Apple OS X Mountain Lion hits 3.2% penetration in two days

13

Comments

  • Reply 41 of 63
    gmhutgmhut Posts: 242member


    If your mac is older than a year and a half, this update (yes update, hardly a new OS) is a bate and switch. It slows your machine and worse, the main features one would upgrade for, are hobbled. No mirroring to apple TV. 



    Also, while this maybe a small thing to many, gone is the screen saver with cycling bright color gradients. One downside of my rather expensive expanded RGB self-calibrating monitor suited for print design, is quick burn in. That particular screen saver worked as an excellent overnight screen washer. Now, not only did I not get the one feature I upgraded for, one of the main ones that I relied on every day is now gone. Further more, Fusion, which I also relied on every day, is no longer compatible and is simply moved into a folder called "incompatible software." I loaded ML on my machine at home as a test. I will not allow my machine at work to be upgraded to ML. Unfortunately, Lion turned my work machine into a vehicle for displaying the spinning beach ball of death, so I'm screwed at home, and screwed at work. Is this what we can expect from Apple without Jobs?



    I don't give a rat's ass to have my desktop act more like a mobil phone. I just want the features I bought to work, features I already had not to be removed, and for my once zippy machine not to be slowed to a crawl. If you look at the requirements at point of sale, all you get is "Requirements: OS X 10.6.8 or later" with no asterisk to warn buyers of the most important fact, this upgrade is not fully supported on any machine more than 18 months old. That equals misleading advertising, and is a total rip off. F you Apple!

  • Reply 42 of 63
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member


    Originally Posted by GMHut View Post

    If your mac is older than a year and a half, this update (yes update, hardly a new OS) is a bate and switch. It slows your machine and worse, the main features one would upgrade for, are hobbled.


     


    Not true.


     



    Further more, Fusion, which I also relied on every day, is no longer compatible and is simply moved into a folder called "incompatible software."


     


    So it's Apple's fault that you upgraded before checking that third party software you use works? Or it's Apple's fault that Fusion didn't upgrade their software?


     



    Is this what we can expect from Apple without Jobs?


     


    Oh, shut it. Enough of the doom and gloom already.


     




    That equals misleading advertising, and is a total rip off. F you Apple!



     


    So get a refund instead of whining on the Internet, I'd think. Then stop doing business with Apple.

  • Reply 43 of 63
    gmhutgmhut Posts: 242member


    He idiot, this is not whining. Try looking on line and you'll find this is not exactly an isolated complaint with Lion and now Mt. Lion. I depend on macs for a living, and have done so since 1987. Lion is so slow as to be almost unusable, and every machine it's been loaded on at work (none more than 2 years old) spends a good amount of time with the spinning beach ball of death and app "not responding" messages every 15 minutes. These are everything from work stations loaded with RAM to minis, also maxed out with RAM. I loaded Mountain lion at home as a test to see if this had been fixed, and for apple TV airplay for personal use. Mountain lion, does not allow the major features on those machines, but is also slow on my test machine.


     


    Maybe a koolaid swilling sycophant is OK having to buy a new machine to find a stable version of now two releases from Apple, but those of us who depend on them for a living aren't going to accept two lame releases that prevent us from working. You bet I'm going to bitch about it every place I can, I urge anyone else having the same issues to do the same. I prefer that Apple not become as much of a pain in the ass to use as Windows. It's suckup fanboys like yourselves who accept substandard crap and lavish Apple with undeserved praise for everything they do that allows apple to let their desktop OS lapse into being a buggy glorified mobile OS. 

  • Reply 44 of 63
    gmhutgmhut Posts: 242member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


     


    Not true.


     


     


    So it's Apple's fault that you upgraded before checking that third party software you use works? Or it's Apple's fault that Fusion didn't upgrade their software?


     


     


    Oh, shut it. Enough of the doom and gloom already.


     


     


    So get a refund instead of whining on the Internet, I'd think. Then stop doing business with Apple.



    Yes true


     


    Apple doesn't list know issues with other software. So the only way to know if a major ap like Fusion is suddenly broken with no fix, is to upgrade to lion. Switching back is time consuming which is lost money to a professional. If you think it's acceptable for manor apps other than Apple software to be broken with new OS, than you're basically saying you're fine with sticking with the apple OS being an expensive time sucking experiment to see of a pro-level machine has just bend rendered useless for much more than status updates about a sandwich you ate and pics of your drunk friends from the last happy hour you went to uploaded to facebook.

  • Reply 45 of 63
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member


    Originally Posted by GMHut View Post

    Lion is so slow as to be almost unusable, and every machine it's been loaded on at work (none more than 2 years old) spends a good amount of time with the spinning beach ball of death and app "not responding" messages every 15 minutes.


     


    And I've only had that happen a handful of times, and on ONE machine, six years old, with only 2GB of RAM.


     



    I urge anyone else having the same issues to do the same.



     


    And I urge anyone with an issue to see if they can resolve it first and report it as a bug directly to Apple on their feedback page second. Complaining about it to anyone but Apple themselves is wasting time.





    Originally Posted by GMHut View Post


    Switching back is time consuming which is lost money to a professional.



     


    I could have sworn the protocol was to not update at all until you absolutely knew. That's why we see all these people managing buildings full of computers holding off for a few weeks every time a new OS is released, or at the very least doing their research during the Developer Preview stage to let them know what third-party applications will and won't be working on launch day.






