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.
From Tom Bender
Dear Charles:
First of all, thank you for mentioning my little program. Kind comments from a widely respected journalist are worth their weight in gold.
Second, I noticed that you had a pile of responses to your OS X opinion pieces. Wouldn’t you just love one more? ;-)
I like OS X a lot, but after reading comments about OS X’s listlessness, I sat down and tried to figure out what I liked about it. Why do some folks admire OS X’s performance and some don’t? Maybe people with newer systems just don’t notice the interface sluggishness. That could be part of it, but I think there’s more.
First I did some simple benchmarks (all times in seconds on a QuickSilver DP using a 1 meg text document):
1. Launch and open in ClarisWorks
OS X - 3
OS 9 - 4
2. Scroll entire doc
OS X - 42
OS 9 - 12
3. Find and replace 8640 occurrences
OS X - 3
OS 9 - 2
Hmmm, not very impressive. However, after using OS X for nearly a year, why do I meticulously avoid booting back into 9, or even launching the classic mode? Is it because OS 9 is so “clunky” in comparison to X? Perhaps, but how can I tolerate this loss in performance and productivity?
I remember purchasing an HD-20 back in ‘86 and having my second computer-related “ah-hah” experience. (My first one occurred in January of 1984.) The HD-20 used the floppy port and was not really any faster at opening or saving files than the 400K floppy drive. As usual, MacWorld ran an array of benchmarks, but this time the stopwatch didn’t tell the whole story. All of the sudden, there was a REASON for folders and for nested folders and for drag-and-drop and for disk icons and for document icons -- all the Mac desktop metaphors that had previously been placed in the cool-but-not-really-that-efficient category. The advent of hard drives in the Mac universe caused a “paradigm shift” in the way I used my computer. (They also testified to the foresight of the original interface engineers.) No more shuffling through mislabeled, poorly-organized stacks of disks. The time saved could have been more appropriately measured using a calendar than a stopwatch!*
(*Portions of this paragraph were excerpted from a conversation I had with my wife, attempting to justify the HD-20’s $1499 price tag.)
I believe we are seeing another paradigm shift.
OS X has introduced us to the concepts of true concurrency and true crash resistance. With OS X, I can listen to my iTunes AND download 100 megs of graphic files AND recompile a million lines of code AND burn a CD while simultaneously writing a letter to my favorite journalist.
As a matter of fact, that is EXACTLY what I was doing while timing the OS X half of the “benchmarks” above!
About a month after switching to X, I noticed that I was using the computer in a different manner. I launched programs whenever I wanted without worrying about memory allocations. I perused menus at my leisure without worrying about stalling a download or coasterizing a CD. I even used my browser without worrying about losing every freakin’ unsaved document. (The classic version of IE still holds the coveted Bender “Most Crashes In A Single Day” Award.)
I am an OS X switcher.
Sure, I can’t recommend X to every Mac owner. I would hesitate installing X on anything slower than my iBook (500 MHz G3). And I sure wouldn’t switch if it meant leaving my favorite program or peripheral behind. But for everyone else, OS X is the answer.
It’s here. It’s ready. It rocks.
Thank you for listening and keep up the great work!
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...
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