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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > 10.4.2: Precious time and resources wasted in Dashbore

10.4.2: Precious time and resources wasted in Dashbore
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mAxximo
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Jun 28, 2005, 11:06 AM
 
As reported by this article Apple keeps wasting their very limited resources in superflous stuff like widget managers and the like. With application stability at an all-time low and a half-assed search tool in Tiger I wonder how much time this whole Dashbore nonsense will take until we finally see the much needed 10.4.2 update...
     
chris v
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Jun 28, 2005, 11:15 AM
 
Thanks for that constructive, informative post.

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift.
     
ManOfSteal
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Jun 28, 2005, 11:53 AM
 
*Yawn*
     
OptimusG4
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Jun 28, 2005, 12:08 PM
 
I can search just fine, thanks. Oh, and the only instability I had with Tiger was bad RAM. Weird how that works out.
"Another classic science-fiction show cancelled before its time" ~ Bender

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jasong
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Jun 28, 2005, 12:20 PM
 
Actually, my system has been so stable, I would think that any more effort in that direction would be the time waster.
-- Jason
     
nbnz
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Jun 28, 2005, 12:29 PM
 
"Precious time and resources wasted in superflous ranting".

Unless you're a manager at Apple it's probably not your place to say time spent on Dashboard (which is one of Tiger's key selling points) is wasted & superflous.
iMac, Intel Core-Duo 2GHz, 2GB, 250GB, OS X 10.4
PowerBook 12", 867MHz, 640MB, 60GB, OS X 10.4
iMac G3, 333MHz, 288MB, 6GB, OS X 10.3
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fisherKing
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Jun 28, 2005, 01:07 PM
 
um...
gotta say, i find i've been removing widgets from dashboard.
prefer meteorologist, weather viewable & accessible from the menu.
tapdex; i can hit F8, look up a number.
hula girl was cute but wore thin.

most else i can do from safari, etc.

just think it's a cute app, but non-essential.
what i want most from an os is stability, speed.
the support of the apps i run.

just my 2cents...
"At first, there was Nothing. Then Nothing inverted itself and became Something.
And that is what you all are: inverted Nothings...with potential" (Sun Ra)
     
Thinine
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Jun 28, 2005, 01:11 PM
 
You really think it took much time to develop the widget manager, mAxximo? It probably took less than a day for them to create the actual manager, and then a few more days to test. And now it's in general testing by developers. Besides, it's not as if the dashboard developers are working at other, time critical projects (AFAIK).
     
Horsepoo!!!
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Jun 28, 2005, 01:57 PM
 
Ugh...precious time and resources wasted reading mAxximo's posts. :'(
     
Don Pickett
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:04 PM
 
Originally Posted by chris v
Thanks for that constructive, informative post.
You don't understand! All that time could've been spent removing protected memory from the kernel!
The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
     
Chuckit
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:10 PM
 
And creating a "Disable everything that makes this computer even vaguely secure" option in the System Preferences.
Chuck
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MindFad
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:26 PM
 
I'm switching to Be.
     
Randman
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:31 PM
 
I'm sure he's not even used Tiger. What an idiot.

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m a d r a
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:38 PM
 
i disagree with mAxximo about the searching - spotlight is several times better than anything that has gone before and i have no problems with stability, but i do agree with his sentiments about dashboard. i've never in all my life seen such a load of "serve-no-purpose-other-than-to-masturbate-the-developer's-ego" junk cluttering up the pages of versiontracker and macupdate, since the advent of the "widget".

[more froth-lipped madra ranting about widgets]
     
JHromadka
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:46 PM
 
That's it, I'm switching to OS9.
     
Randman
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:51 PM
 
Those who say Spotlight is a waste obviously don't know how to use it properly. And while Dashboard does have a few clunkers, it saves me a ton of time during work. Again, it's quite functional when used properly. Trolls need not apply.

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Hi I'm Ben
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Jun 28, 2005, 02:57 PM
 
I have a sneaking suspicision you just have absolutely no idea what you're doing on the computer MaXXipad.

And my second wonder is... You know that nobody agrees with your nonsense so what thoughts run through your head as you see yourself typing out your madness? Other than always trying to make conflict what is your real purpose? We know your mac is *!@#(ed™. However spotlight works great for me, I use dashboard, and none of my apps are crashing. Infact most are running better. Remember we had that little talk about how Apple isn't making the OS just for you? Take that into consideration.
     
Don Pickett
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Jun 28, 2005, 03:07 PM
 
Originally Posted by m a d r a
i disagree with mAxximo about the searching - spotlight is several times better than anything that has gone before and i have no problems with stability, but i do agree with his sentiments about dashboard. i've never in all my life seen such a load of "serve-no-purpose-other-than-to-masturbate-the-developer's-ego" junk cluttering up the pages of versiontracker and macupdate, since the advent of the "widget".
I don't mind the Widgets, because they're easy for me to ignore. I never used to collapse windows into their title bars in OS9 and earlier, either.
The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
     
clarkgoble
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Jun 28, 2005, 03:12 PM
 
I think Spotlight still has some big UI problems. It really shouldn't start searching until I pause my typing, for instance. Advanced searching with boolean queries really ought be easier. Hell, possible outside of the terminal. I don't know why Apple doesn't have an "advanced" query box that doesn't make one memorize quite so many constants as well.

