Jaguar in Ars Technica
Unlike most software reviews you see today, on the web or on paper, those in Ars Technica are truly in depth. This look at OSX 10.2, Jaguar, makes for typically great reading. John Siracusa writes an excellent summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the operating system. He backs up his thoughts with screen shots and excellently-reasoned arguments. He's not afraid to soapbox about items that are important to him, and make reasonable connections from those items to more universal issues. I used to love being able to dig deep into something, though it was always hard to get the space. I hope he and Ars Technica are making money from it.
I'm not particularly optimistic about the Finder's future right now. It seems clear to me that no one with any authority at Apple understands what made the classic Mac OS Finder so good. Microsoft didn't understand it when it created the Windows file management interface, and it shows. So too does the Mac OS X Finder fail to live up to its namesake. The Jaguar Finder has improved enough since 10.1 to keep its head above water, but that's about it.
He's especially right here. File and window management -- worksapce handling -- on the old Mac OS was always a joy. I remember sitting down with Arthur Naiman one time in 85 or something, and watching as he tailored several windows to his preferred way of looking at them. The result was a thing of beauty, useful, and focused on the task he wanted to perform. Later, others wrote utilities that tried to give you other ways of working with files (CE's File Drawer application, for example), but nothing I've worked with has ever been as good. With TOPS and the old Finder I could even deal with cross-platform LAN resources as easy as I do now. At one time I wrote what to me was a very nice AppleScript that would let me record finder and icon settings, name them, and call them up; it was a great way to save configurations for specific applications.
On the other hand, I might be remembering things better than they actually were? I sort of dropped off the OS 9 bandwagon; after using a lot of NT, I really appreciated its stability compared with what I had on the Mac.
10:26:21 PM Permalink
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