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Snow Leopard was the high watermark release for OS X, before focus and engineering talent migrated to iOS, and successive releases of OS X began to become clutt

Snow Leopard was the high watermark release for OS X, before focus and engineering talent migrated to iOS, and successive releases of OS X began to become cluttered with throwaway useless user interface candy and naggy GateKeeper dialogs.

chrisbolt 13y ago
Naggy GateKeeper dialogs? It's extremely rare that I see them, and even then it's nothing like UAC was back in the Vista days.
- teacup50 13y ago
  If you manually extract something and create a broken signature in the process, Gatekeeper helps you out by refusing to open the bundle in ANY application, and instead simply stating that the file is corrupt and should be deleted. I've hit these things often enough that I just turned it off. Gatekeeper doesn't protect against unsigned code execution; it's merely the same old quarantine code with code signing bolted on. It prevents you from stupidly double clicking an evil executable -- in theory.
eropple 13y ago
YMMV, but a lot of that "useless user interface candy" makes my day noticeably better. Launchpad is silly, but Mission Control pretty much changed how I used a computer. I'd been using Macs since 10.4, but I didn't get Macs until Lion. And 10.9 made multi-monitor much much better by making Mission Control desktops per-monitor. This is the best OS X release by far. As far as Gatekeeper dialogs go, I'm curious what you're doing with your machine because I have seen a Gatekeeper complaint exactly once, because Cisco hadn't signed their VPN software (which was really awesome of them).
- teacup50 13y ago
  > Launchpad is silly, but Mission Control pretty much changed how I used a computer. I'd been using Macs since 10.4, but I didn't get Macs until Lion. And 10.9 made multi-monitor much much better by making Mission Control desktops per-monitor YMMV, but Mission Control completely broke the way Spaces worked as compared to prior Mac OS X releases -- which also happens to be the way I've worked since the 90s. I don't need full screen apps, or separate spaces per head, so from my perspective, that change was an enormous net loss. There are work-arounds, but they're imperfect: http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/ http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/ Factor in silly stuff like notification center, and all Apple seems to have done UX-wise for me is make it harder to actually get work done.
  - eropple 13y ago
    You can turn off spaces-per-monitor, so I don't know what your complaint there is. I also don't really get what Mission Control's "your virtual desktops are in a line" rather than Spaces' "your virtual desktops are in a square" makes you lose. You can turn off the reordering (I do) and it becomes functionally the same thing.
    - teacup50 13y ago
      > You can turn off the reordering (I do) and it becomes functionally the same thing. It's not. You lose spatial organization; I place related projects next to each other (top and to the right) to make it easy to switch between related working contexts, eg LaTeX editor for documentation of a project + IDE for the actual project code + source code for a related project to use as a reference, etc Ditching the grid also means decreasing the amount of room in which spaces can be laid out; The grid is a very efficient mechanism for switching between LOTS of spaces. I maintain a 4x4 grid of 16 spaces, and I never quit anything, or close a document -- RAM is cheap. I simply treat different areas of the grid as different contextual workspaces. If I come back to a project two weeks later, it's all still there.
chm 13y ago
Have you tried Mavericks? I was on 10.6 until 10.9 came out, and I have not been disappointed. I actually gained about 30 minutes more battery time. I also enjoy the notification integration with so many apps. Growl used to do the job, but it didn't always work. 10.6 to 10.9 is a good upgrade, try it.
- tolmasky 13y ago
  Considering we spent months where Mail.app didn't perform it's most basic duty (receiving mail) and Messages continued it's almost simulated organic decay, I beg to differ.
  - sbuk 13y ago
    Nope. It didn't perform it's most basic duty with the non-standards compliant email provider that is Gmail. Literally every other service that offered standard IMAP worked fine.
    - teacup50 13y ago
      I don't use or like Gmail, but given that it's quite likely the most popular IMAP server on the planet, I'd say it's Apple's responsibility to their users to not break compatibility.
      - sbuk 13y ago
        Which service then? I'm using it with iCloud, Yahoo!, Exchange and my own heady build based on Dovecot. All work flawlessly. If a provider uses non-standards complaint implementations of services such as IMAP, it is their responsibility, not the email clients, to support the end user.
        teacup50 13y ago
        I'm sure all of Apple's customers agreed that, simply on principal, it was better that their e-mail was broken in the new OS release.

