What happened to "OK, Apply, Cancel"

[james_s]

As a long time Windows user, that's something I've never understood. Why must applications poop random files all over the system? Why not install *everything* in the program files directory and put any settings file in a settings folder, and store user files in the Documents folder? Why can't uninstall keep track of all that and remove it? If the program needs specific external libraries, just put them in the folder with the rest of the program. Disk space has been cheap long enough that IMO it isn't worth the hassle to try to keep all that stuff centralized.

[rdl]

As a long time Windows user, that's something I've never understood. Why must applications poop random files all over the system?

Because Microsoft invented the Registry and told all the developers to use it. As far as I'm concerned, the Registry should be used only by the OS. Nothing else should ever touch it.

Today, I am almost 100% on "portable" software.

[helius]

This may boil down to the fact that historically a Mac could always tell what monitor was plugged into it and knew exactly which modes that monitor could support and hid anything unsupported. Given that, it was quite difficult to get oneself into a state where the monitor couldn't display the signal and the user then would have a difficult time selecting something else.

On the contrary, it was quite easy for this to happen. Many users (particularly in graphics and prepress industries) used monitors from third parties without identification signals. The wires (and later, diodes) to identify the resolution were in the cable, or missing altogether. The Mac architecture provided non-volatile settings for I/O cards: the resolution for each video card was stored in the computer's "PRAM" between restarts. If this memory was corrupted or cleared, the settings would be lost, and the display would be rendered unreadable. There were specific key combinations you needed to hold down during restart to cycle through the supported resolutions until you hit on one your monitor synced to.

[james_s]

Ok well the Mac was *supposed* to be able to tell what monitor was plugged in and what resolutions it supported, and Apple has never been one to advocate using 3rd party accessories. Under the "appliance" closed system philosophy it's not unreasonable to omit a straightforward way of correcting a situation that was not supposed to occur.

[MarkS]

Looking back 25 years:

..snip..

There are no "OK" or "Cancel" buttons in the Mac System 7.0 Monitors control panel. It works exactly the same as the OSX 10.7 (at a guess) screenshot above.

You are correct. I haven't messed with the Mac in nearly 20 years. Control panels are not/were not dialog boxes, but rather, small applets. It was expected that the choices made in a control panel would have immediate effect. They had their own set of rules.

[helius]

... Apple has never been one to advocate using 3rd party accessories. Under the "appliance" closed system philosophy it's not unreasonable to omit a straightforward way of correcting a situation that was not supposed to occur.

By the mid-'80s, the leadership at Apple was not trying to sell "appliances". They wanted to sell advanced computer products with the highest capabilities and highest margins. The vision of the company was not from Steve Jobs—he was fired. It was from Jean-Louis Gassée. By decade's end, Apple had products like the Mac IIfx for $5000 base price, with minimum memory and disk and no monitor or video card, equivalent to something like $12K in today's inflated money. This was hardly an "appliance".

[rrinker]

 Everyone always talks about registry bloat slowing their computer down. I've NEVER had to nuke and pave any of my Windows installs, I install it when I build the machine and that same install works just fine until I replace the hardware with a new machine. That timeframe can be years and yes, I do install and uninstall programs over those years. I also do not use any of those reg cleaner utilities, because half the time they want to delete stuff that is still live.

 As for settings - I think it's been covered. THere's just too much hardware variety that Windows needs to work with and without the monitor reliably talking to the video card to limit options to only resolutions that the monitor can display, it's not fear to miss some additional control. It's too easy to select something that results in no display and then how do you get back?  Windows gets around this by displaying in the selected resolution for a few seconds and then reverting and asking for a confirmation before applying the change. Devices and drivers have always been the source of most Windows issues, when everyone and their brother builds a hardware device and may or may not have the actual skill to write working drivers for said device (or even when they theoretically should do absolutely idiotic things like having print drivers write to system folders - HP I'm looking at you. That's not following some Microsoft standard, that's just idiotic - and then on top of it the 'driver' is also ridiculously huge. Had to put so much marketing material in the driver you didn't have room to include the code to properly redirect the temporary files to a user folder?

[james_s]

... Apple has never been one to advocate using 3rd party accessories. Under the "appliance" closed system philosophy it's not unreasonable to omit a straightforward way of correcting a situation that was not supposed to occur.

By the mid-'80s, the leadership at Apple was not trying to sell "appliances". They wanted to sell advanced computer products with the highest capabilities and highest margins. The vision of the company was not from Steve Jobs—he was fired. It was from Jean-Louis Gassée. By decade's end, Apple had products like the Mac IIfx for $5000 base price, with minimum memory and disk and no monitor or video card, equivalent to something like $12K in today's inflated money. This was hardly an "appliance".

Sure, but Apple sold a whole selection of parts to equip the machine as desired, everything Apple branded and designed to work together, and priced accordingly. Third party accessories were available, but Apple didn't go out of their way to support them. They wanted you to buy a monitor from them.

The IIfx was a cool system, I have one, although I need to piece it back together. The original motherboard was destroyed by the lithium batteries leaking.

[james_s]

Everyone always talks about registry bloat slowing their computer down. I've NEVER had to nuke and pave any of my Windows installs, I install it when I build the machine and that same install works just fine until I replace the hardware with a new machine. That timeframe can be years and yes, I do install and uninstall programs over those years. I also do not use any of those reg cleaner utilities, because half the time they want to delete stuff that is still live.

 As for settings - I think it's been covered. THere's just too much hardware variety that Windows needs to work with and without the monitor reliably talking to the video card to limit options to only resolutions that the monitor can display, it's not fear to miss some additional control. It's too easy to select something that results in no display and then how do you get back?  Windows gets around this by displaying in the selected resolution for a few seconds and then reverting and asking for a confirmation before applying the change. Devices and drivers have always been the source of most Windows issues, when everyone and their brother builds a hardware device and may or may not have the actual skill to write working drivers for said device (or even when they theoretically should do absolutely idiotic things like having print drivers write to system folders - HP I'm looking at you. That's not following some Microsoft standard, that's just idiotic - and then on top of it the 'driver' is also ridiculously huge. Had to put so much marketing material in the driver you didn't have room to include the code to properly redirect the temporary files to a user folder?

Most of those printers with huge "drivers" are the sort where the printer hardware is simplified and most of the image processing is done on the host PC, a bit like the old "WinModems" that were around for a while. I forget what the printers are called but they're best avoided.

[tooki]

Ok well the Mac was *supposed* to be able to tell what monitor was plugged in and what resolutions it supported, and Apple has never been one to advocate using 3rd party accessories. Under the "appliance" closed system philosophy it's not unreasonable to omit a straightforward way of correcting a situation that was not supposed to occur.

Originally, Macs didn't do on-the-fly resolution changes, because it wasn't a common use case at the time. Apple's early CRT monitors were single-resolution (typically designed to be about 67ppi physical resolution, slightly magnified over the logical 72ppi), so 640x480 for 14", 832x624 for 17", and 1152x870 for 21". Sense pins on the display connector told the Mac what resolution to use, and this was only sensed at startup. (Color depth could be changed on the fly, though, unlike early Windows.) If using a third-party display, you'd use an adapter (from the Mac's DE-15 display connector to the DB-15 VGA connector) with a bunch of DIP switches on it for setting the resolution.

Only years later, when they'd become fairly common, did Apple introduce support for multisync monitors that could support multiple resolutions. The sense pins were first extended to include a few multisync configurations, and later extended again to support the modern DDC monitor ID types.

I will be able to fool around with this soon, as I am intending to pull my old Performa 475 out of storage and give it a fresh battery, ethernet card, etc. for shits and giggles. I already have the display adapter ready.

[james_s]

I remember seeing an adapter once that had a rotary switch to select the mode, I only ever had the fixed type though with no adjustments. I was always a PC guy back in the day but somehow ended up with a bunch of old Macs. Sold several of them but I still have my IIci with a 68040 accelerator card, an original Mac II, a IIfx, LCIII and an SE/30. Except for the IIfx they are all complete and working, I pull one out now and then to play around with it. Never cared for Macs when they were modern, but today you can certainly see just how far ahead of PCs of the era they were in many ways. A 30 year old Mac is still quite usable and feels familiar to one who has used a modern GUI. A 30 year old DOS PC is another story.

[Nerull]

All the people running to Linux to escape the lack of 'apply' buttons are going to be shocked when they found out it doesn't have them either.

It's pretty rare for the windows registry to actually have problems, at least until some "power user" comes along and starts fucking with it. Running registry cleaners and such is quite likely to make things worse.

The major linux desktop systems all implement their own version of a registry, so it's not something you're going to escape there either.