    If you think it's acceptable for manor apps other than Apple software to be broken with new OS…




     


    Not sure what a 'manor' app is. If you mean minor (like a single guy making a utility in his spare time), yes, I think they'll probably get more leeway than a relatively large and stable company (like VMWare) when they don't have an application updated in time for the new OS' release. If you meant major, then, again, I fail to see how this is Apple's fault at all, since a major application will be made by a "major" company-one with the resources and money needed to spend $100 a year on developer releases and new versions of Xcode to make sure their applications work by launch time. And as it is just $100 a year, there are a scant few developers that couldn't afford to do it if they really cared about the products they make.


     




    …you're basically saying you're fine with sticking with the apple OS being an expensive time sucking experiment to see of a pro-level machine has just bend rendered useless for much more than status updates about a sandwich you ate and pics of your drunk friends from the last happy hour you went to uploaded to Facebook.




     


    I'm upset with "sociopath networking" as well, but I fail to see what the inclusion of features relevant to it has to do with companies that don't take advantage of said features and put out applications that are just their own thing.

  • Reply 46 of 63
    philboogiephilboogie Posts: 7,675member
    rcfa wrote: »
    philboogie wrote: »
    rcfa wrote: »
    ...total disaster that was Lion.

    If that is your experience then I can understand a rant. Out of curiosity, can you give one example of what you think was badly done in Lion? And make it a lasting statement, well founded, grounded, solid statement of why it was bad. Something like "I didn't like the Auto-version-ing as opposed to the Save-as commands because when working on a picture on my SD card it never asked me to safe changes; it all happened automatically and I cannot revert to the original version"

    Examples, more than I care to remember:

    I understand from the following list there is probably no way to make you see things differently, so I won't even try to. Also don't want to try to make you see things differently. But there are a few items that I can comment on, hopefully with something you'll find useful.
    a) kitschy, dysfunctionally decorated apps (AddressBook, iCal, etc.) that sacrifice functionality (e.g. the back and forth paging between AddressBook groups and address list view, which is a massive step backwards from the clean, functional Snow Leopard (and before) interface of AddressBook, which allowed you to adjust the width of the various columns and panes to fit your working style and screen space)

    They really did a poor job with this new 'theme' or whatever one wants to call it. A few hours a week I use Windows, and actually like the integrated approach Outlook has. However, since that program is such a pain to use, I can only say that the integration of 4 apps into 1 makes sense. To me.
    b) the "hunt for GUI elements" approach, which not only makes an artificial distinction between mouse and touch interfaces (cause there's no mouse-over in a touch interface), but is also unproductive, e.g. UI elements that only become visible when the mouse is near them, such as scroll bars, or the replacement of disclosure triangles with usually hidden "hide/show" tags

    c) lack of UI precision, be that with the disappearance of scroll bar up/down buttons, or with the invisible, but existing window borders

    Annoys me as well. I have set the scroll bars to always be in view, and understand your point.

    d) the abandonment of what you see is what you manipulate: you can see a window below two neighboring windows, but you can't click it to the foreground, because the invisible (i.e. fully transparent), but existing, window borders register your click rather than the window that you see and think you're clicking. All in the name of "visual simplicity", when it castrates intuitive interaction

    e) the un-natural "natural" scrolling, which neglects the difference between a full-screen touch interface and a windowed pointer interface

    Sorry, missing this one…(2x)

    f) Mission Control and the disappearance of two dimensional spaces and the show all windows command, which results much less efficient window management for anyone who has more than just a few open windows.

    Because of that, I'll stick to Cmd-Tab.

    g) the creation of an app rather than task centric interface, visible in both how iCloud document storage works, and in the lack of the all windows view of Mission Control

    You can show all open documents within a single app in MC, which might be usefull to some. iCloud storage is utter crap, but I have to upgrade, nee, install 10.8 to see if it got any better.

    h) the discontinuation of keychain syncing, which is a massive step backwards in security, because if you can't sync keychains, you end up having to choose again passwords you can't remember, since you can't remember (and sync instead) a password like "ljkhOPU0-9ih(lG;Ghkglh_RDt" and will instead use something like "password123"

    I agree that taking away a feature is never cool, but for this particular one I have them written down in an app which I can access on my iPhone, iPad and OSX, (without an internet connection) which I find a real hassle but workable solution. Everyone tells me to use 1password, but I'm weary on storing all that info into a 3rd party software app.

    i) the creation of a standalone "Notes" app, instead of keeping it integrated into Mail.app, which just results in more app switching for no good reason, the creation of a separate Reminder's app instead of keeping To Do's in iCal, the removal of calendar groups, etc.

    See my Outlook statement. I understand that they added week numbers to iCal, nee, Calendar. Something I have requested through their feedback pages for years. So that single thingy is nice, for me. And some other Europeans I take.

    [/quote]

    k) the AirPort utility, that no longer shows certain key information

    I read that before upgrading to 6.0, so I kept 5.0 as well. Need to install it if I'm going to install 10.8. I might wait till 10.8.1, as I have always done, 'xcept for 10.7, which I regret*.

    l) OS X Server, which keeps losing functionality

    etc. There is more, but that should give good enough of an impression.

