Re: List of Applications Not Compatible with Leopard

"Daniel Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> stated in post
13mapeu4n2cdp9f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 12/16/07 10:52 AM:

"Snit" <CSMA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C38A8F23.9DDC4%CSMA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Daniel Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> stated in post
13ma7eh5snfol76@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 12/16/07 5:45 AM:

What does Windows have to compare to DreamCatcher? Tofu? iLife?
iWork?
ComicLife? OmniGraffle? iChat? Automator? Time Machine?

Well, obviously, Office 2007 just stomps on iWork.

Nope. They each have some pretty big advantages over the other. Each of
the iWork programs are excellent...

Well, I don't do presentations much but I've heard Keynote is the best thing
in iWork. I've used Pages, and it's not really ready for prime time. Nice
clean UI, yes, but Word 2007's is better.

Numbers is obviously not intended to be a real spread*** anyway. It is all
about presentation.

All three are excellent - though they have different strengths than does MS
Office, which is also, in many ways, an excellent suite of programs.

Automator is a promising idea that has not panned out yet; I do not think we
can declare it "second to none" until it shakes off the dead hand of
AppleScript.

It is not a competitor to AppleScript. Both are excellent.

I wouldn't go that far.

I would. Both are excellent and while they have some overlap they are not
competitors.

But as long it does everything through AppleScript, it will have terribly
performance command to OLE Automation. "Second to None" is not a good way to
describe that. It's promising, no more, not yet.

Unless you can point to some program that is a real competitor to it then it
stands that it is second to none in its class. And it is *excellent* at
fulfilling its purpose - programming for non-programmers. There is, of
course, room for improvement, but there is simply nothing else I know of
that comes close to it.

[snip- I hate tofu]
iChat is, from what I read, not even the leading chat program on the Mac-
that's Adium, is it not?

I use both. What iChat has is drop dead gorgeous video chats with fun and
useful features.

That doesn't make it "second to none", does it?

It is second to none at drop dead gorgeous video chats with fun and useful
features.

Time Machine is second to, well, everthing. It's a poor versioning utility
and a poor backup utility. It's only claim to fame is its absurd,
over-the-top UI.

Again you are incorrect. It is excellent. Spectacular.

Spectacular I'll give you. :D

Again: do you have an example of a backup system that works as well as it
does? You have pointed to Previous Versions and other such things, but
*none* of them make retrieval as easy.

My Google-fu may be weak, but I can find nothing about a program called
"DreamCatcher".

<http://homepage.mac.com/jameshoward/dreamcatcher/> Freeware spellchecker for
websites. If there is an equal on Windows I truly would love to know about
it.

Ah. Another little utility. I am not much the wiser even after reading that
website. But I did not know anything about this little thing, how can you know
there's not an *even better* little utility for Windows? :D

I have looked - as far as I can tell there is none. If you can show me
otherwise I would be grateful to be wrong - I would love to show it to my
Dreamweaver students.

iLife is a good product, but whether it's better than its Windows
competitors is an infinitely long thread.

There is no other such integrated suite on Windows where a general user can
do so much... without even, for example, needing to really understand the
concept of files and where they are stored... and then, something that is a
true benefit, providing media browsing services to the OS. There simply is
nothing like it on Windows. Nothing.

This suggests that iLife is inferior.

Incorrect. Grossly incorrect.

You have to qualify it so much, to put it into a category of its own, to avoid
comparison with other products.

Incorrect: there is no other suite that makes such multimedia creation,
organization, and finding as easy as iLife. If you have a counter example
share it, but I have looked and I can find *nothing* that comes close.

Therefore, I can only conclude that those other products would kick it's ***,
if we did comapre them.

And yet you cannot find a single one. OK.

But let's not. It's a boring argument anyway.

It would become more interesting if you would at least try to support your
claims. :)

You have me on ComicLife. That's a unique product which dominates its niche.
The only thing you can do on Windows is.. um.. run ComicLife. Which is
available on Windows, you know. Indeed, I note that the only screenie of the
program on the Plasq frontpage was clearly taken on Vista.

My mistake... though the Windows version does not "tap into" a media browser
the way the Mac version does.

Ah, yes. Windows offers less vendor lock-in. :D

No lock-in... as you noted, the product is on both Windows and Mac. On the
Mac, as I have noted, it works better because the OS offers better services.

TNEF's enough, etc.?

TNEF?

Yes. <http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/>. Is there a Windows equal?

Oh, I thought that was a curse! That's a program! I see!

There's, obviously, something *vastly superior*: Microsoft Outlook.

Incorrect. *IF* you use Outlook you can view these files on Windows. And
if not? Well, you are, as far as I know... stuck.

This TNEF is a utility to extract the data from an email in Outlook format.
Very handy no doubt, but a Windows users can just use Outlook, whose native
format this is.

Ah, vender lock in. You are *stuck* with MS programs if you want to be able
to read common attachments. But not with a Mac.

[snip]
Anyway, they've already done a hotfix to improve Explorer performance, have
they not?

Did it fix the deleting bug? If so then I stand corrected.

As far as I can see, the "Explorer is slow" bugs are not single bugs but a
bunch of problems all contributing to slow performance. That is why not all
users experience the same stuff, and why a workaround that works for one user
fails for another.

My understanding is that the hotfixes on Windows Update help, but SP1 has more
fixes yet.

You used many words to say "no" or "probably not".

[snip]
Well, many of Microsoft's users agree with you here. They want it to Just
Work. But sadly for them, though Microsoft has fallen below their
compatibility standards of old, they are still the best.

Again: not from my experience. I did have to update a few programs for
Leopard... but within a rather short time *all* of my programs - over 200 -
worked fine for Leopard.

Your Milage May Vary, but I think you know what the big picture looks like.
Apple is hardly even trying.

Apple "tried" hard enough to be very, very successful - 200+ programs.
*All* work with Leopard, though a few needed free updates.

And that was going not just from one OS to another but from PPC to Intel.
Really *amazing* work. I have seen far more problems with Vista with my
limited experience with it... and I know the college where I work tested
Vista and found that so much software does not work with it they opted to
skip it completely. They moved to Leopard and it is working very well.

Of course not. But honestly, Snit, you already know that Gutmat's "critique"
is a tissue of lies. That fact that someone added it to a Wikipedia article
makes no difference.

Until you can show contrary information I think we should let this one stand.

I can't stop you believing things that make you feel better.

I am pointing to data. You are claiming I am wrong based on... your
desires? Not on data... at least any data you can show.

[snip]
Are consumers confused because they go a Toyota dealer and have to chose
between a Corolla, Camry or Avalon? And each has three or four trim levels
to chose from too.

Those are not abstract products. Not a reasonable comparison at all.

What the heck does "abstract products" mean?

A car is a physical thing... software is information. There is a
difference. People do not "get" the abstract world of software like they do
the physical world of cars. If you really need this explained to you then
you are grossly out of touch with how people are.

[snip]
As you may have noticed, I often talk myself out of Aero Glass on logical
grounds. But it always wins be back again with it's seductive blurriness!

And, sadly, with OS X I had to use a third party utility to get rid of the
translucent menu... or I could have - gasp - typed a command into
terminal!

You dock would still be transparent if you just used the terminal, no? And
the menus also, right?

You can use a terminal command to alter the transparency of both. The dock,
really, is not a problem - it does not effect readability (the new Dock
actually improves that). The menu bar *hurts* readability. Mine is now
opaque... much better.

Well, we may argue that it's hardly an Apple invention.

But 'annoying security authorization prompts' have been a hallmark of OS
from the beginning.

While OS X might suffer from this *slightly*, it is simply nothing in
comparison to Vista.

I have used both, and I know better.

But I do realize that this is not a bad propaganda line, however: Most people
haven't used both and can't compare. Apple has used this particular bit of
dishonesty themselves, I seem to recall.

So I can't really blame you for trying it.

From even a small amount of using Vista I know it pops up dialogs repeatedly
and forces you to respond to them - even dimming the rest of the screen (or
setting it in black and white). Heck, and the Vista ones are essentially
useless - neither asking for Admin password nor letting you know where the
software came from. And Vista simply has more of them... all the time...
repeatedly.

[snip] Well, that's a pretty small slice of the installed base of PCs in
general. Vista runs on a lot more computers than that.

Irrelevant. With Leopard it will run on darn near any Mac from the last
several years. With Vista it will *not* run on darn near any PC from the
last several years...

Come now. You must realize this argument is silly.

Gee, the fact that Leopard clearly works on a greater percentage of Mac
hardware than Vista works on PC hardware is hardly "silly". Mac users can
be more assured Leopard will work for them... period. You can try to twist
this by noting that Mac has a smaller market share but that is not relevant
to the point.

Leopard simply does not run on the wide variety of hardware Vista does. You
know it; weaseling about it is not very nice. You know, unless you like
weasels. They're cuddly.

You are pushing an interesting straw man - I never claimed that Vista did
not run on more hardware. Please, though, stick to the topic: it simply is
easier for Mac users to know if Leopard will work on the older machine than
it is for a Windows user to know that about Vista. How many machines are
"out there" is irrelevant.

[snip]
It is exactly the case. Both OSes nominally run on 512 MB and do not require
fancy graphics hardware, but they don't run well on that little memory, and
you get more graphical effects with fancy graphics hardware.

With Vista you lose more. Heck, what do you think you lose with a lower end
Mac?

I disagree; with Vista you lose some effects, and gain some performance.

If it is true that you gain performance by using lower end hardware than
that is very sad for Windows. Really.

It is perfectly reasonable for a person to actually *prefer* that setup; it is
not reasonable for anyone to prefer the way OS X works on weak graphics
hardware. It looks worse and is slower. No upside.

I look forward to your speed comparisons on comparable hardware. You seem
to be avoiding those - you know, actual support for your claim.

[snip]
Vista does have an edge at the low end, though, because it will exploit
*old* graphics hardware much better. It can use XP drivers, and can expoit
the hardware acceleration the old cards provided for drawing operations as
XP did. You don't get Aero Glass, but you do get performance. Obviously,
this becomes less relevant over time.

Show me evidence that you get better performance on a lower end PC running
Vista than you do a comparable machine running Leopard. Have fun. :)

I am sure it is physically impossible to convince you of such a thing. :D

If the solid data is there then that would be rather convincing. Your
guesses are not really "solid data".

[snip]
Well, yes: it is not yet the case that Carbon is just a C front end to
Cocoa, so it remains a greater burden on Apple to maintain it. Presuming, of
course, that they do so.

I wonder what the MS and Adobe programmers would have to say on this...

They would say "Apple better make sure our apps still work!"

But then, they would perhaps be disappointed. :D

You keep making assumptions about what Adobe and MS and Apple have talked
about behind closed doors.

[snip]
These companies have big revenue streams coming from Carbon products; they
have every reason to want that to continue.

They'd be negligent if they didn't try to save Carbon.

And yet there is not a shred of evidence that they are trying to save
Carbon... or, really, that Carbon is dying.

Ah, denial.

You are denying your utter lack of evidence.

Well, we'll have another go-round when Rosetta support goes.
That's next, I think.

You think that... OK. Do you have a shred of evidence? Do not get me wrong
- in a half dozen years or so it might... but you have no evidence to
support your claim. None.



--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing. - Edmund Burke

.