[rrinker]

Everyone always talks about registry bloat slowing their computer down. I've NEVER had to nuke and pave any of my Windows installs, I install it when I build the machine and that same install works just fine until I replace the hardware with a new machine. That timeframe can be years and yes, I do install and uninstall programs over those years. I also do not use any of those reg cleaner utilities, because half the time they want to delete stuff that is still live.

 As for settings - I think it's been covered. THere's just too much hardware variety that Windows needs to work with and without the monitor reliably talking to the video card to limit options to only resolutions that the monitor can display, it's not fear to miss some additional control. It's too easy to select something that results in no display and then how do you get back?  Windows gets around this by displaying in the selected resolution for a few seconds and then reverting and asking for a confirmation before applying the change. Devices and drivers have always been the source of most Windows issues, when everyone and their brother builds a hardware device and may or may not have the actual skill to write working drivers for said device (or even when they theoretically should do absolutely idiotic things like having print drivers write to system folders - HP I'm looking at you. That's not following some Microsoft standard, that's just idiotic - and then on top of it the 'driver' is also ridiculously huge. Had to put so much marketing material in the driver you didn't have room to include the code to properly redirect the temporary files to a user folder?

Most of those printers with huge "drivers" are the sort where the printer hardware is simplified and most of the image processing is done on the host PC, a bit like the old "WinModems" that were around for a while. I forget what the printers are called but they're best avoided.

 Those are particularly bad, just like Winmodems. However fairly fancy HP inkjet and Laserjet printers aren't dumbed down in the printer, they have full processors and their only page rendering memory - but the drivers are HUGE - because they contain a whole lot of bullshit - the last inkjet I bought (and I mean last in multiple meanings of the word) included in the print driver software that would dump you to the HP site to buy fresh ink when it ran low. AMong all the other junk it installed that was not really necessary to actually print a document to it. I thought I uninstalled it all a while ago when I trashed the printer, but the other day I happened to notice there was STILL some HP printer thing showing in control panel/programs. NOW it's all gone. The drive for my Canon color laser is super compact, no extra junk - it's actually built in to Windows 10 so all I had to do was connect the printer to the network and all my windows machines just automatically added the driver. There seems to be a bunch of other stuff on a CD that came with it but I never bothered. I can print color and b&w and scan with it with what I have, the extras are not needed and not installed unless you actually install them, unlike HP.

[Vtile]

They may as well have dumbed the 'Start' button down to "Apps 'n' Shit".

[Zero999]

You are correct. I haven't messed with the Mac in nearly 20 years. Control panels are not/were not dialog boxes, but rather, small applets. It was expected that the choices made in a control panel would have immediate effect. They had their own set of rules.

Same with Windows.

The major linux desktop systems all implement their own version of a registry, so it's not something you're going to escape there either.

Totally different. That's just the desktop and is on a per user basis. Windows' registry contains important system settings.

[james_s]

So far I've found that Windows 7 seems to hold up reasonably well, like other versions it does seem to degrade a bit over time and gradually take longer and longer to boot, but so far I haven't had it get just plain flaky the way some did. Windows XP seemed to eventually get really slow, and Win9x was just horrible in that regard. It was rare that I could go a year without having to reinstall due to something deteriorating. I don't know whether it's the registry or something else but it's definitely a real phenomenon. I generally wasn't doing a lot of hacking and tweaking either, just heavy use, installing and uninstalling programs, occasionally swapping out hardware.

I haven't had that particular problem with Linux but that's not to say it's been entirely smooth sailing either. More than once I've had Linux installs just completely fail, turned it on one day and it wouldn't even boot, never did figure out what happened and had to reinstall. I'm sure a Linux expert could have fixed it but while I consider myself competent and know my way around, I'm still not really an expert, most of my experience is in the DOS/Windows world. Now I'm a big proponent of Linux and open source in general but it's not all roses, and not everything Microsoft has made is crap. Can't say I'm a fan of the general direction the company has gone over the last 5-10 years though. IMO Win7 and Office 2003 were the pinnacle of Microsoft tech and it's been downhill ever since. They still do the back end stuff pretty well but their UI and UX has gone to hell in a handbasket. There were always grumbles about new OS designs, but generally the design was a genuine improvement and the grumbles died down by now. Win8 on the other hand remains as reviled as ever, and Win10 is extremely polarizing with some people loving it and others hating it. The fact that it struggles to reach 30% market despite being forced on users "free" with extremely heavy handed and deceptive practices suggests that it is not widely popular. Most of the people I know who upgraded either had it happen automatically without asking for it, or decided to try it and now regret it. I know a few happy users but they are the minority.

