Apple

testing forklift now, thanks for the tip.

thing is, i'd really have all that functionality natively in the finder. using a filemanager separate from the default OS provided one is not so optimal in my experience.

my MBP (running lion 10.7) will be written off and replaced end of this year, the replacement one will surely run this 10.10. i expect the usual troubles with basic functionality that apple only manages to sort out by the time the last handful system updates roll around and everyone is gearing up for 10.11...

There is no such thing as a "reference release" of Mac OS X. You all are crazy.

ianj wrote: There is no such thing as a "reference release" of Mac OS X. You all are crazy.

There's no divine mandate on the Charlton Heston Ben-Hur , either, but that doesn't make it not the definitive film version.

I think Mac OS X 10.10 looks pretty nice. I will probably upgrade my personal system within a few weeks of retail availability, although I've long since learnt my lesson about installing new Mac OS X versions on the first day -- especially even-numbered ones. The whole thing looks like a really classy evolution, finishing the work that 10.9 started, especially given that some of the applications in 10.9 still had what a lot of people call "skeumorphism" -- the choice of materials and certain interface elements still represented Steve Jobs more than it does today's Apple. (Reminders and Photo Booth are good examples of this.)

I don't know if I'd say that flat interface and skeumorphism are directly opposing forces. It's suggested here: http://www.colincornaby.me/2013/05/skeuomorphism/ that Mac OS has been skeumorphic for a very long time, but as Apple mentioned on stage at WWDC, they've definitely changed the "materials" of the OS. I actually think it looks classy, and up through 10.8, Mac OS X definitely looked really cartoony, with velvet and felt and "rich Corinthian leather" all over the place, in stark contrast to the exceedingly classy, minimalist metal and glass hardware.

If I had to pick a least favorite thing about 10.10, and this is a pretty extreme nit-pick, it would be that I question the future of the double-smile Mac face on the Finder. I didn't notice it previously, because it hadn't changed in a few years, but I now wonder if there's not a better way to call and visually represent the concept of a file manager. That face used to represent the platform as a whole, back in the time when Apple's only product was the Mac and they were always about to die, it was a reassuring and comforting friend, almost. These days, Apple has relegated it to the visual representation to a single application on the platform. Helpfully, Finder is probably the least liked application on the Mac.

My favorite thing about it? Almost everything else. It'll be interesting to see how iCloud Drive plays out. It felt very much like Shades of iTools/iDisk and Keynotes Past to me, because of course we've been seeing stuff like this for years. If Apple is correct, the whole experience could be great for those who use it. What I imagine the greatest challenge will be is deploying these "new features" in such a way that they don't bomb out or cause problems, such as when Photo Stream showed up back in iOS 6, and filled my iPod Touch to the brim, prompting me to restore the device and simply not add my iCloud/MobileMe account to it.

On the other hand, if you can easily control the flow of such things, it could end up being a huge boon to those who are using the Mac as their primary desktop. (I am on the Windows side of things, personally, so I use the OneDrive application on my iPhone and my photos get funneled onto my PCs via Microsoft's servers.)

I'm particularly excited about the iPhone/iPad/Mac coherence thing. I have an iPhone and a Mac mini at home and my particular use case for this is that my Mac is in a comfortable spot where I like making phone calls, but I don't get mobile phone signal in that spot. I can put the iPhone up on the top deck of the house and connect it to a charger, say in the kitchen, and make/receive calls and texts from my Mac in the bedroom.

Sidenote about "reference" versions: Because of the network connected nature of most computers these days, running a really old version of Mac OS X without security updates is not a very good idea. One of my favorite OS X versions is 10.3, but just because that's so doesn't mean I'm going to be setting up such a system and attempting to use it as a daily driver -- nor am I going to claim that it's the "reference" release of Mac OS X, as there is not such a thing. There is simply the current version, and then the still-supported previous version. Since moving to a yearly release cadence, Apple seems to have extended support out two versions back (So today we have 10.9, 10.8 and 10.7 eligible for security updates) which is a nice gesture on their part.

commodorejohn wrote:

R-ten-K wrote: Old foggies don't like change and are scared by it... News at 11.

Pretentious snots think they're being hip by dismissing any dissenting opinion with "well, you're just afraid of change , granddad!" - film at 11.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"... so thanks, I guess?

If some of you consider the stylistic changes in 10.10 unacceptable, then inform Apple by either not buying their products or contact their organization and tell them directly. Bitching about it ad infinitum on a random internet forum with little to no traffic is a waste of time and effort IMO, but I assume some of you prefer to commiserate with perfect strangers about it. Horses for courses...

R-ten-K wrote: If some of you consider the stylistic changes in 10.10 unacceptable, then inform Apple by either not buying their products or contact their organization and tell them directly. Bitching about it ad infinitum on a random internet forum with little to no traffic is a waste of time and effort IMO, but I assume some of you prefer to commiserate with perfect strangers about it. Horses for courses...

We are communicating it by not buying, but I'll never understand this notion that that's the only allowed form of disapproval and nobody should ever say bad things about something they don't like. Even if we completely discount the bad-word-of-mouth factor (probably a safe bet in OSX's case, but it certainly made a difference for Vista and Win8,) we can at least still commiserate over it. It makes us feel better - who cares if some other random stranger on the Internet thinks it's a waste of time?

I like the new look. The inconsistency of previous releases with old leftovers and all were ugly, especially the gradients. I don't like the headerbars, but otherwise, it looks very nice.

Stop being reactionaries - change can be good.

The saddest part of Windows Vista and 8 is that they're each actually really technically competent operating systems, and Windows Vista is honestly what I'd consider the first acceptable version of Windows. (To the point where I am almost exclusively using Windows now, after having been vehemently against the idea eight to ten years ago.)

Of course, Vista was helped along significantly by the fact that HP, then most prolific PC OEM, was (and really continues to be, although at a lower grade) terrible at the whole "PC" thing.

Windows 8 is a big change, and a whole lot of that is improved underpinnings that have, in my experience, made an old Core2 PC with Windows 8 even faster and more efficient than a newish Mac mini (Sandy Bridge i5) with 8 gigs of ram. There was also that point after Windows Vista was released and between Creative Suite 3 and 4 (and it may actually have happened earlier) where Adobe's products were universally faster and more stable on Windows.

So, it's actually really unfortunate that the unwashed masses put such a reliance on the tech press. Of course what with Joanna Stern leading the tech press in proclaiming the MacBook Air as the best laptop (which, it arguably is) there's a possibility that people will at least end the harmful practice of moving toward older versions of Windows, and replace it with moving toward Mac OS.

The tech press' response to Windows 8 and the Surface family of PCs has started a really interesting iteration cycle within Microsoft, who is becoming way more attentive to what consumers want out of their devices. Penny Arcade had a neat article about the Surface Pro 3 , and as it turns out, media and prominent reviewers of that nature have direct contacts within Microsoft.

Some new technology has its pitfalls as does anything else, but a lot of what I see here is outright dismissal that anything other than the technology of a certain era could have any merit whatsoever. No acknowledgement of things becoming more stable, easier to use, more accessible, more affordable, and any commentary about increased performance is often met with comments about why anybody would ever need a fast computer(1) to begin with.

In terms of commiseration on the Internet -- it's not productive because what often happens is somebody (for example, commodorejohn) will express a sentiment, such as "Windows XP is the absolute pinnacle of all computing and there will never be anything better" and co-incidentally, demand that Microsoft re-add old functionality and in essence, make the current version of Windows look and work as closely to Windows 95 as possible. (Incidentally, people who grew up with Windows 3.1 seem to be quiet on the Windows 8 front, so maybe there's a really thin band of "young fogeys" that are moderately technical but feel an entitlement to their particular era of computing, and are therefore reasonably capable of being loud about it on the Internet.)

The challenge is that people who are unwilling to use the two mainstream options, Mac OS X and modern/secure versions of Windows, are also unwilling to learn how to use other secure options, such as configuring a Linux/BSD/Solaris distribution, or paying for a commercial UNIX system.

(1) Although, that sort of leads to an interesting double standard where, why on earth would it matter how fast your computer is if you want to browse the web and launch Word, but of course, they need the fastest IIfx or Amiga 3000/4000 in order to achieve any given task on a retro computer faster.

If you have conservative tastes in computing environments and want to be able to use a given UI with a reasonable expectation that it won't change with version bumps, proprietary Unix and BSD are waiting with open arms. People being disappointed about something together on the internet happens all the time, but when it gets to be about topics like this, there tends to be an implication lurking in the shadows that Windows and Mac OS X (maybe Ubuntu if the young fogey in question is feeling particularly adventurous) are the only options, which is not only false, but would be hilarious on a forum of this nature.

Cory5412 wrote: In terms of commiseration on the Internet -- it's not productive because what often happens is somebody (for example, commodorejohn) will express a sentiment, such as "Windows XP is the absolute pinnacle of all computing and there will never be anything better" and co-incidentally, demand that Microsoft re-add old functionality and in essence, make the current version of Windows look and work as closely to Windows 95 as possible. (Incidentally, people who grew up with Windows 3.1 seem to be quiet on the Windows 8 front, so maybe there's a really thin band of "young fogeys" that are moderately technical but feel an entitlement to their particular era of computing, and are therefore reasonably capable of being loud about it on the Internet.)

Man, I never said XP was the pinnacle of anything. XP was good in its day, but it still had its share of issues and with the massive numbers of patches that have had to be made to it over the years it's more than a little balky lately. What it is is a usably modern version of Windows that still has the sensible UI of the 95 series - yes, it does its own stupid things, but it lets you turn them off . If Microsoft were to bring that most basic, reasonable compromise to their technically-superior newer OSes, I'd switch over in a heartbeat. (Or, at the very least, when I got around to buying a new laptop.)

ianj wrote: If you have conservative tastes in computing environments and want to be able to use a given UI with a reasonable expectation that it won't change with version bumps, proprietary Unix and BSD are waiting with open arms.

Yeah, and that's great, if you like Unix . Honestly, I've investigated and continue to periodically investigate alternatives - I just had a play around with BSD a couple weeks back, I'm messing around with Solaris this very afternoon, and I've been keeping a close eye on Haiku for years. It's just that none of these seem to be "there" yet - I admire BSD for being a saner, less schizophrenic, and less political cousin to Linux, but unfortunately it still relies on OSS-community software for most of its library, and so it still suffers a lot of the same issues with inconsistent or just outright bad UI, commercial Unix also suffers from this to a lesser extent and it seems like half of the commercial Unices have been converted into Linux distros anyway, and Haiku is beautiful but still missing some important stuff and has very little software. I'd love to be able to move to something less dependent on the whims of one company with departments who need to look busy to justify their budget, but I just don't see a good alternative yet.

ianj wrote: There is no such thing as a "reference release" of Mac OS X. You all are crazy.

Actually, there is such a thing, and it is defined in Apple's OS documentation, i.e. "a stand-alone system software package that can be installed regardless of the version of OS X currently installed (assuming the Mac is compatible with the reference release)".

That said, I originally wrote that I considered 10.6.8 to be a "reference release" (in quotes, not in caps, since I was using a phrase in a colloquial way, not in an Official Way®). I was using it to mean "the standard by which I judge other versions". In practice, I think that 10.6.8 was a truly mature release that had nearly all core functions working well, and, for the first time in OS X (IMHO), subsequent revisions of OS X did not have a compelling balance of new, useful functions/features vs removed, broken, or arbitrary functions/features. I've been upgrading and testing new Mac OS (and other OS) releases as soon as they came out since I first got interested in computers in 1984. In almost every case, I've immediately moved my personal production machines to the new OS in order to get the new functions.

