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Mountain Lion - are MacPros screwed?
- Thread starter Honbe
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Versions are are not intended to be a backup replacement. If they were, apple would have deprecated Time Machine, and they clearly have not.
They're to cater for the "oh **** actually i want to go back to 2 hours ago" instances, or the "oh crap, my app crashed and i haven't saved all day" problems.
They also help with the OS being able to terminate apps as needed without you losing work.
"Save as a version" is no big deal?
I've been more productive with versions already, as i can go through and edit a document without needing to worry about getting back or doing version management - and mix the results of multiple different versions (cut/paste between them) to get what I want.
Version management is something that people are bad at, and computers are good at.
Some people just think they can do a better job of it, but I'm willing to bet 5:1 odds that virtually EVERYBODY who has been working with computers more than a couple of years has lost more than a few hours of work due to forgetting to save, or saving over the top of something they wanted.
Need to re-start? No need to go through and manually decide whether or not to save every document you have open.
People have better things to do than version management by hand. The computer can do it - you really don't need to be involved.
I've upgraded a Lion install with Mountain Lion on a spare drive and other than icould stuff and messaging, there is very little noticeable difference from Lion. In fact I am hard pressed to understand how they can justify charging for this upgrade. The nicest surprise though was seeing the restore windows on restart box is now unchecked by default.
I can't speak for everyone, but the majority of the time that I lose work it is because the program I was working with crashed.
So auto-versioning is asking me to trust the application (that crashed and lost my work) to save regular copies of my work.
I still don't trust it. If I think something is important, it is MY job to save it, not the computer's.
If I really want versioning of my work, I can use SVN and a cron job to do automated commits for me. That's a pro feature that won't be going away with Mountain Lion.
Well aware that Versions is not intended to be a backup solution. The thing is if you have Time Machine up and running you don't need Versions. You already have versions every hour. "Go back in time..." remember. Now you have to fight the "Auto" saving thing at the same time as having TM. I have neither and have lost almost nothing in 15+ years.
So in the end I have 45+ versions of a one page text document that locks itself when it wants to, won't let me change the name if I happen to double cap something, and just gets in the way. I must say though that I am not a fan of most things that do things on the computer for you unless I wrote scripts for it. minifridge1138 get's it. You can't trust the buggy app ever. Trust yourself.
OMG Apple is making their OS user friendly!! OH NOOOOOZZZZ The h4ck3r5 don't know what to do with themselves!!! If there isn't anything to fix on a computer its just no fun!!! How dare they!!!!
Sorry, real "professionals" use their macs for their PROFESSION...and don't want to have to fix their computer ever day!
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+1!!
Sorry, real "professionals" use their macs for their PROFESSION...and don't want to have to fix their computer ever day!
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+1!!
I am afraid that Apple with their Lion left us more than enough to fix...
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Exactly. And that is just a small part of the problem. We have to save any changed document as a revision in our organization. Before it was easy - Save as.. Now we have to first Unlock, then Duplicate and then Save. Really "user friendly"...
Even Micro$oft did a better job with shadow copies than Apple with Versions.
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What dude? User friendly is the problem. As we progress it is getting LESS user friendly (of course IMO). Or at least for users who have been using Apple stuff for years not just because they got an iPhone a few years back. It has nothing to do with fixing anything. The more you obfuscate the internals the more fixing you need anyway. It's like global warming as an analogy, it will most likely freeze the planet again, not warm it up. It results in the opposite.
I've been using Mac, Windows, Linux, and Unix for many many years...and they more friendly they get the more I like them.
I'm also 33...and have had my share of fixing buggy computers...so maybe its just that the desire to trouble shoot is gone and I just want to use the damn thing without pulling out my hair!
Mac OSX has gotten SO much better lately...And I've been using Macs for about 20 years!
I am using Macs for work since 1995 and unfortunately do not share your opinion...
I received a Mac Pro(refurb) with Lion on it (although i was told it would have SL on it by
) i did try it out but then found out that rosetta was no longersupported and a few other issues,scanner driver,printer driver and decided i could not face the hassle of getting it all sorted out.
Cloned SL from laptop to new SSD and installed,all worked well(had to re-enter quite a few Licence keys though, luckily had all the records) and for a few days had both drives in and booted up using option key until i was happy all was working well, then took Lion HD out i kept this in case i had to return MP to
I was told NOT to do this by
staff but all is well a couple of months down the line.I liked what i saw of Lion in the short time i had it but i can not afford to spend the time sorting out issues to make it work. I will never early adopt hardware or software hence the decision to buy MP only a few months ago, tried and tested is more important than the latest and greatest (for me at least)
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Mac Pros can still take advantage of Grand Central introduced and still available since Snow Leopard.
If I could only pick one I'd pick Maya.
Heres why:
1. A TON more tutorials, its actually kind of hard to find tutorials on Houdini and the only book I've found is old.
2. Maya is much easier to use. Houdini (although greatly improved from past versions) is still kind of a pain to use.
3. More things are compatible with Maya (including animator friendly things like scripts people write to orient joints and such).
Now, take what I say above with a grain of salt because I don't do a ton of animation, I mostly will model and use Houdini for fracturing effects and such. From people I know who do a lot of animation, they prefer Maya. Houdini is more for visual effects type of stuff IMO.
Performance wise for Linux, they both run about the same. At work we have machines that run Maya and Linux and both are pretty stable on Linux.
If you are a student, you can get Maya free from Autodesk's education site. Houdini has a free version although it caps your renders to a small size (not a huge deal if you are just running the software to learn it).
EDIT: Oops, I forgot to mention even if you aren't a student you can try Maya free for 30 days, which, unless you have previous experience in it you probably won't learn much in that time frame.
Something you can do (and its something I do before purchasing pricey software) is either go for a 1 month Lynda.com or DigitalTutors.com subscription and watch some of the videos. The Lynda ones are meant to get you started with the software fast so they don't go too deep, but the Digital Tutors vids are for learning really advanced techniques. Watching some of the vids help show the workflow involved and could help you make a better decision.
Digital Tutors's "Character Rigging for Production" is an excellent course and may be of interest to you.
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I hope nobody paid for ML,yet. Because it is a Developer Preview. Not even beta. So its kinda not a complete OS. Just saying.
To answer the OP's question. Yes. MacPROs are screwed...in the same fashion that all Apple products face some form of obsolescence. I think the question should be does it make sense (economic, philosophical, spiritual, etc) to upgrade? Considering that once I buy my new hardware, I'll have a hefty bill trying to upgrade to current on most of my software. I'd say no. But that's me.
To answer the OP's question. Yes. MacPROs are screwed...in the same fashion that all Apple products face some form of obsolescence. I think the question should be does it make sense (economic, philosophical, spiritual, etc) to upgrade? Considering that once I buy my new hardware, I'll have a hefty bill trying to upgrade to current on most of my software. I'd say no. But that's me.
The issue is not whether the system of Versions, Duplicate and locked files is any good or not. The problem is that if you think Save As and making your own versions is a better way you don't have that option with Apple software. Personally I think that Duplicate and Versions sucks but I'm using Office 2011 so I don't have to deal with it except on the rare occasion when I use text edit.
Well agree to disagree then. Also, I am 3 years older so maybe I have a little more "old man" in me in regards to change
I am not optimistic about the MacPro's future, but I don 't see how ML screws them?
Things that worry me are Gatekeeper (future iteration of OSX will do away with certificates for non-app store products, you bet) and System update through the app store.
It is clear where Apple is headed and I'm not sure I like it.
Things that worry me are Gatekeeper (future iteration of OSX will do away with certificates for non-app store products, you bet) and System update through the app store.
It is clear where Apple is headed and I'm not sure I like it.
Apple has gone way, way, out of their way to assure developers that's not going to happen. I doubt this will happen any time soon.
They basically met with all the third party developers before Mountain Lion was announced (which is unusual in itself) and told them all they're not at all considering cutting third party out of app store apps, they think out of store apps are important, and they don't want to burn that bridge.
And then they repeated the same thing to reporters.
Again, they're putting a lot of effort in to make it clear they don't want to do that.
To add to the number of developers withdrawing from the app store over sandboxing this week, and it looks even less likely. If Apple went MAS only, apps like Coda would cease to exist.
Did anyone post this already?
Netkas reports some good news regarding drivers for graphic cards found in the DP1 of Mountain Lion.
Let's start with the Radeon HD 6970 and6950 that are now fully supported without any tricks, an unexpected and very positive surprise. In addition, DP1 also features drivers for the Radeon HD 7900, 7800 and 7700, so we should find those GPU in some of our future Macs.
Netkas reports some good news regarding drivers for graphic cards found in the DP1 of Mountain Lion.
Let's start with the Radeon HD 6970 and6950 that are now fully supported without any tricks, an unexpected and very positive surprise. In addition, DP1 also features drivers for the Radeon HD 7900, 7800 and 7700, so we should find those GPU in some of our future Macs.