I've seen that alot lately.

How the heck do these two desktops look the same?:

http://www.wpc-fr.net/images/article..._6261_full.jpg
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/...osx.screen.jpg

Other than integrated search, which you can get with Google Desktop, there's very little that looks the same with Aqua and Luna+Aero.

Is there something I'm overlooking here, or has everyone truly lost it?

If you reduce the feature list for Vista down to marketing bullet points, it looks like a list of features that Apple have promoted with previous releases of OS X. Even a few of the names echo OS X:

FileVault > BitLocker
Aqua > Aero
Windows Mail > Mail.app

The marketing Web site for Vista (pre-release) was so clearly inspired by Apple's page design that my jaw dropped the first time that I saw it.

I'm not an Apple fan, but between Vista and Zune (iPod, right down to the packaging, only brown instead of white) I feel that somebody in MS must have an inferiority complex or something - it's just too weird.

Take a look at this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=TaIUkwPybtM

there you will see why Windows Vista did NOT steal ideas from MacOX

ROFL at that video. I can't help but think that was a joke (please let that be a joke). Those were TERRIBLE arguments that guy had, "LOL, THERE NOT IN THE SAME CORNER! THEREFOR MICROSOFT DID NOT COPY OS X! LOL!".


Yes, the caps/spelling mistakes were intentional.

Yes that is a joke, and expect to see a lot of those things in the coming days

Thanks, you've put my mind at ease

I love that video a lot. It is one of my favorites, without forgetting the Microsoft Ipod. The funny thing with this "Microsoft Ipod" is that Microsoft actually does that with their products .

Jorophose, the only reason you don't believe it is because you have an irrational hatred for OS X. The marketing bullet points match, the features that Bill Gates has been saying are "Microsoft innovations in Vista that you won't find anywhere else) have been in OS X for years (in some cases over a decade), and you can just watch that video for how the visuals and layouts have been copied. As if all that isn't enough, some Microsoft employees have freely admitted in their blogs that they had Macs to use as references while designing the Vista UI.

In fact, I'm tired of you denying this, so I went to all the trouble of finding one of the quotes (I want the last 15 minutes of my life back)
windows-shutdown-crapfest
There you have it. Satisfied yet?

No chort, this time my posts aren't affected by bias. I'm speaking honestly here. Other than integrated search, I don't see ressemblance between the two interfaces.

Unless GUIs are apple-only, icons are apple-only, songs downloads are apple-only, images are apple-only, and everything else related to an interface is held by apple, nothing is copied from what I see.

And if that's the case, isn't KDE stealing from it too? And GNOME too? And XFCE? And JavaDesktop?

Now, if Aqua had something like a start menu first, and then aero took it, or vice versa, or aero took something like a dock, then I can understand. But how is adding new, shiney, albeit redundant, icons and windows copying?

(Note I mean copying as in copyright infringement. The bad one.)

The basic problem that Microsoft is facing right now is that, having spent 6 billion dollars and nearly 6 years working on Vista, they simply do not have anything readily visible to show for it. During that same time, Apple has released four major releases to their OS/X system and has ported it to completely new hardware.

(As I say this, I think that I'm completely neutral because in my office I happen to have Linux and OS/X and Windows machines.)

Vista is, unfortunately, pre-ordained to be a very costly flop, and there is going to be much bloodletting in Redmond in the coming months. I would compare it very much to the "OS/360 debacle" of the early 1970's, although on a smaller scale. There is something obviously wrong with the way that Microsoft has been developing software, and obviously right about the way that Apple has been doing it.

And ... that difference happens to be open-source.

Viewed purely from an engineering perspective, Apple is demonstrating its ability to respond timely to changing market demands, and Microsoft is not. Wall Street might not understand the bits and bytes, but they're voting with their wallets, as investors are wot to do.

No, it's called "focusing on core-competency". Microsoft has always been strong at adding features, features, features appealing to the business community, and mostly about hyping ideas long before they come out and keeping the idea hypted that "very soon" Microsoft will release a product with these features. That keeps other potential players out of the game because everyone says "well Microsoft is just going to release that in a few months, so I'll wait and get it from them".

Apple has always been about simple and intuitive UIs.

So over the past years, Microsoft has been hyping a new presentation engine, new network stack, new file system, etc... they kept talking about those features for years, while every year of development they had to push back the release by a year. Eventually to get the product out they had to strip most of the features they bragged about, leaving them with a bunch of minor new features, and not much else. In the process they managed to have such a disconnected development process that none of the stuff is very coherent or intuitive.

It also turns out that one of the biggest parts of Vista was adding end-to-end DRM, to make the entertainment industry happy (but actually makes the consumer experience worse). They appealed to big-business, but it's not a compelling reason for users to upgrade (actually it's a pretty compelling reason to stick with XP or move to a non-Microsoft OS).

Now while they were doing this, Microsoft also tried to focus heavily on user experience and overall usability, but because that is so far from their core competency they failed miserably. If anything, some new aspects of Vista are more difficult to use than previous versions of their OS. Usability is a foreign concept to Microsoft, and it's showing.

Meanwhile Apple has been steadily releasing gradual improvements, focusing on keeping everything easy-to-use.

