Topics:
Mac OS 10.11.6 - Back on the Road! (26 Aug 2016)
Mac OS 10.2.8 - The End of the Road for Me (18 May 2004)
Mac OS 10.2.2 (12 Nov 2002)
10.2 Crashes (2 Nov 2002)
Mac OS 10.2.1 (21 Oct 2002)
Perl on Mac OS X (August 27, 2002)
Mac G4 Dual CPU Tower Comparison (August 27, 2002)
Mac OSX 10.1.5 vs OSX 10.2 Benchmarks (August 26, 2002)
Mac OSX 10.2 Jaguar (August 24, 2002)
Mac OSX 10.1.5 (June 2002)
Mac OSX 10.1.2 (January 2002)
Mac OSX 10.1 (October 2001)
Mac OSX 10.0.4 (July 2001)
Mac OSX After Three Months (June 2001)
Mac OSX First Impressions (March 2001)
It was not to be. 10.7 Lion began adding many more demons to track file versions, to handle software updates and the store,
and on and on. This was not a favorite version. It was slow & bloated and buggy compared to Snow Leopard. Mountain Lion 10.8
at least fixed the various problems introduced in Lion 10.7, but it was still close enough to Snow Leopard to be somewhat of a
disappointment. No worries, onward and upward to Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9, with the worst name, and more flawed features. The
addition of Apple Maps & Apple iBooks were great features, but both were very poorly done. Onward to Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite,
and things tightened up a bit, but Maps & iBooks were still flawed. Handoff became a useful feature though, and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan was
mostly better than Yosemite, except for screwing up Apple Mail on multiple machines.
Today we are only about a month away from the first of the new/old named macOS 10.12 Sierra, and although my testing of a few betas has
shown few bugs, my how it gobbles RAM and CPU. I hope there is a lot of debug code being stripped out as I type. I think the only
new feature since Snow Leopard that I really use a lot is Handoff.
Instantly I became more productive. The Mac is just too darn slow in so many ways. The wireless networking has a lot of problems, and
the Finder hangs whenever it has to deal with folders containing thousands of files. Windows on the other hand opens such folders instantly
and without any problems.
The new Dell Latitude D600 is every bit as slick as a titanium PowerBook G4, and it won't lose its titanium color when the paint flakes off
like it has on my PowerBook G4. My Dell OptiPlex opens up just as neatly as my dual processor G4 Mac did, but for half the price. Both Dells
are much faster than the Macs.
So, do I miss the Mac? Sure: I miss OS 9, MPW, and HyperCard. When I realized that Apple was completely stopping all support and development of
these great tools, then there was nothing left to keep me on the Mac, and I am happier now on Windows. Windows has much better mapping software and
reference software than the Mac does, but it does have more spam and virus worries. I suppose that is the only area now where the Mac excels. No,
there is one other and that is having a nice Unix shell as standard. OS X's Terminal is still better than cmd.exe, but neither are as good as MPW.
The Finder's Find command continues to gobble RAM. (In other words, the
stdclib memory allocation bug is still present.)
My HP LaserJet 2200D still does not work via the Print menu of any program or via
CUPS, except for one exception: the CUPS test page prints.
This update has not apparently hurt anything, but neither has it helped anything.
Here is an Awk script that will summarize your crashes:
Mac OS 10.11.6 - Got back on the road a year later!
26 Aug 2016
I forgot about this web page until today, when I was searching for metadata found in old files on my website. Yes, I
gave up on Mac OS X in 2004, but it only lasted a year. I used Windows XP for that year, but in 2005 I got a new iMac G5,
in 2006 I bought the new Intel Macs, and it continued on through all of these years. I upgraded from Panther to Tiger 10.4,
which was a great release because I could still run MPW & HyperCard. Then Leopard 10.5 was the last of the PowerPC systems,
and 10.6 gave us Snow Leopard, one of the finest release of all of Mac OS X because it had few new features, shrank because
there were no more Universal Binaries, and was just so lean and clean. Long live Snow Leopard!Mac OS 10.2.8 - The End of the Road for Me
18 May 2004
Over the past years I continued to upgrade my Macs up through 10.2.8. I then upgraded to Panther, Mac OS X 10.3. Panther
seemed like a step backwards to me: it removed the system-wide favorites which I had grown to use instead of a customizable
Apple Menu in OS 9, and the new Finder was worse in many ways, with a very ugly rendition of Labels and still no decent compact
icon views, etc. But all of these problems did not compare to the ways in which my Mac would hang due to threading bugs. Panther
seemed actually worse than Jaguar, although it may have just been the equal. I went back to Jaguar for several months but in the end,
I bought two new Dell computers with Windows XP Professional on them and I made the jump back to Windows.Tuesday 12 Nov 2002
Mac OS X 10.2.2 arrived this morning. The upgrade on four different Macs went fine.
On two I used Software Update, on one I used a downloaded version, and on one I used
Software Update from a remote machine via the command line and ssh.Saturday 2 Nov 2002
Mac OS X 10.2 crashes quite often. True it does not bring the whole machine down
(well, that has happened twice but generally it doesn't...) but here is a list of
what has crashed on my machine over the past two months. It is arranged
by how many times the app has crashed:
# Application
----------------------
5 CronniX
5 Dock
5 Internet Explorer
5 TextEdit
2 Finder
2 LaunchBar
2 StuffIt Expander
1 Adobe Photoshop 7.0
1 iCal Helper
1 iTunes
1 LimeWire
1 Mail
1 Microsoft Word
1 System Preferences
1 Ticker
1 ZipIt
----------------------
35 TOTAL
Not particularly robust.
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
# greplogs - Summarize Mac OS X crashes.
# 2 Nov 2002 - Created by Dan Allen.
#
BEGIN {
OFS = "\t"
if (ARGC < 2) {
print "Usage: greplogs ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/*"
exit(1)
}
}
/^Date\/Time:/ { when = $2 }
/^Command:/ { cmd = $2 $3 $4 }
/^Exception:/ { except = $2 }
/^Codes:/ { code = $2 }
/^Thread.*Crashed/ { now = 1 }
/^ \#0/ { if (now) { routine = $4; now = 0 } }
/^PPC Thread/ { print when,cmd,code,routine }
Monday 21 Oct 2002
Mac OS 10.2 is good in so many ways. The new DevTools with GCC 3.1 are faster, the math libraries have been improved,
Classic starts much faster,
and life is quite good, except for printing. 10.2.1 was supposed to fix the printing problems, but it hasn't. Many
apps in Classic (Notepad, HyperCard, WriteNow) generate strange error messages. Some printers seem to print most of
the time (HP 810), but others do not work at all, and they are supported printers! My HP LaserJet 2200D happens to
be completely non-functional in OS 10.2.1. One prints and nothing ever happens. Of course printing from Windows 2000
to the same printer works just fine.
Tuesday 27 August 2002
For more on building Perl, see this page.
The older Quicksilver machine (referred to as OLD below) has this hardware:
--- The first test is to build a collection of C tools in Terminal. The build is timed using the Unix command time. The output is user time, system time, and then the actual clock time. The results show that the two machines are very similar, the new machine being just 1% faster. time buildtools old 49.140u 9.910s 1:01.68 95.7% 0+0k 104+80io 0pf+0w new 49.440u 8.540s 1:00.93 95.1% 0+0k 193+190io 0pf+0w --- I have a C tool that does some very intensive numeric processing Same answers for both machines, but slightly different times with not any significant differences in speed. bench tool output Compiler: gcc Apple cpp-precomp 6.14 Adding 100000000 integers... Sum: $ 0011C379 3ADB7080 = 5000000050000000 Old Time: 0.51 seconds New Time: 0.47 seconds Adding 1000000 square roots... Sum: 666667166.458841801 Old Time: 0.19 seconds New Time: 0.20 seconds Simulation result: 99.212549206061041218 Old Time: 0.04 seconds New Time: 0.04 seconds FARTHEST ISLAND FROM CONTINENT: Rapa Island, French Polynesia Distance: 3291.15 nm at 192 degrees to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica Old Time: 0.06 seconds New Time: 0.04 seconds FARTHEST ISLAND FROM POPULATED AREA: Henderson Island, UK Distance: 2813.78 nm at 240 degrees to Hicks Bay, New Zealand Old Time: 0.08 seconds New Time: 0.11 seconds FARTHEST ISLAND FROM SERVICES: Easter Island, Chile Distance: 1865.51 nm at 261 degrees to Rapa Island, French Polynesia Old Time: 0.15 seconds New Time: 0.13 seconds FARTHEST INHABITED ISLAND FROM LAND: Tristan da Cunha, UK Distance: 1315.39 nm at 17 degrees to Saint Helena, UK Old Time: 0.22 seconds New Time: 0.16 seconds MOST REMOTE UNINHABITED ISLAND: Bouvetoya, Norway Distance: 997.86 nm at 322 degrees to Gough Island, UK Old Time: 0.19 seconds New Time: 0.17 seconds --- Paul Finlayson's Numeric Benchmarks Numeric results are identical (to be fully expected). Execution times nearly identical. No significant differences here. OLD: [~/PAFBench] 21:49:42 % ./build Sat, 24 Aug 2002 21:49:45 PDT -- Start Build Sat, 24 Aug 2002 21:49:48 PDT -- End Build Integer Benchmark: T = 7.33 sec Computed: 0, Expected: 0. Float1 Benchmark: T = 0.37 sec Computed: 1885618790.063066, Expected: 1885618790.063066. Float2 Benchmark: T = 5.87 sec Computed: 0.01181410377111, Expected: 0.01181410377111. Float3 Benchmark: T = 22.94 sec y[1] = -4.49527e-13 y[2] = -2.70189e-12 y[3] = -3.74104e-11, Expected 0,0,0. NEW: [~/PAFBench] 11:23:04 % ./build Tue, 27 Aug 2002 11:23:06 PDT -- Start Build Tue, 27 Aug 2002 11:23:09 PDT -- End Build Integer Benchmark: T = 7.34 sec Computed: 0, Expected: 0. Float1 Benchmark: T = 0.37 sec Computed: 1885618790.063066, Expected: 1885618790.063066. Float2 Benchmark: T = 5.89 sec Computed: 0.01181410377111, Expected: 0.01181410377111. Float3 Benchmark: T = 22.77 sec y[1] = -4.49527e-13 y[2] = -2.70189e-12 y[3] = -3.74104e-11, Expected 0,0,0. --- Running a simple text filter on a 178 MB text file shows a 16% shorter time with new faster bus. This is because this large text file gets cached in RAM being accessed at 167 MHz rather than 133 MHz. 167 MHz is 20% faster than 133 MHz, so the 4% slowdown between the actual 16% versus the theoretical 20% is the penalty for the 1 MB L3 cache vs 2 MB L3 cache, I would suppose. Nevertheless, for working with large documents the new machine is significantly faster. time tr '\r' '\n' < /Sources/Text/WorldNIMA.txt > foo Old: 4.920u 2.930s 0:16.62 47.2% 0+0k 2+13io 0pf+0w New: 4.880u 2.570s 0:13.93 53.4% 0+0k 275+14io 0pf+0w --- These times were after doing the run a couple of times to use the disk cache to see how the cache memory performance is. New faster machine is about 10% faster. This is not quite the win that the last text filter was. Not sure why. time grep 'Tristan da Cunha' foo Old: 0.210u 0.450s 0:00.67 98.5% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w New: 0.240u 0.360s 0:00.60 100.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w --- Building a collection of many tools using MRC in MPW under Classic is just over 3% faster on the new machine. Not really significant. MPW running in Classic Old: Built Tool Suite in 154 seconds, or 0:02:34 New: Built Tool Suite in 149 seconds, or 0:02:29 --- Launch Excel X - to blank document and floating palattes showing: The newer machine's faster RAM access wins when the caches are hot. Cold cache: Old: 4 seconds New: 4 seconds Hot cache: Old: 1.5 seconds New: 1 second
Mac OS 10.1.5 vs 10.2 Benchmarks
Mac OS X 10.1.5 - Dual CPU w/April 2002 DevTools and gcc 3.1. time buildtools Old: 51.430u 6.380s 0:59.46 97.2% 0+0k 80+73io 0pf+0w New: 49.140u 9.910s 1:01.68 95.7% 0+0k 104+80io 0pf+0w --- bench tool output: Compiler: gcc Apple cpp-precomp 6.12 Adding 100000000 integers... Sum: $ 0011C379 3ADB7080 = 5000000050000000 Old: Time: 0.51 seconds New: Time: 0.51 seconds Adding 1000000 square roots... Sum: 666667166.458841801 Old: Time: 0.18 seconds New: Time: 0.19 seconds Simulation result: 99.212549206061041218 Old: Time: 0.05 seconds New: Time: 0.04 seconds FARTHEST ISLAND FROM CONTINENT: Rapa Island, French Polynesia Distance: 3291.15 nm at 192 degrees to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica Old: Time: 0.06 seconds New: Time: 0.06 seconds FARTHEST ISLAND FROM POPULATED AREA: Henderson Island, UK Distance: 2813.78 nm at 240 degrees to Hicks Bay, New Zealand Old: Time: 0.10 seconds New: Time: 0.08 seconds FARTHEST ISLAND FROM SERVICES: Easter Island, Chile Distance: 1865.51 nm at 261 degrees to Rapa Island, French Polynesia Old: Time: 0.14 seconds New: Time: 0.15 seconds FARTHEST INHABITED ISLAND FROM LAND: Tristan da Cunha, UK Distance: 1315.39 nm at 17 degrees to Saint Helena, UK Old: Time: 0.15 seconds New: Time: 0.22 seconds MOST REMOTE UNINHABITED ISLAND: Bouvetoya, Norway Distance: 997.86 nm at 322 degrees to Gough Island, UK Old: Time: 0.18 seconds New: Time: 0.19 seconds --- OLD: [~/PAFBench] 11:15:19 % ./build Sat, 24 Aug 2002 11:15:21 PDT -- Start Build Sat, 24 Aug 2002 11:15:26 PDT -- End Build Integer Benchmark: T = 7.38 sec Computed: 0, Expected: 0. Float1 Benchmark: T = 0.38 sec Computed: 1885618790.063066, Expected: 1885618790.063066. Float2 Benchmark: T = 5.63 sec Computed: 0.01181410377111, Expected: 0.01181410377111. Float3 Benchmark: T = 22.87 sec y[1] = -4.49527e-13 y[2] = -2.70189e-12 y[3] = -3.74104e-11, Expected 0,0,0. NEW: [~/PAFBench] 21:49:42 % ./build Sat, 24 Aug 2002 21:49:45 PDT -- Start Build Sat, 24 Aug 2002 21:49:48 PDT -- End Build Integer Benchmark: T = 7.33 sec Computed: 0, Expected: 0. Float1 Benchmark: T = 0.37 sec Computed: 1885618790.063066, Expected: 1885618790.063066. Float2 Benchmark: T = 5.87 sec Computed: 0.01181410377111, Expected: 0.01181410377111. Float3 Benchmark: T = 22.94 sec y[1] = -4.49527e-13 y[2] = -2.70189e-12 y[3] = -3.74104e-11, Expected 0,0,0. --- [~] 11:26:13 % time tr '\r' '\n' < /Sources/Text/WorldNIMA.txt > foo Old: 4.080u 3.550s 0:15.13 50.4% 0+0k 2+8io 0pf+0w New: 4.920u 2.930s 0:16.62 47.2% 0+0k 2+13io 0pf+0w --- (with hot cache) [~] 11:58:14 % time grep 'Tristan da Cunha' foo Old: 0.210u 0.710s 0:00.92 100.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w New: 0.210u 0.450s 0:00.67 98.5% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w --- MPW running in Classic Old: Built Tool Suite in 212 seconds, or 0:03:32 New: Built Tool Suite in 154 seconds, or 0:02:34 --- Launch Excel X - to floating palattes: COLD: Old: 6 seconds New: 4 seconds HOT CACHE: Old: 2 seconds New: 1.5 seconds
One must upgrade wClock to 2.0 (just released) and there are several minor gotchas but they all related to ways in which I had tweaked my system that nobody else does. For example, I build and use my own version of Perl, which got broken with 10.2 installing over it its older Perl 5.6.0 (I use 5.6.1 -- 5.8.0 is very slow.) The aliases for tcsh that used to be pre-installed (l, ll, word, etc.) are in a file on the disk, but not installed.
Buying 10.2 at CompUSA includes a new DevTools CD with the product, which is great. The July 2002 DevTools that come with it only work with 10.2. I did upgrade installs on the core OS (2 CDs) and the DevTools (1 CD). You can do a custom install so that all of the languages are not installed which save many MBs.
Graphics and drawing are definitely faster. I have run numeric intensive benchmarks and they are enclosed for your comparison. Bottom line? MPW is much faster running in Classic (hurray!), the cut and paste hangs seem to be gone (hurray!), and compute-intensive things seem to be little changed.
Twice now I have lost all of my Folder icons in the Finder. I have had to delete various cache files in /System/Library/Caches/ and ~/Library/Caches to have my folders return. This is quite a bad bug as it makes using the system pretty difficult. Rebooting does not return the folders. It requires finding the icon cache files and removing them.
All in all, I like it a lot. More later.
iPhoto is great, but slow with my 4,000+ images.
I have discovered problems with several web sites using Internet Explorer on Mac OS X. The Java applet word games from http://www.m-w.com/game/ do not work. The web site http://www.kauaicoasthawaii.com/ causes IE 5.1.3 to vanish, instantaneously quitting (crashing).
I wanted to buy my wife a new iMac and put her on OS X, but it will not do what she needs it to do. She remains on Windows 2000 on a Dell.
Mac OS 10.1 - First Big Upgrade
All in all I find myself using Mac OS X most of the day, but I have to reboot into Mac OS 9.2.1 in the morning and at night in order to do a full syncronization between Macs. The time problems are the cause of this. Anyway, I like Mac OS X, but MPW is essential and it is still missing. This could be one of Steve Jobs' worst deeds yet: the quiet death of MPW.
Backup tool and I have problems mounting Appleshare file servers using the MPW choose
command, so I had to reboot into Mac OS 9.1 towards the end of the day.
My web browsing, email, and iTuning all worked fine, with no crashes by the
core OS. I did have the Classic layer quit on me when in MPW I tried to mount a file server. MPW and Classic
layer all immediately were gone, without a trace.
I have, however, never had Terminal quit, and the core FreeBSD/Darwin underpinings seems quite solid.
The Slide show screen saver is beautiful, with a subtle zooming and panning of still images that makes you think it really is a movie!
One of my surprises has been related to this quiet feature: where the heck does Mail store the
people's images? I
wanted to copy my addresses with photos over to another machine running OS X and the address book info copies
over but no photos. I imagine there are dangling pointers to the images which have remained quite well hidden
to my extensive use of Sherlock and the Unix find tool, searching on mod dates, etc.
I was pleasantly surprised to know that my HP 810 DeskJet printer was supported right out of the box. Nice touch. Unfortunately some of my PDF files do not print correctly on the printer from Mac OS X, but —surprise—they do print fine to the same printer using Windows 2000!
I was pleasantly surprised to see that my cool Kodak DC-4800 digital camera was supported right out of the box, and using the DC-4800 is slick. Plug in the camera using a USB cable, and when you turn the camera on, an application automatically launches on Mac OS X and the photos in the camera are automatically downloaded to your Pictures directory on your computer. No dialogs, no menus, no buttons, no fuss. You can turn on or off this feature, but it is very well done: it does what you want to do 98% of the time. Very nice integration, the best I have yet seen of a digital camera and a computer.
The biggest surprise has come only through extensive use of both older and the latest Mac software. It is apparent that Apple didn't design Mac OS X — NeXT did. What an amazing buy-out: Apple bought NeXT and then NeXT completely took over Apple's software. What a tragedy, because the loyal Apple developers never bought into NeXT because of NeXT's bloated, Objective-C-oriented quirky software. They preferred the "Mac" UI. Now the "Mac" UI being pushed is no other than the crummy NeXT UI. If NeXT had made great software, they would have sold more computers, but they didn't make great software, and this is going to hurt Apple a lot in the coming years.
I think I realize now that the gcc compiler that I thought was so much to blame for the slow Mac
OS X widgets may not be as bad as I previously thought. I have analyzed its code more and I think the AppKit
is the culprit, the main Cocoa system framework that supports all of the slow menus, buttons, dialogs, and
painful scrolling list controls used by so much of OS X.
The dialogs for saving and opening files (called StdFile in the old days) are atrocious. They are so wasteful of screen real estate, they are incredibly slow, and they do not give good information about the files, like Windows does.
Sherlock is much too sluggish. Its improved indexing in Mac OS X over 9.1 is still nowhere near as good as the Indexing Service found in Windows 2000. The Sherlock UI is way too complex and it again makes poor use of screen real-estate.
I miss having the ability to make the function keys launch favorite applications which I have on Mac OS 9 and on Windows.
Makefile
and makefile are two different files.
A one line exit added to the config script fixed this and Perl 5.6.1 builds fine.
I have also built Bash 2.05, the famous command shell which still gets me to laugh out loud when I
realize that it stands for the Bourne Again Shell. It is conceptually
a derivative of the original Unix shell
sh written by one Steve Bourne, and Born Again Christians like to Bible Bash... well,
if you understand religion and Unix it is truly one of the great puns of our era. This build went well,
working perfectly after doing the canonical gunzip ... tar xf ... cd ... make incantation.
Unfortunately, I have become comfortable with the provided tcsh shell that comes
with Mac OS X, so this is now an unnecessary triumph.
I also found and built Sudo 1.6.3p7, the superuser do utility that comes with OSX but which needed updating.
Gee, my accomplishments are all FreeBSD-oriented, and are not Cocoa successes. Hmmm.
Review written using TextPad on Windows 2000.
Mac OS X has great eye appeal. When you see it running you want to like it due to its simplicity and its style. There is finally a built-in screen saver. It has a slide show that is very well done. The dissolves and fades are excellent quality, and it slowly zooms and pans in and out randomly on the slides, as if you are watching a movie. It comes with some nice abstract color backgrounds, but no scenic photos. (I'd bet this is another Jobsian insistence.) The fonts are gorgeous. They use a new anti-aliasing technique that makes PDF files look typeset on the screen. Very nice. These details are apparent throughout and are what make OS X appealing.
The calculator is terrible, still a 4 function beast, albeit Aquafied. Windows wins here again with at least the basic scientific and base conversion functions. The note pad and scrapbook — both very useful desk accessories — are gone. The menu bar clock still will not display the date other than for a moment. It should give you a greater set of choices for date and time formats. The new clock application, however, is very nicely done, with both analog and digital choices. Pity it doesn't show a small calendar of the month...
The date and time control panel allows you to set up a network time server, but doesn't give you a list of time servers (not even time.apple.com) or any hints as to what to type for a time server address. Mac OS 9.1 has a nice list of servers and by default it is set to time.apple.com. OS X is a step backward.
The new Finder has no economy with respect to screen real estate. Spacing of icons in the new Finder are too far apart, even at the smallest icon sizes. (Actually this is a fault of the Mac OS 8-9 Finders as well: too much wasted space between icons in the horizontal direction even on the "tighter" setting.) Since the menu bar clock doesn't show the date, one must run the digital clock application to have it on-screen. Then one needs the dock, and then there is the menubar at the top of the screen as always. That's a lot of screen real estate clutter. On Windows you have just the Start bar.
There is no way to customize what appears in the Apple Menu. My "Dock" of applications on the Mac in the past has simply been to have my favorite apps available via aliases in the Apple Menu, which was automatically "hidden" when you were not in the menu. Now you must put your favorites in the dock, which can auto hide, but it feels slower and more cumbersome to do so and it is the only way for you to see what is running and easily and definitively move between running apps, so you pretty much need to have the dock showing all the time. The magnifying mode on the dock was cute for a bit but I got tired of it due to the distortion and turned it off. The dock seems easy enough to use but the Window Manager has no notion that it is there and lets windows open underneath it which you then cannot get to because the dock floats on top and if you open Word or Excel for the first time a big status bar gets placed at the bottom of the screen underneath the dock. If the dock stretches the width of the screen (which it usually does on smaller screens) then you cannot resize the window to get it out from under the dock. You have to hide the dock, move the window, and then reshow the dock. Clicking the zoom icon often seems like it does nothing on many apps. It will initially jump the window someplace and then the window from then on will not do anything. The zoom functionality seems to get worse with each Mac release... On Windows the Start bar is known to other windows and the screen rect given to apps does not include the start bar area. This is how it should be done.
The UI is inconsistent in a few places. In the new Finder one click selects and two clicks open, as in past Mac and Windows systems. But open the Control Panels and one click opens each control panel, not two. Why? Since the Control Panels look just like any other folder, I find myself as a result clicking once to launch apps all the time and then of course nothing happens. There are many s uch sources of frustration.
There is no place you can click quickly to see a list of your running applications, unless you are in Classic mode and then you still have the MultiFinder menu at the upper right. Otherwise one must look at the dock and see which icons have a small black triangle underneath them, but they are usually scattered throughout the bar so it is hard to see what is going on in a quick glance. With a list of apps like we have had in the past, you could click and quickly see exactly what is going on. Also, the About the Finder which would show a nice list of running apps? That is gone. It is the world's most boring about box now, but at least the font size is reduced: the "Mac OS 9.1" was way too big in the old dialog, again a waste of screen real estate.
Mac OS X has removed a lot of useful information. The new Mac OS X Finder is the culprit. It also has a clumsy user interface when dealing with files:
Mac OS X is slow in places. It doesn't have the "snap" that Mac OS 9.1 does on the same machine when opening windows and such. Booting up is faster than OS 9.1 subjectively, and is definitely faster than Windows. Sleep is now instant, either going to sleep, or waking up, which is very nice. I built several benchmark applications under MPW and Mac OS 9.1 and then under gcc and Mac OS X and the MPW MRC compiler-buit benchmarks are up to FOUR TIMES FASTER! If they could just build all of OS X with the MRC compiler I bet the system would speed up immensely. (Gcc is probably the worst optimizing compiler on the planet — the Microsoft compiler is the best, and MRC is somewhere in-between.)
Mac OS X shipped with a CD of developer tools. Hurray! This is a very smart thing to do for a first release of the OS that is mainly going to be bought by hobbiests and developers, the very people that will write good software for the OS. No extra charge either, so this is great.
Unfortunately they shipped the wrong developer tools. Project Builder is so boring. CodeWarrior lovers will like it, but the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop — MPW — is the coolest development environment on the planet, and there is no mention of it anywhere. MPW needs to be Carbonized and become the dev environment for Apple. In fact, the only reason that I am running OS X is with the hope that MPW will continue on. If it doesn't, I think I'd rather be on Windows. I want OS X to succeed, I want Apple to succeed, and I have a ton of Macs, but there is a lot of work to be done to get OS X competitive. I feel more at home with Mac OS 9.1. Keep the new OS underpinings, but give me back the 9.1 Finder. It has been refined over years and is a better Finder. Millions of people are used to it, rather than the few thousand that know and love the NeXT interface of the new Finder. Mac OS X is an evolution of Unix, something already tried with A/UX in the late 80s and early 90s. It too had a Unix under the hood and the Mac UI on top. Is OS X too revolutionary? Revolutions are overthrown, but evolution just keeps plugging away. Which will happen with this?
Dan
Created: 26 Mar 2001 Modified: 26 Aug 2016