Cool Mac Gear

I've been journeying on my own OSX Odyssey here for some 22 months now. I'm pretty well switched, although it took a lot longer than I originally expected and longer than a lot of folks thought it should.

Along the way I've been accused of being a perversely obtuse laggard in recognizing OS X's virtues. Well, temperamentally and constitutionally I'm just not the sort that eagerly embraces the latest thing and discards the tried and true simply because the new thing is new. I need to be convinced that the new thing is really better than what I'm accustomed to before I'll take the plunge. And with OS X it took considerable convincing.

It was not, as some suggested, that I harbored a prejudicial bias against OS X -- I did not. Nor was it that I was just sentimentally attached to ingrained OS 9 habits and unwilling to learn new ways of doing things. I'm a fairly quick study, and not only willing, but delighted to discover better, more efficient ways of getting my work done. It's just that I kept running up against the "Emperor's New Clothes" syndrome. Despite its advocates protestations that Apple's new OS was the greatest thing since sliced bread and that OS 9 was a contemptible bit of inferior and antiquated technology -- seemingly an embarrassment to them -- my empirical experience continued to be the opposite -- that despite several really cool things about OS X, OS 9 remained faster, more stable, more responsive, more intuitive, and just plain nicer to work in than OS X.

The watershed for me was Jaguar, at which point the advantages of using OS X began to outweigh the shortcomings, especially after I purchased a computer that could address the speed improvements afforded by Jaguar's Quartz Extreme technology.

However, there are those with faster Macs than mine who are still finding the OS X transition noisome -- especially when it is forced on them by a new Mac that won't boot into OS 9. The following letter by OS X Odyssey reader F Chase is an exemplar:

Charles,

Allow me to preface my remark and echo those many words of appreciation for your efforts with your epic "Odyssey", a Homeric task if ever was one. For a classic fence sitter like myself, your column has become a absolute necessity yet welcome respite.

Now to comments.... while I have yet to make the transition on my humble 450Mhz Cube, a recent decision by a client to purchase the 15" flat panel, 800Mhz iMac threw me headlong into reality.

Having used Macs herself for over 6 years in her consulting business out of her home, my client was not what you might call a power user, yet had developed her own comfortable way of doing things that kept her productive and happy. Isn't that what the Mac experience has always embodied?

Recently, the controller chip on her blueberry rev b iMac literally burned out. Faced with the reality that the most recent backup was in April, and that data recovery would set her back over $1500, she decided to seize the moment, upgrade, and start afresh with the data she had.

When asked whether she could handle the transition, I admitted my own hesitations but confirmed my commitment to shepherd her through. Admittedly, the setup was a breeze; however the reason why one is limited to booting up only in OSX is a hard sell, especially explaining to the technically uninitiated why all the programs in OS9 were to run in emulation. You are dead on when you say that most users don't care whether the underlying guts are running in UNIX, Linux, (well maybe not Windoze) or Mac OS9, they just want the system to work pretty close to the way they have always done things. If you can show them an easier way to do things, great. If they want to adopt it they will.

The first "problem" my customer ran into was something very simple, yet important to her. While saving a new AppleWorks document, she tried to name it using her standard dating convention; e.g., BatesInvoice9/4/03. The fact that she had to change to emdashes or periods from slashes because of UNIX naming convention did not sit well with her.

The next problem encountered had to do with printing in Classic. Following many visits to many OSX forums and too many calls to both Apple and HP, we finally were able to have my client's HP deskjet 3820 printer mount in the Classic chooser and actually print. The problem? First, we were told that we had to download the latest OSX (10.2.6). Hmm, doesn't Software Update do that for you? You'd expect an installation of the new OSX to include scripting to get you the latest upgrade (or at least ask you). Add to this the fact that my client uses a dialup (AOL) and the prolonged time for downloading the latest and greatest did not sit well with the AOL gatekeepers. God forbid you wanted to truly multitask while waiting only to find out your AOL connection timed out. OK, so I came back with everything I thought I needed on a CD burned with my Cube (broadband connection helps). Another bump: the Apple site KnowledgeBase notes did not clearly (I thought) stipulate that you needed to download the 10.2.6 "Combo" update. While burning another CD, I also installed the latest HP driver for OSX and the one they showed for "Classic"....pretty smart? No, that didn't work either. Finally, after further exploration on the web, I called HP again and discovered that I had to install an "earlier" HP driver called, "OS8.6 - 9.0 hp deskjet 5650". Hmmm, interesting. My client bought this printer six months ago at the Apple Store and we were now using an older printer driver!

The saga continues, Charles, and I sincerely hope this situation improves. You see, it's hard for anyone who's just paid $1,300USD to have to dish out additional money to someone to get the machine to work in anyway close to the way it's worked for them in the past. Although I am greatly impressed thus far with OSX, I can understand the hesitation and fear of those who choose to wait. I was faced with the prospect that a really good customer of mine was considering taking their iMac back and reverting to OS9. Granted, I am not opposed to earning a living, but I used to get a kick out of saying that almost 99% of my clients used PCs- until now they were the ones that needed help.

Peace, and thanks for listening.

F. Chase's saga addresses a number of points I've been ranting about here over the past 22 months, and captures some of the reasons why about two thirds of the Mac installed base is still running the Classic OS. One of the chapters in Scott Kelby's new book, the Mac OS X Conversion Kit, is called "20 Things Apple Changed Just To Mess With Your Head."

Incidentally, this book is tailor-made for folks like F. Chase's client. I highly recommend it to her. You can find out more at: http://www.scottkelbybooks.com

The ten ton version upgrade downloads are a particular bugbear for folks on dialup (I get 26,400 bps throughput on a good day. Happily, a reader took pity on me and sent me CDs of the last couple of Jaguar updates. Not sure what the solution to his problem is (in my case, broadband is simply not available within 50 miles, and I was recently informed that it will probably be at least five years before it gets here). Netscape offers its browsers on CD for three bucks, which Apple presumably could emulate.

I continue to maintain that the OS 9 block on G4 Macs is gratuitous. If the eMac, iBook, TiBook and selected G4 towers can continue to boot into OS 9, there I'm going to be hard to convince that there was any compelling reason why the iMac, the AlBooks, and the Mirror Drive Door Power Macs couldn't. It would be unreasonable to expect Apple to engineer the new G5s to support OS 9 dual-booting, but with the G4 machines it's obviously just Apple dragooning customers into running OS X whether they want to or not.

That said, I now can't imagine going back to OS 9 for production work. I do still get a rush from the speed and responsiveness when I occasionally boot into 9 for a particular reason, and I'm awfully glad to have it available, but I've never done a lick of production work in OS 9 on my iBook. I think once your friend gets over the unfamiliarity, she will probably feel the same way. There are still many annoyances in OS X, but it grows on you.

CM

Classic Sleep Mode and More

From David Chilstrom

Congratulations on hitting 400 in your OS X Odyssey. With Classic sleep mode, Apple has introduced a functionality which bears the same name but has a different behavior from sleep as we traditionally know it on a Mac. As you point out, Classic won't sleep if any applications are open, and that is a good thing actually. Our expectation of idling applications is that they be immediately accessible upon selection, and there would likely be a significant lag between the time a sleeping Classic application was clicked in the Dock and that application would be available to the user. This would invoke another round of how terribly slow OS X is compared to OS 9. So, open applications in Classic are as readily available for use as any other idling application in OS X, regardless of the sleep settings for Classic.

You do introduce the idea that perhaps we need a third state for an application to be in, besides being in the foreground or being in the background. A "sleeping" application would, for all intents and purposes be inactive, since it wouldn't be capable of processing in the background, etc., and it wouldn't necessarily be any faster to access than opening an application straight from disk, since it most likely wouldn't be held in RAM, unless there were plenty free. It would, though, have the advantage of opening with the full set of documents or browser windows that were open at the time the application was put to sleep.

This suggests another item on my wish list for OS X. One of the problems with logging out or restarting your Mac is that all open applications must be quit first. In particular, I often have many unread browser windows open when I wish to log out or restart and it's a hassle to have to restore everything as it was before logging out or rebooting. Also, you may log out and walk away from your computer, unaware that an unsaved document has halted the process.

Panther will mitigate this somewhat with fast user switching, but one of the reasons for logging out is to deal with the occasional memory leak which has caused the system to grind to a crawl. System upgrades often necessitate a reboot and I find myself delaying that reboot sometimes for days. My proposal is an option on logging out where the current state of the computer is saved and restored upon logging back in. All open windows and documents would be saved to disk (even unsaved files) so that the computer appears just as you left if after a reboot. This would likely be a faster way to log out as there would be no unsaved files to deal with and it would speed up logging back in if your desire is to pickup things where you left off. Indeed, this would almost always be my preferred choice over logging back in with a cold start.

Regards,
David Chilstrom

Hi David;

Thanks for the well-wishes.

I appreciate where you're coming from on the instant wakeup issue, but it's something that hadn't occurred to me. I've been acclimatized by years of sleeping my PowerBooks in OS 9 and having to wait 10-15 seconds for them to wake up (something OS X is definitely faster at), but having my whole suite of running applications and open documents as I left them. IMHO, it would be great if Classic Mode could do this too.

I'm in complete agreement with you on the matter of logouts. I truly detest logging out or restarting because of the exact issues you cite. Right now, I've been up for 11 days since my last restart and there are 15 swapfiles in the var/vm folder. Still running great. I often have a bunch of browser windows open (a lot more since tabbed browsing was introduced) and I hate losing them when I have to shut the browser down. I usually have about 20 applications open and probably two or three dozen assorted documents and browser windows at any given time. OS X logs out and reboots sooooooooooooooo slowly, and then I have to spend 20 minutes or half an hour getting everything back as it was. Love your idea about the machine self-restoring everything to as it was before the logout.

Charles

Oh what a tangled Web we weave

From dxtr

Hi Charles,

I canned Explorer on Day 1 of my own personal Odyssey. Just did not want to give it the chance to corrupt my system. As for the choice of what program to Color, it was appropriate, possibly subliminal. However you will be hearing from Bill... As for those sites that just won't open with any other browser do you really need to see what they have to offer? I think I would avoid them like the plague. Who knows what they will introduce to your computer!

seeya
dxtr

Hi dxtr;

I had to pick something, and I figured that of all the major apps on my hard drive, Explorer was the most likely to lock up, and I've heard many tales of stability problems with it but have never personally used it enough to experience any.

Re; site compatibility, I have to be really desperate to resort to IE, but very occasionally I run accross a form or government/banking site or something else I really need to access where other browsers won't work, alas.

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore