Things that need to be fixed in Snow Leopard

Mac OSX Snow Leopard has some issues which annoy a lot of people, so here in this short post is a list of all changes Apple has to make to make Snow Leopard at least a decent service pack instead of a large annoyance.

-Safari Stripes :
Many people have been experiencing issues with top sites in Safari. When loading a page the first few seconds all we see are stripes. Apple fix this!

-64-bits not enabled and even impossible for most people :
Apple should better not be promoting 64-bits as a new feature in Snow Leopard, because it isn’t. Many people have to perform special actions to boot in 64-bits mode and most people can’t even run Snow Leopard in 64-bits mode disregarding the 64-bits EFI.

-Huge icons in stacks :
The new stacks feature is completely visually screwed up. The icons are huge and this can’t be changed it’s really an eyesore.

-Blue decorations and slowness in exposé :
This is just plain ugly, get rid of it or enable people to disable it.

Solve these things Apple and Snow Leopard will actually be an update instead of a downgrade.

Snow Leopard’s first impressions, 29€ for some tweaks?

I installed Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard today and I’m actually quite the Mac fanboy, I worship Steve Jobs and cry when I see an iPhone being thrashed, but I must say one thing : Snow Leopard is indeed nothing more than a white Leopard.

I prepared Leopard for an upgrade and made some backups, these were useless to me since everything went flawlessly. After an hour long install, Snow Leopard booted with the same video as I saw when I first bought my MacBook. I tested a few things and indeed it’s a little bit faster, but Leopard was fast enough anyway and Safari 4 still acts like a turtle with a bag of concrete on its back. Snow Leopard do seems to have more vivant colors though.

I tested some other things like the new stacks and well, that’s one of the biggest mistakes I ever saw on a mac. The icons of the grid view look gigantic. Not the flair we are used from Apple, just a bunch of irritatingly giant icons in a grid with a scrollbar next to them.

One of the few things that I do see as an improvement are the new miniatures previews for video files and such. You can play a video from its icon, which is kinda cool but still not worth the €29.

Since I’m a developer and graphics artist I also checked some rumors that Xcode wouldn’t be working, it worked fine and would build iPhone OS 2.0 apps. Photoshop CS 3 worked fine as well, so no flaws there. I’m experiencing one annoying issue, most of my screensavers I installed in Leopard don’t work anymore.

Now about the new exposé. In my opinion, what can you change about something that works great? Ok, when you hold your mouse down on an icon, it displays all screens. But in return you have to take that the exposé you are used to now looks like crap. All exposé windows now have some blue shiny edge on hover, which is in my opinion overkill and just plain ugly.

So is Snow Leopard really the greatest OS release of the year? Certainly not. Many people are comparing Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, but you can’t compare them, Windows 7 is great and might even be worth the €200, but Snow Leopard isn’t even worth the €29. Luckily it provides me with 20Gb of extra free disk space, but 29€ for 20Gb is a little too much in my opinion.

So to see an actual new Mac OSX, we’ll have to wait for 10.7 is suppose.

EDIT : Apparently 64-bits mode doesn’t work either on most macs, you can enable it if you have one of the few chosen models, but most macs even intels, have an 64-bits EFI but do not support 64-bits in the bootloader. So if Apple says Snow Leopard brings 64-bits to the mac they are really selling air.

Decay of the iTunes App store, the user’s fault?

Decay of the iTunes App store, the user’s fault?

No one can deny it, the App Store is full of junk and this junk is even flourishing.

In many blogposts and articles Apple has been blamed. In its turn Apple blames the developers for making junk and dismisses a few as an example. But nothing ever happens and the apps just filled with pictures, fart apps and single function apps keep multiplying. So who started it and who can fix it? The user.

People visit the App Store check the 2 front pages and download anything that has a flashy icon and some nice screenshots, without reading anything or without caring about the reviews. The first 2 pages are usually filled with new apps, which features 60% junk from developers that have thousands of useless apps for 99 cents. Then they find out half of it is useless and they remove it. Should it end there? No, users should write a review or give at least a rating for every app they download.

Does it mean you have to be hypercritical when reviewing each app?

Certainly not, many apps give added value to the App Store or bring competition, so be mild with these. It are the fart apps, the completely malfunctioning apps, the picture or sound collections and the travel guides that deserve a 1/5 rating. A functional app that does as it is supposed to do should get at least 2 or 3 points. If you follow these simple rules you degrade the junk and give extra momentum to the decent apps.

So why is the huge collection of junk a problem? As you know one of the only chances for an iPhone app to get some extra popularity or become known to the public is the “Release Date”-listing. This release date listing is always crammed with junk and the decent apps don’t benefit from this anymore. When a developer is releasing a decent app, the app is in the listing for about five minutes before being replaced by 200 apps from the same developer with names as “Rome Traveling Guide”, “Athens Traveling Guide”, … or “Cat Wallpapers”, “Puppy Wallpapers”, and so on.

The problem also is that the top apps in this listing are most of the time the 1-function apps so in this way a “Picture Grayscale”-app of 1,99$ will get downloaded and a 0.99$ full functional photo editing tool for the iphone with multiple filters which is only updated once every few months will not be downloaded at all.

So as the users behave now, the App Store only gives benefits to people who make bulk applications of low quality. Hundreds of good working functional apps are in the back of the popularity listing and hundreds of junk apps are in the middle.

Maybe this is partially the fault of Apple, they should review apps at some times and place these in a front page listing or while they are reviewing an app for listing in the App Store, just give a small review as well and if this is positive place them on the front page in a listing, hence filtering all junk. Just to the right of the window where I’m writing this I see a 0.99$ app on the top of the photography listing just providing “Animal Wallpapers”, is this an image editor or camera app where the photography section is ment for?

So to Apple:

Filter out the junk apps and add flood control to developer’s accounts.

To the people:

Review apps each time and wisely, trash junk apps and think twice when reviewing a functional app. Suggest things to developers before reviewing and search further than just at the front of the listings, many amazing bargains are in the back.

No one can deny it, the App Store is full of junk and this junk is even flourishing.

In many blogposts and articles Apple has been blamed. In its turn Apple blames the developers for making junk and dismisses a few as an example. But nothing ever happens and the apps just filled with pictures, fart apps and single function apps keep multiplying. So who started it and who can fix it? The user.

People visit the App Store check the 2 front pages and download anything that has a flashy icon and some nice screenshots, without reading anything or without caring about the reviews. The first 2 pages are usually filled with new apps, which features 60% junk from developers that have thousands of useless apps for 99 cents. Then they find out half of it is useless and they remove it. Should it end there? No, users should write a review or give at least a rating for every app they download.

Does it mean you have to be hypercritical when reviewing each app?

Certainly not, many apps give added value to the App Store or bring competition, so be mild with these. It are the fart apps, the completely malfunctioning apps, the picture or sound collections and the travel guides that deserve a 1/5 rating. A functional app that does as it is supposed to do should get at least 2 or 3 points. If you follow these simple rules you degrade the junk and give extra momentum to the decent apps.

So why is the huge collection of junk a problem? As you know one of the only chances for an iPhone app to get some extra popularity or become known to the public is the “Release Date”-listing. This release date listing is always crammed with junk and the decent apps don’t benefit from this anymore. When a developer is releasing a decent app, the app is in the listing for about five minutes before being replaced by 200 apps from the same developer with names as “Rome Traveling Guide”, “Athens Traveling Guide”, … or “Cat Wallpapers”, “Puppy Wallpapers”, and so on.

The problem also is that the top apps in this listing are most of the time the 1-function apps so in this way a “Picture Grayscale”-app of 1,99$ will get downloaded and a 0.99$ full functional photo editing tool for the iphone with multiple filters which is only updated once every few months will not be downloaded at all.

