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Aqua DP4 Review and Screenshots
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Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
Re:Open source, and compatibility... (Score:1)
hware, sware, what people want? (Score:1)
wasn't it Jeff Raskin who wrote the Book of Macintosh, defining in great detail ho whe wanted at $1000 computer assistant for "everyman"? That was before S Jobs got involved in the Mac project. As far as I have heard / read, Raskin was immensely detailed in describing and documenting the USER ENVIRONMENT in terms of what ppl wanted to ACTUALLY DO with a machine. The elegance and simplicity of the early Macs was certainly a result of his thinking, the less that cheap prices and deficient hware Jobs' doing (allegedly)
Now nearly a generation since the Apple computer was introduced, ppl now have a collective experience with computing, but prolly not much greater understanding of computing per se. The vast energies which are expended in learing and interpreting interfaces as a result of cheap imitations like M$ Win are a sad fact of the interim.But with MacOS X is life any clearer, deficiencies or successes in the interface or no? The real question (I want to ask) is whether it is even still possible to look at computers from a "top down" approach based on what someone with NO experience might want to do achieve with the machine.
That might be like finding "virgin" engineers for a reverse engineering project. But this may be worth doing. Whilst I do guess there is a evolution in human cognitive capacity, I consider the idea of the amount of training reqd to even OPERATE a computer effectively and safely these days to be a burden on a society that needs to look beyond the PROCESS and discover the more direct actions and results.
The original idea to make powerful machines available and accessible to untrained ppl was a truly liberating concept. Even thoughHave we really advanced? If not, all the "eye candy" in the world will rot our teeth (sic, we have no *BITE* any longer) and our minds and leave behind a generation of aspirant technologists as well as workaday "users" disenchanted if not thoroughly disillusioned.
Re:Wow, http://deskmod.com is pretty cool (Score:1)
Re:You're the one who's wrong... (Score:1)
Re:How UNIX is OS X? (Score:2)
It has the standard BSD architecture,
Re:Fairly OT, but... (Score:1)
/Brian
Re:cool screenshots :) (Score:1)
alan@polarity:~$ ping www.jjjjulius.com
ping: unknown host www.jjjjulius.com
MIRRORED... (Score:1)
http://xyu.dhs.org/brad/mac/ [dhs.org]
Enjoy... (I hope I last for a little while at least..)
Re:It's intuitive, man! (Score:1)
Re:Apple building advertisements into the OS? (Score:2)
Back when Apple invented Sherlock, all the search engines (i.e. Yahoo, Excite) threatened to shut Mac users out. Sherlock bypasses full page views, so the sites would lose revenue due to lost banner click-throughs and viewings.
So, the banner was basically to mollify those sites and keep Sherlock functional with the biggies.
It's not a conspiracy... it's a compromise.
Display TeX (Score:1)
Sort of in reverse order, and see below reply also
"DisplayTeX ?? WTF is that? First you gotta get printers to use TeX, then you can worry about getting designers to use it. I wouldn't bother my head tho' -- printers aren't going to change from Adobe Postscript and designers will follow what the printers want to standardize on.
Given that TeX rasters even a hundred pages in quite accetable time now on your average workstation, you could just pipe the raster into a RIPless printer.
Of course we'd need a better way of replacing the Computer Modern faces in TeX with PS variants to satisfy designers. But hey , with processors under Moore's Law, could someone interpret PS level one into MetaFont. Even Adobe Multi Master fonts are *way* less complex than Knuth's creations. So if you could handle the loss of control which is really what TeX is about, then ssurely that is at leats theoreticalyl possible.
What PS or rather now PDF does much better is handle complex graphics in a way thta can be interpreted (pre-flighted) for trapping and separations. But that mainly matters at the high end. This hardly matters in visual prrofing, only for imposition anyway.
The problem with color is it is NOT just colour. Forget even the hware for a moment. Colour is *perspectival*. Like when PIXAR figured you could cut the render times for photorealism by using Radiosity wherin e.g. you map a white wall next to a red wall with a scene indirect white light as somehow pink, based on proximity and environment rather than tracing every photon (ray tracing). It depends where you are looking from. Just about every color maping scheme is based on a COLOUR SPACE. e.g. CIE lab Color Appearance Model, wherin RGB + Gamma has to be mapped according to space tolerances and other translations. All this before you get to ICC profiling which is "just" trying to match up input and output devices with a common calibration technique.
The real reason I put in the invention "Display TeX" is because Knuth gave that away. PUBLIC DOMAIN SOFTWARE. Which is how Adobe use some of his work now. Bet they wouldnt if TeX was under GNU. So being public domain, and even allowing the fact that color plus fonts plus raster plus user display environment woul dbe *non trivial", it would be nice to think for a moment that this MEANS OF COMMUNIATION - PRINT could be harnessed without tolls from companies wishing to sell you every tool in your box with a prohibitive expense to choose or even Think Different about your work and its process.
I ought to sign off. Thanks for your above reply. Bye for now
Re:Looks like apple got it right (Score:1)
What's the problem? My KDE dock can take far, far less.
Re:How UNIX is OS X? A LOT. (Score:2)
Incidentally, the reason for Apple not shipping a terminal app as part of the standard install is to prevent lazy developers from making CLI instructions part of the installation of any application. If you can't assume the user will have a virtual terminal available, you can't assume that they'll be able to configure anything that way. Better just do it in the GUI.
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Re:the kernel ain't bsd (Score:1)
Something is missing… (Score:1)
Lots of 'nice' screen-shots of the OS (be they good or bad) but what I _really_ want to see is what it looks like when there's a crash
What does a MacOS X bomb look like? Has it been replaced with something more timely (read: PC) - a popping baloon?
Has it been replaced by a quicktime animation - (the system stays up only long enough to play it
Re:Aqua & X11 (Score:1)
Re:They Realy Oughta Let Loose... (Score:1)
How much of NeXT is left? (Score:1)
Re:BeOS supports 8way SMP with multithreading (Score:1)
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:2)
I did it backwards. Bought macs for ten years then got an x86 laptop (god, it was so cheap)) oops! After 5 hours of not being able to get a functional X (anyone got a config for a Mag Verity? Thought not...) I resorted to the dark side. My favourite error is "operating system not found". Wow.
