Cool Mac Gear

Responding to the switching to OS X discussion here on the Odyssey over the past week or so, reader Jonathan Tyzack writes:

Hi Charles,

I've been following the switching to OS X discussions - don't agree with a great deal of it, but that's by-the-by. To offer a different perspective to the why would I's, here is a list of some of the things I would miss greatly if I ever had to revert back to OS9 from OS X Jaguar:

1. Stability (obviously) - I would have had (and *did* have) more hard crashes in OS9 in a week than I have had in OS X since getting 10.0 over two years ago now. These days, I can install and use third party software at will with little to no fear of it destroying my systems stability.

2. Pre-emptive multi-tasking - OS X simply lets me use my computer in ways that were either impossible or, worse, impossibly annoying in OS 9 (e.g. scrolling your browser causing a background QuickTime movie to stutter and stall... not any more! Having a simple mouse click and hold or dialogue totally lock up all other applications... not any more!)

3. Quartz - yes, it causes a hit to the overall performance of the GUI, but it simply does and offers so much more than the blandness of Platinum. Text rendering is better; anti-aliasing is better; transparency is a god-send; smooth magnification of images, fonts and icons (best exemplified by the fabulous Universal Access features of which OS 9 simply has nothing anywhere near as good); etc.

4. The Aqua GUI - not everyone's taste, but Platinum just looks so 1980's (to me) in comparison. I actually have an Aqua theme courtesy of Kaleidoscope for OS 9/Classic and although the semblance is there, it simply isn't the same...

5. Applications and technologies.

A. OmniOutliner, OmniDictionary, OmniGraffle, and OmniWeb. Especially, the latter three: OmniDictionary is an excellent example of the power of Services in OS X, OmniWeb of the power-browsers available to OS X users, and OmniGraffle is as good an example of the power of Quartz and also the frustrations it can impose as anything else out there - fabulous graphics, shadows, transparency and text effects, but traded off with a degree of "sluggishness" when handling large complex documents.

(FWIW, the next version of OmniWeb, 4.5, is currently in testing by licensed OW users - it uses the Safari rendering engine, WebCore, and thus overcomes the speed and rendering limitations of the current public versions of 4.2 and earlier... I hope you give it a good test run when it becomes available as a public beta which should be soon).

B. The iApps and .Mac integration.
What can you say? iPhoto integration with HomePage makes pro-looking website generation an absolute doddle for the novice - zero knowledge of html required. iDisk makes transferral of large files between distant non-networked machines the easiest its ever been and offers a reasonable chunk of backup storage space. iMovie and iTunes - available in earlier (and good) versions in OS 9 but work much, much better in OS X owing to pre-emptive multi-tasking. iCal - it has some annoying but minor foibles, but web-publishing and integration with iSync make it very nice. iSync - more on this below, but how good is it to be able to synchronise all my calendars and address book info between Address Book, iCal and my online .Mac address book and calendars, not to mention my phone? Absolutely fantastic is how good!

C. Bluetooth and iSync.
Life altering technology? Well this is one and it is only in its infancy. I had managed to avoid getting a mobile phone until a few months ago when a change in circumstances necessitated my having one. I plumped for the SonyEricsson T68i owing to its Bluetooth capability and integration with iSync and I can't say I regret it one bit. Synching of phone no's and appointments is just one of the great benefits (it might seem trivial, but being able to use a full-sized computer keyboard to enter phone numbers, notes, SMSs, appointments, etc as opposed to a relatively tiny one on the phone does wonders for the prevention of hand cramps and pains - something you can appreciate greatly, I would imagine). Having the mere presence of my phone within a few feet of my computer cause iTunes to play and its absence when I leave the room cause iTunes to pause is another (courtesy of the excellent Salling Clicker software, formerly known as SonyEricsson Clicker)... an example of what may come to fruition in the future where e.g. your Mac could turn on your lights for you as you walk up the driveway, etc.

D. Menubar items.
No, the control strip was not better for this - it always got in the way of some aspect of one window or other for me, no matter where I located it! And you couldn't have it in an always open position, because then it really did get in the way of everything!! Menubar items don't have that problem and I can see them all at a glance. I also have the added benefits of such items as Meteorologist (excellent freeware weather app), iAddressX (all my Address Book entries a click or so away), MacUpdate menu, etc.

E. The Dock.
It can be improved for sure but, for me, it is still a far better and much, much more intuitive way of doing things than the ASM/Apple Menu, desktop combination ever were.

F. The Finder.
Room for big improvements again, but how did I survive with just the clumsy icon and lists views before OS X's columns??

G. X11.
Not for everyone, but the ability to install and use X11 and a wealth of free open source software available is magnificent. GIMP, OpenOffice.org, LaTeX, and more...

