Almost a year after our much discussed Mac OS X 10.1 review, it is time to write down our impressions from the new version of OSX, Jaguar 10.2. Is Jaguar worth the full $129 USD? Dive in for more. Update: Slashdot seems to agree with our review, at least on the backwards compatibility issue. I have had Mac OS X 10.1.5 installed on this G4 Cube 450 MHz (which is still modern Apple hardware) with 448 MB of SDRAM since last May. I used Mac OS X on and off for the last few months, but version 10.1.x was really not something that could captivate my interest and make me use it more frequently, mostly because of its low UI speed, and secondly because of the way some of its UI elements work.
The installation of 10.2 went very smooth, it was truly a no brainer installation. You put the CD in, you boot with it, you choose the partition you want, and that’s pretty much all there is into it. The installation took about 40 minutes (a 20 GB IDE drive used). The new version of OSX kept all preferences and settings as they were before and did not overwrite any modified by me behaviors of the OS, which is a good thing.
First thing I tried was to check out its UI responsiveness. I found that OSX 10.2 is definitely faster than its predecessor, at least it does feel faster. Scrolling and resizing is twice faster than it used to be. But that does not make OSX’s UI “fast”. It is still slow and unresponsive. But better than before. An anonymous donor sent me free of charge a GeForce2MX, a special model made for the G4 Cubes (thanks!), so since a week ago I am now able to utilize Quartz Extreme. Indeed, QE makes the UI more bearable, but still it is just not as responsive as Windows XP on the similarly powerfull machine. I even use OSX at 16-bit color, because 32-bit is even slower…
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that OSX is fast doing a lot of things, but when it comes to resizing, scrolling and launch it just doesn’t feel right. In fact, I noticed that in some applications you will find that scrolling with the mouse wheel is very smooth, while trying to scroll the same document with the scroll bar is jerky (Chimera – Cocoa/Carbon mix). On other applications, the opposite would occur (Opera – Carbon). This is really strange behavior, which suggests possibly either bad algorithms or overall bad design.
A lot of multithreading code was added to this version of OSX, and it really shows. Finder is snappier, the menu bar does not stall as much when loading a big web page etc. Especially because Apple now sells only SMP PowerMacs, multithreading was a must in order to scale well on these machines.
Among the new features you will find on Jaguar are a newly redesigned Sherlock 3 (which now openly resembles more of what Watson does these days), there is a great network integration with Windows machines, easier file sharing, redesigned Address Book and a new AIM application, iChat (which I found it to get on my way when trying to chat, looks good but…). The Mail program now comes with an advanced spam-killer feature, Quartz Extreme allows you to have “real” transparency. Another kinda neat idea is Rendezvous which allows you to automatically connect and exchange information with other Macs that happen to be on the same network. However, developers would have to specifically support this in order new applications to be able to connect via Rendezvous to another Mac. Yet another nice addition is now the ability to run a software-based Airport station.
UI-wise, I noticed that the buttons are not exactly the same as before. They now look much better and more “clean”. Same for the drop-down boxes (combo boxes for you GTK+ heads).
The BSD layer and developer tools of OSX have also been updated. Mac OS X now utilizes some of the FreeBSD 4.4 code, includes a Bash shell, while GCC 3.1, which generates better and faster code, is shipped with the developer tools. On the down side of things, a lot of code is now suddenly broken, even if it was not C++. For example, my (pure C) game does not link anymore (it spits a bunch of unresolved symbols), even if the libraries that it tries to link against, are also C and supposedly not affected by the non-compatible C++ ABI of GCC 3.1.
And talking about backwards compatibility, I found this to be the most important problem that OSX 10.2 Jaguar has. A whole bunch of applications do not run, and others exhibit either behavior problems or they simply crash after a while. For example, none of my 10.1.x “tray” resident apps were to load, none of the third party plugins that used to load on the Preference panel load either, the DAVE Windows sharing does not work anymore, ThinkOffice has bad redraw problems (especially on its spreadsheet), Pepper dies on launch (you have to kill the prefs file), Otto, the 3D game, does not respond to keyboard commands anymore with the Rage 128 PRO (while it does after I switched to the GeForce2MX), SDL games on windowed mode are unbearably slow, (while they behave absolutely fine on full screen), and a lot of other things like that. I found IE to also exhibit some weird behavior with its address bar, Fetch dies when disconnecting from an FTP site etc. These are all behaviors that did not occur before, while now they are plenty to discover. The most weird behaviors were possibly the fact that my clock was mysteriously reseted to 1969. For two reboots last week it would take up to 4 minutes to boot the Cube up, while also magically, now the Cube boots just fine again. After 10.2 was installed it also put my monitor to 75 Hz, while the previous version had correctly picked up my PnP monitor to 85 Hz at the 1280×1024 resolution. The 85 Hz was not even showing in the compatible refresh rates list, I had to tell it to show all refresh rates available and then pick it up manually… As of magic, this problem also gone away after 4-5 reboots, some days later…
One of the nice touches of Jaguar is the fact that you can literally now Zoom In and Out to your desktop, which is important as an accessibility feature. Too bad Apple uses bitmaps when you zoom in though, instead of using their PDF vector engine. With the bitmap zooming everything is blurry and not as precise. I wonder why (except for the reason that bitmap zooming is easier to program) they do not use PDF for this feature, as this is truly one of the reasons why someone would go with the PDF/Quartz engine anyway.
Something that I would like to see as a kind of evolution from Apple, is their packaging system. While it is very easy to unpack applications for Mac, the problem is that there are so many kinds: .bin, .hqx, .sit, .dmg, .tar.gz, .pkg and some others that I can’t remember now. Besides the fact that they are too many, the main problem is order. I like having everything in order. These packages most of the time will just unpack things on my desktop, and only .pkg would default the installation to the /Applications folder. But even then, my /Applications folder is a complete mess because of this. That folder is full of other folders of applications or binary files, literally thrown in there. I wish that Apple could standardize an installer and categorize applications in subfolders, so each time you install something, it would go in to a sensible place/subfolder.
I was truly expecting Apple to include a virtual desktop application (which is something important to Unix/geek users), but to no avail. Thankfully, CodeTek have created this great application called VirtualDesktop, it has many features and it works very well with 10.2.
Overall, Apple is doing an important step forward with this release. OS X is definitely a sexy operating system, with a nice looking (but still slow) UI. The Jaguar version brings some much requested additions (spring loaded menus anyone?), but it still lacks features that every geek would love. For example I want to be able to open a terminal on the current directory when I am deep in a Finder directory… Also, a browser that works better and faster it would be highly appreciable (I tried all, I only liked Mozilla a bit – Chimera is unusably slow). And of course, more UI (==scrolling, resizing, launching, responsiveness) speeeeeed…
This is an important release, but it does not worth the whole $129 USD fee for users who have purchased 10.1. An upgrade option should have been offered by Apple for these users. I still think that this operating system is the only one that can seriously hurt Microsoft Windows on the desktop one day (Linux has no chance because of its very nature and because of the way it is evolving). However, that won’t happen if Apple continues to sell so expensive and slower Macs, which makes almost impossible a logical person who runs a PC at 2.5 GHz with WindowsXP to downgrade to dual 1 GHz (or even worse, to an eMac/iMac). We all know that the MHz Myth does not apply anymore for Apple’s case. PCs are much faster today. And Apple will have to do something about it.
Pros:
Better multithreading, better dev tools, faster Finder, Quartz Extreme, a bit more speed overall. Airport software station, better Sherlock, better USB printing.
Cons:
Still sluggish UI, no ability to see all open windows in the Dock, Finder is downright weird. Backwards compatibility an issue. Kind of buggy still. No modern filesystem or MIME type-based system.
