New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume
apple.com
apple.com
This seems like a great way to introduce your average user to the powers of version control.
It doesn't. "*Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion."
I'm assuming they'll be supported by Apple's first party programs, then sporadically by 3rd party developers, as it is with Time Machine, QuickView and Spotlight document helpers support.
https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40903620438269952
https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/40905883584180224
Question related to this:
https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906705118175233
https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906796650471424
https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40909480342331392
If indeed Apple is moving forward and opening up dialogue with external researchers this is a good thing. Hopefully that means that Mac OS X Lion will finally join the ranks of Windows 7 and Linux in having full ASLR available and more sand-boxing of the various components so that it becomes a much more hardened target.
Yeah, I was honestly really surprised as well that Apple is doing an outreach, it definitely makes me extremely happy to see that Apple may finally be getting it concerning security!
I think vista (and seven ?) handles softwares updates in a more friendly way, asking you if you want to do the updates when you shutdown the system.
It isn't that you've wanted "restart" from an operating system, it's that you've wanted an operating system where the paradigm is such that no restarts are required.
The problem with making my laptop work like an iPad is that the laptop is a general purpose computer and the iPad is not.[1] The genius of the iPad was that it was a specialized device built for a single purpose: consuming media anywhere, anytime. It has long battery life, sunlight-visible screen, and does not require mouse or keyboard. It is very good at its purpose -- you can use it as a book reader or movie viewer while riding a bus, sitting in a park, etc -- and it sucks for anything else (e.g. anything that requires typing more than a few characters).
My laptop, on the other hand, was designed to be an all-up computer that could be used anywhere that there was a flat surface, but mostly indoors. I can use it at home, at the coffee shop, etc. It's also fine for consuming media as long as I'm not in direct sunlight or away from power for more than a few hours.
So. What exactly am I gaining by adding these iPad features? Sure, I bet they're handy and I'll probably learn to use them. But I can't help but think that a bunch of guys as talented as Apple could have produced something really impressive in the time they took adding these iPad features.
[1] No pedantry, please.
1. There's no notion of save.
2. There's no notion of quit.
3. There's no notion of filesystem.
Having the app save things automatically and always present you with the most up-to-date version of your document is kind of cool actually. But, you say, "I don't want it to save my document sometimes--what if I want to experiment and then throw away the changes?" I think that is where the new "versions" feature fits in. It seems designed to give people exactly that. I suspect that ⌘S will change from "Save" to "Snapshot".
Having the app suspend itself, save its state and unload at the appropriate time is interesting too. It gives the app a sense of persistence that doesn't exist in most desktop apps currently. I've already subconsciously switched to this style of thinking. I like my Firefox set up to restore the windows from last time. I do a similar thing with my Emacs so that all my buffers get saved and restored (emacs-desktop).
I think I'd have a hard time letting go of my filesystem. I don't see anything in Lion that seems to indicate they are moving that way. But I kind of understand it. It'll probably start moving that direction eventually. But who knows.
>The Mac App Store is a central app clearinghouse.
>Launchpad gives users a better way to look through apps (no more Applications folder or bloated dock).
>True full-screen apps have been missing from OS X for years, and these remove clutter.
>Mission Control is the full-screen version of the iOS multitasking bar. More user-friendly than Apple-Tab.
>Resume & Auto-Save reproduce that "persistent app" feeling from iOS.
These are pretty good lessons they've learned from the iPad user experience. There's no reason why a laptop shouldn't learn from the experiences of other platforms.
The substance behind this hype are the improvements toward ubiquitous computing. No single improvement is revolutionary. Auto Save and Versions means less worry about losing work. Google Spreadsheets has these. Resume is similar to Session Manager for Firefox. It is useful for single computers now, but will be even more handy when we move around between computers and resume from anywhere. AirDrop and even iPad File Sharing over WebDAV on Lion Server are efforts to integrate services like Dropbox into the core of the OS.
