Apple issues new build of Leopard Preview - Page 4

Vista makes OS 10.0 seem speedy? Um.... yeah, right.

I've heard (and believe it) that MS is pulling a PR stunt with RC1. Basically, it's Beta 3, but they're calling it RC1 in an effort to show development is moving just fine and who knows maybe in a mad effort to actually make their ship date.

I don't know if it's still a mess or not. I suspect it's shaping up and will be a decent OS, but we'll see.

BTW, the Vista Start panel looks sensible to me. It's basically like Quicksilver for launching apps (a smart addition), plus the fiddly, cluttered hierarchical Programs menu (ugh) if you want it. What's the problem?

Virtual Desktops - Spaces. And the demos look completely intuitive. Dragging whole groups of windows between spaces, locking specific apps. So you can download for free, but the thing about Apple is that it's fun and easy to do stuff.

Live Search Incremental Backups - OK, so Apple didn't invent backups, and yeah they have a space background, but I have yet to see anyone do live searching of backed up content and then retrieve it.

Quartz 2D Extreme - This should make it into Leopard. Doing ALL drawing on the graphics card.

Honestly, they didn't give us a whole lot of details. But you're trying to make us compare an alpha OS with only a dozen or so publicly available or guessable feature to compare to a nearly feature frozen wide scale tested/reviewed OS that can barely compare with what has been publicly available on a Mac for years in some cases.

Did I mention there are only two Mac OS X licences? as opposed to...63,345 for Vista. (Something like that anyway.)

edit-You said Spaces didn't count because it was on linux. Also that it wasn't innovative. Have you watched the video? You wanna talk about lack of innovation, what operating system are we debating, "Windows". Wow, that is sooo original, especially since it took 2 thefts to get it. (Xerox then Apple) Anyway, the you said to list things Leopard will have that Vista will not, that's what I did.

Just FYI, everyone: all the people mentioning Core [anything] or Quartz [anything]: Vista does it.

(Except possibly CoreData... I'm not sure if MS offers this as a public API.)

Including CoreAnimation... MS's tech for this is called Sparkle^d^d^d^d er, Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. [good grief, what a name]

Beta 3 is what it is.

I don't like the way it comes up. Everything is different there. No consistency. Hopefully they will fix it.

Yup.

How does it come up, and how is it inconsistent? genuinely curious. I've only seen a handful of screenshots.

the "Dashboard is a rip off of Konfabulator" thing has been rehashed in other threads. Dashboard and Konfabulator are descendants of Desktop Accessories from way back in MacOS 6. They have been updated to include hooks for instant web access but basically its the same.

As for the "name one thing", I think we have shown numerous things on OSX that aren't on XP or planned to be in Vista - things that are very useful and not eye candy or prettier than the Windows equivalent.

That never effected me, nor about 89% of the general public at that time. A couple of posts on the internet does not make you important.

It hurt, yes, did people care, not that much. It's a critical bug, not a show stopper for 97%.

On other hand, Vista not being able to run program's properly, will hurt a lot more eh?

You can teach someone to becareful with FW HDD(if you can't it's few and far between), it's a lot harder if you're asking them to stop using a program's they were using.

I bet it was really a show stopper when a for that person's Powerbook battery blew up eh? Gee how many people are still using theres?

It's relative here, and Vista is a lot more risky.

I've found it to be just as they say in that review. Different parts of the Start menu act differently. It's as though the Dock had almost random pictures, symbols, text, and whatever coexisting for no apparent reason. Click on one item, and you get a folder hierarchy, another will use a test string, etc. It's changed several times through the beta process. I've no idea what it will be like when they are through.

And the OS is SLOW. Read all about it. It's one of the reasons why they are trying to use Flash. The hope is that main functions can be sped up with it. And even new machines bought for the purpose of running Vista may not be powerful enought to run the syastem as intended. Three levels.

We scream if Apple comes out with a low end machine that can't use some high level candy. But this will be ingrained in the MS product line.

And I'm sure you've read all about the brilliant application of the Security Center (I forgot the new name for it right now). It's much better than it was, but it makes the demand of OS X's requirements for a password seem nonexistent. And, it's ultimately worthless. Unless they can make it work without frustrating people without all of the popups, they will just click through it, or better yetmore brilliance, turn it off!

And, talking about turning it off. I'm sure you've heard about MS's concept of "Trusted drivers". If you don't have them, then DRM'd content likely won't play. But, id they are giving you trouble for various reasons, you can also, TURN THEM OFF!

What the hell is the point in making requirements for important functionality, and security, if you can TURN THEM OFF?

The whole thing is a contradictory mess.

Not a mess, but definitelly needs some refinement. They're trying to use XP lingo while trying to expand the power.

Not a bad thing, but a car with a rocket booster vs a engineered machine that achieve the same speeds, gives theory of trade offs here.

All engineering and thus software engineering are trade-offs. You're not an eccentric here, there must be a good amount of "XP"-ness in vista, for better or for worse.

Double authorization messages are just part of the XP-ness. As we well know each pop up notice is a part of of a certain set of system checks. So you just happen to have two system check flagged by the human eye as the same thing.

These things will hopefully get streamlined(hopefully!).

It's not the same intensity, but it's very much like the OS9->OSX decision.

You can draw again that apple took the high road and made:
classic(an emulation window almost)
vs
Vista, a middle line drawn and throw in as much compatiblity as the cost of its integrity(security or others)

Neither is clearly better, and XP->Vista is a lot more easier then OS9-OSX.

You can make more parallels like the DX10 capable cards to run aero smoothly vs Quartz extreme requiring Radeon level cards.

Vista 1.0 is not an easy swallow while 10.5 is like a stepping stone.

Hmmm, well, I'll just have to wait and try it out the Start panel myself. I personally find a little inconsistency (especially in one element) in service of utility not the worst thing in the world.


What machine did you test Vista on? I haven't heard that Vista is very slow, only that it's slower than XP (which is only as expected, as Vista is doing a *lot* more).

I agree it's goofy that you can just turn UAC off.

Don't make excuses for Vista's crappiness. 8)

Yes...that's *always* the scuttlebutt (hehe, butt). Another scuttlebutt was that MS was working on OS X...but Apple released OS X before Microsoft did...so Microsoft spent 5 years to change some things and settled on naming it Vista.

Come on, dude...MS is *NEVER* secretive about its development. If ANYTHING, Apple is the one working on tons of stuff that MS makes public years before its released and makes Apple look like the copy cat when Apple releases anything that remotely looks like one of MS's early-dev prototypes...NOT the other way around.

I know you're only kidding around but at least put some smiley faces and winks here and there so that other people aren't confused by your posts.

It certainly does CoreSucking. Come on, Hobbes, just let it go, will ya?

No, it does not. Vista has no Core Image, nor Core Video, nor Core Data, nor Core Animation.

That's what I thought.

It has a Quartz Extreme equivalent: Aero/Glass Whatever-They're-Calling-It-This-Week, but no Core equivalents. Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer is not an equivalent of Core Animation.

Sure it does. It's an API called WPF (formerly Avalon). Like CoreImage, it composites graphics through the video card, and gives developers a number of typographic & graphics filters for free. Go look it up on Wikipedia.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer (choke) allows developers to integrate 3D animation effects into their apps, a la CoreAnimation. Although honestly we don't know much yet about CoreAnimation, so it's hard to compare. CoreAnimation may well be the more integrated and sophisticated solution.

Anyway, read all of my posts, folks. I'm not a Vista fanboi -- I think it's not very innovative and imitative to the point of embarrassment, and hope/suspect that Leopard, when all of it features are fully announced, will trounce it. I'm just pointing *facts* about what Vista is.

[..] I'm just pointing *facts* about what Vista is.[/QUOTE]

So tell me: where in Vista is anything like Core Data?

OK:

Honestly, I think MS has some good people on their UI design team. I've read interviews with some, and there's some smart folk. They're not bozos. But they're hamstrung by some horrible management, corporate-mandated design goals, an insanely huge code base, some bad planning, and a development schedule from hell.

I agree that MS is pretty transparent about their development -- they announce everything years in advance, and are then left wiping the pie off their face when they don't deliver. Apple is much smarter about this kind of thing, though way to the other extreme, and at the cost of transparency with users and companies often not having the slightest clue what's coming next.

O.K. Thanks for the info.

So it seems Vista does have Core Video / Image equivalents after all. Still not sure about Audio (does Vista have an utlra-low latency Audio framework? I think I heard rumblings about that a while ago) and Data.

Nothing, AFAIK.... as I said in a previous post. CoreData is pretty cool.

Though -- if we're talking about developer tools here -- I've heard Apple still has a way to go before it can match Visual Studio in features and sophistication. They're making progress, though.

Personally, I'm more interested in what both Vista and Leopard offer the end-user.

You mean, like Quartz Extreme.


Fine, so it has some Core Image-like features. So far, I have seen nothing in Vista that actually makes any apparent use of this.


Sounds more like Quartz Compositor to me.


To be sure, Vista has various interesting features, and some of the Setup program has finally left the 1980s. For the most part, though, color me unimpressed.

Not sure about Audio. I know Vista has a new audio stack.

If I had to guess I'd say a number of the animation effects in Vista use WPF.

Point is simply that Vista is following along a very, very similar road as Apple.


Hmm, I don't think so, Quartz Compositor is just for making screen-savers and the like, no? Expression Designer etc. is more full-featured than that. But not knowing more about CoreAnimation it's hard to compare the two.


Yeah, it's hard to see how any Mac user would be wowed by Vista. We've been doing this stuff for *years* now.

My favorite thing about Vista so far is the breadcrumb bar. Nice design. But if that's all I can say about MS's work in the past 5 years, that's a bit sad.

Well of course, or else they wouldn't have anti-aliasing, but whether they're predefined animations that are available to third-party developers as an API is another matter.


Well, yes, no doubt.


Sure, you can build screen savers with QC, but, to give you another example: a large part of Photo Booth is built with Quartz Compositor.


Most of it, anyhow.


Heh The breadcrumb bar goes in the right direction, but I've found it to be somewhat unpredictable to use. Might have to get used to it more first.

Contrary to melgross, I'm quite satisfied with performance.

Do you have a more precise measure for that?

Sparkle is Vector aka Flash Animation.

What the hell that has to do with OpenGL accelerated 3D animation is news to the world.

Uh, I dunno:

It wraps 3D objects in XAML to embed these 3D Objects within it. Since these are already vector objects it just adds their xml description to it's xml file. It doesn't generate (render/plot and create) them.

Technicalities aside(already elaborated by others)..

Do you know what flash is??? It's like you're saying a GPU wasn't ment to draw and move objects based on a mathematical formula. I suppose you graphics card was never ment to play games either.

Yes I know what it is. Vectors are more than just scalars with direction in OpenGL.

If I want to model FEM on biomechanics and other organic structures, or inorganic structures I can easily apply OpenGL frameworks to do this.

Sparkle is not designed to address Engineering solutions to dynamic system modeling.

CoreAnimation can be applied to such solutions.

Since most of the Internet is consumed with cute Vector graphics in their most primitive sense its easy to not see how they differ.

http://www.google.com/search?q=FEM+E...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

If I want to bring high-end static/dynamic modeling solutions to a platform, Sparkle isn't going to be a framework I use.

Make sense now?

Yes and no, you're trying to draw lines that are pretty smudged at this point.

Sparkle aka Avalon(why are Microsoft code names always better then retail ones?) is going to be used on of course DX and D3D.

Also given that Sparkle is a design program while Core-sets are API's it gets further blured.

In the end do they do the same thing? Most likely to a point. They are going in different directions, but the result become similar in the process.

So, it seems like Vista, lo and behold, may actually make its (latest) ship date. It's looking like they finally got the train back on the rails.

I'm curious how Apple will deal with the Vista juggernaut coming this January (or very early '07 at least).

Here's my guess:

- Vista release in Jan/Feb '07
- Apple response: the "real" Leopard preview for MWSF, 18+ mo. in the making: "top secret" juicy CoreAnimation-powered UI overhaul with a collection of attention-grabbing features (mmmmm), official spring launch date announced

A bigger question is how will Apple respond to every new Windows machine now coming with a fairly snazzy-looking OS (minus a fair amount of charm and elegance, of course) and a crude but passable version of iLife (for those who don't know any better). Eventually Apple will need some new ideas to lure users from Windows.

One thing will be how effective MS's new security software is. Hackers have already broken into the kernel. So without several security packages immediatly available, it could be interesting.

If there are any well publicised security problems before Apple releases 10.5, it could make a difference.

haha its going to have major problems before its even released. brilliant...

Well we know from the get-go Vista will have security issues. The is a Fact unless you've been under a rock(and neither is it trolling)

This is due to backward compatiblity with XP and 98 programs. Certain securities must be turned off to get certain programs to work. Thus programs will need to be updated(or stopped using)

IE should be much more patched, so, that's better, still, activeX is still around.

The network stack is rewritten, so even if it's better, any new code is going to have holes the first time around.

So Vista is a known bumpy ride for the next couple of years, till everything comes together.

10.5 has the benifit of a upgrade release. Code that worked before are tweaked to worked better(hopefully)

Very little programs should break under 10.5, so not an issue there, and classic is RIP.

There may be an issue with 64-bit universal coding, but it's shouldn't be that foriegn, since Xcode was already thought ahead of this problem.

Any show stoppers for 10.5 should effect 1% of the population. There is no inherent breaking done like Vista.

Vista has some nice things. Like breadcrumb navigation in Explorer. Leopard should have it. Basically, Windows Explorer has always been a well-done version of the Finder (buts lets not get THAT discussion started :-)

It's been over 2 months since WWDC and there has only been 1 updated build seeded outside Apple. Comparing this to Tiger's build cycle where there was a couple of new build every week after is was announced a the WWDC.

Looks like we may have to wait until January to really find out how significant Leopard will be.

This waiting is killing me!