Carbon isn't emulation. It is a "quick fix", but it is a valid OS X api that is fully buzzword compliant (protected this, premeptive that). "Classic" is run as emulation and does a good job of it. It even supports 68k specific memory calls (notably the A5 World) although I would be leery of using a 68k app in the first place (if your really need to play gang wars, buy a used SE for $50) Of course the holy grail is cocoa. However, you will see a lot more carbon apps than cocoa ones for a variety of reasons:
a) Carbon is easy. You can download Apple's Carbon Dater to test your current apps for Carbon compliance. This tells you what you need to change and pretty much how to do it. Sadly, it usually reccommends you change your event loop (a good idea since WaitNextEvent is where cpu sharing parameters are set) however, this has got to be one of the best porting tools I have seen.
b) Cocoa is tied to not-so-popular languages. Well, okay, Java is pretty popular, but not for heavy stuff. The language of choice for Cocoa is Objective C. Ever heard of it? Neither have a lot of other people. So, in addition to learning the API, you really have to learn a new language. With carbon you can keep your C/C++/Pascal app and carbonize it.
The "big plan" of course is to have current apps carbonized ASAP and encourage new products to be written Cocoa from the ground up. In the meantime, don't dis carbon. It means that you will have a ton of native apps pronto.
Apple has already been through one earth shaking change (68k to PPC) and they really learned their lessons. This transition, so far, promises to be smooth. Remember that Rhapsody was canned because the transition from Classic to Yellow Box was considered to be too big a leap too quickly that would lose a lot of developers. Apple's doing it right.
HolyMac.com Back up! (Score:3)
Re:Aqua & X11 (Score:1)
How about running a deeply iterative Mandelbrot set render [uwaterloo.ca] on a postscript printer engine? This has also been done. Some code here [students.tut.fi] but not sure this would do the trick - i havent the time to look at it in detail. First link the guy who did this on LaserWriter IINTX, which had a '30 processor when Apple's best computer had only '020s !!
I dont know about executing this as a virsu like program, but maybe you could just embed it in an innoscent looking document market SecrE7$Ov_cMDrtACO'S_gIRL.PS.GZ and watch as Ghostscript dies or hangs in a multiday caluclation #8-)Looks like apple got it right (Score:1)
UI Designers: Please read Edward Tufte (Score:1)
Why not just have a small icon that says
EMAIL
and a small icon that says
WEB BROWSER
??????
Aqua is very cute, but as a UI, it appears to be completely counterintuitive. I can't figure out what half of the icons represent.
Re:Something is missing… (Score:1)
The "Classic" environment, however, being the present Mac OS running as an application (like an emulator), is free to have the emulated OS crash. In that case you'll probably see the "bomb" dialog within the Classic application, followed by the discreet dialog I mentioned above asking if you'd like to restart the emulator.
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Re:general mailaise, specific malaise (Score:1)
Sorry, I deserve a "Redundant" point off my karma for that.
I meant to preview the post as a reply below, then added a bit, though it wasnt quite a reply anymore and subbed at root. Only when I refreshed the story did i see I had accidentally subbed twice. Sorry again, because it wasnt proly worth a root post reading again, and I overkilled that RealTech link. I should like to learn a stack more about SIMD issuance tho' and just how much Altivec can affect the sware architecture of OSX.
'cause you seem bored to see my post I get the impression you think the argument is moot, and like im missing some valid point which would make the post null . . .? This prolly seems over earnest, but I am trying very hard to find out everythign I can about this OS for critical use in my company as well as some development work, and I just dont want to feel that buying hware to run this alpha code is a illconsidered move. Hence my zealotism (sic) Have a good one.
Open source, and compatibility... (Score:1)
regards,
Benjamin Carlson
I know DP4 and aqua are not synonymous (Score:1)
I was attempting to be concise. The review that the link pointed to reviewed DP4. All the screenshots are of the UI (as they should be, after all, they are pretty pics!)
Apple's created a lot of terminology for us to deal with, Darwin, the BSD influenced core. Quartz, the layer on top of Darwin (pdf?), carbon and cocoa, and Aqua, sitting on top of it all as a pretty face.
Mostly, I'm glad people got to see the new screenshots, make mirrors, and read the review before it was removed.
Apple is very aware they have something people are interested in. They've had websites using the look taken down. They've had themes removed from themes.org, as well as people making themes that work in MacOS9.0.4 (appearance manager or kaleidoscope) themes. People are attracted to this interface. I know I'm ready to get a hands on experience and see if it performs, no matter how many "rules of good UI design" it breaks. Face it, this is the first modern interface for us, on a visual level.
on a linguistic level, we haven't even begun. Our computers don't communicate with us on any real level. The error messages are rarely coherent to an ordinary user. The only message we're asked at all tends to be "Do you want to save that file before quitting?"
When we see some development in this area, I'll be really excited. in fact, if anyone has thoughts for this I'd like to here them. Email me!
until then, I want to play with OSx (waiting waiting waiting)
Much improved QuickTime player (Score:1)
Of the screenshots posted, I found the ones of the new QuickTime player particularly encouraging. The current incarnation of the QT player is an affront to UI design principles, and has been rightly pilloried [iarchitect.com] and excoriated [asktog.com]. The screenshots of the new QT player seem to address the bulk of the criticisms made; perhaps it's a testament to my cynicism that I am encouraged by a company that seems to have listened for a change.
Coupled with the changes to the Dock, I am now more hopeful that the final version of MacOS X will also take into account the critiques [arstechnica.com] of the previous preview that have appeared on the web.
Re:Basic components don't need to be intuitive (Score:1)
I have recently been experimenting with different window managers, and to test them, you have to use them a bit. It takes very little time to learn the buttons for the manager. And most of them share similar features/indicators with other managers and graphical shells.
I understand what the original poster is typing, it makes sense, but I wouldn't consider it worth even mentioning as an example of bad design for the new mac OS interface. Things which are worth mentioning are things which become annoying. Like in GTK the menus require you to select a submenu, and move your mouse horizontally to the submenu's menu rather than moving it diagonally to the submenu (doing this causes the mouse to select the menuitme below the submenu.) But since GTK+ is open source I am not going to complain lest I get the "code it yourself" reply
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
Re:Aqua & X11 (Score:1)
Adobe? Don't bother - they've nothing to do with Quartz. PDF is an open standard. Quartz is using PDF because Display PostScript was fairly expensive due to Adobe royalties (and, IIRC, there may have been some technical issues, too).
Just a clarification, hassling those folk will accomplish about spit in this arena.