chrisbolt 13y ago

Naggy GateKeeper dialogs? It's extremely rare that I see them, and even then it's nothing like UAC was back in the Vista days.

teacup50 13y ago
If you manually extract something and create a broken signature in the process, Gatekeeper helps you out by refusing to open the bundle in ANY application, and instead simply stating that the file is corrupt and should be deleted. I've hit these things often enough that I just turned it off. Gatekeeper doesn't protect against unsigned code execution; it's merely the same old quarantine code with code signing bolted on. It prevents you from stupidly double clicking an evil executable -- in theory.

eropple 13y ago

YMMV, but a lot of that "useless user interface candy" makes my day noticeably better. Launchpad is silly, but Mission Control pretty much changed how I used a computer. I'd been using Macs since 10.4, but I didn't get Macs until Lion. And 10.9 made multi-monitor much much better by making Mission Control desktops per-monitor. This is the best OS X release by far. As far as Gatekeeper dialogs go, I'm curious what you're doing with your machine because I have seen a Gatekeeper complaint exactly once, because Cisco hadn't signed their VPN software (which was really awesome of them).

teacup50 13y ago
> Launchpad is silly, but Mission Control pretty much changed how I used a computer. I'd been using Macs since 10.4, but I didn't get Macs until Lion. And 10.9 made multi-monitor much much better by making Mission Control desktops per-monitor YMMV, but Mission Control completely broke the way Spaces worked as compared to prior Mac OS X releases -- which also happens to be the way I've worked since the 90s. I don't need full screen apps, or separate spaces per head, so from my perspective, that change was an enormous net loss. There are work-arounds, but they're imperfect: http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/ http://totalspaces.binaryage.com/ Factor in silly stuff like notification center, and all Apple seems to have done UX-wise for me is make it harder to actually get work done.
- eropple 13y ago
  You can turn off spaces-per-monitor, so I don't know what your complaint there is. I also don't really get what Mission Control's "your virtual desktops are in a line" rather than Spaces' "your virtual desktops are in a square" makes you lose. You can turn off the reordering (I do) and it becomes functionally the same thing.
  - teacup50 13y ago
    > You can turn off the reordering (I do) and it becomes functionally the same thing. It's not. You lose spatial organization; I place related projects next to each other (top and to the right) to make it easy to switch between related working contexts, eg LaTeX editor for documentation of a project + IDE for the actual project code + source code for a related project to use as a reference, etc Ditching the grid also means decreasing the amount of room in which spaces can be laid out; The grid is a very efficient mechanism for switching between LOTS of spaces. I maintain a 4x4 grid of 16 spaces, and I never quit anything, or close a document -- RAM is cheap. I simply treat different areas of the grid as different contextual workspaces. If I come back to a project two weeks later, it's all still there.

chm 13y ago

Have you tried Mavericks? I was on 10.6 until 10.9 came out, and I have not been disappointed. I actually gained about 30 minutes more battery time. I also enjoy the notification integration with so many apps. Growl used to do the job, but it didn't always work. 10.6 to 10.9 is a good upgrade, try it.

tolmasky 13y ago
Considering we spent months where Mail.app didn't perform it's most basic duty (receiving mail) and Messages continued it's almost simulated organic decay, I beg to differ.
- sbuk 13y ago
  Nope. It didn't perform it's most basic duty with the non-standards compliant email provider that is Gmail. Literally every other service that offered standard IMAP worked fine.
  - teacup50 13y ago
    I don't use or like Gmail, but given that it's quite likely the most popular IMAP server on the planet, I'd say it's Apple's responsibility to their users to not break compatibility.
    - sbuk 13y ago
      Which service then? I'm using it with iCloud, Yahoo!, Exchange and my own heady build based on Dovecot. All work flawlessly. If a provider uses non-standards complaint implementations of services such as IMAP, it is their responsibility, not the email clients, to support the end user.
      - teacup50 13y ago
        I'm sure all of Apple's customers agreed that, simply on principal, it was better that their e-mail was broken in the new OS release.