Mac OS X Lion Discussion


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Right, I was referring to an iPod Touch. It's not really an advertised feature so I'll err on the side of caution and eject it anyway. It takes, what, 5 seconds?

If you have no need for it that's fine, I think it's a nice feature to have system-wide. Especially when I see how many non-tech savvy people don't eject before removing a drive. Having to manually eject a drive seems pretty archaic.

Btw, how isn't it "an advertised feature"? If your iPod touch is done syncing iTunes will immediately tell you it's "OK to disconnect". Things don't become more obvious than that really. If you have disk mode enabled iTunes will tell you "Don't forget to disconnect" or something along those lines.

screenshot20110409at134.png

If you have no need for it that's fine, I think it's a nice feature to have system-wide. Especially when I see how many non-tech savvy people don't eject before removing a drive. Having to manually eject a drive seems pretty archaic.

Btw, how isn't it "an advertised feature"? If your iPod touch is done syncing iTunes will immediately tell you it's "OK to disconnect". Things don't become more obvious than that really. If you have disk mode enabled iTunes will tell you "Don't forget to disconnect" or something along those lines.

screenshot20110409at134.png

Ah, never really noticed. To me I just registered those words as "eject now". I guess I've just been conditioned. But you're right, for novice users it's a nice touch. Unfortunately the same doesn't apply to other things like USB drives, so it's slightly unfortunate that at the end of the day it's just going to confuse the user into thinking all devices work the same way and don't require ejecting.

Having to manually eject a drive seems pretty archaic.

Not only that, it?s also non-intuitive.

Back then, there was a CD stuck in our CD-drive. We had to press on eject to be able to bring the CD with us.

Now the media is right in front of us and can be taken at any moment without the need to press an eject button.

In the average Joe?s heads, "ejecting" a device is something that happens physically, not virtually.

Unfortunately the same doesn't apply to other things like USB drives, so it's slightly unfortunate that at the end of the day it's just going to confuse the user into thinking all devices work the same way and don't require ejecting.

That's why Apply should apply it system-wide. They had a patent ready for it a while ago describing the feature.

screenshot20110228at180.png

OpenGL 3.0 is still @ 95%

Untill its @ 100% the version will/does report 2.1

Now its fixed, new glview released... max supported is 3.2

http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview

- pixel formats does not work correctly (will be fixed later)

- rendering test doesn't work anymore (will be fixed later)

- memory info incorrect (will be fixed later?)

hwinfo.png

corefeatures.png

That's why Apply should apply it system-wide. They had a patent ready for it a while ago describing the feature.

There's a key difference between the way iTunes works and the way external drives work, though. An external drive could be accessed at any time by any application, hence it's always mounted and ready. An iPhone, on the other hand, can only be accessed (legitimately, anyway) by iTunes, and only when it's syncing. If it's not syncing, no files are being written, and so there's no harm in removing it.

I really don't think this would work outside of iTunes, simply because you never actually know when it's safe to remove a drive. Maybe with Thunderbolt/USB 3.0, where read and write speeds are much faster, this would make more sense, but right now I don't see it being practical for USB 2.0 or FireWire.

I really don't think this would work outside of iTunes, simply because you never actually know when it's safe to remove a drive.

Apple has a patent ready describing how a drive is automatically locked down when not in use. So apparently the company disagrees with your assessment and it can, in fact, be done. At least, they seem to think so. Solving the problem of when it's save to remove the drive or not can be easily indicated by a graphical change to the drive's icon or whatever.

I think the feature would be of great use when it comes to USB sticks and such.

They have thousands of patents, not all of them are good ideas :p if they can make it work, go for it. But a visual indication that a disk is ready to be ejected still requires that you look at that visual indication, likely in the finder itself, and that takes almost as much time as ejecting the disk anyway. Now, if they start pushing drive makers to add visual indicators on the drives themselves, I think this feature will be great.

Am I the only person who really hates the "invisible" scrollbars? Sure, it's fine when it's on a touch display where you can flick it down to see there's nothing there but on a desktop screen with a mouse it's a usability nightmare and breaks years of conventions (sometimes there's good reason to but this isn't one of them).

AppleInsider have a screenshot of a font dialogue with 4 select fields and there's no indication that 3 of those 4 are scrollable whatsoever.

Am I the only person who really hates the "invisible" scrollbars? Sure, it's fine when it's on a touch display where you can flick it down to see there's nothing there but on a desktop screen with a mouse it's a usability nightmare and breaks years of conventions (sometimes there's good reason to but this isn't one of them).

AppleInsider have a screenshot of a font dialogue with 4 select fields and there's no indication that 3 of those 4 are scrollable whatsoever.

I LOVE the invisible scrollbars.... I don't remember the last time i used one to scroll....

Now its fixed, new glview released... max supported is 3.2

http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview

- pixel formats does not work correctly (will be fixed later)

- rendering test doesn't work anymore (will be fixed later)

- memory info incorrect (will be fixed later?)

hwinfo.png

corefeatures.png

How did you upgrade to version 3.2?

There's a key difference between the way iTunes works and the way external drives work, though. An external drive could be accessed at any time by any application, hence it's always mounted and ready. An iPhone, on the other hand, can only be accessed (legitimately, anyway) by iTunes, and only when it's syncing. If it's not syncing, no files are being written, and so there's no harm in removing it.

I really don't think this would work outside of iTunes, simply because you never actually know when it's safe to remove a drive. Maybe with Thunderbolt/USB 3.0, where read and write speeds are much faster, this would make more sense, but right now I don't see it being practical for USB 2.0 or FireWire.

Read/Write speeds are irrelevant, if a disk is inactive it can be removed safely. I have unplugged drives a lot in Windows without ejecting them first and it causes no harm whatsoever.

Read/Write speeds are irrelevant, if a disk is inactive it can be removed safely. I have unplugged drives a lot in Windows without ejecting them first and it causes no harm whatsoever.

I remember back in the early Mac OS X days removing a drive without ejecting would cause it become unreadable in Windows and Mac OS 9. No problems when putting it back in Mac OS X though. :laugh: Really annoying, because you had to format the drive in order to correct the issue. It has been fixed ages ago though.

Read/Write speeds are irrelevant, if a disk is inactive it can be removed safely. I have unplugged drives a lot in Windows without ejecting them first and it causes no harm whatsoever.

My point was that if read/write speeds were faster, it would be more likely that the disk is inactive at any point :p

My point was that if read/write speeds were faster, it would be more likely that the disk is inactive at any point :p

Because when using USB 2.0 or FireWire 800 drives there's a constant flow of files going back and forth at any given time? Especially when talking about things like cameras, SDHC cards and USB sticks, three things you are most likely to disconnect frequently. Right...

I don't use them to scroll either (but my mum and grandma both do despite the mouse having a scrollwheel) ... their "use" is really to indicate that there's more content in the box.

Lion does the same thing iOS does: when a view is scrollable, it shows the scrollbar for a few seconds before fading it away.

My point was that if read/write speeds were faster, it would be more likely that the disk is inactive at any point :p

How so? If data is being written to an external drive, there will usually be a dialogue box, an OS does not usually constantly write and read from external disks to anything like the same extent it does internal hard disks, so that's irrelevant. If a user pulls a disk out when they are writing data to it, that's stupid whether you can write to the disk at 1 or 100 MB/s

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