Replies

Ping for a good comparison on Vista and OS X on a Mac Book Pro using Parallels...

The graphic should have been this graphic (and may have been fixed by the admins by now)...

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

In case you haven't guessed... this is an excerpt... but I forgot to check the "This is an Excerpt" Box.

Why don't these cold medications list a caution label about posting on FreeRepublic when taking them??? Who cares about heavy equipment?

Personally, I find a lot of the UI portion of the Mac vs Windows Threads rather unsatisfying. This particular author is writing his opinion from a very visceral point of view- without any scientific theory behind his point of view. Correct UI Interface Building is an extremely complicated science/art. Terms such as: "Locus of Attention"; "Learned Helplessness" are very important concepts in designing/developing a good UI. Apple has done a lot of important research in this arena, based on a lot of work by cognitive psychologists in the 1950s -- to answer questions like: How do we perceive information? etc. .. Apple wrote up a series of guidelines which were the bible for all Apple Developers for Mac OS 1-9. Then Apple proceeded to violate their own guidelines with Mac OS X.

Here's a simple example of an Apple violation that ticks me off to this day. (I hate it, I hate, I absolutely hate it) ... Go to the System Preferences. Click on any icon. Watch the size of the Window Change. Click "Show All" Watch the window size change again. Changing window size was absolutely forbidden in Mac OS 9.

Microsoft changes the menu size (Word is a classic example)--but Microsoft has always done this (maybe that's way I've always hated Word)-- but Microsoft has never pretended to be the last answer on UI interfaces.

So, I'm happier if we talk about other aspects of the systems.

I'm posting this on several of these MacPing threads for those who haven't seen it. It has to do with virtualization and the upcoming release of VMware Fusion on Mac. Parallels is working on and will probably deliver the same feature set.

The first link is to the blog for the lead developer of VMware Fusion for Mac. He is thanking the person who leaked the video of Fusion's latest beta build. Obviously, he's very proud of what the company is doing.

VMware blog: Double Dragon

And this page at YouTube is the exciting part, showing DirectX games running on the Mac desktop in windowed mode.

YouTube: 3D Graphics in VMware Fusion for Mac OS X

Not only are we going to be able to run Windows apps, we'll be able to run the DirectX games in XP and Vista. And the multimedia apps like Adobe Premiere and others will also work. VMware plans to support DirectX 9 features fully for both Vista and XP.

BTW, this is also good news for the Linux folk.

Of course, the upcoming games with DirectX 10 support are not supported. But then, Vista doesn't support the nVidia 8800 card, the only full DirectX card on the market.

What excites me about this is that so many people who have held back on Mac because they don't want to reboot to Windows to play games (or run a few productivity apps) will no longer have to worry. It will "just work".

Reducing all of Microsoft's consumer and server products to just a set of virtualization clients is the killer app for these new multicore CPUs. And it will bring 99% of Windows apps straight to the Mac desktop. That includes all the Windows programs and games you already own.

No wonder Microsoft slapped a "virtualization tax" on Apple and Linux (and their own users). Yeah, like we're going to let that stop us!