Apple close to unveiling guarded Snow Leopard UI overhaul - Page 3

Yeah, as stated earlier the "new features" will be under-the-hood stuff that isn't as marketable to end users as Time Machine or Spaces.

This thread is so Good! - on so many different levels.
On one hand there is the argument over resolution independence and then on the other we are reminiscing over GIZMO. Now, what fantastic insight by @satchmo has revealed what could *actually* be the case... "monochromatic shades of grey".

BTW does anyone remember the "Architect/NotePad" UI Scheme developed by Apple JAPAN?

/usr01

And steve can bring out AMD holding a wafer with the slogan, ``I just works.''

Agreed.

Even if your figures are correct, that's not the relevant statistic. The relevant statistic would be how many PPC owners would buy Snow Leopard.

Typically, when computers get to about 4-5 years old, people stop upgrading them. Not always, but the percentage drops pretty quickly. So if Apple released 10.6 as Universal, the percentage of PPC owners buying it would be far less than the 28% of Macs that use PPC.

It goes even further than that. If Apple releases 10.6 as Intel only, some percentage of those PPC owners might use that as an excuse to upgrade, so some incremental percentage of new hardware sales would be created by NOT supporting PPC.

I certainly don't profess to know what those numbers are, but the end result is that supporting PPC would double Apple's work, greatly increase the size of the program, add a lot more bugs, increase the support costs and add something less than 28% of additional sales.

If Apple decides it's not worthwhile, it wouldn't surprise me.

Super. I hope you enjoy you using your Safari.


No, that's not a safe assumption. I suggest you go and watch a single 400 MB+ flash movie (i.e. online TV) and watch as Safari ratchets up to over 1.5 GB of memory use, even with a restart and everything cleared.


Are you joking? Can't afford a dictionary? You know one comes with your Mac, right?

It's 'too much' when I can 'assess' that the memory usage is:

a.) Disproportionate to the tasks being performed.

b.) Disproportionate to the time running.

c.) See below.


I probably would, yes. Unfortunately Safari does that caching (see a.)) but is still slow. Eventually when the program hits over 1 GB generally its impossible to carry on with any sort reasonable responsiveness. So we have:

c.) Increased memory consumption by Safari does not necessarily increase its speed or responsiveness.


Yep. And evidently it still is.


Apple hasn't focused on anything with Safari 3. They just need you to believe they did.


Woah, slow down there.


You're not most people. But evidently you 'think' (term used loosely) everyone else is also blind to Safari's failings.

@greglo

If you want people to respect your opinion, you can start by not acting like a total douche.

Would you really refer to GUI changes as a feature? I wouldn't.

I'd like the ability to shade just the folders (using the labels feature) like you could do in classic. I'd also like the ability to change the label colors.

I'm not asking much...

i'm guessing it will look something like this

Coming soon:

"Removed at the request of Apple Legal"

What's the difference between you & the devs who rave about how great the Apple OS is for development? What product do you develop, I'm curious? Are the praisers all posers?

Oh my...I sure hope not cause that would be the worst interface makeover ever!

amen!!!

That doesn't include all of his statement, in which he made clear that they would be adding new features, just not a load.

Jobs had said the same thing.

We've been over this before and I, in addition to others, had provided links to the relevant articles. I don't have them now, but they are there.

Besides, from what we've been seeing lately, since 10.6 has first been shown, that there are new features popping up all over the place.

If Apple will be moving to light type over a dark background, that's not in the guidelines.

In fact, that's OUT of guidelines overall, where in publishing, it's long been recognized that light type on a dark background is less legible, and less readable. I don't see how following Apple's OLD guidelines will help.


Most major companies charge for that. Why should Apple be different? It cuts out the riffraff.


I doubt that helping everyone is actually helpful when Apple just beginning to alpha some features. Too much feedback is worse then too little then. Once these features get better fleshed out, and more usable, that when BETA testing should proceed. I'm sorry that some small developers feel left out. It doesn't seem to help MS and its legion of developers to have every single beta out to them. No reason why it would help there either.

With so many developers saying that they can't even start until Apple releases the finished product, I don't mourn for them for not getting almost useless code so much earlier.

I'm not saying that Apple WILL do this, only that's it's not yet been made clear that they won't, despite a lot of people making assumptions.

It took years for Apple to stop supporting Classic on NEW machines.

Apple always points out how easy it is to do Universal apps. A click of the button! I know that optimizations are more work than that, but most software out there is Universal now. Or, there are two versions.

