Yes, more Steve Jobs! I'm sorry, but I'm just a very big fan. :)
In the Developer Keynote from Monday, Steve talks mainly about the upcoming upgrade to OS X. It actually looks very promising. (I was a little lukewarm about the last one.) Just one small thing for example: they have finally realized that the active window should be more distinguished from the inactive ones. I've been bitching about that since the beta back in 2000. If only they also have made desktop pictures capable of scaling down a vertical image which is too tall for the desktop! (Such a lame miss that it can't do that.)
One excellent joke Steve makes at the expense of both Microsoft and Adobe: He presents a "basic version", a "business version", an "enterprise version", and an "ultimate version"... all of them at the same price ($129), and all of them containing everything, being just one version obviously. Gotta love that.
Big surprise: Apple Safari Browser for Windows! If you are ever frustrated with Internet Explorer or want compare Firefox to something else, check it out. (For one thing, it's apparently twice as fast as IE.)
Talking about speed, I am bugged by the fact that whenever Jobs demoes something, everything on his machine happens instantly. It does not do that on mine, depite the fact that I have the biggest and fastest Mac money can buy, and stuffed with memory (currently 6GB!). What gives?
Talking more about speed, but this time in a good way: I remember many years ago, trying to download Netscape 3 (I think it was) over modem. It was over 30MB, I couldn't even do it. Now I downloaded the Safari 3 beta for Mac, it was 15MB, and it downloaded in less than half a minute! Kewl.
Update:
Another quick reverse here: In Leopard, networked machines and drives will automatically show up in Finder. That's great! I remember that from working on Windows. Back in 1995.
I'm hugely disappointed. It looks like the one improvement I was really hoping to see in the next version of OS X, ZFS, will not happen. Or rather they will ship a "read only" version of it (only being able to read from disk, not write to it).
ReplyDeleteIt's not that ZFS is some miracle, but rather that OS X's current file system, HFS+, is a joke. I would have welcomed almost any file system implementation (of which there are many) in HFS+'s place as the default (supported) file system. Apparently Jobs sees it more important to spend engineering resources on improving on how the desktop icons reflect on the background surface than on making OS X trustworthy and usable for mission critical computing.
The new Safari Beta 3.0 has one very useful feature: You can manually resize the text input box to any size. Very helpful when typing this comment text, for example.
I know nothing about file systems, but surely it can't be quite that bad, OS X is used on many servers and by many geeks and scientists.
ReplyDeleteEolake said: "but surely it can't be quite that bad"
ReplyDeleteIt really is that bad. As one guy eloquently put it: "HFS+ sucks canal water up its snorkel." ;-)
It sucks in many ways, but one of the biggest is that HFS+ maintains a single large "catalog" structure as a directory for every file on disk. If anything happens to the catalog the whole file system becomes unstable. And given the way it is engineered, something frequently goes wrong with it. This is the reason why when you go to Mac support forums the standard answer/suggestion to almost every user problem is to run the "repair disk permissions" and "repair disk" from Disk Utility.
A couple of weeks ago I wondered why, on my Mac, Safari was allocating all available memory eventually crashing the system. I cleaned Safari's cache, restarted the system, and rerun Safari. Same result. I then executed Repair Disk, discovering that Safari had corrupted the file system's catalog structure with one of its cache files. After running Repair Disk everything worked fine again.
The catalog idea in HFS+ actually originates from Apple ][. On Apple ][ the user level command to list files took its name from this and was called "catalog" (equivalent to "dir" on Microsoft systems).
On file systems that have been introduced in the last 20 years (after HFS) the directory information is decentralised -- in Mac parlance, every folder the user sees has its own "catalog". Also, new file systems implement a technique called journaling which allows the file system to automatically roll back from any interrupted updates (power failure, for example) to the "catalog" (it's not really called that, but this is in Mac parlance remember). The result of this is that the user never needs to do the equivalent of "Repair Disk", unless the disk is physically broken.
Apple is, of course, aware that this is the achilles heel of OS X. This is why they are looking into ZFS. Their problem, however, is that as HFS has these non-standard ideas such as the resource fork, they can not just switch to a more modern file system. They somehow need to maintain compatibility.
Eolake said: "OS X is used on many servers and by many geeks and scientists."
In computational servers yes, but I have not heard anyone using the Mac with HFS+ as a database server, or for running any application where files are frequently and rapidly created and deleted by concurrent processes.
Mac OS X can mount a remote file system over NFS. Many server farms utilise this method.
OK, I was not aware of that, thanks.
ReplyDelete"You can manually resize the text input box to any size."
ReplyDeleteIn the Mac version too? Where do you find that setting?
Yes. You don't need to set anything. Just grab from the lower right corner of the text field (not from the edge).
ReplyDeleteAnother new feature is that it does spell checking as you type! Maybe you won't be seeing as many spelling mistakes on my comments from now on.
Oh, I misunderstood, I thought you meant the font size. For some reason it's often (even) smaller than the text on the page itself.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're right, it's very useful.
Spell checking too.
Though for a while I've been using Spell Catcher, which is Live and system-wide. Good stuff.
I was not aware of Spell Catcher. The reviews say it's good. But supposedly with the OS X inbuilt checker becoming more ubiquitous, no external tool is needed.
ReplyDeleteWhat I would really like though is a good grammatical checker. I wouldn't have to be continuous, of course. Maybe something to access from the services menu. Or even better, a command line tool.
"I" → "It" ;-)
ReplyDelete