H. Classic.
An odd one to include I suppose, but it makes using OS 9 apps much more tolerable than using OS 9 itself. Stuck waiting for some task to finish? Use an OS X app for a while instead. Classic app crashed? Doesn't bring down the entire system though does it... no thumb twiddling while waiting for the system to reboot. And yes, some apps are faster to use in Classic than they are in OS 9...

I. A true multi-user environment.
OK, it doesn't apply to you Charles, but for those of us that it does... OS 9 and earlier SUCKED. Not to mention the ability to network with non-Macs that comes built in to OS X, seriously out of luck with OS 9.

J. Console and Terminal.
Applications that help you monitor and troubleshoot things that are going wrong with your computer or your applications? Show me an equivalent in OS9 - perhaps Extensions Manager and the shift key at boot-up (he writes ironically).

And finally,

K. Trivial useless things that really improve your computing life? All ridiculously simple but: A changing desktop image every few minutes; a dot in your close window button showing that your document hasn't been saved since the last alteration; minimised browser windows showing their actual contents; bouncing dock icons that show you that user input is required by a background app; command-H to hide applications; dialogue sheets; click, pause drag for moving text preventing erroneous drag and drop; interleaving windows which make drag and drop between different apps so much easier; Services; Junk mail filter; a Calculator that can actually do some real maths(!)...

I could go on and on, but that'll do for now.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. All this on a 400MHz G3 as well... who would have thought, huh? Maybe it's my 7200 rpm hard drive that makes it all so tolerable ;-)

P.P.S. One other more esoteric benefit of OS X - generally not having to wait extra days, weeks, months for that British or International English version to appear when Apple finally finds the time to ship it. Not such an OS 9 problem, perhaps, but remember System 7 and 8??

P.P.P.S. Please, please download Cronnix. A freeware, very small application that will let you change the times for the daily, weekly and monthly cron jobs to something more sensible for you (e.g. see mine below). Do it and you can then forget about them forever...

Hi Jonathan;

Thanks muchly for the great and comprehensive apologetic for OS X. I really don't disagree with you a whole lot. I have definitively switched to OS X and there's no going back (at least I don't think there is).

I think you're on to something with your suggestion that the faster hard drive in your tower machine may well be a major mitigating factor to OS X's sluggishness. The 20 GB hard drive in my Pismo is no speedster even by OS 9 standards (the 10 GB 4200 RPM unit I had in the WallStreet of yore had a 1024k buffer cache, and was notably faster than the plain 20 Gb drive in the Pismo -- both are Toshiba units.)

The new OmniWeb sounds like it will be a super browser. I will certainly give it a whirl when it becomes available.

As for the Control Strip. I just configure it to show/hide toggled by the F-12 key. Out of the way when you don't need it; instantly available when you do. The Menulets are OK, but they're always there, and it can get crowded. I still prefer the Control Strip.

Cronnix: I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago, and have been trying to get around to checking it out. Now you've done a mini-mini review for me. ;-) For others, here's the info on Cronnix 2.1i, which is an Aqua frontend to the Unix tool "cron". Cron is a Unix system service that allows scheduled execution of scripts, programs, applications - in short anything that can be started from the command line. This includes OSX applications and AppleScripts.

Charles

OS X adoption

From Chris Kilner

Charles:

After reading your columns on OS X adoption, I decided to look at why OS 9 still resides on all four of our Macs. My wife's G3 iMac boots into OS X, but she needs OS 9 (via Classic) because some of her consulting requires running client-supplied programs in Classic. The family B&W G3 boots into OS 9 about half the time for my son's games because USB game controller support stinks in X. The children's 5400 has OS 9 because it can't run X and my indigo iBook still has OS 9 on it due to laziness. I have booted into OS 9 exactly once since installing Jaguar (to check whether iMovie in OS 9 could inport DV to my FW hard drive after I experienced dropped frames in OS X...but OS 9 dropped even more frames).

My wife likes the better stability and networking of X, but probably would not have upgraded without my help. I love X and was an early adopter. My 7 year old son prefers 9 because he knows how to do everything (sleep, shutdown, use the Finder, Control Strip, etc.). My 3 year old daughter prefers X, but most likely because it's prettier, she likes the newer machines, and "Dora the Explorer" runs smother in X.

Learning curve, input support, and old hardware are the reasons OS 9 still has a place in our house. Speed and GUI responsiveness are non-issues in our house despite our low-end machines (G3-350, G3-366, and G3-600) that don't support Quartz-Extreme. Also, Classic and program updates have made program replacement a non-issue.

Chris Kilner

Hi Chis;

I always enjoy hearing about different Mac setups and configurations, and the reasons behind them.

The Classic programs I still am not ready to get along without work great in Classic mode, but there are some applications and functions that still require Classic booting. Fewer all the time though.