Installation: 10/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 9/10
Features: 8/10
Credibility: 9/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 6.5/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 8.41 / 10
Is there an FTP applet now? I remember it to be clunky to configure it.
Do I understand correctly that you installed it over 10.1.5? Rumor says it’s slower than a clean install then… I didn’t try it myself (10.2 should arrive in a week or so), but if that were true it’s a bad thing.
IF that was true, then the product would have been buggered. No, these are just rumours. The OSX 10.2 was installed just fine, without a hitch.
Eugenia, what OS do you give hardware support 10/10 ?
Why is hardware support only 8 ?
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
Because a lot of people have reported problem with some SCSI CD-RW, because my (new) digital camera does not work, and because not all hardware works (eg. a lot of scanners do not work out of the box). There is a lot of hardware that used to work with OS9 (leave alone the “PC” hardware) that does not work on OSX.
Windows 98 has 10/10. It is the most supported OS today. Even WindowsXP wouldn’t get more than a 9/10.
The security update for Jaguar is available. It updates OpenSSL.
The new dev tools are shipping for $20 from ADC. They will be available for download soon and dev’s will get an email when apple will be ready to take the download.
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
> The security update for Jaguar is available. It updates OpenSSL.
Well, if you actually see the last screenshot in the article, this is what I was updating there.
What model is your new degital camera ?
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
Polaroid PDC 640CF, USB. It is a model of 2000, but I bought it last night at Frys (it was on sale
“Belgian House Music”???????
http://goober.osnews.com/img/1611/jaguar1.jpg
Eugenia…I think you need to listen to some Jimi:
http://www.jimi-hendrix.com/
I listen to Eurodance in that particular screen, not anything Belgian.
Eurodance was really high in Greece when I was a teenager/young, so it reminds me a lot of things when I listen to it.
You should read my homepage about what music I like. As long it is not Greek or French music, I would probably like it.
Eugenia could you give us the OSes that you rate 10/10.
W98 is for harwdware support, could you give use other oses that get a 10 and where they get it please so We could understand where your 10 is ?
I figured for a lot worse from you (Eugenia). I will be drawing up my own review in the short coming weeks (as soon as I get me copy, hopefully today). I will also be dogsitting for my friend soon while he shows his mom around Europe, so I’ll do a review of Windows XP, Red Hat 7.3 and Mac OS X 10.2!
It’s good to hear that the networking has improved (though it’s good enough for my requirements now), and with what I have heard so far from others, this good news is only going to piss off my XP using colleagues even more since they still can’t access their shared drives (much less print to the SMB print server on the Unix network, D’OH)!
>Windows 98 has 10/10. It is the most supported OS today.
>Even WindowsXP wouldn’t get more than a 9/10.
On the contrary, virtually ALL the hardware that dates back to Win98 days will install out-of-the-box under WinXP (notwithstanding the “Hardware compatibility list”), but on the other hand, more recent hardware will require the user to download drivers in order to install on Win98).
This has always been the case, as time passes and new hardware is introduced, out-of-the-box compatibility with older OSes is compromised.
This is why WinXP tops out everything else in this respect.
And this is why attempting to install OS/2 Warp4 (1996) on a new computer is close to impossible.
But hey, don’t take my word for it, just install both Windows versions on a recent machine and check the device manager yourself. I am willing to bet that Win98 will display quite a few yellow exclamation marks…
Oren
>On the contrary, virtually ALL the hardware that dates >back to Win98 days will install out-of-the-box under WinXP >(notwithstanding the “Hardware compatibility list”), but >on the other hand, more recent hardware will require the >user to download drivers in order to install on Win98).
That’s not what I heard (I’m not a Windows user myself). I’ve heard from friends that a lot of hardware had to be replaced in order to be able to install XP. Thats what it said in reviews too.
Windows XP *loses* stability if you install Win9x drivers. Yes, it is (kinda) backwards compatible for its driver API. But this is also the No 1 way to make your Windows unstable: non-certified drivers for the version of Windows you are using. I am making sure I use XP-only drivers for all my hardware. I haven’t seen a single crash since I installed it on my PC, March 2002.
My husband also had crash/problem-proof XP. Everything was working fine. However, after he installed the Win9x drivers for his TV-Card (there were no XP drivers for it), his XP now do not go to sleep mode.
These are normal behaviours. Drivers are really an important part of the OS, and they _have_ to be working well with the system. If they don’t, you are guaranteed to have problems.
While this is a nice review of OS X 10.2 I only have to add:
Regarding hardware support, I personally take up the same position I had in the BeOS times:
If you have a Polariod Camera that does’t work on OS X, who do you is responsible to deliver a driver?
Apple or Polaroid?
Ralf.
> who do you is responsible to deliver a driver?
It does not matter who is responsible.
Talking as a user, (and not as an editor of this site who does understand these issues), what matters is if this hardware works or not. The plain user does not care about the politics. He expects to plug in his hardware and work. If it does not, it does not matter who is at fault. The user will be unhappy with the OS and he/she might try to find an OS that supports all that.
Hardware support is a painful thing for OS developers. But still, only the end result matters for the user.
Right, the user comes first. Blaming someone else does not give you a driver anyway.
I have a 600MHz iBook and Chimera is fast for me. Faster than Mozilla or OmniWeb, not to mention IE5.2… Regarding hardware support… Yeah, it’s lousy. The only digital cameras supported are the most expensive ones. And I have a cheap one. A CF reader is cheap though. 32 euros. That’s a workaround anyway. They should support some sort of generic digital camera or something. But I don’t know if it’s possible. Whatever.
About the scroll, I have the answer for you:
1) Cocoa apps support scrollwheels out-of-the-box. Carbon apps need to use a special API.
2) Gecko (in Chimera) is Carbon, but the view box is probably a NSScrollView (cocoa) subclass, so maybe that’s where the problem lies. Jaguar allows to use carbon and cocoa smoothly in the same app, so that will porbably get solved really soon.
I hate carbon apps. They are Classic fossils. They will disappear (i hope) now that Apple supports Objective-C++ and Cocoa/Carbon mix.
> I have a 600MHz iBook and Chimera is fast for me
I am not talking about rendering speed. Try to *resize* Chimera. I get 1-2 frames per second here, with Quartz Extreme enabled.
When I say that something is slow, I mean this: scrolling, resizing, app launching and generally, UI responsiveness.
This is what OSX lacks.
>>I mean this: scrolling, resizing, app launching and generally, UI responsiveness.<<
I have never had troubles with scrolling, there seems more latency on OmniWeb, though I can say Mozilla/Netscape is fine in this area.
As for the others, I keep my windows at a default size. I personally would rather see an outline for the resize than the window actually doing it, but that’s my preference!
Windows XP is already the most supported OS from a hardware perspective. XP dwarfs any Mac in terms of hardware support.
With the recent strides we’ve made in getting drivers ported, XP can work with virtually any hardware you have.
We spent countless hours working on the installer to make sure the upgrades from Windows 2000 were flawless. Even on VIA chipset motherboards, quite a feat. That took the engineers a long time.
OS X is a little bit ahead of us right now. But Microsoft has longer product cycles. You know, over 1 billion users that we have to make happy with each major release.
The next major release of Windows will put Mac back in its place — in the Museum of Modern Art.
Bill
..that Apple should have done what MS did and provided an option to turn off all UI animations and effects.
WinXP runs fine on 300mhz K6/2/128Mb RAM/Onboard GFX when all interface appearance functions are disabled.. in fact on the same tasks its approx 10% faster than Win2k on it…
Apple are providing an elegant workaround by using a graphics accelerator to draw the UI but its still a workaround for a problem… their UI has made a “feature” jump that is somewhat beyond the ability of current hardware to deal with.
