
Mac OS X Public Beta - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/09/macos-x-beta.ars
======
mdasen
Wow, that takes me back. I remember installing it on my G3/300MHz. It was so
slow. That really can't be over-emphasized. I'd try all sorts of things to get
more speed like turning off the dock bounce, running prelinking, messing with
all sorts of hidden settings. It remained slow.

Having been an Apple customer since the Apple IIc, I was worried. OS 9 had a
snappiness to it. OS X would struggle to change windows. At the time, Windows
98 and even moreso Windows NT could run circles around OS X. With XP dropping
the same year, Windows consumers were running a really well optimized OS
compared to an OS X that needed a lot of work.

Apple has come a long way since those dark times to having a truly enviable
OS. They quickly got 10.1 out the door and 10.2 and 10.3 shipped in around
1-year increments (with 10.4 shipping a year and a half after 10.3). Apple
really did a lot of work and, at this point, I don't think anyone questions
Apple's ability to push a great OS, but there were some really bad times.

I remember people questioning whether it was that the Mach kernel was just
inherently slow (igniting lots of micro vs monolithic debates) or whether the
compositing window manager was worth anything or coming up with theories that
it was because Apple replaced Display PostScript with Display PDF to get
around Adobe licensing or whatnot. Today, the majority of Mac users probably
never experienced that bad time of trepidation when the future of the Mac
platform was in doubt. Today, it's really great to be a Mac user. It's hard to
imagine a time when Apple's products were so fringe. At nearly 10% of the
market (and nearly all of the premium market), Apple feels so strong and
people really know Apple (both for computers and other devices).

Kudos to Apple for taking the risk and getting through the bad transition to
what is a really wonderful OS. And kudos for making each new OS version feel
better than the previous.

~~~
city41
> Kudos to Apple for taking the risk

Apple has always taken the risk, it is one thing I love about them. You only
need to look to their processor choices to see that: 68k -> PPC -> Intel. All
transitions were just as painful as the OS9 -> OSX transition was. All in the
name of pushing forward.

And I bought one of the first white iBooks (post toilet seat design) with the
sole intention of using OSX (I'd used MacOS from 7 through 9, but departed
briefly around that time). It was so slow it was literally completely
unusable.

I do admit though, to this day there are things about OS Classic I really
miss.

~~~
jbrennan
I seem to recall the PPC -> Intel transition going rather smoothly, what with
Rosetta instruction translation and Universal/Fat binaries. It took them about
9 months between shipping the first and final Intel Macs, and most apps were
Universal within the first year (Photoshop and Office being the most notable,
albeit gigantic, holdouts).

~~~
chc
I would go so far as to say it was more painful for the last PPC buyers than
it was for the first Intel buyers.

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petercooper
How the distracting pin stripes in OS X up until 10.3 (when they were made
significantly lower contrast, before they faded away in 10.5) got past any UI
experts or even Steve Jobs is beyond me. I'm an ardent OS X user now but I'm
surprised to still hold my 2000/2001 Windows user opinion of "eugh, the new
Mac OS looks horrible!"

~~~
pohl
I didn't use Windows back then. Could somebody post a screenshot of what it
would have looked like in the same year?

~~~
petercooper
<http://www.granneman.com/images/windows_2000_screenshot.gif> was quite
representative of what I was using in 2000/2001. I'm a foaming-at-the-mouth OS
X fan now, but I still find Windows 2000 more palatable as a day-to-day sort
of UI compared to the first few releases of OS X.

At the time, Windows beat OS X in some areas that are no longer important..
like very easy to resize windows and more consistent minimize/maximize
behavior, all of which are less important in a high resolution world.

~~~
modeless
I still think Windows is significantly better in the window management
department. Exposé is nice, but Windows 7's mouse gestures for
maximize/restore are just brilliant, I prefer the taskbar to the dock, and the
top menu is a liability now that many apps are ditching menu bars altogether.

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dasil003
I remember buying my first Mac in a decade when this was announced. Microsoft
practically drove me into Apple's arms when I tried to install Internet
Explorer 6 and it hosed the boot sector on my HD, and I didn't have a CD-ROM
driver for the restore disk that came with my machine. I had to spend 3 hours
reinstalling from Win 95 floppies, and then upgrading the OS.

