Messages

51

General Software Discussion / Re: Is XP really that good?

« on: November 30, 2008, 10:34 AM »

That'd be the norm for any OS (of the currently available) if it was the dominating product. As soon as you get a zillion shit-for-brains people using something, it'll go horribly wrong . Yeah, the Windows API is pretty messy, and it's very clearly visible that it has legacy all the way back to win3x... but at least it is properly documented, covers more or less everything you need for core OS services (without requiring third-party libraries), etc.

<hypothesis-alert>Well, I think I'd argue that the messy APIs of windows, and the do-it-yourself ethos of user interfaces (everyone reinvents their own interface, little coherence anywhere, even between MS products) makes Windows software on average (independent of number of users) messier than OS X or KDE.<hypothesis-alert>[1]

Honestly, I can't think of one piece of XP-originating software where I could say the user interface has been really beautifully and consistently designed (functionally and/or aesthetically)[2].

I wouldn't mind playing around with OS X, but why oh why did Apple choose Objective-C for Cocoa? :-s

  Though there are some nice bridges to a whole other plethora of languages. My favorite is Ruby, where one can have a full cocoa experience while still using a nice and cuddly language (for me anyway not being a "real" programmer).

----
[1] hypothesis is really just a fancy way of me saying i have no solid evidence (if it was ever possible to collect) this is the case  
[2] I exclude cross-platform marvels like Lightroom which ignore the platform UI guidelines completely.

52

General Software Discussion / Re: Is XP really that good?

« on: November 29, 2008, 08:48 AM »

For your normal user, there is little reason not to run Windows. More apps, easier to use, faster or just as fast

Well, that is all very open to debate Having to fix endless XP machines of friends (registry errors, infections aplenty, horrible performance), having to recommend from the tidal wave of poor alternative software (more in number yes, not always in quality), I can't say it is better for users at all. XP is easier to use only if you've gone through the Windows mill for years and got used to its quirks, otherwise it is a horrid hodge-podge mess of a UI. Having switched one person over to Ubuntu a year ago, I've had significantly less embarrassed phone calls and less of my time wasted. I'm no Linux user myself, but once configured (which can still be endlessly frustrating), it runs better and with less problems than XP did for him (at least for my limited sample of normal users).

As an OS X user, I'd also say the same about Windows XP APIs as you say about Linux. The horrible mess of user interface styles, the lack of unified inter-service communication, no consistent metadata handling or search, really poor graphics[1] (GDI sucks, terrible colour management) and sound libraries (poor latency), shoddy typography support etc.

----
[1] I know I'm ignoring DirectX, but i see it as an accessory library. Apple's Quartz pulls OpenGL much more directly into the core graphics APIs. Apple was doing full hardware compositing using OpenGL transparently  in OS X 10.2, shortly after XP was released.

53

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: November 29, 2008, 08:23 AM »

Yes, Sherlock was Apple's interface introduced way back in OS 8.5 which allowed both local and cloud searching through one interface, it used SGML files to configure search providers easily (Mozilla later made Mycroft to share these search providers, and incidentally, I made a mycroft > Opera search provider database a while after).

This is the same broad idea as Windows 7 functionality (it uses OpenSearch, an XML replacement for the sherlock/mycroft style providers), but Windows 7 seems to be a much more robust implementation in terms of file-system handling. The cloud items pulled in through Win 7 will be treated like files, not like search results, thus allowing a more transparent UI (context menus, thumbnails etc.).

Leopard's spotlight allows network searched files to be included in the local mix, but not cloud files (Sherlock was sent to an Old peoples home with Leopard too).

54

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: November 28, 2008, 04:48 PM »

Cool! cloud data (flickr in this case) pulled into windows explorer transparently:

http://www.istarteds...-and-you-shall-find/

And you can play Crysis without a graphics card (in slooooow-motion) :

http://www.istarteds...-only-albeit-slowly/

55

General Software Discussion / Re: Regular Expression Designer: Free Program to Help you Build Regular Expressions

« on: November 28, 2008, 04:13 PM »

I always liked regex coach:

http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/

But this looks good too, thanks mouser! 

56

General Software Discussion / Re: Opera - An exercise on frustration

« on: November 28, 2008, 04:08 PM »

Indeed, the UI could be tuned more, but this feature is also far to brilliant for its minor imperfections to detract. I want proper boolean/proximity searches, which would be just amazingly awesome. Don't forget to make your prefs > advanced > history > addresses a large value to store all that text-content goodness. And don't forget about opera:history for your own local google-alike database.

57

General Software Discussion / Re: Is XP really that good?

