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Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions, but

"Next up is the OS. Have you noticed that OSX releases of late, well, to be blunt, suck? It’s not that they suck as a stand alone OS, but they take away a lot of the freedoms and flexibility that the Mac desktop OS user has come to expect. Bit by bit Apple is removing all of the parts that make OSX something other than a phone class OS"

Is nonsense. "Suck" is a matter of opinion, but there's nothing you can do on a 5 year old Mac that you can't do on a new Mac (and several things more). People keep confusing attempts to make the OS easier to use with "closing" it. When I can't run my own software, and drop to a terminal with the standard UNIX tool chain, I'll but the argument. But there's no sign of this so far.

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If you can tell me how to set up Lion to use my preferred Snow Leopard hot corner settings, I'll be forever grateful:

* Top left corner: Show all four spaces in a 2x2 grid

* Top right corner: Show all current application windows

* Bottom right corner: Show desktop

* Bottom left corner: Show all windows

I've been using this setup (minus the Spaces part) since 10.3, and have yet to find a workflow I prefer for managing windows on a laptop screen's limited space when using a laptop with no external displays hooked up. I'd prefer to also have Leopard-and-before style proportionally-sized Expose to SL's grid, but that's a minor thing.

Lion's Full Screen Mode and Mission Control appear to have made things more "accessible" (and oh, are people often surprised by my setup when borrowing my laptop for a bit and inadvertently hitting a corner!) but I can't find any way to replicate what I had before. As far as I can tell, the options are just gone.

And I find the removal of features I'd come to love really disturbing, especially coupled with the move away from hardware upgradability/expandability.

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As far as moving the Mac to ARM goes... that's in all likelihood the day I buy another ThinkPad. And for pretty much exactly the same reasons as the first time, when my PowerPC-based PowerBook G4 just didn't have enough power, and couldn't virtualize x86 OSes for testing/dabbling/whatever.

Fair point, they did rather neuter spaces (I guess to get more people using it, but at the expense of power users). All other options still work. I'm not at my machine to lookup settings, but ML added a "Don't group windows" to Mission Control that pretty much replicates Expose from SL (just ignore the Spaces view at the top).

That's good to know about ML. I've been happy staying on SL for my personal laptop so far, but am glad there's an upgrade path that'll still give me an all-windows Expose functionality.

Spaces was always the least-used of my hotcorners -- especially after getting a separate work laptop that lives with two external monitors hooked up, plus the internal screen open, which greatly reduces the need for that kind of stuff. It's mostly made me not bugged by it being on Lion.

You should check out Total Spaces: http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/

I was dreading the move to Lion since Spaces was a big part of my development workflow. But Total Spaces has filled in the gap for me.

Since its just juggling windows around there is a slight lag in responsiveness compared to the original spaces but in general it does the trick for me.

You can do most things on your list with Total Spaces:

* Top left corner: Show all four spaces in a 2x2 grid * Top right corner: Show all current application windows * Bottom right corner: Show desktop * Bottom left corner: Show all windows

>If you can tell me how to set up Lion to use my preferred Snow Leopard hot corner settings, I'll be forever grateful

This is not the kind of the locking and freedom removal the article is talking about.

This is a feature that's changed, removed, as they experiment to find the best (according to their team) way to implement it. I, for one, never use Hot Corners (find them disturbing), and I also hate "autohide dock". So it's not like it was a feature with unanimous love that got removed (something like Maps on iOS or Rosetta that people either needed or didn't care about).

I like OS X 10.8 a lot better than say 10.5. Full-screen spaces is a killer feature for me.

At a developer level, OS X is now more accessible than it ever has been. Do you remember OS X 10.0, back when you could program the system in any language as long as it was Objective-C? Today you have multiple languages that are ABI-compatible with the Objective-C runtime. Isn't that a huge win? You have POSIX support that's better than it has ever been. You finally have thread-local variables. You've got a great toolchain in LLVM/LLDB/Clang that Apple has been bankrolling.

Mac is the development platform for iOS and Apple knows it needs to keep developers happy and the iOS apps flowing. It has nothing to gain from neutering Mac.

Exactly, it's not like Apple didn't reach out to the unix community last year and work on putting together a slick command line tools package to make projects like homebrew even easier to use and support. If you're the sort of user who compiles a lot of software in the command line it's pretty easy to forget that launchpad even exists. And so what if it does?

> When I can't run my own software, and drop to a terminal with the standard UNIX tool chain, I'll but the argument. But there's no sign of this so far.

You can run your own software and drop to a terminal with the standard UNIX tool chain on your iPhone, too. You just have to jailbreak it first.

So Apple is really one flip of the switch away ...

That's true of every computational device in the world. Windows, Ubuntu, Android, etc. Everyone could flip that switch, and lockout non-jailbreakers (or Kernel recompilers). It's not an argument for it happening.

>So Apple is really one flip of the switch away ...

And how is that different from OS X 10.1?

> So Apple is really one flip of the switch away ...

... in much the same way that Ubuntu is really one flip of the switch away.

Also, I don't see how those changes in the software level has anything to do with the ISA its targeting. Same thing with the upgradable components. Just because you are using an ARM core doesn't mean you can't support SATA and DDR3 buses.

I wish they would bring back keychain syncing through iCloud.

I get the feeling there was some weird support or security issue, because its removal is odd given the rest of their iCloud moves. I wish it was back too.

I often think Apple should have bought a source code control company or a document versioning company to get the expertise for making iCloud sing.

Oh, yes; that would be awesome. It would be absolutely amazing if it would sync everything (including website credentials) between iOS and Mac also (I wasn't a MobileMe user, so I don't know if it synced data only between Macs or between all devices).

I've been struggling with a corrupt file system for the past couple days (some inodes are currpot, and anytime you want to access them, either through Finder or Terminal or Time Machine or even SuperDuper, the system crashes. Nasty, nasty bug) and there are basically two things that are keeping me from just erasing the whole fucked-up volume and install ML anew: I'm not sure if I mive ApplicationSupport/MobileSync folder to the new machine, it would still sync my iPhone and iPad, and that I can't export the entire keychain (I have to do it bits by bits, and most items are not exportable).

Nor would we reasonably expect those avenues to be closed off to developers even if, from a consumer standpoint, the device does become 'closed off' by guiding consumers through the app store to get their software. Developers need under-the-hood access, and Apple has always understood that devs, at least, need freedom.

The whole idea that a laptop-like device has a consumer and developer mode is what's disturbing to many. Unless the developer version is free and open.

I don't think they'd bother with different modes. It's just that, like it is now, if you're a dev you can install iterm2 and xcode and lift the hood and bash around, but if you're a consumer, you not only don't have to ever open the terminal, you don't even need to be aware it exists.

This is why the hyperventilating about closing the OS is so overwrought: It doesn't need to be closed to serve Apple's purpose of having a walled garden, it just needs to be massively more convenient to stay in the walls of the garden if you're a consumer. Devs will find the gate and wander out on their own.

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