Cool Mac Gear

Services are one of the coolest features of OS X, and truth to tell are one of the biggest reasons why I would not seriously consider going back to OS 9. DEVONtechnologies' freeware flotilla of Services enhancements along with their superb DEVONThink database app. make Services even more powerful and useful.

DEVONtechnologies ' new HotService 1.0 makes the keyboard shortcuts of all installed services available right after launching Cocoa applications. Due to a bug in Mac OS X up to the current version 10.2.6, the system requires to pull down the Services submenu at least once to use the shortcuts. This is extremely annoying with text-centric services such as WordService, CalcService or the DEVONthink services.

Copy the folder "HotService" into the directory "InputManagers" (located in the "Library" folder of your home directory). If there's no such folder, just create one using the Finder. This bundle is not necessary if you've installed the latest version of ICeCoffEE based on Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE). But some people don't like nor support haxies and therefore don't use ICeCoffEE at all or use an older, non-APE version.

WordService 2.5 features new commands for inserting date and time not only in short, but also in long, verbose form. Also, the keyboard shortcuts for shifting text blocks left or right have been modified and new shortcuts for inserting date and/or time have been added. This service provides 34 functions to convert, format or speak the currently selected text, to insert data or to show statistics of the selection within all Cocoa applications (e.g. Textedit, Mail, Stickies, Notes, Fire, OmniWeb, ProjectBuilder or TeXShop) and Carbon applications supporting services.

Copy DEVONThink services into the directory "Services" located in the Library
folder of your Home directory, then log out and log in again.

• AntiWordService enables all well-behaved Cocoa applications able to read plain text, for example TextEdit or DEVONthink, to open Microsoft Word documents Open Word documents from within any well-designed Cocoa application of your choice that supports reading plain text files, for example TextEdit or DEVONthink Personal Edition. You can also use drag and-drop to open Word files in any suitable application. Due to limitations of the Mac OS X filter service system (up to version 10.2.x), Word files must have a ".doc" extension. In addition, sometimes the filter service system does not work properly and returns the usual garbage of Word documents instead. Just open the document again to fix this.

• BlueService sends selected text to compliant Bluetooth devices.

• CalcService and WordService insert new commands into the Services submenu allowing to make simple calculations and reformat text within any Services-aware Cocoa or Carbon application, for example TextEdit, Mail, ProjectBuilder, OmniWeb or DEVONthink. CalcService replaces a selected formula by the result of the calculation sending Calculator.app into retirement, and WordService provides a variety of 35 functions for converting, formatting, sorting or speaking text, inserting the current date, time or folder contents, and showing statistics about selected text.

AntiWordService, BlueService, CalcService, HotService and WordService require Mac OS X 10.1.5 or higher and are available as "ServicePack" or as separate files for free download from http://www.devon-technologies.com.

BlueService also requires a BlueTooth adapter and a BlueTooth-enabled PDA or mobile phone to communicate with.

These Service enhancements are quick downloads, even over dialup (the entire ServicePack is just 290k).

System requirements:
Every iMac, Power Mac, iBook or Powerbook with Mac OS X 10.1 or later and
128 MB of RAM. It may also run on some older machines equipped with a
Power-PC 604 CPU when using XPostFacto.

For more information, visit:
http://www.devon-technologies.com

USB Hubs And Kernel Panics

From anonymous

I will not run any mission critical machine with anything other than a Pertech USB (know popularly as the Ugly Hub); I've resolved countless KP and even legacy OS 9 hard crashes by replacing even Belkin and MacAlley USB hubs. Given that you run so many USB devices, and even though you have no problems with same in OS 9, OS X is a touchy, touchy beast when it comes to any external busses, be they SCSI, USB, FireWire or FibreChannel, and even the slightest voltage errata will cause a KP. Too sensitive? Maybe, but the tradeoffs are worth it, and, honestly, it helps if nothing else to weed out sub-standard hardware to insure better overall performance.

Cheers
Anon

Hi A.

Thanks for the info. I'm currently running a Keyspan 4 port hub. I agree that USB externals seem to be the source of the odd KP I've experienced with this iBook. (Only three in 7 months).

Charles

Memory Management

From Craig D Sutherland

The Terminal command top has several parameters that are useful for the type of analysis you are seeking. You can run man top in the Terminal to get a breakdown of each and what they present to you. Type in 'top -d' and watch as you go about your usual activities.

