At 16:18 -0500 18/2/12, Bob King wrote:
here I go, sticking my scrawny neck out again, but I’m getting
worried about the pace of things for the ‘non-pros’ amongst us, for
surely, with the main selling point of Freeway being it’s use for us
HTMLphobics , these ‘non-pros’ must be in the majority.
Just being HTMLphobic doesn’t make you a ‘non-pro’. It just means
that your ‘pro’ isn’t in the direction of coding.
There’s a whole range of computer usage from ‘playing’ to ‘heavy’.
Ignoring actual games, I would class ‘playing’ as email and browsing
and ‘heavy’ as using multiple applications or one or more
multi-window applications that require extensive input rather than
just reading output. You can do ‘playing’ on an iPad; you need a real
computer to do ‘heavy’.
Some people have real jobs that they do that only require the same
capability as ‘play’. Apple seems to be heading in a direction that
supports them but ignores the ‘heavy’ users. My last web project
involved running Freeway, a browser that was logged in to the site, a
browser that wasn’t logged in, an extra set of browser windows for
database manipulation, TextWrangler, FileMaker for reference to an
old database, Skype for communication with the client, plus email for
general use. I had these spread across an 27"iMac with a 24" extra
screen and a Mac Mini, both using 4 spaces and with Teleport allowing
one keyboard/mouse to control tit all. I’m sure many of you are more
than familiar with that sort of working. My wife has Lion on her
laptop so I’ve been able to experiment a bit, and it seem to be
geared to one workspace per application rather than one workspace per
multi-application function. You can have an application with windows
in several workspaces but it’s much harder and fiddlier to set up and
work with than with Spaces. It’s also more difficult to remember the
relative positions of the workspace you’re in and the one you want
next. You’re also expected to have a trackpad of some type that I
would only use for changing workspaces. (I run with all the swipe
options turned off on my MBP to reduce the distracting screen
jumps/grows/shrinks that you get from them).
Having to use Lion would slow me down and force me to think more
about my working screen environment instead of what I’m trying to
achieve than SL does.
It’s not the pace of development of Freeway that I’m talking about
(more about that later), but that of the Mac OS. I use Snow Leopard
on an iMac, one of those late 2006 17" jobs plagued by the dodgy
screens; the use of two external 19" screens, however makes it a
bargain at £120.
Snow Leopard is perfect for me. The (over) rapid release of Lion,
with (for Apple) unusual, teething problems, and Apple’s adoption of
the Microsoft ‘enforcement’ culture, Aka Windoze, has stopped me
from going Lion. From the comments on this forum, I see that I am
not alone in my caution.
I now see that 10.8, or ‘Mountain Lion’, is on the horizon, in
direct competition with Windows 8, with both seeming to have
abandoned the desktop computer, and going hell bent for the tablet,
phone and touch symbol-control market.
I fully agree.
Am I being paranoid in seeing, in the very near future, a state
where those who seek to use new apps (by new, I mean, less than 5
years old) are forced to use the latest OS , only obtainable of
course from the App store, and usable on the very latest gizmo.
Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen 
It will be ironic, if the Internet, the freest source of information
ever known to man, is only available to us, chained and entrapped,
by Apple and Microsoft…
Apple seem to be hell bent on carving out an empire in much the same
way as Microsoft were a decade ago.
Lastly, to go back to Freeway’s development, I have this horrid
feeling that the delay in version 6 is that Softpress know that they
will have to jump on the iOS/gesture driven bandwagon and are
gauging the loss of we troglodytes against the new shiny market,
promised by the pundits to be 'just over the horizon’
That doesn’t mean that Softpress have to force us to use only the IOS
methods. A trackpad is far less precise than a mouse, especially when
the pad also gives the click, and so is inferior in any design
application. One really bad thing for me would be if we were forced
to run with auto-save on. Personally I only save a FW document when
it’s nearer to what I want than the last save. There’s so much trial
and error (for me anyway) that I’d end up with lots of saved ‘errors’
and I’d have to do a deliberate save-as each time I saved.
Hopefully if there enough Mac users not making the switch to Lion
they will realise that they have got it wrong. After all, this forced
change is only a whim. There’s no fundamental reason for the change.
When we’ve been forced before there’s been an underlying technical
reason.
David
–
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
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www.ivdcs.co.uk
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