OpenGL Presentation at Siggraph Available 55
Visigothe writes "Siggraph has made available the Apple Quartz Extreme Demonstration PDF. The PDF has an overview of some interesting Quartz Extreme features, including the OpenGL calls that are made, as well as the new OpenGL extensions that Apple created for their upcoming Jaguar release. This is going to be a very interesting window system indeed!"
OpenGL contributions (Score:2)
Compliments to the Apple folks on this work: If the screenshots in the
Sheesh, now I'm being nice to Apple. What's next, MS? Heh, very unlikely.
Re:OpenGL contributions (Score:5, Informative)
Most of these are extensions already existing for Windows and other OpenGL ports. NVidia example [nvidia.com]. ATI example [gamedev.net]. What they're basically saying is that the Mac drivers are caught up, and/or use of the extension is new to Jaguar's version of the Quartz engine.
There are a few Apple-specific extensions in there, but they're very specially purposed to Quartz' preferred data formats. Essentially, they're just a way to reduce the portability of the system (restricted pixel formats) in favor of some speed boosts, which is a pretty fair tradeoff if you're a company like Apple who only deals with a pocketful of vendors who make special concessions. You wouldn't want these back in OpenGL main.
There's some damned fine engineering going on at Apple, as always. But there's also the familiar nice spin, though. I wish they'd keep that much out of the technical presentations, or at least would more clearly mark it as such.
Re:OpenGL contributions (Score:1)
Yes, I have to agree, there's some mighty fine work going on at Apple -- those screenshots are beautiful.
Thanks again.
opengl games (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system. (Score:3, Funny)
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Let's see, reasonable prices... $299 for XP Pro Vs. $129 for Mac OS X.
Stability? Ha ha ha ha ha! Yeah, ok.
Multimedia Answers: Macintosh poses fewer problems than Windows [post-gazette.com]
Why don't you just come out and say there's more software for you to pirate! Be honest now.
Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system. (Score:2)
The problem scales badly too. The top end Dual G4 get's it's clock cleaned by $1500 worth of commodity x86 hardware. So on the high end, you end up paying a $2000 Apple$oft tax for OS X.
As long as you keep slobbering after each new shiny mac, reguardless of how outdated the hardware is, Jobs will continue to sell you crap and charge you extra for the "privlage".
For the good of apple, there needs to be a groundswell of dissent among the apple loyalists. When apple's fanatic user base stops shining Jobs' knob, he will decide to put some hardware reaserch and developement dollars into something besides a circuit to give the white LED power indicator 300 levels of fade.
Or you can predict apple's demise as their hardware becomes 3 years obsolete then 4. At this rate, in 5 years there will be a better processor in your microwave than in your computer.
Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system. (Score:1)
There will always be people like you out there that just don't get it. You think that BMWs, Mercs and Audis are overpriced, because you can buy a Chrysler Neon and drop two stinking big turbos into it and "have a better car".
Go read that quoted journalist above - or take a look at ANY research on total cost of ownership. You pay more at first, but the machine is much cheaper and much easier to maintain.
My friend just spent 3 days at work trying to fix a Win2k a box he didn't want to have to format because it had certain server functions that he didn't want to have to replicate. Why? Because he needed to install a modem in it, and Win2k didn't want to play.
You save your $x up front. You pay later in time troubleshooting, grey hair and stress. Personally, I'd rather pay a little more up front and get a computer that works as advertised. like the rest of your article, you're speaking out of your ass. http://money.cnn.com/2002/07/31/pf/investing/q_te
That CNN article above called Apple a "Tech Survivor", or http://int.multexinvestor.com/Analysts/ArticleTIA
There's a good chance that the stock will start trading back up in coming months as investors anticipate Apple's next wave of products. And the current entry point, right above cash, looks mighty enticing.
You either don't understand, or you're trolling. Either way, go post your FUD somewhere else.
-- james
Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system. (Score:2)
No it wont, that's just you saying it, and you don't count for much.
The problem scales badly too.
Poorly, not badly. Remember, Mac users are more intelligent! ;)
The top end Dual G4 get's [gets] it's clock cleaned by $1500 worth of commodity x86 hardware. So on the high end, you end up paying a $2000 Apple$oft tax for OS X.
Whatever.
And you still have to use a poor excuse for an OS.
As long as you keep slobbering after each new shiny mac, reguardless [regardless] of how outdated the hardware is, Jobs will continue to sell you crap and charge you extra for the "privlage".[privilege]
As I said yesterday, I don't have to have each shiny new Mac, unlike you, who has to make up for your personality disorder by running out and buying the latest PC hardware, because it becomes obsolete in three weeks. ;) Also, I can afford Apple hardware, so I'm not too worried about it.
For the good of apple, there needs to be a groundswell of dissent among the apple loyalists. When apple's fanatic user base stops shining Jobs' knob, he will decide to put some hardware reaserch and developement [research and development] dollars into something besides a circuit to give the white LED power indicator 300 levels of fade.
Name a PC maker that spends as much as Apple does on R&D. I'll wait.
