Complaints to Microsoft AND Apple posted on Applelust.com
Hi All,
<a href="http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_25.shtml"; target="_blank">http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_25.shtml</a>;
I found this article very interesting. It details a few major problems with Office v.X (directed at Microsoft) and OS X. I agree with all of them, and I wonder how everyone else sees it. He's a great writer, in my opinion, and I figure the further this article gets out of its web-cage, the closer it'll get to the Inboxes on Mr. Gates' and Mr. Jobs' desks.
<a href="http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_25.shtml"; target="_blank">http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_25.shtml</a>;
I found this article very interesting. It details a few major problems with Office v.X (directed at Microsoft) and OS X. I agree with all of them, and I wonder how everyone else sees it. He's a great writer, in my opinion, and I figure the further this article gets out of its web-cage, the closer it'll get to the Inboxes on Mr. Gates' and Mr. Jobs' desks.
Comments
<strong>Hi All,
<a href="http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_25.shtml"; target="_blank">http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_25.sht ml</a>
I found this article very interesting. It details a few major problems with Office v.X (directed at Microsoft) and OS X. I agree with all of them, and I wonder how everyone else sees it. He's a great writer, in my opinion, and I figure the further this article gets out of its web-cage, the closer it'll get to the Inboxes on Mr. Gates' and Mr. Jobs' desks.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Would you like me to post it on my Fresh Apple page?
But some of his other observations are dead on.
It would be nice if Steve Jobs read this article and did something about it.
[QB]Much of that guy's criticism towards OS X is rather lame, IMO. In some cases he doesn't understand how OS X works, so he thinks standard behavior is a "bug". He points at the wrong reasons for OS X's sluggishness.
This here's the space to down-tailor his argument, then. I'd love to hear some responses/negotiations regarding his 'demands.'
-- PEte
<strong>Much of that guy's criticism towards OS X is rather lame, IMO. In some cases he doesn't understand how OS X works, so he thinks standard behavior is a "bug". He points at the wrong reasons for OS X's sluggishness.
But some of his other observations are dead on.
It would be nice if Steve Jobs read this article and did something about it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I do not claim to fully understand how OS X works. My main concern, however, is usability and, in that respect, Mac OS X and Office v. X have several aspects that are significant failures.
If you could identify for us more clearly which aspects of my comments you disagree with, it would be much appreciated.
Pierre
I didn't see anything wrong with your article. As far as all the stuff about Word... well, yeah. Word's been like that since version 6. If you've noticed reading the inevitable laudatory reviews that accompany any release of Office for Macintosh, they all sound alike. That's because they're all "encouraged" to restate the same boilerplate that MS feeds them.
I abandoned Word after version 5 came out, and I've spent the subsequent years wondering what on Earth everyone else was thinking. If it was someone's open source effort it would be derided for general bugginess, unpredictable behavior, bafflingly overcomplicated interfaces, instability, bloat, lack of polish, etc. There are alternatives that work for most people, especially on the Mac. Use them. Encourage them. Use your knack for thorough appraisal to provide feedback to developers who actually give a damn. Forget Office.
On to Mac OS X.
Item 1: What I would prefer is something that told me that some of the files had the same names as others, and offered them in sequence, and offered a disclosure triangle that, when opened, showed a list of all the relevant files with checkboxes and "Select All" and "Unselect All" butons, so that I could go through and ask for all files to be replaced, or just these 10, or whatever. That would be nice.
Item 2: I agree that the requirement of a password when you are logged in as Administrator is bizarre to the home user, and counterintuitive. It's also useful, though, outside of the home, so I'd add a refinement to your idea. Anyone worried enough about security to require a password while they're logged in as Administrator will also require a login when they first start up the machine. Home users will generally set OS X to automatically log them in to a particular account. So, tie the password requirement to that setting: If the system is transparently logging you in at startup, it can transparently verify your identity during installs. Otherwise, if it had you type a password to log in, it'll require a password when you install, too.