Lets hope – although if Apple are suddenly going for hardware speed, it seems very unlikely that they will.. that Apple will realise this eventually.
I also find it somewhat disturbing that backward compatibility has been broken so soon…
If you posted the screen grabs as PNGs they would look sharper. It’s
hard to judge the UI when it is shown slightly blurry, but my
impression is that there is so much decoration that it would be slow
to use.
Why does the preferences requester have grey lines across it? That can
hardly improve legibility.
After looking at that stuff, it is rather a relief to see a clear,
functional GUI like
http://aros.polarboing.com/aroswb/
where a button is a button and a scroll bar is a scroll bar.
This is not logical.
You are not a normal user, you are a OS reviewer.
You should know who to blame for it, but you blamed the OS manufacturer.
Hint: Next time you buy a Digicam that schould work with you Mac read the spec if it is designed for OS X or watch for the “runs with X” logo on the package. Like every normal user does.
Ralf.
What a classic troll. And he’s good. I like Steve Balmers posts on Kuro5hin more, though. They are classics.
“check out its UI” –> check out it’s UI
Uhmm, “check out its UI” is right. Your suggestion is “check out it is UI” :-).
“a newly redesigned Sherlock”–> a redesigned Sherlock
Don’t see any grammar errors with Eugenia’s one.
“kinda” –> kind of
I guess “speeeeeed… ” is wrong too?
“the most weird behaviors” –> the weirdest behaviors
Not sure on this, but, isn’t behaviours suppose to be singular, nor plural?
Dear Macintosh Users,
While we love the Macintosh platform (free R&D and extra Microsoft Office bucks), we do encourage you to look at the vast variety of cheap and fast PC’s as a viable second machine. For those times you need your software to run fast.
With Intel’s latest 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 or AMD’s latest Athlon 2600+, our UI is never slow. Couple market leading CPU speed with the best performing graphics systems you can get on any personal computer (ATI 9700 Pro, upcoming Nvidia NV30) and it is easy to see why Windows is the world’s leading computing platform.
Instead of being control freaks and trying to write the graphics drivers ourselves, we encourage Windows OEMs to right the fastest possible drivers, using every feature of the graphics processor. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t let the graphics card vendor write much of the driver, sacrificing much of the speed of the hardware.
As long as Apple retains its crazy level of control over video drivers and stays with Motorola, the Apple user experience will always be sluggish, just like the original Mac.
Overall, OS X is a great source of ideas for Longhorn. And when we ship in 2005, our UI performance will be be stellar.
If you are a Macintosh Microsoft Office user, thank you for your support. We will continue to support your business productivity needs. We made our new MSN for Mac just for you. It’s great and you should try it out. Let me know what you think.
Bill
Hiya
> check out its UI” –> check out it’s UI
Eugenia is right, you are wrong. “it’s” is *always* a contraction of “it is” or “it has”, whereas “its” is
a possessive pronoun.
If you get in the habit of reading “it’s” as “it is” or
“it has” then you’ll find it easy to tell the two apart.
–Jon (who *is* normally a pedant 🙂
http://www.witchspace.com
The thing is that AFAIK, OSX support digital camera’s using an industry communication standard,Changes are that your camera is not compliant to the industry specs. My HP camera works fine and out of the box. My Boss has an expensive Canon one and there are no W2K/XP drivers for it and so it only works on an W98 box. OSX works fine with the camera out of the box. My HP 318 also has a disk mode in which it emulates a USB harddisk, maybe your camera has a similar feature.
ido, you are usually such a pedant!
Eugenia is not a native english speaker. She is Greek.
I am not a native english speaker, I am German.
Trust me, Eugeina’s scripts are ok to read. And we take as much care to write the best english we can.
If you are such a know-all, go and translate her OS X review to german or greek and post i here. Have a lot of fun! We will correct it for you.
Ralf.
Why does the preferences requester have grey lines across it? That can
hardly improve legibility.
Yeah, I agree. I had a REALLY hard time making out what’s what with that UI.
Guess it’s another thing to actually use it.
Dear Zenja,
Thanks for the support. Steve and I are a team and we enjoy working together, just not on the same website at the same time.
We each reserve a part of our incredibly busy work schedule to spend time listening to users. It is incredibly important to our business that we show that Microsoft cares. And also to ensure that what Microsoft has to say is clear. Both Steve and myself like to lead by example.
Everyone at Microsoft is a big fan of OSNews. We use it to keep up with the good ideas that are out there. And occasionally, we find a talented OS developer who wants their genius and hard work to be of benefit to the most people and they join Microsoft to make their dreams into reality.
Bill
ok rajan r, I’ll give you the first and the third 😉
dear Ralf,
I’m not a native english speaker myself…
it wasn’t criticism, I’m just trying to alleviate my boredom.
I’m sure Bill Gates is connected from sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net …
Thank you guys for the grammar lesson.
I didn’t know that “its” can’t be written “it’s” (this is an exception from the rule, right?). I also still have problems with second and third forms of short adjectives. Are they _always_ used without “more” or are there exceptions to it? For example what about “red”. Red, redder, reddest or red, more red, most red? I guess the latter. But then what about green? Is it also green, more green, most green or green, greener, greenest this time? If the latter, is there a certain rule or do I have to listen to my feeling?
I remember a rule that short adjectives would be used with more or the other way around. But what about “fantastic”? I can hardly say “fantasticer” or “fantasticest” so I would use “more fantastic” and “most fantastic”. I just don’t get it. :/
Well, sorry Eugenia for the offtopic posting but this is more interesting than hardware support IMHO. *grin*
BTW I’m german that’s why I have no clue.
While we (I) are (am) at it, would this be possible: “I’m german, too, that’s why I have no clue” or are the comma(-s? -ta?) wrong? I always wondered how to set the comma(-s? -ta?) in those cases with “,too”.
>>I’m sure Bill Gates is connected from sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net …<<
He works out of home and being the cheap skate that he is, refuses to pay for MSN!
that would be the fantasticest, Sparck! 😀
“For example I want to be able to open a terminal on the current directory when I am deep in a Finder directory… ”
Eugeina, check this site out, it is an applescript to open the terminal in the current finder window, very usefull indeed
http://www.entropy.ch/software/MacOSx/
I am at work and the proxy isn’t allowing me to get there right now but i know that’s the right site.
Thanks for the review.
if you are looking for a fast browser on macos x go to
http://www.omnigroup.com/ and pick up omniweb. it was a nextstep/openstep browser and is the only 100% native browser for the macos x.
my experience with it is its fast, easy to use and intuitive. only the ALT-Q usage for people switching sun, linux and mac a lot is dreadfully inadequate, as with all mac apps on ibook: everytime i try to type a mail adress i close some window, since the apple key and the alt key are in the same position… and apple-Q is quite, where ALT-Q is @. ever tried looking for the special characters |[]{} ? its downright weird…
I don’t mind if a review has sort of a, well, benevolent touch with regard to the product reviewed. But given the fact that osnews is a developer-oriented website, i simply cannot understand why this major topic was mentioned in a, well, rather unsatisfactory way. 10.2 seems to break things big time (see http://www.osxgnu.org and similar comments from the developer of TinkerTool), especially for developers. Just calling this “an issue” seems like a person knowing better choosing a very soft way of putting things. Another word for this might be self-censorship.
Overall a nice review, but I have a couple of quibbles. I can’t swear to this, since I haven’t yet played around with Jaguar myself, but I think you would have had fewer problems and perhaps better performance if you had done a clean install. That in itself is a black eye for Apple — an upgrade install shouldn’t cause problems — but if you have the time I would recommend doing a clean install of Jaguar and seeing how that works for you.
I thought one point you made was rather odd: “While it is very easy to unpack applications for Mac, the problem is that there are so many kinds: .bin, .hqx, .sit, .dmg, .tar.gz, .pkg and some others that I can’t remember now. Besides the fact that they are too many, the main problem is order.” First, this isn’t a bug, this is a feature. I can’t see how it’s a bad thing that many different formats are supported. Second, this has little to do with Apple. It’s Stuffit Expander that supports all these formats, and it’s individual developers who decide how they want to distribute their application. Maybe all developers should use the installer, but I like the convenience of drag ‘n’ drop installation.
As to files being unpacked on the Desktop rather than the Applications folder, consider that only .pkg files are specifically installer scripts. .Dmg files are disk images, so of course they mount on the Desktop like ordinary disks. The rest are compressed files that get unpacked wherever they happen to be. It would be absurd for, say, an archive of compressed mp3 files to automatically unpack in the Applications folder. Alternatively, you can select a default destination directory for uncompressed files in the Stuffit Expander preferences.
And as for imposing a structure of subfolders within the Applications folder, the Mac Way has always been to leave organization to the taste of the user. Traditional-minded Mac users already find the OS X file structure too rigid and Unixy. There’s nothing stopping the user from creating subfolders, if that’s his or her desire, but unless most users are as orderly as you I don’t think that should be the default organization.
I’ve got a solution to one of your problems. You mention, “For example I want to be able to open a terminal on the current directory when I am deep in a Finder directory.” Dragging a folder onto the Terminal window will change the shell to that directory. If the folder you want is already open, drag its proxy icon in the Finder window title bar into the Terminal window.
If you like electronica, check out some of the apps http://www.massinova.com/>massinova Jaguar” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.massinova.com/xtras.html”>Jaguar compatible too.
looks like you automatically parse and format url’s I didnt read the fine print.
Here’s some tips on English grammar. For short, simple adjectives, comparatives are made with -er and -est. “Red, redder, reddest” and “green, greener, greenest.” Longer, more complex words, especially if they’re Latin or Greek in origin rather than Anglo-Saxon, take “more” and “most.” (Note the beginning of my last sentence.) Unfortunately, there’s really no way to decide which form to use, it’s completely idiomatic. English isn’t logical; this is our revenge on the rest of the world for having gender and case.
As for commas, you really only need them around dependent clauses, and when in doubt, leave them out. Vieles Gluck!
Why didn’t you just save the keystrokes and put:
“It’s not BeOS”
Seems to me that would cover it all.
“Trust me, Eugenia’s scripts are ok to read. And we take as much care
to write the best english we can. ”
Well, I am a native English speaker from Southern England, which is
where the language came from, and I find Eugenia’s posts perfectly
readable. There are a few minor errors, but nothing that would cause
confusion.
There are plenty of people around who are supposed to be English
speakers but make basic mistakes such as not using capital letters for
“I” or at the start of a sentence, or joining words together as in
“alot” or “infact”.
Yes, “it’s” and “its” are exceptions. Obviously the idea is to
distinguish the two possible meanings, as with the two spellings
“disc” and “disk”.
[quote] There are plenty of people around who are supposed to be English speakers but make basic mistakes such as not using capital letters for “I” or at the start of a sentence, or joining words together as in “alot” or “infact”. [/quote]
yes, they are called “Americans” 😉
[Y]es…
“Dragging a folder onto the Terminal window will change the shell to that directory.”
Thanks for the tip, works fine with Nautilus and GNOME.
This is funky, it seems that gnomes really like the taste of apples. BTW, did anyone else notice that the finder fileview looks _exactly_ like the one of Nautilus? The “additional file information” below or besides the file is new to 10.2, isn’t it? Now did they copy this from Nautilus (how cool would that be? 
) or are ex-Eazel members now working for Apple again?
Grammar: “As for commas, you really only need them around dependent clauses”
Does that mean it would be “I’m german too, that’s why I’m clueless”? I remember from school that there should always be a comma before “too”, that’s why I’m unsure. Thanks!
//He works out of home and being the cheap skate that he is, refuses to pay for MSN!//
Er…Speakeasy DSL costs a *lot* more than MSN. (And for good reason.)
So, here I see Bill just trying to boost the economy by using a 3rd party provider. :-p
What’s wrong with Apple? I thought they have guidelines that ever app looks the same. Now what does Apple do? From the screenshot I see, that some apps are Aqua-style and some apps are Metallic-style. The same thing got on my nerves with MacOS9: Most apps are Classic-style, but Sherlock, QuckTime and iTunes are Metallic.
It’s like GTK+, Qt, Motif, …. under other Unices.
Look at http://members.csolutions.net/zayda/osnews/img/1611/jaguar2.jpg
The only app that looks like Aqua is the Windows Media Player. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?
>>Er…Speakeasy DSL costs a *lot* more than MSN. (And for good reason.)
So, here I see Bill just trying to boost the economy by using a 3rd party provider. :-p<<
It depends where your service is coming from… I am paying about $25 (for ADSL) a month here in Europe!
oh and the above was a joke, no accuracy required dopey 🙂
That’s an old debate: brushed metal vs. normal Aqua look. The Apple guidelines say that the brushed metal look should be used for programs that use or resemble digital devices (iTunes, iDVD, etc) or, and here is the big inconsistency in my opinion, applications that share data with those digital devices. That’s why the address book is in brushed metal. It shares data with some other appliances of the “digital hub” age.
Honestly I think that Apple uses it just because it “looks cool.”. I hate that they have those two very distinct looks. It just doesn’t feel right. It works for a few, small applications, but it shouldn’t be used for something like iMovie.
It is too bad that backwards compatibility seems to suffer quite a bit with thise release. That would have been another reason to mark this release as 11.0 (together with the missing upgrade price).
The change from gcc 2.95.x to 3.x is probably the most obvious reason why some applications don’t work anymore. The reason why a pure C program doesn’t work any longer is probably because they also moved to FreeBSD 4.4. I suspect a few things in some C libraries changed as well.
Here is the chance for yet another thread about version numbers. They don’t make much sense nowadays, do they?
It doesn’t surprise me if OpenGL applications running in windowed mode are slow with Quartz Extreme enabled.
Switching between rendering contexts is very, very expensive. You can see this in Windows and Linux too if you start 2 decently intensive 3D applications in windowed mode.
You don’t usually play 3D games in windowed mode anyway, and if you use a Maya or something you can always just turn QE off, so it’s a very minor drawback.
“Honestly I think that Apple uses it just because it “looks cool.”. I hate that they have those two very distinct
looks. It just doesn’t feel right. It works for a few, small applications, but it shouldn’t be used for something
like iMovie.”
Is it not possible for the user to change these decorations to a
different theme?
My feeling is that Mac OS 6 had a better interface – simpler, easier
to see, more functional.
Yes, “it’s” and “its” are exceptions. Obviously the idea is to
distinguish the two possible meanings, as with the two spellings
“disc” and “disk”.
What are the two meanings of disc/disk? Out of curiosity I looked it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. and they say that “disc” is simply a variant of “disk”.
Since I figure new Jaguar users may be reading this or people planning on ugrading thought I’d throw in something that worried me but that I haven’t seen much discussion of. The Mac help facility needs to download a ton of files from Apple when its used for the first time. Right now with lots of people installing Jaguar this download is taking a very long time. I’d recommend waiting until (early in moring — east coast, late at night — west coast) and run help for a few different things to get those files local.
Disc commonly refers to optical media (eg Compact Disc), while Disk refers to magnetical media (eg Floppy Disk).
Hey ladies,
IMHO XP is shite for hardware support, I have quite a few cards that didn’t work and stil don’t under XP. 2000 is much better. Win98 has support for pretty much everything, but its shite and 16bit, no matter what hype you may have read.
Linux is far better for plug&play than ANY OS I have previously used. e.g.: I upgraded to copper gigabit recently at home -> yes a bit OTT. I have a mix of linux, kernels >= 2.4.18 and windows2000 and XP.
The cards are a mix on Intel gigabit and assante gigabit.
Linux -> detected automatically worked instantly,
win2k, didn’t get recognised correctly [intels] driver update fixed it.
winXP -> same as 2k.
Assante : linux worked straight out of the box,
win2k, driver update “fixed” it, but blue screens. Some OS that it. XP still doesn’t work, drops packets. waiting for new driver.
So I’m moving to macs and linux only from now on. XP doesn’t even play my games and thats the only reason I have a copy. 16-bit is not an option thanks.
Eugenia does a great job – I think she must literally be at her computer(s) sisteen hours a day – and all for the sheer love of computing.
I’ve got 10.2 on all our Macs now – our new (old) Quicksilver 1 GHz dual processor, Flat Panel iMac, eMac and 700 MHz G3 14″ iBook. RAM is maxed out on all of them. All have at least 32 mB video, except for the iBook, which has 16 MB.
Apple has introduced such a plethera of new features and apps with Jaguar, I hope the next big update (Panther sometime in 2003) focuses on refining what has been done in 10.2, honing in ever more on speed and fixing what is broken. It is staggering how many apps are broken under 10.2. Apple cannot do this everytime they come out with even a major update. So, I say, work on the new features, speed and give everyone a chance to get apps caught up and running smoothly.
There are speed increases across the board in all our Macs. Obviously, the Quicksilver Dual processor with 128 MB Titanium card is flying with Quartz Extreme. But, in a way, it is more interesting to me to look at the consumer Macs.I should say though that, on the Power mac, my big Adobe apps like PhotoShop and InDesign launch immediately and operate very smoothly. Also, Java apps like ThinkFree Office and LimeWire, launch instantly, which is a brand new experience for me <g>.
On the eMac and FP iMac, the speed increase is very noticable (both have 32 MB video cards), but obviously not to the extent of the Power Mac. However, usability has increased, which is good. Consumer apps like iPhoto launch must faster and the Finder is faster. Speaking of consumer apps, we did have one big surprise we didn’t think of. Because this version is much more than a regular upgrade, we decided to reformat and install on all the Macs. We backed up all our files, of course, but were shocked when iDVD did not appear in the installs on our two Macs that have SuperDrives. I’m not sure if we should have been shocked or not in hindsight, but it was something we didn’t forsee. So, I had to get out the “old” Software restore disks for one of them and make a disk image of the entire install so I could get iDVD from it.At any rate, consumer Macs are faster under 10.2 which is good news and people will get more out of their iApps and new features than ever before. But, the ultimate speed problem still remains – the processor speed problem. Apple has to get out of this hole somehow.
The iBook was the biggest surprise. It, proportionately speaking, realized a bigger speed boost than the other consumer macs – and that’s with only 16 mB of video RAM. The only explanation I can think of for this is that it just goes to show how painfully slow 10.1 was on it. Multithreading must be a big part of this speed increase along with the video card using Quartz Extreme as far as it can go with it. So, iBook users may have gotten the best deal out of this. Usually, I run the iBook with 16 bit color to speed things up. I’m at full strength with it now and it’s faster than 10.1 with 16 bit color. I’ll probably go back to that and see what the speed gains are there, but it’s so nice to look at it as it is now and still be usable. So, in conjunction with Eugenia’s speed gains with her upgraded Cube, it seems the speed increases do run throughout the whole line.
This matter of broken apps – this is the type of thing you expect when a new OS is released. So, this only increases my feeling that we’ve simply been beta testing for Apple until now. They have introduced a lot of new features and they’d better work on those, continue to increase speed and give developers a chance to fix broken apps. My only really bad experience with 10.2 is with the Help System. Reports are flooding into the Mac sites about this too. It is an absolute disgrace. It is like pre-alpha software. I have no idea what they were thinking when unleashing it on us.
Despite Apple’s Switch campaign, I did not view Apple trying to compete with Microsft head to head anymore in the regular sense of the term. I think Jobs is just trying to see more Macs. Anyway, for digital hub type stuff, Macs are greater than ever now. For “regular” work, XP Pro has no equal at this time.
I didn’t see jbolden’s post about the Help System until I posted my comments. Aha! That was such a puzzlement to me -I thought, how could they release this crap? But, that explains it. Thanks!
…but moving too slowly.
I tested Jaguar on the new Macs myself and you really need a top-of-the-line PowerMac to make it responsive, too much processor-cycle-sapping eyecandy for the smaller machines.
Come on, NextStep (and afterwards OpenSTEP) computers with the good old Motorola 68K series CPUS still had display postscript (what do you think display PDF is?) and object-oriented stuff out the wazoo and the UI still was more responsive than many current Macs (that should comparatively be heaps faster). It looked nicer IMO as well.
I realize software is becoming more “functional” but this is ridiculous.
OpenSTEP on a PC absolutely screamed, and we’re talking 486-class CPUs here. It would be interesting to see it run on a modern box with supported video and SCSI cards…
Despite me being a Unix guy by trade, I have to admit that PCs with NT and 2K are the most responsive OSes for me (XP, even with eyecandy removed, still lacks some of the UI “snap” of NT and 2K IMO on an old box).
Still OSX remains the desktop future of Unix though, and as such should be supported as much as possible.
I just don’t believe Apple should be charging that much for a much needed upgrade… their boxes are fat enough cash cows as it is. Take a hint from Sun. Mind, I’m not suggesting ports to x86.
Maybe after October with the new desktop POWER CPU from IBM we will see something more worthwhile but I believe Apple has both software and hardware issues…
If I can use a comparatively slow and old 400MHz corporate HP Vectra with 256MB and a Matrox G100 on which NT, 2K and XP UIs all run more than fine, OSX should have at LEAST the same level of responsiveness from similar hardware to make users “switch”. If you need more controls to allow the disabling of eyecandy, so be it. Every time I use a Mac I disable the genie effect for instance… (only serves to chew up CPU cycles IMO).
How else are you going to get all the OS9 users to permanently go to OSX? I know selling machines is important but a userbase is more important still, because it means demand, which in turn means supply and support, which in turn spurns more demand, ad infinitum…
Linux and its Window Managers have been getting bloated themselves lately and as a result Linux has lost all that immediacy that it became famous for in the first place. Back to fvwm I guess… :>
Oh well, end of rant…
Many thanks to the OSNews crew for their work and special thanks to Eugenia for your dedication…this site has that community feeling that was so great during the exciting years of BeOS development.
cheers
I went to CompUSA this weekend and took a look around the Mac section. I have to say that I was suprised to see the new iMac’s base is as large as it is. Still, it was a pretty interesting machine. My mom just got one, moving over from XP, and she seems very happy with it; she thinks it’s easier to use.
Really though, I was *impressed* by the big Apple studio display. Just looking at that screen makes my mouth water, it’s great! If you haven’t had a chance to see one of these, you might make a concerted effort toward viewing one. Of course with a $2499 price tag, the monitor is a little rich for my blood.
WRT hardware support, I believe that Eugenia is right that Win98 has the most hardware support of any OS. However, and I think this is a very important point, WinXP has the most support for *new* hardware. Win98 is not really growing in hardware support, while XP is; and it will continue to. It will not be long before XP is on top of that race.