Now, after being an early adopter for more than twenty-five years (and continuing to be an early adopter in other areas of tech/process), I decide that Lion and beyond haven't met my cost/benefit criteria (and I used a term informally to describe my opinion about a Mac OS version), so I'm either crazy or a luddite? Sorry - that's just wrong.

commodorejohn wrote: Yeah, and that's great, if you like Unix .

If you don't like Unix, what are you doing here?

(couldn't resist)

As for OS X 10.6 vs. newer versions... I've been through the 10.6 -> 10.7 -> 10.8 upgrade cycle, and I have no idea what people who think something went bad after 10.6 are talking about. Unless you're like the OP and think the smaller window controls look "cheap" (huh?), or you really, really care about having colored sidebar icons, that is. But really, if you're going to obsess over the details of your UI to that level and insist that they never change, you should be using a different platform. As far as I can tell, the actual user experience is the same across all three versions.

Well you find me a better VMS forum! ;P

a computer should just do the job it is expect to, really. developers fumbling around with the latest trends in UI design and functionality for the f*ck of it just gets into my way of using it. especially if i have no choice but to run exactly this OS on that hardware. which seems to be very much the case in apple land. at least in windows-land i usually have the choice to install something that i can approve of, even if it's not the latest and greatest...
for osx, i simply don't ever upgrade the OS on the same machine, full stop. lesson learned. phase out machine, phase out OS version.

and the choice is very much between windows and osx for the majority who have to use certain commercial software. going linux or whatever is sadly a pipedream at this point for reasons of compatibility and practicality.

6.0.8 was the best version of the System Software. Damn those developers fumbling around with the latest trends like colors and beveled buttons. User-selectable desktop pictures? Nonsense! A computer should just do the job it is expected to do. It is a tool and nobody is allowed to have fun with it or think it's pretty.

I think the only reason anyone needs Windows or Mac OS specifically anymore is that are gamers or they work with Microsoft Office documents for a living, and generally if you do, you do it on a machine provided by your employer, not your personal box. Same goes for any other commercial software one might use on the job.

GIJoe wrote: using a filemanager separate from the default OS provided one is not so optimal in my experience.

the total opposite in my experience

ianj wrote: Unless you're like the OP and think the smaller window controls look "cheap" (huh?)

hehe for sure. when i first gave the 10.7 developer preview a shot i didn't even consider that these gui parts were meant to be in the final release. a complete amateur job; especially in comparison to what they had before.
to be clear, unlike the mentioned 10.7/8/9 gui elements the 10.10 gui is proper work but simply a joke that lacks any sort of creativity and skills.

Windows XP was balky and terrible when it was new, too. The only difference now is that if somebody discovers a way to wipe everything on your C:\ disk just using some code on a web page, Microsoft is not going to fix it for you, or even attempt damage control by not releasing details about the error until after the release of the Service Pack, as they did back when SP1 came out back in the day. (Also, in re XP "balkiness" -- computer performance has since far outpaced Windows XP's needs, which means that among "commercial" operating systems, it sort of stands alone as appearing far lighter on hardware requirements. The fact that it's doing this while also making inefficient use of system resources, notwithstanding.)

Ultimately, if you don't want to deal with a commercial desktop operating system (Windows or Mac OS X) then you need to deal with, well, something else. If you don't want to deal with that, then you're left with Windows or Mac OS X again, so I suppose the question is whether you want the ability to choose your window manager and desktop environment, and configure it as such, or you want "support" and some of the other comforts of commercial software.

In regards to the Reference Release -- do you mean the initial release of any given "version" of Mac OS X? I'm actually not sure how to parse this article, but I imagine that what it means is that 10.5.0, 10.6.0, 10.7.0, 10.8.0 and 10.9.0 are the "reference releases" of Mac OS X. Not that Mac OS X 10.6.8 is the reference point for the entire Mac OS X family. A whole lot has changed since 2009 when Mac OS X 10.6.0 was released, and Apple's simply not willing to run their platform that way, whether or not it would cater to your particular whims.

If your whims are a commercially supported desktop operating system that rarely changes, you really should be looking at a commercial UNIX or VMS, and if you think that Apple's "fumbling around with the latest trends in UI design and functionality for the f*ck of it" gets in the way of your productivity, then I suspect you'd find it worth your time, money, and effort to move to another platform. (Also, if you're keeping your Macs for any length of time, keeping the same OS version on them for their entire lifetime is a reasonably bad idea, especially now that new major versions of Mac OS X are free for Mac owners, and Apple has not increased the system requirements for 10.9 or 10.10.) If you have "critical" applications on a Mac, and you're bad at backups, then it is good to hold off for a while, but it's a bad idea to never upgrade. It's not like Windows where Apple's committing to support any given major version for a decade.

To use a terrible car analogy -- it sounds to me as though we've reached the point where users who have been around for a while believe that the system shouldn't be changed because they know it and they like the particular options it gives you. (See: commodorejohn) Even if those options are terrible and dangerous, not only to yourself and your own data, but to the interconnected networks at large.

Back in 1984, you could have a Mac with any desktop picture you wanted, as long as that picture was a 50% gray gradient, and we've long since reached the point where that's just not what computers are anymore. As much as it's a productivity tool, it's a vehicle for personal expression, and because we've long reached the point where computers are also home appliances, you can expect them to be just as subject to design trends as anything else.

And, let's be honest, even large equipment and professionally focused equipment is subject to "design." Nikon is selling this professional level camera that has had a "retro" visual style applied, even though you could argue that this is the true pinnacle of professional camera design.

Cory5412 wrote: To use a terrible car analogy -- it sounds to me as though we've reached the point where users who have been around for a while believe that the system shouldn't be changed because they know it and they like the particular options it gives you. (See: commodorejohn) Even if those options are terrible and dangerous, not only to yourself and your own data, but to the interconnected networks at large.

Explain to me how maintaining the legacy UI option is terrible or dangerous, and then I'll start taking you seriously when you say this.

If you want to run a "legacy" interface, or a still-updated and forked release of something else, such as GNOME 2.0 (MATE) -- then you should run an operating system designed with this in mind.

When Microsoft builds Windows with a mind toward graphical applications, they're building the whole thing as a single product. It hasn't really been since Windows 95 succeeded Windows 3.1 that the file manager and program manager were divorced A: from one-another B: from the functionality of the whole system.

If you want something else, use another operating system. Something designed with the separation of the console and underlying architecture and the graphical applications in mind may honestly be a way better operating system for you, and Windows hasn't been that in over fifteen years. And just because something isn't suitable to you isn't a reason to treat it the way you do. Have you actually had an opportunity to try Windows 8 or 8.1 yet, or are you still simply repeating what Chris Pirillo said of his poor grandfather, who had to use it on a Mac in a virtual machine, back in late 2012?

There is a version of Windows Server (starting with 2008) that has had most of the graphical interface removed altogether, but to my knowledge there is no way to subsequently layer a different GUI on top of it. (It actually has a "GUI" -- what has happened is that it's got no desktop and uses a few more text management tools, but you can also launch the management console for, say, Active Directory Users & Computers on it.)

You didn't answer my question. How is it "terrible or dangerous," as opposed to just "not what Microsoft wants?"

And yes, I've tried 8.1. I haven't had a choice, as my department switched over to it a few months ago. The interface is, as any intelligent person could have predicted, total crap. And it's still pretty crappy even with third-party hacks to make it less crap.