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“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

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Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#51
post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

With any luck the Touch Bar is on its way out. The M1 MacBook Air doesn’t have it and is honestly a better laptop for that sole reason.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#52
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in the ' touchscreen support or the Linux integration.' part of your comment. I don't think we'll see touch screen on a Mac in the short-to-middle term because Apple have very defined views on interaction models. Of more interest is the Linux integration part. What Linux 'features' are missing from macOS on the terminal that cannot be installed from either Homebrew, MacPorts or pkgsrc? Genuinely intere…

About Linux it's to have Docker with good performances, and a development environment more similar than the production environment. I'm almost not a fan of compilation to install standard tools, its a bit slow and it feels unnecessary. About the touchscreen support, it's simply that I like touchscreens. It think it's more convenient for some usages and I think Apple acknowledged that with their ridiculously small tou…

Thanks. That makes sence, although Docker on the M1 seems to have improved things. If it's any consolation, my 3 year old tries to touch things on computer and TV screens! It's clearly an natural interaction given the technology around today.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#53
post #32

And that was in the PowerPc Era! I think this is the video mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ2lWbRU3xM

Here’s the linked page on Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20040108215755/apple.com/ilife/v...

Is that embedded video playable on anything? it isn't compatible with the latest version of Quick Time I have

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#54
post #37

As long as the hardware runs Linux, I'm going to overwrite the operating system, so I'm indifferent. I've bought all my recent computers used from Craigslist and Linux runs great on all of them.

Good for you. How does this have any relevance in this thread though?

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#55
post #20

I love the backpedalling later about how great Vista is. Which was bollocks.

I disagree. Vista did have some problems, but this was because it introduced SuperCache (which worked in a way that did not match everyone's expectations), a new strategy for file copies (that didn't work better in a lot of cases), a new display server, and new driver models for networking, sound, and video in user space. Vista is when we stopped having to reboot for changing the video driver, where a sound driver cr…

I was able to crash Vista pre SP1 just by copying a few kb file to the network. It's file copy performance was very different from XP.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#56
post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

The introduction of invisible gesture control on iOS was the end of UX for Apple.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#57
post #18

I've read enough of buggy behaviors on MacOS that I'm not sure I'd buy a Mac today. Wasn't their new filesystem a giant mess? Even the shiny new M1 had SSD wear problems in the beginning, hmm, great QA, guys!

4096 files is the limit when reading from SD cards on a Mac (not windows). https://youtu.be/0bqOB_XGBVE

Interesting. But the video is way too manic (too many cuts, guy too animated and shouty) that watching him gives me anxiety.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#58
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longhorn was a failed version of Windows after Windows XP and before Windows Vista. Longhorn was planned to be a dramatic follow-up version of Windows XP in which the Windows shell was rewritten on top of .NET with three main pillars: communication (WCF), presentation (WPF), and data (WinFS). WinFS was a new filesystem based on a relational database engine (SQL Server). Longhorn was similar to a previous failed Windo…

Apparently Cairo's lesson wasn't good enough, so they ended up rewriting all Longhorn stuff mostly in COM and since it was such a good idea we got WinRT (IInspectable + .NET metadata) as "improvement". Which kind of was, had the respective teams not botched the whole idea with WinRT, UAP, UWP, replacing C++/CX with toolless C++/WinRT, left .NET Native stagnate,.... So now we get WinUI, Reunion sorry AppSDK, and the w…

Yeah, what I liked about the 90s you basically got MFC and it was basically it, you could create any desktop app and only waited for incremental upgrades. MFC was supported by Borland and Symantec, so basically whatever you choose you could quickly create a Windows GUI app. What I dislike about the current situation is the lack of certainty as to which toolkit I should invest my time in as I'm sure someone at Microsoft will change their minds again.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

', and ship Vista.' You spelled 'shit' wrong?

Maybe I’m the minority but I’ve only had good things to say about Vista. Maybe the problem isn’t Vista but trying to run it on underpowered hardware? It ran perfectly fine on a quad-core and 4GB of RAM.

Most people had 512MB or 1GB back in the day, the lesser ones 256MB.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#60
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Cairo's lesson wasn't good enough, so they ended up rewriting all Longhorn stuff mostly in COM and since it was such a good idea we got WinRT (IInspectable + .NET metadata) as "improvement". Which kind of was, had the respective teams not botched the whole idea with WinRT, UAP, UWP, replacing C++/CX with toolless C++/WinRT, left .NET Native stagnate,.... So now we get WinUI, Reunion sorry AppSDK, and the w…

Yeah, what I liked about the 90s you basically got MFC and it was basically it, you could create any desktop app and only waited for incremental upgrades. MFC was supported by Borland and Symantec, so basically whatever you choose you could quickly create a Windows GUI app. What I dislike about the current situation is the lack of certainty as to which toolkit I should invest my time in as I'm sure someone at Microso…

C++/WinRT tooling is so bad, that MFC feels modern.

Ok, I got the point that they decided to stop doing language extensions and C++/CX was a dead end.

Surely the PM that signed the idea to replace C++/CX, could have spent one minute considering not to ship a development experience that is worse than MFC.

In 30 years haven't they had time to add syntax highlighting and code completion to IDL files?

Ah, and the Windows team then ignores C++/WinRT on their own samples, and use their own internal WIL framework instead.

https://github.com/microsoft/wil

So you get some samples on MSDN now that after being rewritten from C++/CX into C++/WinRT, are also tainted with WIL library types

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