For those of you out there who think it is purely the responsibility of the OS to build drivers, you are mistaken. The same goes for those of you who think it is purely the responsibility of the hardware vendors. The truth is that at MS the OS group works very closely with hardware vendors (their customers) to provide as much hardware support as they can in Windows. I’m not sure that Apple has exactly the same culture about this type of thing. It is definitely the case that MS spends many dollars debugging buggy >hardware< and drivers as an effort to assist partners and improve hardware support on the platform.
>>If I can use a comparatively slow and old 400MHz corporate HP Vectra with 256MB and a Matrox G100 on which NT, 2K and XP UIs all run more than fine, OSX should have at LEAST the same level of responsiveness from similar hardware to make users “switch”.<<
That’s weird… we have Windows NT and 2k running on Compaq DeskPros with either Pentium IIs/IIIs at 400MHz (128 MB of RAM) are very sluggish, especially our one PII machine. I wrote a simple database application in BASIC that I am testing on that machine and it takes hand counts for that thing to initialize (these machines don’t do anything more than email, web browsing and a few Word documents… I only use it for Visio these days since I do everything else on my TiBook)! Mac OS X (10.1) running on my iMac G3 at 400 MHz is more responsive, even when I only had 128 MB or RAM (now has 512 MB).
Maybe with the Hpaq in place it that Vectra performance will make its way to the DeskPros?! We use to use HP Vectras at my last job years ago, not a bad machine (running Win95)!
Ah, finally a useful topic!
1. It’s vs. its – no exception, same rules as other pronouns. Compare with he’s and his.
2. Superlatives – as “Joe User” observed, it has a lot to do with origins of the word in question. English inherits the “-er” you use in German from a common ancestor, but it tends to apply only to words of English origin.
3. Commas – I have no rule for this, but if you’re using them at all, you’re way ahead of the people who use only “…”.
4. Bonus word – “loose”, as a verb, is a relatively obscure word that means something like “let go”, as in “she loosed the hounds.”
In every case, the writer probably meant “lose”.
” right…
By ido (IP: —.weizmann.ac.il) – Posted on 2002-08-26 11:12:23
I’m sure Bill Gates is connected from sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net …”
He very well could be. I traced it, and the ISP originates out of Seattle. I live across the state, and it hit 12 different nodes to speakeasy.net. Considering Redmond and Seattle are somewhat close to each other, it could be Bill Gates himself.
Come on, NextStep (and afterwards OpenSTEP) computers with the good old Motorola 68K series CPUS still had display postscript (what do you think display PDF is?) and object-oriented stuff out the wazoo and the UI still was more responsive than many current Macs (that should comparatively be heaps faster). It looked nicer IMO as well.
Try running Windowmaker with fullscreen X on your Mac. You’ll find it does scream. 3D effects are incredibly expensive; the difference is as great as a Gui vs. a command line. In terms of 3D we are back in the days of the 286/386 when GUIs existed but they slowed the computer down so much it was often better to just use the CLI and direct to video card. For desktop gui in terms of performance the real comparison would be older SGIs not Next.
With Jaguar Apple has finally laid the groundwork for full 3D desktop apps, imagine in 5 years apple users may have:
– automated 3d visualization of data like see http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/rsd/images/
– An infinite number of virtual desktops working out of something like the doc (this is bad but it gives you the idea) http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/images/car1.jpg
– 3D finder (think the dock + folders with the whole HD structure)
-VRML players
etc…
All these grammar bull comments will be moderated down. If you want to comment, comment about MacOSX. If you have problem with the grammar, email ->ME<-. Do not post here.
Ido, I noticed you write a lot of useless comments over here. Please read the forum’s rules before you post again. http://www.osnews.com/rules.php
Comment on topic. Please.
/me doesn’t give a rat’s ass about grammar. You shouldn’t either. It is the content that matters.
“Disc commonly refers to optical media (eg Compact Disc), while Disk refers to magnetical media (eg Floppy
Disk).”
I would say that if it stores computer data, it’s a disk. All others
are discs, including audio CDs, vinyl LPs, frisbees and coins.
I have been playing with 10.2 (Flat panel iMac 800 Mhz G4)for about a week now and I have a couple of observations.
The UI is much faster compared to 10 or 10.1. I didn’t use any benchmarking software I just counted the bounces on the doc. It’s still not as fast as Win 2K, but I like the look and feel of OSX better.
I haven’t had any backward compatiblity problems yet, but then again all I do on my mac is Final Cut Pro (new film student) The iApps launch faster and I like the improvments to mail.
I also think that Apple is doing an amazing job with OSX considering that this is a “new” OS they have come a long way. I’m not sure about the $129 price tag, but I can understand Apple’s position. I can also understand the prices of their hardware..kinda.
I know that Moto has slowed them down quite a bit and they are trying to get all of the speed they can out of what they’re giving, but Apple needs to drop the price tag a bit and grab some marketshare. I know that it is really unfair to compare Apple to any other computer OEM because Apple is th only company that makes it’s own OS and sells its own hardware. With that said Apple still needs to come down and the price of the hardware a bit.
All in all OSX 10.2 is one of the best upgrades I’ve seen. If it had included isync and ical then i would say it would have been worth the $129
The speed complaints are silly if the test system is a 450mhz cube. Of course it’s slower than ideal! Speed improvements are significant across the board, and for those of us with faster CPUs (ie dual powermacs) the gui is almost as fast as in windows. You can’t expect apple to churn out some miracle code that will somehow make it so you don’t have to upgrade.
Im not saying lowend systems should be neglected, but if we’re trying to compete with windows then do a comparison on a faster system. How well do you think Windows 2000/XP runs on a pentium 3-500? Trust me, I know, and it aint zippy!
That is what I use. A dual PII-based **Celeron** (much slower than a P3 at the same MHz) at 533. And I am telling you, Windows XP is _WAY FASTER_ than OSX on the Cube of 450 Mhz G4. And if you think that this Cube has a whole 1 MB of L2 Cache (the Celerons only have 128 KB), 448 MB of RAM (my PC only has 256 MB) and the fact that Mhz do not matter and that G4 is faster than Celerons, you will see that the comparison WAS MORE THAN FAIR.
WindowsXP here literally FLIES. MacOSX does NOT.
And that’s the end story here.
I have a PIII-450 running Windows 2000. It is *WAY* faster than OS X on the iBook and iMac (both 800 MHz). I haven’t seen the startup on the Mac computers, but it probably is not faster than Windows 2000 on my machine. I also ran Windows XP on that machine for a while. It is slower than Windows 2000, but I’d say still faster than Mac OS X.
Apple has a serious speed problem. If the latest Microsoft OS on a 3 1/2 year old machine runs faster than (or even just as fast as) the latest Mac OS on the latest consumer hardware, then there IS a problem.
However, megahertz don’t matter, I am told by the Mac store people…
To be fair, Apple does not have much of a choice. They don’t make the CPUs, so they have to work with what they get. And that’s the big problem of that whole platform. Apple doesn’t have any options right now. And they cannot tell of any future options as well because then nobody would buy their machines for the next little while. The only thing they could do in such a situation is lower the prices in order to be more competitive, but they won’t do that either.
Of course windows UI is faster. Windows and pentium/celeron/athlon based pcs are much faster than any mac under most conditions, even when their clock speeds are slower. This is not news. Apple has been behind in hardware for a long time, but they cant tell people that…that wont sell systems.
But you are reviewing a piece of software here, and you’re doing it with a system that apple doesnt even sell anymore. I generally agree with your review, but if you really believe apple’s “lightspeed” propaganda and expect a G4 450mhz to really fulfill the mhz myth, I would say that is expecting too much. IMHO, the next big CPU/hardware cycle apple is approaching will make/break Job’s goal of 10% market share. The OS is already much much better than windows fundamentally…if OSX were compiled for x86 it would scream.
