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John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

arstechnica.com

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Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#121

Post by malandrew »

morsch wrote: post #87
malandrew wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I actually like [pagination] for very long articles because it helps me keep my place across multiple reading sessions. I can remember I was on page 8 instead of remembering my exact position in a very long scrolling web page." Tell me why 'I can remember I was reading the section "A Cloud In Three Parts"' doesn't work? There is a reason that sites that actually understand the medium put a mouseover on Section Title…

The same reason it's easier to remember that something in a book was 3 pages ago rather than 14 paragraphs... or even sections. It's cognitively useful to have a physical measure for distance rather than a more abstract one; clicking a link on the web is (metaphorically) understood as a physical act of moving. Scrolling is physical, too, but it's more fluid while paging is sort of "integral".

Give it another ten years and the concept of knowing you were on page 5 will be the same as knowing you were listening to the b-side of a vinyl record. It'll be nice for nostalgia, but will cease to be a reference point.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#122

Post by tomkr »

locusm wrote: post #120

Why is it when you enable dictation it needs to send your contacts to Apple?

I'm assuming this is so that if you speak the name of one of your contacts, it understands the word. Names can be weird, especially last names, so they're bound not to be in the standard list of words that can be used. This way you can name your contacts when dictating without the system freaking out.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#123

Post by JonnieCache »

masklinn wrote: post #74
keithpeter wrote: post #63

I've suggested this before (and not done much about it), but that is not going to stop me suggesting it again. How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review of Ubuntu 12.04? Or Debian Wheezy, or Fedora (large integer, preferably 18 because that is the version that RHEL 7 will be based on)? Or the safe and conservative CentOS/SciLi/PUIAS version 6.3, now being targeted by Oracle. Or your favourite GNU/Linux, or BS…

> How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review I don't think a crowd-sourced review could ever be that, as it most likely won't be a cohesive work and will have a hard time finding talented writers (which I hold Siracusa to be). And will probably fail to balance the emphasis (at all) between features of differing importance and levels of interest. Furthermore, Siracusa's reviews are also the result of more than…

Maybe there could be a kickstarter to just pay Siracusa to write 26,000 words about ubuntu?

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#124

Post by bitsoda »

blinkingled wrote: post #22

TL;DR "In some ways, Mountain Lion is a refinement, enhancement, and yes, a major bug-fix for Lion . But the changes and additions are significant enough that they will inevitably come with their own set of bugs. Let's not forget Snow Leopard, which promised no new features but still brought plenty of bugs in its 10.6.0 release." I hope they fixed memory management - Lion is too swap happy and slow on a decent 3Gb RA…

In my n = 1 study, I can (sadly) report that memory management is the same as it was in Lion. Some people are reporting that it's improved, but I'm not sure they ever had the evil beach ball spinning as much as I did on an early 2011 MB Pro with 4 GB of ram. Terminal, Chrome with ~12 tabs, iTunes, Spotify, Dictionary, Sublime Text, Transmission, and Notational Velocity will bring my laptop to a grinding halt. There's no reason for this. I used to be able to have three times as many applications open in Snow Leopard, Ubuntu, and Windows machines before. Mountain Lion still requires me to reboot about twice a day to be usable. I'm not sure what the hell Apple has done to its OS's memory management recently, but it makes me sad.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#125

Post by morsch »

malandrew wrote: post #121
morsch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason it's easier to remember that something in a book was 3 pages ago rather than 14 paragraphs... or even sections. It's cognitively useful to have a physical measure for distance rather than a more abstract one; clicking a link on the web is (metaphorically) understood as a physical act of moving. Scrolling is physical, too, but it's more fluid while paging is sort of "integral".

Give it another ten years and the concept of knowing you were on page 5 will be the same as knowing you were listening to the b-side of a vinyl record. It'll be nice for nostalgia, but will cease to be a reference point.