Open Source really doesn't have much to do with it. Apple has kept their kernel relatively stable over the past several years, because it hasn't needed major improvement. Microsoft rewrote their kernel, but that's because they needed to embedd DRM and new protections against malware. Most of the improvements in OS X have been in the UI, and various Apple applications that were designed completely in-house by Apple.

We can look at another major commercial OS that came out between XP and Vista, that is Solaris 10. There were some pretty huge improvements over Solaris 9, and they weren't because of Open Source at all.

They didn't rewrite the kernel. They took the 2k3 one and added DRM to it.

Aand, a UI being simple and intuitive depends on who's using it.

Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
"sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install mozilla firefox
startx (when download complete of course)"

(I don't know the keyboard shortcut to getting a terminal launched in X)

Is simpler than launching an application, entering in some keywords, scrolling a bit, downloading a file, and then updating the entire OS later via the same application. Or going to the site and downloading a .deb file.

Actually, with Yakuake (for _example_), it's just

- press F12
- type 'sudo apt-get update && apt-get install firefox'
- press ENTER, F12 and wait a moment depending on your internet connection speed

Or if you've updated Apt recently, drop that part off..

To the thread: taking a look at Vista screenshots and what's said to be inside (I don't own a copy, so I'll just say 'what's said'), then take a look at Mac desktops, KDE, Gnome and pretty much any major desktop environment, it's pretty clear: they all look a bit the same. Not completely identical, but partly yes. It's always a competition "who did it first" and in this case I doubt MS didn't. Though I've heard rumors MS is flexing their virtual muscles by saying that some people (I think they're trying to refer to Linux users, at least) "have stolen MS intellectual property". That's pretty funny, but the fun ends when MS lawyers get freed from their dungeons and see food for the first time this year.

Then again, what's so bad in it? Why shouldn't Windows users be entitled to the good tools and nice desktops that the others have? Is it forbidden that they can too use a search box in their Start menu (Which the others call "K-menu", "Gnome menu", "applications menu" etc.) or have transparent windows? It's a bit lame to make Vista look over 50% identical to OS X or KDE or Gnome, or their mixture, but then again it's more lame to laugh at it and try to convince that only Mac and Linux users should do that. I'd say MS is stupid if they didn't add these new things in their new operating system. And if you're talking about the long release time (5 years or so), remember that usually quick releases end up being crap releases; back in the days Apple's every new operating system got it's fix packs at certain intervals (compare to Windows' service packs) because without them the OS was like a cow with a dozen holes in it. Probably longer release schedule would have made better products back then, but good they're doing better now.

Linux and open source community can celebrate every time they get some new thing in their desktops, like transparent widget with three legs and happy pink teeth telling you the best tea choice of the day, before others because the open source community doesn't usually try to benefit commercially about it. In Microsoft they have to think about money, how to keep current customers etc. They're losing time in all that, time that Linux users -- for example -- don't have to lose, because it's all the same if a thousand Linux users dump the penguin today. Mac does have to think commercial stuff too, but they've got some fresh ideas and at the moment stay one step further than the competitors. One day MS could be the one who comes up with fresh ideas, even if it does sound unlikely (because of their historical tactics).

The point is, don't laugh at Vista having the same things you have, and especially don't get angry about it; the stupid make a lot of work, when the wise get around more easily. If Microsoft didn't have, for example, good ideas for their new Vista some years ago, good they didn't release it -- maybe they were just smart enough to wait for others to invent fancy stuff and then just implement it in their own products, drinking coffee while waiting, smiling happily

First off, I don't know why you bother trying to say this over and over "simple depends on who's blah blah blah", because apparently you are the only person who doesn't instinctively recognize OS X as "easy to use". That's the #1 comment of anyone who's ever used it, that's the general view in the press, and the Internet community. I guess you can always find one person who will disagree with even 2 + 2 = 4.

Second, the example you provided is not easier. It's very difficult for humans to remember specific strings of (meaningless) characters to type. It's very easy to remember what pictures to click on--our brains are visual, it's just natural to do it that way.

You would have a lot more credibility if you wouldn't be trying so hard to bash Apple with every single post you make. Who do you think you're convincing, any way?

"apt-get something" is generally a lot easier for someone to understand, compared to scrolling sites put up by god knows who to find downloads, and hoping it's not infected with malicious code. And before anyone says it, Mac OS X does have malware, and a rather significant amount. Macro viruses can attack anything aslong as the application is around.

On top of that, out of the 2-3 reviews per month that pop up praising OS X, find me the amount of people who bought OS X and returned it, hated it, or are simply frustrated.

OS X's interface is ass-backwards. Close windows on the left by default, when most people are right-handed, last I checked the small icon/circle thingies don't really say much about what they're going to do to the windows. Until recently 1 mouse button, now 4, that stupid dock, and plenty of other things. The dock's a pain in the ass to work with, because no matter what it's going to sneak up on you, and to find out what's hiding there after a while, when looking for that report you wrote last night at 2 AM, you either have to have more memory than all of Big Blue's super computers. There's no labels unless you're willing to scrub it, and moving horizontally like that isn't how the human body was made. There's no difference between icons of the same type, too. And then there's the whole thing where moving it around the dock makes it asplode, and the fact that the dock will ALWAYS take up 70+ pixels off of your screen.

There's a good reason why Mac OS and X only have ~2-3% of the market share. It's an alright OS, but it's still got problems. Nothing along the lines of ME's problems, but crap, it isn't bulletproof.