    No no, thanks for the feedback, appreciated. I come here to learn, and your post is an informative on how one uses their Mac, wants it to behave, and why etcetera.

    I've been using NeXTSTEP since the 0.8 release, and Mac OS X since it was called Rhapsody Prerelease, and Lion is the worst in the entire 24 year history, and Mountain Lion is just a tad better.

    Apple keeps dumbing down things past the point of usefulness.

    Ah, old school. Love it. I've been using 3.3 and even got to use 4.0. OSX 10.0 was completely unusable with the Finder and all, but looked promising. They sure did 'jellybean-up' version after version, and I am happy with OSX as-is. Still have my Dock on the right, still wish for the old days. But do understand things get broken or discontinued, and realize I shouldn't linger on to how things were.

    (*)Though I do have my own gripes:
    - Aperture switching to Full Screen is a strep backwards from how it was in 10.6. Simply because they had to make it the same as all apps now can go Full Screen.
    - File Versioning. It really is a bug if someone changes a file on a non HFS FS like an SD card and doesn't ask the user to save the changes.
    - MobileMe Gallery. Photo Stream is not a replacement. Nor is it part of the OS some will say. But with its tight integration into Aperture, iOS Gallery.ipa and all I believe it is indeed a part of the whole ecosystem as it supposedly is called. I'm all for progress, but don't kill off things that were working perfectly before and got no successor whatsoever.
    - Preview Save a copy (or whatever) always defaults to the Desktop in 10.7 Before, it would default to the location of the original file.
    - The Finders' sidebar. I cannot drag items out of it and see it dissapear in a poof. Right-click, choose…ooh, how MS-like.
    - Colored icons. I understand their stance on 'distracting', but to first remove colored icons from iTunes, getting hammered 'from the community' and then to continue to expand on this feature by doing the same thing in Aperture is beyond my comprehension.
    - The Finder would auto-mount a network disk if I dropped a file on its icon in the sidebar. No more with 10.7

    An so on and so forth. Some miss Sherlock, some miss the old Cmd-I that would update its info when clicking on a different file. Then you find out that still works by hitting Cmd-Option-I. I surely hope these options are all preserved in 10.8.

    Best,
    Phil
  • Reply 47 of 63
    aglaeaaglaea Posts: 17member


    What exactly are the mentioned great new features? I haven't seen any. What I find interesting, and may be my only reason to upgrade, is that Mountain Lion seems to be faster and more responsive. Anybody got more detail about that?

  • Reply 48 of 63
    quadra 610quadra 610 Posts: 6,757member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by GMHut View Post


    He idiot, this is not whining. Try looking on line and you'll find this is not exactly an isolated complaint with Lion and now Mt. Lion. I depend on macs for a living, and have done so since 1987. Lion is so slow as to be almost unusable, and every machine it's been loaded on at work (none more than 2 years old) spends a good amount of time with the spinning beach ball of death and app "not responding" messages every 15 minutes. These are everything from work stations loaded with RAM to minis, also maxed out with RAM. I loaded Mountain lion at home as a test to see if this had been fixed, and for apple TV airplay for personal use. Mountain lion, does not allow the major features on those machines, but is also slow on my test machine.


     


    Maybe a koolaid swilling sycophant is OK having to buy a new machine to find a stable version of now two releases from Apple, but those of us who depend on them for a living aren't going to accept two lame releases that prevent us from working. You bet I'm going to bitch about it every place I can, I urge anyone else having the same issues to do the same. I prefer that Apple not become as much of a pain in the ass to use as Windows. It's suckup fanboys like yourselves who accept substandard crap and lavish Apple with undeserved praise for everything they do that allows apple to let their desktop OS lapse into being a buggy glorified mobile OS. 



     


     


    I'm not sure why you're trying to pass your anecdotal complaints off as universal. It's bad form. 


     


    Mountain Lion seems to be a decent upgrade that performs very well. Worth the upgrade cost, certainly. It runs beautifully on an Early 2008 MBP 2.4Ghz, 6GB RAM. Not a new machine by any means. 


     


    If you have so many complaints and are *that* unhappy, why prolong the suffering? Jump ship and go Windows. 


     


     


    image


     


     


    http://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/25/roundup-of-os-x-mountain-lion-reviews-faster-and-smoother-incremental-bargain-at-twice-the-price/


     


    With Apple having launched OS X Mountain Lion to the public today, reviews of the company's latest Mac operating system have begun pouring in. Many of the reviews are quite extensive, but we've selected a few choice excerpts to highlight general reaction to the release.



    - John Siracusa, Ars Technica



    Quote:







    The Mac is a platform in transition. In Lion, OS X began shedding the well-worn trappings of traditional desktop computing at an accelerated rate. This trend continues in Mountain Lion. Where Lion stumbled, Mountain Lion regroups and tries again--while still forging bravely ahead in other areas.



    As the second major refinement-focused release, it's easy to view OS X 10.8 as "what 10.7 should have been." The flip side of this argument is that the real-world mileage we've all put on Lion has helped Apple make the right kinds of adjustments in Mountain Lion. If we'd had to wait for two years after 10.6 for the next major release of OS X, chances are good that the worst of the missteps in Lion would just be landing on our doorsteps today. I'll take 10.8, thanks.


