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Microsoft Businesses OS X Operating Systems Apple

Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn 200

Posted by pudge from the because-it-doesn't-exist dept.
Sophrosyne writes "Microsoft Watch has presented an article on Longhorn, which is due not before 2005, and compares it with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), which may be released this September. The article touches on some of the areas where Windows is ahead in operating system design and technologies, as well as how Panther plans to compete. Included in Microsoft Watch's article were links to a Extreme-Tech article on Desktop compositing, and 3D User Interfaces. It also contains videos of Longhorn's 3D Quartz-like user interface in action." If processor power is so important, why are we so willing to waste it on making windows do funny things when we move them around? Just wondering.
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Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn More

Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn

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  • The biggest difference (Score:5, Funny)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @05:56PM (#5976168)
    between Longhorn's Windowing System and Quartz is IE will have it's css extended to allow you to do crap like that to arbitrary windows, so popup ads will be mesmerizing.

    the groundwork is in place already [microsoft.com]. It's only a matter of time before it's applied to the windows themselves.

  • ridiculous comparison (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @05:56PM (#5976172)
    Okay, Panther is due out RSN - and Longhorn is due in, what, TWO YEARS? I guarantee you, OS X will be much farther along by 2005, and the effect on OS X by the PowerPC 970 & succeeding processors (we'll have at _least_ the 980 and possibly 990 by 2005!) will be pretty astounding, if early, unconfirmed reports are even halfway accurate.

    Okay, now about making windows do silly things - I gotta agree here - the first thing I do after installation of any system is turn off all window animations & effects. I want that extra millisecond! :)

    I'm stuck temping on a weird laptop that keeps turning on window animation after every reboot - bizarre behavior. Plus it's Win98SE *sigh*. I haven't had to endure _that_ for quite some time. :(

    I like OS X, and plan to switch to a Mac when I can afford a PPC970 machine (hopefully this year), but I must admit that I could do without all the extra window chrome in OS X. I don't even like the extra window chrome in Win Me/2000/XP (I turn it off, but it's still there in some apps like Windows Media Player), but in OS X, it's extra pixel hungry. And that frickin' metallic theme that Apple puts on everything now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed metal looks good on hardware, not on software.

    • Re:ridiculous comparison (Score:4, Informative)

      by Mikey-San ( 582838 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:13PM (#5976291) Homepage Journal

      What the /hell/ are you on?

      1. NO 970 MACHINE HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED BY APPLE YET. Say it with me, dammit. While it may be likely, don't take as canon rumor sites and IBM press releases that don't even mention Apple Power Macs. Jeez. You're already a Mac user, eh? (And I say that being one.)

      2. 980? 990? WTF? At what data are you looking? Search Google for "ibm 970 chip" and the only info you find are two random comments in some forum somewhere; search IBM for roadmap info on PowerPC, and you will find their "9xx" selection, and the only thing under that is this:

      http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/tec hdocs/A1387A29AC1C2AE087256C5200611780 [ibm.com]

      Lastly, with the release of the 970 being sometime in the second half of this year [arstechnica.com], don't you think saying we'll probably have a "990" by 2005 is a little premature?

      Meh.

      • Whoops! I hit preview and everything. Correction:

        "Search Google for ibm 970 chip' [...]"

        Should be:

        "Search Google for 'ibm 980 chip' [...]"

      • Re:ridiculous comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Captain Nitpick ( 16515 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:45PM (#5976597)
        Lastly, with the release of the 970 being sometime in the second half of this year , don't you think saying we'll probably have a "990" by 2005 is a little premature?

        Actually, this isn't that far-fetched. Look at all the chips that have been called "G4" by Apple.

        • 7400
        • 7410
        • 7450
        • 7451
        • 7455

        What is far-fetched is expecting a major redesign rather than minor incremental improvements.

        • But the original post obviously wasn't referring to tiny incremental changes (like the examples you posted), otherwise, he wouldn't have said to think about where the platform would be by 2005.

      • Apple doesn't tell you anything... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Steveftoth ( 78419 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:02PM (#5976729) Homepage
        The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.

        Also, as everyone knows, Apple is famous for not saying anything until the product is in trucks, and heading to stores. So while it is not a guarentee that they will be using it, I would put money on the fact that the next step in the evolution of Apple computers will be twords the PPC 970.