I dunno, I guess I just would have given apple a more positive grade on the speed scale, and also using a dual g4 test system. Maybe its a little biased, but if you ignore apple’s hardware hyperbole then it makes more sense…i mean, read apple’s section on the eMac’s graphics capabilities, laughable… Maybe I’m a little spoiled, but I’m used to reviewing high end PCs for gaming, so we would at least test the midrange and high end along with the low.
Just my two cents. I did like much of your review, I wasnt trying to shred the whole article
> I dunno, I guess I just would have given apple a more positive grade on the speed scale, and also using a dual g4 test system.
Excuse me sweetheart, but I am not a millionaire. I even got this Cube for free. I would not waste money on more computers on this house. We already have 9.
As for the Cube. The Cube is NOT outdated. It was still selling *just* 1.1 years ago. Also, THIS Cube is FASTER than the G3s at 600 Mhz that Apple RIGHT NOW sells as Classic iMacs or at iBooks. This Cube is a G4 (which OSX with GCC 3.1 is optimized for), it has Quartz Extreme ENABLED (none of the Classic iMacs still selling have that, neither the iBooks selling up to April do), it has a shitload of memory, and the most important: This Cube has 1 MB of L2 cache. This makes a huge difference.
As you can see, this Cube is NOT outdated yet. Apple still sells slower machines!
The Cube was discontinued because of bad sales and problems with the hardware (it was switching off and on on SOME models that had problems). This one is ok now (we fixed its power supply).
You’re right. We should expect more from apple in terms of value and longevity, especially on more consumer oriented systems. They are charging too much for too little. The OS is worth it, as is the industrial design, but the hardware ain’t.
But also, it’s hard for me to blame apple 100% for their hardware woes right now because their hands are tied. I’M TOTALLY BIASED, I ADMIT IT. GOD HELP ME, I LOVE OSX!!!! I HATE MICROSOFT!!! MUAHAHAHAH
<<on my knees, fervently clutching my jaguar upgrade box as if it were my newborn child>> “we…will…prevail….”
phew. therapy. thanks. BTW, I’m not rich either, sweetheart
Yeah, I got dragged into this, and Gates’ host name wouldn’t have “sfo1” in it if he was connecting from Washington. (K)SFO is San Francisco International Airport, and is commonly used to refer to SF. I’m in the Los Angeles area, and LAX is often used to denote something originating or belonging to the LA area. (LAX is the region on my cell phone bill.) Also, Speakeasy is one of the most popular DSL providers in the SF area, as they’re only about $45/mo., and provide 2 static IPs. A deal, if you ask me.
On to a Jaguar question: PC Card support. Has Jaguar improved up PC Card support? And if so, is the PC DVD Decoder Card finally supported? I miss my hardware MPEG-2 decoding, and I have to use DVD Player 1.3 in OS 9 to get it to work. Versions 2 (2.7 is the latest on OS 9, IIRC) and 3 (OS X version) do not support it, and 10.1 didn’t even install DVD Player.app because I can’t boot from my DVD drive (PowerBook).
— Rob
Name a SINGLE MS OS that when you did a full version upgrade (95 to 98, 98 to ME, 2k to XP) made the system faster?
Jeez win3.1 screamed on my 16mhz 386 compared to win2k on my p3 500. That comparison is complete BS isnt it?
The problem here is that OSX is way to slow for what it does. And this is why people want more speed on their given machines. We are talking that OSX’s UI is slow even on the high end Macs. This is why everyone is shouting foul.
XP boots a lot faster than Windows 2000, for example. So, yes, it did improve speed.
The comparison is flawed, however, because OS X 10.0 was a step backwards in many regards. It wasn’t a fully finished OS. Only now, with 10.2 you can say it is “finished” – even though a lot of things broke.
Another thing is that overall the performance of Windows improved. The latest OS on the latest hardware at the time of release was faster than the one before. That’s why OS X is so “slow”. It should be a lot faster on the latest hardware.
BTW, on an a different note, why the font panels of Cocoa at least, do not show a sample text with the font you just selected? The sample screen is literally hidden and you have to drag the whole font panel window down in order to reveal the sample screen! It does not make any sense!!
It happens to me on TextEdit and Chimera and other Cocoa apps.
ido: ok rajan r, I’ll give you the first and the third 😉
Nah, thank Bill Gates (it seems he comes here often) and his Office product 🙂
ido: I’m sure Bill Gates is connected from sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net …
Which was exactly my thoughts, seems extremely unlikely Microsoft’s chairman uses an competiting DSL service…
CattBeMac: He works out of home and being the cheap skate that he is, refuses to pay for MSN!
No, he isn’t cheapskate, he just want to keep competition in the DSL market so that MSN won’t be DOJ’s next target
.
Indeed, the backward compatibility has been a problem for me since my upgrade. I was 99% sure that the move to GCC 3 wouldn’t do anything to break C apps, but in some cases, it did.
And, while I’ve moved Pepper’s preferences out of the way and got it to relaunch now finally, I don’t have my old serial number around anymore, it seems. And with Hekkelman having abruptly shut down, I suppose I have BBEdit in my future soon. (But not immediate future, since I’m unemployed now, whee.)
I hope the help system will suck less after people stop buying OS X 10.2 in a mad rush, but I haven’t read anything about it going to get files from Apple. My impression honestly is that Jaguar has been released in a slightly undercooked state.
I do have to add a note of disagreement, though–crappy speed in resizing a window doesn’t make a UI slow overall, it makes it slow at resizing a window. And that slowness isn’t consistent. Working with a fairly complex RTF document in TextEdit, or any directory view window in Finder, the resizing speed is perfectly fine. And, while resizing in OmniWeb and IE is kind of chunky, it’s perfectly serviceable. Resizing in Mozilla 1.1 or Pepper, though, is actively painful.
And, even with those observations, in practice OS X really isn’t slow to use in day-to-day operations. I don’t want to downplay the necessity of addressing the problems that it has; I just don’t think people should get the impression any UI isues are showstoppers.
There area couple more serious 10.2 issues. It doesn’t seem to be able to burn ISO9660 CDs any more (from the OS itself, that is). And in 10.1.5, my PowerBook was finally able to switch gracefully from its internal monitor to operation on an external monitor with the lid closed. Now that appears to be broken again.
in ui speed in xp or 2k on my systems (p3 800 320, 1900+ 512). And for a computer I dont reboot faster bootup time isnt much of a sale. And I have personal reasons about the product activation and liscensing agreements of XP that also make me think of it as a waste of money.
10.2 seems to be the real start of os x, and I feel sorry for it’s early adopters. Hopefully the incompatabilites dont hurt too much.
Name a SINGLE MS OS that when you did a full version upgrade (95 to 98, 98 to ME, 2k to XP) made the system faster?
For most users, they upgraded from 98/Me to XP. Whom they experience speed increase. Plus, for 2k to XP, I noticed the boot time is faster, especially if you are on a LAN.
OS X mainly became faster and faster because it was slow and needed the speed.
jbolden1517:
Yes, I know 3D effects and other eyecandy slow things down, which is why I said in the original post that Apple SHOULD have off switches for everything…
It is a step forward (and I also know about SGIs BTW, I used to be a Unix admin for a large SGI shop and they were nice) for 3D on the desktop.
I’m sure windowmaker runs nice on Macs but it IS kind of a step backwards. I’d just like to see eyecandy-off switches for the benefit of the slower machines, that’s all.
Plus you’re missing a point: Windowmaker is NOT Display Postscript! I was stating that NextStep/OpenSTEP was fast WHEN USING DISPLAY POSTSCRIPT on ancient hardware and was totally object-oriented, therefore there is no REAL excuse for the sluggishness we’re experiencing now.
To CattBeMac about HP Vectra speed:
My box has double the RAM of yours and THAT makes a huge difference alone with modern OSes. Also, I was talking about UI speed ONLY – the graphics card matters also. Plus I know how to tweak NT kernels pretty well and it DOES make a difference. All I’m saying is that the UI responsiveness of NT or W2K on that kind of hardware is perfectly fine. Not blazing fast like on my home PC (merely an 850 PIII with GeForce2, .5GB RAM and 4 hard disks) but still fine, which is more than can be said for OSX on similar hardware.
To everyone that says OS upgrades hurt speed in general: Not entirely true. Of course new OSes add bloat and extra features but also robustness. Compare W98 to a properly installed and patched NT or W2K installation on supported hardware and there is no contest. NT has a journaling filesystem (most people seem to ignore this tidbit about NTFS), proper multitasking and the stability is fantastic IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING. Plus W2K can play all the games etc. and has several large speed improvements in filesystem writes (based on my own testing), probably due to the scatter-gather algorithms, can do soft-RAID out of the box (stripes for Workstation, plus mirroring and RAID-5 for server and above).
I love Unix and people, it is what I do for a living, but please give credit where it’s due. I don’t like M$ but I DO like the truth.
D
>>Plus I know how to tweak NT kernels pretty well and it DOES make a difference. All I’m saying is that the UI responsiveness of NT or W2K on that kind of hardware is perfectly fine. Not blazing fast like on my home PC (merely an 850 PIII with GeForce2, .5GB RAM and 4 hard disks) but still fine,<<
Unfortunately the PCs here at work are under MIS control, I can’t even download updates to software without their intervention.
>>which is more than can be said for OSX on similar hardware.<<
Well see that’s the problem, I am comparing similar hardware at work to that at home… a Compaq DeskPro verses an iMac G3 with similar specs. I found Mac OS X to outperform both Windows NT and Windows 2000 on these machines, and even more so with Mac OS 9, which is snappier than OS X!
I also like the truth 🙂
Yes, I know 3D effects and other eyecandy slow things down, which is why I said in the original post that Apple SHOULD have off switches for everything…
It is a step forward (and I also know about SGIs BTW, I used to be a Unix admin for a large SGI shop and they were nice) for 3D on the desktop.
I’m sure windowmaker runs nice on Macs but it IS kind of a step backwards. I’d just like to see eyecandy-off switches for the benefit of the slower machines, that’s all.
Plus you’re missing a point: Windowmaker is NOT Display Postscript! I was stating that NextStep/OpenSTEP was fast WHEN USING DISPLAY POSTSCRIPT on ancient hardware and was totally object-oriented, therefore there is no REAL excuse for the sluggishness we’re experiencing now.
I’m not missing it, I just don’t think the display pdf is what is harming performance so I was rejecting the analogy to NextStep. The performance gap IHMO is because of the 3D effects. If you listen to users who shut a few off they get huge boosts in speed. I guess you can make a case for an “off switch”; I like the fact I can turn “active desktop” off on W2K for example. Perhaps the reason they don’t let you turn them off is that the which depend on them might not work properly, but I don’t know.
I remember Next’s systems quite well. I also remember that everything I ever read about them said that the display was very sluggish. That was blamed on the Display Postscript. It was far too complex for the purpose of dislpay.
In “91, I was deciding to change platforms, and was considering either Next Or Apple’s Mac. A computer store on 23rd st. (Mahattan, New York) had both. The Next was really slow compared to the Mac. Of course the optical drive didn’t help either.
Quartz is a simplified version of Display Postscript. Of course, it isn’t quite that simple, as the latter hasn’t been developed for quite a few years and Quartz has added other features.
But, Next was running on 33Mhz “040’s, and that wasn’t really satisfactory. Display hardware was very simple in those days too. Most of the load was on the processor and 8, 10, or 20Mhz bus.
I don’t know how anyone remembers those systems as being fast. The only one that seemed ok was the greyscale one (not upgradable, of course).
jbolden1517,
Read post #94…
Display postscript DOES hurt performance, way, way more complicated than more traditional ways. Also has its significant benefits, of course.
NeXT boxes were not that slow in any case (they still were slower than boxes with equivalent hardware and “traditional” display methods though) and if you installed the OS on x86 hardware it went pretty fast indeed.
Plus, with all the advancements in modern hardware, OSX should be plenty fast even on lower end machines. Maybe I am too funny…
When you say 3D effects, what exactly do you mean? I can think of several effects like opaque move, genie and transparency that definitely hurt performance but what exactly are you referring to at a low level?
In any case, there SHOULD be off switches for all that stuff, a la XP. XP on my work 400MHz PII is painfully slow with all the eyecandy (and also garish) but with it off it’s better. Basic stuff and should have been there from day 1, some people (me included) don’t like all the FX and are not luddites.
D
Well see that’s the problem, I am comparing similar hardware at work to that at home… a Compaq DeskPro verses an iMac G3 with similar specs. I found Mac OS X to outperform both Windows NT and Windows 2000 on these machines, and even more so with Mac OS 9, which is snappier than OS X!
Win2000 and WinXP needs RAM, I was playing with Win2K on a 266MHz Machine with 256MB (49 euro thsi week)and a recent harddisk and it was not to bad… You’ll have to turn off all eyecandy in the display/effects menu (use the classic mode in XP)
And you can’t call a 17″ iiyama CRT display similar to the crappy iMac CRT…
Some of the things said about the 3D effects are correct, but what they do and how they work isn’t fully understood here. I don’t mean to insult anyone by saying that.
Let’s understand what is happening here. Most of the effects are static, such as buttons, bars, etc. They don’t effect the speed at all. Even if they pulse, the processor time utilized is so low that it often dosn’t register.
However, opening windows, minimizing, etc. does slow things down. Od course, this is intentional. Apple has made a design that used this as an effect. There are some minor adjustments to these effects in the System Prefs. I agree that opening windows, minimizing, etc. should have effects controlled by the user.
These effects, of course, don’t effect the speed of anything else.
The real problem is the threading and pre-emptive multi-tasking in the system. Or, sometimes, the lack of it.
Why, for example, does the cursor still jump around when Mail is closing on most systems? For the same reason that it jumps when a file is being downloaded etc. Prioritization. Nicer (a program designed to change the priorities) can help, but this is a problem that all “Modern” operating systems share, to some extent.
Unfortunately, Apple’s hardware has been behind in the speed department since the early 603’s, when, for a time, they were actually ahead of Inlel’s chips in terms of Mhz. But that was when the speeds were around 350Mhz. A long time ago.
Even though the G4’s are more powerful than the PIII’s and P4’s, they are only about 30 to 40% more powerful. That’s actually a lot, but when one chip is at 2.5 to 2.8Ghz vs. one at 1.25Ghz, it can be seen that the latter can’t possibly keep up.
Dual chips are a help, but they are not the answer. If Apple’s machines had 1.8Ghz chips, and the buss speeds to let them work properly, then that would be a different story.
Since the G5, according to Motorola is gone, and G4 development is basicaly ended, hopefully the new Power 4 desktop chip set will make up for it.
Don’t forget that even though the basis for OS X has been around for a long time, OS X is vastly different from Next’s system, NT has been around as a continuously evolving system for a long time, and the software makers are used to the way it works by now.
I could go on, but the jist of it is to give it some time, as both faster hardware, and more sophistication on the part of Apple in tuning the API’s and such, along with the software houses becoming more comfortable with the system, will occur. I’m sure that most of these problems will be resolved.
“For example I want to be able to open a terminal on the current directory when I am deep in a Finder directory…”
>> Try this:
http://www.entropy.ch/software/applescript/welcome.html