And, as your quote shows, they base what they think they want on what they know. This makes revolutionary change hard to come by.
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why i'm leery of lion
- Thread starter stevemiller
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And, as your quote shows, they base what they think they want on what they know. This makes revolutionary change hard to come by.
B
Yeah, because if people in general knew about the revolutionary change someone else would already've done it.
In many cases however revolutionary change can actually be somewhat derived from what people say they want. Like the "faster horses" from the quote for example. The key is not to take it literary and breed "faster horses", but to focus on the fact that people obviously aren't entirely satisfied with horses and find novel and unexpected ways to deal with the issues.
Unfortunately people fear change. Just look at these Lion threads...
Unfortunately people fear change. Just look at these Lion threads...
Fullscreen and new app launchers are too aesthetically pleasing and geared toward the masses! This continuing evolution in the ease of mainstream computing is an insult to my hard-earned technical prowess! Why would they add these new finger gestures when these keyboard shortcuts have been working for me for years??? Rabble rabble and so forth and so on!
Relax.
Your mac comes with an app called photobooth, it's not a pro application, is it? Does that means you can't use your Mac with pro apps?...
This goes as well with all these new mainstream eye candy stuff, they are not going to hurt you or steal your(or mines) precious keyboard shortcuts
Unfortunately people fear change. Just look at these Lion threads...
hey, did you read my post? i'm not fearing change! my original point was that i doubt many of the changes and features will trickle down to actually benefit me for a while. so it makes the prospects of running out, buying, installing, and potentially waiting for bugfix/compatibility releases not really worth it, just to know that i have some l33t new technology that may become useful once those pokey adobe devs decide to make use of it (more likely they'll implement a godawful non-standard version that is yet another 1gb app to install in their suite). i'm not being a luddite here, i'm being a realist!
also, i'm not saying apple can't throw in some tinker-toy launchpad app if they want, but again, its not going to drive a purchase from me. its friendly and thats fine, but in terms of innovation it doesn't hold a candle to all the wonderful 3rd party launchers from quicksilver/launchbar/butler/(heck even apple's own spotlight).
let me clarify my position, i'm not saying what apple should or shouldn't do with lion or the future of mac os, just personally stating my reservations on how much i suspect i'd actually use what they're bringing to the table this round.
things can be easy but still inefficient, and once you've discovered a more efficient way of doing something, you don't really want to go back.
taking launchbar as an example, to me nothing is easier than typing the first letter or two of what you want to do and having it appear for you. by contrast bringing up an "elegant fullscreen" display to peruse my apps against a relaxing mountain backdrop would just become tedious. i guess it would be helpful if you use your computer primarily for liesure and you're often trying to decide what application you feel like using; in fact that's regularly what i'll do on my iphone while i'm on the subway. but the fact remains thats not how i use my computer. so loading lion up with that type of stuff is fine, but i'll never bother using it, those features aren't going to drive any desire to upgrade.
So one of your main worries is that developers won't use the API's that Apple provides, and that somehow makes Lion the thing at fault? Huh?
fault is the wrong word. but is it not fair to have legitimate concerns about developer adoption when that adoption is essential to the utility of 4 of the tentpole features apple is advertising? compared to all the stuff like time machine/expose/spotlight/etc thats there for you to use no matter what. lion feels like snow leopard, which gave us cool concepts like grand central and open cl, but they barely get used by developers, so i'm left asking myself, why did i bother? i mean if i even went back to leopard today, i'm not sure if there's anything i'd realize was missing!
Things like grand central barely got used? Source?? How would you even know?
This is how software works. OS makers give developers the tools to implement new features. Its up to the devs to use them or not. I really think we will see wide adoption of most of Lion's high profile features given enough time.
Also, consider Apple's long history of giving high profile devs prior access so that at launch there are some heavy weights in given industries implemented those features.
Your concerns do hold water, as it is up to devs to adopt many of these features, but Apple is definitely aware of this and they strive to make it easy for devs to use these tools. Apple is pretty good at making markets trend towards their aims. Look at HTML5.
I'm not as concerned about having to wait for full implementation of features, as I am about the fact that iOS is a mobile OS.
