Mac OS 10.7 Lion and Classic Macs

[napabar]

Hey guys, just installed the developer release of Lion and here are my findings so far:

1. AppleShare. Starting with 10.6, Classic Macs were no longer able to connect to modern Macs using AFP with TCP/IP. However, Mac OS 9 was able to share using AFP with TCP/IP. This is no longer the case. The last AFP link to the Classic Mac OS is gone. It looks like it's FTP only from now on. I expected this to be the case with Lion, which is why I've so heavily invested in my FTP experiments some of you may have read about.

2. FTP. To make matters worse, FTP is no longer an option to share files on Lion. It's just AFP and SMB. This perplexed me. Perhaps it will be added later, but I doubt it. Rumpus sales will be up!

3. Power PC and Classic apps. No more Rosetta. Power PC apps have a line through them just like Classic Mac apps do. Launching them produces a message that says PPC apps are no longer supported. I also expected this one. At least Lion still detects Classic Mac apps for what they are. I figure someday resource forks are going to go away, and they'll just look like unknown documents.

4. HFS disks. Yup, they still mount as read only, but at least nothing has changed here since 10.6. I expect this to hang around for a couple more releases, before going the way of the 400K MFS disk, and be unreadable.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I would imagine FTP is in the "Lion Server" components, which are standard now, but not enabled by default.

 

[Gazhay]

Having used a few dev releases in the past it isn't uncommon for whole features to come and go.

It doesn't surprise me about backwards compatability, its in part a marketing decision.

Ftp is an 'older' protocol now, so i could see it being dropped. If the underlying tech is gone i'm sure there are plenty of alternatives. Pureftpd springs to mind first.

I'm sure the built in web server will remain, so there is still the option to dump files in that directory and download with a browser, a simple script would enable the reverse to allow uploads.

It's going to be more uncomfortable, but not impossible.

 

[napabar]

I doubt FTP's age had anything to so with it. It's still the most widely used protocol for file transfers. It wasn't added into the OS until Mac OS X, so it's much "newer" to the Mac OS than AppleShare/AFP, and FTP and UNIX are joined at the hip in terms of history.

 

[Gorgonops]

3. Power PC and Classic apps. No more Rosetta. Power PC apps have a line through them just like Classic Mac apps do. Launching them produces a message that says PPC apps are no longer supported.

I'm about as jaded as they come on the subject of the "new" Apple's blatant policy of shoving planned obsolescence down our throats as fast as possible, but... I'll admit that even surprises me a little. It's been less than five full years since the last new PowerMac left an Apple showroom. (I'd swear Apple store still had them as refurbs into 2007, for that matter.) I wonder if anyone mentioning "PowerPC" at Apple headquarters in anything but a spiteful tone now is immediately given demerits and forced to stand in a corner for twenty minutes. :^b

I haven't seen it first-hand yet, but the "Lion" feature that simply cracks me up every time I hear it described is "Full Screen Apps". Granted Apple has been spitting all over the idea of adhering to anything approaching "User interface guidelines" ever since they put those vertical window controls into iTunes, but the idea of encouraging application writers to take over the whole machine with their own "kiosk mode" interfaces is, uhm... an abomination? Can you say "DOS"? I knew you could.

 

[napabar]

The full screen apps are optional. They work in either mode.

Switching between them is easy with Mission Control. This is nothing like DOS.

 

[protocol7]

Word is that there is only 64-bit support too. I'm not really sure what that means in the Apple world as the C2D in my MacBook is 64-bit but the EFI is 32-bit. So not only is PowerPC/Rosetta gone, but possibly the early Intel generations are too.

Edit: Just saw imac600's review and he appears to have the same MacBook as I have. So maybe it is just the Core Duos and below that are affected.

 

[Gorgonops]

Switching between "full-screen apps" was pretty easy with Software Carousel or DESQview as well. That didn't improve the level of UI consistency between the programs you ran under them much. ;^)

Partially what I find funny about this is not that long ago I was dealing with having to set up a Mac Mini to drive a television to display web-based monitoring statistics, and the coworker who'd done several previous setups was using a complicated "zoom" hack to make Firefox "look" fullscreen because Kiosk mode explicitly *didn't* work on normal Mac browsers. Luckily I found this to use instead. It just amuses me how Apple's pendulum has swung so far the other way; now any silly "trendy" and "gadgety" thing they dream up for their iPod/phone interfaces makes it into "Real" OS X sooner than later. (Remember how insanely excited Apple was over shoehorning "Cover Flow" into every freaking part of iLife and the OS they could a few years ago?) When it comes to consistency over time they're worse than Microsoft now, if that's at all possible. Of course, I guess if your goal is to keep reselling to the "it's newer and shinier, it must be better!" crowd then you don't have a whole lot of choice.

 

[Mac128]

The full screen apps are optional. They work in either mode.
Switching between them is easy with Mission Control. This is nothing like DOS.

This makes a lot of sense frankly. There's no use bemoaning Apple's abandonment over what are now 25 year old GUI features. Apple is a company and as such is interested in growing and drawing new, younger users into using it's products. To that end, I think it makes an enormous amount of sense to modify the UI to mirror the products that the majority of its customers are buying, in order to entice them into its computing platform. The fact that these features are optional is the best possible move they could make. This allows someone like me, who could care less about some of these iOS features running on my Mac, to keep going the way I have been, while simultaneously allowing the iOS users to extend that experience to their desktops. That said, I like the iOS, but its not suitable for every task I perform on the computer. But that's just me. Others approach the computer differently, and for that reason, I think this is ultimately a very smart move on Apple's part. If I were being forced to use it, much like cover flow, which I can turn off, then I would be whistling a different tune for sure.

napbar, have you by any chance tried MFSLives? Snow Leopard broke it, so I'm wondering if they've Fixed it, or if that solution to reading MFS is just completely gone now? Either way, I suspect if HFS is taken away in the near future, even more than MFS, someone will implement a similar add-on to maintain readability.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I dunno, I find the UI just plain inconsistent from the screen shots I'm seeing. I appreciate Apple working on new methods of interaction, but I don't want an appliance on my desk, I want a damn computer.

The problem with them being optional now is that Jobs Inc. has a long history of making optional dubious interface choices mandatory later. "We'll let you get used to it now. Later it will be too late."

Losing PPC *and* this strangely dumbed down interface? Well, I wasn't going to drop my G5 for awhile, but now simply dropping Mac altogether when it's time to upgrade and moving to Ubuntu looks better and better. At least I can get my work done in it.

Oh well, Tiger forever.

 

[napabar]

Well said, Mac128.

No, I haven't tried MFS lives, but i seriously doubt it. It will need to be re-written. With virtual file systems like MacFuse, we should be seeing something like this come along for HFS and MFS.

I was still able to connect to my Mac 512K with Lion. No surprise there really. FTP is FTP.

 

[Gazhay]

I doubt FTP's age had anything to so with it. It's still the most widely used protocol for file transfers. It wasn't added into the OS until Mac OS X, so it's much "newer" to the Mac OS than AppleShare/AFP, and FTP and UNIX are joined at the hip in terms of history.

Well, FTP pre-dates AppleTalk. It has been in decline for many years and plain ftp is (and should be) fairly uncommon now. SSL-FTP and SSH transfers are far more secure.

Since Apple's policy is to support the new and more secure, dropping the old and insecure is far from surprising imho.

As an aside, many linuxes dont ship with ftp either.

 

[protocol7]

Even with the server components installed I still can't find a way to share via FTP. I actually use this every day to share between my Macs and PC so it's absence is notable.

 

[CJ_Miller]

RE: FTP - Uncommon? Seems to me that it is one of the more common networking tools out there, and not going away anytime soon. My company uses it every day to move order, customer, and other data around its corporate network. I frequently use it in my personal internet travels. Since it is just a simple daemon compiling it on a modern mac should be easy, no exotic dependencies. And if you can get the daemon running, making a GUI for it is even easier - there is no real programming involved because it has already been done.

RE: iOS GUI, I don't know, that's why I use Path Finder. The Finder, Launcher, etc were never very good IMO. They've always been oversimplified.

 

[Gazhay]

Yup, very uncommon in serious web development and development environments. As stated, horribly insecure and any serious computer person or business will use it through SSL or just use a SSH type of transfer.

SSH being preferred because of it's much superior security, and no need for an extra daemon on top of the SSH server.

As for a server, a two minute google shows Macports has at least one server, and Macports also has netatalk for appletalk compatability too.

As i said, inconvenient, but Apple are not going to maintain slow, outdated and/or insecure protocols for hobbyists.

 

[napabar]

As i said, inconvenient, but Apple are not going to maintain slow, outdated and/or insecure protocols for hobbyists.

I would agree, as far as AppleTalk and older versions of AFP with TCP/IP, but there is nothing "hobbyist" about FTP. It is not proprietary, and it is still the most widely used file transfer protocol out here. FTP is married to UNIX, and still available in the command line of Lion. All we know is that Apple has removed the server portion of it from the GUI of the first developer release of Lion.

If this plays out with the final release of Lion, maybe Panic can add a FTP server to Transmit, or Maxum can develop a lite version of Rumpus..

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Yup, very uncommon in serious web development and development environments.

Right, as an authenticated method; there are many better and secure ones. But anonymous FTP is still very common as a way to disseminate files.

 

[Gazhay]

I don't buy that either. However, it is a separate argument, we are speaking the ftp server built into a home computer.

No-one is going to use their home Lion box or laptop to host anonymous FTP ?!

Direct links from web browsers, cloud based sites like Megupload, DropBox etc etc, far more common these days than FTP, even anonymous ftp.

In fact, a lot of the anonymous ftp sites, now have browser interfaces, some still use ftp to for the file download (usually handled in browser) but some are pure http transfers without ftp at all.

As I said, it's really not a big deal, it's in macports, one command will install one for you.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Direct links from web browsers, cloud based sites like Megupload, DropBox etc etc, far more common these days than FTP, even anonymous ftp.

More common, sure. But that doesn't make anonymous FTP uncommon. People have been trying to kill it off for years and it survives.

I prefer Gopher to FTP for simply serving collections of files but that's perpendicular to this discussion, and I'm sure you have strong opinions about that too.