    - Jason Snell, Macworld



    Quote:







    All told, I found Mountain Lion to be a stable, solid release. Even prerelease builds were far more stable than I've come to expect from OS X betas, leading me to wonder if Apple's new annual schedule is leading to more careful incremental updates (with fewer bugs) rather than great leaps (with more, nastier bugs).


    - Nilay Patel, The Verge



    Quote:







    Ultimately, this is pretty easy: you should spend the $20 and upgrade to Mountain Lion, especially if you have a newer Mac. You'll gain a handful of must-have features, and everything will get faster and smoother. I haven't really missed Snow Leopard at all since upgrading, which is remarkable considering how much I disliked Lion.




    - Brian Heater, Engadget



    Quote:







    Taken as a whole, the features mark a fairly aggressive bid to fold the best of OS X and iOS into one product -- a strategy we first saw with the introduction of the Mac App Store on Snow Leopard, and with the arrival of Launchpad last year in Lion. [...]



    That said, it seems time for Apple to make a bold new pronouncement on the desktop front. The company appears to have most of its resources invested in the mobile side -- and there's no question as to why: the iPhone and iPad have reinvigorated the company, making it a computing player on a scale that no one (save, perhaps, for Jobs himself) could have predicted a decade ago. Still, it might be hard for OS X users not to feel neglected -- many of the latest new features feel a bit like iOS hand-me-downs. When and if Apple rolls out a new operating system this time next year, hopefully we'll be seeing a very different side of Mac OS.


    - Jim Dalrymple, The Loop



    Quote:







    There will be tens of thousands of words published on Wednesday when Mountain Lion hits the Mac App Store, but let's face it, what you really want to know is whether Mountain Lion is worth the upgrade. Let's get that out of the way now -- yes, it is definitely worth it.



    Mountain Lion costs $19.99 and comes with more than 200 new features -- that's a bargain at twice the price.






    - Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo



    Quote:







    If Apple doesn't want Microsoft to steal their innovation crown with Windows 8 Metro, they urgently need a new vision that breaks with this unholy mix of obsolete 1980s user interface heritage and iOS full screen skeumorphism.



    It feels like Apple has run out of ideas. Or worse, that Apple is too afraid to implement new concepts, fearing it will kill the company's golden goose. Too afraid to change the world once again, as Steve Jobs used to say, one desktop at a time.


    - MG Siegler, TechCrunch



    Quote:







    It must be said that Mountain Lion isn't really all that different from Lion -- hence, the variation of the name (even though mountain lions are technically cougars -- insert joke here). But unlike the jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard, which focused on performance and tightening code rather than features, the jump from Lion to Mountain Lion does pack some new goodies. [..]



    In a time when Microsoft is just about to upend their entire OS with their biggest change (and bet) yet in Windows 8, Apple has taken a much more refined approach. Perhaps they take some criticism for this, or perhaps they're just being savvy. OS X remains a great OS, and sprinkled with some of the best elements of iOS, it still feels pretty fresh. Not bad for an eleven year old big cat.
  • Reply 49 of 63
    quadra 610quadra 610 Posts: 6,757member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Aglaea View Post


    What exactly are the mentioned great new features? I haven't seen any. What I find interesting, and may be my only reason to upgrade, is that Mountain Lion seems to be faster and more responsive. Anybody got more detail about that?



     


    "Faster and more responsive" alone, is worth the $20.


     


    You can barely buy dinner for one for $20, and then you've eaten it. It's gone. 


     


    Some apps that do one thing only cost $20. 


     


    With ML, you're getting an OS that is "Faster and more responsive", includes better iCloud integration, Notification Centre, iCloud Reminders, iCloud Notes, refinements to Mail, Dictation, new sharing features, Finder enhancements, enhanced Preview features (annotation, comments), etc.


     


    http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/


     


    http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html


     


    For only $20 you're getting a better OS. 

  • Reply 50 of 63
    gmhutgmhut Posts: 242member

    This site has become an Apple apologist's wet dream.
  • Reply 51 of 63
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member


    Originally Posted by GMHut View Post

    This site has become an Apple apologist's wet dream.




    Yes, you have absolutely no argument whatsoever and are valiantly and courageously… trying to pass off your singular subjective (and often wrong) position as objective, far-reaching fact.


     


    I'll post this again, since you're ignoring it:


    image


     


    "BUT APPLE DELETES ALL THE BAD REVIEWS!"

  • Reply 52 of 63
    quadra 610quadra 610 Posts: 6,757member


    The last word is usually Ars Technica:


     


    http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/

  • Reply 53 of 63

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    I'm sorry, I find hilarious your assertion that all current users of Snow Leopard, a three year old OS, are geniuses.



    What "assertion" of genius are you talking about?  I simply implied that they're not complete idiots, and know better than to try an x.0 release that will supposedly fix something that ain't broke.

  • Reply 54 of 63
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member


    Originally Posted by audioinside View Post

    What "assertion" of genius are you talking about?  I simply implied that they're not complete idiots, and know better than to try an x.0 release that will supposedly fix something that ain't broke.


     


    So you're STILL insulting all users who might want to update their software, regardless of the knowledge they have about the new OS.

