Where to Now for OS X?
Leopard is upon us and is described by most reviewers as a mature operating system. So where does that leave the future of OS X? Does OS XI beckon?
Overall, to paraphrase the reviews I’ve read, “Leopard is a pretty impressive release, albeit evolutionary, not revolutionary like Steve had tantalizingly hinted.”
So where to from here? Will we see those “top secret” features that never made it into this release surface in subsequent dot upgrades of Leopard? Or will they have to wait until the king of the operating system jungle, Lion?
OS X is a winning brand for Apple, but one that is now seven years old, and if 10.6 follows in another couple of years, OS X would be well over a decade old by the time 10.7 would arrive. Mac OS survived some 16 years but was never tied to a numeral that dated it. The other difference is that technological change was much slower during Mac OS’s time. It’s not unreasonable to expect that early next decade GUIs could begin to take on a radically different form from today’s. Will we still want OS X, the year 2000’s operating system, in 2011?
In this day and age—as emphasized by Apple’s incessant regeneration of the iPods—new is very much preferred, and sooner or later, the OS X brand will get old.
In Leopard, OS X has matured, especially under the hood, but there’s still a bit of room in the front end. This could bode well for the Finder and GUI in Leopard’s successor, which surely must be named Lion, especially if it is to be the last of the OS X family. (Of course, Apple could keep releasing OS X upgrades for another 20 years, as it is not bound to a single digit; the dot is not a decimal point, that is, in 2020 we could be using version 10.12.)
Will OS X 10.6, Lion, take OS X as far as Apple would like to, particularly in the GUI?
Three things in Leopard make me curious about the future of OS X’s front end, and many reviewers have criticized two of those. They are the translucent menu bar, the 3D Dock, and the much longer shadow cast by the front window. Together, these create the illusion that your screen has depth, and that you could almost reach into it.
What do these tell us about the future? If you were developing the subsequent operating system, and you wanted to condition users to a new way of thinking and working, wouldn’t you begin introducing some small elements now to make that transition easier?
The translucent menu bar, the 3D Dock, and the longer front window shadows condition people to think more three dimensionally about the GUI. And all around there are developers working on three dimensional interfaces, albeit simulated. Until we get 3D displays, that’s all that is possible. And then those pseudo-3D interfaces will condition us for that day in the future where we’ll reach into our screens and grab the document we want.
So in Leopard we see a tiny hint of the future, one that will probably be fully revealed early in the second decade of the 21st century. And one that, although still built on an OS X base, will present such a revolutionary front end that it will require the renaming of the Mac operating system to Mac OS XI. Before then, though, we will see one last OS X, 10.6 Lion, sometime in 2009.
And the ideal date for the launch of Mac OS XI will be 11-11-2011, at 11am of course.
So, will 10.6 Lion be the end of the line for OS X?
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Well, MacGlee, I’ve got it now too. Installed yesterday on a clean partition (kept my old Tiger system as a safety net.) Haven’t installed anything except the OS yet and nor have I migrated anything to it. IT’s a very clean system.
First impressions? Some wows; pretty good. Mostly. Stacks are a visual assault when viewed as a grid because of the transparency.
And Time Machine first backup failed!!! And the ever so helpful message says it failed but gives no explanation and no way of finding out what went wrong. I haven’t been to the logs yet but I shouldn’t have to either.
First impressions? Pretty good. Mostly. Won’t be rushing to overwrite my old system yet.
oh yeah, what I don’t get is why Activity Monitor in Leopard tells me my VM size is 30GB!!!!!!!!!!!!! Many processes are reporting over 500MB of VM.
Fortunately it’s not actually using that much space, as I checked the drive partition and given it only has 40GB total, but was reporting 32GB free, it seems Activity Monitor is misreporting VM usage.
OS X is a winning brand for Apple, but one that is now seven years old, and if 10.6 follows in another couple of years, OS X would be well over a decade old by the time 10.7 would arrive.
I’d argue that is purely a perception issue. If Apple had called each new version OS 11, then OS X 12, etc, we wouldn’t perceive them all to be merely updates of the same OS. I think OS 10.5 is as different from OS 10.1 as OS 9 was from OS 6.
With that out of the way, I do see major ways in which the OS paradigm in general could be improved beyond radical interface changes (like touch screens or 3D). And in any case, I find the implementation of voice commands to be more useful and intriguing than touch screens as the future of machine interaction. I activated this on my Mac and found it lacking of course, but POTENTIALLY revolutionary.
Think about drivers embedded in devices so that you never need to install drivers ever. How far would that go to improving the computing experience? Time Machine works along these lines, making backup almost a mindless, effortless activity. It should only improve going forward. I tried activating this in Vista but it is inexplicably disabled in Home Premium.
All my software works just fine, no compatibility issues
For those in my field of film production, which for the Mac user base is a substantial percentage, you should be aware that Adobe After Effects does not work in Leopard. The update will roll out in December.
ok, back in Leopard today and Time Machine backup worked fine. BTW, checking the logs said error #11 was the cause. Hardly helpful.
Adobe Acrobat Professional also doesn’t work - or at least is not compatible. Fix for it will be in January.
Just saw this on Macitt, Chris, and it deserves mentioning here as a warning to Time Machine users. TM will access apps and documents as if they still exist on your machine, even after you’ve deleted them from your system. That means that apps you’ve deleted, maybe for security reasons, are really still there and will launch without warning when tied to a document type. Deleted documents and apps will also show up in Spotlight and context menus.
The work-around is to permanently delete the app from within Time Machine. And you can also exclude your TM volume from Spotlight. These are both work-arounds and both should be enabled by default.
Just FYI.
Don’t exclude your TM volume from Spotlight.
For many people the volume with the Time Machine backup may contain other files as Time Machine only backs up to a folder on the drive.
So if anything, exclude that folder from Spotlight.
But still, don’t exclude the folder from Spotlight, because if you do, you won’t be able to use Time Machine on Spotlight searches.
That means that apps you’ve deleted, maybe for security reasons, are really still there
Hands up anyone here who’s ever needed to delete an app for a security reason on a Mac.
This is a non-issue. If you have stuff you don’t want backed up, put it somewhere Time Machine isn’t backing up.
Why in the world would you want to, by DEFAULT, include crap that you deleted to appear in your Spotlight search (well, in Ben’s case it’s because that’s what Apple tells him he wants and that’s good enough for him).
That’s why you deleted it, to get rid of it. I can see under certain circumstances wanting to find a file or app that you got rid of, but that’s a special circumstance. We’re talking about the default setting.
I have the same issue with Spotlight including files in your Trash in the search results too.
Btw, did anyone notice that DVD Player got an upgrade? Is that one of the “top secret” features?!
Not much differences that I’ve noticed so far except for one change that’s been a long time coming. They finally made the full-screen shortcut Command-F instead of Command-0. This always bugged the crap out of me because the shortcut in Quicktime is Command-F. So kudos to whatever programmer noticed this and fixed it.
well, in Ben’s case it’s because that’s what Apple tells him he wants and that’s good enough for him [1]
Jerk.
Why in the world would you want to, by DEFAULT, include crap that you deleted to appear in your Spotlight search
Well first of all that is the most definitively split infinitive I have ever seen. But in answer to your question, you don’t, dummy, you want it to appear in searches BACK IN TIME for lost documents. Perhaps you don’t understand how this feature works yet?
If ordinary spotlight searches include Time Machine’s stuff, then obviously that should be changed. [2]
By the way, my new policy is simply to call you a jerk whenever you make a comment that appeals to a stereotyped a priori definition of your opponent, in place of rational argument.
I heartily welcome everyone who joins with me in using this accurate technique to label Beeblebrox’s vitriolic namecalling. It springs from the sudden realisation that this type of comment [1] is so plainly in opposition of the reality of the adversarial position [2], and those of most people he commonly uses them against, that against such juveline namecalling, no further justification or rebuttal is required.