Items missing in Tiger. - Page 5

Yeah, it *was*.

Pre-OS X, you could look something up in Help, and ask it to 'Show Me'. It would then launch the appropriate prefs panel, whatever, and draw on the screen with a red 'marker', circling things you should be looking at, drawing arrows, etc, all the while having little balloons that would tell you what to do next. It could run in either a coaching mode, or you could tell it to just do it, and it would only be interactive when it needed you to type something in, otherwise it just did it. But it kept showing you what it was doing.

Windows pisses me off when it pops up with a "Do you want to see the Windows XP tour" btw this tells you nothing just what features are in XP not how to use them.

The old help that Kickaha mentions was superb. There was no guess work, no trying to compare poor screenshots with the real thing (especially after version changes) and I learned a lot that way.

I also remember the tutorials that came on the consumer level macs when you first used them. They would teach you how to use the mouse, how to hold it, some basics about clicking and double clicking, and so on. They'd show you what to do, and then ask you to do it. I always thought it was rather cute, even if too basic for me at the time.

Apple has a lot of movies on the .Mac accounts on how to do .Mac type things, and they are pretty good. Not the same amount of integration that I'd like to see, but useful none-the-less.

Exactly. Search-based Help is for reference. It is for people that know what they are looking for. This is different from a Tutorial. They need to bring back Guides and Balloons, in some form.

And bring back the Happy Mac and the Welcome to Macintosh screen too!

I think Balloon Help was the greatest thing Apple ever did in this area. There was a lot of bitching about it from various pundits, and it went away. Tooltips are almost as good, but they usually don't cover every widget on the screen and there is no way to turn them off.

With Balloon Help, you could turn it on and, especially in Apple apps, it would show you exactly what each button, text box, etc. did and it would change dynamically depending on the state of the widget. You wouldn't want it on all the time because there would be balloons popping up while you worked, but there were freeware hacks that let you use one of the modifier keys to temporarily turn Balloons on while the modifier was held down. You could learn a new app in about 5 minutes just by popping up each dialog box or prefs panel or whatever and reading the balloon text for each item. Once you were done, it was just as if you had read the whole manual.

Great post lundy. I would expect that you and others here talking about the Baloon Help and the tutorials have already sent feedback to Apple on that...

Back to the security stuff for a minute.

Key length

Even a 768-bit key requires vast resources to break. Add one bit, to make it 769 bits long, and it becomes twice as difficult. A 770-bit key is twice as difficult yet, and so on. Using 768-bit keys, you could keep your communications secret from nearly every entity in the world for at least the next several years. A 1024-bit key would be vastly, astronomically more difficult to break.

Some people go so far as to use keys 2048 or even 3072 bits in length. These will stop the very best codebreakers on the face of the earth for astronomical periods of time, barring the invention of otherworldly technologies such as quantum computers.

If every particle of matter in the universe could be used to construct one single cosmic supercomputer, and this computer was put to work trying to break a 4096-bit encryption key, it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.

Using today's technology that is true. But what about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are developed that can simplify the factoring of large prime numbers?

If you want your secrets to remain secret past the end of your life expectancy, then, in order to choose a key length, you have to be a futurist. You have to anticipate how much faster computers will get during this time. You must also be a student of politics. Because if the entire world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets, then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large prime numbers.

So the length of the key that you use is, in and of itself, a code of sorts. A knowledgeable government eavesdropper, seeing someone using a 4096-bit key, will conclude one of the following:


--You have no idea what you're talking about. Or,

--You're clinically paranoid. Or,

--You're extremely optimistic about the future development of computer technology, or pessimistic about the political climate, or both. Or,

--You have a planning horizon that extends over a period of at least a century.

(Paraphrased from the Cryptonomicon).

As an aside cryptology expert Bruce Schneier recommends 1280 bits through 2005 for individuals, 1536 for corporations, and 2048 for governments.
2006 will of course be a different story.

Just a note about Tool Tips: Any widget put together in Interface Builder can have a tool tip associated with it. Most developers don't use them, or just make them a couple words, but there is no reason why they can't be descriptive and describe any object like Balloon Help did. The global on/off setting for Balloon Help was nice though. The way that Proteus does it isn't bad either. You can either hold the cursor over a contact for a while to get information, or press option with the cursor over the contact and get it instantly.

There may be one more reason to have a 4 kb encryption code: Male envy. Bigger is better! It goes something like this.

lala, setting up encryption because I'm cool.
Gotta pick how much encryption?
Hmmm, wow, it goes up to 4096 bit! That's gotta be the best, and I've got to have it!
*click*
Take that snoopers!
What do you mean it takes an hour to encrypt a text message?
Hmmm, maybe bigger isn't always better.
No wait, it is! I need a faster computer! Bigger computers are better!

Ok, I am ignorate here...My PB has a resolution of 1400 x 900 (I think). So will this mean that I can adjust the scale beyond those paramers?

It means that IF you could increase those parameters, the letters on the screen wouldn't NECESSARILY have to get smaller - the app could change resolutions without the size of letters on the screen changing.

Choose another resolution from the Monitors panel and you will see what I mean. If there is a higher one than 1400 x 900, all the text on your screen will get smaller. There are a few things that you can do to correct this, such as using bigger fonts, but that is a kludge. The real resolution-independence means that the font size you set stays the same no matter what resolution you choose. That's because resolution should be just that - not a roundabout way to change the desktop real estate or font sizes.

I would love resolution independance - I cant run any higher than 1024*768 unless I use 60 hz refresh - which means blindness in 10 minutes...but everything is too damn big on my 17 inch crt...and beleve me, I could use the real-estate.

Coming back to the postings about getting 1:1 WYSIWYG so the screen display corresponds exactly in size to what you have on paper, I don't see (one you have resolution independence coded in) why the OS can't calculate the correct display off the hardware information that's already available to the System Profiler...