The OS X user interface
The first thing you notice about the Mac is the interface is both weird and on this machine, more than a tad slow. This is probably to be expected with me coming from BeOS which is designed for high responsiveness and is the fastest interface you're likely to see on a PC. Going from one to the other is something of a slow down. That said the speed of the interface is perfectly acceptable once you've got used to it. Panther is meant to be faster but this machine was running Jaguar.
The interface is however very, very good. I have never used anything which even comes close to it's quality and polish. There are glitches but these are few and far between. The usability is as you would expect absolutely top notch and OS X provides a system which is powerful, stable and very easy to use.
I mentioned above the interface is "weird". The OS X interface has inherited parts from OS 9 and it's predecessors and it's not the same as Windows or any other OS I've ever used. You have to get used to the menu bar at the top (very 80's) and the fact you have to close applications by selecting Quit from the menu - unless it's iPhoto which closes when you close the window...
There are some little things I still miss from BeOS which I would like to see. BeOS lets you navigate the entire file system with a single right mouse click, this isn't a prefect way of getting around but if you want to get to a directory buried deep down somewhere there is no faster way of doing it, you can't do this in OS X which is a pity (would be useful as an advanced feature you can activate).
Another thing I'd like to see is "right click to back" (right click on the title bar of a window and it moves to the back) it allows you switch very rapidly between two or three apps and is amazingly useful, it is one of those things you won't realize just how much you use until you lose it. Even with the new features in panther I'd still like to see it implemented.
The Dock
I have something of a Love-Hate relationship with the dock, it was and is confusing to use. The problem is that it tries to act as both a means of launching programs and tracking them while they are running. Invariably you end up going to the wrong icon to get the window you want. No matter how much I tried I could never get fully used to it, it always sort-of worked.
They do seem to have found a way of showing running apps in Panther (expose) and I'd be interested in trying it out but I found another way which I'd also encountered on other OSs: Multiple desktops. I'd originally used these on the Amiga which uses "screens" but they are implemented elsewhere with a small desktop "pager" or "switcher". I got myself one and never looked back. I still use the dock but only as a launcher and very occasionally as a way to move things out of the way quickly. My one other gripe with the Dock is that the trash icon has a bad habit of moving out of the way if you aim is not perfect, there should be a bit more of a delay before this happens.
Using a desktop switcher did add a problem. Due to the way the graphics system works the windows you see are actually textures which are displayed by the 3D accelerator. If you are using a desktop switcher you may have quite a number of windows open and these all take up room in memory. This machine only has 16MB video RAM, it quickly runs out and switching between desktops can sometimes be a rather slow experience.
Using more video RAM would speed this up of course but there may be another way which uses less RAM: Graphics in OS X are drawn as vectors using display PDF, if this could be done on the Graphics card windows could be stored as a set of vector descriptions and drawn when they are needed. This would take up a lot less RAM and speed up switching as well as off-loading it from the CPU. GPUs do not support this at the moment but can be added and I believe the bitboyz (sic) implemented vector drawing in one of their mobile chips. With everyone moving to 3D based drawing it'll be a common problem so maybe this is something worth adding to desktop GPUs.
- "A year with a Mac, Page 1/4"
- "A year with a Mac, Page 2/4"
- "A year with a Mac, Page 3/4"
- "A year with a Mac, Page 4/4"