« on: November 28, 2008, 04:04 PM »

I like 40hz's phrase: "Good enough" -- XP's memory management works for most scenarios (it was manna from heaven coming from Win9x for those unlucky enough to remember *that* memory train-wreck). Linux is supposedly much better at proactive cache management; XP is, as f0dder mentions, quite conservative. My girlfriend's iBook runs Leopard for weeks on 640MB RAM, watching films etc. without problems. It will of course swap as several apps are open (Microsoft Office is a chief culprit), but stays useable. I notice that OS X is more similar to Linux in that it keeps stuffed cached (inactive rather than free ram is shown), rather than the more conservative flushing of XP. I think I'd rather my meory was stored with stuff I may need than just flushed to make it look good.

Vista follows the cache more stuff path as I understand it, though it certainly doesn't handle low memory system well from my experience.

58

General Software Discussion / Re: Lessons from 2 years without Windows

« on: November 13, 2008, 05:45 AM »

I agree with his experience.
There's no replacement for some windows software.

-urlwolf (November 12, 2008, 05:40 PM)

Just to mention, all the software he discusses are not "windows" software, as they all run under OS X too (and at least the Adobe apps till CS3, they run better). And IRB starts plenty fast under OS X too :p

But then I love contemporary art and live in metropolitan London; though have no care for white earbuds, nor am I "rich"!

To the nicely written article:

I don't really agree on the issue with virtualisation (not from a linux perspective, but as a general proposition). We run both OS X and Windows XP in parallel and both OSes handle virtualisation fine. I regularly run Matlab and Adobe Illustrator under XP, and Office/iWork/Scrivener/Opera/File manager/Photoshop/chat etc under OS X, both OSes run fast and there is never a lag (3Gb 2ghz late-2006 Macbook). I sleep the machine so never have to deal with windows startup more than once every few weeks.

It seems like virtualbox is an ideal solution (it can't be so much worse than vmware surely?). And virtualisation aids, not hinders migration IMO. My boss is starting to run more things under OS X that he used to under XP slowly, but surely. He builds confidence of the new OS one app at a time, yet still keeps the comfort blanket a full-switch would take away.

Thanks D-- for the writeup! Oh, and some of your China posts were interesting reads too, having worked in Shanghai for 4 months this summer. 

59

General Software Discussion / Re: Plain text editor for writers

« on: November 03, 2008, 06:47 PM »

Ha, #1 and #2 are both Windows clones of Textmate; this makes sense as TM is such a fantastic editor. After years of frustration with editors like Ultraedit, and noodling with scintilla, using TM was a revelation. Great to see that becoming available on windows

johnk: yes, typewriter scrolling is much better than that half-window hack. I use it in fullscreen in Scrivener and it is excellent; it gives clear context for your current writing point. I'd like to see that in Q10 or another windows text editor too.

60

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« on: November 03, 2008, 05:54 PM »

thanks for grabbing that URL between your teeth urlwolf 

edvard: yup I prefer to download what I need to run an app. OS X is basically 0install in that one drags an app to your applications folder and you're done, app will run fine (there are a few exceptions). Drag it to trash, you've uninstalled it!

61

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« on: November 03, 2008, 05:30 PM »

Yeah, QS animations make it shimmer indeed! QS uses core graphics APIs and then builds on them, this is another example how the core OS X APIs enable QS to shine. And at least on a G4 iBook use minimal CPU; I think core graphics scales its effects to the hardware really well.

I think iWork is showing higher memory use because it has to convert the documents from office format right?

62

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: November 03, 2008, 05:11 PM »

Indeed legacy support will still be the lead weight on MS with W7. I wish they would break completely. Offer a VM environment for all legacy software (MS-DOS - > Vista), but don't cripple your software on each release. Offer clean APIs for programmers at the core of your OS, not libraries on top of libraries on top of libraries. Not cruft going back to ms-dos still lying about. And I wish they'd rip out the horrid DRM system, and pointless activation systems.

I think in the UI, MS are cleverly using existing motifs from Windows, but removing the horrible mess we've lived with since Win95. I think functionality will be radically improved with the combined buttons, the fantastic jump lists, window peeking, contextual thumbnails, user-focussed systray. I'd personally get rid of the start button, and I still think that the unified menu bar is better than the window-locked bar (multi-monitor being the exception). But I can't think of anything that is a step back in Windows 7 UIwise (he says bombastically), and I'll be so bold to say it may offer the cleanest and most functional workspace of any OS to date (caveat being I ain't actually used it, reality may be different )

63

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: November 02, 2008, 03:59 PM »

A very slick talk on the new UI features:

http://mschnlnine.vo...dc08/WMV-HQ/PC24.wmv

Although he claims the prior art is Windows 1, anyone who has used the dock will be immediately familiar with the Win7 taskbar. However I can say that MS are finally "getting it". His talk is the cleanest description of why the Win95->Vista UI is such a mess (the example of the number of outlook icons is indicative of the larger problems he highlights), why OS X is currently better (the reduced clutter of redundant launch surfaces), and why Win7 will beat leopard. It's the first UI that, at least on paper, will beat Exposé+dock for window/application management IMO (though I wish they would add multiple-desktops). I can't wait!

