Apple to release OS X 10.9 with new power-user features, more from iOS | Hacker News Reader

Apple to release OS X 10.9 with new power-user features, more from iOS

9to5mac.com

35 pointsuladzislau44 comments

Rumors. All rumors.

Why is this here? I'm one of the biggest OS X 'fanbois' in the world, and I read the rumor mill sites every day, and I enjoy them for what they are: speculation.

But this isn't news; news is typically factual. And the Apple Rumor business is abysmal; 9to5mac, and specifically Mark Gurman, have one of the best track records in the game[1]; even then, it's a horrendous track record.

If this stuff shows up, then yay. I'll be thrilled. Especially proper multi-monitor support for full-screen apps. And I'm not saying that Mark Gurman is wrong (after all, he has "sources"). It's entirely possible that everything in this article will show up in 10.9

But it doesn't change the fact that it's still chaff, not wheat.

[1]: http://www.quora.com/Who-has-been-the-most-accurate-in-predi... (sorry for the Quora link, the cited site is no longer up)

It just looks like Apple integrated TotalFinder, but considering that is closed source, I imagine it will not be an integration with TotalFinder, but there own brew.

I only hope 10.9 doesn't break TotalFinder.

Screenshot in the source article is a screenshot of the existing TotalFinder.

We don't know if Apple has done anything at all to Finder.

When I saw power user features I wondered if it might be something that might convince people that OS X isn't going further down the locked down iOS route and certainly multiple monitors and more advanced use of finder are towards the power user end of things.

On the other hand it would be fair to say that they're relatively a small investment on Apple's part and it would be possible to read too much into them.

Looking at changes like this my take is that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I don't think Apple are going to lock down OS X the way iOS is locked down but nor do I think that power users are as critical a part of their target audience as they once were.

The end result - small changes for power users, enough to give them faith that they're not being completely ignored, and more significant investments for the new breed of typical Mac user.

>> "The new operating system includes major enhancements to the Finder application such as tags and tabbed browsing modes."

This would certainly be a welcome improvement.

However, not sure this ranks as a "power user" feature so much as a "fixing a really broken" feature. The finder in OSX ranks up there with the single-button mouse as among the most nonsensical stubborn non-features Apple has clung to over the years.

Yeah, I didn't see anything I'm interested in as a "power-user".

OSX lately has decided to hide a ton of features out of the box that require changing values in Terminal before being useful. A quick list I know of: - Hiding full paths in Finder - Launchpad can't actually delete things. - Library is hidden

Other weird default settings: - Scroll with trackpad is inverted

It also doesn't have Ubuntu's nice window snapping or Windows' snap to sides feature, which is a big time saver.

Finally, I don't feel like "port iOS features to OSX" has been a win for Apple. It just seems to confuse people by adding more crap to the OS.

Library being hidden by default makes a lot of sense. It contains user specific application configuration, it's the same as on Windows having AppData which is hidden in the users "home" directory.

There is almost no reason for a user to ever be in the Library folder, let alone why it should be visible by default.

---

As for scroll being inverted, they did this so that it matches what you do on iOS. You move up to scroll down the page since you are physically dragging the page, and you move down to scroll up.

I recently used a friends computer where the scroll was still inverted and he said it felt much more natural. To each their own, it is a non-hidden setting!

I can't say I agree with the many people that think the Finder is broken. For my purposes the Finder works fine, doesn't get much in my way. Might be because I've used Apple computers for around 20 years now. I can imagine people migrating from other platforms have more issues with the Finder, since it works quite differently from Windows, Linux OS-es.

Actually, I don't think I interact much with the finder directly nowadays. I start apps using Apple-Spacebar and switch between apps using Apple-Tab. Finder is pretty much only used for some file management purposes (moving files to other folders, copy files etc...) and for those purposes it seems to work fine for me.

I do really wish Apple will fix full-screen display for multiple screens. I can imagine a lot of Apple developers would like to see this changed as well. Perhaps Steve Jobs blocked this change in a previous Mac OS X release due to personal issues with it? I can't imagine any Apple developer implementing full-screen support as it stands currently, only if it was forced by management, cause it makes no sense at all with regards to multiple screens.

