Cool Mac Gear

I’ve been taking another crack at doing some production work in OS X over the weekend. My daughter is home from school for the summer, so I’ve been obliged to vacate the Pismo from the computer desk in her room, which I have been using as a second office and workstation since last October. Consequently, I’ve set up the Pismo at my regular workstation for the present, and am giving the old WallStreet a well-deserved breather.

However, I’m finding it heavy going. I would really like to switch to OS X full time. I’ve grown to like many of its features, and most of the third-party Mac software development innovation is now OS X focused. I quite enjoy working with OS X for certain specific work tasks, and for casual Web surfing. But I also find that I’m 20 to 30 percent slower getting things done in OS X than I am in OS 9.

This can no longer be chalked up to unfamiliarity. I’ve been using OS X daily for eight months now, and I’m comfortably familiar with its workings at the interface level. WindowShade X and Fruit Menu have restored two of my favorite missing Finder features, and I’ve pretty much mastered the Dock. Nevertheless, trying to do my work in OS X quickly exposes a number of frustrations and annoyances.

• Scrolling windows and menus in many applications is slow, and sometimes erratic --starting slowly and then accelerating, which I find puts me off my pace and slows me down.

• Drag-and-drop is also likewise often flaky, especially when going from a Classic application to an OS X native one.

• There is no auto-scrolling utility available for OS X (that I know of) similar to Scrollability, which I am addicted to.

• Some OS X native applications are still buggy. This isn’t OS X’s fault per se, but it is something I obliged to deal with if I want to run in OS X. For example, the OS X version of Nisus Email, at least in my installation, won’t access its preferences. I’ve tried reinstalling, reverting to the last beta version, but no joy. The preferences selection in the menu remains stubbornly greyed out, which in turn means that I can’t activate the preview emails function, which is one of the main reasons I use this application.

TypeIt4Me works quite well now (still more hiccups than with the legacy version though), but it insists on copying the last-used macro to the Clipboard, obliterating whatever else was there, which does not happen in the legacy OS version. For some of the stuff I do, this is a major annoyance.

ViaVoice X is wonderful for dictation, but wants to be shut down before I put the Pismo to sleep or else it malfunctions. And so on. None of these glitches is fatal or insurmountable, but they do add up in terms of kneecapping efficiency and slowing me down. By comparison, working in an OS 9 is like greased lightning. Everything works as it is supposed to.

However, the biggest shortcoming in OS X for me is the inability of the brain dead OS X mouse driver to accept input from two input devices simultaneously. This would not be a problem, indeed would likely not even be noticed, by a high 90s percentage of users, but it is a near fatal flaw for me. I have a physical disability that makes mouse clicking extremely painful when done repeatedly over extended periods of time such as when editing text. Clicking and dragging is especially problematical.

Consequently, I keep three input devices hooked up -- a regular mouse, a trackpad, and a foot mouse, and my usual modus operandi is to do virtually all my clicking with the foot mouse while positioning the cursor with one of the hand devices. This works beautifully in OS 9 -- indeed every legacy Mac OS version I’ve tried it with, but not at all in OS X. Mouse clicks from the foot mouse (which has its ball removed -- I’m not coordinated enough to drag and click with my foot) are supported, but clicking with it while dragging with one of the other devices is not. Until this is remedied I am not going to be a happy camper in OS X for production work.

That issue aside, I’m still finding no compelling reason *FOR ME* to work in a OS X from a functional standpoint. OS 9 simply works better, slicker, faster, and smoother for what I do with computers -- even on my old 233 MHz WallStreet, and it just screams on the Pismo with 640 MB of RAM. At least for the immediate future, I will probably be switching back and forth quite a bit, until I get a second computer workstation set up again.

Jaguar can’t come too soon, and I’m hoping that it will put these issues I have with OS X to rest. The potential is there, but the polish and finesse are still short of the mark.

Piece of JUNK!?!?!?!?!

From Chris Long

Hey Charles:

Re -- Is OS 9 A “Piece Of Junk?”

I read the Joel Davies piece -- he makes a couple of good points, but overall i think he’s a tad too infatuated with all the EYE CANDY in OSX. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve installed and I’ve been using Mac OSX.1.5 on my iBook at home and I’m learning to actually like a lot of it -- but this does not make OS9 a PIECE OF JUNK. Perhaps in some situations it falls short, but, like you, I frequently leave OS9 running for weeks on end *WITHOUT ANY PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER* -- Perhaps it’s the software packages I do (and don’t!) use -- Whatever the reasons, it’s rock-solid on my iBook, and after 14 years of using the ‘legacy’ Mac OS I’ve grown quite fond of it. It hums along like a well oiled machine.

However much I learn to like/love OSX it’s gonna be a sad day indeed when I finally give up my OS9.

“JUNK”, indeed!

Chris

Hi Chris;

Your sentiments mirror mine.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore