Apple close to unveiling guarded Snow Leopard UI overhaul - Page 2

Yup. Safari uses way too many resources.

I find Camino uses much less processing power.

Welcome to the boards bzuniga

Yeah I'd say that if they show Snow Leopard in June and then do not deliver until Aug/Sept then I'd consider that being delayed because Jobs' said about a year during WWDC 2008. Though I wouldn't call the delay egregious in any way.

I think the iPhone SDK 3.0 will certainly get preference and ship in June with new iPhone hardware. Then the team will breakneck to get Snow Leopard to Final Candidate polish and release in 60 days. A tall order indeed.

You do realize that Snow Leopard is Intel only. This whatever features are or aren't in Snow Leopard will not matter to any PPC owners.

What would you like to see in the Finder? I think a lot of people want more flexibility but often it's hard to find a consensus as to what features people want/need.

The developers are going to work on Saturday Night Live?

I'm sure they couldn't do worse than the current writers.

Making up what? It's still March. Even if it's delivered in June some time, that's still 2.5 months away, at least.

They could show it in late April, and still give enough heads up.

The final builds don't start moving up in speed until the last month.

Those colors look awfully familiar .... does it remind anyone of the default Solaris, maybe? Can't say I am particularly fond of them .... I like the present ones better.

Apple hasn't made the definitive statement regarding PPC support so I guess anything goes here. Though I doubt we see PPC support and I do not recommend we see PPC support.

Breaking with legacy is difficult but I want a lean n mean OS that is optimized for the dominant hardware ISA and that's x86.

I like knowing that if an app in Snow Leopard only it's going to be strictly optimized for Intel based Macs.

I can. We did it at NeXT. When all of your application space can leverage the changes via InterfaceBuilder it's not that difficult to "flick the switch", so to speak.

This is what we generally hear.

But your response isn't to what I actually said in response to Georgetang.

He wants to see them dropping Universal support. I said that 28% of Mac users who are still using PPC's aren't too happy about that prospect.

I also said that to most people, getting rid of Universal support won't matter much (because of file sizes, which is what he was commenting upon).

The fact that PPC people won't get ANY of these features, many of which can work just fine on PPC machines, if Apple wanted to bother, is something that will tick them off.

There's nothing wrong in any of that.

I'm not arguing that there aren't "automatic" processes going on. I'm saying that interfaces designed for, say, black type on a white, or light grey background, don't always work well the other way around.

I did publishing work when I had my company, and we were always reworking things around, depending on what was wanted.

Dark backgrounds often require different typefaces. It also usually required a bolder typeface. That's just one element.

Will XCode change everything around so that it meets the developers standards? Moving from color to greyshades also requires the reworking of graphic elements. Will XCode do this as well? There are a bunch of niggling little things that would have to be redone if Apple goes to this new "color" palette.

What about rez independence? Will it take care of all that as well? Developers won't have to design new icons, graphics, and images?

One of the reasons we were given as to why we weren't given rez independence in 10.5, even though it is there for developers, was because they would have to redo their GUI's. You're saying this is wrong?

They need a starting point so they can bitch about it costing $129 even though they will probably pirate a copy anyway.



I think this will get delayed until late summer, and we get our first official look at the UI at the WWDC. That will give developers some time to make some changes. Of course, I expect to see leaks of the interface before it's officially released.



I am one of those useless slackers you speak of but I don't post any screenshots and never talk about features that have not been announced.

Safari 4's form widgets display resolution independence, when utilizing the Zoom functionality... that's a baby step.

Heh! Possible.


It could get delayed. With all the talk about it being released in March, or by some even nuttier people, last January, I would hope it won't be. Right now, I'm assuming it's going to be about on time. I would consider it to be on time if it came in by the end of July.

Nevertheless, I think that Apple will show the rest of the features about two months before release, or at least, a month before.

I just want to know if anyone with a developer release is noticing wicked fast speed increases (especially on last year's Mac Pro). Anyone?

Apple should have delivered at least one Quad core iMac during the last rev. This would have giving the people in the know something to buy as simply knowing about Snow Leopard is enough to want a Quad core machine. The otherthing of course is a low cost Quad platform for developers.

The current lack of a Quad core iMac is one of Apples bigger bone headed moves. They atleast needed one machine during the last rev.

As to SL I do expect some use interface changes but don't see it as a big deal. I'm expecting that those major under the hood changes will benefit us owners of older intel hardware. At the very least they better fix WiFI on my MBP from early 2008. Apples inability to establish a reliable WiFi connection with these machines on many networks ought to be a major embarrassment. It is the one low level problem that I see them having to fix.

Don't get me wrong the other improvements that should come with SL are highly desired too. Especially GPU processing / acceleration. This should be better than a machine upgrade for me. I'm not one to believe SL will work miricals as I think some do, but it ought to really enhance a MBP of this age. Maybe I should say it better as I'm going to be a bit ticked off if Apple doesn't agressively implement the new software features on relatively new hardware.

Oh I think SL will ship at WWDC and each of us will patiently wait for 10.6,1 to come out to stabilize the platform.



Dave

It will be interesting to see where this new interface leaves Adobe. The Creative Suite UI may look even more out of place on a Mac than ever before. In the meantime, all the newer, leaner creative apps (Pixelmator, Lineform, Freeway, iStudio etc.) will look right at home in Snow Leopard.

If Apple gave Core Image the ability to do CMYK in Snow Leopard, Adobe would be in serious trouble on the Mac.

+1 for the PPC column.

I say we start the betting now. I bet 50 quat-lews that Microsoft has an announcement (any announcement and usually a vaporware one at that) the same day as an Apple announcement.

