MacOS X, Rants and Raves
I read the Register piece (by Andrew Orlowski), 'How I learned to stop worrying, and abandoned Mac OSX' when it first came out. I thought it had some valid points, and some that I disagreed with. The feedback indicates that some people seem to have very little perspective. Others were more moderate. This being the web, I wanted my say...
On the plus side, I like Aqua. Personally, I was a never a big fan of the grayscale look, and stuck with 7.6.1 a lot longer than I should have (I think I finally moved to 8.x during the mid to late developer builds of Allegro, aka 8.5). I think the aqua look is quite a bit nicer than platinum. Yes, it's slow, slower even than I expected it to be, although the reason why eludes me. The PDF engine is a next generation implementation of the Display Postscript which ran on 68030's, so something else is at play here. Maybe all the layers, display caching, etc.? Certainly QuickDraw based applications (Carbon, Classic) are going through significant display transformations. There is one aspect of aqua that I don't cotton to, trays. I like windows, I've never lived in an MDI and don't want to.
Somewhere in between is the Dock. I use it sometimes, but not often. Much like the Control Strip, it meets a lot of peoples needs and can be adjusted to be pretty small and get out of the way when not in use. Because it's the only game in town, a lot of people are writing interesting tools for it, which makes it more useful.
On the negative side, the current Finder is semi-tragic. It can be used, but so can Windows. Part of the problem with the current Finder is the problem with metadata and where that leads when files come down with suffixes that interfere with each other. Quite messy. Stupid stuff like only having one 'Get Info' window (Apple says to take a screen shot of one and compare it to the other file, so sad). Another big problem is the visual real estate issue. On my main monitor running at 1280 x 1024, the Finder seems like it must be stuck in the 800 x 600 I lived in during the early 90's. Everything is just huge.
The root problem (IMHO) is that the Finder was written from scratch with the intent of making it a NeXT'ish browser. When developers freaked at WWDC 2000 (I was there, I was upset, blame me), I think they went back and bolted on icon and list views. The result is sort of like a third party Finder replacement, it does weird things at weird times. I do like some things they've added, like the ability to select an item on the desktop and have cmd-up-arrow actually open the desktop folder (and cmd-shift-up has been retained and gets you to the desktop from anywhere).
The new browser mode is both useful and retarded. I almost never use a mouse in the Finder (or anywhere if I can help it), browser mode is very difficult to navigate using a keyboard. It also has some weird ideas about consistency. If you change the size of the columns, sometimes it uses that change, sometimes not.
The biggest flaw I see with the Finder is the droppings (the '.DS_Store' file). This problem showed up once long ago on an Apple platform (the Apple IIgs, GS/OS), people flammed about it, and eventually it went away. Pitiful to be sitting here in 2002 talking about a problem that was solved on the IIgs about 13 or so years ago. Get these damned files out of my directories! I guess desktop files with B*-trees got tossed out with the rest of the baby. I don't care where they put it, but these files are beyond annoying at this point.
10:59:32 PM 
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