A glimpse at Snow Leopards more subtle refinements - Page 4

So much whining about a folder icon. If you really hate the icons that much, download CandyBar and change the icons to whatever you want, including the 9 year old Aqua icons.

Installer is one app getting a refresh in Snow Leopard.

This is not recommended practice for every kind of components.

For example kexts go to special folders, caches go to special folders, sounds and fonts are installed to special folders, etc...

Also, as if it weren't obvious, how many people uninstall/trash applications anyway? We're pretty much at a point where most people will never fill up their hard drives. I may be a neat freak, but I know I'm in the minority.

Then there's the reality that many people are Windows users and casual ones at that. They think when they delete a program (or just its shortcut, haha), that it's gone, even though remnants remain in the Registry. When they switch over to the Mac, they're unlikely to change their behavior and for the most part, trashing an app's icon in Mac OS X means it's gone. Thank goodness Apple doesn't litter the desktop with aliases like Microsoft does with shortcuts.

Preference files don't amount to much and most users never venture into the Library anyway, though it would certainly be nice if those files were erased when the application they're associated with was deleted. But then again, what if the user accidentally deleted an application? Would they want all their preferences to have been reset?

What needs a rethink is the installation process. Mounted disk images are cool, but they should really think up another way (besides just .pkgs), or simply present disk images differently (how, I don't know). Or as I and others have suggested, integrate Apple's Downloads application directory into the iTunes Store for easy installs and management of updates in iTunes (or Software Update).

do any apps take advantage of opencl yet?

Thanks so much Newton for this valuable insight. One thing I'd be very interested to know as a potential customer of SL when it comes out is whether it breaks major apps like those in Adobe's CS4. Have you any idea about that?

I am bummed by the long, long wait for ZFS — but i put the blame squarely on the CEO of Sun who 2 years ago made many of us believe that bootable ZFS was coming to Leopard. What was that guy thinking? Did he not grasp the technical problems involved in making that a reality? No wonder Jobs was pissed at him.

ZFS on timecapsules would be a pretty nice thing — but it doesn't seem as though we are going to see that any time soon. (Edit: actually I may be being too pessimistic about that.)

No, EFI is nothing new about Snow Leopard. Nor is this about Hackintoshes. The Macs have used EFI since the move to Intel, three years ago. EFI never kept anyone from making clones or Hackintoshes. Snow Leopard's 64 bit security might, but that is just speculation. We'll have to see.

EFI is supposed to be much better than BIOS, but it should, since BIOS is 30 years old.

I can't even say that Wintel has been dragging its feet, here, because Vista uses EFI and few people use Vista. Or so I understand, as a non-Microsoft user.

Back in 1997, Steve Jobs wanted developers to use Rhapsody, but they balked because it would have meant re-writing their applications in Cocoa and Objective C, So, Carbon API were born as a compromise. Carbon Apps often use installers like Windows has.

Apple, in Snow Leopard, is going all Cocoa API's or putting wrappers on Carbon API's to clean up later. Dragging and dropping packages should be the standard, but Carbon will be around for five years or so.

Not being picky.. but thats the British flag..

Apple did not break CS4; it merely decided not to issue 64 bit Carbon API's. Apple has been pushing developers into using Xcode ever since it moved to Intel, but Adobe balked, because Xcode isn't cross platform. Apple decided to pull the plug on Carbon so it would be obsolete in 5 years. Snow Leopard is getting rid of the compromises which were forced on NeXTstep back in 1997.

We ought to be happy that Apple is slowly pulling the plug on 32 bit Carbon Apps, even if it embarrasses Adobe. There are still lots of neat things in NeXTstep that Apple can implement now.



At the time Sun hadn't made ZFS into a boot file system. Leopard has ZFS in an experimental form. Snow Leopard should improve on that. But, lets be reasonable. The only hardware that needs ZFS is the servers, but that will change with time and ZFS gets to be the standard OS. HFS+ Journaling is getting a trifle old, but it isn't a problem for Apple yet.


This is one of those stealth upgrades. Apple is moving steadily toward ZFS, but there is no reason to rush things. There is a lot of work to do and only recently did Sun get ZFS to be its boot file system.

I suspect the pattern is that Apple made ZFS experimental in 10.5 and optional for servers in 10.6. 10.7 in 12 to 18 months make it standard on servers and optional in the consumer OS. 10.8 makes it the standard file system in two to three years.

This is not a big deal. There is no groundswell demanding this. Apple is merely solving problems before it becomes urgent to do so. I expect an explosion in Video on everyone's computer. As disc drives and home LAN's become ubiquitous, then all this data will need to be managed or it will get lost on our drives.

This is a pretty ridiculous statement--there's so many things wrong I don't know where to begin. Installers are not unique to Carbon, and in fact many Cocoa applications use them. As was stated earlier, Apple requires some components to be installed in certain places, outside of your application's bundle. Want to provide a contextual menu plug-in? Has to go into [~]/Library/Contextual Menu Items. Want to provide a QuickLook importer? Has to go into [~]/Library/QuickLook. Want to add an Input Method, WebKit plug-in, PreferencePane or ScreenSaver (all Foundation/AppKit/"Cocoa" based plug-ins)....have to install them in special folders. Some of those items will not work unless they are in /Library, so you need root priviledges to install them--something drag & drop install is not good for at all. Others don't require root privileges, but they won't be available to other users of the computer if you don't install them to /Library (what retarded software would want to install a QuickLook importer only for the current user instead of all users)? To make it available to all users you need root privileges. Then there's drivers and kernel modules, which require even more special handling.

Those are just the dynamic code modules. All kinds of applications, from iPhoto and Mail (Cocoa based applications) to Adium and Yahoo Messenger (also Cocoa) all have data in my ~/Library/Caches folder right now. How are those files supposed to be uninstalled?

Lame statement.

It will be a while before Apple breaks 32-bit Carbon. iTunes is still Carbon in the latest Snow Leopard seeds, and in fact many parts of Cocoa still rely on Carbon underneath. NSMenu still uses internal Carbon classes like CoreUIMenu even in Snow Leopard (CoreUI is basically the Carbon HI APIs abstracted out).

Snow Leopard+1 will certainly not prevent Carbon applications from running since Adobe has announced they will not release CS5 until late 2010. Adobe isn't the one to worry about anyway, Microsoft has not announced any plans to drop Carbon, and the day Macs can't run Microsoft Word and PowerPoint is the day Apple stops selling Macs to higher ed customers.



ZFS is in Snow Leopard Server. In Snow Leopard Client it's read only. However IMHO there's not going to be any transition to ZFS for Mac OS X Client for years to come (e.g. not SL+1). Apple is still adding features to HFS+, e.g. the automatic compression support added for Snow Leopard (which is annoying as #*&! since it prevents you from opening your Snow Leopard files on Leopard). ZFS is still dreadfully slow, and there's nothing in there that can't be added to HFS+.

Since I posted I did some reading and I think you are wrong about this. ZFS in Sl Client is likely to be read/write capable and with some kind of functionality built into Disk Utility. It won't be bootable, but it will be possible to partition your drive and have a small HFS+ partition for the System and a larger ZFS partition for your home directory. Indeed this is possible now though you have to use the terminal to format the ZFS partition, and the ZFS that works with the 10.5 kernel is stuck at build 119. (Leopard will likely never get beyond this ZFS build in other words the progress in ZFS that is being made in SL will likely not be backported. Or so I read.)

Given this progress I think we might just see a bootable ZFS option on SL+1, but very likely in SL+2.

Hehe, its funny to see how little all of you know...

The correct solution is to install those things on the first run of your application, prompting for the user password if necessary.

Ever used an app that works with Growl? That's what happens there. It's very un-intrusive and subtle.

Amorya

Is this a comment about SL content, installation process (I'm reading so much absolute crap that is stated as fact its remarkable), the "future" or something else? I have just been reading from the side lines - makes me shake my head in wonder!

P.S. I now understand how some of these folks have managed to post 100's or 1000's of messages - sometimes quickly. They think this is a chat instead of a forum for discussion.

jOhn

It was basically saying in reference to what people are saying about Cocoa vs Carbon etc, they're all know-it-alls who really know very little.

I suppose you know more? Tell us.

Why bother? It just gets mixed up in the bull you guys like to sprout about how you know everything about Apple.

I don't know bupkiss about Cocoa vs Carbon especially considering Apple's love affair with NDA and open discourse.

I do know that a man can't serve two masters. Apple's spent a lot of effort working on Carbon that should now go to Cocoa and that makes me happy.

I believe this is now possible.

See here.

You are correct. I didnt even think to check that out. Other subtle changes that I havent seen mentioned are the more convenient naming of screenshots which append the date and time to the file name and the use of Base-10 instead Base-2 for drive and file sizes.

There is another alternative. What if it did this: when you drag an application folder to the trash, the systems asks if you want to remove all related files? In principle, it could check to see if any other apps have used a given kext or font or whatever and warn you (or maybe only remove the ones that are not used by other applications).

That would give the benefits of an uninstaller without requiring a separate app. And it shouldn't be that much harder to implement - it wouldn't require any more information than a good uninstaller would require.

Of course, it's really a moot point because all those extra files tend to be fairly small and it doesn't do any harm to leave them where they are, but for the truly anal-retentive....

These feature would only appear when its a *.app file being sent to the trash and Apple could include an option to have it off by default, if they wish.

All Apple would have to do is add the locations of the files to the application package upon install and/or first run, depending on the app type. This could be part of the SDK, so that its automatic and transparent to developers.

The files are small, but these small files are sometimes the culprit for wonkly programs or programs that immediately quit after launching. If I could tell someone to simple do a complete uninstall of the app instead of walking them through the library to hunt down associated files Id happy.

I dont see any technical or logistical reason why this would not be possible.

No but you need 64bit QuickTime and iTunes..... why those aren't 64bit yet is unbelievable to me.

Isn't Apple going to expose 64-bit Quicktime support through QTkit?

Guys, just to throw something out at you, when uninstalling the latest iPhone SDK beta, I already had the new iTunes 8.2 installed.

Something in there seemed fishy when Terminal told me it was analysing iTunes X, not iTunes 8...

iTunes X - 64bit Cocoa iTunes maybe???

...do we think they'll change the title bar theme of all windows to something darker as well?

But just as the Menu Bar in Leopard has a different theme from all window title bars, I don't see Snow Leopard window title bars all resembling QTX Player.

Look at the "theme" of the clicked "Mac" link from Apple's website (ignore the others as they mimic Leopard's current title bar theme):



We've all heard rumors that SL is moving more to a white-text-on-black aesthetic. For that matter, there's already some white-text-on-black in Leopard: the labels that show up on mouse-over of apps in the Dock, iTunes 8's Grid View theme, iPhoto's Faces labeler, etc.).

If that's true, the above seems like a reasonable substitute. Thoughts?

Maybe because there's no value? Who cares if an audio-playing app is 64 bit? Do you have a few billion songs in your folder?

They will be converted to 64 bit when it's worth the trouble - which is presumably with Snow Leopard - at least by the time it's ready to release. At that time, it should be possible to run ONLY 64 bit apps- making it desirable to get rid of 32 bit apps from the system. Until then, there's no real value for apps like that.

I think you guys are taking this too literally and they never even said it won't ship with any "new features".

I believe that Jobs actually did state “no new features”… right before showing us some new features, like native ActiveSync support in Mail.



edit:
My memory is, in fact, falable… luckily I’ll forget that I forgot soon enough and all will be right with the world again. According to a quote in an AI article from the SL developer preview conference:

We've all heard rumors that SL is moving more to a white-text-on-black aesthetic. For that matter, there's already some white-text-on-black in Leopard: the labels that show up on mouse-over of apps in the Dock, iTunes 8's Grid View theme, iPhoto's Faces labeler, etc.).

I hope the above is true. Why? White-text-on-black is more legible for many people on a monitor. As I understand it, historically, black-text-on-white in a GUI was to represent a sheet of typed paper in a mechanical typewriter. But note that your TV has basically a white-text-on-black theme overlay as in titles, credits, or captions. Or title, credits, and captions in a movie for that matter.

Regarding SL speed on old(er) MBPs, if there's not a significant shift in disc footprint AND in CPU-intensive apps AND in task-switching responsiveness, I may begin to wonder what the fuss was about - I expect encoding/compressing/converting of all sorts to be noticeably improved by the GPU-enablieng code, I expect a functional increase in discspace (*at least* on my boot/internal) - and I expect they'll take a lot of flack if they fail to deliver on these points.

IIRC he said they weren't focusing on features but on internals (though I felt at the time that much of what he was describing - Grand Central, OpenCL, Quicktime X - qualified as features)

A lot will depend on the HW you have, but there will be improvements in benchmarking, though you may not actually notice the difference in your everyday usage. As they have stated, this really does seem like they are really just cleaning house and redoing the foundation for the future of OS X for the multicore systems. Its a great longterm move and I think Apple was smart not state that they features will be on hold for this version. If you are in doubt that your Mac will benefit from the update or if the new UI or user features arent appealing Id just wait until youre ready for a new Mac.

Why did you remove the 2nd half of my post where I point out what was actually stated?

Awesome, thanks for that & the pics, that'll be really nice. It's funny what we would each check up front. Open/save dialogs have been high on my wishlist for improvement since 10.1 - and they have improved with most paid upgrades but not to this extent! Thanks Hobbes for the other link also!

I hope whoever you wrote this for gets it - however, you don't actually seem to be referencing MY post, so I'll skip a detailed response to yours.

Didn't read it in the IP, didn't *have* it to read in the reply box.
That said: you're bitching about my not disagreeing with you?

Just wondering why such a thing would happen. If I were bitching I wouldnt be questioning your motives, Id instead be making statements about them.