[Vader's Robotic Stump]

Here are some tidbits that Steve Didn�t share about 10.1. If anyone knows anymore please include them.

Has anyone figured out how Apple managed to make such a supposed drastic change in speed? Did they sacrifice some effects, font smoothing, transparency or frame rates to speed things up? For instance the faster Genie effect by making is �scale� (which is easier for the CPU).

Launching apps might be faster because not all the resources are loaded at startup, this may lead to lags when clicking on a certain function within the app later on.

Are the menu�s less transparent?

Is everything really faster just to optimization? How did OSX get developed for 4 years, get released slow as hell and within 100 days Apple seemed to find all the problems and fix em?

Your thoughts....


This information comes from the Apple OSX page: http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/

�OpenGL is 20% faster in this release, with full native support for the superfast NVIDIA GeForce 3 card allowing applications to take maximum advantage of advanced 3D applications.�

�. The sleek new controller lets you navigate your DVD�s with ease, and you can choose to arrange its controls vertically or horizontally.�

�Mac OS X version 10.1 also features enhanced AppleScript support throughout the system. Not only is the Finder far more scriptable but so are many of the system components like Print Center, Internet Connect and Terminal. AppleScript also uses the Internet standard SOAP and XML protocols to enable communication across your network so you can send AppleScript events from one Mac OS X system to another.�

�Under Mac OS X version 10.1, iDisk uses the WebDAV protocol built into the operating system as part of its state-of-the-art Internet capabilities. WebDAV uses the same language as your web browser, which means it only connects to your iDisk when it needs to. No more server disconnect messages from your iDisk for not using it often enough. And because it uses standard web protocols, you�ll be able to access your iDisk at school or the office, even from behind a firewall.�

�Mac OS X is the only high volume desktop operating system to include Java 2. And with this release, the new Internet Explorer 5.1 fully supports Java in the browser.�

�Print Center now ships with over 200 PostScript printer description files such as those from Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox. There is also improved support for most USB printers, with automatic selection of the driver for that particular printer.�

�Currently with Mac OS X, long file names are shortened in the middle with an ellipsis. Mac OS X version 10.1 adds a couple of improvements to help you read long file names in the Finder. First, you can now resize columns so you can more easily see longer file names. Using the column thumb will resize all columns the same amount. Pressing the option key while moving the column thumb will resize only that column. Not only are columns resizable, but file names in icon view now wrap to a second line.
� File extensions help Mac OS X maintain full Internet compatiblity, but they also add a layer of complexity for long-time Mac users who prefer working without them. Now you have a choice � we�ve improved the experience by adding system preferences to turn off the display of these extenstions.
For Apple customers who like to customize their folder icons, using column view can also be challenging when trying to determine whether a custom icon represents a file or a folder. Fortunately these users can now tell that an icon is a folder with a handy arrow that points to the next level.�

�You set your desktop picture from System Preferences in Mac OS X version 10.1, instead of from the Finder�s preferences. Use one of the default pictures from the preinstalled selection, or choose your own picture. You can automatically preview all available pictures in any folder and select the one you want instantly.
The General Preference Panel lets you choose how many Recent Items to show in the Apple menu. And for more readable text at smaller sizes, you can now choose to turn off font smoothing for applications you choose the threshold of font size 9, 10 or 12. The Sound Preference panel has more features too, letting you select different settings for each sound output device.�

�As with the clock, you can choose to show or hide these controls from the associated System Preference. And you can also change the clock to display with analog hands with the Date and Time Preference.�

[ 07-18-2001: Message edited by: Vader's Robotic Stump ]

[MadBrowser]

Here are some possibilities for how they sped up MacOS X:

The 80/20 rule applies heavily to software development. 80% of the time is spent executing 20% of the code (the most heavily used portions). But heavily optimizing them and profiling them, they may have gained speed.

PowerPlant: Has it been updated to support CarbonEvents + general bug-fixes? I don't use it so I don't know but if so, it could explain certain apps being sped up.

Compiler Advancements: It's been known that a lot of work on gcc has been done at Apple to improve it's PPC code generation. Maybe some of that work is bearing fruit?

Better drivers? Heavily improved graphics drivers could help speed up UI operations.

Kernel optimization? The kernel version has jumped significantly if rumors are to be believed. They may have done some tuning.

General Scheduling... I'm sure they hit a point early this year where they had to freeze 10.0 and work on bug-fixes. 10.1 may just be an exploration of some optimizations that didn't make the 10.0 cut...

It's a very interesting question that I wish someone could give definitive answers on...

It's also apparent that some of these features already existed in 10.0 (the other effects, dock pinning, etc...) and have just now been polished and given GUI control.

[Dalgo]

I'm not quite as cynical. You see, at MWNY last year, I watched those guys demo the computers running Mac OS X. remember, this was before the public beta. I remember that the guy there clicked on the terminal app and it took about a minute to start up. Most of the programs that they were demoing were already launched and they never quit them. This guy, however, accidentally quit the terminal and had to relaunch it. The end result was that I got to see just how horrible the launch times were. Flash forward to Mac OS X 10.0.4. Ther terminal, on my G4 400 AGP now launches in 2-5 bounces. That is way faster than the ~minute it took at MWNY last year. So, do I think that Apple can speed it up even more without sacrificing anything? Definitely.

[frawgz]

Less transparency in the menus would do nothing - the overall "image" or transparency would still have to be calculated.

Consider what most NeXT-knowledgeable people have been saying all along (in fact, this is how software is usually developed) - get it working first, then get it working fast. Supposedly in the NeXT tradition, the .0 release gets it working, and the .1 release gets it working fast.

[Detrius]

Actually, the general software development cycle anywhere should be roughly as follows:

implement features
fix bugs
improve features (including optimization)
fix bugs, etc...

So it is perfectly understandable that in the past four months, the operating system has drastically increased in speed. They had implemented most of the features and fixed most of the bugs, so they released it. They fixed the obvious remaining bugs, began optimizing the original code and began implementing new features. Thus, the cycle repeats itself.

[JFK2000]

I don't know technically how they managed to speed things up so dramaticly, but I can imagine a bunch of software engineers with the mandate, give me every possible way you can imagine to speed X up even if it means losing some functionality.

Once you have all those options before you, you can decide what are and are not acceptable tradeoffs.

That's just a guess, but the idea is one of the things the engineers have been working on was just the speed issue. That probably wasn't done with the original release which was primarily concerned with getting the OS out the door.

Just my not well informed 2 cents.

[krove]

Originally posted by frawgz:
<STRONG>Less transparency in the menus would do nothing - the overall "image" or transparency would still have to be calculated.</STRONG>

Right, aqua (transparency, animations, etc) doesn't really deliver any speed hit that is noticably appreciable. How would an elimination of a few transparencies and font-smoothing bring the launch speeds of apps to under a mere few seconds?

The only reasonable explanation is that there were major under-the-hood optimizations that 10.1 was promised to deliver. I wonder if there were two development cycles: one for the fated 10.0.x series and another for 10.1 (puma). It makes sense as to why there is a dramatic change in features and performance.

I can't wait for the download!

[ 07-18-2001: Message edited by: krove ]

[Vader's Robotic Stump]

Originally posted by krove:
<STRONG>

Right, aqua (transparency, animations, etc) doesn't really deliver any speed hit that is noticably appreciable. How would an elimination of a few transparencies and font-smoothing bring the launch speeds of apps to under a mere few seconds?</STRONG>

I don't think we are talking about removing the transparencies to improve launch time..... we are talking about Window resizing and menu's dropping. I KNOW that if you remove font smoothing things get faster in OS9. I think the same goes for OSX.

[ppmax]

vader: did we really need another uninformed cynical post? someone should cut off vaders other hand so he cant type...

actually, ill do it:

you must not work in swd because you have no idea what developers go through to get a piece of code working properly. so ill clue you in: its like sculpting. the details come last, not first. and just so you know the whole deal, a project of this magnitude needs *rigorous* testing for each and every change (bug fix, optimization, or new feature) so people like you dont freak out when their desktop icons dont line up properly. often, QA takes more time than development. have you considered that you didnt get these things in march because there were big bugs to regress? have you considered that the dev team actually did speed things up? have you considered that there are a million other things that users are asking for, each of which needs to be considered, spec'd, built, and tested?

"speed" is a feature request, just like every other feature request. chances are some other feature (perhaps the beloved spring loaded folders) got sidelined so developers could optimize. undoubtedly someone is crying because there this release didnt give them labels, or windowshades, or some other widget.

you and others often complain that apple had 4 years to build X. if you had any idea how long it takes for a project this large to come to market you might have a bit more respect, tolerance, and admiration for the people behind this effort.

but instead you chirp like a little lost bird. the last thing developers want to hear is some chump speculate about what they could have or should have done more quickly. if you want to 2nd guess apple's developers, go read a book first and learn about that which you are so quick to criticize.

[frawgz]

Originally posted by Vader's Robotic Stump:
<STRONG>
I don't think we are talking about removing the transparencies to improve launch time..... we are talking about Window resizing and menu's dropping. I KNOW that if you remove font smoothing things get faster in OS9. I think the same goes for OSX.</STRONG>

Anything involving removal of transparency or anything along those lines would do nothing to speed up the GUI in OS X because of Quartz's concept of arbitrary transparency; that is, every layer, every window is arbitrarily transparent and the whole image that the user sees is a calculated composition of those layers, regardless of what transparency. There won't be a speed boost from such unless Quartz itself drops that layer of abstraction, which we can be reasonably sure didn't happen.

As for font smoothing, we know that hasn't been lost either - only an option to control its limits as with OS 9.

Leaving out components until the system/application needs it: Mac OS X already follows this philosophy through lazy execution, doesn't it? Correct me if I'm wrong..

[Vader's Robotic Stump]

Originally posted by ppmax:
<STRONG>vader: did we really need another uninformed cynical post? someone should cut off vaders other hand so he cant type...

actually, ill do it:</STRONG>

Are you a know it all or just a complete jerk?

I am IMPRESSED that Apple has managed to make OSX so much faster and I am wondering how they did it. As you can see from the Keynote the replaced Genie with Scale as it is less processor intensive and I was wondering if the same tactic was used in other parts of 10.1

How the hell am I uninformed in cynical in this thread?

I am also pointing out the other impressive features of 10.1 that Steve didn't mention.

You think you are such a hot shot don't bother replying to stupid old me perhaps you should go impress the ladies with your complex knowledge of computer programming.

i d i o t

[adamtki]

I really don't believe OS X has been improved that much in speed. Otherwise, Steve would've demoed a before and after comparison. Since the majority of people complaining about speed run G3 machines, he should've demoed how much faster it's gotten on those machines. I think it's deceiving to demonstrate how much faster your software has gotten by simply using a faster machine.

[AG3]

Faster hardware...That wasnt a normal g4...It was the suopposedly DDR G4 that was meant to be released. Thats why Idvd crashed because drivers were fully implamented! Ohh well thats what steve told me.

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by Vader's Robotic Stump:
<STRONG>How the hell am I uninformed in cynical in this thread?</STRONG>

To be honest, VRS, I found your subject line to be a little misleading: "What Steve didn't tell you" implies, to me, some secret cabal to boost the OS's speed by sneakily shortchanging it in other areas of performance. I don't believe they did this; I don't see why simply cleaning up the code and fixing the kernel scheduler couldn't have boosted performance significantly. But I accept your explanation.

10.1 is gonna rock ... I read the copy on Apple's website twice already. Can't wait 'til September ...

[SkullMacPN]

Originally posted by Vader's Robotic Stump:
<STRONG>

Are you a know it all or just a complete jerk?

I am IMPRESSED that Apple has managed to make OSX so much faster and I am wondering how they did it. As you can see from the Keynote the replaced Genie with Scale as it is less processor intensive and I was wondering if the same tactic was used in other parts of 10.1

How the hell am I uninformed in cynical in this thread?

I am also pointing out the other impressive features of 10.1 that Steve didn't mention.

You think you are such a hot shot don't bother replying to stupid old me perhaps you should go impress the ladies with your complex knowledge of computer programming.

i d i o t</STRONG>

Call me crazy, but I picked up on the same things ppmx and Nonsuc did. The your subject and the possable answers you give to your own posed answers leads me to belive you've automatically assumed Apple has cut corners somewhere to get things to go faster.

[Vader's Robotic Stump]

Originally posted by SkullMacPN:
<STRONG>

Call me crazy, but I picked up on the same things ppmx and Nonsuc did. The your subject and the possable answers you give to your own posed answers leads me to belive you've automatically assumed Apple has cut corners somewhere to get things to go faster.</STRONG>

Well sorry if that came across. I was simply trying to point out all the cool features that Steve did not mention in the keynote itself. That is why I posted about 12 unmentioned features.