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:1)
API set that shares calls with Classic but drops
the deadwood (API's that touch system globals, etc.)
In the sense that apps built against the Carbon
API set don't go through any runtime emulation
layers, Carbon apps are indeed OS X native.
Wow, this is nice (Score:1)
Btw obviously rob's "gf" doesn't mean "girlfriend" but rather "gnashing fiend". Everyone has a few demons lurking somewhere (:
Candy? Try pills. (Score:2)
i can't resist those jolly candylike buttons
Looked like NyQuil LiquiCaps to me. In fact, the capsule-like appearance of the buttons inspired me to write a Dr. Mario clone [rose-hulman.edu] that works on everything but Mac (it'll work on OS 10 as soon as it gets a stable x11 server).
The real power is Cocoa (Score:1)
The real power lies in Cocoa, the Frameworks Formerly Known As NeXTStep, then OpenStep, then YellowBox.
These Frameworks are the most advanced and mature API's available. They make writing powerful applications easy since they provide such a rich set of classes. It's hard to sell something based on the API's but Mac OS X has by far the best. By comparison, programming in your typical X window manager is much more difficult, as evidenced by the fact that few X applications even support cut and paste.
Burris
Re:Same Old Mistakes (Score:1)
Well, yes, but if you mouse-over one button then all three symbols show up in their respective buttons.
Personally I think the "Stop using this window" works as red. Green I can very easily relate to maximise (moreso than just a box with another box in it) - it just feels right to me. And of course, yellow is the perfect compliment to red and green, a recognised "in-between" type button.
Anyway, the fact that just moving into the area of the buttons displays all three "pictures" definitely makes this feature novice-friendly in my eyes at least...
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:1)
I guess you found out the big secret. Apple is actually the largest hardware company in the world. Plug in a (Quantum, IBM, Western Digital, etc.) SCSI, IDE or Firewire hard disk and it just works. Because all of the drive manufacturers are Apple fronts.
USB keyboards and mice? (and on a few rare machines, PS2, no kidding) All Apple. Even MS hardware is actually a division of Apple.
Modems? Apple. Video cards? Apple. Drive controllers? Apple. Monitors? Apple. RAM? Apple. Processor upgrades? Apple.
If only they had simply published specs that third parties could develop for, knowing that compliant hardware would just *work* instead of having to ruthlessly take over the hw industry and secretly produce everything themselves. Wouldn't that be a far better solution?
Re:MacOSX = BeOS PR2 (Score:1)
Even if you limit to Carbon/Cocoa ("native") applications, we already have: IE 5, QuickTime 5, AppleWorks 6, the NeXT mail client, and most of the smaller apps that were included with Mac OS 9, such as Sherlock, Script Editor, and Stickies.
I know Be has a lot of useful software, but Macintosh and Windows are still in another league from everything else as far as the range and sheer number of apps from major vendors like Adobe and Microsoft. Mac OS X only adds to that by supporting apps from Mac OS 7/8/9, NeXTSTEP, Java 2, and BSD/Unix.
Mac OS X is great for everybody except Microsoft. It's going to continue to raise awareness of non-Windows computing, as well as Unix in general. It's a consumer OS that's very interoperable with standards and other Unix and Linux, BSD, etc.
Frog, Funk, and Tink (Score:1)
Re:How UNIX is OS X? (Score:1)
i suspect they will keep many NeXTisms, such as a non-traditional
if you intend to be stand-alone, you can lobotomize the cluster administration services and never be the wiser.
Re:The IMPORTANT Mac Feature... (Score:1)
Re:an aside (Score:2)
Who is the biggest freak?
Mac Freaks
Be Freaks
Linux Freaks
BSD Freaks
Amiga Freaks
Hemos
If I told you who I voted for, I would ave to invest in asbestos undies.
Tom
ESR does code. (Score:2)
Or Raymond, a pansy nutcase who couldn't code a VB virus
Half-wrong. Eric S. Raymond maintains all this [tuxedo.org] open-source software. But he "couldn't code a VB virus" because his OS of choice, Linux, doesn't have a working VB implementation, and the VB-compatible scripting language in development at the GNOME project is sandboxed, which means it can't modify files outside a safe area.
Re:Darwin _is_ open-source software. (Score:1)
"Apple can revoke this license, and forbid you to keep using all or some part of the software,
any time someone makes an accusation of patent or copyright infringement.
Open source and free software are different. ESR coined the term "open source" but open does not make it free. I pretty tired of the OS/OSS phrase and wish people would start talking about how FREE software is.
Re:Same Old Mistakes (Score:2)
Note that a lot of the UI crappiness in DP3 got resolved for DP4. I suspect that the red/green/yellow button stuff will hit the scrap can, too, if Apple keeps on hearing bad press over it.
And one other point about the "Knowledge in the Head vs. Knowledge in the world" slogan. It is indeed often better to put knowledge in the world, if you have a place to put it. A big problem with the icon interfaces that deteriorated into those gibberific toolbars you see in Word is that there was just no place to put everything, but somebody did it anyway. In other words, everything you put in the interface takes room away from something else. Putting the whole world out there, if you have to scan it all (serially) is just about as bad as if you'd put nothing there.
Of course, the window controls in Mac OS X are totally unforced errors; let's hope that Apple wakes up.
Re:MacOSX = BeOS PR2 (Score:1)
"Why don't you leave that poor family alone?"
*BANG!*
He said go back inside.
--
The other side is crowded. The dead have nowhere to go.
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:2)
And in exchange, you get less choice in devices to run on your system. The reason everything "works" when plugged into the Mac is because everything is controlled by Apple.
And what is this nonsense about a PC generally
lasting only two years, compared to a Mac lasting seven years? Any facts to back up that ridiculous assumption? Believe it or not, there ARE quality parts for PC's! Not every PC owner builds there system out of shit. And it's still cheaper than a Mac. You talk about all the extra cost that occurs after you buy a PC... well what about Macs? Any device that can be bought on a PC or a Mac will be more expensive on a Mac
In regards to building my own PC: "And you'll get what you pay for: questionable hardware reliability and zero support."
Hmmm, I don't see it that way at all. My hardware is just as reliable as your hardware, I don't buy garbage. It just happens to be less expensive, because the PC hardware market is not controlled by one company, and the market is so huge, the demand is strong and prices are low. As for support, if something breaks in my PC, I can fix it myself. More than likely the part is under warrantee and I can get replacement for free. If your Mac breaks, send it back to Apple (at least that's what you're implying -- you pay more so you don't have to maintain it).
Having said all that, I wouldn't mind a G4 running BeOS, but I don't have that kind of money laying around.
-thomas
-thomas
Re:Same Old Mistakes (Score:2)
Uh...not quite. Abrupt color changes between regions are excellent cues that for image segmentation (into objects), but only weak cues as to the identity of the objects themselves. The splatter of color is most confusing when it makes the user think there are many (functional) objects on the screen when there usually really aren't.
In the case of the apple window controls, you might be able to make an argument for giving them distinctive colors, but no argument other than possibly aesthetics for making them identical shaped droplets until after the user had to focus on them with the mouse.
As others have noted, there are some decently useful "built-in" meanings for colors, especially "red" for "stop", "yellow" for "caution", and "green" for "go". But I'd argue these conventional meanings (with the exception of "red" for "close") are only poorly matched to the current interface.
Re:Aqua & X11 (Score:2)
"PDF relies on the imaging model of the PostScript ® language to describe text and graphics in a device-independent and resolution-independent manner. [...] A PDF file is not a PostScript language program and cannot be directly interpreted by a PostScript interpreter. However, the page descriptions in a PDF file can be
converted into a PostScript language program."
So, basically, PDF is a more structured version of PostScript with the programming components removed. For a more complete comparison of PDF & PostScript, please refer to section 2.4 of the Portable Document Format Reference Manual Version 1.3 [adobe.com].
IMHO, the advantage to Apple is that, if they ever offer a Cocoa environment for Intel, a port of Quartz would provide a cross platform imaging model for developers to target and Apple wouldn't need to rewrite the interface APIs - just recompile. I'll grant that cross-compiling is a far cry from open sourcing. However, given Apple's trouble in convincing developers to migrate to Cocoa (hence the need for Carbon), this might just be the kind of move needed to get the ball rolling. If Apple is harboring any aspirations of being a player on the Intel side of the fence, it's going to take a lot more than the Cocoa APIs by themselves to make it happen.
CPU only (Score:2)
Also no one buys an Onyx2 for CPU only non-multiprocessing applications. Throw a simulation scene with 500,000 polys frame/ 80MB textures at the Onyx2 and it will smoke any PC or Mac out there.
Yes, your GeForce will do better on games, but games and vissim are very different.
Also throw an application that needs massive memory bandwidth between processes at the Onyx2 and it will also shine.
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:2)
You wrote:
3D cards have absolutely nothing to do with professional 3D graphics.
Have you ever tried to animate a complicated, textured, and lit character using a crappy video card? Do you rember SGI- they were used for 3d because they had the best video cards. Cards don't matter for rendering, but they sure as hell matter in the animation/modelling part of 3d. This is a problem for Apple, but not that big of one.
Also, if you can get me a copy of 3d studio max for Mac, I'd sure like to see it.
To end with a positive note, Alias/Wavefront just announced that they were porting Maya to OS X. No rumor, actual press release.
Re:Looks like the link has been disabled... (Score:2)
Re:Looks like apple got it right (Score:2)
Re:general mailaise, specific malaise (Score:3)
Here is a more relevant article about the shortcomings of the Aqua interface [asktog.com], and another article about the improvements that Apple should be making [asktog.com].
Both of the previous articles were written by Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini [asktog.com], who founded the Apple Human Interface Group, so his opinion should count for something.
Another article, that is slightly less relevant, dissects the UI of the new QuickTime player [iarchitect.com]. It isn't kind.
I hope that these references are of use to anyone reviewing the UI changes that Apple is incorporating into Aqua and it's software, so as to avoid making the same mistakes WRT Linux GUI design.
--
This is a Developer Release! (Score:5)
Before you start bashing DP4, remember this is an Alpha quality product meant for developers to tune their wares. Apple will be releasing a public beta during the summer to receive feedback from Joe Mac User on the user experience. But even with that, MacOS X looks like a winner already. It will finally put a consumer-based interface on top of a hard core UNIX engine. It looks like Steve Jobs is going to beat Linux to the consumer desktop!
Brag all you want with Linux and Intel, but once I get my 4MP G4 running MacOS X on Jan. 1, 2001, all I will see is GNU/Linux i386 in my rear-view mirror!
cool screenshots :) (Score:5)
Im looking forward to playing with this gui...
Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed maybe? (Score:3)
I have beeen real close recently to shellingout for a shiny new G4, thinking hard how much I want my hands on OSX.
Then yeasterday I read this analysis of G4 / mot performance [realworldtech.com] and im starting to think all over again.
Im feeling pretty bummed out that Apple could be so misleading with their advertising.
Looks like they are over using a whole bunch of ppls goodwill to remember them as an idealistic company so not to question the assertions they make. I should welcome myself to reality or something.
This is not Aqua DP4!!! (Score:5)
Re:Open source, and compatibility... (Score:2)
Troc
Re:Same Old Mistakes (Score:2)
Let me get this straight... you are a "NT, Linux & Solaris" user and you are bitching about a Mac not easy enough to use?
By your own definition Linux would be horribly unusable. Maybe Apple should include freecell and change the trash can to the recycle bin so that OSX is a little more intuative for everybody. Personally I think I can withstand the intense mental concentration it will require to open and close the windows. And while I may have to forget some of my extensive knowledge of beers of the world in order to fit the information into my brain, I think that after using the software for about 5 minutes it will become intuitive.
I think what you forget is that no matter how hard you try, unless you want to copy something exactly, an interface will feel awkward at first. When I made the switch from a Mac to the vaunted Windows 3.x it felt clumsy and odd at first. The trash can/recycle bin location was different as well as the computer icon on the desktop. Floppy icons did not appear on the desktop when discs were inserted. The close window button was on the other side. But as you pointed out, the design was easy to understand and with very little learning it was easy to use.
I think that somebody needs to lead us forward in operating system interface design, and you know it will not M$. It will be interesting to see where all of the current technologies take us and if they ever converge. But guess what? We'll all be using our heads a lot more (hopefully).
Re:Darwin _is_ open-source software. (Score:2)
ESR = "Open-sourcing code is great, it has all sorts of benefits for users AND companies. Do it right, and it's a win/win situation."
One is a zealot, one is at least halfway practical. One alienates people, the other embraces them. One understands that people need to make money, the other believes everyone has a grant from a major university to live off of.
