On 22 May 2004 at 20:20, Mark D Lew wrote: > On May 22, 2004, at 1:35 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > But, in case you want to defend your stance on Longhorn and OS X, do > > tell exactly which features of Longhorn (i.e., features that were > > absent in any previous version of Windows) are ripped off from OS X. > > > > I'm all ears. > > Weren't we talking about Mac OS X's "Expos�" feature here not long > ago? Isn't that one of the things coming in Longhorn which doesn't > currently exist in Windows?
Longhorn was planned out in its basic architecture long before the release of Panther and Expose. In any event, Expose is just a task switcher, a really amazing one, but nonetheless, not something architectural. Indeed, it was ripped off by a third-party add-on program within a short time of its release. > As I understand it, the main features which Longhorn is going to add > which were not in previous versions of Windows but are in Mac OS X -- > I assume that's what's meant by "ripped off" -- primarily have to do > with the graphic interface. > > Longhorn is going to have windows that can be semi-transparent so that > other windows are visible behind them. It's going to add animation > features so that the various manipulations of icons, windows, etc, > will be smoother and snazzier. For example the "genie in a bottle" > effect when a window is "put away" somewhere, or the way that a tiny > icon can balloon to a more readable size when your mouse pointer moves > over it (to name two "gee whiz" effects which I myself soon turned > off...). I'm not very familiar with the state of the art in Windows, > but as I understand it, these things are currently absent in Windows, > but they are present in Mac OS X. And do any of them add any actual useful functionality at all? > Also, some changes that aren't really new features, but evolutions of > features that already exist: The current Windows task bar is going to > be dressed up in a direction that makes it more like OS X's "dock". > (This is largely a byproduct of the animation/transparency stuff.) > With regard to file organization, the current "My Pictures", "My > Movies", "My Music", etc., are moving more in the direction of OS X's > Library folder, leaving users less responsibility for keeping track of > where files are actually located. (This latter is something that an > old curmudgeon like me dislikes, by the way. I prefer to do all my > file locating myself, but obviously I'm an exception.) I have never acquiesced to Microsoft's choices about where I want these things located. But I have to use the registry editor to change them. And, frankly, I don't think most users *do* know or care where those files are located. Maybe in Win9x they had to worry about it, but in Win2K and WinXP, they can get there easily without ever needing to know where the folders are actually located. > Of course you may now nitpick that these are not really "features" but > just fluff, or that they aren't really "innovations". But whatever you > want to call it, I believe this is the sort of thing people have in > mind when they characterize Longhorn as copying OS X. OK. I didn't know Microsoft was stupidly intending to rip off the non- cosmetic aspects of the OS X UI. Frankly, making the TaskBar more Dock-like sounds like a massive mistake to me, since as Bruce Tognazzini has pointed out, Apple made many of the same mistakes in the design of the Dock that MS made in implementing the TaskBar. I understand that quite a few of those have been rectified in later iterations of the Dock, but it seems to me that many of the problems are fundamental (to both examples) and cannot be papered over in this way. > I'm just addressing your question here; I have no desire to associate > myself with any claim that either OS is "ripping off" the other. Both > groups are chasing a similar goal, so it's hardly surprising that > they're going to evolve along a similar path. It's only natural that > one system will adopt the more successful features of the other. If > the Microsoft buzz is to be believed, Longhorn is not just going to > chase Mac OS X in graphical interface stuff, but surpass it -- at > which point it will be Mac's turn to "rip off". In regard to Longhorn, I hadn't heard about UI issues yet -- all I had heard about was all the major changes to the fundamental underpinnings of the OS, none of which are things that are present in OS X, so far as I'm aware. Microsoft has always ineptly copied Apple's innovations, usually betraying in the process that they don't even fully comprehend what they are copying. I don't consider that to be anything other than par- for-the-course Microsoft stupidity. If I were MS, the last thing I'd copy would be the transparent dialogs. First, I don't see that there's any benefit to it at all (how often do I *need* to see what's behind a dialog? and, please, don't bring up non-movable dialogs, which don't exist in Windows), and Apple had to work *very* hard on Quartz to make it perform decently. Why MS wants to go through all of that schreck just for a cosmetic feature, I can't say. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
