First impression of Vista

Tue Feb 6 21:25:30 UTC 2007

On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 13:54 -0500, Aaron Vegh wrote:
> Yikes,
> This is the last place to start a flame ware, but hey, there's good
> reasoning for some of those brain dead features you speak of:
> 
> > But there are two things that I think are brain dead on a Mac,
> > 1) why is every apps tool bar on the very top of the screen,
> > I have been an apple user since about 1981, and certainly when i got my
> > first 128MB Mac, with only running a few apps, and a small screen,
> > having a common top pull down menu panel was OK.
> > Fast forward to this century, and people have 20-30 apps/windows open,
> > and i don't want to be going to the top of the screen for my menus all
> > the time.
> 
> There's a couple answers to that one. The best is something called
> "Fitt's Law" which talks about the ease of acquiring a target with
> your mouse much easier when it's at the hard stop on the sides and
> corners of a screen. This is a feature, not a bug. Even taking that
> into account, the proliferation of keyboard shortcuts tends to
> invalidate the mousework -- when you use an app long enough you tend
> to not use the menus much. Ubuntu realizes this to a certain extent
> anyway: placing their system-wide menu in the always-at-the-top
> position.

Yeah i guess honestly this is where i am in a extremely small minority,
I choose to adopt a thumb touchpad keyboard many years ago,
i mean to me, i hate to say it, if you have to move your
hands off the touch typing position and grab a mouse, you immediately
get invalidated as a power user. People some times sit down at my desk
and want to use my computer to show me something and usually state the
same thing, how can you use this!?, in a mere movement of 2 cm's with
the thumb your running from screen edge to screen edge, so for me the
mouse physics and fitt's doesn't apply, as I get where i want to go so
much faster because i am there before most people have gotten half way
to even reaching for the mouse to start the process. I even emailed and
inquired about the head point system where you wear the hat, or stick
little circles on your head and a detector senses your head movement and
moves the mouse cursor, but its not too supported to linux yet, else
probably my thumb pad would be a thing of the past. I even looked at
those binary keyboard balls, ..... don't get me started :) ....
anyways based on my extreme ways what I require is going to be perhaps
in a vast minority. 
The problem with short cut keys is if you use them very rarely ....
use it or lose it.
For me I find the best thing is the Slickedit approach, where you have
mouse/pulldowns, etc but as you want it you can assign everything to
keyboard short cuts, so you can grow at your own pace.

> 
> > 2) on the alt tab'ing on a Mac, when you land on a "shrunk"
> >  app, like in linux dt's it should revert out of "shrunk" state.
> > I mean what was apple thinking, you are going to alt tab to a app,
> > release on it, and _not_ want to use it?
> 
> The very question is a funny one because if you've been using a Mac
> for this long, then you should know, you don't shrink apps, you shrink
> windows. So definitely, if you want to shrink a window to the Dock,
> and you switch back to the app, it'll stay in the Dock. You can then
> create new windows from the app. It's a partcularly Mac phenomenon,
> actually, and it throws off Windows users all the time. Linux users
> too.

Your making me want to plug my mac back in and see... but again,
I just remember alt tabbing, landed on the iconic image of the app i was
running, that is shrunk (iconified?), and got zip.
When i speak of the mac, it is under the context of being (or is sold to
be) dead simple. If i put X on the osx10.4 and go crazy downloading ...
even KDE, etc, then I am at a Linux distro by then (with the QT/itunes)
benifits of the Mac to boot, but I have severely crossed into the power
user mode by then, and I would argue that is defeating the purpose on
the reason for the Mac.
> 
> > But unless Jobs gets his
> > thumb outta his ass, I just see the Mac slipping farther and farther
> > behind with respect to usability as compared to a good linux desktop.
> 
> There's "good" again. others have asked what you mean by this; I'd
> like to know as well. I think Apple has provided some great,
> innovative user interface features, like system-wide instant search,
> and Exposé to make sense of all those open windows. Suffice to say
> your experience is your own, and you need to make the call on your
> platform that makes the most sense for you. That's all any of us can
Being a long time mac users, i more then many realize their pedigree
ontowards current UI ...... or is that xerox :)
but seriously they are hugely inventive.
That said, as of late, on my 10.4 install I don't have a 3d desktop,
in fact just to get v-desktops i had to go to the apple down load site
and download and install something that gave me that functionality,
something most Mac users will not venture to do.
A power mac users, based on the X ability of Mac, really can get
everything a Linux user has, and the benefits of the QT codec, etc,
the only reason I don't run a hybrid, is that currently i have a dual
dual core opteron 2.6GhzX4  system and two pci-e slots one with a 7900gt
dual dual link, and awaiting another.
I can't get this on a Mac (yet?), and I certainly can't get a dual quad
core (which I am evaling for work) yet on a Mac, and if apple had it,
all though their quality is good, their prices are kinda high,
if Apple had a dual quad core, with ability for dual card dual dual link
dvi graphics  cards and it was even 15-20% higher priced then a opteron
soln, honestly I'd be running Mac hardware, and  a hybrid OSX104. and
linux system.

What MAC OSX10.4 doesn't provide me with (out of the box)  (granted i
havnt dug deep in on Mac set up),
KDE like (or devil's pie) features to place and size a popup window
(from any app) to were i want it, important for a dual head user (i.e.
dont want it put down over lapping across both monitors) also to
remember last size and placement on some, and over ride placement on
others.
3D desktop (beryl/compiz) effects and features.
Option like via Devil's Pie, to have control over a app's popup, say a
IM message, i want it on all v-desktops.
I think this is stuff apple will have to have in time, especially as a
certain segment of users get more "poweruser'ish".
Another feature that is supposed to be out in beta that is really cool,
not sure who gets inventive credit for this, is dual mouse cursors, that
concept will take some getting used to , but when you think of it,
having the ability to switch mouse cursors, so you could leave one over
say on one of your dual or tri monitors, in say your photoshop
(gimpshop) window, leave the other in your dev. env. on another window,
and warp between mouse cursors, MAN that is going to be sweet, and I
have only heard of this coming to Linux (if its coming to mac or MS
soon, i'd love to know). Personally, I will use multi mouse cursors, at
least 2 if not three of them, the minute its out and stable.
Now would multi mouse cursors be a poweruser feature only? or would one
day this be considered standard on a OS desktop UI? Hopefully someone
will not say thats a Apple innovation, then I will turn really red,
but I don't know who innovated that.

I guess what I feel is that the opensource community's contribution to
these things, must be larger then the resources apple, MS, Sun, etc put
into this, so it comes as no surprise to me that where there is a lot
more effort/resources there usually is more progress (MS NT OS comes to
mind as the only huge negation to this rule). MS has sort of caught up
to Linux (with vista) with respect to 3D desktop, and Mac is supposed to
be there with its 10.5, but, then MS is going to be 5-6 years before
their next major release?, and Apple? 1.5-2 years? In that time, unless
a lot of the open source contributors go on sabbatical, its frightening
to think about the technology gap that will grow between Linux distro's
and MS/Apple. and yes some of it will be eye-candy, but then again, it
seems like eye-candy usually becomes a needed feature sooner or later.

Also, I would agree that the linux tech. of xgl, etc is version 0.95
right now, well Suse claims compiz is 1.0 like, but beryl is considered
< 1.0 release. Anyways, it seems to me the opensource community has a
lot of time to ice this stuff before MS and even apple will have their
next gen. OS's out ... MS Windows 2012?  Apple OS 11 ?

bottom line is i hear people saying Mac's are so user friendly and Linux
is the opposite, and I just don't see it, I saw it in spades 2-3+ years
ago, but I don't see it today, in fact I see tables turned a bit (Suse
SLED vs. OSX 10.4 i think would be an example), whats more important is
I see the gap growing.

-tl

> do. :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> Aaron.
> --
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