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remmers
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The OS X Item
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Sep 18 21:27 UTC 2006 |
This is the item to discuss OS X, the native operating system of current
Apple Macintosh computers, and its underlying Unix base, Darwin.
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| 28 responses total. |
ball
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response 1 of 28:
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Sep 19 00:14 UTC 2006 |
I haven't used MacOS X recently, but I did try two instances of Darwin
OpenDarwin and FreeDarwin and found neither of useable.
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rcurl
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response 2 of 28:
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Sep 19 01:21 UTC 2006 |
There's a big difference between using Darwin and running an OS in Darwin.
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ball
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response 3 of 28:
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Sep 19 01:53 UTC 2006 |
Well yes, obviously.
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other
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response 4 of 28:
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Sep 19 21:31 UTC 2006 |
Darwin road leads to Hell. (From the east, anyway.)
I'm a pretty sophisticated user of Mac OS X, including enough of its
underlying Mach BSD system to have done some shell scripting --
including a simplified interface for the fs_usage utility -- and
combining of shell- and apple-scripting into functional tools like a
clickable app that takes a partial app name as an input and pauses or
unpauses the matching processes (using kill -STOP and kill -CONT) and a
script in a FileMaker database that automatically uploads a compressed
copy of itself to a webserver upon closing (using curl, in the
background, and only if the file has been modified).
I don't have a lot of experience using other modern OSs except Windows,
so I haven't a lot of basis for comparison except to say that I have had
very little difficulty figuring out a way to make my Mac do just about
anything I want, and I have had extensive difficulty making Windows
machines not do any particular thing I don't want them to do.
I recently used an Ubuntu machine and was very impressed with the LAMPP
set of tools and the easy interface of the VNC system. I downloaded an
ISO for my older G3 laptop, but haven't been sufficiently motivated to
install it.
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ball
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response 5 of 28:
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Sep 20 01:03 UTC 2006 |
I'm using a VNC viewer on Linux on the old iBook, to connect to an X
session running on my usual NetBSD box. This is partly because the
monitor crapped out on the NetBSD box.
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cross
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response 6 of 28:
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Sep 20 04:17 UTC 2006 |
I use Mac OS X as my primary environment these days. I hope never to have
to go back to the days of sitting in front of a "standard" Unix workstation,
or one of the monstrosities that is a typical X11-based environment (KDE,
GNOME, etc). I just dont like those interfaces (I realize that's partly my
own bias; I consider them bloated and they feel constricting. If you can use
them and get your work done, then more power to you...).
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twenex
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response 7 of 28:
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Sep 20 14:18 UTC 2006 |
I haven't used a Mac in ages, but i remember it had some features that I
thought were particularly stupid; I like the idea of software eject, for
example, but Apple's implementation of it (at least in System 6, and, as I
understand, all the way up to Mac OS 9 if not X) is just brain-damaged: you
drag a disk icon to the trash to eject it. Common sense not only suggests that
if you drag an icon of a disk to the trash, it's because you either want to
empty its contents, or format it, but that the "Eject Disk" button on the
Special Menu should do "what it says on the tin" (as the saying goes here in
the UK), and furthermore without asking you to replace the disk for apparently
no reason.
My main problem with Macs, though, is that they come from one supplier. I have
been sufficiently burned in the past, both by products limited to one supplier
(Commodore Amigas), and crap-but-locked-in products in a supposedly free
market, that I simply can't bring myself to put myself in a
reliant-on-one-supplier position again.
I don't know if they have since changed this, but i understand that in Mac
OS X, Apple changed the Finder so that it only displayed one window, with the
contents of the directory you're in, at one time, instead of opening the
contents of each directory you've gone through; thus you have to use a special
mode of the finder to find another directory into which, say, you want a drag
a file. Nasty.
That, and the presence of the Dock, also presumably mean the death of a really
cool feature - tabs for open windows at the bottom of the screen. What a
shame.
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cross
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response 8 of 28:
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Sep 20 22:29 UTC 2006 |
Regarding #7; I don't think that's true. Yes, you can still drag a CD or
floppy (floppy? Wow; I'm not sure I even own a floppy drive anymore...) image
to the trash can to eject it, or you can hit the eject button on the keyboard,
or use another interface. I agree that it's strange at first.
You can certainly open multiple finder windows, and in some ways, it's nice
that you don't have a bunch of open windows cluttering up your screen and
representing each of the intermediate folders you went through to get
somewhere.
The functionality of the dock supercedes that of tabbed windows; running
applications appear in the dock.
I agree that the single vendor aspect is troubling.
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gull
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response 9 of 28:
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Sep 20 23:36 UTC 2006 |
Re resp:4: I've heard that Windows 2000 and up can be scripted quite
powerfully using Visual Basic -- apparently they can run VB scripts
just like they can run batch files. Documentation on this feature
seems to be hard to come by, though.
Re resp:7: They changed the Finder to act more like Windows Explorer,
which doesn't open a window each time you open a new folder, either.
You can certainly still open multiple Finder windows. There's also a
feature where, if you're dragging a file and hover the mouse over a
folder, that folder opens. This makes it pretty easy to drill down
when copying files.
As far as asking for the disk back, at least the Mac knows what it
wants in that situation. I've seen Windows silently fail in baffling
ways when it needed data off a disk I'd just ejected. (For
example...save a Word file to floppy, take out the floppy, then try to
print. The floppy drive runs for a second, then nothing happens.)
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twenex
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response 10 of 28:
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Sep 20 23:40 UTC 2006 |
My criticisms of the Mac are most certainly not predicated on the idea of
Windows being the better system!
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