What I’d Like to See in Tiger: Part 4, A Self-Repairing OS
Every operating system has its quirks. OS 9 was marred by frequent crashes. A typical prevention regimen included running Norton Disc Doctor religiously (defragment, defragment, defragment). Other OS 9 fun included memorizing all your extensions and when you installed them. Looking back, Conflict Catcher, which would start up your Mac a bizzilion times with every conceivably combination of extensions turned on and off.
Thankfully we don’t have to worry about this in OS X. When you install an application you need not worry whether it will conflict with another application. This is welcome relief.
However, as I said every operating system has it’s quirks. And while OS X is a far superior operating system to OS 9 there are still troubleshooting issues that pop-up. These issues are inherently anti-user because they make no sense whatsoever. I appreciate that OS X is built on top of a rock-solid Unix foundation. But I don’t appreciate that I have to run fix disk permissions every couple of weeks or so. Why isn’t this function build into the operating system?
Permissions are one example, rebuilding the disk directory with third party tools in another. In 2005 you’d think we were beyond these issues. More than Dashboard users want a computer that does as much as possible to take care of itself. With Tiger, Apple should do everything it can to make the operating system more intelligent, and more able to take care of itself.
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Nathan. I use a number of tools to reduce the unwanted OS X eye-candy clutter. WindowShade is very useful, it reintroduces collapsible windows (essential!) and also allows you to reduce - or even completely remove - all that feathered drop-shadowing Apple love to heap onto everything. There is even a feature to allow some level of fading background windows - which worked so perfectly in OS 9. Another essential piece of shareware is ‘DockBlock’ which sits on the menubar and enables you to completely quit (and relaunch) the Dock - thereby freeing your Desktop work area of this ugly ‘toy box’ so you can actually get on with some work… Of course Apple should have made the Dock an application (there is a hack where you can return it to being the app it actually is).
I often use ShapeShifter - which is the OS X equivalent of Kaleidoscope. There are a couple of beautiful ‘themes’ available which offer ‘serious’ users the chance to return their system-wide GUI to being simple, restrained and dignified - the aim of their creators is to show what a sharp, business-like OS 9 MIGHT have looked like if Apple had modernised it - rather than releasing the dumbed down appearance of OS X. All this stuff may slow down screen redraws, but the benefits of working in a ‘sober’ environment far outweigh this and you actually find your work and navigation speeds increase significantly.
I doubt anyone will see this post at this point, but I just want to say I regard eye candy to be an interface aesthetic with absolutely no underlying functional value. By this definition, then, live window updating is not eye candy. It IS a useful feature. It’s not merely something which is nice to look at. (And I speak here also of how a Finder window continues to display its contents even during move and resize operations.)
Merely because something has a nice visual effect does not make it eye candy. It has to add no value APART FROM the visual effect in order even to be eligible as an example under this rubric.
Ahh, but the live window update is eye candy…. because it doesn’t work effectively.
The UI advantage is that I can resize a window with a “live” redraw so that I know “when to stop”.
The problem is that Aqua (or Quartz, or god knows what) is too slow! The “live” update is never truly live. I can drag the corner of the window, at a normal rate (I’ve even tried this on a G5) and it never snaps to the rate of my mouse.
I have a PowerBook 1.5Ghz with 1GB of ram. I have the Performance set to “Highest”. I also personally upgraded to a 7200rpm hard drive. I religously update to the latest system software. My machine is optimized like you wouldn’t believe. In fact, OS 7-9 gave me this obsessive habit… and it just carried over to OS X.
iPhoto _is that slow_ for me. Maybe my install of iPhoto is bad or something. But it really does take an eternity (5+ seconds) to shift-click several images, then create an album from selection.
I have iLife ‘05… I guess I should finally install it and see if iPhoto 5 is faster for me.
I propose to close this thread, cause I think we all have expounded on this at length.
To your comment I will say only that whether something is eye candy has nothing to do with its performance. Do you mean to suggest that if only the performance is better that live window updating will cease to be eye candy?
I will agree that the performance of OS X and Aqua/Quartz in general needs to be improved. But this stands apart from whether something is or is not eye candy (which can be either fast or slow).
So I have waiting patiently for the PowerBook G5. That will be the day of days.
Based on that comment I think you (and many others) may be overestimating the performance of a PowerBook G5 (at least using current specs, hypothetically). That’s all I want to say since it drifts even further from the original topic here.
Well, Tiger got you the instantly-updating Finder…
The self-repairing OS would be a lot closer if they finished implementing the HFS+ compatibility layer over UFS (the thing that leaves all those ._ files around) so they could dump the damn fragile HFS+.
I have NEVER, in 25 years, broken a UNIX file system just running normal unprivileged commands. I have never broken one that was even vaguely usable afterwards that the standard fsck couldn’t repair. At least not until HFS+.
I don’t know what’s wrong with HFS+, and I don’t care, I just want it the flock outta here…