  • Reply 55 of 63

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Quadra 610 View Post


    With ML, you're getting an OS that is "Faster and more responsive"



    Any benchmarks out yet to support this claim?  Otherwise I think the anecdotal reports are a likely result of Apple's marketing hype feeding the Shiny New Car effect. Even Ars' 24-page review doesn't say a thing about enhanced performance.  My ML install gives nearly the exact same Geekbench numbers as SL, and I can't say that the UI interactions that Geekbench can't quantify feel measurably different one way or the other.  

  • Reply 56 of 63
    aglaeaaglaea Posts: 17member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Quadra 610 View Post


     


    "Faster and more responsive" alone, is worth the $20.


     


    You can barely buy dinner for one for $20, and then you've eaten it. It's gone. 


     


    Some apps that do one thing only cost $20. 


     


    With ML, you're getting an OS that is "Faster and more responsive", includes better iCloud integration, Notification Centre, iCloud Reminders, iCloud Notes, refinements to Mail, Dictation, new sharing features, Finder enhancements, enhanced Preview features (annotation, comments), etc.


     


    http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/


     


    http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html


     


    For only $20 you're getting a better OS. 



    You are again mentioning things I don't use:


    - iCloud was a mess with for me unwanted behaviour, I turned it off: no value for me


    - I don't want a notification centre, I don't want to be disturbed while working: no value for me


    - refinements to mail: may be useful, I'll have to read about it


    - Dictation: may be very useful, will look into it


    - I don't use FB, Twitter or other 'sharing' destinations: no value for me


    - Finder enhancement, will have to look into it


    - enhanced Preview features: not or hardly used


     


    So, I ask: is it faster and more responsive? You don't give me a clear answer, but it seems you say yes. I'll check the almighty Ars review for the verdict on that.

  • Reply 57 of 63
    quadra 610quadra 610 Posts: 6,757member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Aglaea View Post


    You are again mentioning things I don't use:


     



     


    Then we don't have much to discuss, now do we?


     


    As for "faster and more responsive" . . . guess what's the best way of finding out?


     


    At the very least, it's a better Lion *already.* That much we can be sure about. 


     


    It's $20. Every review out there is telling you you can't go wrong. I'd just install it for the sheer fact that it's the latest, and I'm completely current. It doesn't make things any worse. 


     


     


     




    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Aglaea View Post


     


    - enhanced Preview features: not or hardly used


     


     




     


     


    Really? PDFs are a huge deal for consumers and Pros alike. Anything that makes working them easier and more flexible is very welcome. Preview is pretty much your built-on viewer for everything that is not video. 


     


     


    Quote:


     


     


    - iCloud was a mess with for me unwanted behaviour, I turned it off: no value for me


    - I don't want a notification centre, I don't want to be disturbed while working: no value for me


     




     


     


     


     


     


    which in fact, are the big draws for *everyone else.*


     


    At some point you'll need to reconcile yourself with the direction in which Apple is moving. Otherwise I'm sure you'll see yourself having these same conversations for the next several years.


     


    Actually, your usage habits seem a bit antiquated, to be honest. Not very progressive. 

  • Reply 58 of 63
    rcfarcfa Posts: 1,124member
    Usage patterns are never "antiquated", they are either productive and secure, or less productive or less secure. Usually when it's about "convenience" there's a massive price attached to it. e.g. the whole "let's log in with Facebook" thing just means it's even more easy for Facebook to vaccuum up all your personal information.

    iCloud and most cloud services are in essence an attempt of taking user's data hostage such as to bind customers to a computing eco-system that's closed, it's an attempt of creating revenue streams in an age when there's ever less of a need to buy ever newer computers, because even 5 year old computers provide all the compute power people need, unless you waste it with silly, and producitivy slowing UI animations and other useless fluff that eats up CPU and memory resources like mad without bringing tangible benefits besides an initial "wow, looks cool".

    e.g. PhotoStream wreaks havoc with my Aperture workflow, fills up my iOS devices' storage with useless pictures, and prevents me from publishing/sharing carefully crafted albums that I would like to keep up for more than just a few months or whatever arbitrary time limit Apple decides is appropriate for PhotoStream. PhotoStream is made for the same idiots who share on Facebook every fart they let go. I take a lot of pictures, and I'm pretty good at it, but if I have 5 per month that are up to the standard that I would want to share them, then that's a lot. (e.g. a profesional photographer once took about 50000 pictures to publish a small book on birds with maybe 100 pictures, and that doesn' t mean he was a bad photographer, but he had standards about how good a picture has to be before it's worth publishing).
    I really could care less about all the duck-face-girl pictures shot in the latest drunk haze that seem to populate most of these streams...

    I used to have a platform on which to professionally share pictures, and now I have to either make my own, or find a separate service.

    e.g. Getting rid of keychain syncing means that people with more than one device will either constantly not have access to the relevant passwords, or they start using the same password everywhere again, so they can remember it. So that's a massive step towards less security.