I admit that the 28% stat is not entirely useful, but it does show that more than one out of four Mac users is still not on an Intel machine. Will Apple want to be seen abandoning them yet again?

My thought on this is that many of the "features" that Apple is adding, Quicktime X, the Cocoa Finder, and numerous others, will work perfectly well on a late dual cpu G4, and on G5 machines. Apple could have a release for them, without the Intel, multicore features, and announce that it will be the last PPC release, except for bug, and security fixes.

That would make the older user population feel better.

Too many times they are not happy when Apple moves older machines out of support. We've had many of those people post angrily here. Quite a few people posted that it was too soon for Apple to be ending new OS support from PPC machines. It will only be about 3 years. This would extend it to five. It would tell them that Apple still cares about them. It would not affect what Apple is doing for the Intel machines. Everyone would be happy.

I can't agree with a lot of this.

First of all, he's right about the crashes. Almost every time it crashes, it's due to some improperly written Flash ad. You can tell from the reporter. I've not had a Safari crash for a long time that wasn't related to Flash.

I've now had Safari 4 on for five days running, and used it a lot (I've had it since it first came out). I've gone to very many sites, played videos, displayed PDF's, gone to Flash sites etc. Memory is at 492.22 MB. It's been about that for some while. sometimes it goes up a bit, and then goes down a bit. It's easy to monitor.

Safari 4 is definitely NOT slow. I don't know what you're seeing, but it could be a problem with your installation. The browser tests show that Safari 3 gets about a 11XX, and that Safari gets a 1851 in overall speed rating on my machine. That's a lot faster than 3, which wasn't slow.

It's now at 491.95 and dropping.

Yes, if they're additions, or better ways of doing things.

with snow having rumored no changes and 10.7 Round the corner, is any one truly surprised. y

I'm not so sure how "round the corner" 10.7 is.

I agree with this, re PPC support for Snow Leopard.

I use the system requirements for iLife 09 as my basis for this and believe that PPC will get some
of the SL goodness, although it may be slowish and stuttery and annoying, a little like iMovie 09
on PPC iMac at home.

The problem though is that if Apple delivers a PPC version it simply slows the development cycle down. For every feature they add they have to debug and test it on x86 and PPC.

Granted I'm sure Apple really wants to deliver a solid OS for PPC users and frankly Leopard seems to be that OS but I'm not sure they really want to extend PPC legacy support out another OS cycle. Most PPC based Macs are going on 4 years old or older. It's becoming a natural time for them to be upgraded.

I can't argue with any of that, but I think that there is a lot in the iLife 09 software that runs on PPC which could be enhanced with what I have read about SL.

Granted, a PPC G5 iMac will not get much benefit from most of what I have read on here but I would hope that the PowerMacs of the same era with multi cores could really see improvements.

I think this would spur sales of more modern machines for these users as apposed to not supporting them and having those users hang on to what they have for grim death.

Russian speaking people can view this post here

To those of you who said that this little mock up was horrible... what exactly makes it that way? Other than the background of the Icon View window being dark grey with black text, I like the idea of a direct thumbnail resize slider... and possibly using those other dark bars as favorites.

As to the dark background with black text: you DO know that you can do that in Leopard, and I believe Tiger as well. In Icon View, hit Cmd-J, and choose a different color or even a background picture if ya want for just that window. I have some of my reference graphic folders with dark grey background and monster icons. Nothing new there.

Em, if you are regularly (or even once) watching 400 MB+ flash movies, I thing the problem lies in your browsing habits. And Safari crashing is a fair punishment to that (I would also suggest been poked with hot iron, but that's just me).


And you can "assess" that based on what? Your engineering degree and/oe deep knowledge of the trade-offs decided?


Yes, like shown on all those benchmarks that show it *blazing* fast and faster than other browsers...


When it get's "over 1 GB" eh? Must be those nice, nimble 400MB+ flash files you keep watching...


A qualified opinion if I ever show one. You *do* know that the code for Safari's engine is Open Source and out there, and that the progress to it is generally well documented on the development blog?

They can afford to do this one more time. It's good will. How much is that worth?

They are no longer a small company, personnel numbers are no longer an excuse for anything they do.

Just because something CAN be done, doesn't mean that it SHOULD be done. What you've done shouldn't be done.

I've got 5 PPC Macs myself so it's not like i'm not affected. I disagree about the personnel, from what I've read Bertrand Serlet's team is quite small. I think it's clear that the iPhone work delayed the release of Leopard and it could do the same with Snow Leopard.