        I do agree that 980/990 prediction is a little early at this stage in the game though.
      • Speculation on a 980 is actually fairly realistic. The big brother of the 970 is the Power 4. The Power 5 is just starting to replace the Power 4 and it would be realistic to see a cut down desktop chip based on it coming out in the near future as well. This is supposed to be the 980. A 990 to follow on after that is mere hyperbole. They're just going to be ramping up the 980 during the 2005 timeframe.
      • If you look at past history, Apple has used a new G4 every year, and a new G3 every year.

        The G4 in the original Power Mac G4 was a 7400, I believe. The G4 in the original PowerBook G4 was a 7410. There are also 7450's and a few others. The 7400 may have come only in 300, 400, 500 MHz, while the 7410 came in 500, 600, 700 MHz. The 7450 used less power than previous G4's and also had more Altivec units.

        So it's not out of the question to see 970's this year and see 980's or whatever follows next year.

        We're

    • Making windows media player less ugly (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:45PM (#5976590) Homepage Journal
      On windows xp, reassociate movie files with "mplayer2.exe" (comes with the OS), and you can have back the stable old simple interface movie player from Windows 2000.
      • actually,

        reassociate with mplayer.exe (that you download from http://www2.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-be ta/) and you should be released from all the codec problems you experience (most of all, you windows users will stop bugging us *n*x users about this).

    • Extra millseconds (Score:5, Informative)

      by spooje ( 582773 ) <{spooje} {at} {hotmail.com}> on Friday May 16, 2003 @08:41PM (#5977252) Homepage
      With OSX you don't lose CPU cycles for all the extra animation. Quartz off loads the Open GL and most vector processes to your video card. This frees up your CPU for real tasks.

    • Brushed metal... (Score:5, Informative)

      by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @10:49PM (#5977747)
      > that frickin' metallic theme that Apple puts on everything
      > now (despite their design guidelines) - yuck! Brushed
      > metal looks good on hardware, not on software.

      Brushed metal is indeed annoying. Fortunately, it's simplicity itself to be rid of. Wether an application used Aqua or brushed metal widgets is defined by a single variable in an xml file inside the application bundle. Change that variable, restart the application, and the accursed brushed metal is gone!

      There are free programs [unsanity.com] that'll demetallify all your apps in one step; or do so on an app by app basis, and keep track of the altered ones in a central location.

      If you're some kind of freak, you can even ADD the brushed metal skin to applications that didn't use it in the first place!

      cya,
      john

      • Yeah, I knew about the apps to remove the brushed metal from everything, but why is that even necessary?

        Plus, my biggest gripe is with all that wasted window chrome - I don't know of anything that can be done about that. :(

        Still, even with it's faults, I'd rather be using OS X than what I'm using now (Win2K).

        • Re:Brushed metal... (Score:3, Informative)

          by jo_ham ( 604554 )
          What exactly do you mean by wasted windo chrome?

          OS X looks pretty, there's no denying it. It does have lots of "eye candy" effects and pretty icons.

          However, you can turn all this off, including the toolbars in the Finder windows.

          You can turn off dock magnification and resizing. You can turn off the animation effect for minimising windows. You can turn off dock bouncing for opening apps.

          The only eye candy you can't disable is the way the plus, minus and x symbols appear in the red, yellow and green circl
      • You're pointing out one of the great things that Apple's pushing, universal XML pref files. This makes creating 3rd party tools a snap and even hand editing prefs very, very easy. I wish that the OSS group would get behind that.

    • Re:ridiculous comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Thom Khatt ( 673897 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @11:03PM (#5977785)
      Just one of the favorite tactics from the big MS playbook. We've seen it time and time again. Good product is on the market. Microsoft promises something "Bigger and Better". People believe the FUD and wait to buy Microsoft product. Sales of original product drop off. Microsoft product finally comes out after months/years of delay and is inferior to original product. But people buy it because it's "Microsoft". "You can fool some all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can always fool enough of the people enough of the time..."
    • The brushed metal in OS X is drawn with OpenGL. It's a texture. In fact, the option that a developer selects to get the brushed metal look on their app is called "Textured Window".

      My point is that it's not drawn pixel by pixel but just sort of a wrapper around an object.

      Microsoft's eye candy is all kludged onto older stuff that was built without any forethought for the future. You have to turn it off to get back to what's practical for MS Windows.