To say that experience made any hiccups with the OS X Public Beta seem
tolerable would be a vast understatement.

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thought_alarm
Shadows? Transparency? Compositing Window Manager?

It'll never catch on. People don't want that stuff.

~~~
someone_here
People still say that about Compiz!

~~~
danudey
Compiz copies the effects present in OS X (and Windows 7), but they seem to
ignore the reasons behind them.

Mac OS uses the 'shrinking window' effect to show you where your window has
gone, and drop-shadows to give you a sense of depth. Translucency in menus
gives a subtle feeling of impermanence, and subtle transparency emulates the
effect of paper-on-paper, where you can kind of, but not quite, make out the
letters on the page below the one you're viewing.

Compiz, however, seems to be based on the philosophy of 'Now that windows are
textures, we can do arbitrary transforms on them' and throws in a lot of
effects that make little sense. Menus that wobble into place, windows that
behave like they're made of Jell-O, and so on. They're neat conceptually, but
I tired ages ago of people pointing out how Linux was better because I could
configure my windows to burn up in a puff of smoke whenever I closed them.

~~~
Pengwin
Compiz does make usability of Gnome on Ubuntu better. Super-E (which displays
workspaces overview) and Super-W (a clone of OSX expose) for starters. The
added workspace switcher animation when switching to left and right is nice to
show you which workspace you are transferring to.

Sure a lot of the stuff Compiz is silly. Granted that wobbly windows is a wow
factor thing, but why not? its the little nice touches that keep peoples
interest in things, and makes it an enjoyable experience.

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protomyth
Looking back, I do wish they had kept some of the UI elements from OpenStep /
NEXTstep. I liked the dock on the right side (without all the desktop crud),
the Workspace Manager was nicer than Finder, and the NeXT menu bar works
better on bigger monitors than the Apple bar.

A modern version of the Librarian.app is what I miss most. It would have been
so much nicer if that had been kept and expanded to include music, movies,
etc.

~~~
rbanffy
> and the NeXT menu bar works better on bigger monitors than the Apple bar.

Still, it would be annoying to find it when you have three 30 inch screens...
The menu bar right on the window containing the data it's supposed to operate
on is still a better solution.

~~~
protomyth
Nah, it was a pretty easy thing to find and the ability to tear off stuff was
perfect. The vertical stack with left to right menu / submenu selection gave
it a really nice feel. I have never gotten that feel from a horizontal
starting bar.

~~~
rbanffy
It was pretty easy to find on a 17" screen. I agree it's a better solution
than the fixed menu bar at the top, but that doesn't make it easy to find if
your program is on 30" screen #1 and its menu is on 30" screen #2.

You can give it a try with the GNUStep apps that come with modern Linuxes.

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iuguy
I left the Mac behind after OS 8.1 on a Quadra. 8.5 was too slow (but very
nice) but 9 just seemed to be a step backwards. I also didn't like the
transition from 68k to PPC on Mac. I never did it on Amiga either.

When I first saw OSX I thought it was ugly and slow compared to Windows 2000,
although it looked better than RedHat, which was my main OS at the time. I
didn't like OSX for a really long, long time. In fact I still don't trust it.
Yes it's a nice desktop OS for end users and I'm typing this from a Mac Mini
hooked up to my TV, but it still has it's quirks and sometimes just doesn't
feel 'right'.

Having said that, a lot of what used to distinguish OSes (UI paradigms,
available software, hardware architecture) has either fizzled out or become
less relevant, so each to their own I guess. Mind you, I live in a house with
everything from AROS to Windows in terms of popular OSes.

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protomyth
gotta love 1.5GB being described as unlimited memory

~~~
orangecat
And storage for only $5 per GB!

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blahedo
From p. 14: > _The Bad: Continued_ > _6\. The new Finder defeats spatial
orientation._

Et plus ça change, ...

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ZeroGravitas
Things today's Apple fans won't let their competitors get away with (possibly
because they didn't live through this):

"beta"

A name that needs an explanatory paragraph to pronounce correctly and doesn't
really make logical sense.

Sound technical foundations that run slow on today's hardware.

Having two OSes and a transition strategy.

Crazy UI like pinstripes and brushed metal.

Letting the Unix/Next underpinnings shine through the gaps in the UI shell.