So as the users behave now, the App Store only gives benefits to people who make bulk applications of low quality. Hundreds of good working functional apps are in the back of the popularity listing and hundreds of junk apps are in the middle.

Maybe this is partially the fault of Apple, they should review apps at some times and place these in a front page listing or while they are reviewing an app for listing in the App Store, just give a small review as well and if this is positive place them on the front page in a listing, hence filtering all junk. Just to the right of the window where I’m writing this I see a 0.99$ app on the top of the photography listing just providing “Animal Wallpapers”, is this an image editor or camera app where the photography section is ment for?

So to Apple:
Filter out the junk apps and add flood control to developer’s accounts.

To the people:
Review apps each time and wisely, trash junk apps and think twice when reviewing a functional app. Suggest things to developers before reviewing and search further than just at the front of the listings, many amazing bargains are in the back.

The Novice Guide to choosing a Web Browser in Windows 7

Many people will soon be forced to choose between one of many browsers in Windows 7 so here we made a small article in basic language which helps them pick the Web Browser that is right for them.

The Novice Guide to choosing a browser :

1. Internet Explorer (Download) :

You can use this browser if your used to it, but it’s the uttermost basic browser there is. It doesn’t provide extended functionality, lacks some functions to display websites correctly and is somehow considered unsafe, especially when your e-banking.

Pros : Basic, Simple

Cons : Unsafe, Bad displaying of websites, Lacks functionality

2. Firefox (Download) :

Firefox is the most “fun” browser and is the best browser if you are too used to Internet Explorer but still want to try something else.

You can change its looks by using personas to display backgrounds behind your buttons. It displays the web correctly, is light and is also extendible by using plugins to eg. display all google pages on one one page so you don’t have to click the next buttons anymore.

A downside is that it isn’t the fastest browser and that you still have to install features through the plugin system that are default to most other webbrowsers.

Pros : Fun, Decent, Simple, Extendible, Light

Cons : Extensions are hard to install for novice users, Not the fastest

3. Safari (Download) :

Safari is the browser from Apple, the manufacturer of iPods, iPhones, Macs and iTunes. It has its own look but still doesn’t differ much from what you are used to in layout. It still looks basically like internet explorer and Firefox to decrease the learning curve.

It’s the best browser if you want synchronisation with iPod Touch or iPhone. It’s the fastest browser together with chrome and supports all possible web technologies.

It also has an astounding way to let you open all your favorite websites, by displaying all your favorite websites in a 3D wall, which automatically puts a star next to all websites which were changed since the time you last visited them.

Pros : Best usable with Apple products, Fastest, Simple, Easy access to favorite sites, Displays websites correctly

Cons : Heavy, Lacks Functionality

4. Chrome (Download) :

Chrome is a browser from Google, yeah that’s right, the Search Enige Google. It is considered the fastest browser by many sources, but this is disputed by Apple’s Safari.

It displays websites as well a Safari and has a different look and feel than most browsers. It’s simple and more or less functional, but it is a big step from Internet Explorer since the interface differs too much. It is updated a lot and is considered very safe.

Pros : Very Safe, Different, Fastest, Displays Websites Correctly, Updated a lot

Cons :  Not so easy for Internet Explorer users, Heavy

5. Opera (Download) :

Opera is the least known of this browsers and isn’t made by a huge organisation or a computer giant, but still gets around well.

Opera displays websites quite well, but it definitely isn’t the fastest browser. It has a whole lot of functionality and has a huge amount of features to enhance your user experience. It is always the first to come out with fun features like Opera “Unite” which let’s you chat or share images or other files with other people who use Opera.

Opera is also the browser which looks the least like the traditional browser. It differs from Internet Explorer tremendously and is criticized because many of its features are hard to access.

Pros : Many features, fun, always innovating, different

Cons : Slow, Hard to use, doesn’t feel like a normal browser, not customizable

What do we suggest?

Firefox or Safari

Why?