It's good and powerful, but definitely a .0 release.

Regarding Dashboard, I think people who think Dashboard is taking resources from other projects are living in a fantasy world. It's not like someone could leave the Dashboard team and immediately help on say virtual memory management. The teams are probably largely independent. If they are spending time on a dashboard widget manager (which frankly should have been there to begin) then it's just taking time away from other features of dashboard they were going to add.

Of course one might argue that the dashboard widget manager is taking time away from fixing some of the big memory leaks in dashboard. But frankly I'm not sure those are a problem with dashboard or webkit. So it may be the Safari team that needs deal with those.
     
Superchicken
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Jun 28, 2005, 04:00 PM
 
I checked my dashboard while reading this post

Mainly I use the weather widget. It's actually been genuinely useful in the last few days. As well I use a nice flickr uploading widget I found. I occasionally use the Wikipedia one, and have gotten a lot of use out of the calculator one. Address book loads fast enough for me already so I don't need the widget. And the iTunes remote is useless when You've got Spark running... but yah it's still a nice feature.
     
monkeybrain
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Jun 28, 2005, 04:15 PM
 
I find the dashboard very useful. The dictionary widget is very handy, and it's good to have a calendar and translator on hand all the time, likewise with WikityWidget and a BBC radio player.

It all depends on how you used to use your Mac, if - like a lot of people like me - you used several small apps and Sherlock to make notes, quickly check stuff or translate some text, then the Dashboard is very handy. Completely dismissing it is rather silly. Some people use Spotlight every day, I use it quite rarely since its only use for me is as a launcher and I use Quicksilver for that.

One thing in Tiger that I haven't heard much criticism about is smart folders. They are really slow on my system because it performs the search every time you open the folder; I expected it to remember the results and update in the background (as iTunes does I believe) so it would be as fast as a normal folder. Also, you can only have positive search criteria, such as "name is", and not negative, e.g. "name is not." All the other smart playlists, mailboxes etc., have negative searches - why not smart folders?
     
chris v
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Jun 28, 2005, 05:30 PM
 
Originally Posted by Don Pickett
You don't understand! All that time could've been spent removing protected memory from the kernel!
You'd think in the month that they've been working on 10.4.2, they could have removed those pesky permissions by now, if they had their priorities straight.

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When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift.
     
Don Pickett
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Jun 28, 2005, 05:52 PM
 
Originally Posted by chris v
You'd think in the month that they've been working on 10.4.2, they could have removed those pesky permissions by now, if they had their priorities straight.

Fad: Will Be OS run on MacTel?/??!1!?
If they understood the tiniest thing about GUI design they'd make unaliased 9 point Geneva the default fault!
The era of anthropomorphizing hardware is over.
     
analogika
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Jun 28, 2005, 06:01 PM
 
Originally Posted by Thinine
You really think it took much time to develop the widget manager, mAxximo? It probably took less than a day for them to create the actual manager, and then a few more days to test. And now it's in general testing by developers. Besides, it's not as if the dashboard developers are working at other, time critical projects (AFAIK).
It's rather telling that mAxx is complaining, while much of the work done on Dashboard focussed on *security* enhancements - being able to test-run a widget before it's installed, for example.
     
Graymalkin
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Jun 28, 2005, 06:54 PM
 
I'm a little surprised by Dashboard. Of all of Tiger's major user features I figured it would be the one I used the least. Then Apple's Dashboard site linked to over 400 (~680 now) widgets. Damn. The default widgets are all a little useful now and then, some of them are a little superflous in my opinion. It's the third party widgets that really make Dashboard an awesome system. I love the Wordpress widget, I can post to a WP site without so much as opening a browser. This is the sort of thing I'd write a one-off Cocoa/AppleScript app for if it didn't exist and work so well. It's available pretty much anytime I want it to be. While a regular application could so the same thing having the functionality in a widget is simply convenient.

I'm also a big fan of the Radar In Motion widget. I don't need or want something taking up space in my menubar just to see if the weather at the beach might be nice enough for a visit. I could head to weather.com but why bother if I can have a widget do the work for me and show me just the information I'm interested in? I like these one-off widgets for the same reason I really like RSS feeds. I don't need to bother with Flash ads, slow loading times (even over 3Mbps cable), or interupt what I'm working on. I find that when I fire up Safari I tend to hit my "Daily Reads" autotab bookmark folder and mysteriously losing three hours of my day.
     
CharlesS
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Jun 28, 2005, 07:08 PM
 
Originally Posted by analogika
It's rather telling that mAxx is complaining, while much of the work done on Dashboard focussed on *security* enhancements - being able to test-run a widget before it's installed, for example.
No ****. Not to mention much-needed improvements like being able to easily remove widgets from the toolbar. Superfluous, my ass.