Others understood my question and think it as interesting as me. Perhaps the ones that think I am being cynical have doubt themselves and are reading things wrong.

I am totally excited about OSX 10.1 but yes, I am cautious. Apple HAS cut corners with speed, they proved this by changing "Genie" to "Scale", personally I like scale more and the speed is worth it.

I was asking so that people on the showfloor could check to see if other things were changed or cut. It is really had to see the little things in the webcasts and satellite broadcasts.

So again, I am NOT being cynical and I would love to go into a coma till OSX 10.1 comes out so I don't have to wait and so that I can start using it full time.

I just want to know of any noticeable changes that were not mentioned

I know several people who are using pre-release Puma builds on G3s.

Even on G3s guys - Puma is h*ll of a lot faster.

[moreno]

quote:
Has anyone figured out how Apple managed to make such a supposed drastic change in speed? Did they sacrifice some effects, font smoothing, transparency or frame rates to speed things up? For instance the faster Genie effect by making is �scale� (which is easier for the CPU).
- more or less transparency is the same...
- scale effect is present on the system since build 4Kxx
- the option for disable 'font smoothing' - to enable the reading of some texts that the aliasing turns unreadable


my idea is that Apple only has finished the System frameworks on March... and only after started to optimize them....

[applenut1]

apple has cut corners or taken the easy way out.

window resizing at least in the finder lcips the contents now. it no longer dynamically asjusts the contents.

Quicktime has been given real time priority as well as DVD, iDVD, iMovie, and several other parts according to the apple rep.

and I believe the UI has been givena a higher priority

Originally posted by frawgz:
<STRONG>
Anything involving removal of transparency or anything along those lines would do nothing to speed up the GUI in OS X because of Quartz's concept of arbitrary transparency; that is, every layer, every window is arbitrarily transparent and the whole image that the user sees is a calculated composition of those layers, regardless of what transparency. There won't be a speed boost from such unless Quartz itself drops that layer of abstraction, which we can be reasonably sure didn't happen.
</STRONG>

That's wrong. Quartz draws opaque objects much faster than translucent ones, try dragging a normal window around compared to a translucent Terminal window and tell me they're the same. It's not even close.

[foobars]

Originally posted by &lt;jethro&gt;:
<STRONG>

That's wrong. Quartz draws opaque objects much faster than translucent ones, try dragging a normal window around compared to a translucent Terminal window and tell me they're the same. It's not even close.</STRONG>

That's correct. Despite what some people say Quartz does not maintain a "arbitrary transparency" system. If you have dev tools installed fire up QuartzDebug and take a look. Quartz will not update parts of an opaque window when something under it is redrawn, it will, of course for a transparent one. Furthermore, Quartz has the ability to descriminate what parts of the window specifically need to be updated- so for instance if you are running the top command in a transparent window, it will only update the parts of the window that change, not the whole thing. Or if you drag a window underneith the drop shadow of another, it will only redraw the parts of the drop shadow that need to be updated (not any of the opaque parts or even the whole shadow). Very intelligent.[/LIST]

Originally posted by applenut1:
<STRONG>Quicktime has been given real time priority as well as DVD, iDVD, iMovie, and several other parts according to the apple rep.</STRONG>

I thought real time scheduling was one of the big advantages of Mach over other kernels. Doesn't it make sense to use it in low-latency multimedia situations? AFAIK real time is not necessarily a super high priority, it is just a way of sharing the CPU among time sensitive tasks. Or am I missing something here.

[gorgonzola]

I don't know about whether they did anything with the priorities (although they did change the resizing in the Finder, which is frankly good strategy), but I do know that I turned on *everything* and tried to kill the machine by resizing a Finder window with 100 images in it in column view while launching all of /Applications or something like that -- handled admirably.

Genie runs just as well as Suck, it's just that the animation cycle itself is shorter (no pause before sucking it in), that's probably why -- X handles it fine.

I don't know what they did do, but I was using their dual-800 machines and 10.1 for about an hour today and I can tell you that there's no real slowdown later. The OS is phenomenally fast, even though not all the live updating is there anymore (in Finder, like applenut said). Of course, I was using a dual-800, but it runs extremely fast on lower-end machines as well.

I'm going to run some more detailed tests tomorrow and try to figure out what it's doing -- if you have any suggestions, please email me or post in this thread (might be posted up as a news blurb if there's anything interesting). I'll be at Javits all day tomorrow and I want to set aside some time for putting Puma through its paces. (BTW, they get surprisingly irritated if you call it Puma ).

[Vader's Robotic Stump]

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
<STRONG>The OS is phenomenally fast, even though not all the live updating is there anymore (in Finder, like applenut said). Of course, I was using a dual-800, but it runs extremely fast on lower-end machines as well.</STRONG>

Can you try it on a single 450 G4 or something like that? I am interested in how well it runs then.

Thanks!

[Scott_H]

I know from the code that I write that speed is often the last thing I worry about. Often I cringe when I have to go back and look at my source code, "Why is that in the for loop? I'll move out later. .... Look at that set of vector interpolations. I could do that with matrix algebra. Maybe someday I'll fix it...."

So I'd guess that Apple "profiled" OS X and got to work on the slow ****. There's some major slow stuff in OS X that's slow for no reason. That's easy to fix.


The other is the compiler. People say that gcc for PPC is okay. One of the ideas behind RISC CPUs is that you off load some of the work from the hardware to the software, that is the compiler. I'd bet Apple got some work done on gcc so that it compiles better code.

[Vader's Robotic Stump]

Holy ta ta�s!

Do you guys see something strange in this picture?



Look at the scroll arrows! Double ended!!! This is something that Steve did not mention nor is it in the press release.
I am glad they are back.

For those of you @ MWNY does the dock have half circles for inactive apps? It is hard to tell in the demo's that Steve gave today.

[Douglas Kine]

Better yet, try it on a G3...please?

Thanks

[spectre]

Better yet.. try it on a Rev A iMac

Yes, try it on the 500 iMac please.

[frawgz]

Originally posted by foobars:
<STRONG>
That's correct. Despite what some people say Quartz does not maintain a "arbitrary transparency" system. If you have dev tools installed fire up QuartzDebug and take a look. Quartz will not update parts of an opaque window when something under it is redrawn, it will, of course for a transparent one. Furthermore, Quartz has the ability to descriminate what parts of the window specifically need to be updated- so for instance if you are running the top command in a transparent window, it will only update the parts of the window that change, not the whole thing. Or if you drag a window underneith the drop shadow of another, it will only redraw the parts of the drop shadow that need to be updated (not any of the opaque parts or even the whole shadow). Very intelligent.</STRONG>

My mistake. I had gotten caught up in the big hubbub about Quartz being simply too slow for this generation's graphics cards, and more than one someones had mentioned Quartz' arbitrary transparency policy. It sounded right to me, and I assumed it was right. Completely forgot about this point.

In any case, I still maintain that "less transparency" would do nothing for speeding up menu drops. Unless, of course, less transparency means none at all.

[rudynorff]

Somebody asked how it could be that Apple sped up OS X in only 2 months!
Well, Mac OS X's introduction was moved twice if I remember it correctly, because the engineers didn't get done on time. They were under heavy time-pressure! So all they were focussing on was to get this release out. So they didn't (and weren't able) to go for speed, or do speed improvements.
But once Mac OS X was (almost) feature-complete and users kept complaining about speed (which was a good thing to do) Steve told a lot of the engineers to focus on speed and only some of them to concentrate on new features. So if Apple has 500 (I don't know the numbers) OS X engineers and let's say 200 (I guess even more) concentrate on speed this is a lot.
If a college student like me is able to write a fully functional program with 3000+ lines of code in 2 weeks, imagine what 200+ engineers can do in 2 months! And believe me 2 months is a lot in development!

Hope this is right!
Rudy

[ 07-19-2001: Message edited by: rudynorff ]

Try it on the SE/30.

[curmi]

Originally posted by rudynorff:
<STRONG>...If a college student like me is able to write a fully functional program with 3000+ lines of code in 2 weeks, imagine what 200+ engineers can do in 2 months!...</STRONG>

This isn't true, as those who've worked in the industry for a long time will be able to tell you...

From "The Tao of Programming" (http://epims.gsfc.nasa.gov/tao.html):

3.4

A manager went to the Master Programmer and showed him the
requirements
document for a new application. The manager
asked the
Master: "How long will it take to design this system if I
assign five
programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the Master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How
long will it
take if I assign ten programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take
two
years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer shrugged. "Then the design will
never be
completed," he said.

[Gee4orce]

Originally posted by Vader's Robotic Stump:
<STRONG>

I am IMPRESSED that Apple has managed to make OSX so much faster and I am wondering how they did it. As you can see from the Keynote the replaced Genie with Scale as it is less processor intensive and I was wondering if the same tactic was used in other parts of 10.1

</STRONG>

Cloud City: Vader fires up his OSX machine, and launches a few applications. Taken aback my their speed, he staggers backwards
Vader:[Chorr-hisss] Impressive ! [Chorr-hissss] Most impressive ! [Chorr-hissssss]

[Rick1138]

Both scale and suck are available now from the command line.Anyway,I'm excited about 10.1,now instead of telling people,"It's the greatest OS ever,but it's not quite ready yet",I can say"It's the greatest OS ever,if you don't but it you are a moron."Three cheers to Apple's programmers and engineers.

[suthercd]

Reading the comments, one part of Jobs presentation used a 12 hour clock as a graphic- He indicated the release of 10.0.0 was represented by 4 o'clock in the graphic. 10.1 is represented by 6 o'clock.

So we are half way through the development/evolution cycle of OS X. Candid and helpful info. Lot's to look forward to over the next year.

[suthercd]

Reading the comments, one part of Jobs presentation used a 12 hour clock as a graphic- He indicated the release of 10.0.0 was represented by 4 o'clock in the graphic. 10.1 is represented by 6 o'clock.

So we are half way through the development/evolution cycle of OS X. Candid and helpful info. Lot's to look forward to over the next year.

[Millennium]

Let's see: how could Apple have sped OSX up?

Well, when it comes down to it, there are two types of speed in an OS: actual speed and percieved speed (also called responsiveness). If actual speed goes up but responsiveness stays flat, users won't much care about the speed increase. On the other hand, if responsiveness increases but actual speed stays pretty flat, users will still think the system has gotten faster.

Now, Apple's not stupid (even though its CEO can be at times). They've probably got profiling down to a science; they can know exactly how long a given function takes to execute. With this in mind, they can concentrate more on the slow stuff, like the compositing in current incarnations of Quartz (most of the rest of Quartz seems to actually be quite fast, but compositing is a huge bottleneck). If you can get this quick, your responsiveness will go way up. I should note here that transparency in and of itself is not causing much of a speed hit; to see this for yourself, start playing a QuickTime movie, and then half-cover it with a transparent Terminal window (half-covering is important; since part of the frame will be covered and part will not, you'd be putting even more demand on the CPU under a traditional graphics subsystem than just covering the whole thing). Even better, find an Audion skin with varying levels of transparency and use that instead; that'd really give the CPU a workout. But the framerate will not change. So clearly there's something other than transparency that's killing the CPU, and whatever it is it's so big that transparency seems to be nothing by comparison.

As for actual speed... that depends. It's possible that they have a better math library now (remember how you could install LibMoto in OS9 and get a decent speed boost, just from that? Same principle). Last I heard, the MathLib in 10.0.4 isn't supposed to be very good, so this is a real possibility. Fixing the scheduler would also be a big help, because once that's done you can cheat with it (for example, cranking up an app's priority while it's launching, then scale it back to normal levels when it's done).

You mentioned the idea of an app not loading all its resources at startup. The thing is, OSX already does this, and you're right, it does cause a speed hit. That's why prebinding makes things seem faster; it keeps the OS from doing that.
PowerPlant: It's well-known that Metrowerks has been updating PowerPlant for Carbon Events. However, this isn't out yet, meaning that if the Finder still uses PowerPlant, it'll be using a beta version. I find this a bit unsettling.

I still want to see a Cocoa rewrite, mind you, no matter how fast it gets; I don't want Cocoa for speed. I want it for integration.

Compiler advancements: Hmmm... while this is possible, I'm not sure if it's likely. Could be, though.

Drivers: A possibility. Maybe they'll finally have Rage Pro support

Actually, the general software development cycle anywhere should be roughly as follows:

implement features
fix bugs
improve features (including optimization)
fix bugs, etc...

I'd modify that a bit, actually:

• Plan features
• Prioritize features
• Implement highest-priority features (for the first time through, this would be just the basics)
• Fix bugs
• Optimize
• Fix optimization bugs
• Re-examine remaining features, re-priotitizing if necessary
• Implement next-highest priority features
• Fix bugs
• Optimize
• Fix optimization bugs
• Re-examine remaining features, re-prioritizing if need be
• Repeat ad nauseam

The point is, it's not an easy process, nor a simple one. And take special note that out of the five parts of the loop I get into, only one involves implementing new stuff, and three involve maintenance (two of which are just bugfixing). Yeah, it's a little slower than what Microsoft has made us used to. But it gets good software out there that works, without the endless delays that plagued OS/2 and other such operating systems.

[rudynorff]

Originally posted by curmi:
[QB][/QB]

So, you want to tell me, that if Apple had hired only one engineer, it would have been finished 3 years ago?
Seriously, the OS X Team is divided into several subdivisions (I guess) e.g. the Finder-team. So there is this small group (of let's say 10 engineers) and they now get the command "make it speedy" (or whatever)!
So what they do is, they divide this finder division into several other divisions, so let's say two guys are responsible for making the resizing faster, the other guys are working on the menus and so on. The same for the kernel division and so on.

Get what I'm saying? And this quote is only true if the development team is badly organized, but I think Apple is doing a great job. They better.

So, maybe you just didn't get what I was thinking. I have to apologize in a way too, because my english must be terrible to read for somebody who lives in an English-speaking country!

Gotta go,

Rudy

[rogerkylin]

Before the expo, I posed the question if 10.1 wasn't released could we get an update before, and got mixed responses. So here's an updated question.

I understand that the 10.0.x and 10.1 projects forked at some point in the past. But couldn't the optimization lessons learned from 10.1 be used to speed up 10.0.4? If some lines were rewritten, they should just copy and past, and recompile. Apparently if it is a library or compiler improvements it seems these should also be managable...

Maybe five engineers, in five days could give us a small improvement...enough to tide us over.

[Millennium]

Noticed a couple other things I hadn't seen before...

One-ended scrollbars: Woohoo! Man, do I ever miss this one. Now, if only there were a way to move that vertical scrollbar over to the left side...

Movable Dock: I'm not too sure I want to cheer for this yet. While it looks like Apple may have given in on orientation, I didn't see an option for pinning. I keep my Dock on the bottom, but pinned to the right side, so this is an important one for me.

[foobars]

Originally posted by rogerkylin:
<STRONG>Before the expo, I posed the question if 10.1 wasn't released could we get an update before, and got mixed responses. So here's an updated question.

I understand that the 10.0.x and 10.1 projects forked at some point in the past. But couldn't the optimization lessons learned from 10.1 be used to speed up 10.0.4? If some lines were rewritten, they should just copy and past, and recompile. Apparently if it is a library or compiler improvements it seems these should also be managable...

Maybe five engineers, in five days could give us a small improvement...enough to tide us over.</STRONG>

You have a very good point that some people still don't understand. No company (especially in the UNIX OS world) works one one build of the OS at a time. Instead, there are different branches of the system and smaller groups work on seperate builds in parallel. The 10.1 build has been a seperate branch of development since even before the 10.0 release. If there's one thing to be learned from this huge speed increase its that it doesn't come from any one thing, but from months of hard work but a group of programmers. 10.1 clearly has opimizations and changes on all levels of the system.

Apple won't do any "cutting and pasteing" for two reasons:
1) It probally won't speed things up. If you throw an F1 racing gearshift in a 1997 geo metro it may speed things up a bit, but not in the way you want. 10.1 is fast because it's been changed at all levels. Plus it looks like Apple may have gotten pretty creative in how they brought about speed increases. Application lauch speed leads me to believe they might have invented some new super prebinding system. It seems to me many of the improvements Apple made are brand new with 10.1 and couldn't be added to 10.0.4 without some heavy modifications under the hood.

2) Apple doesn't like to work backwards. Why waste time putting 10.1s featrues in 10.0.4 one at a time when you can add all the featrues in one release and work on it in the mean time. Apple would rather put it's foot down and make a landmark release than dribble out an update that will get no notice. (Which release was the fast one? 10.0.6?) Apple wants 10.1 to be a huge deal.

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by Millennium:
<STRONG>Noticed a couple other things I hadn't seen before...