Or you can predict apple's demise as their hardware becomes 3 years obsolete then 4. At this rate, in 5 years there will be a better processor in your microwave than in your computer.
Unlike companies such as Dell and Gateway, who only have commodity hardware to sell, Apple is not just about their hardware. People purchase Macs because it's a system, and will keep purchasing them regardless. You can spend $16k on a Sun running at 800MHz... I don't hear you saying Sun is going out of business. The demise of Apple has been predicted by much smarter than the likes of you since the 1980's!
Yawn!! Why don't you do some R&D on spelling and grammar!
Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system. (Score:1)
Even if that were actually true, what is it that makes you relate processor performance to application performance, or any of the other hardware in the system? Not to mention, your performance?
Frankly, maybe I would pay double for a system that doesn't jerk me off, so to speak.
As long as you keep slobbering after each new shiny mac, reguardless of how outdated the hardware is, Jobs will continue to sell you crap and charge you extra for the "privlage".
See above point. Check your definition of 'outdated'.
For the good of apple, there needs to be a groundswell of dissent among the apple loyalists. When apple's fanatic user base stops shining Jobs' knob, he will decide to put some hardware reaserch and developement dollars into something besides a circuit to give the white LED power indicator 300 levels of fade.
Do you really think it took... never mind.
Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system. (Score:2)
Re:Why don't you just get a REAL operating system. (Score:1)
Re:opengl games (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:opengl games (Score:2)
A theorem, developed by H. Nyquist, which states that an analog signal waveform may be uniquely reconstructed, without error, from samples taken at equal time intervals. The sampling rate must be equal to, or greater than, twice the highest frequency component in the analog signal
Which is why we sample music at 44.1KHz to play back audio up to 20Khz, for example.
Re:opengl games (Score:2)
Re:opengl games (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:opengl games (Score:2, Interesting)
Hah, like you can keep up w/ 300fps. How much meth does that take?
Wild Predictions (Score:5, Interesting)
Why try to prevent theming? Because what was coming would utterly break any theming software imaginable.
Why the clunky Finder and Dock? Because they were mere halfway points in the journey, to get people used to a crude version of the real thing so that it wouldn't feel quite so alien when it finally arrives.
What journey? To a fully native OpenGL-based 3D windowing environment. Even this, Quartz Extreme, is just a small step along the way, but it's at this point that it starts becoming obvious. The magnification effect of the Dock isn't just cool eye candy, it's a 2D approximation of their long-term ideas.
Mark my words: This clunky 2D Aqua we've got now will be long gone in two years or less. In hindsight it will be obvious that it was just transitional. See how many bad design decisions you can explain away this way?
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:1, Flamebait)
I guess I must have a problem with my browser, 'cause I don't seem to have gotten the part of your comment where you explain why in the hell someone would want such a thing.
Maybe you should try posting again.
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:5, Interesting)
It its done right, you'd want it for the same reasons you want a GUI over the command line.
Pointing out that there are many people who would prefer the command line-- even think its *faster*.
I don't think Apple's going 3D for the UI any time soon...
But you can't deny that with 10.2 the OS X UI is way ahead of anything else that's out there.
People who have never used it often dismiss it as "eye candy"... these are the same people who think the new imac is just a design statement because they don't realize how useful the movable display is-- after all, *they're* happy and they haven't needed to move their piano weighted display.
Aqua is Aqua not because its pretty- Its pretty because it makes it a LOT easier to look at for hours on end and a lot easier to use-- meaning you get things done faster.
This is the next step towards making it even prettier, smoother, and easier to use.
And I'd say apple's extended its normal 2 year lead over the rest of the industry to a 5 year lead with this. I can't imagine Linux doing this within the decade, and Microsoft will have a knockoff in 5 years that meets the checkmark requirements but doesn't really work that great.
I have a friend who keeps asking me "so, why don't you put linux on that thing". I like linux, and have used it extensively, and actually intended to make one of my boxes a linux server, but after installing it, never booted it again. Why bother? it takes work to use.... the Mac user experience takes NO WORK to use, you just use it. Which means my time is spent programming.
This is a freedom that you have to experience to understand... so those of you who poo poo OS X, I encourage you to try it out for awhile and see what all the fuss is about. Don't just assume its those "mac heads ranting". You'll be missing out.
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:5, Interesting)
The revolutionary thing about Aqua isn't that it's pretty-- as you pointed out. It's how incredibly simple it is. That's why I balk at the idea of an interactive 3D UI. It's not simple, and it won't be simple until our input devices change dramatically. The mouse is an acceptable input device for now because it's not too hard for the mind to associate moving left-right-up-down on the tabletop with moving left-right-up-down on the screen. That's not too bad. But learning to navigate a 3D interface with a mouse is hard. You either have to throw in a number of new mouse buttons that alter the axis of focus as you move the mouse-- which is just heaven for us RSI sufferers, let me tell you-- or you end up "driving" or "flying" through the UI. That's not simple. It sucks.