Re-thinking the memory management schemes with applescripts is unusual. As said before a huge amount of design brain power has gone into memory management in the BSD kernel and in the MMU on your main chip. At least 10 years has been spent evolving the BSD kernel and memory management strategies. You probably would not want to redesign the distributor of a 327 Chevy when better gas was the problem.

I would bet dimes to dollars that memory leaks in apps are adding to your slowdown. Another interesting command to learn more is 'leaks appname'. Again, 'man leaks' will help delve into the details. Try a 'leaks Safari' when it is running. BTW, the appname is case sensitive. Find another process in top and run leaks on the. Cttrl-c will quit the top process and make you Terminal available, or you can open a second Terminal, leave top running and then run the 'leaks' from the new window.

Craig

Hi Craig;

Thanks for the info. Memory Usage Getter shows individual apps' memory usage in a GUI. Based on that, I agree that browsers are prime offenders (along with the Window Manager) gobbling up RAM. Of course knowing this, while interesting, doesn;t fix the problem. Gotta run the browsers.

Whatever that little AppleScript is doing, it seems to be helping with the slowdowns.

Charles

Solution To OS X Slowdown Woes On The Horizon?

From Jonathan Tyzack

Hi Charles,

In response to Ben Gravely's "OSX migration and Beige problem" he should know that Office98 and Photoshop (version 4 at least) work very well in the Classic environment so upgrading of those two apps may not even be necessary for him for a few years yet (by which time the freeware OpenOffice.org could well have become a native OS X app thus negating any need for MSOffice at all). However, I can't speak for CAD and Quicken as I don't own or use either. Naturally, Mozilla already exists for OS X and there are other (and better IMO) browsers too.

Incidentally, I haven't yet seen you review the X11 environment for OS X. Any plans to do so or would you rather avoid the inherent clash of cultures that running a distinctly *NIX environment on a Mac entails, or perhaps the additional disk space it would all require? I just ask as XFree86 reached version 4.3.0 recently and is now quite snappy owing to OpenGL acceleration improvements and is also e.g. able to use OS X fonts etc (FWIW, I haven't yet tried Apple's own X11 but similar features already exist in theirs). Since the update, OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 has become eminently usable on my Mac and once I became used to the various UI quirks of the app, it has turned out to be an exceedingly capable Office replacement for my intermediate level uses. It is going to be quite a boon once it does make it to native OS X status. The only other app I (occasionally) use in X11 is the GIMP, which is roughly on a par with Photoshop 3.0/4.0 for features (although, crucially for some it lacks CMYK support... IIRC).

On a totally different tack - in a recent Odyssey someone asked if anyone could really claim that OS X was faster than OS 9 for anything on an equivalent machine. Well yes, I can really say that there are a lot of significant procedures that are faster in OS X than in OS 9 - here are some of them in no particular order at all:

1. Booting - I don't know what it is with your Mac, Charles, but mine boots into OS X in about half the time it takes to boot into OS 9. Add in the ability to easily have all your favourite apps launch at once (through Login prefs) as well and you save even more time. I'll concede that shutting down takes longer in OS X, but unlike yourself, I only generally do this when a software update requires a restart - that is, once every few weeks or so. Incidentally, it also takes half the time to launch Classic than it does to boot OS 9 itself (partly due to the swathes of extensions I can disable under Classic which would be necessary for me to use in a true OS 9 boot).

2. Browsing the Finder - for me OS 9 isn't even close to OS X for speed of browsing the Finder when in column view. Having a handy toolbar full of favourite locations in every window helps many fold in this area too. Likewise Open and Save dialogues which were diabolically bad in OS 9 and earlier unless you had third party hacks like Default Folder. It may seem trivial, but having in-Finder previews of all your files, especially images, significantly speeds things up too as it cuts out the need to launch other apps.

2. Searching the Finder - OS 9 is a joke in comparison, be it actually running a search or (especially) indexing (which would effectively kill OS 9 for any other use until it had finished - hence the need to run it last thing at night).

3. Moving, deleting, copying etc of files - all much, much faster in OS X.

4. Browsing the internet, downloading files, etc and networking - as you mention yourself, browsing is greatly improved in OS X over OS 9, as is networking with other machines.

5. Waking from sleep - is there any comparison at all? OS 9 is painful (especially when File sharing or connected via AppleTalk) in comparison.

6. Printing - not everything is faster or better here (in fact, a lot of stuff needs working on and could be greatly improved), but I find that pages spool a lot faster in OS X which means I'm hanging around a lot less for the app doing the printing to become responsive again. Not to mention that printing really does happen in the background - that is, I don't notice it happening at all unlike in OS 9 where "background" printing of large documents would cause some degree of slow crawl in other apps.

