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It's been now nearly two weeks since I (temporarily) uninstalled WindowShade X. In lieu of a detailed recapitulation of why I did that, please see OS X Odyssey 227 and 228. I'm reasonably confident that I can reinstall WindowShade X in Jaguar without reintroducing the gradual slowdown problem, but so far I have not. A number of correspondents have challenged me over the past several months to try using the OS X Finder on its own terms rather than resorting to hacks that make it work more like OS 9, so I decided to continue living without windowshading for a while. I am obliged to concede that it's not as bad as I had anticipated. After 12 days or so, I'm no more happy about digging around in the Dock to find a particular collapsed document than ever. I will typically have a dozen or more Tex Edit Plus documents open and in progress, plus documents and windows from several other applications, all of which would be normally collapsed to their title bars in OS 9 or with WindowShade X in OS X. However, I've found that using the Windows menu to recall documents from the Dock works tolerably well, and by leaving only the icons of applications that I always or almost always have open anyway in the Dock, I've kept Dock congestion down to fairly manageable levels, although the icons still get pretty small. I've now adapted to this form of operation, and I do find it functionally usable, but it is still definitely a lot slower and more cumbersome than with windowshading. It's certainly less cluttered-looking, which I suspect it is part of what its advocates prefer, but I'm a form follows function kind of guy, and my Desktop is a cluttered mess anyway, although there is functional order in the chaos. Working with the stock OS X collapse to the Dock (or just Hide) method of dealing with multiple open windows is usable, I concede. I'm not sure how long will carry on with it, and I didn't think that even faster Finder performance would ever make it as convenient and efficient as windowshading, but I'm going giving it a fair workout. Back to the Finder slowdown issue for a moment, while uninstalling Fruit Menu and Window Shade X and their preferences from original installations under OS 10.1 has definitely improved the gradual slowdown problem in Jaguar, I think that ViaVoice may also be one of the culprits. Because putting the PowerBook to sleep with ViaVoice open causes the program to malfunction, I quit ViaVoice after using it. However each time I restart it, it takes a longer time, and on Tuesday I found that dictation response had slowed to a crawl, and the Finder was exhibiting the sort of flaky behavior that would be typical of the Classic OS beginning to run out of memory. I thought that sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen in OS X, but it took a restart to restore normality. So I'm still not out of the woods. once I get my new iBook set up, I'll be able to experiment a bit more freely with OS X optimization on the Pismo.
Re: disconnection problems in OS X Re: disconnection problems in OS XFrom Lee Kilpatrick In your dual-booting article, you mentioned a problem with your modem getting disconnected, which eventually required a reboot rto reset the modem. You said "these types of problems don't happen in OS 9". Actually, I ran into almost the exact same problem in OS 9 about a week ago. Granted, I was using a dialup connection for the first time in ages, but I was quite annoyed. I was thinking to myself, "This probably doesn't happen in OS X!" It only happened once during the week I was using dialup, but it did require a reboot to fix. I think even the connection/disconnection dialog box for remote access got stuck and wouldn't go away. Lee
Hi Lee;
Perhaps I should have said "this sort of problem has never happened to me in OS 9 (or OS8 or System 7)." Indeed in what must be tens of thousands of dial-up connections in the Classic OS over the years, I can't recall a similar incident, not that I doubt your word. I wonder what causes it in either OS.
Charles Re: TextEdit and text dragging From Daniel A. Shockley Charles, I noticed a comment from a reader (Fenton Jones) that is incorrect. TextEdit does support text-dragging and text-clippings - or at least it does in 10.1 and 10.2. "One last annoyance, text clippings. Why the heck can't you drag a text clipping from TextEdit? What kind of message is Apple sending when its own text editor doesn't support its technologies? Can't make up its mind, needs more money to hire developers? Wants us to use some kind of Services for text clippings??" I just checked, and I can drag text out from TextEdit to the Desktop. The reverse also works. It does seem to take a half-second of click-and-hold before you can drag the text, but that's a good thing. The very short delay for dragging used to make it much too easy to drag text by mistake. I agree with you both about one thing, though - I'd never use TextEdit for actual text-editing. I use BBEdit or other tools for that. I use TextEdit a lot for simple document in which I'd like text styles with little hassle. I put directions, notes, etc in TextEdit documents.
Daniel A. Shockley
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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