    The whole iCloud document model is retarded, because it's app centric, rather than document centric. A text document I should be able to open with TextEdit, Pages, InDesgin, etc etc., but now documents end up in some app-specific jail. The same app centric view was part of Lion, when one couldn't see all windows on a particular screen (e.g. you're writing an e-mail based on some web research and a Word document, at which point you don't care about all Mail, or all Safari windows, but about all windows pertaining to that task which likely are on the same screen)

    The problem is, that while Apple has iPhoto and Aperture, GarageBand and Logic Pro, they only have one OS X, which doesn't even have a "dumb user/expert" toggle. So in order to have appeal to uneducated, illiterate masses, they keep dumbing things down. Computers, from being wheels for the mind (think race car), have become wheel chairs for the impaired minds. While that may sell millions of extra iDevices and Macs as fashion gadgets, it doesn't help anyone who wants to be productive, who cherrishes privacy, and open data formats.

    e.g. iTunes Match: could be useful, but any serious music collector has a few thousand CDs already. So the limitation (without much control over the process) to 25'000 songs that haven't been bought on iTunes, makes it utterly useless, because iTunes match complains about the library being too big.

    e.g. lack of web hosting: easy, quick, integrated => gone.

    So really, iCloud offers nothing to me, other than a free e-mail account, and an iTunes store ID.
    AddressBook/iCal "syncing" is something I could have with Yahoo, Google and for that matter with OS X Server.

    While MobileMe had a rough start, it actuall ended up a very decent service once the kinks were ironed out. iCloud is "MobileMe Light for Dummies", and as such useless. But I guess it's hip to be stupid, so in that sense I must be antiquated...
  • Reply 59 of 63
    rcfarcfa Posts: 1,124member
    philboogie wrote: »
    rcfa wrote: »
    philboogie wrote: »
    rcfa wrote: »
    ...total disaster that was Lion.

    If that is your experience then I can understand a rant. Out of curiosity, can you give one example of what you think was badly done in Lion? And make it a lasting statement, well founded, grounded, solid statement of why it was bad. Something like "I didn't like the Auto-version-ing as opposed to the Save-as commands because when working on a picture on my SD card it never asked me to safe changes; it all happened automatically and I cannot revert to the original version"

    Examples, more than I care to remember:

    I understand from the following list there is probably no way to make you see things differently, so I won't even try to. Also don't want to try to make you see things differently. But there are a few items that I can comment on, hopefully with something you'll find useful.
    a) kitschy, dysfunctionally decorated apps (AddressBook, iCal, etc.) that sacrifice functionality (e.g. the back and forth paging between AddressBook groups and address list view, which is a massive step backwards from the clean, functional Snow Leopard (and before) interface of AddressBook, which allowed you to adjust the width of the various columns and panes to fit your working style and screen space)

    They really did a poor job with this new 'theme' or whatever one wants to call it. A few hours a week I use Windows, and actually like the integrated approach Outlook has. However, since that program is such a pain to use, I can only say that the integration of 4 apps into 1 makes sense. To me.

    Well, I don't mind Contacts to be separate, because I use that also for addressing envelopes and making phone calls, so it's not necessarily all that related to Mail.app. But Calendar and ToDos are more or less the same, in the sense that everything we have To Do, is either an event, has a due date, or is an open ended task. So to dos need some calender integration, and so I want them to be integrated with calendaring. And Notes I often send to myself as a quick e-mail anyway, or send them on to someone else as e-mail. So that's why notes were not misplaced in Mail, even though I don't mind them being a separate app. But the ripping apart of Reminders and Calendar is just an ill conceived attempt of creating a one-to-one correspondence between OS X apps and iOS apps, completely forgetting that these things likely were separate apps on the iOS devices due to limited screen space...
    b) the "hunt for GUI elements" approach, which not only makes an artificial distinction between mouse and touch interfaces (cause there's no mouse-over in a touch interface), but is also unproductive, e.g. UI elements that only become visible when the mouse is near them, such as scroll bars, or the replacement of disclosure triangles with usually hidden "hide/show" tags

    c) lack of UI precision, be that with the disappearance of scroll bar up/down buttons, or with the invisible, but existing window borders

    Annoys me as well. I have set the scroll bars to always be in view, and understand your point.

    Yup. There are many things that can be fixed, by fiddling with preferences, but the question is, once the default moves to something else, it's just a matter until when Apple removes the option to customize it. e.g. the "classic view" in Mail is just one step away from being called "deprecated view", even though on anything with a slightly larger screen it's much more productive than the "new" iPad inspired view.

    d) the abandonment of what you see is what you manipulate: you can see a window below two neighboring windows, but you can't click it to the foreground, because the invisible (i.e. fully transparent), but existing, window borders register your click rather than the window that you see and think you're clicking. All in the name of "visual simplicity", when it castrates intuitive interaction

    e) the un-natural "natural" scrolling, which neglects the difference between a full-screen touch interface and a windowed pointer interface

    Sorry, missing this one…(2x)

    Let me try again: There is a time when windows hat borders, these you could grab to resize the window. In the name of elegance, these were reduced to a narrow bar at the bottom of the window in NeXTSTEP, and to a resize corner in OS X. Now there is no UI element anymore, instead there is a "zone" near the window in which the cursor changes to the resize cursor shape. What this really means: we do have a window border again, except it's transparent. So now, do this: make move two windows over a third window, and move the two windows close together, such that there is still a narrow gap through which you can see the third window behind these two. Now try to click the third window in that gap to bring it to the foreground: WONT WORK. Because what you're really doing is not clicking the third window, but the transparent window border of one or the other of the two foreground windows.
    Practical example: all the alert bubbles of the new notificaiton system have about a quarter of an inch gap between them, through which you can see the windows behind, but you can't click onto these windows, because what you're really clicking is the invisible/transparent window border of these alert bubbles.