      Quartz is not as snappy yet as plain-bitmap interfaces (at

  • New viruses (Score:5, Funny)

    by Frac ( 27516 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @05:58PM (#5976194)
    Did anyone watch this clip of the new prototype GUI [extremetech.com]?

    This is it. This is what e-mail viruses are going to look like in four years.
    • Whoa! How cool, next gen, never seen before! I'm reserving my copy now (nevermind it's probably a mockup)!
      Never mind it has already been done before... sorry folks, I can't find it in my history but a couple of days ago the developer announced Quake* GL supported on his framebuffer code here on /. Cool, everything truetyped and composited just to show off... now what IF linux devels didn't have to BEG for HW & SPECS... what IF HW companies developed production class code for linux (are they afraid it wo

  • hrmpf (Score:4, Insightful)

    by coyote4til7 ( 189857 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:00PM (#5976209) Homepage
    I think the nickle summary is that Microsoft and Apple are madly hurrying to add stuff. They're not sure exactly what anyone is adding except they've heard there are rumors. Then they suggest you use google to go dig some unsubstantiated stuff up. Sheesh.

    • Re:hrmpf (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ichimunki ( 194887 )
      I think the summary is more like "blah blah blah" (or is that "beep beep beep"). Like Apple has any chance in the next five years of unseating Microsoft-- no matter how great their OS is by comparison. And I think opening with Sorry, Linux desktop fans: When it comes to desktop operating systems, it's currently a two-way race between Windows and the Mac OS is the biggest indication that she's full of it. Linux doesn't lose on account of the UI itself... it loses for other reasons: the need to install it (r

      • Re:hrmpf (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dbrutus ( 71639 ) on Saturday May 17, 2003 @10:01AM (#5979704) Homepage
        Microsoft doesn't have to be formally unseated for the playing field on the desktop to radically change. If MS had a 80% share instead of a 90%+ share of the regular desktop market the other 20% would be a large enough market that *everybody would make multiplatform versions.

        Where the article goes wrong is that it presents the fight like it's one about UI or OS features. It isn't. It's about legal and financial issues. Linux, Mac OS and Windows are all capable enough to write a letter, surf the web, and do your accounting on which is the vast bulk of PC use to this day. MS is trapped by the market and its own business decisions to need to increase growth in order for those options not to stay underwater (thus invalidating their entire company compensation scheme). Their efforts to extract more money from existing customers, to break the informal contract they have kept for decades on casual piracy, and creating more and more restrictive EULA's will end up with their market share eroding. Apple will benefit from this as will Linux but Linux will be hampered by their reliance on the GPL which is and will remain the main focus of MS' FUD attack.
  • Its not 3d!! If you look, all the windows are orientaed the same way, towards the screen. THey got useless crap, and stuff rotating around, and more of their damned processor eating animation, but thats it. All the other 3d interfaces ive seen have been just that, where you can put somehing off to the side and view the window at an angle, or turn your viewpoint around, so you leave something behind your head, essentially. THis is just more eye candy, that will fuck up my end users, and crash more often.

    • Re:Fantastic, except (Score:5, Informative)

      by dhovis ( 303725 ) * on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:30PM (#5976453)

      It is 3d in the resect that the content of the windows are treated as textures which are mapped onto planes. That allows the compositing to be handled by the video chip instead of the CPU.

      Apple introduced this in Jaguar as "Quartz Extreme". Basically some of the CPU intensive stuff in the interface is offloaded into the 3D functions of the video chip. It requires a fairly hefty video chip (Radeon, or GeForce2+), but those are common now. The upside to it is that Quartz Extreme makes some of the flashier features (e.g. transparancy) available with no additional CPU cycles. It uses the video chip (which is largely untaxed anyway unless you are playing a game). In fact, on a Mac with QE, you can play a quicktime movie under a transparant terminal window with no slowdown and no increase in CPU use. You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use.

      • Re:Fantastic, except (Score:3, Informative)

        by teridon ( 139550 )
        dhovis wrote: "You can use an OpenGL screensaver as your background with no significant CPU use"

        I have to disagree with you there -- on my 466 MHz G4 with a Radeon 8500, the Flurry screensaver running on the desktop takes up about 8% of the CPU, and the Window Manager process goes to 20-30%.

        Processes: 91 total, 2 running, 89 sleeping... 326 threads 22:25:34
        Load Avg: 2.44, 1.97, 1.75 CPU usage: 62.7% user, 21.3% sys, 16.0% idl
        SharedLibs: num = 70, resident = 22.5M code, 2.08M data, 6.78M LinkEdit
        MemR

  • Tearing up? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by foooo ( 634898 )
    What do you mean Panther will tear up Longhorn? Apple to suddenly have 90% market share?

    Shiny spinny stuff is cool and all that, but windows doesn't have huge market share because of an amazing interface.

    It is because they arrived at market at the right time, with the right product, with the right marketing strategies. (Perhaps not morally right.. but the proof is in the pudding as far as $$ go)

    • Re:Tearing up? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by oscast ( 653817 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:03PM (#5976745) Homepage
      "What do you mean Panther will tear up Longhorn? Apple to suddenly have 90% market share?"

      Tear up meaninging... that Apple will lengthen the gap with which its OS is better than Windows.

      "Shiny spinny stuff is cool and all that, but windows doesn't have huge market share because of an amazing interface."

      That's for sure.

      "It is because they arrived at market at the right time, with the right product, with the right marketing strategies.

      The vast majority of consumers don't CHOOSE windows... it is chosen for them as the result of illegal business practices which caused microsoft to dominate the industry...

      "(Perhaps not morally right.. but the proof is in the pudding as far as $$ go)"

      You bring up an interesting point... The best way to gauge user preference is to measure boxed OS sales... something Apple has consistently outpaced Microsoft by a large margin.

      • Re:Tearing up? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by foooo ( 634898 )
        My personal opinion is that user preference is best determined by number of seats installed.

        Boxed sales might be a meaningful measure if computers did not come with pre-installed OSs most of the time.

        No amount of rabid Apple fandom is going to show that Apple has had more success in the OS department financially speaking.

        We can debate quality of OS all night long, but the point of my original post was people vote with their dollars and what they're actually running on the desktop.

        Apple is an excellent n

        • Re:Tearing up? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by aristotle-dude ( 626586 )
          The problem with that theory is... all pcs from major manufacturers come with wait for it.... windows. This makes it the most popular by default. Most people do not seem to bother trying to educate themselves about alternatives. If you look at UI features of Longhorn, they are borrowing heavily. I'm a mac user but I also have an XP machine at home and I'm a windows/.net developer at work. I'm glad to come home to a machine that has run without reinstalls or defrags since Oct 2002 when I bought my eMac.

        • Re:Tearing up? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by lpp ( 115405 )
          Actually, if the article was titled "Why Apple May Tear Up Microsoft", I would agree it would make sense to argue market share and earnings.

          But an article titled "Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn", and referring to the technical merits of the two pieces of software, should really end being judged by the technical merits.

          But, as you said...your opinion...there's mine now...wheeeee...

          _lpp

          • Re:Tearing up? (Score:3, Informative)

            by gig ( 78408 )
            You are supposed to think of an actual panther (the big animal) fighting with a longhorn bull or whatever a longhorn is. Both codenames are animals.

            The reason these features are important is that application developers build on them. I plugged a new printer into our AirPort base station today and it just appeared in the printer lists on all of our Macs with no configuration, thanks to Rendezvous (ZeroConf networking). Also, our TiVo looks on the network for iTunes music and iPhoto albums and shows them on

        • Re:Tearing up? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by GlassHeart ( 579618 ) on Saturday May 17, 2003 @03:01AM (#5978695) Journal
          I like Windows and abandoned Macs somewhere around '91 for many reasons but mainly value for the dollar.

          This value comes at a price. You helped create a monoculture of operating systems, where interoperability is possible essentially only when Microsoft was late to the party, where a single virus outbreak may take down most of the world's connected desktops, and where one company decides where you want to go today.

          I like Apple, but I wouldn't want to see Apple with 95% of the market either. What I want is diversity, where several competing platforms capture various niches, none able to dominate the others.

          Funny you should mention value for the dollar. You do realize that Microsoft can probably sell Windows at $10 a copy and still make money, right?

          • Apple is all about value. Macs are easier to use, do more out of the box, cost less to own, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts because somebody actually designed what features your computer has as a complete system.

            So when I hooked my PowerBook up to my Power Mac I benefited from the fact that they both have Gigabit Ethernet, even though I may not have known that I would want that later (I typically move about 20GB of data between the two once or twice a week). You can also hook two Macs up

        • Re:Tearing up? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by hype7 ( 239530 ) <u3295110.anu@edu@au> on Saturday May 17, 2003 @10:40AM (#5979880) Journal
          I should know better than to start a flamewar on apple.slashdot BUT the term "tearing up" IMHO would only be meaningful if Company X was going to dominate Company Y in actual market share and earnings.