64

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« on: November 02, 2008, 02:35 PM »

Wow, I didn't expect Office to work so well on a G3. It works fine on a G4 iBook, but Pages/Numbers is even better.

My plugins:

address book
calculator
cl1p.net - online clipboard makes it easy to share across machines
clipboard & shelf
dictionary
File tagging
iCal
image manipulation
iTunes
process manipulation
Spotlight
Terminal control
Web search

I used to have more, but as I'm alpha testing the latest alpha builds, I don't want to have too many plugins around.

Shelf is useful, but it is better as a one-two with clipboard module. The shelf is a place you can stack items you may want to use later: select a few items and add them to the stack, write notes for what to do with them. Then come back to them the next day. Clipboard stores the last X items from the clipboard for immediate access into any app, but won't survive a reboot as the shelf does.

I also disable dashboard on my Macbook as I don't really use it (I use Opera widgets instead). But I can heartily recommend iStat Menus as a replacement for iStat Pro (uses the menubar, nicely customisable). The only thing is that it can make startup slower by 10-20 seconds.

65

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you launch stuff?

« on: November 02, 2008, 02:19 PM »

Yes, the plugin system and plugins of the latest FARR are utterly fantastic, I'm really amazed and impressed     

You should try ubiquity too seeing you are overdosing on launchers at the moment 

66

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« on: November 02, 2008, 02:17 PM »

Thank you for protecting Earth and her space stations from attack, even more amazing that after wiping the thick gelatinous body fluids of "those from beyond" (cue sounds of a theramin and extensive echo), you could get some details on this semantic desktop app. 

Ubiquity is cool, lets hope it doesn't go the way of it's ancestor Enso and gets abducted by little gren men 

67

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you launch stuff?

« on: November 02, 2008, 08:04 AM »

Darwin: agreed that the pseudo-modal mode of Enso is more useable than many people criticize it for. But I still find Enso frustratingly limited to use. I want to like it, and love the principles, but it is so broken in so many ways. They have an alpha next-generation build which is much nicer, but its really just an ugly hack, and now they're working for Mozilla, Enso has basically died...

68

General Software Discussion / Re: Quicksilver Goes Open Source

« on: November 02, 2008, 08:00 AM »

Darwin: don't forget to download the excellent 97 page manual and cheat sheet for quicksilver (QS):

http://groups.google...ead/ef99bcac45de5ca7

Note, QS cutting edge builds are now here:

http://code.google.c...chemy/downloads/list

But for a Tiger user I'd recommend sticking to the last official build. The cutting edge builds are better for Leopard users.

And if you want to read a preview of the next generation QS currently in hushed development by Alcor:

http://blacktree-alc.../trunk/01-README.txt

Not much to go on, but nevertheless exciting.

Yeah, running QS and spotlight works great even on old hardware, I find that amazingly impressive (considering what spotlight is doing). I installed Leopard on a 5 year old iBook and it works wonderfully. I'm about to try to install Windows Search 4 on an old XP laptop and see how it compares, but the last version was still much more incapable than spotlight.

Have you installed any QS plugins, and if so which ones?

69

General Software Discussion / Re: Codeweavers - no good deed goes unpunished

« on: November 02, 2008, 07:48 AM »

This isn't really a direct economic hit of  $52,462,500 right? The financial strain is in terms of the server punishment for downloads and possibly higher support requests, but they haven't had to pay for goods sent to people.

Will they offer a full support package?

As I see it they have lots of new users who even if 5% of them upgrade when the next major version is out, then they are in a financially great position.

Good luck to them, and nice to see them true to their word. In an age of corporate caution and fear to affect a bottom-line, this was gutsy thing to do.

70

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« on: November 01, 2008, 09:42 AM »

urlwolf and housetier: thank you both, this is absolutely where I think we should indeed be going. Deepa Mehta looks interesting and I'm off to play around, though this needs to be implemented at the core OS API level to be really useful IMO. I was once a user of Personal Brain (back when it first appeared), which I loved, but after a while I stopped using it because I was forced only into its UI, and no data could leak out easily. I suspect Deepa Mehta will be the same.

urlwolf: any interesting info gladly received
houstier: let us know how the talk went!

71

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: November 01, 2008, 05:53 AM »

40hz: is that Ballmer reading the prior art document!? 