Items 4, 5 & 6: The TidBITS article on the sorry state of file dialogs in OS X brought up an interesting point which I'd wished you'd underlined: Open and Save dialogs were invented because the original Mac OS was single-tasking, so Finder had to be quit before another application could launch, and that application had to quit if you wanted to launch Finder. In other words, they're a hack. The fact that they stuck around after the Mac adopted multitasking is unfortunate: If you want to find a file, you should use Finder, right? Apple blew a golden opportunity to retire that hack with OS X - they still would have had to offer open/save dialogs as part of Carbon's legacy support, but the new APIs - and Cocoa - should have adopted the original idea of using Finder for file manipulation. IMO.
I'm not going to make excuses for Apple's development team, but I know they're trying to eliminate the differences between Carbon and Cocoa, and I expect the two kinds of dialog boxes to converge before long. Keyboard shortcut support for dialogs exists in OS X (AppleWorks and TextEdit support it), so it seems like Apple just has to go through and enable it consistently within Finder.
Item 7: Yup, and also, if the cursor's in the middle of a name and you reposition it with a mouse click, it leaves a cursor-sized black line in the old position. Not impressive.
Item 8: Not a problem for me (outside of Finder forgetting everything but its own name, but that's a different issue).
Item 9: I never really noticed this. It could be something that gets optimized, though. It's useful enough behavior that I haven't been tempted to kill it.
Item 10: I've never seen this behavior, and I've been known to have over a dozen applications running simultaneously on a similar system to yours (450MHz Cube, 1GB RAM). Do you by chance have several Microsoft applications running simultaneously? They're famous for stepping on each other's toes, and I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to have hacked much farther into the system than they had any reason to: On my NT box at work, I've had the pleasure of watching everything on the system freeze while Word did a search. So much for preemptive multitasking.
Items 11 & 15: Bottom line: Modem support in OS X sucks. It always has. Just be glad you don't have a dual processor Mac, because modems are borderline unusable in those.
Item 12: If "plug-and-play" extended to unplugging it would be called "plug-and-play-and-unplug."
Item 13: Use OmniWeb or the latest Mozilla for OS X. No annoying popup windows.
Item 14: Agreed. Auto-foregrounding is one of the things about Windows that I particularly despise, and I'd like OS X to respect that if there's an event in a window after an application is launched, I'd like that window to remain frontmost and active. On the other hand, that might be an Explorer thing. I don't remember any rude interruptions from Expander when I download something in the background with OmniWeb.
Item 16: IE does that too, and for that matter so does AppleWorks (although it's getting a lot better). It's bad programming, and there's not a lot that OS X can do about it.
[edit: Excised the word 'paradigm' and an inadvertent double negative.]
[ 02-17-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
What are the alternatives to Office? As much as I would love to throw all Microsoft products (to which I've become 10-years accustomed) out with the trash, I admit I've become quite inelastically attached to them. I need the spreadsheet capability of Excel, the power-word-processing of Word, the presentations of Powerpoint, etc. But give me an honest-to-God no-useful-feature-ungiven alternative and I'll probably bite.
By the way, you talk about OS X and Apple as if they will probably change many of the problems mentioned in the Apple Peel article shortly -- do you believe this because most of these concerns have already been brought to Apple, or because their software team is stellar and figures these things out for themselves, or both? I'm really curious because I've become overwhelmed at the imaginings of a smallish group of actual human beings trying to create a OS from scratch and I'm impressed at the rudiments of OS X. I just hope it improves in all of these ways sooner rather than not at all.
- PEte
[quote]Originally posted by Amorph:
<strong>I didn't see anything wrong with your article. As far as all the stuff about Word... well, yeah. Word's been like that since version 6. If you've noticed reading the inevitable laudatory reviews that accompany any release of Office for Macintosh, they all sound alike. That's because they're all "encouraged" to restate the same boilerplate that MS feeds them.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I agree that there are many issues that date back to Word 6 and that are still there in their full irritating splendor. However, I specifically wanted to mention issues that are new in Word v. X -- and I believe the ones I mentioned are. Which of course, none of the "mainstream" reviews ever mentioned.
[quote]I abandoned Word after version 5 came out, and I've spent the subsequent years wondering what on Earth everyone else was thinking. If it was someone's open source effort it would be derided for general bugginess, unpredictable behavior, bafflingly overcomplicated interfaces, instability, bloat, lack of polish, etc. There are alternatives that work for most people, especially on the Mac. Use them. Encourage them. Use your knack for thorough appraisal to provide feedback to developers who actually give a damn. Forget Office.<hr></blockquote>
I am glad you were able to get rid of Word. However, as CHP says below, and as I have had the opportunity to <a href="http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/applepeel/archives/igot_peel016.shtml"; target="_blank">argue myself</a>, many people simply don't have a choice, for various reasons. And that includes myself.
[quote]Item 1: What I would prefer is something that told me that some of the files had the same names as others, and offered them in sequence, and offered a disclosure triangle that, when opened, showed a list of all the relevant files with checkboxes and "Select All" and "Unselect All" butons, so that I could go through and ask for all files to be replaced, or just these 10, or whatever. That would be nice.<hr></blockquote>
Right on! :-) That would be nice indeed. I didn't mean to say that the Mac OS 9 way of doing things was perfect, far from it. But I'd like the best of both worlds, which is pretty much what you are suggesting.
[quote]Item 2: I agree that the requirement of a password when you are logged in as Administrator is bizarre to the home user, and counterintuitive. It's also useful, though, outside of the home, so I'd add a refinement to your idea. Anyone worried enough about security to require a password while they're logged in as Administrator will also require a login when they first start up the machine. Home users will generally set OS X to automatically log them in to a particular account. So, tie the password requirement to that setting: If the system is transparently logging you in at startup, it can transparently verify your identity during installs. Otherwise, if it had you type a password to log in, it'll require a password when you install, too.<hr></blockquote>
That is, indeed, my feeling as well. It is as if Apple figured late in the game that it was too easy for the average user to install potentially problematic software and decided that asking for the password again would act as a sort of safeguard. Well, I'm sorry, but what it does mostly is that it causes frustration, because it doesn't make sense. If Apple's purpose was to warn people, then an explicit warning would be much more appropriate.
[quote]Items 4, 5 & 6: The TidBITS article on the sorry state of file dialogs in OS X brought up an interesting point which I'd wished you'd underlined: Open and Save dialogs were invented because the original Mac OS was single-tasking, so Finder had to be quit before another application could launch, and that application had to quit if you wanted to launch Finder. In other words, they're a hack. The fact that they stuck around after the Mac adopted multitasking is unfortunate: If you want to find a file, you should use Finder, right? Apple blew a golden opportunity to retire that hack with OS X - they still would have had to offer open/save dialogs as part of Carbon's legacy support, but the new APIs - and Cocoa - should have adopted the original idea of using Finder for file manipulation. IMO.<hr></blockquote>
Indeed. Eventually, the need for Open/Save dialogs should disappear. This raises several more important architectural issues, however, because all applications would have to become "Finder-aware" and reflect changes made in the Finder immediately. And more generally, it raises the issue of the application/documents metaphor itself. Ah, the good old days of OpenDoc-induced daydreaming... :-).
This said, I think that a more realistic compromise at this point would simply be to have Open/Save that more closely mimick the behaviours of the Finder itself, including the use of a tool bar and the same shortcuts working consistently across the board.
[quote]Item 7: Yup, and also, if the cursor's in the middle of a name and you reposition it with a mouse click, it leaves a cursor-sized black line in the old position. Not impressive.<hr></blockquote>
You are being too kind. These types of things are plain ugly -- and embarrassing.