          The article referred to products, not Companies. Panther will tear up up Longhorn, not Apple will tear up Microsoft.

          If the article said that, then maybe market share and earnings would be relevant.

          A Porsche 911 Turbo will tear up a Honda Civic. Yet market share and earnings... Honda Civic wins. See what I mean?

          How good a product is does not necessarily translate to how many of the items is sold. You're thinking like a member of a development team, not an end user. Which isn't all that surprising, considering your disclaimer ;)

          -- james

  • Hum... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zbowling ( 597617 ) * <zacNO@SPAMzacbowling.com> on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:24PM (#5976385) Homepage Journal
    Yet another way windows can useless tax the entire systems resources. It seems as computers get faster, windows gets more uselessly taxing. We never get to experience something new in how fast windows load and apear because windows adds so much to take advantage of everything we have.

    I was a UNIX head 10 years ago, then I was a mac head about 7 years ago, and finnaly I moved to windows when windows 3.1 came out. Now I am going back to UNIX/Linux/Mac. I would like to redefine windows use as a proff of concept platform. When a new tech comes out it seems like it only works for windows for a while, then it moves to Mac and later UNIX/Linux. Windows is so restrictive and not very powerful. It forces me to things their way and conform my system to them and their products and technologies. Unfortunatly they have a software and hardware dominace in the market place. I think thats what they call a monopoly. Well I hope this will change with the new release of the Mac OS. The new MacOS already does things that Microsoft says it will include or be able to do later. Maybe this will end the monopoly that they hold if more companies switch. Go Apple!

    • Re:Hum... (Score:2, Funny)

      by jpsowin ( 325530 )
      Then when Apple becomes a monopoly, we will all switch to Windows 2015PROXP+ becuase we want to kill the big mean Apple monopoly!
      • Actually, Apple has made it really, really easy to shift to FreeBSD or Darwin if they get out of line. Technologically, they've made themselves vulnerable to such a switch so if Apple ever does get mean, running Darwin/GNUStep on the same hardware and then shifting to FreeBSD/GNUStep on your next hardware purchase means you have a very easy technology route out of Apple slavery. Apple knows this, of course, which is why they did it. Their business pitches sometimes include this explicitly.

        Now GNUSTep isn't
        • There used to be a product called "Yellow Box for Windows NT" which was basically the Mac's Cocoa API on Windows. There's no reason why the Cocoa API can't also run on Linux or whatever system Apple wants to release it for.

          I would love to see IBM do a "PC 2.0" with Linux and Cocoa for Linux and a bunch of Lotus software. Sell them 10 at a time as basic business desktops and when one fails you swap in another and the user just logs in and doesn't care that they just got a whole new system.

          Microsoft is so b

  • its all about revenue. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:26PM (#5976416)
    microsoft single largest source of revenue is licenses bundled with the sale of new PCs. If they release something new that runs just great on existing old computers they lose *tons* of revenue. All MS operating system and software updates will require new computers for that reason.
    • This is why linux will win out, it doesn't have the revenue constraints, it just keeps going without concerns over turbulance of the market. OSS developers can implement features because they want them, they don't need to worry about whether or not anyone will pay for them, those feature they leave to business developers who also *gasp* are often OSS developers working on the same projects, so the features people want are implemented, whether people want them enough to pay for them (or can afford to) or no

  • 3d gui bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @06:51PM (#5976654) Homepage Journal
    Okay, 3d is a neat thing. It's really neat because it creates entire new genres of video games. And it also make really cool animation for movies and such possible. However, for user interfaces 3d is bad unless it's a hologram, and we're still talking flat monitors here. It's one thing if you use the 3d stuff to make it look cool. Say an icon is a spinning 3d image of a disk instead of a pixellated icon of a disk. That would indeed be cool, if useless. However, making the actual interfact 3d is bad. 3d implies depth which means something is behind something else. Behind is bad in UI, because it's obscured.

    What I would like to see is a vector graphics based user interface. Right now my task bar I have to set the width in pixels. I have to select one of 4 sides of the screen to put it on. All of my windows are rectangular in shape. With a GUI based on vectors I could have a round web browser. Or an oblong winamp. My task bar could be a triangle in the lop left of my screen. I could change the shape of existing windows to make room for new ones. Usually if I've got 3 or 4 windows open on a desktop all the room is used, but a small piece is left over, or one of the windows has to be sized awkwardly to fit. The awkwardly sized window ends up having it's internal ui elements messed up. With a vector based ui you could morph each window to maximize use of screen space.

    Microsoft is using 3d because they can. They are thinking about keeping a hold on their 3 year upgrade cycle. Apple, while not making a vector based ui, is thinking about making a good ui.
    • FWIW, BeOS had plans to implement the entire GUI via OpenGL. To the user it would have still been a 2D interface, but under the hood it would have been OpenGL. Too bad Be went bye bye.

    • Re:3d gui bad (Score:4, Informative)

      by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @08:05PM (#5977107) Homepage
      Quartz is vector-based. It has a built-in path rasterizer and support for floating-point coordinates (among other things). It can also do nonrectangular windows (and change their shape on the fly), but no one really takes advantage of this outside Apple's sample code.

      • Re:3d gui bad (Score:3, Interesting)

        by faedle ( 114018 )
        Actually, there is one major piece of software that takes full advantage of Quartz. They even advertize both in their product packaging and in the video they include with the 30-day free trial all the neat things you can do because their software is Quartz-enabled.

        That would be Microsoft Office.

      • Re:3d gui bad (Score:2, Informative)

        by alonsoac ( 180192 ) *
        Windows can do nonrectangular windows since many years ago, but I have seen few applications and even fewer tat actually looked good/worked well.
        • Non rectangular windows are done right in Mac OS X. Since the image you see on the display is composited in real-time, when an app shows a round window (or any shape), what's behind the app shows through because it really is behind. You don't have to do any tricks.

          Audion is one Mac app that has had funky windows forever. On Mac OS X it is just way easier for the developer because the system takes care of compositing your app with other apps that are open.

          Also, there were many themes for the old Mac OS tha

    • Re:3d gui bad (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nathanh ( 1214 )

      Okay, 3d is a neat thing. It's really neat because it creates entire new genres of video games. And it also make really cool animation for movies and such possible. However, for user interfaces 3d is bad unless it's a hologram, and we're still talking flat monitors here.

      No, I disagree. I know it's the conventional wisdom to say "3D GUIs aren't practical" but I'd like to think that reality isn't constrained by our collective imaginations. Just because you're unable to conceive of a practical 3D GUI doe

      • Why not combine the two? Why not 3d vector graphics? This is possible using 3d postscript for display behind the scene. The best thing about this angle is that some day in the future when physical displays sitting on the desk are a thing of the past is that it will be an easier transition programming wise on many levels.
    • However, for user interfaces 3d is bad unless it's a hologram

      Let me give you an example.

      First, imagine your current desktop as having depth. Each window is a different distance from you, and windows that are "nearer" to you can obscure windows that are "farther". If you are constrained to looking at your stack of windows from one direction (the front), then visually that's what you have today.

      One limitation of this is that you cannot really have too many windows. Windows in the "back" can be hard t

      • what good is this on an OS that can't handle opening as many windows as I can manage with a 2d interface? What good is it for anyone who actually closes windows they aren't using? Seriously, I've never known anyone who actually needed more than 8-12 windows at a time and those are power users... they can all manage to switch between them without any issues. This again is a wasted resource.
        • what good is this on an OS that can't handle opening as many windows as I can manage with a 2d interface?

          Did you actually read my post?

          The OS is not the problem. It can handle many more windows than any person can. It's the 2-D desktop metaphor that's limiting us today.

          What good is it for anyone who actually closes windows they aren't using?

          Why should you have to close it? You're so conditioned to the way you work that you can't "zoom out" and consider that there may be other ways to get things d

  • Wow, what a great read...did I miss something? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:01PM (#5976724)

    What I got out of the article is that because OS X 10.3 will be released before Longhorn, it's gonna "tear up Longhorn".

    What a load! I love OS X but just because its out first doesn't mean it will be better than Longhorn. That list of longhorn's feature set is full of HUGE features and while Apple doesn't have to worry about things like providing a digital image catalog (a la iPhoto), other things like file system search features that takes english language strings and not query language are not so easy to deflect.

    I do believe by 2005 when Longhorn is out, Apple will have made amazing OS X gains, heck it might even be OS XI by then, but I do NOT buy first to market wins.

    Resistance is futile. [apple.com]

    • Re:Wow, what a great read...did I miss something? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2003 @07:30PM (#5976897)
      "I do believe by 2005 when Longhorn is out, Apple will have made amazing OS X gains, heck it might even be OS XI by then, but I do NOT buy first to market wins."

      I think the premmise of the article was that because Apple was so far ahead now when compared to XP, the introduction of Panther in a couple months will make that lead massive. In two years time that Massive lead will be growing exponentially.

      While Longhorn may (or may not) be an innovative update, the article is simply saying that it will have to be absolutely INCREDIBLE to catch up to the hights that OS X will have achieved by that time.
      • The articel says "Panther" will tear up longhorn - not "the verison of OS X that comes in 2005".

        That stated, I seriously doubt Panther will be able to hold it's own against Longhorn. If the innovations continue, the OS X of 2005 will be able to, but Panther might not. Time will tell

        I love Apples
    • Panther competes with XP and will likely erode any areas of XP leadership that exist. Panther+1 is likely to eclipse XP entirely and Panther+2 will make XP look hopelessly outdated. Longhorn will likely be released in the same timframe as Panther+3 or Panther+4 (way to early to tell). So we're going to have up to 3-5 .x OS releases on the Mac side before Longhorn is released. This assumes, Btw that Longhorn's schedule doesn't slip to 2006 as other MS OS releases have in the past.

      Apple has a golden opportun
  • Apple constantly is putting out OS upgrades, and MS has one big release every so often. Microsoft says it will have a whole lot of things, and then Mac will already have released them and they will be done better.

  • adjustable pretties (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scrotch ( 605605 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @08:12PM (#5977132)
    For a while now, I've been thinking that OSes ought to have a couple of different graphics modes. When you're just sporting around the internet or moving files about trying to look busy, the windows should dance and swoosh and have shadows and transparency. Use up all those extra processor cycles. When you start rendering your hour long video composition, they should chill out. Window borders should drop down to 256 colors, shadows should disappear, windows should just close, rather than slither away. It would be nice to have a switch somewhere ( EyeCandy: On/Off ), and even nicer for the OS to flip that switch automatically when the processor load gets really high for more than a few seconds. My 2 cents.
    • To be honest, the easiest way to solve such a thing is with a dual CPU setup.. Which is why if you've ever used a dual powermac you're blown away by the responsiveness of the system even when doing heavy processing tasks. It's a shame more cookie-cutter hardware manufacturers haven't realized this like apple has, and released dual cpu ready machines to the consumer. Despite popular belief, they're not that expensive to build and the benefits are noticable to the average user.

      Dual cpus, and Ram are the m

  • Apple delivers and MS hypes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by afantee ( 562443 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @09:11PM (#5977367)
    Since its initial release just 2 years ago, Mac OS X has had 2 major revisions and numerous minor updates with significant performance gain and countless new features. In contrast, Win XP remains virtually unchanged apart from a single service pack and a large number of security patches.

    MS is just full of puffs and bluffs. They have been talking about .NET, Longhorn, speech recognition for so many years, but failed deliver any meaningful result. Now we know that Longhorn is at least 2 years away, and WinFS is just a Windows Service on top of NTSF rather than a revolutionary file system. The only things really worth mentioning in Longhorn appears to be the Aero GUI and Window rendering through GPU, basicly a second rate imitation of Aqua and Quartz Extreme.

    MS is just a slow dinosaur that has to die sooner or later due to its total incapacity to innovate. Apple is 60 times smaller than MS, and yet makes more and better software than the Redmond beast, in addition to cool hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, iMac, PowerBook, and so on.

    Although Win XP has some nice features, but it just doesn't feel nearly refined as Mac OS X. Judging from the recent leaks, Longhorn can't even match Jaguar, let alone Panther. And no one can imagine how much better OS X would be by 2005.

    • Re:Apple delivers and MS hypes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Arkham ( 10779 ) on Friday May 16, 2003 @11:05PM (#5977793)
      Looking at corporate America where I've worked, I can say unequivocally that even if the next release of Windows set your chair on fire every time you booted it, it would probably still remain the corporate standard for years to come.

      Microsoft is SO completely entrenched in the dektops of companies that nothing, no matter how great it is, could change it. If for no other reason, Exchange ensures a dependency on Windows. IT support weenies aren't trained to support more than one platform, and Windows is it.

