Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Should Apple Charge for OS X Snow Leopard?

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh, Software, UNIX — Tags: , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 14:44

Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard, is due to appear on the prowl next year, is an interesting release for OS X. Instead of opening the feature floodgates from R&D’s lake of shinyness, a mere puddle of new features will trickle through. In the meantime, OS X has hired a personal trainer, and is now being honed by its developers to become faster, leaner and more modern.

The list of underlying new features that have been confirmed include:

  • OpenCL, allowing the computer to harness the control of the graphics card
  • SquirrelFish in Safari, to speed up JavaScript (this will also be backported to OS X 10.4, 10.5 and the changes will also appear in iPhone OS X)
  • Grand Central, a new parallel programming technology to assist in harnessing OpenCL and multi-core CPUs
  • Upgrades to Darwin meaning it can fully harness 64-bit CPUs, adding support for a theoretical 16tB of RAM.

Updates obvious to the end user will include QuickTime X, a new version of QuickTime, and Exchange 2007 support for Address Book and iCal. The Server version will also include full support for ZFS.

However, as yet, we don’t know how much Apple is planning on charging for this update. This represents a problem: OS X is speedy anyway, and many end-users may not see the benefit of something that has very few new end-user features. (It’s also worth remembering that Snow Leopard doesn’t support PowerPC Macs, and there’s still a large proportion of these around.)

I still think that Apple should throw in at least a couple of new features to entice users into buying the upgrade. There are still a few problems with Leopard’s feature base that Snow Leopard could provide an opportunity to polish and fix. These are simple things, like the eye candy: there could be a little more (functional) eye candy around the Trashcan and the Finder, for example. Leopard also has the problem of the 3D Dock having an incorrect perspective in comparison to the icons specified by Apple’s own Aqua design guidelines. They might also contemplate improving the virtual desktops (Spaces) feature, to remove it from the Dock and stick it up in the menu bar (IMO, they should do the same with the Dashboard and Time Machine by default, as it simply clutters up the Dock).

Alternatively, they could simply offer Snow Leopard as a free (or cheap) upgrade to all Intel Mac owners. This would be quite a popular move (Apple giving something away for free: OMG!) so I think it would certainly make good economic sense for Apple.

To avoid upsetting people on the other side of the Severn, Apple should also translate OS X into Welsh.



Saturday, June 7, 2008

iPredict for WWDC…

Filed under: Apple, Communications, Macintosh, iPredictions — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 12:13

The infamous iHype has been steadily growing in anticipation of Steve Jobs’s keynote on Monday at WWDC.

The Macworld offices are, evidently, very busy, with new rumours coming in left, right and centre. And this is not to mention the Apple rumour sites, whose editors must, judging by the number of rumours we’re seeing, be on forty caffiene tablets an hour.

Rumors include a tablet Mac, larger iPhones with 3G and GPS, 14-inch MacBooks with aluminium casing, and all manner of other goodies.

I have slightly different predictions:

  • It is almost certain we will see a 3G iPhone, although I suspect the case design will remain largely unchanged. We’ll see, at most, an all aluminium and glass design - I severely doubt the authenticity of the iPhone with white plastic casing. We’ll see voice dialing, a revised home button which glows different colours when SMSes, MMSes, etc are received, 802.11n, and the actual launch of the 2.0 firmware and the App Store. O2 will also offer the iPhone on a pay-as-you-go plan in the UK, charging 11p a minute for each call and SMS, and offering free Internet access (3G, GPRS, EDGE and Wi-Fi with The Cloud).
  • I suspect we may see new MacBooks and MacBook Pros next week. Both devices will be made completely out of aluminium, and the MacBook Pro will take on a more ‘brushed metal’ appearance, similar to the iMac. The MacBook will have a black surround around the screen, also similar to the iMac.
  • The first features of Mac OS X 10.6 will be revealed. It’ll be called Cougar, and will focus heavily on polish and reliability. One of the most immediately obvious features is Fairy Dust, a new set of graphical transitions that occur when a window is minimised, an icon is undocked, etc. This will mean that the Genie effect is revised, and now causes the window to ’sink’ as well as warp into the Dock, and that when the Trash is emptied, the Trashcan will glow and the items inside will appear to explode. Cougar will also include a new Terminal, which allows users to switch, using a menu, between the Bourne shell, the Korn shell, bash, dash, csh, tcsh, and a new, Apple designed shell called crash (Completely Redesigned Apple SHell). It’ll also have native support for ZFS and ext2/3/4. The new graphical enhancements will give Cougar the slogan ‘everything that happens is a blockbuster’, and therefore the new intro movie will reflect that fact, flying around a maze of historic Macintosh models while Ed Welch’s theme tune to Blockbusters plays in the background - additionally, the new intro movie will reveal that OS X has finally been translated into Welsh.
  • ‘One More Thing’ will be a new revision of the Mac Mini. It will include an all aluminium design, and will also have FireWire 800 on board, 802.11n, a SuperDrive, keyboard and mouse as standard, and a $200 discount off a 20″ Cinema Display.
  • There will be one more iddy-biddy thing: there’ll be Blu-Ray SuperDrives for Macs, which can be ordered separately and installed by hand, or added as a build configuration option for an extra $300-ish.
Even if I am entirely wrong, it’ll be very interesting to see what is revealed on Monday. Now I just need to work out what time the keynote starts, and what time it’ll be in London when that happens.