I fail to see what good blending iOS into OS X will be for power users such as myself and others, that use our computers to make a living.
I do a lot of scientific / math / maya / etc. and fail to see anything but disadvantages.
If I am wrong, please correct me. Tell me what Lion has to offer those of us who have been using computers professionally for years.
But they're not dumbing anything down or removing anything. They're just adding a lot of little tweaks and much needed features that should have been there a long time ago. They're not doing complete revamps from an advanced OS to a toy, but they are adding all those little things that make a big difference from a UI standpoint.
You're 'professional' experience with the system will remain the same, but throughout using it you'd notice some things are a bit more convenient than others. The good thing about Lion in my opinion is that this isn't going to be a compromised OS in that to add features you have to remove some.
That's where I disagree. They're adding some little things that could help some people a little. Launchpad, one of the major features of OSX, is really not a "major" feature. It may be ok, but for the most part its meh.
Given the architecture of OSX and having apps in an application folder this feature is more superfluous.
My bone of connection is that apple has been paying a lot of attention on the iDevices - and its paid off, but with SL not having any "consumer" type updates people were hoping to see some major updates to OSX, not the ipadification.
Thats what I want to see too, but the iPadification is only going to intensify
If Apple is going to gear the iDevices up so grannies can use them, they could at least keep the Macs a bit "pro" without all this iOS stuff rubbing off on them!
Well, the thing is: if people were disappointed that SL didn't get any "consumer"-type updates, why are they now disappointed when Lion is getting exactly "consumer"-type updates? "iPadification" is just another way of saying that most of the updates are consumer-oriented, not pro-oriented.
Me? I'm looking forward to Versions. A version control system built into the OS sounds pretty pro to me. I'm also looking forward to the advancement of the QT X libraries and less dependence on the QT 7 stuff.
ETA: The only "pro" feature remotely going away is that Spaces is now 1D instead of 2D. I mourn that. But otherwise, I don't see why everyone's so afraid of any "pro" stuff going away. It's all still there. As long as the *nix underbelly is there and accessible, I don't really care what consumer stuff they put on top of it if it doesn't get in my way.
Full screen apps sounds like a nonstarter for me. I use spaces to split my desk top into 9 views. I still have to shuffle things around to get work done. I hope it isn't the default or is hard to avoid.
There's nothing wrong with simplicity as long as it doesn't come at the price of dumbing down the system. The only snobbish engineers I am aware of are those right out of school. Seasoned ones are far too busy and mature for progress blocking attitudes. Furthermore there's not one accomplished scientist or engineer I know that doesn't know what they want.
Not knowing what one wants, is the home of the uninitiated and uneducated.
If not for these highly skilled professionals, we would not have the excellent products and services we have today. To suggest they don't know what they want and need in the tools of their trade (software & hardware) is to be removed from reality.
I love my desktop - it's still my primary machine, love the UNIX terminal, stability, and everything that Snow Leopard improved from Leopard. That said, I also really enjoy using my iPad, especially when I don't feel like sitting in front of a big monitor, or just want to browse online from wherever I am (like I'm doing now.)
Point is, I like both types of UI - full OS X and iOS. The whole launchpad UI doesn't make much sense on a desktop computer though. Flip through page after page, open this folder or that one...very inefficient. Works well on a small tablet-sized device, not so well on a 24"+ sized monitor.
My biggest complaint (or fear) of Lion is exactly this:
I'm gonna have to test the "new" Spaces before I get Lion to see how easy it is to use - looking at the demos, it doesn't seem to be as flexible as the current incarnation. If it isn't, I hope there's a setting to let us change how it's invoked.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely upgrading to Lion and other releases in the future, but Spaces is such a huge part of my daily interaction with OS X, that losing its current functionality will be a pretty serious loss for me.
Point is, I like both types of UI - full OS X and iOS. The whole launchpad UI doesn't make much sense on a desktop computer though. Flip through page after page, open this folder or that one...very inefficient. Works well on a small tablet-sized device, not so well on a 24"+ sized monitor.