    This totally violates the direct manipulation paradigm. If my mouse pointer is over a window, a click should register in that window, and not on a window near the mouse pointer that happens to be layered higher. This is totally unintuitive, and simply the result of trying to get rid of window borders for design reasons.

    f) Mission Control and the disappearance of two dimensional spaces and the show all windows command, which results much less efficient window management for anyone who has more than just a few open windows.

    Because of that, I'll stick to Cmd-Tab.

    ctrl-(some digit) works, too. But the problem with that is, if you have to use Remote Desktop, this becomes a massive hassle, because such commands are not properly forwarded to the remote system, but are interpreted locally. Since also the Menu Extra is gone, which allowed direct selection of a specific screen by number, this is a major productivity killer for admin type work.

    Also, since I used to have my screens in a 3x3 grid, with mail in the middle position, I was for most things never more than a ctrl-arrowKey away (up was Safari, down was Skype/iChat/AddressBook, left was iCal, right was task specific software, with less important things, like Finder (1), preferences/Terminal (3), iTunes (7), and Remote Desktop (9). This was very productive. Now it's a lot of mousing/pointing to get the same effect (and without first disabling the constant rearranging of the screens it would be even worse.

    Ideally, I'd have a 3x3 grid in a torroidal topology, which means in a grid like this:
    1 2 3
    4 5 6
    7 8 9
    the following squences can be achieved with ctrl-arrowKeys:
    1<>2<>3<>1<>2<>3,... 4<>5<>6<>4<>5<>6,... 7-8<>9<>7<>8<>9, ... 1<>4<>7<>1<>4<>7, ... 2<>5<>8<>2<>5<>8, ... 3<>6<>9<>3<>6<>9
    this would allow for rapid switching among all the 9 screens. The idea of lining up 9 screens in a line that can only be navigated sequentially is just retarded.
    (yes, I can access directly by screen number, but that's not as quick and intuitive for me as relative motion)

    g) the creation of an app rather than task centric interface, visible in both how iCloud document storage works, and in the lack of the all windows view of Mission Control

    You can show all open documents within a single app in MC, which might be usefull to some. iCloud storage is utter crap, but I have to upgrade, nee, install 10.8 to see if it got any better.

    In ML, at least one can change MC to no longer group windows by application, which helps things a lot. But in the SL days, I could have all my nine screens visible, with all windows exploded, and I could move a dozens of windows from one screen to another in rapid pace. An operation like this requires now that I navigate to each screen from which I want to move windows, and then move the windows to other screens, one screen at a time. This takes about twice as long.

    This is particularly an issue, since windows don't remember which screen they were on when they get restored. e.g. say Safari is by default on screen 2 in my case. This is for general web browsing (quick lookups, reading news, etc.). But web pages that are relevant to specific work contexts, e.g. I work on some home renovation project and I'm looking for water heaters, end up on the screen that I use for working on that particular project. So now I may have about 40-50 Safari windows, and a software update requires me to reboot the computer. Try sorting the 50 windows to their appropriate screens after, do this once in SL and once in Lion and once in ML. Lion is by far the worst, ML is a bit better, but in SL that's at least twice as fast a process.

    h) the discontinuation of keychain syncing, which is a massive step backwards in security, because if you can't sync keychains, you end up having to choose again passwords you can't remember, since you can't remember (and sync instead) a password like "ljkhOPU0-9ih(lG;Ghkglh_RDt" and will instead use something like "password123"

    I agree that taking away a feature is never cool, but for this particular one I have them written down in an app which I can access on my iPhone, iPad and OSX, (without an internet connection) which I find a real hassle but workable solution. Everyone tells me to use 1password, but I'm weary on storing all that info into a 3rd party software app.

    No app can replace a system facility. Because when it's a third party app, there's lots of politics involved if an app will or will not adopt that app. If it's an Apple provided facility, then that's less contentious. Even so, things like Opera and FireFox don't even use what Apple provides. 1Password is a crap, too. Much too flashy UI which takes up too much space, and it can't handle multiple keychains, which is a big issue where I work, because e.g. the boss may make some keychain accessible to some assistant (e.g. frequent flyer accounts for booking trips), but certainly not all his info (e.g. access to his personal bank account)..

    So there's no replacement for keychain access, except that now there's no reasonable way to sync it anymore.

    I'm tempted to just throw my keychains into ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ and see what happens, but I'm not sure how well the datastructure of keychains handles the syncing and simultaneous access by the system...

    i) the creation of a standalone "Notes" app, instead of keeping it integrated into Mail.app, which just results in more app switching for no good reason, the creation of a separate Reminder's app instead of keeping To Do's in iCal, the removal of calendar groups, etc.

    See my Outlook statement. I understand that they added week numbers to iCal, nee, Calendar. Something I have requested through their feedback pages for years. So that single thingy is nice, for me. And some other Europeans I take.

