Users trying to scroll horizontally in our app accidentally scroll back and forward, and it’s very hard to get what you’re expecting.
Horizontal scroll was always causing trouble on the web, but with OS X Lion it's even more vexed. (Of course Nielsen has been saying that for ages, but who would listen to that old weirdo.)
Now here we are, a decade later, and Mac OS X has matured into a fine product. This ten-year marker presents an opportunity to do something technology writers usually avoid. I'm going to look back at some of my hopes and fears from the early days of Mac OS X's development and compare them to the reality of today. Was I right on the money, shrewdly warning of future disasters that did, in fact, come to pass? Or do my predictions now read more like the ravings of a gray-bearded lunatic? It's judgment day.
More of John Siracusa's OS X writing. He gives a retrospective look to his review of the first incarnation of OS X and verifies his predictions from that period.
This animation conveys no new information. It does not tell the user where a window came from, since the animation starts at the final position of the window. Whether or not the animation actually delays the opening of the window, it certainly feels like it does, which is even more important. This type of animation can make Lion feel slower than Snow Leopard. And when an animation like this stutters or skips a few frames due to heavy disk i/o or CPU usage, it makes your whole Mac feel slower, like you're playing a 3D game with an inadequate video card. And for what? For what someone at Apple hopes will be a lasting feeling of delight?
27000 words long review of OS X Lion by Ars Technica's John Siracusa. I paid for it, read it over the weekend and I think it's a masterpiece of technical writing. Incredibly thorough, rich with historical context and covering with confident professionalism everything from user experience to file system and memory management.
Brady recently left Apple, though, and started his own development company, Ten's Complement. And If any one person outside of Apple could bring ZFS to Mac OS X, Brady is likely on the top of the list. "At one point in time, I could look at a b-tree node dump in hex and see the file layout—kind of like in The Matrix," he joked. Clearly, Brady has a deep understanding of both ZFS, HFS+, and Mac OS X's internals, and he is leveraging that understanding to develop Z-410.
On non-Apple implementation of ZFS for OS X, with some interesting bits of history behind HFS+.
It’s bad enough that you’re allocating tiny amounts of virtual memory on-disk but then you insist on shuffling piddling amounts of data between files in order to “release” that disk space back to the user! Frankly if I need 256Mb of disk back then (a) I will empty the trash or (b) I will buy an external disk.
The OSX strategy makes especially no sense in the Netbook world – We are running with a “small” amount of memory, where “small” = 2Gb, but are likely to be firing-off a small number of very fat applications. What sense is there in creating and reclaiming 64Mb swapfiles when the applications eat 250+Mb apiece?
Explanation of how swapping works on OS X, with a tip how to get around it to improve performance.