My biggest complaint (or fear) of Lion is exactly this:
I'm gonna have to test the "new" Spaces before I get Lion to see how easy it is to use - looking at the demos, it doesn't seem to be as flexible as the current incarnation. If it isn't, I hope there's a setting to let us change how it's invoked.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely upgrading to Lion and other releases in the future, but Spaces is such a huge part of my daily interaction with OS X, that losing its current functionality will be a pretty serious loss for me.
fair call on gcd, i don't know how widely it has been adopted. after a quick web search, final cut i believe does not, since its still carbon (but that may change tomorrow), cs5 sounds like it does (which is heartening, although i've had far worse performance from my adobe apps since snow leopard, but thats another discussion).
anyway, my point in all of this was not "lion WILL suck;" but the realization that many of the features may not be immediately useable, and i worry if cross platform developers might not want to add os-specific features making their software behave differently on different systems. as a result, that makes me leery of getting it straight away and dealing with whatever initial release kinks there may be when the flip-side benefits are still uncertain.
a lot of people seem to get offended if you speak your mind about concerns for apple stuff, and i'm not sure why. if nothing else, delayed developer adoption of features is at least worth raising awareness. many os features in the past have been stand-alone tools that start globally working for you immediately: spotlight, time machine, spaces, expose, automator, and so on. until recently i didn't even think about how the individual software devs would have to update their apps for many of lion's tentpole features; i naively assumed the magic os pixie dust would do all the work and i'd be safe from every overwriting or losing a document in a crash ever again. and i'm a relatively savvy computer user, so there's got to be a lot of other people who are going to go into lion assuming the same thing, and be posting angrily when they lose stuff.
with regards to stuff like launchpad, i'm not complaining about them, i'm just saying they're of little interest to me. i wanted to express my concerns about the features that do interest me without dismissive responses like "who cares launchpad alone is reason to upgrade."
That is true of every OS release...
OS's are platforms for developers some features will get take up quickly others won't. Some may take a lot of work, so they have to be timetabled into the development budgets. Then again even minor changes aren't trivial and still need budget time to test.
How well these tentpoles integrate with existing work is something that will no doubt be discussed at WWDC. If Auto-Save is an extension of system Save then those who use that will get it with little effort.
If you take something Like GCD it's not like it made the problem of finding parallel code any easier. What it did was make dealing with the code easier so once a programmer had found a snippets that could be handled off the main thread. The full benefit of a tech like that will years to implement. Take years of programmers learn what works what doesn't there will be short term gains and long term gains. Big complex programs will have code in it that unless it breaks won't even be touched for a couple of years. I know of one cross-platform program that went SL only (on the Mac side) because of the benefits of GCD on a very low level part of the program.
I guess it comes down to your own natural Optimistism levels.
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I suggest a hyphen up there. I had to re-read that sentence several times thinking "only on the Mac side?? But it shouldn't be possible to go SL on the Windows side!!"
But I'm a tad inebriated, so...
Yes, but that there is my beef exactly, always talking about "dumbing down" and how some people are evidently the "pro users" and whatnot. They sound to me like those dinosaurs who still lurk the internet, full of pride because they can handle pointers and full of disgust for those who prefer automatic garbage collection (not that the two are specifically related).
As far as I see it, Lion isn't even out yet. As far as I can tell, they have done no such thing as remove some critical OMFG feature which would make it impossible to navigate OS X through anything but Launchpad.
So what is all the fuss about? Why do some of those "pro users" need to distinguish themselves so from what they see is "consumer" market?
If I profile code and try to read IL-code, does that make me a pro user? If someone uses Photoshop for their job vis a vis their hobby, does that make that person a pro user?
It almost seems as if these "pro users" feel their technical prowess to be less relevant in an operating system which tries to make things simple, and they don't like it.
And as far as not knowing what they want: they may very well be the most intelligent engineers that have ever graced our planet, that does not make them visionaries. If you're stuck into doing things a certain way for too lang, you tend to loose sight of other ways to go about it. If what you were saying was actually generally true, there would be a lot more companies bringing out tech that shocks the market, instead of just one at the moment.
It's a big a common myth.
Apple user? Non-Nerd
MS/google user? Nerd and smart
I just don't know where I fit anymore as I use all three.