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A couple weeks ago, MyMac.com’s Russ Walkowich posted a feature entitled “The Greatest Macintosh Application of All Time.”; I think “greatest” is not really the best terminology to use in evaluations like this, which are largely subjective and based on the individual needs and tastes. “My favorite” Mac application would be more appropriate. Personally, it’s no secret that I’m in admirer of Tom Bender’s Tex Edit Plus text editor. I spend more time in TE+ than any other application, for everything from drafting articles, to cleaning up text downloded from emails or Web pages, to HTML markup, and I don’t hesitate to affirm that for me it’s the “greatest” Mac application for an awful lot of the things that I do with computers, and as such, it’s probably my favorite Mac application. However, while the OS X version of TE+ shares the virtues of its Classic sibling, and has added some new ones like the Tex Aid floating tool palette, I’ve found that in some areas of performance that are important to me, such as fast scrolling, it lacks the polish and lightining speed of the Classic version. I can only attribute things like this slow scrolling and a menu activation, and less snappy AppleScript response, to OS X issues. I still love TE+ for OS X. It’s just that I find the Classic version performs better fro me -- an analog of my general take on OS 9 vs OS X. Last evening, I received the following letter from Tom Bender, commenting on these issues and OS X performance in general. I was very interested in Tom’s timed benchmark results, confirming that even on a Quicksilver G4 DP machine, TE+ does indeed scroll much faster in OS 9 than in OS X. However, Tom also affrims that notwithstanding the performance hit, he still prefers OS X. I don’t dispute for a minute the validity and rationality of that view, and I don’t doubt that I may well eventually grow to prefer OS X too, but for me, not yet. Anyway, here’s what Tom has to say.
Thanks for the comments, Tom. Feel free to weigh in anytime. Re: About dragging and shift-clicking (Odyssey 174) From Jonathan Tyzack Hi Charles, in your response to Michael Koren in Odyssey 174 it seems that you might not know of another trick to speed “scrolling” in OS X (perhaps in OS9 too?): If you option click in an empty part of the scrollbar it will jump to that location in the document/web page/etc (e.g. option-click two-thirds of the way down and you will jump to two-thirds of the way down the page/pages). Assuming you already have some text highlighted (or the insertion point inserted in your text), you can use shift-option click in the scrollbar to jump up/down to the position you want and then click the text again to get it all highlighted from the original insertion point (I hope that makes sense - play around a bit to see what I mean!). This way you can traverse several paragraphs or pages in just two clicks and a double key press. Obviously, if having pressing two keys at once is too painful for you, it might not help much... Cheers, Thanks for the tips, Jonathan. 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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