[rdl]

If you'd like to learn some interesting facts about what some of the information Windows stores in the Registry is, just Google shellbags.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=shellbags

[apelly]

Flat UI? There must be some actual research about this somewhere. Have any of you guys stumbled across any papers about it?

I can not understand who it helps to take away clues about interactivity. Buttons/links that look like ordinary words/titles? Low contrast windows? Come on.

And: Give my bloody menus back!

You have software with five thousand options. And you want me to wade through 5k icons to find what I want? Nope. You decide what I want, and only make it easy to use those ten features. Wow! You've just made your software really easy to use. And useless.

Most of those printers with huge "drivers" are the sort where the printer hardware is simplified and most of the image processing is done on the host PC, a bit like the old "WinModems" that were around for a while. I forget what the printers are called but they're best avoided.

GDI? Graphics device interface? Something like that, I think. In the beginning it enabled super cheap laser printers.

[james_s]

Yeah, GDI, that sounds right.

The flat UI thing is a fad, or a trend, or whatever you want to call it. Like architecture, clothing styles, haircuts, kitchen appliance colors, and everything else various styles come and go because most people are attracted to new and different. It's popular with hipsters and millennials who aren't old enough to have experienced it in the days of the primitive MS-DOS shell and Windows 2.0 on EGA monitors. Eventually people will get tired of the stark flatness and someone will "invent" visual cues to differentiate clickable controls from static text and glossy UIs that take advantage of modern hardware and the cycle will continue. Whether this happens next year or 10 years from now is anyone's guess but it will happen.

[tooki]

All the people running to Linux to escape the lack of 'apply' buttons are going to be shocked when they found out it doesn't have them either.

It's pretty rare for the windows registry to actually have problems, at least until some "power user" comes along and starts fucking with it. Running registry cleaners and such is quite likely to make things worse.

The major linux desktop systems all implement their own version of a registry, so it's not something you're going to escape there either.

To the best of my knowledge, no OS before or since Windows has implemented anything quite like the Registry, recognizing it as a singularly terrible idea. Just one example: file associations. Wanna see how not to do it? Look at Windows, where the Registry supports only a 1:1 relationship between a file extension and single application to run it. (And AFAIK, there is no Registry entry at all for which file types an application can open, though my confidence level on this claim is low.) And every installer and application wants to claim it, so it gets set back and forth constantly if there are competing apps for a file type. Wanna see how to do it right? Look at the Mac's LaunchServices database, which is compiled dynamically, on-the-fly, as storage volumes are mounted or ejected. It knows not only which file types are an application's native filetypes, it also knows (separately) which types it can open. And then there's a system default for "unclaimed" files of a given filetype, but with a mechanism for per-document overriding (so that, for example, you can set one .jpg file to open in Photoshop, and another to open in Preview). And this happens completely without the use of an installer -- connecting a disk containing an application is all it takes for it to be integrated into LaunchServices intelligently.

[james_s]

I don't find the registry itself to be all that poor of a concept, as someone else mentioned the issue is allowing everything to store and modify stuff there. The registry ought to be for the operating system to keep track of internal things, nothing else should be messing with it and the user should not have to edit it themselves.

I haven't had too many issues with file associations, Windows let's you right-click and "open with" in most cases and will remember the choice if you let it. I still remember what a hassle it was on the pre-OSX Macs the way file extensions were not used and if you wanted to change the type of the file you had to use a tool like ResEdit. The separate resource and data forks made it a hassle to transfer data between platforms.

[tooki]

I don't find the registry itself to be all that poor of a concept, as someone else mentioned the issue is allowing everything to store and modify stuff there. The registry ought to be for the operating system to keep track of internal things, nothing else should be messing with it and the user should not have to edit it themselves.

Except that that everything under the sun writes to the Registry, to the point that users DO have to edit it.

I haven't had too many issues with file associations, Windows let's you right-click and "open with" in most cases and will remember the choice if you let it. I still remember what a hassle it was on the pre-OSX Macs the way file extensions were not used and if you wanted to change the type of the file you had to use a tool like ResEdit. The separate resource and data forks made it a hassle to transfer data between platforms.

Windows only remembers that choice globally -- you can't override the preferred application for a single file. HUGE difference.

As for Classic Mac OS, file extensions were supported from around the early 1990s, when System 7 included the PC Exchange control panel. But they were clearly subordinate to the Creator and Type codes that indeed needed a tool to edit -- but the overwhelming majority of Mac users never even heard of those codes, never mind needed to edit them. (Apple has since effectively recreated those codes, in an even better way, using extended file attributes, which are now widely supported across various filesystems.)

As for the data and resource forks (which are only tangentially related to the question of file associations, since the creator/type codes weren't stored in the resource fork): the fact that other systems didn't support them didn't make them a bad idea. If anything, the fact that other OSes/filesystems added and even extended the idea (e.g. NFTS's support for multiple file streams, not just data and resource) confirms that the idea was very sound. Apple's current re-implementation of this idea, in the form of bundles/packages, is brilliant, and remains IMHO one of the Mac's strongest implementation advantages, in terms of providing a user-friendly and technically robust solution to the common problem of needing something in between a dumb folder full of files, and a giant monolithic file. I am not aware of any other OS that has anything like the Mac's bundles, and they suffer for it.

[rdl]

Windows 7 has no built in way to remove a file association, you can only change it.

Once a file extension exists it is stored in the registry, whether it was opened by a program or even can be opened is irrelevant. It stores it anyway. You can make a typo changing an extension, then go back and fix it, but your typo is stored forever. Brilliant, eh?

[helius]

As for the data and resource forks (which are only tangentially related to the question of file associations, since the creator/type codes weren't stored in the resource fork): the fact that other systems didn't support them didn't make them a bad idea. If anything, the fact that other OSes/filesystems added and even extended the idea (e.g. NFTS's support for multiple file streams, not just data and resource) confirms that the idea was very sound. Apple's current re-implementation of this idea, in the form of bundles/packages, is brilliant, and remains IMHO one of the Mac's strongest implementation advantages, in terms of providing a user-friendly and technically robust solution to the common problem of needing something in between a dumb folder full of files, and a giant monolithic file. I am not aware of any other OS that has anything like the Mac's bundles, and they suffer for it.

Bundles were created by NeXT in the late '80s, during the period when Resources were being used by Apple. They were not "Apple's current re-implementation of the idea" insofar as Apple did not create them to replace Resources. Resources were elegant in some ways, but they were also very tightly tied to the Memory Manager and part of the reason that protected memory never made it to Classic MacOS.

[tooki]

As for the data and resource forks (which are only tangentially related to the question of file associations, since the creator/type codes weren't stored in the resource fork): the fact that other systems didn't support them didn't make them a bad idea. If anything, the fact that other OSes/filesystems added and even extended the idea (e.g. NFTS's support for multiple file streams, not just data and resource) confirms that the idea was very sound. Apple's current re-implementation of this idea, in the form of bundles/packages, is brilliant, and remains IMHO one of the Mac's strongest implementation advantages, in terms of providing a user-friendly and technically robust solution to the common problem of needing something in between a dumb folder full of files, and a giant monolithic file. I am not aware of any other OS that has anything like the Mac's bundles, and they suffer for it.

Bundles were created by NeXT in the late '80s, during the period when Resources were being used by Apple. They were not "Apple's current re-implementation of the idea" insofar as Apple did not create them to replace Resources. Resources were elegant in some ways, but they were also very tightly tied to the Memory Manager and part of the reason that protected memory never made it to Classic MacOS.

Yes, bundles were born at NeXT, but because NeXT was Jobs' second computer company, and as such in many ways the NeXT hardware and software was the Mac reimagined with a few years' added experience, and since NeXT in essence became Apple later on*, it's absolutely fair to describe bundles as a re-implementation of Resources, since the idea clearly came directly from them and today's Apple is NeXT in almost every sense of the word.

::must remember to always be achingly pedantic when replying on eevblog... must remember to always be achingly pedantic when replying on eevblog... must remember to always be achingly pedantic when replying on eevblog... ::   

*Apple's purchase of NeXT has been referred to as a reverse acquisition, insofar as Apple paid for NeXT, but NeXT's technology and staff pretty much entirely replaced Apple's. In a sense, NeXT paid negative dollars to acquire the Apple trademarks, IP, and real estate.