Firefox has all the things a browser needs and if you need to get more advanced features you can use the plugins, also the personas are a lot of fun, to get eg. your favorite singer to appear behind the buttons.

Safari because it is in our opinion the fastest and because the 3D “Top Sites” feature is the best way to access your favorite websites, something you won’t find in any other browser by default.

What do we avoid?

Internet Explorer

Why?

Many people who make websites agree, Internet Explorer is ruining the web, where Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari already support 3D animations in websites and the ability to watch video’s without needing Flash Player, Internet Explorer just lacks these features. If less people start using Internet Explorer you would have websites you can walk through, view youtube video’s without slowdowns or without needing Flash Player and could play eg. World of Warcraft or The Sims directly in your browser.

Word List :

-Flash Player : A tool created by Adobe that enables you to play games and watch video’s on the Internet.
-Personas : A feature of Firefox which allows you to set a background images behind the buttons at the top of your webbrowser.

-Opera Unite : A feature of Opera which enables you to display applications in your webbrowser which allow you to eg. Leave notes for other users, exchange files or images or host your own website. It is still being developed and isn’t included in Opera at the moment.

-Top Sites : A feature of Safari which enables you to display miniature versions of you websites in a 3D wall to allow you to easily access your favorite websites.

WWDC ’09/Snow Leopard Preview

 

I was browsing the web recently and I came across some intresting facts and rumors about Snow Leopard which can easily be linked to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. In this way I can predict a date for the release of Snow Leopard and can I also conclude something else about the WWDC keynotes.

First of all, Apple already announced the many performance improvements of Mac OSX 10.6, but a performance improvement wasn’t enough to justify the price of $129 for a new Mac OSX. So Apple took iTunes as an example and started developing a new GUI. The GUI will be darker than the current one and will be smoother. So now we can conclude that Mac OSX 10.6 will cost money but will certainly not be a small update. Snow Leopard will be the fastest and most stable operating system in the world and will have a completely new interface.

What about the date?
Snow Leopard will be released 2 months after the WWDC ’09 on the 8th of June, so that makes somewhere mid August, probably the 10th.

There is yet another conclusion : Steve Jobs will be back to perform a keynote on WWDC ’09! 
He would be away for about a half year and the WWDC is  about half a year after his departure. So he will probably announce the new OS himself.

Windows fanboys “?”, Mac Fanboys quiet, Linux Fanboys bitching.

Yes its so far, Mac OSX has a decent marketshare and they are quiet, some are even willing to install windows 7 on bootcamp. If you would have asked that from an OSX fanboy 2 years ago he would have came to visit you with a bazooka. Anyway, this is a result of their rise in marketshare, they are less frustrated and actually becoming objective. 

Windows fanboys, well they have nothing to complain about, they still have 88%. Think about it, 1.000$ is divided between three children, one gets 85$ (Mac OSX), one gets 880$ (Windows) and one gets 8,5$ (Linux). Which one will be frustrated?

So there is another group with a very small marketshare : The Linux Community!
Representing 0,85% of all PC users they think they own the world and the are 100% convinced that Linux will run on 60% of all desktops within 2 years, I present to you : The Linux community.
Now that Apple fanboys finally do shut up, Linux fanboys become arrogant and insulting, why? How can a fly be arrogant to a cheetah and a lion? Well yeah, we all know the answer, flies are irritating.

So message to the Linux fanboys : SHUT THE F*CK UP AND DISCOVER REALISM!

The end is near for Linux, at least for its popularity… or not?

Recent announcements of Windows 7 chook the entire world and microsoft didn’t even say anything, people are. One of the articles that I came across was about the use of Windows 7 on netbooks and I started thinking.

Apple is releasing Mac OSX 10.6 in a while which will make Mac OSX even more stable and probably the fastest OS on the earth.
It’s kind of an Xbox-effect, Mac OSX 10.6 will be released before Windows 7, so it should have an advantage, but…
Windows 7 is already so popular that it has approximately 1,5% of global marketshare which means that Apple will have to come up with something good to get Windows 7 out of the people’s heads.

Did you notice how I didn’t mention Linux? Well what’s there to mention, Ubuntu, the most popular distro has released its latest version a while ago and it wasn’t very special, I hope Ubuntu 9.04 will be more innovative. And for a non commercial OS it has to be. The last chance for Linux, as OS on netbooks is also endangered. Windows 7 will run on netbooks as well, it will even have a direct-on button for simple tasks and will have a lot higher performance. What do you think people would use? Linux or their favorite windows? Well here in Belgium it’s clear, 3/4 of all Linux netbooks are returned to the store after people find out that there is Linux on there instead of Windows, they now even prefer a 6 year old Windows OS above a brand new Linux distro. Says enough doesn’t it?  I don’t think Linux stands much of chance, people will eventually choose Windows above linux, because they are used to it.

My conclusion is that there will be a war next year between the 2 biggest OS’s Mac OSX Snowy Leopard and Windows 7. Linux will have to watch how the two endanger its marketshare. Of course this will not be the end of Linux since it is community driven, but you’d better prepare for a Linux with 0,3% marketshare instead of 0,85%. Unless Ubuntu 9.04 is there to save the day with a superfast booting OS. 

So the big cat and lucky seven are fighting but the penguin is not invited. And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that way. Tons of blog posts were released of Windows 7 pulverizing Linux. That’s obviously a different attitude than the one at Vista’s release but at the moment you can’t really tell it will go either way or another, so it might turn out a completely other way.
This is just what I think will happen. 

Linux is dead (or isn't it?)

Is vista really that bad?

After having used xp for quite a while instead of vista and having used Mac OSX on a regular base. I return to Windows Vista to make some free disk space and a partition to install the already famous Windows 7. And that’s when I noticed something, is Windows Vista really that bad? After removing some old junk from my hardrive, the boot went as smooth as a baby’s but.

But I also noticed something irritating in this process. To enable me to make room available for a new 20Gb partition I needed to clean my cache with the system cleaning tool and I noticed that all cache and backups, system restore points, page files, … took an astounding 9,82Gb of my harddrive space! I still have pc’s that only have a 40Gb harddrive, imagine that, 10Gb for the Vista installation + 10Gb cache = 50% of the harddisk we used to work with until three years ago. This is huge.
But is Apple any better with their Mac OSX? No, Windows saves all that information to restore your PC in case anything goes wrong. Mac OSX also has such a feature called Time Machine, Time Machine uses an external harddrive to store the info Windows Vista stores in its cache and guess what? Time Machine copies have the same effectiveness but take about 50Gb more on an external harddisk than Windows Vista does in its cache. So this means that if Apple wouldn’t tell you to buy an external HD to backup everything, files on Mac OSX would take twice the normal diskspace. So definitely a good score for windows, you don’t have to buy an external HD and they discovered a highly space efficient method to make backups.

I was afraid for one more thing, after cleaning so many system files and disabling system restore, the paging files, … would Windows Vista still work? If I did this in Windows XP, I have gotten already a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) or two and in Vista, nothing. It’s obviously more  stable.

What brings me to the next point, Virus Protection. Where my old XP PC’s were constantly infected (nowadays less), Windows Vista hasn’t had one encounter with a virus, I don’t even use an Antivirus but do regular checkups by downloading AV scanning engines and nothing! A clean Vista.

Now UAC, the dreaded new function… Well who told you that Windows Vista sucks? I guess in most cases your PC maker from the local store or a 24/7 downloading uncle. Well what do you do on Windows Vista? Write notes, manage pictures, chat with friends, go online,… How often do you have to install something? PC makers all the time and your uncle every time he installs a new antivirus to try it out or downloads a virus actually. You, not very often, so is it really that hard to enter your password once in a while?

So the conclusion is that Windows Vista is quite fast (if cleaned), is much safer than XP and much more stable as well, all driver and software issues are history and it has an even better backup method than Mac OSX. So is it really that bad? No.