Ticking sound coming from a .pkg package? Don't let the .bom go off! Inspect it first with Pacifist. Macworld - five mice!
     
bmedina
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Jun 29, 2005, 02:03 AM
 
Post and run? How unsurprising....
     
smithz4096
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Jun 29, 2005, 05:03 AM
 
Originally Posted by mAxximo
As reported by this article Apple keeps wasting their very limited resources in superflous stuff like widget managers and the like. With application stability at an all-time low and a half-assed search tool in Tiger I wonder how much time this whole Dashbore nonsense will take until we finally see the much needed 10.4.2 update...
maxximo,

have you checked your LCD, have you calibrated your display? You may need to repair permissions to make sure Tiger is runnin' properly. Did you run a RAM-Testing Tool? err... Did you check your mental stability before switching on your machine? Do you use a decent (at least 2.x ghz) machine, do you have at least 4 gb ram installed ? ... and so on, et cetera p.p.

I never had a problem, i just boot into something that serves me better. eof.
     
smithz4096
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Jun 29, 2005, 05:10 AM
 
Originally Posted by Don Pickett
If they understood the tiniest thing about GUI design they'd make unaliased 9 point Geneva the default fault!
i partly agree. If they would respect the userbase, they would offer a decent pref-panel for fonts used in the UI. Including support for proper bitmaps (including geneva 09) and any other font the user wants. And all that without hassle and third-party inconsistency.

Sadly, apple doesn't care about it's userbase anymore that much, they care about steves egocentrical off-world ******** and marketing buzz. For example those 200 "new" features of tiger are a joke, every tiny bit is listed as a feature.

eof.
     
analogika
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Jun 29, 2005, 05:14 AM
 
Originally Posted by smithz4096
i partly agree. If they would respect the userbase, they would offer a decent pref-panel for fonts used in the UI. Including support for proper bitmaps (including geneva 09) and any other font the user wants. And all that without hassle and third-party inconsistency.
Just imagining the third-party inconsistency when people change their standard dialog fonts to 18-point Stencil, and all text spills out of buttons (as is already partly the case in localized versions) makes me shudder with antici -------------


not.
     
JLL
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Jun 29, 2005, 05:18 AM
 
Originally Posted by smithz4096
Sadly, apple doesn't care about it's userbase anymore that much, they care about steves egocentrical off-world ******** and marketing buzz.



Originally Posted by smithz4096
For example those 200 "new" features of tiger are a joke, every tiny bit is listed as a feature.
And many real cool underlying features aren't listed, so it probably adds up.
JLL

- My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
     
smithz4096
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Jun 29, 2005, 05:21 AM
 
Originally Posted by analogika
Just imagining the third-party inconsistency when people change their standard dialog fonts to 18-point Stencil, and all text spills out of buttons (as is already partly the case in localized versions) makes me shudder with antici -------------
not.
Have you ever heard: Freedom of choice?

Besides, if the text spills out of buttons, that means the whole crap is poorly coded and the UI is not font-sensitive at all. Apple-Style: It's all surface. I'm running against walls here. bye.
     
Randman
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Jun 29, 2005, 06:36 AM
 
Originally Posted by smithz4096
Apple-Style: It's all surface. I'm running against walls here. bye.
Can you take maxxino with you?

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smithz4096
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Jun 29, 2005, 07:40 AM
 
Originally Posted by Randman
Can you take maxxino with you?
No.
     
Horsepoo!!!
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Jun 29, 2005, 07:45 AM
 
Originally Posted by smithz4096
No.
I thought you were leaving.
     
Kevin
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Jun 29, 2005, 08:25 AM
 
Originally Posted by mAxximo
With application stability at an all-time low and a half-assed search tool in Tiger
Hey I suggest you call Apple support.

None of these things are happening to me. So I doubt it's Tiger.
     
Millennium
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Jun 29, 2005, 09:36 AM
 
Originally Posted by mAxximo
As reported by this article Apple keeps wasting their very limited resources in superflous stuff like widget managers and the like.
So the widget manager is 'superfluous'. I suppose you found the old Extensions Manager to be superfluous as well?
With application stability at an all-time low...
Which applications are you referring to?
...and a half-assed search tool in Tiger...
What, you mean an app that doesn't search in places you tell it not to search?
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eddiecatflap
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Jun 29, 2005, 10:16 AM
 
spotlights excellent , it's the command-f that needs looking at

i mean the one in the finder windows , i keep getting beachballs and it's driving me nuts
     
Hi I'm Ben
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Jun 29, 2005, 10:29 AM
 
I would like a few features in Spotlight. Since we're mentioning it. I'd like that if I typed something into the spotlight drop down, then from that dropdown i could right click and delete, or reveal in finder. I think that's my one annoyance with it. For some reason Spotlight assumes that the only reason i'm trying to find these files is so that i can open them, many times i'm using spotlight to find something so i can delete it.
     
JLL
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Jun 29, 2005, 10:41 AM
 
Cmd-click to reveal in Finder.
JLL

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OreoCookie
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Jun 29, 2005, 10:51 AM
 
If you want to discuss something specific, start the thread differently, please.
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