7. Quicktime and iTunes - yes I can watch a movie in the background without having any stuttering frames, yes I can listen to iTunes in the background without dropping any music... in OS 9? Not a chance.

8. Services - not available on OS 9 but how much do these speed up various tasks in OS X? Quite a bit when you get into using them (FWIW, the majority of my everyday apps are Cocoa and therefore I benefit greatly from these... it is a pain that most Carbon apps still don't and I wish Apple would push this excellent UI enhancement more to the forefront).

9. Changing system/application preferences - in OS X apps this can occur on the fly, in OS 9 you would have to quit the app and then re-launch it to see the change.

10. Using multiple applications - cutting and pasting is speedier owing to window interleaving between different apps, (generally) doing something CPU intensive in one app has little to no impact on switching to use another app (assuming well written applications).

11. Sheets - dialogues that you can ignore until you want to deal with them thus preventing labor interruptus.

12. Troubleshooting - generally speedier to find out what is going wrong if it is a CPU sucking app or memory hog - just run top. Having Console to view system logs also aids in diagnosis.

And to finish it off, absolutely anything that requires multi-tasking in any shape or form... which is essentially absolutely everything I do these days because now I can. Maybe it is the way I work, the work and play that I do and/or the way I use my Mac, but I can safely say that I am much more productive in OS X than I ever was in OS 9. This isn't to say that all is rosy and perfect in OS X. Of course it isn't. There are the irritations of menus sometimes taking longer to appear than they should, sputtery scrolling, Preview taking forever to display anything, the GUI flaws and inconsistencies that are present, etc, etc. From what I have read thus far of Panther, many of these issues look as though they are going to be addressed to some extent - probably not all though, quite naturally. Anyway, there we go... just sick-to-death once again of the "everything is faster/better/more shiny in OS 9" polemicists when it so patently isn't.

Cheers,

Jonathan

P.S. Just to pre-empt any "well if you use it on a newer machine, OS X is fast" comments, I have a 400MHz G3 iMac with 640MB RAM. No Quartz extreme acceleration - about the only thing that would potentially speed OS X relative to other's old machines is the 7200rpm HD that I have as my boot drive, and in comparison to you Charles, the many GB's of free space still left on it ;-)

Hi Jonathan;

Responding to your points:

1. On both of my OS X Macs, booting OS X takes significantly longer than booting OS 9, although I do run a moderately lean OS 9 Extensions Folder. Classic Mode does boot faster than a straight OS 9 boot, although I don't bother with a different Extensions set for Classic Mode. I daresay that your 7200 RPM HD has something to do with our dissonant impressions. Frankly, the 20 GB HD in my Pismo is a slug, although the 20 GB drive in the iBook seems somewhat zippier.

2. True if you use Column view. I don't use it a whole lot. I've never found it as intuitive as List view, which is my default most of the time, but I also find icon view the ticket for some thangs. On the balance, for the way I work. I find the OS 9 Finder with its spatial predictability more efficient for navigating. I've never indexed my HD in either OS 9 or OS X. Don't like the concept. I use SpeedSearch X for content searches.

3. Copying perhaps. I don't notice that moving and deleting is faster. In fact there is a lag when deleting with a keyboard shortcut in X that doesn;t obtain in OS 9. Plus, opening files is virtually instantaneous in OS 9; sluggish in X -- at least on the G3s.

4. No argument. Network and Internet performance is better in OS x, and the X browsers are faster and better too.

5. Ditto. Waking from sleep is much faster in X. However, the fact that X drains the portables' batteries overnight while asleep, while you can leave OS 9 sleeping for literally weeks, is a fly in the ointment.

6. I do so little hard copy printing that I can't comment empirically in this issue.

7. Oddly enough, I've experienced very little dropout runing iTunes in OS 9 while multitasking, albeit with not especially damanding applications.

8. I love Services (see column above)

9. Yeah, that's cool and application installations are generally a lot more painless in X too, but the incredible flexibility and tractability of OS 9 (being able to simply drag a bootable system from machine to machine for instance) is something I miss a lot.

10. Agreed.

11. Ditto

12. Hmmm. I still find OS 9 troubleshooting a lot easier, and more to the point, there is a lot less need for it.

And you're right about multitasking in X. However, *for the sort of production work I do* I would still estimate that I'm 10-20 percent faster in OS 9, although the gap is shrinking.

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore