Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
« Trees, Forests, Domains and such Programming quote of the day »
Mac OS X
I had to update an old Filemaker solution at work last week, and used the opportunity to spend some time in Mac OS X, which I have installed on both my iMac at work and my Powerbook at home…and I gotta say, I’m really dissapointed.
Reviews I’ve read all say the same thing, that it’s just not ready for primetime, and that may be a large part of it. But more than that, I really thing Apple’s missed the point.
First off, it’s nothing like a Mac. I really liked my Mac. It had it’s problems, but OS 9 has a really good “feel” to it. The UI is responsive and smooth, and also flexible so it can be tailored to fit a power user’s needs. OS X is missing all sorts of features needed to navigate and configure a usable system. I’ve added some 3rd-party tools and hacks to get it better ( most notably X-Assist, that gives me back an application menu and application hiding commands ), but even with those, it feels slow, unresponsive and clunky…I know it’s not in terms of CPU usage and such, but I don’t care. I’ve got a 400 mHz G3, I shouldn’t feel like it’s sluggish.
The native version of Quicktime is almost unusable. It’s embarrassing for Apple that they couldn’t at least make that perform well. Just open a movie of some size and try to drag the progress bar to different parts of the movie and you’ll see what I mean.
I know a lot of the UI can be fixed…but I can’t fix it — Apple hasn’t given me the chance. Which is the other problem, it’s not configurable. No UI switches to turnoff all those fancy graphic effects which are neat for about a minute, and then just piss you off because they make everything slow.
The new Finder is really a lot like Windows 2000’s file explorer…but painfully slow. Enough said.
Next, the classic environment. It works, mostly…which is impressive in it’s own way. It’s painfully jarring to experience, however. It’s sooooo different from OS X’s native environment, that I’d just assume they left it operating in a window like on the original OS X server and didn’t try to itegrate it. I mean, come on, do I really want to interact with an interface that sometimes interleaves windows from different applications ( in OS X native ) and sometimes brings all an application’s windows to the front? Do I really want to have some windows with close/minimize/maximize buttons that are both in different locations, and behave differently? No, I don’t think so.
Lastly, it’s hosed up my powerbook pretty good. The power management doesn’t seem to work consistently or nearly as well as OS 9’s, and it just randomly locks up or shuts down. I’ve heard there are some problems with 3rd party RAM in the Lombard models and OS X, but that’s just lame…especially since I wouldn’t even be able to install the system on the 64meg they original gave me in the thing.
I still hope they can get their act together and make this a better OS, but I’m skeptical. They started listen to feedback some in the late stages of development — but they never really heard what I heard from every Mac user I know, which was “Just give me a Mac that doesn’t crash!”
Oh well, I guess I’ll be dropping back to OS 9 soon.
