Lukas Mathis on Mac OS X Lion

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/10/24/lion/

by earcar • 16 years ago

63 51 16 years ago

jpdbaugh6• 16 years ago

It looks like I will finally have enough motivation to finally switch to Ubuntu. I just don't know if I can handle not having full control over my machine.

ugh4• 16 years ago

At the moment it looks like you will have no more or less control than on Snow Leopard.

jpdbaugh6• 16 years ago

Yes, however I think the changes being made are definitely putting Mac OS on track to become a lot of more like iOS in future iterations.

pluies• 16 years ago

Interesting writeup. I think calling both the installation process and the window management system "broken" is a bit of an overstatement, but he's very right about de-emphasizing the Finder.

Lukas' blog in general is awesome — thought-provoking and mind-opening. If you have the smallest interest in design (as in "how thing work" in general, not only "how things look"), it's definitely worth a read.

hackermom2• 16 years ago

That's a lot of blah blah claiming to be about Lion, when it's really not so much about Lion at all. So far, these details are to the most part just about new applications for Lion - and you can be sure that at least one of these will be available for Snow Leopard later on.

Maybe people should hold back on their second-guessing regarding Lion until we actually get some technical and substantial details to hold on to, but I guess as long as there are fools, there will be wolf calls...

ugh4• 16 years ago

Apple listens. They don't always react but they do listen. The time to complain is now. And besides, this is a very even-handed text about things Apple itself announced under the heading of Mac OS X Lion.

hackermom2• 16 years ago

But there's nothing substantial to complain about yet... What's been shown so far are applications; and the use of these is optional, not mandatory.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

Whenever and wherever there is some pain, there is an opportunity. The universal pain of the tech-savvy and the constant help they have to give to relatives and friends is simply huge. Neither has OS X made this go away, though much of it has been outsourced in the form of the Genius Bar. It's much the same in the workplace, if not more so! What the majority of the population wants is curated computing. What IT departments try to provide as had as they might is curated computing. It's also a fact that they're hindered by the open architecture of today's typical computer. (Why do you think enterprise IT tries so hard to lock everything down?)

There is still a huge amount of pain and therefore there's tremendous opportunity.

My prediction is that under Lion, end-user computing is going to run locked-down under a hypervisor, and only devs/power users will be running as we do today.

avk• 16 years ago

I prefer SizeUp to Divvy for OS X Window management: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

mortenjorck2• 16 years ago

Spot-on criticism of the App Store.

The App Store is peerless as far as purchasing and installing go, but it's nearly useless for discovery unless you're looking for something on the order Angry Birds or Facebook. Calling the Mac version "the best place to find apps" wouldn't ring so hollow if the same were remotely true on iOS.

risotto• 16 years ago

Useless is a bit harsh. It is, after all, a big web app that is nothing but fresh screenshots and reviews of apps. Somehow my friends and I manage to find tons of awesome apps all the time.

Google can be pretty awful to find software on. Search for "os x audio recorder" on it and you get one or two direct links to modern software, and the rest are really old or link jacked pages.

A search for "audio recorder" on the App Store is a remarkably different experience. The top hits are well written and well-reviewed apps.

So what is better for "discovery"?

mortenjorck2• 16 years ago

Fair enough. Unfortunately, there really isn't a reliably good central place for discovery. Most of the good iOS finds I've made were from blogs, forums, or Twitter.

scott_s3• 16 years ago

I'm surprised that I haven't read anyone that has connected the dots on the app store for Mac and the emphasis on the Macbook Air. The app store solves the problem for how does one get shrink-wrapped applications onto a Mac with no optical drive? In the future, they may remove optical drives from their laptops entirely.

sp4rki• 16 years ago

Eureka! That's exactly what I thought when I heard of the Mac App Store. The App Store seems to me like a move to simplify things for Macbook Air users, which is actually a niche product for regular people. Developers prefer a 13 or 15 inch Macbook Pro because of the computing power and screen real estate they provide. Hell they are called Macbook Pro for a reason. Designers prefer Macbook Pros on the larger side because for the scree real state also. It's off course true that a power user might buy a Air for development, but they are the exception to the rule. The market for the air is businessmen on the run, university students, hipster apple fanboys that don't want to carry a 10 pound machine in their over the shoulder bags. For this people opening a disk image and copying the app to the apps folder might prove too complicated, alas they now have the App Store. This will have absolutely no effect on the ecosystem of users that like OSX because it offers a Unix system with pretty graphics (which Ubuntu even with it's latest updates is lacking) and great usability for the most part. Hell I only use OSX because I do both design and code and I need a machine that can do both and is not Windows. The moment Macbook Pros becomes an oversized Ipad I'm biting the bullet, buying a system 76 laptop, putting Arch linux into it and start contributing code to Gimp.

thought_alarm2• 16 years ago

I think you're reading a little too much into it. Steam solved this "problem" long ago.

Optical drives may eventually become less common. I admit mine rarely gets much use, but I still fancy throwing a DVD in there once and a while.