    Week numbers are OK, but there were also shared calendars that offered that.
    Worse is that nested calendars are all but gone. e.g. I may have a calendar group "work" and a calendar group "private". Each of them may contain a variety of things, like school vacations, conference dates, etc. So with say a dozen calendars for private and work each, switching from "work" mode to "private" mode means toggling 24 calendars: turn 12 on, and turn 12 off. If we had calendar groups again, that would be two clicks: turn the work group on, turn the private group off.
    k) the AirPort utility, that no longer shows certain key information


    I read that before upgrading to 6.0, so I kept 5.0 as well. Need to install it if I'm going to install 10.8. I might wait till 10.8.1, as I have always done, 'xcept for 10.7, which I regret*.

    The problem is, the latest 5.6.1 refuses to install. I still have 5.6.0, but that misses the changes that 5.6.1 brought about. It's nice to have the net topology view in 6.x, but 5.x was more useful. Things like SNMP settings remain in the config, but can't be accessed with 6.x. Similarly a variety of other settings that can't be modified anymore (channel width, interference robustness, logs, client connections, location, etc.)
    Also try to remote configure your AirPort net e.g. with Back To My Mac with the 6.x software. In 5.6.x they just show up in the list as usual, in 6.x you have to look for them under "other base stations"
    l) OS X Server, which keeps losing functionality

    etc. There is more, but that should give good enough of an impression.

    No no, thanks for the feedback, appreciated. I come here to learn, and your post is an informative on how one uses their Mac, wants it to behave, and why etcetera.

    I've been using NeXTSTEP since the 0.8 release, and Mac OS X since it was called Rhapsody Prerelease, and Lion is the worst in the entire 24 year history, and Mountain Lion is just a tad better.

    Apple keeps dumbing down things past the point of usefulness.

    Ah, old school. Love it. I've been using 3.3 and even got to use 4.0. OSX 10.0 was completely unusable with the Finder and all, but looked promising. They sure did 'jellybean-up' version after version, and I am happy with OSX as-is. Still have my Dock on the right, still wish for the old days. But do understand things get broken or discontinued, and realize I shouldn't linger on to how things were.

    I'm never for old stuff for the sake of it being old, but similar I'm not for new stuff, for the sake of it being new. It has to make sense, and lots of things were added because they "demo well", not because they make users more productive. I'm maybe old-fashioned in the sense that I consider a computer a tool, not a eye-candy-show-off-toy.

    (*)Though I do have my own gripes:
    - Aperture switching to Full Screen is a strep backwards from how it was in 10.6. Simply because they had to make it the same as all apps now can go Full Screen.
    - File Versioning. It really is a bug if someone changes a file on a non HFS FS like an SD card and doesn't ask the user to save the changes.
    - MobileMe Gallery. Photo Stream is not a replacement. Nor is it part of the OS some will say. But with its tight integration into Aperture, iOS Gallery.ipa and all I believe it is indeed a part of the whole ecosystem as it supposedly is called. I'm all for progress, but don't kill off things that were working perfectly before and got no successor whatsoever.
    - Preview Save a copy (or whatever) always defaults to the Desktop in 10.7 Before, it would default to the location of the original file.
    - The Finders' sidebar. I cannot drag items out of it and see it dissapear in a poof. Right-click, choose…ooh, how MS-like.
    - Colored icons. I understand their stance on 'distracting', but to first remove colored icons from iTunes, getting hammered 'from the community' and then to continue to expand on this feature by doing the same thing in Aperture is beyond my comprehension.
    - The Finder would auto-mount a network disk if I dropped a file on its icon in the sidebar. No more with 10.7

    An so on and so forth. Some miss Sherlock, some miss the old Cmd-I that would update its info when clicking on a different file. Then you find out that still works by hitting Cmd-Option-I. I surely hope these options are all preserved in 10.8.

    I agree with most of that. As for the cmd-i: try cmd-alt-i ;) One of the few useful "hidden" features...
  • Reply 60 of 63
    rcfarcfa Posts: 1,124member
    One quick word about "performance gains through OS upgrades":

    there are a few cases (better compilers, etc.) where identical code can run faster.

    However, in general, performance enhancing changes are always a trade off:

    e..g do more things with the GPU: if the GPU has plenty of RAM (newer computer), then that increases performance, if the GPU has less RAM, it means more shuffling back and forth between GPU memory and regular RAM, and thus decreased performance.
    e.g. space-time trade-off: increasing disk buffer sizes, caches, etc. speeds up performance on computers with sufficient RAM, older machines with memory limitations may slow down, sometimes considerably.
    e.g. compressed swap files: on fast CPUs, the compression overhead is less than the IO performance gain, on old computers, the IO performance gain is less than the additional CPU load loss
    etc. etc.

    So, Apple obviously wants the latest computers to be as fast as possible, and Apple also wants to tune an OS to be most efficient on computers shipping now or in the future. So if today no Mac ships with less than 4GB RAM, that's taken into consideration when optimizing the OS. If you run a new OS designed to have plenty of RAM on a machine with maybe 2GB or RAM or less, it may crawl. Not because the OS is bad or slow, but because it's optimized for a specific context. If one were to optimize it for machines with less RAM, it would not have optimal performance on more recent machines.

    Engineering is all about trade-offs.

    The real crux is, that there's no backport of iCloud to Snow Leopard, so one's forced to move to Lion or ML, which in many cases means older hardware will not efficiently run these OSs which are optimized for more recent devices. And so something as marginal as iCloud forces a bunch of people to essentially buy new computers. Apple shareholders rejoice, some users groan.
Sign In or Register to comment.