Windows 7 : Windows strikes Back!

After having been commercially destroyed for 3 years windows strikes back with the newest version : Windows 7. The Beta will have been downloaded more than firefox soon. This could be the most successful version of Windows ever as it is even being downloaded by Linux and Mac OSX users out of curiosity, which are normally oblivious to new idea’s especially coming from windows. It provides the improvements of Windows Vista and is even faster than XP enabling it to even run on netbooks. So now we have a full blown state of the art operating system for netbooks. 99% of the people who download it are enthusiastic and the other 1% are filled with prejudice. But the prediction seems true, people have skipped windows Vista and are now going for Windows 7.

My prognosis is that Microsoft will strike back with Windows 7 and once again pulverize the other desktop OS’s. Linux that got its small rise in marketshare by the downfall of Vista will once again lose all of this new gained users, now that Windows is working again, who needs Linux? Take this together with the ability of Windows 7 to run on netbooks and this could mean up to 50% loss for Linux. Mac OSX will do slightly better because the downfall of Vista only inspired Apple to give the marketing of Mac OSX a boost. So people discovered Mac OSX and Mac OSX is more than a decent operating system but this is not the reason why people are buying macs. People buy macs because they have the same brand as the übercool iPods. Buy a Mac or you’re out, this means that the growth of Mac OSX will only slow down and will only mean a slight loss at the release of Windows 7, yes indeed I believe that some Mac OSX users are going to switch to Windows 7 when they have to buy a new computer or are just going to install it on bootcamp. So expect a 20% loss for Apple and a 80% decreased growth.

So the marketshare statistics for 2010, Windows 93,5% Mac OSX 5,5% Linux 0,4% Other 0,6%
If this trend remains we will see a downfall in mac popularity because the Mac frenzy is over, which means :
Windows 96,5% Mac OSX 2,4% Linux 0,3% Other 0,8% 

I seem enthusiastic, don’t I? Well don’t think that this is a bad thing, I’m a developer and one operating system means, having to buy one programming environment and only having to compile code once instead of having to buy three IDE’s, learning the hardest programming languages and having to update three different applications. So I’m very enthusiastic that this is Windows which is the most friendly OS towards developers. But this is also fantastic news for all the Windows users (less for the most hard-core Mac and Linux users because it just isn’t their OS). Do you remember what it was like to see a game in the store and see the big Xbox Logo above it when you only had a gamecube/wii? Well it’s the same thing now, do you see that great application but it’s only available for Mac. Well it will soon be for Windows as well because it is more attractive to developers.

Note that this is a prognosis, things can take an ugly turn.

(Now I’m waiting for the first flame comment by Mac-/Linux Fanboys.)

Mac OSX 10.6 “Snow Leopard” might be free!

After recent announcements by Apple we have reason to believe that Mac OSX 10.6 will be free for all Mac OSX 10.5 users, like they did with version 10.1 Puma.

Snow Leopard will be a Mac OSX version that fixes a lot of the instabilities in Mac OSX 10.5 which is suffering many application crashes. It will also prepare Mac OSX for the flow of games that will also become available for Mac OSX by providing new and more effective graphic card technologies. As you can see these changes aren’t that impressive and that is the first reason.

The second is that Apple did not announce Snow Leopard in the Macworld Keynote. A new Mac version is much more exciting than the a new macbook pro or a DRM free iTunes. But they just didn’t say a word about Mac OSX 10.6. Isn’t that a bit odd, no, because Mac OSX 10.6 is probably going to be a free update without much extra features and therefore not worth mentioning.

The third also envolves the keynote at Macworld, Apple is going to release a Box set with Leopard, iLife and iWork for just $169. Isn’t that also a bit odd. Leopard costs $129, iLife and iWork 2009 $79 = $287. This could have something to do with Snow Leopard being free, which would make $158+ some booklets and box = $169.