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Windows dressing isn't the Apple way | |
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||
| Time: 05:36 EST/10:36 GMT | News Source: The Independent | Posted By: Byron Hinson | ||
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Of all the global companies making PCs today, just two make money. Few would be surprised that one of these is Dell, the Texas-based manufacturer that pioneered the idea of selling direct to its customers. But who would guess that the other is Apple Computer? Globally, it accounts for fewer than 5 per cent of computer sales, and in some markets its share is even lower. | ||
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| #1 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 9/21/2003 11:54:48 AM |
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Everyone talks about MS copying Apple... I guess you could make an argument for that with Windows 95, but Windows XP and Windows Longhorn bear no resemblence to Mac OS *.*, so I don't see what the deal is.
If anything, I would say that Mac OS X copied more from Windows than vice versa... multiple windows open, taskbar at the bottom, fast user switching, etc. |
| #2 By 442 (68.153.133.185) at 9/21/2003 1:02:07 PM |
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"Everyone talks about MS copying Apple... I guess you could make an argument for that with Windows 95, but Windows XP and Windows Longhorn bear no resemblence to Mac OS *.*, so I don't see what the deal is."
Windows XP stole a large portion of the look from OS X. The colors, animations, icons, single TaskBar buttons with pop-up menus for open documents in the application, etc. "If anything, I would say that Mac OS X copied more from Windows than vice versa...multiple windows open, taskbar at the bottom, fast user switching, etc." I'm not sure about that whole multiple windows open thing. The Mac has had that since 1984. The Dock, or TaskBar as you call it, is not copied from Windows. It was taken from the NeXT OS which Steve Jobs owned and founded and Apple then bought in 1997. Windows stole the TaskBar concept from NeXT in Windows 95. NeXT was out in the mid 80s and early 90s. Please try to get your facts straight. Albeit, WinXP did have Fast User Switching first, Apple does it in a more elegant fashion...as usual. |
| #3 By 2332 (65.221.182.2) at 9/21/2003 1:35:10 PM |
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Yawn,
Regardless of who stole what from whom, Windows XP easily beats OS X from a raw useability standpoint. Sorry, but being pretty does not equate to being useable. Hell, Apple even uses mystery meat navigation in OS X! The ONLY reason for stuff like that is to focus on being pretty instead of being useable. The task-based UI that XP has allows novices to do fairly complicated tasks (like e-mailing a photo from a digital camera, for instance) without any real knowledge of the individual steps of the task. Not only that, the tasks are context-aware... so you only get the tasks that make sense for whatever you're currently doing. This feature alone makes XP vastly superior to OS X. |
| #4 By 442 (68.153.133.185) at 9/21/2003 3:34:55 PM |
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"Regardless of who stole what from whom, Windows XP easily beats OS X from a raw useability standpoint."
So you're telling me that it's easier to go through five or six mouse clicks, a Wizard, tiny dialog boxes that can't be resized, or have hidden functions in right-slick menus than it is to drag and drop? EVERYTHING in OS X is drag and drop. A one step process. Even removing apps is a drag and drop to the Trash. Try that in Windows. "Sorry, but being pretty does not equate to being useable." You're totally right. Windows XP is case in point. You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig. "The task-based UI that XP has allows novices to do fairly complicated tasks (like e-mailing a photo from a digital camera, for instance) without any real knowledge of the individual steps of the task. Not only that, the tasks are context-aware... so you only get the tasks that make sense for whatever you're currently doing." Try using iPhoto, which has won praise from nearly every PC and Mac magazine. It makes it very simple to import, edit, organize, and share your pictures. By the way, emailing a digital picture in Mac OS X is no brainer and requires no knowledge of the individual steps of the task. "This feature alone makes XP vastly superior to OS X." Perhaps you should acutally try using Mac OS X for a while before you comment on it. Not in a store for ten minutes. REALLY use it fora week...then get back to me. |
| #5 By 442 (68.153.133.185) at 9/21/2003 4:14:52 PM |
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#3 "I'm not sure about that whole multiple windows open thing. The Mac has had that since 1984."
No it didn't. Macs did not multitask until OS X. And it was one application taking up the whole interface at a time." Oh my lord you have got to be kidding me!?!? True, the very FIRST Mac did not offer multitasking but that's not what the poster said. He specifially said "multiple windows" which the Mac has ALWAYS had. Multitasking is a different thing and did come a couple of years later with the Multi-Finder. Mac have multitasked since 1985 or 1986 I believe. Check www.apple-history.com for more in depth info. Mac OS X offers a different type of multitasking called preemptive, which is far batter than what the Classic Mac systems used, which was called cooperative. |
| #6 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 9/21/2003 4:41:59 PM |
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Here we go again...why does it matter so much, both companies have copied from each other, some arguements here don't even add up.
Yes we all know Microsoft WILL copy ideas from Mac OS X style and feel for Longhorn, people can already see that, but Apple would probably do the same if things were the other way round. Hardware wise no one can compete with Apple's style, its what they do best. Just like Microsoft has done many, many times in the past (with nearly everything they do) Apple has copied the Fast User Switching from Windows XP, something even Steve Jobs joked about being the only thing they have actually copied from Microsoft from Windows XP...yet once again Apple have done it better. This is all im interested in personally - Microsoft copy more than most, its a fact...but as far as I'm concerned if they copy and make things better then I'll probably go for it. Right now I'm happy using both for different projects. It seems most of these arguements come from people who may have used a Mac for 10 minutes, and if thats where the judgements and comments come from, you shouldn't comment. |
| #7 By 135 (208.186.90.91) at 9/21/2003 5:07:27 PM |
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jaredbkt - Who cares. You can argue until you are blue in the face and nobody is going to switch to using an Apple.
You might as well argue to stereophiles that Bose and B&O make good audio equipment worth buying. |
| #8 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 9/21/2003 5:08:38 PM |
| #7 - Really? Check up the facts again instead of things you may have heard in hearsay. Mac's have had multitasking for quite some time, I was on my friends OS 9 last week and it was multitasking fine. Since the mid/late 80's i believe. |
| #9 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 9/21/2003 5:10:29 PM |
| #11 - Some people do care, mostly about those who can't get facts right. No one should be trying to switch anyone, people can make their own decisions if the facts are given correctly. |
| #10 By 135 (208.186.90.91) at 9/21/2003 9:45:18 PM |
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Byron - "Some people do care, mostly about those who can't get facts right."
Most of what is being offered here by Apple advocates isn't facts, but opinion. |
| #11 By 61 (24.92.223.112) at 9/21/2003 11:21:25 PM |
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jare: XP looks absolutely NOTHING like OSX, and in fact, they follow completely different UI methods... Microsoft is more towards the inductive UI while Apple is still using a deductive type of UI. The colors don't even closely resemble unless you count the aqua blue in OSX, which, btw, Microsoft has been using since Win98, and the more neon blue in XP as similar.
Windows 1.0 had a taskbar in it, you should look up the screenshots for it. They dumped it until Win95, where it actually became useable. The Dock, while a good concept, is still quite clumsy if you ask me and isn't as efficient from an organizational standpoint as the Windows taskbar.. however, it is a nice innovation. I personally prefer BeOS's dock. Cooperative multitasking is hardly multitasking, one app gets the use of the processor at a time, which makes running multiple apps a pain as it takes awhile to switch between the two, on top of having services running in the background and whatnot. It was only multitasking in that you could run more than one app at a time, but you still couldn't really use either. |
| #12 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 9/21/2003 11:31:48 PM |
| Cooperative multitasking was present in Windows 3.1. 95 had preemptive multitasking. Interestingly, the original Lisa had preemptive multitasking. But until OS X, the Mac OS did not have preemptive multitasking. And similar to what CPUGuy said, there's a big difference between being able to "run" two programs and being able to run two programs. |
| #13 By 3653 (209.149.57.116) at 9/22/2003 12:02:24 AM |
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i'll be glad when sun buys apple and puts it out of its misery... like it is doing with java and their expensive hardware.
then we can move our arguments on to other mp3 makers. rio, i mean apple... is irrelevent. |
| #14 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 9/22/2003 1:26:36 AM |
| So, UNIX was pre-emptive and OS X is based on the Free BSD (e.g. UNIX) Mach kernel, yet OS X stole from the success of Windows NT? Hmm, I'd say it piggy-backed, at least as far as multitasking is concerned, off of UNIX not stole from NT. I'm all for Apple bashing, but at least let's use logical arguments. |
| #15 By 9589 (68.17.52.2) at 9/22/2003 5:35:38 AM |
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The author either is a liar or can't read a financial report. Over the last 12 months, crapple has LOST money. Yes, its revenue was nearly $6 billion dollars, but its profits were a negative $18 million (think about that for a moment - you could put six billion dollars to work with a 1 year treasury note and earn nearly five times more than crapple did trying to sell their crap). And it lost money for all of its fiscal year 2001 (over $300 million dollars).
Meanwhile, crapple continues to lose market share. To say that it has a 5% of the world wide market for personal computers is being extremely generous. IDC reports each spring on PC market share and reported this past spring that crapple had lost share AGAIN. IDC estimates that its share now is less than 2.6%! This is an irrelevant company heading toward oblivion. And the article isn't worth spit - just another advertisement by a crapple zealot. |
| #16 By 8589 (65.71.64.37) at 9/22/2003 8:23:06 AM |
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This is an Apple story. It should be in the Apple section. I find no usefull information as a Windows user in this story whatsoever.
Besides, everyone knows Bill Gates helped write the original software for Apple. LOL :p |
| #17 By 61 (24.92.223.112) at 9/22/2003 10:35:24 AM |
| So then why did you bother reading it? |
| #18 By 2332 (216.41.45.78) at 9/22/2003 11:35:16 AM |
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"So you're telling me that it's easier to go through five or six mouse clicks, a Wizard, tiny dialog boxes that can't be resized, or have hidden functions in right-slick menus than it is to drag and drop?"
LOL. Sorry, but not everything can be done by drag and drop. In addition, many tasks don't make sense for drag and drop. And you would be surprised to know how hard it is for novices to grasp the concept of drag and drop. I've done training for years, and many people just don't get the correlation between a mouse click and "picking something up". "EVERYTHING in OS X is drag and drop. A one step process. Even removing apps is a drag and drop to the Trash. Try that in Windows." So everything is a drag and drop one step process even if there are multiple steps that need user input? Give me a break man. A task based interface is superior for those who need it the most - the beginner. Advanced users can ignore it. As far as removing apps, the reason you haven't been able to do that in the past was because of a bad design choice by MS a long time ago... or at least a bad choice when viewed in today's light. DLLs were meant to maximize code reuse in an effort to minimize HD usage. This was during a time when HD space was expensive, so it made sense. Now HD space is cheap, so it seems dumb. They have fixed this with .NET. A .NET app is removed by dragging and dropping into the recycle bin, just like on the Mac. "You're totally right. Windows XP is case in point. You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig." Uh huh. And you can drink Jobs' poison coolaid and nod like a drone until the Sun dies, but it doesn't make you right. "Try using iPhoto, which has won praise from nearly every PC and Mac magazine. It makes it very simple to import, edit, organize, and share your pictures." I have used iPhoto. (I've got a Mac with OS X sitting next to me right now.) It's nice, aside from the horribly ugly metallic look Apple has recently become obsessed with. But it's no easier to use that Windows XP's built in photo manager, which has pretty much all of the features most users will ever want. Continued on next post... |
| #19 By 2332 (216.41.45.78) at 9/22/2003 11:35:38 AM |
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Continued from previous post...
"By the way, emailing a digital picture in Mac OS X is no brainer and requires no knowledge of the individual steps of the task." In Windows XP, any time there is a picture file visible there is a task on the left of the window that says "E-mail a picture". I click on that, and it asks me if I want to make the picture smaller if it's a large picture. (Most digital camera pictures are huge, and if you've ever received a 5MB picture on a modem connection then you know why they need to be made smaller.) It then asks for the e-mail address, and sends the picture. Can't get much easier. How do I do this in OS X? I have a photo on my desktop. I right click... oh wait, no right mouse button. Ok, I option click... damn... nothing there. Ok, I drag it into iPhoto. Hmm... well, I can rotate the hell out of it, but that doesn't help me much. Hell, I'll just drag it onto a new e-mail and send it. Tough luck for the poor bastard who now has to wait 10 minutes for his e-mail to download. See, not all tasks can be done by drag and drop. And there are many more examples. "Perhaps you should acutally try using Mac OS X for a while before you comment on it. Not in a store for ten minutes. REALLY use it fora week...then get back to me." I used OS X almost exclusively for about 3 months, albeit not by choice. I found OS X to be very pretty, and some features were really quite nice. I loved how dialogs were tied to their source application. I also loved the panel view for file folders. But there were so many UI mistakes in OS X, coupled with how slow it was overall, coupled with the number of security exploits that came out in such a short period of time, that I was happy to move back to XP. (In general, I'm fine with security problems as long as they are fixed quickly. The problem with OS X was that, since it was based on BSD, I had to worry about tons of unix exploits in addition to any Apple specific exploits. Some bugs weren't fixed for far too long.) One of the worst things about Macs in general is the horrible modal design. Having the menu bar be separate from the application just confuses the hell out of people. I'm pretty damn experienced as far as computers go, and I can't tell you how many times I thought I closed an application only to find it was still running. Sorry, but if I close the only visible window for an application, the application should close. In addition, menus shouldn't change because the focus changes, and that's unavoidable if you have a modal interface. Apple improved on this slightly with the task bar thingy at the bottom of the screen, but most users don't have a clue that a tiny little arrow below an icon means the application is open. It's just another example of Apple decided that having a pretty UI is more important than having a useable one. Lastly, before Mac OS X, Macs WERE NOT CAPABLE OF PREEMPTIVE MULTITASKING. Period. Windows has been since the first version of NT, and since Win 95 for consumers. |
| #20 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 9/22/2003 12:15:19 PM |
| BobSmith - I think the claims that Apple stole multitasking from Microsoft are sort of tongue in cheek. It's like the Apple advocates claiming Microsoft stole windows and mice from Apple, except that the Apple advocates are actually serious. :) |
| #21 By 7711 (12.107.81.66) at 9/22/2003 12:44:06 PM |
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I always love the "Mac OS is so intuitive to use" argument.
Like it's so intuative to eject a disk by dragging it to the trash....to me that would "trash".... ie delete.... the disk So intuitive..... |
| #22 By 3 (62.253.128.7) at 9/22/2003 1:01:44 PM |
| #29 - or you could just press the eject button on the keyboard? |
| #23 By 2332 (216.41.45.78) at 9/22/2003 1:15:18 PM |
| Or hit Apple + Y. :-) |
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