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Yesterday, The Mac Night Owl Gene Steinberg posted a think piece on wither the Mac OS X GUI experience. Gene's thesis is that Apple should "Keep it Simple, Please." With Mac OS X, says Gene, " Apple had the chance to start with an empty slate, and then fill in the pieces and develop a brand new Mac user experience." However, the fly in the ointment, so to speak, Gene contends, is those of us in the stick-in-the-mud Mac loyalist community who were quite satisfied with the old Mac user experience, and who just wanted modernized OS underpinnings to go with it. Gene asks: "Would you have preferred to see Mac OS 9 sitting on a UNIX core rather than Aqua?" My short answer is, "Yes." I don't mind the Aqua look itself, but as far as I'm concerned, the old Mac GUI "wasn't broke," so it didn't need "fixing." And now that Apple has "fixed" it with the Aqua GUI, a lot of the things I love about the legacy GUI are indeed "broke" or missing altogether. "Do you miss all those features that were abandoned in the transition to Mac OS X, whether you used them or not?" asks Gene. Again, Yes! And I did use most of them -- notably windowshading, pop-up folders, the Application Switcher menu, spring-loaded folders, System Font customization, the Control Strip, the fully functional Apple Menu, and so on. I MISS this stuff, and the Dock is simply not a satisfactory substitute. In fact, I would happily trade the Dock for the old stuff and never miss it. "Has Apple succeeded, or will it succumb to the pressure to make Mac OS X nearly the same as Mac OS 9, except for the prettier look and feel?" Gene asks? I fervently hope the latter. The only Aqua innovation I really like is the multi-column View option, which is available for the legacy OS in the shareware Greg's Browser for those who really want it. "Will Apple truly be able to create a brand new user experience, one that'll address the shortcomings of the old interface?" Gene queries. ".... Or will we look at Mac OS X a year or two from now and see that, beyond the UNIX core, nothing has really changed?" I, for one would be perfectly satisfied if the latter turned out to be the case. I love the legacy Finder, and it works for me superbly. But why not both? Would it be so hard to include the old Finder feature that Mac veterans like me know and love, and that make getting through the work day so much more convenient? The fact that the shareware folks have been able to quite easily develop hacks that restore some of the the old functionality indicates that there is no technical impediment, but I would like to see this stuff integrated in the system. It wouldn't even have to be enabled by the default installation, so those who want a new GUI experience could knock themselves out with Aqua, but please give us the opportunity to think different. Re: OS X Odyssey 36 - Preemptive vs Cooperative Multitasking From Hugh Fisher "However, the Classic Mac OS has cooperative multitasking, in which individual applications request and yield use of the processor cooperatively, but priority is given to the frontmost application, so the applications running in the background tend to slow to a crawl, which is still a lot better than no multitasking at all by a long shot, but not ideal." While cooperative multitasking has its problems, I would argue that for the 680x0 family Macs it was better than preemptive multitasking. Slowing background applications to a crawl is exactly what you want to happen when the foreground app is burning a CD, playing a QuickTime movie, or even just trying to keep up with a fast mousing user. In the early 90s I spent quite a lot of time working with 680x0 powered Sun workstations with preemptive multitasking, and their GUI was noticeably sluggish compared to a Mac. Even today some audiovisual apps really do need to take over the whole machine for periods, and I'd guess that this is a major reason for the delay in porting some apps to MacOS X. Hugh Fisher
Good point, Hugh. I guess you really want a lot of processing power for preemptive multitasking. I do find it very convenient for the sort of stuff I do, which is usually not too demanding of raw processor speed. Charles On various kinds of multitasking From Peter J. Pedersen Dear Sir, Regarding your column on cooperative vs preemptive multitasking, I would like to make a few comments: If I understand the structure of MacOS pre.X correctly, the OS runs preemptively internally, and it's only in and between external applications (plus the OS, understood as one application) that the multitasking is preemptive. In other words, MacOS releases cycles to other applications according to their demands, but when it is MacOS' turn, it spreads the cycles to its internal tasks, such as copying, printing, window drawing, preemptively. One of the main catch words used in recent years in the calls for a new OS has been precisely preemptive multitasking. A significant number of the callers haven't quite thought through what the consequences might be. As you point out, it's exhilarating to be able to switch from task to task without having to wait, but on the other hand it means that applications that make heavy use of the CPU tend to be slower than under a cooperative system where they can demand more cycles for their more intensive tasks. That is one reason why applications will be slower on OS X, all things considered, than they are on previous releases. It is also important to consider whether one really wants to leave it to the OS to prioritize the handing out of cycles to applications and tasks. What if one has several tasks that are processor intensive, but one is more important than the other? In that case there needs to be the equivalent of a control table with which to increase or decrease the number of cycles assigned to the individual task. I trust that such a component will become part of OS X in the same way that it has been in many other OS. Respectfully, Peter J. Pedersen PS. Being the owner of a WallStreet II, I have as yet been unable to install OS X (midway through the screen blanks out, leaving only the kind of cryptic text that made my first computer purchase an Atari ST rather than a PC - something about Firmware...), and so I speak from a theoretical position.... Hi Peter; I appreciate your point, and if I were a user of PhotoShop or some other processor intensive application, I might indeed find OS X's preemptive multitasking less satisfactory than the old cooperative multitasking in the legacy OS. However, in practice, I find that the OS X mode works well for me, for pushing other tasks to the background while I do word processing or email reading or something undemanding (of processor power) like that in the foreground. In such instances, things go much faster than they would in OS 9. As usual, it depends on what you want to do. As for your OS X installation woes, I commiserate. I was unsuccessful in getting X to install on my WallStreet II as well, and believe me , we tried every trick and suggestion that we could. In my case, the PowerBook just resolutely refuses to boot from the installer disk, whether from the expansion bay CD-ROM drive, or from an external SCSI CD ROM drive. Charles The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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