I'll leave it up to the reader to decide which is which.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:MacOSX = BeOS PR2 (Score:2)
--
The other side is crowded. The dead have nowhere to go.
Re:Darwin _is_ open-source software. (Score:2)
People need to put things into perspective...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Darwin _is_ open-source software. (Score:2)
Re:The IMPORTANT Mac Feature... (Score:2)
Be doesn't have that critical mass. They have a fraction of the MacOS marketshare, which is a fraction of Windows'. And even then, one only needs so many email clients and mp3 players.
Simply put, there are at least 1-2 of each kind of app type for the Mac, and usually several choices. BeOS, in contrast, usually doesn't have a given kind of app - or if they do, it's buggy as hell.
It's a matter of critical mass. Be doesn't have it, Apple does.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:Quartz is Adobe's baby (incorrect) (Score:2)
Re:cool screenshots :) (Score:2)
Anyway, I think his website is cool. He seems to have it together much more than you cynical bastards.
Re:Open source, and compatibility... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5)
Re:Same Old Mistakes (Score:2)
don't people ever learn? usability and good looks are orthagonal - but i am going to like the good looking interface better.
think about cars. some are pretty. some are ugly. some are practical. some are not. one has nothing to do with the other. the best ones are BOTH pretty and practical.
all other things being equal, i still like the pretty ones better. some times, i even take a slight hit in usability just for the good looks. i appreciate good (and by that i mean pleasant to look at) design.
that looks adversely affect usability is an assumption that comes from way back when, when people thought that GUIs were just pretty faces and "serious work" could only be done with ugly, text-based CLIs. it's complete BS. the argument is so old, it's not even funny.
in all other consumer goods, design is a major factor. why should it be different for your OS??
Looks should not damage usability. With those nifty-looking colored buttons, I'm afraid they do (for novices, in this case).
i hate those lame-o "warning" voices! who said nifty-colored buttons are hard to use for novices? how many "novices" did you ask? the truth is, they are different from what you know, they are new, and therefore you have this inherent resistance. you are a design conservative, nothing else. that's fine and i don't mind it - but don't bring fake arguments. next thing, you will say it's bad for the children!
your so-called novices would probably not even notice that these buttons are "hard to use".
oh, and as for don norman and his excellent book: as excellent as it is, it is not, and was never meant to be, a bible. it is pretty old by now and has to be read keeping this fact in mind. the UI challenges back then were inherently different from today's. basic computer knowledge is prevalent nowadays, and no-one will have trouble closing a window any more. many standard GUI metaphors have become "knowledge in the world", just because people got used to them.
Re:Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder (Score:2)
as it happens you may be wrong regards "network oriented tasks and graphics". I used to use macs exclusively, for design / layout / everything. First the quality of the supporting media (e.g. Smackworld ecause of their obvious habit of getting high before atempting any review - and its competitor Crackuser likewise) sucked, then the sheer droning of designers in general justifying themselves with an identity linked to the presumed - an dfor a while confirmed - superiority of their machines, this last bit made me want to suffer Windoze more than stick around with crappy overpriced hardware.
This article which i linked to already is a indictment of Apple's complacency [realworldtech.com]. It also suppports why you ar eright, about building an intel box may be better, but does not confirm your thought that IRIX on MIPS is equally worth eschewing. SGI is all about custom graphics hardware, backplanes bandwidth and the like. Much of their stuff will just cream a G4, no matter how pretty the latter might be.
What this screams to me is that Apple is yet again delusioned in thinking its core markets are designers and graphic pros. If RealWorld Tech is right in their analysis, it is precisely the same as APPLs desired target market WHO SHOULD IN FACT CONSIDRE ANOTHER COMPUTER. Can no one whip Color Sync and get good font handling. Will RealDesigners one day finally use DisplayTeX?
You are also right in finally saying that unless you are "image conscious" - i.e. want an iMac (stupid name for anything that) you may be out of the running for APPL these days. If the high end of their desired market will hit on Intel or another arch altogether and they ream ppl on price, they HAVE to offer something really exceptional in their hardware. Underlying tech aside, there is no OS I should rather use. (especially if they reverted to ver 6.1 :) Regards your comment about networking performance, I should only hope that BSD internal actually does show some performance. But I have no evidence to support any other thinking re that.
Do read that artic le [realworldtech.com] its a sad and timely remider that maybe,just maybe APPL is still a difficult case we should be wary of.
Re:Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed mayb (Score:4)
And if you are shocked that Apple's commercials are misleading, it's indeed time to wake up. You didn't really believe that if you drink Fanta(tm), everything suddely becomes fun, right? Apple's claims are no lies (it is quite possible to get 2GFlops of sustained performance), but they're not necessarily relevant to you either (how often do you have to do tons of single precision FPU calculations with an AltiVec optimized application?) As usual, the thruth lies somewhere in the middle...
And personnally, I think that when you buy a Mac, you not only buy it for the raw performance, but because of (and some of the following may or may not apply to you) the OS, the GUI, the casing, Steve Jobs' showmaker capabilities, the fact that most people have a PC, the fact that you want to run most "common/known" software titles without needing Windows (well, there's always WINE under Linux of course), ... Whatever.
--
Re:Darwin _is_ open-source software. (Score:3)
imagine that - two sides to this debate.
general mailaise, specific malaise (Score:2)
I used to use macs exclusively, for design / layout / everything. First the quality of the supporting media (e.g. Smackworld ecause of their obvious habit of getting high before attempting any review - and its competitor Crackuser likewise) sucked, then the sheer droning of designers in general justifying themselves with an identity linked to the presumed - and for a while confirmed - superiority of their machines, this last bit made me want to suffer Windoze more than stick around with crappy overpriced hardware.
This article which i linked to already is a indictment of Apple's complacency [realworldtech.com]. It also suppports why you are right, that building an intel box may be better, but does not confirm your thought that IRIX on MIPS is equally worth eschewing. SGI is all about custom graphics hardware, backplanes bandwidth and the like. Most of their stuff, even from a few yrs ago, will just cream a G4, no matter how pretty the latter might be.
What this screams out to me is that Apple is yet again delusioned in thinking its core markets are designers and graphic pros. If RealWorld Tech is right in their analysis, it is precisely the same as APPLs desired target market WHO SHOULD IN FACT CONSIDER ANOTHER COMPUTER. Can no one whip Color Sync and get good font handling. Will RealDesigners one day finally use DisplayTeX?
You are also right in finally saying that unless you are "image conscious" - i.e. want an iMac (stupid name for anything that) you may be out of the running for APPL these days. If the high end of their desired market will hit on Intel or another arch altogether and they ream ppl on price, they HAVE to offer something really exceptional in their hardware. Underlying tech aside, there is no OS I should rather use. (especially if they reverted to ver 6.1 :) Regarding your comment about networking performance, I should only hope that BSD internal actually does show some performance. But I have no evidence to support any other thinking re that.
If APPL should do anything its what they should have done a long while ago - focus on making smart low form factor expadables (pizza boxen like the PowerMac 6100) for business users, and big ugly beasts for designers w/ like 12 PCI slots, preferable 64bit. I miss the build quality of the older tower Macs. They felt so good to have deskside. I want this feeling back - not shiny G4 shells - and I am prepared to pay for it
Do read that artic le [realworldtech.com] its a sad and timely remider that maybe,just maybe APPL is still a difficult case we should be wary of.
Watch them take this down. (Score:2)
They've had websites using the look taken down. They've had themes removed from themes.org
Played Vitamins [rose-hulman.edu] lately? It's a clone of Nintendo's Dr. Mario(TM) with an Aqua-like theme. Works on DOS, Windows 9x, and X11; includes Windows binaries. And it comes with a default theme "Aqua" that looks like Mac OS 10's default theme by the same name.
"I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world."Re:UI Designers: Please read Edward Tufte (Score:2)
(Whoa, put that keyboard down, just kidding!) Seriously though, people like pictures and icons and shiny things. If they didn't everyone would be using Motif. There is something to be said for asthetic appeal. People don't live in ugly houses, they don't like reading books with ugly formatting, they don't like reading magazines without lots of color and pictures. Humans are visual creatures used to seeing lots of color. A grey icon that says EMAIL might be efficient, but it would bother the hell out of some people. Second, it might not even be more efficiant. Often, when one gets a desktop organized just so, people can actually access things faster than by reading an icon. Once you have the icon memorized (through familiarity) it is processed by the pattern recognition part of the brain. This is significantly faster than sending it through the analytical part of the brain(mainly because humans don't do pattern recognition with plain, black characters). For me at least, I access icons on my desktop and BeMenu more by color and shape of icon rather than anything else. This is shown very well by the default helix GNOME menu. The icons for terminal and logout are the same shape. So my brain, (using shape before it reads the text of the icon) will often cause me to logout when I wanted to start a terminal.
Re:Aqua & X11 (Score:2)
What the hell are you talking about? (Score:5)
Strange. Very strange indeed. I know where I can get all of these for MacOS.
With the selection of PC 3D cards being far superior to that of Mac cards, I do not see the Mac regaining much market share in the professional graphics market.
You know nothing about graphics, apparently. 3D cards have absolutely nothing to do with professional 3D graphics. Professional 3D graphics use raytracing renderers, which deliver the best quality you can get but are very slow. 3D cards use scanline renderers, which are much faster but give lesser quality (however, the quality is still easily enough for games). But because that's not used in professional 3D graphics, the fastest 3D card in the world makes no difference at all for pro stuff.
By building an Intel/AMD machine out of used/new parts that I can buy on Ebay, I can build a dual PIII Xeon for a fraction of what the high end Macs are selling for.
And you'll get what you pay for: questionable hardware reliability and zero support. Building one's own computer is a very effective cost-cutting measure, but there are things that really are better left to the pros even if they are doable by amateurs.
The fact is that the performance of a comparably priced Intel/AMD machine will almost always be superior to that of the Mac.
Not true in the least. To get the performance of a high-end Mac, you need a high-end PC. Further, the things you'll require as add-ons, and let's not forget the added costs in time when it comes to setup, render them much more expensive in the end. You don't see the cost right away, of course, because the "sticker price" is lower.
It should also be noted that the average useful life of a Mac is four years (and personally, most of the Macs I've seen tend to last seven). The average useful life of a PC is only two. So in the time you use a single Mac, you'll have on average bought two, and often three, PC's. Macs may be more expensive, but they aren't that much more so.
That is the benefit of having an open system architecture.
Ah, but there are many disadvantages also. Hardware is very different from software; openness doesn't have the same benefits and drawbacks as it does with software. Point one: the multiplicity of useless drivers. If I want to use a video card in a Mac, I plug it in and it works. Ditto for projectors, input devices, et cetera, even when made by many different companies. You can't do that in any other OS I know. USB was a step in the right direction, but it's still not enough. This is the disadvantage from having a too-open platform, one where no standards were ever defined.
Yes, having an open hardware platform has its advantages. But there are some very severe disadvantages also, ones which I don't believe the advantages outweigh, as they do for software. Just think, for a moment, at the Linux Kernel. The source download not tops twelve megabytes, most of it drivers. With only a little standards support, the driver set could have been streamlined, probably cutting the sive of the download by at least a third if not by half, with all the variety of devices we see today.
And let's not even go into IRQ's and such. That was simply an idea gone wrong, which Apple fixed in their PCI implementation.
You know, you're right. Macs' sticker prices are higher than those of PC's. But the fact is, they're better hardware, and they're worth more. I'd be willing to bet that well over 95% of the people who gripe over the Macs' price point have never even owned one, and it's probably closer to 99%. Once you've owned one, you understand. It really is worth the money.
Re:Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder (Score:2)
Erm, all of these applications are available on Apple Macintosh. Photoshop was 1st developed on the Mac plaform and due to the wider array of plug-ins for the platform the Mac remains the best platform to run Photoshop on.
The new G4 Power Macs are so powerful that they provide enough power to rival far more expensive SGI boxes. Photoshop is optimised for Altivec and Lightwave is being optimised.
As for 3D graphics cards a large number of PC manufacturers have OEM deals with ATI and use the same cards that are used in Power Macs. Other 3D cards common in PCs such as voodoo based cards are designed for games and not serious 3D work, they have no baring on machines being used in the professional graphics market.
The only major graphics app missing on the Mac is Maya - however the MacOS X port was announced at WWDC 2000.
As for regaining market share in the professional graphics market - they never lost it! a very small number of users switched, most likely due to other company presures and not merits base on computing platforms.
Apple macines have had a reputation for being expensive. Though this was once true it is no longer the case. True you can get cheaper PCs, than Macs but for price/performance you can't beat a PowerMac.
Re:Open source, and compatibility... (Score:2)
I think console apps can run straight off, of course those who use GTK won't....and there'll propably have to be some modifications.
I know for one that at least you can run Perl scripts straight from the console, not just from the MacPerl app as in current MacOS...which is the most annoying thing in the world for a Perl lover like myself. In fact, because of this I have been abandoning MacOS in favor of LinuxPPC.
This should also be a tremendous boost for Macs on the server market. The G4's Altivec may not be the most desirable processor trait for servers, but with a beautiful OS like that I think Apple will entice a lot of new buyers into choosing Mac.
Just my 2 Icelandic crowns.
Re:Looks like apple got it right (Score:4)
I'd say that was a glitch in the user.
TWW
Wrong! Thanks for playing... (Score:2)
You might want to head over to Apple [apple.com] and check out the 200+ developers that are already porting apps to MacOS X. But even if these guys did not exist, MacOS X will be able to run 99% of all previous MacOS applications in what is called the "Classic" environment. So stating that Be has more apps than an Alpha Version of MacOS X is just plain wrong. BeOS is no where close to the number of apps that MacOS X can run even though MacOS X has not been released to the general public.
Re:Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed mayb (Score:3)
Re:Looks like apple got it right (Score:2)
I've got a Virtual Desktop Manager for my NeXT box. It's called Virtspace, and it runs on NeXTStep 3.3 and OpenSTEP 4.2. It was written by Garrick Toubassi and David Koski and distributed by NYRO Technic, Inc.
From the Apple Developer docs I've read on the web, it doesn't seem like they've changed the windowserver client/server architecture that much, and so it's probably still possible to write one.
Re:MacOSX = BeOS PR2 (Score:2)
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Re:Looks like apple got it right (Score:2)
But you can always use a video card with zooming capabilities, make your desktop 1920x1080 and just zoom in!
--
The other side is crowded. The dead have nowhere to go.
Apple building advertisements into the OS? (Score:3)
Checking out the Sherlock picture [holymac.com], I was surprised to see the advertisement built into it. So, if there's someone out there who can field these questions, please do:
If you have to go through Sherlock to perform any system searches, I'd find the presence of ads to be fairly troubling, but if it's not the OS's standard search utility, I don't think that it's too big a deal.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Mac OS X =! Threat to Linux (Score:3)
Re:Same Old Mistakes (Score:2)
But which is which? You have no way to know except by experimenting; and you have to remember. Knowledge has to reside in the head. Bad.
Actually, the buttons overlay images when you mouseover them. Still not the best, but when you go over a button, it looks like the close button, etc.
Just my
ls:
Price/performance isn't the issue (Score:2)
I have to take issue with most of that paragraph. The Mac has plenty of high end rendering software (including many packages that don't run on wintel)
However, that's a bit of a red herring. It's a common misconception that graphics work mostly involves heavy 3D rendering. Sadly, most of us graphic designers don't get to do the 'pretty stuff', we plug away at logos, websites, corporate graphics and publishing. If I could render 3D 10 times faster, I'd have saved about an hour over the last 3 months.
Mac Photoshop and (equally importantly) Quark Xpress are the 'definitive' versions, they started off as Mac only, and the fonts, plug-ins and output drivers have had many years to settle down on the Mac platform.
Going back to another of your points, with 3D graphics cards, lack of 'selection' means standardised drivers, which means reliability and fewer conflicts, but again, this whole discussion is pretty much irrelevant to real world graphic design work. I've had a 3D card in my G3 for over a year, and I've made no use of the 3D abilities since I deleted Tomb Raider.
As for 'regaining share in the high end graphics market', who says Apple ever lost share? Graphic designers are by and large Mac zealots of many years standing (myself included, as if you hadn't guessed) who won't touch wintel with a bargepole. PCs still haven't got over the dodgy fonts legacy, for example M$'s Arial font (just enough of a botch of Helevetica and Univers to avoid copyrigth infringement) is regarded in this office and elsewhere as one of the sure fire signs of a document 'designed by a secretary'.
I'd need a very big incentive to switch platforms, because I'd have to source all my software and fonts again (with no guarantee they even have equivalents out there) as well as learn to cope with a different OS, which would cost a large multiple of the money I'd save by switching to wintel. Even if sticking with Macs would cost my company a few extra thousand pounds (dollars, whatever) it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the costs of re-training or losing zealot staff because of switching. Price/performance isn't the main issue in our choice of machine; reliability, ease of use, our software investment and most importantly familiarity are.
- Andy R.
Re:Apple building advertisements into the OS? (Score:2)
The ads are placed by the search engines that make Sherlock plug-ins. In return for granting a short-cut to their data (and skipping past their own banner ads), Apple made space for them to put in a little banner.
Re:Same Old Mistakes (Score:3)
The mouseover states mean that you have to mouse over them to get that info. A UI that requires interaction to get basic information isn't doing its job.
The "traffic light" metaphor is not the best. What does it mean to "go" a window, or "yield" it, or "stop" it? The metaphor does not directly relate to the object in question here (the window). A traffic light has three states and the window has three actions. That's about the extent of the similarity.
Look at the widgets in MacOS 8/9.
Close is a blank widget. No box, no window.
Max/min toggle is two different sized boxes nexted. Signifies the two sizes you toggle between by clicking it.
Windowshade (minimize) looks like a window with a title bar. Again it signifies the two states you toggle between.
Look at the widgets in Win3.1
Close is a minus sign. Pretty obvious to any 6-y.o.
Maximize is an up arrow. Makes the window bigger.
Minimize is a down arrow. Makes the window smaller.
Look at the widgets in Win95/98, even though their placement so close together is bad. I've misclicked too many times.
Close is an X, which is pretty intuitive, too!
Minimize looks like a button in the task bar, very small.
Full-screen/multi-window toggle button is the least intuitive until you try it, just as bad as the OS X color coded buttons.
Give users a picture, don't expect them to remember the associations of which color does what. Pictures are best. If you want to color code in addition to that, fine, but don't make it the primary distinguishing feature.
Aqua & X11 (Score:5)
Now that Darwin has been ported to Intel with support for X11, there has been much talk about if/when any of Aqua's tasty goodness will be available in that context. It has been suggested that this will never happen b/c Apple is unlikely to give away as important a crown jewel as its much ballyhooed GUI.