[quote]Item 8: Not a problem for me (outside of Finder forgetting everything but its own name, but that's a different issue).<hr></blockquote>
Well, consider yourself lucky
[quote]Item 9: I never really noticed this. It could be something that gets optimized, though. It's useful enough behavior that I haven't been tempted to kill it.<hr></blockquote>
Yes, indeed. Killing it with Dock Detox has left me with no way to tell when a BG app needs my attention. But at this point, with my machine, the CPU-intensive high bouncing is just too much of a performance hit. We need something that can be customized with less CPU-intensive options.
[quote]Item 10: I've never seen this behavior, and I've been known to have over a dozen applications running simultaneously on a similar system to yours (450MHz Cube, 1GB RAM). Do you by chance have several Microsoft applications running simultaneously? <hr></blockquote>
Nope. This started happening long before I installed Office v. X on my machine. In fact, I experienced it the very first week after I'd installed 10.1. And I have experienced it several times since then, each time with a different mix of open applications.
[quote]They're famous for stepping on each other's toes, and I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to have hacked much farther into the system than they had any reason to: On my NT box at work, I've had the pleasure of watching everything on the system freeze while Word did a search. So much for preemptive multitasking.
Well, I'm certainly not one to let MS go easily, but in this particular case I definitely do not think it has anything to do with their apps.
[quote]Items 11 & 15: Bottom line: Modem support in OS X sucks. It always has. Just be glad you don't have a dual processor Mac, because modems are borderline unusable in those.
Well, if that's the case, it's highly unfair. The vast majority of Mac users I know are still using a modem. Broadband is simply not an option here in the sticks. Having Apple ignore our needs like this is almost insulting.
[quote]Item 12: If "plug-and-play" extended to unplugging it would be called "plug-and-play-and-unplug."
It sounds perfectly clear to me :-) but it doesn't change the fact that it's counter-intuitive.
[quote]Item 13: Use OmniWeb or the latest Mozilla for OS X. No annoying popup windows.
Grief. I seriously have tried other browsers several times, and have each time come back to Explorer because of a high level of disappointment. OmniWeb would crash all the time (I tend to have a large number of windows open, it doesn't seem to like that), Netscape/Mozilla has a proprietary interface that is sluggish and ugly, Opera has ads, etc. I'm doing my best, but at this point I keep going back to Explorer. Besides, this is a JavaScript issue, I don't see how Netscape or other browsers would be more immune to it.
And as you said, it doesn't just happen with Explorer. It happens with all kinds of apps. (In fact, I specifically remember it happening with Netscape 6.2 the other day.) It's a more general problem.
[quote]Item 14: Agreed. Auto-foregrounding is one of the things about Windows that I particularly despise, and I'd like OS X to respect that if there's an event in a window after an application is launched, I'd like that window to remain frontmost and active. On the other hand, that might be an Explorer thing. I don't remember any rude interruptions from Expander when I download something in the background with OmniWeb.<hr></blockquote>
Could be. But the blame game doesn't help the end user. Whether it's Explorer's or Apple's fault, I ultimately don't care. I want it fixed.
[quote]Item 16: IE does that too, and for that matter so does AppleWorks (although it's getting a lot better). It's bad programming, and there's not a lot that OS X can do about it.<hr></blockquote>
I did mention Explorer as one of the two main culprits. I don't use AppleWorks so I wouldn't know. Eudora tends to creep up, but only while it's checking mail... through its modem connection. The other apps I use are much better behaved.
I despise bad programming when it has a very serious usability impact on the whole system, and it is a let-down considering that one of the hopes with OS X was that a single app wouldn't be able to affect the system as a whole. Well, it still can, obviously.
Thanks for your comprehensive and constructive feedback!
