Someone try jaguar?

Oh really? I never saw that Eject screen until I have upgraded to 10.1.5/Jaguar. But I heard that this function was including in Finder.app package in 10.1.4 as well.
 
Originally posted by simX

That last statement is TOTALLY untrue. All PowerMacs come standard with graphics cards with 64 MB VRAM, and all other Mac products, with the exception of the iBook, come with graphics cards that have 32 MB VRAM. All iMacs and eMacs have nVidia GeForce 2 MX cards with 32 MB VRAM. Powerbooks now have 32 MB VRAM Radeon Mobility 7500 cards. PowerMacs come with either Radeon 7500s or GeForce 4MX cards, both of which have 64 MB VRAM.
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OK, didn't really put my point across very clearly, or indeed accurately. I shouldn't have said 'currently available'. What i was sort of trying to say was that most of the machines currently out there, being used by people don't support it - just look at the number of people on the forums bitching that they won't get the Quartz Extreme benefits.

My point really was that the chances that the people reporting to the Reg were ALL experiencing speed improvements due to Quartz Extreme is unlikely. Whatever.
 
Just to let everyone know, I did plug my Jaguar external HD (7200 rpm, just so ya know) into my iceBook (combo drive 500) with 128 MB of RAM, which can barely run X as it is... and even though it definitely didn't get Quartz Extreme, it was a LOT faster than it had been.

Maybe this will put some people's fears to rest. Remember, it's not the Quartz Extreme that's going to do most of the speedup (all it does on my LCD iMac is make scrolling and window resizing a lot faster... and it seems to be slower (at least in this beta) at full-screen OpenGL acceleration (such as the OpenGL-based "flurry" screen saver) than 10.1.3...), the main speedup you'll find in Jaguar is the multithreading, which is a FAR bigger deal than accelerated graphics, IMO. Multithreading allows a lot to happen at once without slowing it down, and believe me, it does this on ANY machine. That helps a LOT.

We'll have to wait and see what happens when Jaguar is fully released (ARRRGH i wish it supported my printer so badly; i'd use it every day!!!!) because even as it is, the speed increase is HUGE on any machine; just ones with better graphics cards have a bit better display of on-screen elements.
 
Originally posted by Bluefusion
the main speedup you'll find in Jaguar is the multithreading, which is a FAR bigger deal than accelerated graphics, IMO. Multithreading allows a lot to happen at once without slowing it down, and believe me, it does this on ANY machine. That helps a LOT.
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*HACK* *COUGH* :eek:

I hate to burst your bubble, but MacOS has had multithreading since 7.5.3 (even if it was a hack in 9.x and earlier to get some of the pre-emptive threading). MacOS X has proper threading support for this sort of thing.

Now HERE is the kicker. Apple didn't get around to multithreading the Finder in OS X until Jaguar. Because of that, the Finder will experience a good boost in response time. The other boosts like login time and boot time, and so on are just side effects from other optimizations Apple has made.

Trust me on this one, I have written a few multithreaded apps for MacOS X and 9 for various small personal projects. The downside to multithreading is that if you spawn too many threads as part of your program, you can make things worse by having too much time being spent switching between your threads.
 
Nuh-uh. The Jaguar multithreading is VERY different than what has been around in OS 9. Believe me. I can open six programs at the same time (drag-select and double-click) and they all take the same amount of time to launch as they did if I opened them individually, now. That has NEVER been the case with any OS I've used. Also, toggling between open apps is MUCH faster than OS 9, and quite a bit faster than 10.1. In addition, things like Mail checking for new email can happen at the same time as I launch a program; no slowdowns. I can type in a big, bloated word processor (Word) and run iTunes visuals in the background; no slowdown whatsoever, even though doing the exact same thing under 10.1.4 caused it to slow both the visuals and the menu responsivenesss of Word down.

I don't claim to know WHAT they did with their multithreading, but a cursory glance will show you that it's been GREATLY improved.

Oh, btw, did I tell you that the startup progress bar loads on my system in 4.3 seconds? Getting from the grey screen to the blue is the same amount of time, but the actual system startup is nearly as fast as waking up from sleep. Login is also fast, with the addition of not having to sit around waiting for login items to load (a really annoying part of 10.1.4: because I have lots of third-party things; stickybrain, palm desktop, logitech drivers, wacom drivers, etc., I have to sit around after the desktop appears, waiting for everything to finish loading. If I don't, programs will take 20-40 bounces to open. Once the wait time is over, the system behaves normally. But it's REALLY annoying). Now, with 10.2, that wait time is GONE. Completely. And I'm still using all those peripherals, and they're still working fine.

I'm not a programmer, so I can't explain what they did. But they did SOMETHING really big, and it's not Quartz Extreme, because it works on my Combo Drive icebook (with a lowly 128 MB of RAM)...
 