But that does present an interesting problem if you're, say, Microsoft. How do you sell Word to someone who doesn't have an optical drive? Would Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else who sells big-ticket shrink-wrapped software turn to the App Store to solve that problem? Not in a million years.

scott_s3• 16 years ago

First, Steam distributes games only. Second, Apple does not tend to depend on third-parties for critical infrastructure.

ugh4• 16 years ago

You can already buy Office or CS online and download it. My local electronics store even sells cheap Office licenses with nothing but the key. Microsoft or Adobe don’t need the App Store.

redfloatplane• 16 years ago

With the MacBook Air refresh, Apple made "No optical drive" a feature. The OS X Install USB key is an omen of things to come, too. I think you're right, and it's really just a matter of time until they bring it across almost all of their laptop lines.

jonknee• 16 years ago

I don't remember the last time I installed shrink-wrapped software. Adobe CS and Microsoft Office are both downloads these days and those are the only ones I have that I know come in a box too. No app store is needed and if you're big enough to be doing shrink-wrapped software, you're big enough to not want to pay Apple 30% to process your purchases.

tensor3• 16 years ago

I must say, the deprecating of Java does concern me. I do agree that Apple has been somewhat slow to update their version of Java. It's also strange that they default to 1.5 instead of 1.6. In principle, having Oracle maintain the JVM sounds ok.

However, I understand that the Apple Java makes use of hidden API's in order to provide the level of integration that it does. That integration always impressed me and was one of the many things that originally sold me on using Macs for development. Will Apple work with Oracle to achieve the same level of integration? Or is this really a sneaky way of trying to kill Java on Mac?

I miss the Apple that loved Next, used Java internally, among other languages, and spent a lot of time trying to make technical users happy with things like X11 support and Apple integrated Java. These things are what brought me to the platform.

astrange• 16 years ago

> It's also strange that they default to 1.5 instead of 1.6.

What are you looking at? 10.6 doesn't even ship Java 1.5.

tensor3• 16 years ago

Oh? Perhaps it was 10.5 then? Or maybe due to upgrading. I've had to switch the default from 1.5 to 1.6 on my machine and on several other peoples as well.

jfb• 16 years ago

The Cocoa/Java bridge has been deprecated for ages; other than that, I can't think of any other secret sauce that Apple spreads on their JVM (of course, if there were hidden APIs, and if the Apple JVM used them, and if Apple wanted them to stay secret, I wouldn't be able to say). Regardless, it's not like Java on OS X is going to disappear; if nothing else, Apple's internal usage of Java and their desire to eat their own dog food guarantees as much.

This warning comes with considerably more heads-up than most such developer related warnings from Apple, so by the time 10.7 ships, I would imagine that an open JDK/JRE will be readily available.

tensor3• 16 years ago

I'm no expert on the matter, but from what I hear the APIs involve bridges to the graphics or windowing system. I do hope that a solid open JDK is built.

warmfuzzykitten• 16 years ago

Overlapping Windows is a non-issue. Windows and full-screen intermingle with the new Mission Control.

Windows and Linux get Java from Oracle; why not OS X?

moron4hire2• 16 years ago

LaunchPad: a no-hierarchy version of the Windows Start Menu. Desktops get too many programs installed to be able to find them reasonably in such a thing. We learned that fifteen years ago on Windows. Even my phone is starting to get unreasonable to manage with the number of programs installed. Windows Vista and 7 have the ability to search the start menu because of it.

The App Store: I love the ability to browse packages on my Ubuntu and PC-BSD systems and install them with no hassle. I wish this existed on Windows (MS toys with it every once in a while, with the Web Platform Install Kit and the Visual Studio Plugins site). But it sounds like Apple is going to lock it down. They could have their cake and eat it too if they would make the application repository configurable, with the default pointing to Apple's servers, and the config item roughly hidden in an obscure setting somewhere. But Apple continues to assert that you don't own your computer, you rent it from them.

Full-screen apps: welcome to 1990. From experience, I loathe default-full-screen programs. I like to have the option available, and I think we've come to a consensus that that should be through the F11 key, but starting a program, waiting, and having it take over the entire screen is going to be a pain in the ass. It also basically torpedoes a lot of Apple dogma from previous years with no true ability to fully maximize program windows.

Ironically, these updates serve to make OS X even less differentiated than other Windows and KDE- or Gnome-based Linux distros than ever before.

GHFigs• 16 years ago

a no-hierarchy version of the Windows Start Menu

Nonsense. LaunchPad does in fact have hierarchy in the form of user-created folders and pagination. Even if it didn't, comparisons to the Start Menu are odious. The main reason the Start Menu sucks is not "too many programs", but that it relies on notoriously unusable submenus[1]. And then it insists on nesting them. And then most of the items in the Start Menu are not actually applications. Even Windows 95 shipped with at least two ways of avoiding the use of the Start Menu as a launcher, and subsequent versions added at least two more. Search works well, but search has its own problems. For instance, you can't search with a mouse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law

Windows Vista and 7 have the ability to search the start menu because of it.

Mac OS X likewise has the ability to launch applications from the system wide search. (As does iOS, for that matter.) Why does this somehow stop counting if they add an additional feature?

I loathe default-full-screen programs. I like to have the option available

That's what this is: an option. There is no indication that any application now launches full screen by default, or any reason that couldn't do that now if they chose to.

It also basically torpedoes a lot of Apple dogma from previous years with no true ability to fully maximize program windows.

Not really. Full screen mode still does not replicate "maximize" behavior. Even on Windows the two are distinct. Microsoft Word, for example, has a separate full screen mode which behaves differently than simply maximizing the window.

Lukas Mathis on Mac OS X Lion

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