Pierre
[ 02-18-2002: Message edited by: Pierre Igot ]</p>
<strong>Amorph,
What are the alternatives to Office? As much as I would love to throw all Microsoft products (to which I've become 10-years accustomed) out with the trash, I admit I've become quite inelastically attached to them. I need the spreadsheet capability of Excel, the power-word-processing of Word, the presentations of Powerpoint, etc. But give me an honest-to-God no-useful-feature-ungiven alternative and I'll probably bite.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Define "useful."
But there is the possibility, if you're a real power user, that Office is the only viable option for now.
[quote]<strong>By the way, you talk about OS X and Apple as if they will probably change many of the problems mentioned in the Apple Peel article shortly -- do you believe this because most of these concerns have already been brought to Apple, or because their software team is stellar and figures these things out for themselves, or both?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Both, plus there are some things that Apple has said will happen: for example, that the feature sets of Carbon and Cocoa will dovetail together until it's impossible for an end user to tell which API was used to write an application. That's an ongoing process for both Carbon and Cocoa.
I have heard that Finder was an exercize in porting MetroWerks' PowerPlant classes to OS X. If that's true, it will improve as MW polishes PowerPlant. If not, it'll improve as the Finder team polishes the code, and as Carbon improves.
[quote]<strong>I'm really curious because I've become overwhelmed at the imaginings of a smallish group of actual human beings trying to create a OS from scratch and I'm impressed at the rudiments of OS X.</strong><hr></blockquote>
According to Steve Jobs, there are about 1,000 people working on OS X. It's a huge effort.
I did note that, and insofar as it might help people who depend on Office, it's useful. I was referring more to the bugs being particular instances of a general tendency of MS Word to be especially bloated and bug-ridden since version 6 (was that Office 4? I forget).
The mainstream reviewers are another problem. One of them assured me via email that no, the latest version of Office:mac really was much faster than previous versions, and MS really had extensively reworked it. Uh-huh.
[quote]<strong>I am glad you were able to get rid of Word. However, as CHP says below, and as I have had the opportunity to argue myself, many people simply don't have a choice, for various reasons. And that includes myself.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well then, it sucks to be you.
[quote]<strong>Eventually, the need for Open/Save dialogs should disappear. This raises several more important architectural issues, however, because all applications would have to become "Finder-aware" and reflect changes made in the Finder immediately. And more generally, it raises the issue of the application/documents metaphor itself. Ah, the good old days of OpenDoc-induced daydreaming... :-).</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, you know, a document-based architecture is much more feasible now than it was in classic Mac OS. Objective-C is capable of all kinds of mind-warping dynamism (and its basic functionality is available to Carbon via CoreFoundation). Aqua is, by virtue of its per-window layering, more document-centric than OS 9 was. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is working on that very thing.
Hell, people were extending Terminal.app back in the NeXT days without ever even seeing the source code.
[quote]<strong>This said, I think that a more realistic compromise at this point would simply be to have Open/Save that more closely mimick the behaviours of the Finder itself, including the use of a tool bar and the same shortcuts working consistently across the board.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apple will get there. It might take them a bit, but they'll get there.
[quote]quote: Item 7: Yup, and also, if the cursor's in the middle of a name and you reposition it with a mouse click, it leaves a cursor-sized black line in the old position. Not impressive.
<strong>You are being too kind. These types of things are plain ugly -- and embarrassing.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I have a knack for understatement.
[quote]
[dock items bouncing high]
<strong>Yes, indeed. Killing it with Dock Detox has left me with no way to tell when a BG app needs my attention. But at this point, with my machine, the CPU-intensive high bouncing is just too much of a performance hit. We need something that can be customized with less CPU-intensive options.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Or simply optimized to take up less CPU, since it's not good from a user perspective to have different behaviors to signify alerts. Really, how much work can it take to bounce an icon?
[quote]
[OS X slowing down - and falling down - with lots of apps open]
<strong>Nope. This started happening long before I installed Office v. X on my machine. In fact, I experienced it the very first week after I'd installed 10.1. And I have experienced it several times since then, each time with a different mix of open applications.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Wierd. Did you install 10.1 over 10.0? Although that shouldn't matter either - so did I.
Hmmm.
[quote]quote: Items 11 & 15: Bottom line: Modem support in OS X sucks.
<strong>Well, if that's the case, it's highly unfair.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's absurd. And frankly, I think Apple's crazy to have shipped OS X standard without fixing it first. Most people are still on modems. If their first experience of OS X is like mine (the big, fancy installer hung while trying to send my registration out over the modem) they're going to be swamped in complaints, and scrambling to correct a lot of negative first impressions.
There's been an uproar about this for a while now in various fora (including Apple's official ones), and it's attracted the attention and efforts of Darwin developers like Louis Gerbarg (who developed and posted a fix for the worst problem affecting the dual-processor machines in response to a MacNN thread on this very issue).
[quote]
[plug-and-play doesn't extend to unplugging]
<strong>It sounds perfectly clear to me :-) but it doesn't change the fact that it's counter-intuitive.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I know. But the alternatives aren't any better. Some of them are worse.
[quote]<strong>Grief. I seriously have tried other browsers several times, and have each time come back to Explorer because of a high level of disappointment. OmniWeb would crash all the time (I tend to have a large number of windows open, it doesn't seem to like that), Netscape/Mozilla has a proprietary interface that is sluggish and ugly, Opera has ads, etc. I'm doing my best, but at this point I keep going back to Explorer. Besides, this is a JavaScript issue, I don't see how Netscape or other browsers would be more immune to it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
OW and (I hear) Mozilla have an option to only run JavaScripts in response to link clicks. So if you ask to see a screenshot gallery by clicking a link, it'll work, but the page can't open a new window of its own accord. The browser will simply ignore the script.
[quote]quote: Item 14: Agreed. Auto-foregrounding is one of the things about Windows that I particularly despise
<strong>Could be. But the blame game doesn't help the end user. Whether it's Explorer's or Apple's fault, I ultimately don't care. I want it fixed.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Of course. But if you're directing attention to faults in an article, might as well pin the bug on the right vendor.
[quote]<strong>I despise bad programming when it has a very serious usability impact on the whole system, and it is a let-down considering that one of the hopes with OS X was that a single app wouldn't be able to affect the system as a whole. Well, it still can, obviously.</strong><hr></blockquote>
OS X can contain the effect of an app, but that's about all. There's no way the system can tell whether an app is running productive code or just chewing cycles. The irony is that OS 9 and below forced developers to write tight code because the OS didn't provide any safety net. OS X might just let them get sloppier.
Not only that, but as soon as Apple announced that OS X would have a real-time kernel, I foresaw abuses. It's a great feature for people who really need it, but it's also a great way for certain Large Developers I Will Not Name to defeat the preemptive multitasking and grab cycles now.
Thanks for writing the article, and for coming here to discuss it.
[ 02-18-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
<strong>
The mainstream reviewers are another problem. One of them assured me via email that no, the latest version of Office:mac really was much faster than previous versions, and MS really had extensively reworked it. Uh-huh.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
It boggles the mind, doesn't it? I mean, do they really want to contribute to inflicting so much pain on their fellow Mac users? Office has not been extensively reworked since version 4.2 (Word 6, etc.), which has been patched, repatched, and rerepatched, with a little bit of window-dressing, but that's it. And performance certainly hasn't improved significantly since Office 98, quite the contrary. The only reason Microsoft has managed to get away with such poor performance for its word processor is that the hardware running it has improved so much. I wouldn't even consider running Office v. X on a rev. A iMac -- supposedly supported by Mac OS X, right?
But then, I wouldn't consider running Mac OS X on that machine either, so...
