that matter) that sooner or later they'll just jump ship. Google made the right decision basing Android on JAVA which has garbage collection and a relatively clean object model. Anybody remember OS X being "the best JAVA platform out there" ? Just more Apple marketing blather.

Or take this little gem:

"Earlier, the Mac App Store was suggested as a way Apple might expedite the adoption of new Lion technologies. In the case of sandboxing, that has already happened. Apple has decreed that all applications submitted to the Mac App Store must be sandboxed, starting in November."

Sweet. So as a developer i have to adopt to Apple's new - and probably buggy - API's, do the beta-testing for Apple, take the heat from customers for the bugs that Apple left in there (the build number of the released Lion contains tons of open bugs filed in radar), migrate my application, in case i want to support one more release than the latest and greatest from Cupertino i have to fork a version that can play without the new API - since it's not in the last release. And if i don't do that, the "App Store" shows me a fat middle finger.

Now that's a way to treat your dev's.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: klapauzius,

It's always great when brother klappy weighs in from the developer perspective.

I have no idea how Apple has been so cunning to make it seem normal for developers and users to do all their R&D and market research for them for free. Over and over again. It's as if they're saying, you want to be a member of this cult, and be on our good side, you have to work for us. Be one of the drones. Stay in line and we'll praise you. Get out of line and we'll destroy you, and badmouth you. Apple only develops crap to a proof-of-concept stage, and then steps back, figuring the developer world will give them free creativity. They've been right. They understand the geek elite mindset.

Still, there's a basic contempt for the end user in this model, that I have been railing about since the beginnings of OS X. Instead of making an interface that drives a computer operating system WELL... the interface becomes just a marketing engine for a userbase that the engineers think are chimps. The true geek elite see GUIs as toys for morons that don't understand "real" command line computing.

I'm suspicious of Lion. The only thing I've heard that makes me want to install it, is brother yabor saying it's snappier. I will take speed over anything. As fugly as the stupid leather texture is, I'd suck it up if what I got in return was speed and performance. I have no idea if I'll like gestures, or think they are gay hand-flappy twiddling.

I wish I had some clue as to how Lion performs with the Adobe Suite. I can't try it until I know that for sure.

But to me, the OS X problem has always been an interface design problem. A great interface means a great platform. And a great interface is a MINIMAL interface. Listen, I think most of the brothership knows I am not ever going to be a guy that's going to look at a rendered texture in an interface and be impressed. I won't utter words like "ooh, it looks like metal! (or linen, or crystal, or leather, or glass)" or "ooh, look, it has a reflection! Or a Shadow!" without total sarcasm.

Make the computer fucking work, and work fast, and I'm actually OK. But I sit around thinking how TRULY fast these computers would be, if they cut out a lot of the useless fat. A pro should be able to put the system on a diet. Save the cycles of rendering complete marketeering bullshit, and put them on the task of making the computer run faster. I don't need a screen filling photorealistic icon. I'd be happy with a flat, 2-D monochrome icon. I like the icons in my MENU BAR better than I like those in the dock.

Color, rendering, shadows, etc. could be used far more JUDICIOUSLY than they are. The only reason they are not, is because it's obvious that Apple still believes its customers are retards. That the LOOK of an icon is more important than its functional visual role in a cohesive interface.

Is there any Apple designer, any one, who could be the 2-D Jon Ive? Somebody who actually believes less is more, and that a more minimal interface would be more efficient that a visually superabundant one?

quote:

The only thing I've heard that makes me want to install it, is brother yabor saying it's snappier.

That was meant to be funny. Safari is definitely a lot faster. Let's see if that lasts.

But thumbnails in the Finder still take quite a lot of time to load: here, I see no difference with Snow Leopard. The beachball has made its appearance in Lion as well.

--ADDENDUM: after some testing, I have to say that folders with lots of thumbnails actually DO load faster than in Snow Leopard.

So yes, Lion is snappier than SL overall, I'd say.

I'm finding Snow Leopard to be dog slow of late. I'm starting to out-type it. That this coincides with the release of Lion I find very suspicious.

The app store talkback on the Lion page is some of the most hysterically entertaining bullshit in the Mac-lovin' world.

You have people who genuinely hate Lion, and give it one star... and then you have these stormtroopers who react to the low reviews, and jump in to be apologists and counteract every low review with a five star.

To look at the average, you'd think this was a five star piece of software... but once you read what's going on in the talkback, you see it's the Apple Faithful gaming it, because they can't stand the idea of being perceived as rubes.

I nearly peed myself at this one:

quote:

AWESOMELY AWESOME!!!!!!!
I CAN'T BELEIVE THE POWER OF THIS OS!!! APPLE, YOU REALLY HAVE OUTDONE YOURSELVES THIS TIME. Everyone, BUY IT NOW, that's not even a suggestion it's a COMMAND.

Basically, impossible to get an accurate review. The five star reviews are made by shock troops, and the one star reviews are made by people who see the software as buggy and piss poor.

Me, All I had to do was take a look at Calendar, the soft shadows, and the new layers of interface to say no thanks. Not yet. I'm not sold. Looks like $30 for beta crapware is $29.99 too much.