OSNews

Well, we can see if the flamers come out of the woodwork for THIS article, too. Long ago--from the time when System 5 was current through the time you ran "MultiFinder" instead of Finder for task switching, up through the release of System 7--I was quite the Mac fan, using them at college and then later at work as a desktop publisher. When it came time to replace the TRS-80 Model 4 I'd been pushing along for years at home, though--after I'd left Kinko's!--I made the decision to follow the PC path. This wasn't because I particularly liked PC hardware. It was partially because the PC hardware was cheap, and partially because the fanaticism of Mac users utterly turned me off. You could NOT say anything remotely critical of the Mac without being flamed as an utterly ignorant fool. Macs were perfect. If a Mac couldn't do it, it was obviously because nobody needed to do it. Erich Ringewald, the author of MultiFinder, made the observation a few years back that the bumper stickers he'd seen (current at the time) saying "Windows 95 = Mac 89" were perfectly true, but the real problem was that Mac 95 = Mac 89, too. That's been true for years. I rejoined the Mac fold just over a year ago with an iBook running MacOS 9.0.4 and was, over time, alarmed at how little things had changed under the hood. Spare me the litany of "the vast differences" between System 7 and MacOS 9 other than the name change, fans--when push comes to shove, it still stops with mysteriously-numbered error messages, still handles memory management about as well as that TRS-80 Model 4 did, and when applications crash they still have a good chance of taking the operating system with them. My iBook freezes regularly, and I'm not doing anything particularly fancy with it. And spare me the Fitts' Law argument about the Single Holy Menubar, too. I understand it and, from that point of view, one menubar is better. The problem is that new users who aren't computer-literate don't understand about that single menubar switching contexts. My mother has an iBook and I have watched her countless times be fumbling in an application, accidentally click on the desktop background and wonder where some of the menu commands went. With all due respect to Jef Raskin, visually linking an application's functions with the application's data seems to be more useful to new users than giving them larger "target areas" for the mouse. Spatial organization trumps mathematical modeling. I may break down and put 10.1 on my iBook at some point, simply because MacOS 9.0.4's instability drives me nuts. And I don't agree with some of Eugenia's points--but I don't disagree with a lot of them. The most revolutionary thing about OS X (to my DTP/web designer biased eye) is Quartz. Quartz will always be a performance pig. That's not a problem in and of itself. But just because you have it doesn't mean you need to use it everywhere. Nobody is made more productive by alpha-blended translucent menus and bouncing application icons. As for a lot of the cruelty directed at Eugenia on her earlier piece, English is her second language, and that frequently shows. Deal with it, folks. I've always found her 'reviews' to be entertaining largely because of what I consider her pretty odd perspective on things--she obviously doesn't look at things the way I do, and oftentimes I'm left going 'Eh?' But the less-thoughtful reactions to her say more about the authors of those reactions than they do about her writing. She must be an idiot because she don't talk pretty. And, most tellingly, she must be a biased Windows-lovin' troll because she had something bad to say about Macs. (Those of us who used to follow BeNews know she's a biased BeOS-lovin' troll. Just kidding! Don't hit me.) P.S.: Some of the comments were just odd, like the person who said BeOS was an attempt to clone NextStep. Sir, what color is the sky in the little world you live in? They have virtually nothing in common. Anyone watching Gil Amelio's strategy for Apple would have realized he was trying to move them toward competing as an "enterprise solution" computer company--and that's why he bought Next, with its cult following as a development environment, rather than Be, unaware that it would lead to his ousting--and ironically to the abandonment of enterprise customers entirely.