That might be the case but it's irrelevant to the point I was making, that physical metaphors are cognitively useful to provide an alternative structure/index to experiences/information. Your example is a good one because we have lost this particular physical metaphor in the move towards CDs and more so regarding MP3s. But the web has its own set of metaphors, and web browsing as a journey is a pretty powerful and entrenched one.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#126

Post by keithpeter »

JonnieCache wrote: post #123
masklinn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review I don't think a crowd-sourced review could ever be that, as it most likely won't be a cohesive work and will have a hard time finding talented writers (which I hold Siracusa to be). And will probably fail to balance the emphasis (at all) between features of differing importance and levels of interest. Furthermore, Siracusa's reviews are also the result of more than…

Maybe there could be a kickstarter to just pay Siracusa to write 26,000 words about ubuntu?

That is touching my open source nerve, the penguins ought to be able to assemble something like this themselves.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#127

Post by rat87 »

keithpeter wrote: post #63

I've suggested this before (and not done much about it), but that is not going to stop me suggesting it again. How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review of Ubuntu 12.04? Or Debian Wheezy, or Fedora (large integer, preferably 18 because that is the version that RHEL 7 will be based on)? Or the safe and conservative CentOS/SciLi/PUIAS version 6.3, now being targeted by Oracle. Or your favourite GNU/Linux, or BS…

They (Ars) did a massive in depth review of gimp 2.6 including fair positive and negative points. Now that gimp is finally close to getting 16 bit mode after all these years(in the upcoming 2.10 release) it would be cool if they could do a followup.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/01/gimp-2...

Suite freedom: a review of GIMP 2.6.4 Ars brings you a massive, in-depth review of one of the most popular cross- …

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#128

Post by alexwlchan »

JonnieCache wrote: post #123
masklinn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review I don't think a crowd-sourced review could ever be that, as it most likely won't be a cohesive work and will have a hard time finding talented writers (which I hold Siracusa to be). And will probably fail to balance the emphasis (at all) between features of differing importance and levels of interest. Furthermore, Siracusa's reviews are also the result of more than…

Maybe there could be a kickstarter to just pay Siracusa to write 26,000 words about ubuntu?

Even if you could raise the money, I doubt that he would do it, or that it would be comparable to his OS X articles.

If you listen to Hypercritical (his weekly 5by5 podcast), you'll have heard that he struggles just getting the OS X reviews out the door. Since Apple is trying to move to a yearly release cycle, that’s just going to get harder. When’s he going to get the time to write an Ubuntu review?

It’s also worth considering that, “He has been a Mac user since 1984” (from his Ars bio). Part of what makes his reviews so good is his deep-rooted knowledge of the Mac platform, and having watched OS X (and previous versions of Mac OS) “grow up”, so to speak. I don’t know how much experience he has with Ubuntu, but I bet it’s not as extensive as OS X.

And that’s putting aside all the arguments of whether it’s a good thing to do, or whether the Ubuntu community would want him to write such a thing.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#129

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

quotemstr wrote: post #67
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: "Better"

Don't you mean "one step away from a walled garden"?

No, else that's what I'd have typed.

The walled garden thing is interesting. I (and a couple of other people I know) instantly reacted to Gatekeeper with "fantastic, I can lock down my Dad's machine and keep him out of trouble".

One step towards a walled garden doesn't place you inside a walled garden and in it's current form Gatekeeper is a good thing. Disabling it was the first thing I did when I installed Mountain Lion and it took about 15 seconds (including me not knowing where the option was). In this version of OS X I honestly think it's a non-issue.

The big question is whether this is the first step on a journey into the walled garden or just an individual step that happens to be in that direction.

Personally my feeling is that they won't ever take that final step. I think they get that OS X isn't iOS and that you can't apply the same standards for any number of reasons, both practical and political. Taking something away from people (which is what this would be) is a whole different thing to never having given it to them in the first place (which is what has happened with iOS).

But for now no-one knows. As I say, for now I don't see it as any issue with 10.8. Whether there is an issue with 10.9 or 10.10 or whatever, time will tell.

Re: John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

#130

Post by zoul »

swdunlop wrote: post #94

Just don't put it on your development workstation yet; XCode 4.4 is blocking the install of Command Line Tools for some developers. This means Homebrew doesn't work, VIM doesn't work (no /usr/include for pyconfig.h), and things are generally horked unless you want to play end-user in the app store. Welcome to release day, Apple style. :)

Not sure about 4.4, but at least the 4.5 preview works fine.
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