One-ended scrollbars: Woohoo! Man, do I ever miss this one. </STRONG>

Man, do I hope to god there's a way to de-select this. Probably my least-favorite of Apple's recent UI "innovations."

[DannyVTim]

For the people who don't program, it doesn't take a lot some times to speed up software dramatically sometimes. For example, I had a program that would execute a set of instructions over and over to draw an image off screen, and then it copied it to the window that was on screen. I removed one instruction from the inside loop to outside the loop and the drawing sped up considerably. Also, I played around with routine to copy the off screen image to the onscreen window and it sped up to filling the window instantly from filling in the window over a few seconds. This took about an hour total to do these things. It took about an hour to find the bottleneck. A few months later, I gave the app to a friend who I wrote it for and he freaked about how much faster it was.

My point is it doesn't necessarily take a lot to speed things up considerable. More importantly, I didn't even bother to try to speed it up until I finished getting the program complete which is what Apple has been going through. X version 1.0 is almost done now, a real version 1.0 not the current version 1, with a complete IOKit etc. So, now they can work on making it faster. I'm sure all the gripes made them go after the easy things to increase speed while they were continuing to complete X. Now, developers can finish products at this point, and Apple can work on cleaning up the code and speeding it up. I would expect more feature with 10.2 but also speed increases that are equal to even faster then the 10.1 increases.

Forget about all that silly speculation about transparency etc. Those things may or may not be true; however, those things aren't nearly as important as cleaning up the code for obvious bottlenecks and trying different ways of handling a process that will execute quicker. This is all quite normal. And, the current 10.0 wasn't really complete, so it's only natural that X will get faster.

[Spirit_VW]

Originally posted by Millennium:
<STRONG>Noticed a couple other things I hadn't seen before...

One-ended scrollbars: Woohoo! Man, do I ever miss this one. Now, if only there were a way to move that vertical scrollbar over to the left side...

Movable Dock: I'm not too sure I want to cheer for this yet. While it looks like Apple may have given in on orientation, I didn't see an option for pinning. I keep my Dock on the bottom, but pinned to the right side, so this is an important one for me.</STRONG>

Pinning is in there - I think it's just a setting under "Position," and no longer a separate entry.

Also, I KNOW I've read on a few sites that the little arrows by folders in column view will not only tell you they're folders but also provide spring-loaded folder functionality.

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by Spirit_VW:
<STRONG>Also, I KNOW I've read on a few sites that the little arrows by folders in column view will not only tell you they're folders but also provide spring-loaded folder functionality.</STRONG>

MacCentral posted an interview with Ken Bereskin today that was mostly a rehash of what was announded yesterday; however, Bereskin did say 10.1 would have further new features that wouldn't be announced until the release. Perhaps this is one of them.

[OwlBoy]

Originally posted by rudynorff:
<STRONG>


Seriously, the OS X Team is divided into several subdivisions (I guess) e.g. the Finder-team. So there is this small group (of let's say 10 engineers) and they now get the command "make it speedy" (or whatever)!
So what they do is, they divide this finder division into several other divisions, so let's say two guys are responsible for making the resizing faster, the other guys are working on the menus and so on. The same for the kernel division and so on.

Rudy</STRONG>

Menus are system wide slow. THe finder team would not work on em Im guessing...

-Owl

[gorgonzola]

Originally posted by Vader's Robotic Stump:
<STRONG>

Can you try it on a single 450 G4 or something like that? I am interested in how well it runs then.

Thanks!</STRONG>

The only available machines with Puma are dual-800's with Cinema Displays. Go figure.

[gorgonzola]

Originally posted by Spirit_VW:
<STRONG>

Pinning is in there - I think it's just a setting under "Position," and no longer a separate entry.

Also, I KNOW I've read on a few sites that the little arrows by folders in column view will not only tell you they're folders but also provide spring-loaded folder functionality.</STRONG>

Pinning is there.

The arrows don't do spring loaded as of 5F25 (Steve's build) but this may be an unannounced future feature as some Apple reps seemed to think that those *did* do the spring loaded thing.

[saltines17]

Originally posted by Nonsuch:
<STRONG>

Man, do I hope to god there's a way to de-select this. Probably my least-favorite of Apple's recent UI "innovations."</STRONG>

There is, don't worry