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The Death Of OS X Classic Mode - OS X Odyssey 894
•Blogs •OSX Odyssey •Hot Topics •Comments •Tell-a-Friend
Ever since Steve Jobs declared OS 9 to be officially "dead" at the Worldwide Developer's Conference back in 2002, complete with a mock coffin onstage at the San Jose Convention Center stage and accompanied by the strains of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Apple has treated the Classic Mac OS like an embarrassingly eccentric elderly relative that it wished would pas quietly on to the hereafter. However, as it has played out, it reminds me a bit of the Monty Python sketch "The Death of Mary Queen of Scots," a typically Pythonesque over-the-top mock BBC radio dramatization in which you hear the eponymous queen repeatedly taking a horrendous beating to the sound of violent blows being dealt, things smashing, awful crunching noises, a saw cutting, bones being broken, and other grievous bodily harm being inflicted, accompanied by screaming from the queen., followed by a pause and a man's voice saying "I think she's dead.", and the battered queen piping up: "No I'm not." More violent sounds, etc....
Up until the latest version of OS 10.4 Tiger for Power PC, OS 9 has been kept on life support thanks to Apple's continued, if somewhat grudging support of OS X Classic Mode, but Classic Mode was not included in the Intel versions of Tiger, and Apple has now finally dispatched "the queen" and finally nailed down the coffin lid on Classic by leaving Classic Mode out of OS 10.5 Leopard entirely.
Which constitutes my greatest reluctance to upgrade to Leopard. For example, I still use Classic Mode daily for production work, including the text-only browser WannaBe for which there is no OS X native substitute that even comes close (sorry folks, command line browsers like Lynx are a sorry replacement for slick and elegant WannaBe), and I also still use the Classic version of Tex Edit Plus extensively for editing and markup, not because the OS X versions of TE+ are not better - they are in a whole passel of ways - but due to the fact that no OS X native auto-scrolling utility works anywhere near as slickly and conveniently as Classic-only scrollability. It's a matter of productivity. Those two factors alone make my work flow significantly more efficient.
In anticipation of what I will be up against with Leopard, I've experimented lately with working exclusively in OS X, using Opera with the images disabled instead of WannaBe and the latest version of Tex Edit Plus, and I am slowed down significantly. I'm stuck with dialup Internet access, and even with the images turned off and dialup acceleration at full compression, Opera is still a LOT slower than WannaBe, and having to manually scroll is a pain.
I'm wondering how many other potential Leopard upgraders are experiencing similar withdrawal issues. One reader noted to be yesterday that he will not be upgrading to Leopard because his daughter has a bunch of old Classic-only games that she loves. I'll bet there are plenty of other users who have long since switched to OS X native for most things, but still use Classic Mode to support software and functions that just don't exist in OS X.
Yeah, I know. The world moves on and you have to move with it or get left behind. Lots of avant garde minded folks are celebrating the removal of "dead code" like Classic Mode support from Leopard. But it wasn't dead yet to me and a lot of others by a long shot.
Charles W. Moore
•Blogs •OSX Odyssey •Hot Topics •Comments •Tell-a-Friend
Article URL:
http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/18015
Next Article: 360Works elevates remote FileMaker server administration to the next level
Previous Article: Moore's Tech Web Reader - Monday, November 12, 2007
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