There isn't anything in there that would get me back on board (I jumped ship about two years ago). I would consider proper multi monitor support for fullscreen "apps" a bugfix and not a feature.

Where is the proper window manager (or at least some hooks for 3rd party window managers) and the modern file system (at least give us snapshots and copy-on-write)?

OS X works extremely well on a laptop, which has been Apple's primary Mac focus for a while now. Flicking between virtual desktops/fullscreen apps on a multi-touch trackpad is a wonderful way to use a 13" screen.

If you replace the awful Finder with something usable, I'd argue that it's the best OS (desktop environment) for that particular form factor. For a proper workstation...well, they haven't even bothered to update the hardware for years. No surprise that the software has been neglected as well.

That's a good point, although a huge part of that is how good the trackpad is and how deeply it's integrated into the OS.

These look like good moves. While Microsoft and Ubuntu are shunning their desktop users, Apple is making me look the smarter for choosing a company who still stands believes in a desktop OS :)

FYI, I was a decade long Windows user who switched to Mac then to Ubuntu then back to Mac after Unity.

As a happy Ubuntu Raring user, I can't honestly agree with the complains against Ubuntu.

It's the best desktop experience I've ever had.

I tried Ubuntu 12.10 again briefly and was disappointed that intel HD4000 wasn't fully supported in 3D. Graphics is dog slow in Ubuntu on the same hardware.

It looks like shopping spies still on by default in 13.04. I doubt I'll ever use Ubuntu again on that principle alone. Even Apple doesn't force that on you in Spotlight. Still cannot move taskbar. Still cannot resize taskbar without 3D support.

Hear hear! I just installed 13.04 on a relatively modern computer yesterday (C2Q, 8GB RAM, an "old" 9800GT) and had what I consider the typical linux experience. Any one of these might halt or scare off a newbie:

* It wouldn't let me choose the encrypted/LVM option when formatting the drive before installing. Unencrypted worked though. I didn't bother to really investigate why, maybe the HD is at fault?

* Defaults to the nouveau drivers for obvious reasons and I swapped it to the NVidia binary (for specific reasons). Screen dumped to console on its own while it reset X. Functionally fine, but scary looking compared to anything you'd see in Windows or OSX.

* Changing the GPU driver now makes the system boot up in a not-native resolution until LightDM loads. Visually unappealing.

* The computer has a Broadcom Wifi card installed that I'd like to use. Oh boy! (read that as... fuck broadcom). Obviously not handled by Ubuntu out of the box so I drag out an ethernet cable. Trying to install their binary driver requires command line magic which temporarily breaks dpkg/apt when a installing kernal module stalls out. I fixed that and then installed an open source version which grabbed the binary for me, which worked, but I wouldn't ever expect a layman to figure it out. Requires a reboot to finally function.

* Numerous "application encountered an error" popups in the 10 or so hours I was working with it. Nothing that halted the OS, but several apps had to restart. It dings my confidence in the quality a bit. And the computer's RAM checked out fine a couple months ago and all temps were normal, I'm going to lean towards either my suspected aforementioned drive issue or actual errors with the apps. Didn't investigate, but they could happen to anyone.

* Annoying Amazon and Ubuntu One monetization techniques defaulted into the Unity. It's not a functional issue, but raises concerns about the future of the free software ethos at Canonical and treads awfully close to the adware and spyware that plagues Windows users that the OSS community has been railing against for years.

Compare that to OSX where I could just turn it on and have none of these problems, it's not quite rainbows and unicorn farts. I like linux for many reasons and Ubuntu has made great strides towards making Linux available to the masses, but it's still relatively easy to want to do normal things and encounter rough edges that require technical prowess.

Really, FTFF is in the works? I'll believe it when I see it. (I don't know why Apple hasn't just bought Path Finder.)

Since I had to look it up: FTFF = Fix The &$%#ing Finder[1], a blanket term for OS X Finder woes!

[1]: http://www.applematters.com/article/ftff/

Makes sense. Good focus. As the masses flock to pocket OSes, OS X becomes more streamlined for the audience that remains; the creators.

I'm more concerned about what large feline they will name 10.9 after. Do they even have any left?

OS X 10.9 - House Cat FTW

There hasn't been one called "cougar," which is a scary-cat name people think of, I think. Of course, "cougar" is another name for the puma, but then, so is "mountain lion," so that may not be a barrier.

Cougars(/pumas/mountain lions) are also interesting because they're not big cats, taxonomically speaking, so potentially the entire felidae family is in play, and it's pretty big. "Lynx" is a possibility... maybe also "wildcat" or "bobcat"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae

Wildcat was already used as the codename for the iPad, though I suppose it's possible they could repurpose it.

I'd vote for Wildcat

Looking at Wikipedia there is Clouded Leopard mentioned under the big cats entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clouded_leopard

I'm personally waiting for Thundercat.

I vote for Sabertooth.

Lets hope that it doesn't require us to re-install all of our *nix tools like every other release did in the past.

I've never had to reinstall my *nix tools when using OS X.

Where are you installing them? OS X respects all of the guarantees in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard so if you aren't installing custom-built binaries in /usr/local then the problem isn't OS X.

With every update I seem to have to reinstall just about any command line tool that I've previously installed because either they've moved some executables, or deprecated something , or the old binaries simply do not work with the newer version of the os. MySQL is probably the biggest annoyance with regard to upgrading. I don't believe that this is just a thing that I go through because the answers to my problems are a Google search away and I've taken an 07 MBP from Leopard to Mountain Lion.

I've never had that problem, but I've only been on OS X since Snow Leopard, and it seems that things have remained pretty consistent.

I also try to do as much installation from Homebrew (http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/) as possible, so that I can let the package manager worry about stuff like that.

OSX is unix??? It already comes with the standard set of tools.

And what's a unix hacker doing complaining they need to recompile their toolset?? Whimp :)

The tools for recompiling and libraries packages depend on are broken in new and wonderful ways which is why this is no fun ;-)

The first thing I noticed is that this would be the first OSX release to be named after something other than a great cat. Instead, they seem to be going for alcoholic beverages now.

Why do I find this darkly hilarious?

It says 10.9 is 'internally codenamed' so I assume Cabernet not the the final release name. Fingers crossed for OSX Ocelot.

My money would be on Cave Lion or White Lion (the two lion types other than mountain that aren't geographically described), though for giggles I'd prefer East Dillon Lion.

Ubuntu 11.10 was Oneiric Ocelot, so Apple might not want to muddy the waters there.

I really think Apple couldn't care less about that, e.g. Cisco IOS.

They didn't just ride rough-shod over an existing trademark, and in fact licensed it from Cisco.

[I'm aware that Ubuntu release code-names are probably not trademarked since they don't refer to the official release of the OS. Still, reusing another codename that's popular public knowledge in the tech community? That would not be cool.]

Clearly Apple licensed it from Cisco, I didn't claim otherwise. My point is Apple does not care about naming collisions with existing products in the market place, which you haven't addressed.

I think ‘Lynx’ would be neat, as it is the last major version before OS X 11 (or whatever they will call it), linking it to the next generation. It also reminds us of the lowly text web browser and the fact that the web is only 20 years old.

You don't think they'll do OS X 10.10?

Em, no. Of all the possibilities, I’d say that is one of the least likely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Sequence-ba...

Are you sure you read that correctly? I quote:

> In this system, the third digit (instead of the second digit) denotes a minor release, and a fourth digit (instead of the third digit) denotes bug-fix/revision releases. Because the first digit is always 10, and because the subsequent digits are not decimals, but incremental values, it is likely that a hypothetical 11th major version of OSX, should it exist, would be labeled "10.10" rather than "11.0".

They did 10.4.10 and 10.4.11 so I'd say its within the realm of possibility.

All very good points. I think it would look silly, but sure, it’s possible. However, I think Apple would only choose it if the version after 10.9 didn’t look all too different from 10.9. If they did some kind of UI overhaul, it would be a good time to jump to a new major version – maybe even ‘OS XI’ or ‘OS 11’.

“this would be the first OSX release to be named after something other than a great cat.”

No, OS X versions have had internal codenames named after French wine regions for quite some time. Known monikers are Pinot (10.3), Merlot (10.4), and Chablis (10.5).

Similarly, iOS builds are named after ski slopes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com