It is important to remember that Aqua is essentially just a widget set - the real power behind the interface is Quartz, the new PDF based rendering engine. If you refer to Wilfredo Sanchez's diary [advogato.org] he indicates the possibility of a port of X11 to Quartz! The addition of Quartz's advanced features to X11 could be quite a treat. Although this is mentioned as a means of supporting X11 apps on MacOS X, it is possible that some support of this type might pave the way to supporting graphical Cocoa apps on Intel (it is unlikely that Classic or even Carbon apps will ever be supported on Intel but Cocoa is a whole 'nother kettle of fish).
Given the well known limitations of X11, esp. wrt to antialiasing, opening Quartz would be a much greater gift to the community than Aqua which is just another, albeit pretty, set of interface elements. I suspect that the real roadblock in opening Quartz is not Apple but, rather, Adobe which maintains a pretty tight leash on PostScript (for good reason).
I implore everyone who's been crying out for more open source code from Apple to focus their efforts on Quartz and to extend their cajoling to Adobe. Out of all of MacOS X's new goodies, I think Quartz is the pick of the litter - not Aqua.
Site Removed (Score:2)
Access has been forbidden. Perhaps Apple didn't like having their fancy new os displayed in such a fashion.
Features, yes. Software, no. (Score:2)
That's what I never understood about BeOS, charging $100 for an OS that you can't really use for anything 'cept browsing the web to see if anything *really* useful has come out yet!
Re:Yes and no. (Score:2)
Cool, I hadn't really thought much about it, I just figured that Apple was the one in charge of the ads, since the one in the screenshot just happened to be an iMac ad.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Re:Does Pretty Matter? As much as clock speed mayb (Score:3)
1) "OS X" is practically designed for MP..
Well, it's true that OS X is designed "to support MP", but that support is largely untested and untuned. SMP is a relatively low priority for Apple when they have things to worry about, like, say, making sure the OS is ready to ship by its new deadline. SMP takes many, many years to develop, both in terms of hardware and software support. Applications need to be written to take advantage of multithreading, and new chipsets need to mature.
2) "How optimised is windows for MP anyways?"
Well, 95/95 has no support for SMP at all. But Win NT/2000's support is very strong, much stronger, in fact, than Linux's support (much as I love Linux, we do have to admit this). With 8-way systems, they do extremely well on real, intense benchmarks like TPC. Windows 2000 Datacenter will theoretically support 32-processor systems, although its performance beyond 8-processors remains to be seen.
Basically, though, out of all the major OS families you can think of (Mac, Windows, Linux, commercial Unix), the Mac platform has the LEAST support for multiple processors (out of the *BSD family, you'll have to go to FreeBSD or BSDi if you want SMP). Anyone can throw together an artificial demo with dual-proc-tuned applications that will get a performance boost. The question is how well the system performs in the real world.
Re:Wow, this is nice (Score:2)
Does digital or analog.
Does GNOME or Windowmaker or AfterStep (or probably anything else with a dock/wharf/panel type thing except maybe KDE)
Looks damn cool.
Admittedly it can't do transparency.
Quartz is Adobe's baby (Score:5)
Long ago Apple came out with these neat machines called the "Lisa" and it's little cousin "Macintosh". To go with them Apple licensed this new lisp-derived language called "Postscript" from these guys called "Adobe". It was a hit and the one-two punch of a bitmapped display and a cheap high(ish) quality laserprinter running "Postscript" made Macs a hit in the graphics community. (Interestingly the most powerful computer Apple sold for a while was the CPU in it's Laserwriter.)
Later on Steve Jobs founded NeXT and having seen the popularity of Postscript and also the problems of having two rendering-models decided to equip his boxes with Postscript all of the way through. So he paid Adobe a pretty penny to develop "Display Postscript" for him which he then licensed. Jobs went on to use this single-rendering-model and to also ship a cheap printer who's brains were actually your system's CPU running D-PS. Adobe took the skills it had developed in the project and rolled them back into faster and more sophisticated Postscript engines such as commonly found in Postscript level II products.
In the meantime the world went on and Adobe started to realize that there were some inherent limitations on having an entirely stream-based file-format (eg it's pretty difficult to pull a single part out of it for seperate manipulation) and that there was a coming need for a cross-platform device-independant rich-content documuments. So Adobe developed Postscript level III which is a fairly object-oriented architecture and then went all out and turned it into Portable Document File (PDF) technology.
In the meantime Apple buys Next and looks to renogiate the Postscript license. Adobe isn't interested in this but decides to go back to the well and convinces Apple to underwrite the development of a Display PDF (hmm - sounds like we've been here before..) Apple agrees and thus begins the process that produces "Quartz" - a joint Adobe/Apple rendering layer implementing Adobe's PDF technologies on Apple's shiny rebuilt OS.
So who "owns" Quartz? Well, they both did the work on it and although Adobe owns the basic file-formats and technologies it's Apple's implementations of them.
There'll probably be some small (smaller then for Display Postscript at least) licensing fee going from Apple to Adobe for every copy of MacOS X sold but Adobe of course also now has a bunch of paid-for engineering, retained a critical position with one of it's most influential customers and assured adoption of it's next-gen product. They've also killed any chance of Apple's own GX technologies ever surfacing or any futher development of the Apple/Microsoft TrueType threat. Finally Apple of course now has the most advanced rendering technology out there, one that can assure cross-platform fidelity and complete integration into every serious graphics application in the forseeable future.
So how to get Display PDF onto some other platform? Well you can try and do a Ghostscript-type re-engineering but as folks have learnt this is some very sophisticated, very patented, very specialized material. The existing code is a good starting point but it's going to be a lot of work to re-apply and who knows what obstacles there are.
Adobe themselves might come out with it for other platforms in the future depending on their contracts and licensing with Apple (Apple might get a two year lead on anything for instance.) This will likely be closed-source and probably fairly expensive. I could see graphics-folks wanting it on NT for instance but MS is gung-ho about their own technologies and this would be both competition and an additionial layer of abstraction for applications to deal with.
Adobe could concievably be convinced that it's in their best interest to release it for a next-gen X-type product. Unfortunatly I doubt they'd let out anything like a complete implementation but rather something that couldn't be used to compete with their own products.
So - Quartz on abother platform? Not unless Apple and Adobe see a profit in this. Display PDF on another platform? Not unless Adobe (and possibly Apple) see a profit in this. Unauthorized ports? Possible but unlikely due to the sophisitication required.
-- Michael
*I couldn't be bothered to keep all of the biCapitalizations straight - deal.
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:3)