"
Mike,
Here are my initial impressions after running OS X on my PowerBook for a few days. Feel free to post them if you want to.
Oct 30, 2000:
I installed OS X on my 400 MHz Pismo last night and got to play with it for five or six hours yesterday and today.
In many ways it's better than my fears had lead me to expect, with lots of potential even if some major blunders have been made in UI choices. It's not so bad that it can't be made quite nice.
A lot of what I have to report, (and these are just initial impressions), will sound very familiar to those of you who, like myself, have scoured the web for reports from early adopters.
First off, it looks great. And I've seen tons of screen shots so there were no surprises. Yet when I booted back into OS 9, (not Classic), the pinstripes of 9's windows looked surprisingly bland and un-modern after just a few hours with X.
Second, speed: I had come to expect painful waits for windows to be redrawn when moved or resized. But it's not anywhere near as long as 8 (or was it 8.6?) took to draw icons in a newly launched window. X lags a second or less (usually less) behind me when I resize a window (which I don't even do that often.)
Another speed issue: waking from sleep. It is instantaneous. I literally can't get the lid open before the computer is ready for me. And going to sleep, the Apple on the lid turns off as soon as you click the lid shut. With 9, I estimate this can take 3 to 7 seconds.
Classic: Really very impressive performance and so far almost everything works (even QuicKeys with Classic apps which really surprised me). My dictionary, Simple Text, Tilery, SuperClock, and a few others all worked well. Photoshop 4 handled a 10 MB file with aplomb. Only iMovie and QuickTime player were sluggish. Very sluggish.
Rather than try a pared down OS 9 System Folder, as would be wise, I tried all my many extensions and control panels. Each and every time I boot Classic this way, I get a message saying elements are missing from Classic, do I want to install them or quit? So I install them. Booting from 9 (not Classic) reveals seven copies of Apple Menu options (something I don't like to run because it has been unstable for me). I then get a Finder quit 3 or 4 times right at the beginning, and a bit of difficulty shutting Classic down. But in between, it seems to work. When I boot Classic with extentions off, I don't have these problems and surprisingly, Photoshop and the dictionary still work.
Overall, a *very* impressive job of emulation by Apple, and after I discover the culprit extention(s), things will only improve.
Quite a few cool apps included with X, so it's not just an empty OS.
Haven't yet plugged in my PPP settings and tried to surf or my network settings. Just used the carbonized beta of Explorer to look at IE files from my HD and once, I quit that and booted IE 5 from within Classic and damned if quicKeys didn't work with that. It did!
For tonight, I won't dwell on the negative bits, but there are a few.
BTW, I met a guy at a restaurant who had run X for one day and then removed it. I showed him a few things I had learned about it in my first day, and the web site I linked to above about a week or so ago, and he said he was gonna try it again.
I also showed it to my friend who bought his first computer, a Blue & White G3, in January. He was very favorably impressed with what he saw in X today.
* * * * *
Nov 1, 2000:
I've been using OS X almost exclusively on my PowerBook since I installed it Saturday night. I only boot into OS 9 (not the Classic Environment) to use iMovie or to watch a movie trailer full screen. Either of these activities bog down in OS X.
Last night I pared down my OS 9 extentions just a little bit and the one time I booted into X after that, I didn't get the Finder quitting when I launched Classic. It also shut down properly, except for one shareware app, which I need to quit manually. After I do, the shut down of Classic and the restart of X resumed normally.
Except that each time I boot into 9, (not Classic), Disk First Aid not only checks, but actually repairs my disk. Kinda spooky.
I started using iCab for the first time last night and it does such a great job of caching and off-line browsing that I will likely keep using it. Running Netscape in OS 9 does a terrible job of this. IE 4.x in OS 9 does a very good job, IE 5.x in 9 does a pretty good job in 9. The carbonized IE that came with OS X does a very bad job.
iCab can read (after importing) the "Web Archives" of IE pages I have saved, with images and all. And it does a trick I've never seen another browser do: it can save an image from a page or a Web Archive of a page, including images, even though you are no longer connected to the web! All other browsers require you to download the page twice if you intend to save it. Hooray for iCab!! Saves me time, and doesn't unnecessarily hog web bandwidth. The other browsers should be required to implement this.
One minor gripe: you can't double click a word to highlight it (as in IE 5.x for OS 9). You need to click & drag over a word to highlight it. That's something I do many times a day to look up definitions.
Also, iCab twice in a couple of hours of use quit unexpectedly on me. It is the only Carbonized app to do so and the OS gave me no message about it. Usually, if IE does this in OS 9, you can then no longer get at cached files. But with iCab, I was able to, so I can more easily put up with it if that continues.
No trackpad clicking supported on X yet, and my keyboard won't control volume or screen brightness. I can control volume from the sound control panel, (or System Pref, I should say), but haven't figured out a way to control screen brightness except by booting into OS 9 (not Classic) and using the keyboard and leaving it at that setting the whole time I'm in X.
Nonetheless, X is really growing on me.
There's definitely room for improvement, and I still think the Ars Technica article covered it well, but the Public Beta is a good start. I would prefer it to be more Mac-like, and I hope they make some changes to make it so, but I've gotten used to it pretty quickly.
I must say again that Classic seems to work really well. If I have crashed it, it's only been once or twice, and although I haven't thrown a ton of Classic apps at it yet, the ten or so that I've tried have worked very well. I'm amazed that QuicKeys works!
Take Care,
Steve"