[quote]<strong>Well, you know, a document-based architecture is much more feasible now than it was in classic Mac OS. Objective-C is capable of all kinds of mind-warping dynamism (and its basic functionality is available to Carbon via CoreFoundation). Aqua is, by virtue of its per-window layering, more document-centric than OS 9 was. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is working on that very thing.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is very interesting. I would love to see Mac computing evolved in that direction again. The app-centric approach simply doesn't make sense. And it allows third-party developers to develop bloatware and get away with it.
[quote]<strong>[dock items bouncing high]
Or simply optimized to take up less CPU, since it's not good from a user perspective to have different behaviors to signify alerts. Really, how much work can it take to bounce an icon?
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, that is quite puzzling, especially since regular bouncing (when launching apps) doesn't seem to cause such a performance hit. Anyway, the whole point is, fix the bloody thing
[quote]<strong>[OS X slowing down - and falling down - with lots of apps open]
Wierd. Did you install 10.1 over 10.0? Although that shouldn't matter either - so did I.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
That's what I did first, and after experiencing these symptoms, I did a "clean" reinstall of OS X 10.1 (as clean as the 10.1 updater would let me do, anyway). Which makes me wary of trying once again, like other people have recommended, since it's unlikely to fix the problem.
[quote]<strong>[Modem support in OS X sucks.]
It's absurd. And frankly, I think Apple's crazy to have shipped OS X standard without fixing it first. Most people are still on modems. If their first experience of OS X is like mine (the big, fancy installer hung while trying to send my registration out over the modem) </strong><hr></blockquote>
Now that you mention it, this happened to me to -- and on several machines -- all using modems.
[quote]<strong>
they're going to be swamped in complaints, and scrambling to correct a lot of negative first impressions.
There's been an uproar about this for a while now in various fora (including Apple's official ones), and it's attracted the attention and efforts of Darwin developers like Louis Gerbarg (who developed and posted a fix for the worst problem affecting the dual-processor machines in response to a MacNN thread on this very issue).
</strong><hr></blockquote>
The problem even extends farther, since I am experiencing the same difficulties with the modem inside the AirPort Base Station. In other words, all AirPort connections are not treated by OS X in the same way. Even though OS X is not dealing with an internal modem directly, but only with an AirPort Base Station that is using its own internal modem, it is still problematic.
Bottom-line: If your Internet connection is a modem connection, regardless of whether it's using an internal modem inside your computer or a third-party modem connected via USB or the modem inside the AirPort Base Station, you are going to suffer under OS X. And it sucks.
[quote]<strong>OW and (I hear) Mozilla have an option to only run JavaScripts in response to link clicks. So if you ask to see a screenshot gallery by clicking a link, it'll work, but the page can't open a new window of its own accord. The browser will simply ignore the script.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Now that is something that should be more widely known! I'll definitely explore this. Thanks!
[quote]<strong>OS X can contain the effect of an app, but that's about all. There's no way the system can tell whether an app is running productive code or just chewing cycles. The irony is that OS 9 and below forced developers to write tight code because the OS didn't provide any safety net. OS X might just let them get sloppier.
Not only that, but as soon as Apple announced that OS X would have a real-time kernel, I foresaw abuses. It's a great feature for people who really need it, but it's also a great way for certain Large Developers I Will Not Name to defeat the preemptive multitasking and grab cycles now.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
This should be cause for great concern. It seems that currently we are experiencing the full spectrum of programming tidiness, from small apps that work seamlessly in the background and perform perfectly adequately -- to big monster ports that, under the Aqua coating, are simply worse than their predecessors. Based on what you are saying, the spectrum might get even wider. I'm worried.
On the other hand, I believe that, as Mac users and writers, we should do our best to promote the alternatives when they exist and are realistic. Which I am going to try and continue to do. I've just downloaded and installed <a href="http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/release.html"; target="_blank">Default Folder for OS X</a> -- and it is sheer brillance. There's a lesson for Apple!
[quote]<strong>Thanks for writing the article, and for coming here to discuss it.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Thanks for your feedback!
Pierre
[ 02-19-2002: Message edited by: Pierre Igot ]</p>