One of my enduring interests and deepest wishes in an OS is full metadata support. So I'm interested in the Windows indexer to see where they're heading. In windows 7 the changes seem incremental but very welcome:

http://blogs.msdn.co...-desktop-search.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.co...-desktop-search.aspx

Most of the discussion is still about speed and the compromises they're making to balance this. I'd rather they were trying to extend metadata models on Windows, but it is clear that the indexer is becoming a fundamental core part of the OS which is great!

On the UI side there is a *lot* of nice tweaking going on. If you can, like, get, like, over the, like, awesome, presentation style, like, of this channel9 video, the awesome contents, like, are worthwhile:

http://channel9.msdn...The-User-Experience/

Awesome. Like.

Libraries are copies of the smart folders in OS X (metadata-based dynamic collations), but the UI in Windows 7 for "drilling down" is clearly better. As alluded to in the blogposts and clarified in the video, writing search queries has be GUIed in Windows 7 and this is brilliant for general users. These are great first steps forward for making the huge benefits of a metadata-based file interface accessible to general users.

72

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« on: November 01, 2008, 05:37 AM »

So for my ideal OS, I want a well-defined database backend and a set of standard APIs for all, yes *all* these common tasks

-tranglos

OS X has core APIs and one of them is Core Data: http://developer.app...macosx/coredata.html

Apple has tried to provide comprehensive APIs and deal with all the main requirements. Cocoa apps just plug into them, using core data to handle their storage and data handling requirements. There is also a system-wide spellchecker and dictionary available to all apps. Of course that doesn't stop e.g. Office from still using its own. Apps expose their data via Applescript (can use ruby/python etc if one prefers) and offer system services to other apps as a fundamental part of the OS environment. This makes everything more bridged together by default. Less data island and less redundancy. And that is what makes integrative apps like Quicksilver work so transparently - the APIs and enforced interoperability makes bridging easy.

In my ideal OS this path would be extended even further. I'd want Core Data like system to abstract further and allow more data mixing (obviously with an apps permission). All data stored in the system would be encouraged to have rich metadata. And the system indexer would have a unified entry point for apps that wanted to expose their data to the system as a whole.  I could thus have an app (e.g. a Getting things done app) that exposed my to do information with my email app and allowed contextual linking between them.

73

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: October 30, 2008, 01:11 PM »

Memory use of the Window manager has been cut 50% per window:

http://www.istarteds...y-consumption-by-50/

Seems to be using the GPU better than it did before (why was it so inefficient before I wonder, is it really some magic that could only come with DX10.1?).

And it seems some more love is being given to font management:

http://www.istarteds...-fonts-in-windows-7/

Now, the crappy font handling in Windows is one of the main reasons I prefer OS X. Apple really sweated the details and for anyone who loves typography and book layout etc. Windows is uselessly primitive. What is a shame is that Microsoft have really helped the technical underpinnings of digital font technology (e.g. opentype), they just failed to implement it much in their OS. Anyway, it looks as if MS are slowly waking up from their slumber, and finally thinking about some of the smaller UI details. They still have to do *much* more, I'm still shocked that their major contribution (the wonderful opentype) is still not anywhere to be found in their OS. I can use contextual ligatures even in Leopard's notepad equivalent, but can't do so in MS's flagship word processor!!! I can but dream that Windows 8 will finally support something MS pushed in 1994...

74

General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« on: October 29, 2008, 02:30 PM »

Jump lists. That there is the single nicest feature I've seen UI wise:


{source: ars technica}

Contextual tools and links, wrapped in a nice API. This really has the potential to be a nice unique feature. OS X has it for a few apps like iTunes, but it is not standardised and ubiquitous as MS are aiming to do. Really lovely  It reminds me of Quicksilver in a good way.

I also welcome the user regaining full dominion over the (horrible) system tray, a welcome poke-in-the-eye to all the apps that fight over this piece of screen realestate (seems much better than the systray hiding mechanism of XP).

The other bits seem nice tweaks, they are playing catch-up to functionality elsewhere. I do think the window thumbnails are better than the kludgy flip3D.

So, er, reading between the lines, I'm sensing that overall performance is an issue for you, Superboyac?

-Darwin

 

75

General Software Discussion / Re: Can You Run OS X on a Virtual Machine?

« on: October 14, 2008, 01:27 PM »

Job's reply at the QA on why no blu-ray:

Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don’t mean from the consumer point of view. It’s great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex. We’re waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off before we burden our customers with the cost of licensing.

Great news IMO...

Displayport is the new HDMI so it seems. Macbook pro gets hybrid-SLI, which is nice. But the $899 macbook rumour didn't pan out which is a great shame.