Forums | MacLife

He's not wrong.

He's reaching.

HackerJax wrote:

McAddict wrote:

I completely disagree with his stance. Yes, it has its flaws, some more major than others, but unlike Vista were you need to wait for SP1 to come out years later, and pay for that, Leopard will be updated monthly (if not more) to kill of any major issues. 10.5.2 should get rid of most of these things, and my guess is it will be here in less than 2 weeks. Vista SP1? Maybe this year.

They aren't going to wait years to release sp1 for vista, its already in beta and MS does not charge for service packs.  If you purchased XP in 2001 you haven't paid for an OS update in almost 6 years and there have been many updates to xp in that time frame.

They have already released a slew of updates that fix major Vista issues and add application compatibility. 

I feel what the guy is saying, its getting to be far too common for OS vendors to ship it first and patch it later.

I 110% agree with him on the transparency and glitzy additions that have no real usability value. I was surprised that Apple went that route and to me it looks like a move more typical of MS, that is grabbing the latest from the competitors OS without much thought on end user usability.

One thing: Potential buyers.
Most new computer buyers are n00bs (or partial n00bs), not knowing the first thing about computers except (hopefully) how to plug it in and turn it on, sometimes they can figure out how to set up outlook or mail.app, but that is about it.
They don't want/don't know anything about changing the preferences, they don't care about things like ZTrace or Apache.
Therefore, the main thing their looking for in a computer is how it looks and feels, how it acts. They want something that looks cool, even though it may not have good ratings (take the original Mot RAZR {probably the new models, too} it was one of the first cellphones to be specifically asked for, yet it (or at least my mom's) was unreliable and the UI was crap, and it was slower than dialup to view the web (EV-DO). Nether-less, it sold, and it sold well.
And for the buggy SW part; the iPhone was expected to be a hit (and it was), so they had prioritized it, but Leo still needs to arrive before the main shopping season, hence here may still be some bugs, including a few glaring ones.
And Time Machine, it may not be as revolutionary in the sense of features, but building on my previous statement that the majority of Mac users are n00bs when they start, they won't know how to set up a backup, what kind of SW to use, and simply won't care. TM is supposed to change that, by having a UI that essentially begs you to use it, and with it's simple setup, people will USE it.
Still doesn't help us D3M1-L33T and above.

Last edited by FutureDreamz (2007-11-30 11:19 pm)

He's not wrong on many points. The UI "upgrades" are just stupid. I hate the new Dock, hate it. Needless eye candy. Leopard will not find Windows or Linux boxes on the home network, I have to manually enter the IP address of the machine to connect. Stupid. Tiger browsed the network just fine. And if the main menubar is going to be translucent, then make all of them translucent. I hate that too. As for increased performance, it's not really noticeable.

I too ran Vista in it's 64-bit glory, but downgraded back to XP 32. I'll consider putting Vista back on after the service pack is released. But there are some valid points. I'm not quite ready to go back to Tiger, but it's pretty clear that Leopard was pushed out the door. It was a bad omen when Apple pulled engineers off Leopard to work on the iPhone. Leopard suffered.

reece_james wrote:

robco wrote:

He's not wrong on many points. The UI "upgrades" are just stupid.

Some are great, printing has been improved. Tabs in the terminal. Plenty of interface upgrades. Unfortunately the Dock and the Menu suffered. Only fixes for the former unfortunately.

I've seen fixes to get rid of the menu bar's transparency. I haven't seen a real fix for the dock.

HackerJax wrote:

I feel what the guy is saying, its getting to be far too common for OS vendors to ship it first and patch it later.

I 110% agree with him on the transparency and glitzy additions that have no real usability value. I was surprised that Apple went that route and to me it looks like a move more typical of MS, that is grabbing the latest from the competitors OS without much thought on end user usability.

I agree that there's some, not only useless, but downright ugly and even sometimes intrusive fluff in today's software in general, and I agree that there are some flaws which ought to be worked out before release, however, I strongly disagree about the extent to which the current accusations imply, for one very common-sense reason:

Size.
In this market, it is impossible to test a product to an extent which reflects the size of the consumer user-base and release it in what those consumers consider a timely manner, and also test it against all the third-party software out there. People tend to be impatient about advances in technology and about when those advances will be made available to the general public, and companies cannot possibly test on a scale to reflect all the different environments and ways in which their products will be used; especially when there are factors involved such as third-party software vendors. Realistically, those third party vendors should conform to the OS, not the other way around, as there are also many of those vendors -it is, most likely, easier for those vendors to adhere to the standards of one OS than one OS to cater to every vendor out there.
And it would seem that as the OS becomes more advanced, there are more issues found with vendor's software, as vendors tend to keep up with the technology advancements and other changes made in the OS, and not the other way around.
The result?
You can expect things to break.

Last edited by Antonio (2007-12-01 3:29 am)

Vista really has nothing developer want...

That perception is because MS is no longer (for the most part) tying developer features to OS releases. Some areas such as DirectX 10 and this is very much the case but for general all around development the focus is not on new versions of Windows, its all about the .net framework.

The big changes for developers in regards to vista came in the form of .net 3.0 which is built into Vista. You can also install it on Windows XP and Windows 2003.

You can target specific vista features such as the gadget api or the new speech recognition api if you are doing something vista specific, but the framework library is rich enough that for the most part you can have a unified development framework across multiple windows versions.

Leopard's core improvements heavily outweigh any other faults that I see at the moment.  I have not had troubles with networking, but then again I have not used it in a mixed environment.

I probably will not touch Time Machine until after a couple of point upgrades.  I have no need for it right now.

-mark

Daniel wrote:

Leopard is the worst operating system Apple has ever released.

Windows 3.1 was better, more stable, and easier to use.

I seem to recall 10.3.7 or something similar that was a lot worse. Bricked ya machine. Not to mention the disastrous early start to OS 9 prior to 9.0.4. Leopard has nothing on them at this stage.

avkills is right, it's the under the hood enhancements and additions that count.

The issue isn't so much about the appearance. It's about the function.

Daniel wrote:

I think this guy didn't go far enough.  I have had nothing but problems with Leopard on both my computers.  From my hard disks not showing up in the installer utility forcing me to muck around in the terminal to get them to mount, to the installer actually breaking my tower to the point where it refused to turn on at all unless I formatted the startup disk with the installer DVD, to an average of twice-daily kernel panics with 10.5.0, to my tower no longer being able to actually shut itself or reboot requiring me to hit its reset switch for any restart-requiring software update, to my iSub being broken, to terrible FireWire stability such that OS X loses track of the entire FireWire bus (thank god my External HD also has a USB 2 interface), to Stacks where if you have too many items in it and it tries to fan out, the fan actually goes off the side of the screen, to serious .Mac issues including the nonfunctioning of Back to my Mac which just generates error messages and iDisk resizing problems, to a Finder that is even less predictable with respect to which kind of a view a given window is going to open in, to the printer mini-app not shutting itself off after a print job is complete by default, to breaking the nVidia graphics drivers to the point where WoW has become unplayable, all in all, Leopard is the worst operating system Apple has ever released.

Windows 3.1 was better, more stable, and easier to use.

So you think you're experience is typical, and Leopard should be more accurately / fairly / honestly reported by the media to reflect it?

Czachorski wrote:

Daniel wrote:

I think this guy didn't go far enough.  I have had nothing but problems with Leopard on both my computers.  From my hard disks not showing up in the installer utility forcing me to muck around in the terminal to get them to mount, to the installer actually breaking my tower to the point where it refused to turn on at all unless I formatted the startup disk with the installer DVD, to an average of twice-daily kernel panics with 10.5.0, to my tower no longer being able to actually shut itself or reboot requiring me to hit its reset switch for any restart-requiring software update, to my iSub being broken, to terrible FireWire stability such that OS X loses track of the entire FireWire bus (thank god my External HD also has a USB 2 interface), to Stacks where if you have too many items in it and it tries to fan out, the fan actually goes off the side of the screen, to serious .Mac issues including the nonfunctioning of Back to my Mac which just generates error messages and iDisk resizing problems, to a Finder that is even less predictable with respect to which kind of a view a given window is going to open in, to the printer mini-app not shutting itself off after a print job is complete by default, to breaking the nVidia graphics drivers to the point where WoW has become unplayable, all in all, Leopard is the worst operating system Apple has ever released.

Windows 3.1 was better, more stable, and easier to use.

So you think you're experience is typical, and Leopard should be more accurately / fairly / honestly reported by the media to reflect it?

There are unanswered posts all over Apple's discussion boards about all the issues I listed.  I seem to be the only person unfortunate enough to be smitten with them all simultaneously, but yes, I think overall Leopard's quality has been vastly overstated by the media.