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MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

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Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#121

Post by golergka »

graypegg wrote: post #108
nobleach wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like "EVERYTHING" Apple has done in this arena just ensures I'll have to use a search function to find what I want. Same is true for Windows 10+. "I just want to format a USB Thumbdrive!!! why do I have to search for some sort of Disks section in the Control Panel??"

I mean, why not? I think a lot of people under-20 will instinctively think of “erase this whole disk and put a new file system on it” as a very “settings” sort of thing, not something to be done in a separate application like Disk Manager. (Which is technically a hold over from when OSes did not ship with extensive disk management tools, so normally you would have some flavour of Norton Utilities installed after-mark…

Why can't this function be found in several places at once?

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#123

Post by graypegg »

golergka wrote: post #121
graypegg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, why not? I think a lot of people under-20 will instinctively think of “erase this whole disk and put a new file system on it” as a very “settings” sort of thing, not something to be done in a separate application like Disk Manager. (Which is technically a hold over from when OSes did not ship with extensive disk management tools, so normally you would have some flavour of Norton Utilities installed after-mark…

Why can't this function be found in several places at once?

Windows has multiple settings and control panel lists to launch the exact same control panel applications. Or even duplicate UI to control the same setting.

I think generally that’s seen as confusing, and probably not something worth striving for IMO.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#125

Post by kitsunesoba »

pram wrote: post #120
kitsunesoba wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall, the main issue with the earliest versions of OS X is that they were slow, somewhat unstable, and would occasionally do really weird things (like how on my summer 2000 iMac DV, OS X 10.0.x once randomly decided it wasn’t going to draw the cursor any more and had to be reinstalled before it was fixed). This led me to spend a fair amount of time booted into OS 9 with an Aqua Kaleidoscope scheme applied and…

Yup by the time Panther came out I didn’t have any problems. Having my macports env, X11, Unreal Tournament 2k4, and World of Warcraft on the same laptop felt like the high water mark of computing at the time lol

Running on a TiBook G4 I'm guessing? I always wanted one of those but couldn't afford it back in the day. Its design has barely aged at all, it basically defined what a modern laptop looked like, and that persists even now.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#126

Post by akx »

netsharc wrote: post #106
blamazon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As in Mac OS 9, it is possible to play DVD movies "on the desktop" by setting the desktop pattern to be a particular color. The DVD player uses this color as a mask for its video display, allowing the movie to appear on the desktop pattern even when the player window itself is hidden. Today I learned!

Windows has this too. Something to do with sending the video data directly to the graphics card, and the graphics card doing the decoding of the MPEG data, and replacing the color (which is usually green) with the video image before outputing to the screen. So if you're playing a video and you open a web page, and the webpage has the same green color, it looks like there's a hole on the browser window and you can see…

This isn't probably really used much these days, but yeah, it was/is called Overlay mode.

The graphics card isn't necessarily decoding the MPEG data (though that could have been an option in the olden days too), but it is likely scaling it and spitting it out in the given-colored pixels faster than you could've done with just software back in the days.

The AVS visualizer for Winamp also supported this; if you set the overlay color to black, you could have all of the black text on your desktop be very, very funkily animated.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#127

Post by avidphantasm »

mattkevan wrote: post #115
avidphantasm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a big dumb list that I now have to use search to find anything in. My guess is that someone doesn't want to spend developer and designer resources curating the old design. Now they can more or less shove new things into the list and call it a day. Sad.

I've used macOS since the early betas and could never find what I wanted in the big dumb grid. Had to use search every time. IMO the sidebar is more usable as I can just scan down to find the right option, or just use the search as before.

I don't dispute your experience. However, for me the old grid provided a two-dimensional spatial hierarchy (if that's a thing) that made it easy for me to quickly drill down to what I wanted. The new list version has a one-dimensional flattened hierarchy with many more categories to consider at the top level. With so many choices my brain shuts down and I just resort to search.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#128

Post by GeekyBear »

tinus_hn wrote: post #116
tambourine_man wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another one was going with LLVM. Now that they had a decent running GCC on PowerPC they want to build a compiler infrastructure from scratch? Apple is full of those decisions. I'm just glad they don't take advices from me.

LLVM is because they don’t want GPLv3. They just went ahead with a stack where they can be in control on their own terms. Basically GNU gambled and lost, they wanted to make a big stand against software patents and some other powerful forces had different opinions.

> LLVM is because they don’t want GPLv3.

LLVM and Clang are also about having a compiler stack that provides the information you need for a modern graphical IDE.

For instance, GCC had made some decisions that made it difficult to point to which line of code caused a particular error message.

Apple's Chris Lattner covered this in a 2007 tech talk he gave at Google introducing LLVM and the (then) new Clang project.

https://youtu.be/VeRaLPupGks?t=1133

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#129

Post by varjag »

dsego wrote: post #59
LeanderK wrote: post #2

Wow, unbelievable that it was designed in 2001! It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? But only barely. It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system, I instantly feel right at home although I've never used it. I find the review terrible though, one of the major changes was the user interface, revolutionary I would…

> It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system The truth is, for the most part operating systems haven't really advanced that much, at least from a ux standpoint. Speaking as someone who started using computers in 1997 on windows 95 and a 133mhz pentium. All the basic metaphors and mechanisms have stayed the same. Tabs in browsers were considered like a huge leap (I know it's…

20 year ago in mainstream; earlier if you used first implementations like in Galeon.

Re: MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

#130

Post by scarface_74 »

coreyh14444 wrote: post #56

I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS, Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc. My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long and the window of opportunity had passed. I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!

Are you sure that was the right lesson to take for a startup?

Apple had millions of users, an already profitable business (by 2001 barely), and marketing reach that was far outside its market share.

They had the best marketer and product guy in the business for a CEE and one of the best logistics experts for a COO.

A startup probably has none of those things.

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