Saturday, April 12, 2008

Awful Debian Artwork

Filed under: Linux, Software, UNIX — Tags: , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 19:30

I dislike Debian’s artwork. It’s just too… pink. I don’t like it.

Therefore, I’m miffed that Aptitude recommends I install debian-artwork along with the xfce4 packages.

Oh well… I’ll just have to knock it through and replace it with something more tasteful later, or leave Aptitude dependencies unfulfilled. Then I’ll have to go through the hell of XDM conf files…



Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Singularity

Filed under: Microsoft — Tags: , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 21:49

I thought the new base for Microsoft Windows, due to appear in Windows 7, would be called MinWin. Apparently not. Now it’s called Singularity. Somewhat like a black hole, then: perhaps the distortion of light around the event horizon means you’ll never see anything happening in it.

Nevertheless, I am interested. Its source code has been released on CodePlex (I’m dubious to call it open-source, because its license is so restrictive) and I’ve downloaded a copy. I can’t test it at the moment (I’m on my iMac) so I’ll have to infer what it’s like to use from the building/running HOWTO Microsoft bundles with it.

Perhaps one of the reasons MinWin became Singularity was because it sounded too much like Minix. Well, they’ve certainly ballsed that concept up. There is mention in the manual of an app called bootd.exe, which sounds suspiciously like Darwin’s launchd (the init daemon on Mac OS X and other Darwin-based OSes). However, it performs nothing like the function of launchd: it is simply the network boot daemon, and doesn’t seem to spawn any processes.

Singularity only currently uses a command prompt, which strongly indicates that this time the graphics system might be kept out of the kernel, in a similar way to X (ie it will become an independent process). At present, Windows’s window manager is speedy (except with WDDM) because it uses kernel-based graphic functions, meaning that you can simply syscall the graphics and have done with it.

Something that surprises me is that the kernel is loaded so late into the boot process: the 16-bit and 32-bit bootloaders come first, before starting the hardware abstraction layer and then passing control to the kernel, which starts the shell. I don’t claim to be an OS technician, so I don’t know if this is how Windows normally works, but I am almost certain that Unix does not work in this way. Unixes start the bootloader, immediately load the kernel and then begin adding the smoke and mirrors later. A bit like putting up the frame to a marquee and then putting things in it.

It’s very hard to make a judgement on Singularity without using it, but I shall be very interested to see the outcome of this little project.



Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Windows 7

Filed under: Microsoft, Software, UNIX, Windows — Tags: , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 18:28

So, according to Microsoft, Windows 7 (codename Vienna) is to be released in 2009.

Fat chance. I’m expecting something more along the lines of 2090, not 2009. But, however, we live in hope that MS will produce a good OS this time round.

As Windows Vista has demonstrated, the structure that holds Windows up at the moment is creaking under the strain of all the new features being added. So, in this (hopfully) short space I’ll try to explain some of the mistakes Microsoft have made with Windows Vista, and explain what I think Windows 7 will need to make it a great OS. (more…)



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