On the other hand, a true 3D UI might make sense in an immersive environment. (So how do you spell "immersive," anyway?) I remember reading years ago about a Media Lab project called "Put That There" that combined some voice recognition technology with some kind of body-tracking technology. The idea is that you could point at a thing on a wall-sized screen and say "Put that..." and point somewhere else and say, "there." The computer would read your voice and your gesture to figure out what you meant. I don't know how far they took this, but it's a neat idea. Eerily similar to the "look at me! look at me!" computers in Minority Report.
So until our whole idea of what a computer is and how we interact with it changes, I think 3D UIs are going to continue to be a terrible idea.
IBM DreamSpace (Score:1, Interesting)
IBM's DreamSpace project (http://www.research.ibm.com/natural/dreamspace/) is almost exactly what you are talking about. It was demoed at several COMDEX shows as a whiz-bang application, you could use gestures and natural language to tell the computer what to do - "make that bigger, make it *this* big, move it over there, now rotate it this way."
It is now part of their larger LifeNet project for human interaction research.
It was, and is, developed by Dr. Mark Lucente.
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:1)
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:3, Interesting)
Same with the drop shadowing on all windows: they only use two levels, foreground and background, but the foreground item (never more than one) has twice as much shadow as everything else. Everything not at the front layer has less shadow, making it further away from the user, and some transparency to it's title bar, implying, to me anyway, distance blurring.
I've been wondering what ancestral role (if any) the multi-column view will have in any forthcoming 2.5D/3D GUI. Any ideas, or is it just a cool NeXT holdover wiht no future in the 21st century?
There's a full 3D file browser called 3DOSX [uiuc.edu] that give at least some idea of what's possible. If nothing else, it'll make you realize that cubes and large, flat surfaces (with their need for more axes of control) aren't the only concievable 3D workspace.
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:1)
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:1)
Ok, now this is just a big Apple stroke-fest, because there are so many holes, inconsistencies and broken implementations in the current OS X interface that calling it "way ahead of anything else" is just a wank. Some examples:
Managing multiple windows sucks. There is no quick and easy way to move between multiple open windows with multiple applications. Things like minimising suck because the position of minimised windows in the dock doesn't remain static. Window resizing is so chunky as to be practically unusable, even on the fastest Macs. Managing a lot of open windows and apps is something Windows' taskbar, or even the old Applcation menu in OS 9 is *so* much better at.
There's no quick and easy way to get to the Desktop. The Desktop is fundamental part of the UI. It is a drop box for files, notes and the like. It is where you access mounted devices. Yet, there is no really simple (equivalent of the Winkey-D shortcut on Windows) to get straight to the Desktop. This is something that has irritated me in MacOS (X and Classic) forever.
It's unresponsive and *extremely* CPU intensive. Just sitting here on an idle machine with a few dozen windows open (doing nothing) the CPU in my 667 TiBook is sitting on 15% - 20% usage. That's ridiculous. Typing this into Mozilla sees it bouncing up around the 50 - 80% mark and has the cursor regularly lagging behind my typing. Again, this is ridiculous.
Task switching sucks. It's extremely difficult to efficiently switch between multiple applications and multiple windows. You either have to deal with the broken Alt-tab method (broken because it implements a queue instead of a stack) to switch between apps and then the alt-` shortcut to switch between windows, or you have to use the dismally slow GUI - either by clicking on the windows themselves (assuming you can see them - big assumption) or right-clicking Dock icons and selecting the window from there. Once again, this is something other GUIs like Windows or KDE do *so much better* that I find it hard to believe Apple stuffed it up so badly.
There are some things OS X's GUI does well, to be sure, but to say it's "better than everything else" when there are so many fundamental things it does badly, is just silly. Particularly when there are established GUIs out there that do these things so much better. OS X's GUI is somewhat under-par IMHO, as its quirks and annoyances outnumber the things it is better at. Jaguar will fix a lot of this, I hope.
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:1)
I suppose I should've been a little more specific.. I was speaking to the visual aspects of OS X much more so than performance. Granted in 10.1.x, performance has been pretty disappointing, but there are some significant improvements in Jag. In build 6C106, lots of things are more responsive now on my Ti 550 with 16MB video, so I suspect your experience will be even better on your 667.
Regarding the multiple windows/multiple apps and minimizing to the dock.., there are utilities available that should 'pin' the dock to a corner and others that create groups of windows/virutal dekstops. I would imagine Apple might consider adding those features at some point. I'd like to see some of those things myself.
I'm very happy with Mozilla in OS 9 on one of my other Macs, but I still wont get near it in OS X, eveything about it is too slow yet.., the cursor lagging behind as you mentioned, even in the recent build of Jag. I don't see any of this lag in Omniweb or IE though.. I do hope Mozilla eventually gets to be as responsive it as it is currently in OS 9. I'd love to use it in OS X.
Re:Wild Predictions (Score:1)
Please... 3D interfaces? Not before we get true VR-glasses/implants and a revolutionary input device. A flying mice? A bat?
"I know this. It's a UNIX-system" - indeed.
saw this yesterday (Score:4, Insightful)
theres plenty of good GLhackers out there, itll be interesting to se what they can do, mac kack 2003/4 will be prove interesting.
It's very nice (Score:3, Funny)
Next mouse? (Score:1)
That's nice, but (Score:1)