Charles

Mac OS X migration comment

From F. Malo

Hi Charles,

I would like to add my humble opinion of the slow pace of the Mac community's migration to OSX. While the comments you made are accurate, there is another factor to consider: the performance gap between older machines and the latest ones on OS X. In this economy, few people who are satisfied with their current computer are going to buy a new one just to run OS X properly. I won't. My 4 year old rev. D iMac still suits all my computing needs perfectly. I might update to OS X but I am very reluctant to spend $130.00 on an operating system that will run slower on my Mac than OS9.

If Apple wanted to transition the Mac community faster, they should have produced something leaner, maybe closer to Linux, instead of a beast that requires 32 MB of video RAM to run properly. It may come as a shock to Steve Jobs, but for most of us, $1000 for a new computer is a lot of money.

Keep up the good work.

Frank Malo

Hi Frank;

I agree. Of course, whatever Mac hardware you have, OS 9 is going to run faster than OS X. ;-)

As I've noted a number of times, I would like to see a stripped down version of OS X, not just for older Macs, but for any Mac on which the user is more interested in speed than spiffy graphics. I'm not holding my breath, though.

And of course there is always Linux itself. Frequent Odyessey correspondent John Dennis has just installed Yellow Dog Linux on his WallStreet PowerBook and is sharing some of his experiences with us on Moore's MailBag, where there will be a report appearing tomorrow.

Charles

Cocoa Word Processor

From Gareth Jones

Hello, Charles

You've been, quite properly, keeping people informed about the progress of the Nisus, Mellel, and Mariner Write word processors. I want to remind people that great progress is being made on another entry in the word processing sweepstakes: the native OS X version of AbiWord. You can follow its progress to release at the following address:
http://www.abisource.com/~hub/.

That page contains many screen shots, but this is a good one to show what AbiWord can do:
http://www.abisource.com/~hub/Guadec4-2.jpg.

AbiWord is a free, open-source, small, fast, cross-platform word processor that is, nevertheless, partially patterned after Microsoft Word. It reads and writes a variety of document formats, including MS Word's ".doc" files. I think the Cocoa version could make quite a splash when it is released.

Best wishes,
-Gareth

Hi Gareth;

Thanks for the report on AbiWord. I have been tracking version updates from time to time in Shareware Beat.

Sounds like a cool app.

Charles

Memory leaks in Windows XP too

From John Dennis

It is nice they are also having memory leak problems. Well it is not nice, but at least we are not alone in this.

Stop XP Memory Leaks
Brenda from Apple Valley, California, phoned asking how to stop memory leaks in Windows XP.

All computers have memory leaks. This happens when programs allocate memory and don't give it back. When too much memory leaks, your computer tells you it's low on system resources.

The best way to regain memory is to restart your computer.

If you suffer from memory leaks after running a certain program or visiting a certain website, contact the company and say you suspect they have a memory leak.

When Microsoft finds memory leaks, it releases a fix, so keep current on Windows updates. Some Windows updates, such as XP Hotfix 811493, also have memory leaks. If you start suffering from memory leaks after an update, report it to Microsoft, and remove the fix. To see if you have it, go to Programs, Add/Remove Programs, and Hotfixes.

OSX Feature Fix: X-Assist

From Sanford

Dear Charles,

After reading the OSX litany, here's a little free utility I've been using that restores some of the OS9 GUI features so many seem to be complaining about: X-Assist.

The blurb at versiontracker.com says:

v 0.5.1
Product Description:
This simple application brings back useful features like OS 9 windowing mechanism back to OS X (where all windows are switched back when a window is clicked on, instead of just the window being clicked on, like in OS X). It also has support for an Application Menu, customizable user defined menus (like in Apple Menu), and a plugin mechanism to support 3rd party plugins (MP3 player and Volume control plugins included).

Product Requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.1 or higher (it works in 10.2.6 too)

What's new in this version:
• updated for OSX 10.1 support. As a result some features may no longer work with 10.0.x • integrated/updated a few more localizations (some incomplete), Japanese, German, French, Spanish

Regards,
Sanford

Re: Problems with Mail

From Rich Bayer

Good day Charles,

In response to Mark Lehrman's difficulty with Eudora I think you might be on to something with your remark:

"I'm wondering if it could be a problem with your email service provider or ISP."

I had similar problems myself and when helping my mom sus out why she could send but not receive. In both cases it was our respective ISP changing the POP server name without notifying us of the change. If Mark called his ISP and verified the TCP/IP settings (or whatever they are called in OS X) he might find a quick and easy solution to this vexing nuisance.

Cheers,
Rich

Hi Rich;

Yes, Good suggestion. I'm skeptical that it's an OS X problem. I hope Mark will let us know what the issue was when he gets it sorted out.

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore