Apple sucks iBalls!
Tiger gives me few more reasons to stay a dog person.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: OS Wars
| Today was a great day of disappointments for me on the computer front. After much pondering, for reasons I will explain, I decided to take a trip to the Apple store and Upgrade my Mac to OS-10.4 "Tiger". I have had a Mac for 3 years now. I spent $3000 on it, and have used it probably a grand total of maybe 80 hours. This is my own fault. There is nothing really wrong with it. It is just that I find myself using my PC. I'm a windows fan, even though that's not something most people will admit. As a skinner and a customizer there is much more possible in windows. This, along with a long list of reason why I don't use my Mac much, have caused it to be a bit neglected. Today I wanted to remedy that. So with much to-do I drove to the mall - a place I try to avoid at all costs - went into the Apple store and to my surprise managed to get a copy of "Tiger" without any of the sales people talking down to me. (This is something that I have become used to at the Apple store). $129 later I left the mall and aside from a great disappointment when I find out that Wetzel Pretzel is out of Grateful Garlic pretzels (I cried only a little), I start home with joy in my heart, and a fancy pull string bag full of OS-10.4 . On a side note; I could not help but notice that the nice Apple black box with the big brushed silver X that Tiger ships in is almost an exact duplicate of the 1990's teaser poster for "Malcom X". Coincidence..... well, probably. Now I get home, and the annoyances begin. First a bit of background. I bought my Dual G4 Power Mac Right when OS 10.2 had just been released. 10.2 was a big improvement over 10.1 so I was pretty happy with it. It did what I wanted and I do not use the Mac much so I never updated to 10.3 "Panther". I still had iMovie, and iPhoto, and iDVD installed. They had been updated several times and worked fine (when I found the time to play with them). A year or so ago they quit giving away iDVD and I hardly noticed. I still had the version that came with 10.2 and I had never actually used it, so I did not care much. I remember Steve Jobs saying in his Keynote at the time, "You can still get iMovie, and iPhoto, and iTunes, for free, and if you buy "iLife" you get iDVD as well, plus a bunch of crap." OK so that's not quite a quote, but that was the gist of it. Shortly after that I became quite busy with my new job and much more interested in the PC side of things again. In short, I quit paying attention to what was going on with Apple. Sure I caught the highlights, "Garage Band" comes out and "Dashboard vs. Konfabulator", but over all my Mac attention span was about as short as the amount of time that my Mac was on. This, I discovered today, was a bit of a mistake for me. | |
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First problem: Now, it seams that I have lost some software. I am a bit pissed, but I don't use the iApps often except iTunes, and that one primarily on my PC. So I decide to suck it up an live with it. I suppose if I cared enough I could do a fresh install of 10.2, then upgrade it to 10.4. But I don't quite feel up to that. | |
| Dashboard, or as I like to call it, "The Great Anti-Climax" Moving on. Now lets check out these cool new apps. First, since I am a skinner and I was one of the first people to start messing with DesktopX, I have to check out DA, DA, DAAAA, Dashboard. Now Dashboard was getting a lot of airtime, because on the surface it seams a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, which is more or less a Mac version of DesktopX. (Another debate all together; we won't get into it here). Well the good news is that Konfabulator should not have much to worry about. Dashboard pretty much sucks. Now this is my opinion only but I can tell you what: I'm not impressed. Sure the graphics are nice, sure they have some nice widgets. BUT, and this is a big but, YOU CAN NOT LEAVE A WIDGET RUNNING ON THE DESKTOP. They only appear on the "Dashboard". The dashboard is essentially a full screen window that darkens the rest of the screen, and with nifty effects pulls you widgets out to be visible. So essentially you are task switching to reach them. At this point you can just switch to the real app. I realize that this means that if you want to see any one Dashboard widget, you have to show them all. You can't, for example, leave a to-do list up on you desktop and work in an app; its all or nothing. This should be Apples slogan. OK OK, but the widgets are so pretty.... So are Konfabulators. Well, that is also disappointing, but perhaps I am overlooking something. I go to the Dashboard configuration. Humm what can I change... I can change the keys it uses, I can set up hot corners to call up the Dashboard. That's it. OK I'm still annoyed by this..... Lets move on. Now still sticking with Dashboard I click on the Icon in the dock and it slides up this nifty tray of widgets. All of the provided widgets are very polished and work well. I try a few and am impressed by their cool spinney 3D effects that make it so the configuration for the widgets are on the back of each widget. You have to see this to under stand but its pretty sweet and makes me long for Longhorn to get its compositor working 100%. Hear that Ian? Well...one last bitch about Dashboard: I was assuming that since Apple makes dashboard and they have full control of the OS that it would be very well integrated. So I check out the weather widget. Its pretty sweet. Nice graphics. New shiny weather Icons, nice. Let me change the zip from the default of Atlanta to mine. Look there the 6 day forecast, that's nice. I continue playing with Dashboard and when you call up the bottom tray these little X's appear in the corner of all the widgets. One of the early problems we had with DesktopX is that people did not know how to close objects, so I am glad to see that they have included that. So I close the weather widget. This turns out to be a bit of a mistake. It seams when you close a widget it is as if it was never run. That's right, when I run the widget again I have to change the zip, position it, as well as set it to show the 6 day forecast, all over again. Now I don't know if this is the case with all the widgets, but it seems that Dashboard only remembers settings for widgets that are running. You can't open and close them at you leisure and expect to keep the settings you have established. You have to leave them running ALL THE TIME. Well like I said, you cant have them visible while you work in any other app, so I guess it is not really a drain on memory, but let me just say if I made a widget for DesktopX that behaved like that I would get flamed with complaints, and I would deserve it. |
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| Well, it is late, and I have been ranting too long. I shall try and summarize my OS 10.4 "Tiger" experience. The loss of my iApps was my fault for not reading the manual first but still, come on Apple, this is the kind of bait and switch that you would be screaming at Microsoft for doing, and everyone would be screaming for court action. Luckily Apples market share is so small that they can get away with things like that. (Well lucky for them at least). I assume that eventually I will crack an buy a copy of iLife that I will never use and Apple will be a little closer to being popular enough to start suing. I am sure there have been tones of usability fixes and such, but the one thing that I was looking for, better Samba sharing, was still not there. Come on Apple, can't you have one of you programmers take a day to come up with a GUI for the smb.conf file? I have been able to right click on a folder or drive in windows and share it since windows 3.11. You just took Samba for UNIX, can't you afford to at least give it a pretty face? As for Dashboard; very pretty at first glance. For a skinner or widget user it is pretty much useless. I will be keeping Konfabulator on the Mac and have already begun the search for a way to disable Dashboard. This is a great example of how an idea can be taken, yet not understood at all. I could be wrong. I'm sure some people out there are wild about Dashboard. I can just say I'm not one.
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That sadly is about all that impressed me with Dashboard. When you go to the "More Widgets" webpage you find some nice widgets and some crap in about the same mix you find at WinCustomize or the Konfabulator gallery, but nothing to rock my world. Needless to say I don't need a "Next Episode of Stargate" countdown widget. That's what my PVR is for. One last thing of note: not all widgets are free. This is not surprising, but something to remember next time you see a pay suite or theme. .jpg)
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Reply #62 Wednesday, May 11, 2005 2:46 PM
Reply #63 Wednesday, May 11, 2005 2:53 PM
| smb.conf |
Doesn't that file have comments in there so you know what you're doing? In my Fedora Core 3 I have no problem editing it. The comments in mine are useful.
| You will get a lot of 'Blue Screen' when u using Microsoft XP |
I've only got one in my LIFE, and it was an error in the nVidia driver file.
The other ones were from bootskins that people just create the images, do a prewiew to get the bar in the right place an post it, not even applying it.
Reply #65 Wednesday, May 11, 2005 4:30 PM
| Lets get back to were we should be, The Mac people telling me I don't know what I'm talking about, and the PC people telling me Mac's suck. |
Reply #66 Wednesday, May 11, 2005 7:27 PM
| Now, guys....this is my job...stop stepping on my turf, m'kay?.. |
I completely agree..
And actually..I think I accidently learned something..LoL..I really did not realize how horrible my punctuation was! Sheeeeesh!
By your example Jafo I understand the mistakes I made and will endeavor in future posts to correct it..::laughs::.. it was worth pointing out..
Thanks!
Zero.
Reply #67 Wednesday, May 11, 2005 9:34 PM
Of course, they have on a good day what, < 5% of the home computer market. I would think if you looked in most industries that have a monopoly, or a near monopoly player that small boutique competitors would have the same leeway. Now if they screwed around with the Ipod all hell would break lose....
Reply #69 Thursday, May 12, 2005 6:31 AM
Reply #70 Friday, May 13, 2005 12:56 PM
i know mac users, i am a windows user.
And i am only a short time desktopx user.
However there are already a plenty of Apple dashboard widgets already that i can't seem to find equivalent desktopx widgets/objects.
Comparing the usability of the two must include what is availble. Personlly i am tired of seeing yet another variation of a weather, calendar or system info widget...
I woudl think that in the years that DesktopX has been out, we would see widgets like:
One i would like to see - an i was looking for today - ( dashboard has it) is a Fedex or UPS tracker widget.
The mac user i see also has traffic, dictonary, conversion, yellow book, and flight info widgets. Oh, all free by the way.
I am a desktopx user primarily for some of the things I thougth it would do for me, but so far I am underwhelmed ( I am approaching this from a consumer standpoint).
Lets get more variety out there in terms of functionality, then worry about the skins.
Reply #71 Monday, May 16, 2005 11:40 PM
1) Upgrade from Panther to Tiger did NOT result in any loss of software... Because of his scathing indictment of Tiger I had prepared myself for total loss of iLife function, which did not happen. All the iLife apps still function as they did before and all data has remained intact.
2) The networking is TREMENDOUSLY easy!!! After Tiger was installed over Panther the Powerbook was instantly able to recognize my Toshiba Laptop (on a PATHOLOGY workgroup) and my home desktop (in a workgroup called SYNOVIUM), all wirelessly. In a Finder window (comparable to an explorer file manager window), under "Networks" both workgroups showed up, as well as several other Mac networks that my neighbors apparently have. Shared folders were easily accessed on both computers after logging in. The Windows PC's, conversely, were able to recognize the Powerbook, once the file-sharing was enabled and the proper path could be supplied. No Unix knowledge necessary folks.
3) With regards to the Dashboard, Mormegil is partially correct- True, Dashboard widgets are not truly on the desktop, but a separate membrane which can be accessed via hot-key or via Expose (by putting the mouse in a predetermined screen corner). Where he's incorrect is the "memory" of widgets, the weather widget in particular. Closing the weather widget, returning to the desktop, then reopening Dashboard and adding the weather widget back did NOT lose my location (Salt Lake City), as Mormegil inferred it would. I have noticed however that if you multiple instances of the widget in operation for different cities, close them all and then bring them back, instances of the widget past the first simply duplicate the first's location. This was the observation previous to the 10.4.1 update, which I received today.
So my advice to the casual reader: Check out Tiger yourself. I was ready to rule it out because of Mormegil's harsh treatment of it and actually found it to be a compelling environment to work in, one conducive to productivity and exceptionally easy to master. Again, just speaking from personal experience here.
Reply #72 Tuesday, May 17, 2005 6:33 AM
Reply #73 Tuesday, May 17, 2005 12:51 PM
DesktopX is probably the most mature widget engine out there, and while it certainly has its faults (I can't get it to run stably either), it's an exceptionally powerful tool that will continue to get better. Wouldn't be surprised if Stardock has someone working on similar visual effects already
Reply #74 Tuesday, May 17, 2005 1:17 PM
You missed part of what mormegil said and what was mentioned in follow-up comments regarding the loss of iLife apps. He did NOT do an upgrade over top of Panther. He wiped the drive and did a clean install of Tiger. This WILL result in no more iLife apps because they aren't present on the Tiger DVD. An upgrade over top of Panther or older versions won't remove anything.
His observations were based on 10.4.0, so yeah, some of the little bugs like widgets not remembering your settings should have been fixed in 10.4.1 I experienced the same problem with the weather widget if I ever closed it out.
Reply #76 Wednesday, May 18, 2005 9:17 AM
Also using a small plugin called Amnesty, all widgets can be left on the desktop at the window level you choose. Only downside is they loose the nice OpenGL effects such as flipping, but no loss of usability.
Off all the widget apps, Dashboard (until Konfab 2 comes out possibly) loads the widgets fastest... it also seems far smoother than either Konfab or DX3 on the PC, though that isn't a good comparison across systems.
So far, very impressed with Tiger. Definitely not the huge update they keep harping on about ( and if I hadn't got it for $50 I would be more upset) but a very responsive and stable OS.
Reply #77 Wednesday, May 18, 2005 10:43 PM
I'm aware of of the unnecessary clean install. I raise point #1 because OSX updates, even major OSX upgrades, do not require a complete wipe of the system. I clicked all the default options for my seamless install of Tiger and all was well, leading me to believe that Mormegil's loss of data was due to a hard-drive wipe manually initiated, not something automatically performed by the software.Let me also reiterate that I could not replicate the Dashboard issues Mormegil reported EVEN BEFORE THE 10.4.1 UPDATE INSTALLED. It was one of the first things I investigated upon installation of Tiger with my observations already posted. Your version apparently did the same thing that Mormegil's did: mine did not.
Dashboard certainly has its faults as well. #1 Security: it's a major hole through which malicious scripts could be targeted. #2 After system start-up or coming out of sleep, the first switch to Dashboard seems to take a few seconds to properly render all the widgets requiring networked info.
BTW: I saw a third-party application that WOULD let individual Dashboard widgets remain on the actual desktop, as opposed to the Dashboard layer... I'll try and post a link as soon as I find it again- would be an encouraging feature for the cross-over market.
Reply #78 Thursday, May 19, 2005 8:20 AM
Konfabulator 2 is out and very nice. More of an improvement on the PC than Mac, yet I can't be bothered with the Mac version I bought as the widgets are just better on Dashboard. The copier is better than the copied.
Reply #80 Thursday, May 19, 2005 6:57 PM
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Reply #61 Wednesday, May 11, 2005 12:31 PM
I might agree that 10.1 was more or less a bugfix release, but then so did Apple which is why you could pick up an upgrade for all of $19.95 via snail mail.