      I carry my iBook to work every day so I don't have to do software development on Windows 2000. Whyen people come to my desk and see tools like BBEdit and SQLGrinder, the ooh and ahh. But none of that matters. Windows is the standard, and it's gonna stay that way.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Dumb (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aufecht ( 163961 )
    Because flapping-in-the-wind-flag-like windows are something that will REALLY boost productivity. Windows is now nothing more than a screensaver. "Oh, that's cool, what is it?" "Oh, that's my new screensaver, Windows" "Cool, can I check my email?" "Sure, let me reboot into Linux"

  • Inaccuracies (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kleinmatic ( 129203 ) on Saturday May 17, 2003 @12:50AM (#5978284) Homepage
    Maybe I'm not the first to mention this, but the article is full of inaccuracies. OS X has had the "ability to create profiles that travel with them among machines," since it was still NextStep (and it had shared directory services before Active Directory was a twinkle in its daddy's eye). I'm not sure what "Terminal Services' access to multiple desktops" means, but Apple Remote Desktop (or the free VNC) will give you most of what Terminal Services gives you. Also, they spelled "Lifescape Solutions's Picassa" wrong (it only has one s [lifescapeinc.com]). I don't mean to be a nerd about it, but it kind of shoots their point -- which I don't think is far wrong -- in the foot.

  • Don't forget it's MS we're talking about (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Andre Breton ( 605694 ) on Saturday May 17, 2003 @04:41AM (#5978951)
    I wonder if people haven't learned anything from history. If Microsoft says something will be ready in 2 years, well... I would at least add another 12 months to that. (Or be prepared to never here again of it)
    And this presentation coming from Microsoft I wouldn't be surprised if it ran on a Mac.

    Regarding Extremetech's article: How extreme can their IT knowledge be if some forum member (!) has to enlighten them on that "Apple has being up and running with their Quartz Compositor engine in OS X, which is now hardware accelerated as Quartz Extreme in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and that MS is once again playing catch-up and acting as if it's new stuff." Hiding under stones much?

    Besides: The public beta of Mac OS X came out September 2000 and Quartz was demo'd to the public half a year before that by Steve Jobs. So implementing wiggly windows takes MS 5 years. More like 6 (see above)...

  • Processor Usage (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Da Penguin ( 122065 )
    > If processor power is so important,
    > why are we so willing to waste it on making
    > windows do funny things when we move them
    > around? Just wondering

    That's why all of this stuff is being moved to the graphics card. The advanced card capabilities are just sitting there twiddling their thumbs until you start real graphics work, so why not use them!

  • hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mgbaron ( 457884 ) on Saturday May 17, 2003 @08:36PM (#5983039) Homepage
    To be honest, this article didnt say very much about why "panther may tear up longhorn." It did however point out that panther is due out this summer, and longhorn not till 2005, making the comparison somewhat of a bad one. Who is really comapring the two anyway? Seems like we ought to wait until the 2003 mac OS to compare.

    Aside from that I have one more question. Does anyone know if there will be a 64-bit version of longhorn, or if it will be exclusively 64-bit?

  • Panther to tear up Longhorn? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by McAddress ( 673660 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:48PM (#5987772)
    It is interesting that everyone seems that it is fair to compare a (almost) current OS to a hype-only possible OS that will not reach the market for another 2 years at the minimum.

    It is like comparing a 2003 car to a 2005 one.

    But the scariest part is that the 2003 wins. gofigure

  • Microsoft's truth in advertising (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zhe Mappel ( 607548 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @01:43PM (#5992624)
    Did you watch the videos on Extreme-Tech?

    Sure, they're only proof of concept things. But one doesn't prove future brilliance by trotting out today's junk. Look at them, especially the last one - chaos, clutter, disarrangement and dislocation, all set ajumble and rotating like Frank Poole after HAL's had his way with him. Who among us used to the differences between Windoze and Apple OS doesn't see in that a sort of perfect realization of Microsoft's design philosophy? Clutter, chaos, things spinning out of control, a world of glommed-on crap with the user left gawping and wondering what (other than paying for the privilege) his incidental role in this GPU-driven wilderness might be...

    The documents being shaken out like bed sheets - that could really increase business productivity, if for no other reason than it'll make it even harder to read management's nonsense! ;-)

    Give fools more powerful technology, and their foolishness only grows.

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