Heh, well... I am a programmer and I know exactly what they did. The model of threading OS X uses hasn't changed since 10.0 (they may have slimmed some of the overhead in the Mach kernel, but that is about it).

Their USE of threading in general though has greatly improved, and the fact that they now USE threading at all in the Finder is a bonus. You also should have noticed I said that the Classic model for threading was a hack. They allowed pre-emptive threading in Classic, but it was at interrupt time where you couldn't allocate memory or do many system calls.

Just because Apple has optimized some places that need proper optimizing doesn't mean the whole model of threading has changed again. They just use it better once the system is up. Booting and the initial startup (before the desktop/login appears) isn't threaded, since certain modules require other modules to load first. If Apple managed to thread this process, good for them. The login wait from 10.1.x is likely due from some overhead still sitting around from app bindings and launching. They most likely found a way around this. I have the exact same problem myself in 10.1, and I can tell you this: a big part of it is due to disk access blocking threads improperly.

I was really just trying to point out that the cause of the boost isn't from 'new multithreading' in the OS, but rather smarter threading and overall code optimization in the individual processes.

Although, this news is great to hear since it might make my 8600/300 a bit more bearable with 10 considering I have no video acceleration at all, not even 2D blitting. And with 10.2's revamped graphics layer, my work so far in getting X to play nice with my Voodoo cards may just force me to start over again.
 
Originally posted by wdw_
I just figured out what's different with apple-tab. It work differently. When you push it, it goes to the lat application you were on instead of to the right. That is way too windowish.
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No, that's way too good. There are some things that Windows does much better than Mac OS, and alt-tabbing is one of them. How does that not make more sense than how OS X currently does it?
 
Originally posted by celeborn


Ah, windowish or not, I find this very useful. It can be frustrating going through a long list of open applications every time you simply want to swap between the two apps you're currently working with.
Windows, on the other hand, can be pretty frustrating because if you have 10 browser windows open it will show all of them separately when alt-tabbing. I hear XP has some improvement regarding grouping together windows of of the same app, but haven't had the chance to see it for myself.
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I haven't gotten to play much with XP, but if my observations are correct, I didn't like how it did the grouping. Too conditional. I hope there is a way that I didn't see to always make it do it. It seemed to only group once either the task bar filled up, or more than a certain amount of windows of the same app was open. So if you closed one IE window, for example, all of a sudden they aren't grouped anymore. Dumb, IMO.
 
The main thing I'm looking for in 10.2 is improvements to the Mail.app, as (not counting AppleWorks) it's where I spend 95% of my computer time. Other than the integrated address book, are there any striking new features there in the (legal) beta...?

I think the new Address Book feature has the potential to really be something good if it's (a) fast and (b) versatile, and by all accounts it seems to be both. I've never used an address book regularly before (I just memorize the email addresses), so this will be a new experience for me, and I suspect I'm not the only person who falls in this category.

I'm also glad they're isolating the Disk Search feature, as it usually takes longer on my end to load up Sherlock than it does to do the actual search.

The spring-loaded folders will also be a biggie--I know one guy who's been using Macs for 20 years and still on OS 9 largely because of (a) speed issues and (b) the spring-loaded folders issue. Jaguar will probably do the trick on both counts.

September, eh? I can hardly wait.

What are the odds that it'll have broader scanner and digicam support? (I've got a Microtek color flatbed and an Aiptek Trio VGA pencam; the former only works in Classic, the latter needs a shareware utility and only grabs images on reboot.)


Cheers,

TH
 
Originally posted by Tom Head
I think the new Address Book feature has the potential to really be something good if it's (a) fast and (b) versatile, and by all accounts it seems to be both. I've never used an address book regularly before (I just memorize the email addresses), so this will be a new experience for me, and I suspect I'm not the only person who falls in this category.
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Yeah, actually, I would like to see more on the address book. It would be nice to have something to interact between that and my Motorola V60c cell phone. I believe that you can use the same software for syncing with Palms and such. TrueSync I think it's called.
 
hazmat: If your cell phone has Bluetooth, the Rendezvous technology synchronizes your address book to it. Rendezvous is broken in Jaguar Dev Prev, however, and I don't have a Bluetooth cell phone to test it out with, either :)

Tom Head: the mail app is significantly faster this time around, and has a ton of small little improvements that make it better, but overall, yes, expect to be very excited with the final product... mail.app has evolved!


Address Book is EXTREMELY fast and works very well. It is very well thought-out and works with iChat in an incredibly seamless way :) the pictures feature really is nice... I never thought I'd use it but iChat lets you scale and move the pictures around before you commit to a final image, and the image gets updated in the address book (just tell iChat to use an address card for one of your buddies, and all sorts of amazing things happen: Mail.app tells you when that buddy is online, lets you send an IM FROM Mail, and iChat's photo prefs for that buddy get saved into the address book. In addition, there is an "email" button in the iChat window--click it and Mail opens up with the correct address filled in. The integration is amazing!