Management of these menial tasks and concerns fades to the background. Google is artful in bringing such improvements to their web apps, and Apple is beautifully skilled at integrating new functionality and paradigms into their devices and OS platforms.
So we have saving, versioning (of sorts), resuming, and sharing. All we need is a humongous data center to store all the data.
The writing is on the wall, just past the glossy pictures.
Launchpad seems like Program Manager from the olden days of Windows.
I have never seen my mom type to find a file she was looking for, let alone launch an app. Every single person I know that isn't in technology or consider themselves technically competent uses and explores their computer solely with the mouse. Even editing a word she just typed, my mom would leave the keyboard, mouse over the previous word's characters, and then retype it.
(Not to get into a your mom vs my mom or anything)
I hope it at least supports drag and drop like cmd-tab. I'd use it. Typing app names is great and all, but I don't manage my photos with the command line.
Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion: (http://netkas.org/?p=609)
>Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better. A lot of apps are sandboxed. OpenGL 3.2 support
I just activated it again to see how it looks and.. well, it could look better :) I tried the preferences and I've to admit I think they looked better (scaled up) in 10.5 than on 10.6.
[0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/00649...
Of course, this only covered vertex processing and other compute-intensive tasks, and thus wouldn't apply to many other OpenGL features.
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-i...
I'm still hopeful that someday the Linux community will finally produce a polished desktop solution on par with Apple.
The auto-versioning got me thinking of how to do this with git. You could have a cron job come by while you're working and if anything has changed, add and commit it to $CURR_BRANCH/auto. Then, when you're ready to do a real commit, you `git merge --squash`
I know that real git users commit about as often as they save, but would this make sense as a workflow for those of us who are still used to committing only when it works? Or would all of the autocommits make things overcomplicated?
What both Macs and Windows seem to lack is a modifier for holding to drag windows: most X11 window managers let you hold Alt to drag windows, regardless of where you click. That would have saved me from several situations in Windows where the titlebar of a window is out of the viewable area, and I therefore could not move the window.
I'm spoiled by Notational Velocity, which saves automatically, and by iPad apps for same. I have Coda and TextMate set to save when they lose focus so I don't lose work...
If your autosave makes you run out of disk space, you're probably "doing it wrong".
They are not so rare at this point in history - many people use a laptop as their main/only machine, and the move to SSD shrunk my disk by 3X. Space is going to be tight for a couple of years - I traded it for great performance.
Your computer already kind of does what you describe: That's what virtual memory paging is. And when your system starts paging a lot, it's noticeably slower. And when your computer starts paging with a nearly full disk, it is an out-and-out dog.
It's entirely viable for a filesystem to archive all of the data you've ever created. Treat the archived files as an LRU cache and, when new data needs to be saved, just write over the least recently used data. Instead of a volume bitmap of used blocks, you have a tree that can be traversed to get the blocks that can be overwritten. This is not data that must be saved, like the swap; it's data that should be saved until something else needs it, at which point it's overwritten, like most OS's RAM IO buffers.
- an ubuntu netbook remix clone (OMG A SCREEN FULL OF ICONS!) but with even more blur,
- built-in F11 key
- Compiz ring switching plugin
- a trackpad, but rebranded!
- automatic saving, but rebranded!
- time machine, but rebranded!
- "suspend" instead of "shut down", but rebranded!
- thunderbird's default email layout
- gmail's threads, but rebranded!
- ripoff of giver (a Novell engineer's 2007 hack day project, see http://code.google.com/p/giver/ )
- ripoff of LUKS
- a "server" control panel program
Why do people pay for this?
Cause the implementation of a feature is more important than the feature itself. Apple rarely comes up with new tech on its own. They rebrand existing tech and work on the experience to create a product and a platform. Seriously, who in the general public knows what LUKS is?
So that you don't have to bother installing each of these items separately. No downloading, config files, drivers, etc.
It's all just there.