Done just to try and steal Apple thunder. :-) ??

50 quat-lews, Anyone? Anyone? Beulewer, Beulewer?

Just a thought.
en

Making sure that all the elements of a document scale up and down uniformly together is a commendable effort. But that doesn't mesh with my understanding of the original intent behind resolution independence.

It was more to do with being able to define the size and proportions of user interface elements in terms of absolute physical dimensions (eg. inches), and having those elements appear to be the same size on every monitor, no matter how dense or coarse that monitor's DPI (resolution) happens to be.

On the other hand, widgets that scale properly as documents zoom in and out may very well use many of the same technologies under the hood as my understanding of resolution independence.


I don't know for sure, but does OS X actually allocate RAM for the whole application image when you're running a universal app? Doesn't it only load the portion of the application image that belongs to the architecture which is actually running?

As well, I think the Universal Binary system is also the mechanism by which Apple distributes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of an application in the same package.

Your understanding of Resolution Independence is EXACTLY what it is supposed to be in its true meaning. Having 2 monitors with various pixel sizes and resolutions look the same to the user is what RI will bring to the table once Apple gets it out the door.

I do have a feeling that this will only happen with 10.7 as i haven't seen any progress being done on any of the 10.6 builds. Worse yet, this may be even further delayed as i really don't see it how they could make Carbon apps resolution independent without some major problems. If Apple dumps Carbon in 10.7 or 10.8, then chances are we will then see RI released. All this is IMO of course.

Adi

If they wait that long, even MS will have it!

They've dumped older parts of the system before, they can do it again.

They've put developers on notice that Carbon's days are numbered. I think they get it now. As most apps that matter are already on Cocoa, or will be shortly, it's not too much of a problem. The developers that haven't yet jumped will, once rez independence is here, and their competitors are taking advantage of it.

Don't assume these change will be for the better. I'm frankly worried what Apple might do with the OS. I definitely do not want this marble theme as describe system wide.

I knew it!

Steve's master plan is to bring this full circle and have Apple's neXT user interface, in monochromatic shades of grey.

You do realize that as soon as the majority of Apple users switch to Intel Macs, Apple will want to enlist AMD.

You will never be happy if you look for happiness in technology

So what do I do? I dislike both the blue and the gray ones.

Given that the "marble" theme as described is only ever so slightly different from what we have now, could you be more specific about what's so horrible a about it?

Isn't the best way to go for any OS to try and get the GUI to fade into the background? How better to go about this than by sticking to muted greys and off-whites? How better than to implement a minimal, "no eye-candy" interface?

Other than the "black glass" overlays (which are neat, but come across as this year's version of the blue aqua buttons), I can't think of any direction other than the one they are moving in.

Actually they did say this, in the original Snow Leopard press release: "... we hit the pause button on new features ..."

And Apple's Snow Leopard web page refers to "taking a break from adding new features".

I use multiple monitors a lot and one of the most frustrating things is the app menus in the MenuBar. So, please please please remove app menus from the MenuBar and put them in the app window in some fashion. I prefer right-click pop-up menus, but they could use the "gear" menu as seen in Safari 4 for Windows. They can go all out and use pop-up pie menus. That'll look cool.

Just out of curiosity, if they take the application's menus out of the menu bar, what will be left in the menu bar? I guess they could just eliminate it.

But we're talking about changing one of the elements of the user interface that has seen consistent treatment ever since the very first Macintosh. There would be plenty of resistance to that, and likely incompatibility with applications which don't expect to have to make space for their menus inside their window.

They probably don't mean literally, of course there will be new features, but not as much as before.

I could go into countless times they screwed over the developers. I understand about the icons / fonts, but for a majority if they followed apple's human interface design guidelines there shouldn't be any problem.

Apple appears on the outside to help developers, when in reality they are just hurting themselves. For instance only providing coding headstarts and ADC on iTunes to developers willing to shell out $500 for a membership. That kind of stuff should be free so it promotes better development environments for the devs.

I'm sure a very few of the top companies HAVE seen it... i.e. adobe and such. But that doesn't help 99.99% of the developers out there. At the last WWDC SJ insinuated it would be out in about a year. Supposedly WWDC will be a little early this year, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was released during WWDC, or shortly after.

Looks like they are taking inspiration from Adobe.

This is just a ridiculous statement. You obviously don't know much about the Mac UI at all.

It's the difference between an document centred UI (Windows) and an application centred UI (almost any Unix system and Macs). It's one of the main advantages of Macs in general and a central reason as to why the UI is easier to use than Windows.

To think that they should change the central differentiating factor of the OS so that it's like MS Windows, (which would break almost every application out there), just because people who use multiple monitors have a "hard time" with it is just nuts.

Deleted.

Sometimes I wish Apple would just charge a bit for Xcode like say <$200 and build in support for development through ADC on iTunes. They could continue to ship a free version for those dabbling but the paid version would come with more features and iTunes ADC.

As for me I'm looking for to UI polish. Hell I want to use my services menu again but it's a GD nightmare.

I don't care if it's flat or marbly or whatever I want it functional.

WHen they announced SL I believe they did say quote "No new features."

On Apple's SL <a href = "http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/">page</a> it says:

"Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard scheduled to ship in about a year builds on Leopards" etc. The article then goes on to discuss the new features, Exchange support, QT X, etc.

It's pretty clear that they are going to add new features, but for right now they haven't embraced that as a selling point for the OS. They are embracing a partial code rewrite which will make a more solid OS.

Flat is in. Bulbous glossy crap is out (see Win 7). They're going to go more towards iTunes and the Pro apps in style if I had to guess. This is a good thing.