While it's nice to think about Apple throwing PPC owners a bone they are a business that needs profits and helping people keep their 4+ year old Mac going isn't generating the type of business that keeps Wall St happy.

I can see Apple still supporting PPC up until 2011, but that doesn't mean Snow Leopard will be PPC.

Apple still supports Macs with G3 processors.

Tiger still gets security updates, Safari 4 hast a Tiger version, iWork '09 works with Tiger and G4 processors of 500MHz (which are OLD) etc. You can run the latest and greatest iWork on machines that are 9 years old, if that doesn't show Apple is all for legacy support, I don't know what is.

Your PPC G5 machines will be well supported by Apple for years to come, but I think it's about time that Apple releases some new products that ditch PPC.

On print this may be true but on backlit screens I have found this to be very untrue. If I have a large article to read I often press Ctrl+option+Cmd+8 to invert colors so I can read the article. This is especially helpful in low light conditions where my screen is much dimmer.

It must be subjective. Even on long articles, dark text on a light background is more comfortable for me to read. I can't stand sites that have light text on dark backgrounds. My coworker is the opposite.

I really can't agree with that. As you know, I'm one of those people who always talks about Apple as a business, in response to people who ask for features that almost no one wants. This is different. Apple used to be quite good at this. It seems that the bigger and richer they get, the less they want to keep their older machine using customers happy.

I don't care how small his team is, it should be bigger. There's no excuse for Apple to not spend some of that $28.5 billion on personnel. I know that it takes time to get new people up and running, but they've now had almost two years to do so after the fiasco with the original iPhone.

Making excuses for them doesn't cut the mustard. You simply can't say that having another 20 programmers on staff for projects like this is going to make any difference in their profitability. How much does their salaries cut into $1 billion in profit each quarter?

Apple "supports" those old machines with help with some problems. The law is that companies must provide a certain level of support for products that are 7 years old. That's why Apple "supports" those old machines in minimal ways. But it doesn't support them with new OS updates, upgrades, or software.

In fact, if your machine is less than an 866 MHz G4, Apple doesn't give you any OS support at all. Now, this could extend to all PPC machines. Even those bought three years ago.

We used to be able to tell our PC using friends that we could install the latest OS on a machine 5 to 8 years old. now, we can't say that.

If you carefully read what I said, I wasn't calling for a full 10.6 release for the PPC machines. Only for the ones that had enough "oomph" to run what could be expected to run on a PPC machine. Obviously, areas in which those machine couldn't function couldn't be supported. But much could. It wouldn't need to be a Universal version of the release. There could, and should be, two versions. The Intel version wouldn't be burdened by having PPC code.

Honestly, this wouldn't cost Apple more than a couple of million to do. It's just the cost of a dozen, or at most two dozen, extra programmers over the time needed. It's not as though Apple doesn't already have many on staff.

I've also pointed out that Apple could easily afford this. They are no longer the $5.5 billion company whose continuation was in doubt. But, then, they were more concerned about supporting older customers than they are now. Ironic, isn't it?

It's true on monitors as well. There have been more than a few studies over the years that show that. If you're different, well, that's you.

You can turn the brightness and contrast to the point at which you are satisfied.

It's also a myth that the eye and brain cares whether something is backlit or not. It really doesn't know the difference. It's all a matter of brightness and contrast. Black type over a light grey background is considered to be excellent. Or changing the background to some other warm pastel shade.

I've measured the brightness levels of magazine pages, and compared them to that of properly set-up monitors, and the levels are about the same. Too many people leave a monitor at factory levels, which are far too blue, and too bright. That could be a problem. The responsibility for that is with the user.

New Mac user here.. What does it typically cost to upgrade to a new version of Mac OS?
I just got my MacBook Pro last year so it's running Leopard.

Thanks

Teach a man to fish...

Who says I want it like MS Windows?

I said I favored right-click pop-up menus (maybe even a half-pie hierarchal pop-up menu), but putting a menu button a la the gear (the action) button is more of a 2nd option in my mind. Right or secondary click options are right there, next to the object one is trying to do something with. For small screens and single-tasking orienting computing back in the 80s, the app menus were a good solution, but we've really gone a lot bigger in screen sizes, screen resolutions, and the number of things going on at the same time in the past 2 decades. It is really long past time to start moving away from some of the UI conventions of the past because "app-menus in the MenuBar UI" convention isn't really holding up.

Often amazon, and some other stores, offer the OS at a discount from Apple's price. So you may see it at $10 to $20 off.