It's a great time to be a mac user :)
OS X 10.1 brought much-needed speed enhancements. Jaguar brings Quartz Extreme, much better multithreading, and a TON (and I mean a TON) of usability enhancements. I find the "screen flash instead of alert sounds" to be a really nice feature--basically, any time you'd hear an alert sound normally, you can elect to have the screen whiteout for about a quarter of a second. I like it because a) it looks better than the manubar flash that OS 9 had, and b) I hate having an alert sound when I'm listening to music (or in the middle of the night, when I have headphones on), so for me, this is a very attractive alternative. It's very sleek, not "cartoony" at all.

Another thing I've found is that the Aqua globe, aka the new Beachball of Death (which appears much less frequently) will appear if you move the mouse over an inactive that has something busy in it (example: if I move the mouse over Mail when it is in the background, and it's checking mail, the blue globe comes up to let me know that Mail is doing something). When you move the mouse off the window, it resumes the normal mouse cursor look. BTW, you can click to the "busy" window, and it will work just fine. The Globe is just there to let you know that it IS doing something. I personally think that's a GREAT step forward in terms of really seeing what's going on in your system.... :):):):) I LOVE JAGUAR!!!!!
 
Multithreading is the ability of a program or an operating system process to manage its use by more than one user at a time and to even manage multiple requests by the same user without having to have multiple copies of the programming running in the computer. Each user request for a program or system service (and here a user can also be another program) is kept track of as a thread with a separate identity. As programs work on behalf of the initial request for that thread and are interrupted by other requests, the status of work on behalf of that thread is kept track of until the work is completed.
 
Originally posted by MacLegacy
Kinda newbish question but what exactly is multithreading? :rolleyes:
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You got a good explanation of it, but the simply way I usually describe it as is basically multitasking within an application.
 
Or, explained in crayon (no offense, but I had a hard time understanding ddma, and I know what multithreading is ;) ):

A program has certain things it wants to do to finish. Most simple programs only have one real thing to do at once, but some programs could split the work up and get it done faster.

A semi-real world analogy:
If you are searching for something in a large store, you'd find it a lot faster if there were multiple copies of yourself, all assigned to search through one section of the store. The best way would be to have the copies of yourself be able to talk to each other immediately, so you could stop the search as soon as you found what you're looking for. But even if you couldn't communicate, each copy of yourself would only have to look in a small section of the store. So it'd be guaranteed to be faster. Now to tie that in to multi-threading, consider each copy of yourself to be a "thread" in a program, each assigned some particular task.

If the world (the operating system in computers) is set up so you can duplicate yourself, then you can make things go faster and usually in a more stable manner.

Multi-threading is beneficial when the operating system can deal with it, and the program is designed to take advantage of it. Another advantage is that the threads are running separately, so if one crashes it doesn't take down the whole system.

Does this make any sense at all, or am I confusing the issue more?
 
Sorry, hazmat and nkuvu. It is easy to confuse multitasking with multithreading, a somewhat different idea.

In a computer operating system, multitasking is allowing a user to perform more than one computer task (such as the operation of an application program) at a time. The operating system is able to keep track of where you are in these tasks and go from one to the other without losing information.

Being able to do multitasking doesn't mean that an unlimited number of tasks can be juggled at the same time. Each task consumes system storage and other resources. As more tasks are started, the system may need to slow down or begin to run out of shared storage.

For multithreading, please refer to my previous post.

Simplify some main point, multithreading shares the same code in different program. That means 2 different programs don't require to run their code separately but multitasking do.

:)
 
Correction, multitasking is the use separate programs/processes while sharing the processor time. Multithreading is the use of separate bits of code within a single program/process while sharing the program's processor time.

The problem with multithreading is that an app has to be specially written to use multiple threads (simple apps have a single thread, such as a shell). The benefits of threading is not really speed, but rather responsiveness. For example, an app can spin off their networking code into a thread, and then keep their main thread free to handle UI events, sending minor messages for the other thread to handle later. This way your network code can be rather unoptimized, and you can still be VERY responsive to events coming in.

The Finder before MacOS 8 was not multithreaded, the result being that you could only do one task at a time within it, despite multitasking being available. MacOS 8 introduced a multithreaded Finder that was much more responsive, despite the bloat 8's Finder had. Before 10.2, the same thing with X's Finder. One thread handling all tasks, so it didn't respond while copying files/etc.

Usually in the case of the Finder, it will spin off a thread to handle each task. File copying threads, window UI threads, and drive mounting threads. By doing this, any thread that is waiting for I/O and such will not prevent the Finder from being responsive elsewhere to the user.

Another example is Carracho, which spins off a thread for EVERY CONNECTION the client and server make. This is an inefficient use of threads, since you can easily load down a system with too many threads running a server. Best to split it into networking/file transfers/UI/etc.

Any clearer now?
 
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