Apple Peel

Mac OS X at Work - Part 5: The Journey So Far

As September 2001 is fast approaching, with the promise of a major update (Mac OS X 10.1), I thought it would be appropriate to take stock of what the experience of using Mac OS X in a real-world setting has been so far, i.e. since the launch of the first “final” version of the new system software back in early Spring. My own personal situation is obviously not necessarily representative of the circumstances of the majority of current Mac OS X users — but it’s the only one I have, and I still believe that a few interesting conclusions may be drawn from it.

Some of my observations deal with small details that might not seem to be of great significance, but the sum of such details is precisely what the overall Mac OS X experience consists of, and it might be worth noting them now, before Mac OS X becomes so ubiquitous that we won’t really remember what life used to be without it. As well, if past and current experience is any indication, most computer users tend to “get used” to whatever idiosyncrasies their software enforces upon them and to forget that things could be done differently — and there’s no obvious reason that Mac OS X should be treated any differently: It is still, after all, very much a monolithic, application-centric operating system that demands a certain amount of learning from its users. Time will tell whether the amount of learning required is really less, for the average user, than in other operating systems (Mac OS 9 included), and the jury is still out on whether Mac OS X’s idiosyncrasies are closer to what’s “natural” for most people. We should therefore strive to keep a strong critical eye even as Mac OS X becomes more familiar.

Things I Miss When Switching Back To Mac OS 9

One-Click Window Closing

I still have to switch back to Mac OS 9 from time to time, for various activities including CD burning, scanning, and DVD watching. When I do, it makes me more aware of things that I have grown accustomed to in Mac OS X and that I actually miss when trying to get back into the “OS 9 groove.”

In OS X, you don’t have to activate a window (i.e. bring it to the fore) before you can close it by clicking on its “Close” box. If you have a window somewhere in the background (including windows that belong to other applications) that you’d like to close, just roll over its “Close” button with your cursor, and the button will activate and let you click on it to close the corresponding window, without changing the current focus (i.e. without leaving your current application).

Title bar buttons of window in background temporarily activated

You cannot do that in Mac OS 9. Whenever a background window is in your way, you need to bring it to the fore in order to save it. Since bringing a window to the fore also means bringing the whole corresponding application to the fore, including all its windows, palettes, etc., this ends up causing a significant amount of annoyance, and even increases the risk of things like system crashes or freezes, since application switching under the classic Mac OS is a much less “natural” behaviour than it is under OS X. (You can also set OS X to behave more like OS 9 when switching applications, using third-party utilities, but I don’t recommend it. The OS X behaviour makes more sense.)

When I think about it, the reason I like the one-click window closing behavior in OS X probably has to do with the fact that it’s a good example of behavior that’s no longer application-centric, but rather document-centric, or even user-centric. After all, what does the user care which application a window belongs to when he wants to close it? All he wants is to close it. He doesn’t need to be reminded that it belongs to a different application.

New Application Menu

In Mac OS 9, the “Applications” menu used to be a separate menu at the right-hand side of the menu bar listing all currently open applications and including the “Hide Others,” “Show All,” and “Hide [current application]” commands.

I do miss some of the functionality of this menu (the “Application Switcher” part), and I honestly don’t think I could do without DragThing and its “Process Dock.” On the other hand, I really like the fact that the rest of the functionality (the Hide/Show commands) is now part of the application menu that bears the name of the current application, right next to the new Apple menu. I always found it rather tedious to have to go all the way to the right-hand side of the screen with my mouse when all the other menus were located on the other side of the screen.

Application Menu in OS X

Now, Mac OS X 10.1 will reintroduce some additional menu bar functionality on the right-hand side… Based on what I have read, however, it will not be functionality that you need to access physically with your mouse on a very regular basis. It will be indicators similar to the current clock in OS X’s menu bar, i.e. things that you mostly look at without ever having to click on them. I believe it makes sense to keep all the menus that you need to access regularly on one side, and all the other stuff on the other side — and OS X is more consistent in that respect than OS 9 was.

Pre-emptive Multitasking and Multithreading

This may seem rather obvious, but it’s really switching back to OS 9 from time to time that makes you appreciate the many very real benefits of Mac OS X’s rock-solid architecture, and more particularly its multitasking/multithreading capabilities.

Regardless of the extent by which OS X 10.1 will reduce application launch times, the fact remains that some applications can take a long time to launch, and not all that time is related to the system software: For example, when I launch my current beta of Eudora for OS X, the icon only bounces a couple of times, but it still takes quite a while for Eudora, after the icon has stopped bouncing, to open all its windows (I keep a number of mail box windows open at all times). In other words, some of the application launch time (the bounces) is related to the system itself, but some of it (after the bounces) is also related to the application itself, and I don’t expect that OS X 10.1 will change much in that respect.

For this reason, I suspect that I will still find the ability to switch back to something else while an application is launching invaluable. Until the time comes that we all have instantaneously launching applications (and that will take something much faster than hard drives for data storage), this very obvious benefit of pre-emptive multitasking will have significant relevance for many users. Switching to something else while an application is launching might not come naturally to the average user, but I believe that this is mostly one of those behaviors that computers have forced us to acquire (us waiting for them instead of them waiting for us) — and, with OS X, many users are going to have to start un-learning some of those computer-imposed behaviors. I trust that they will not find this too uncomfortable.

Another obvious benefit of the new architecture is the fact that things are no longer interrupted by the fact that the user is holding the mouse button down (to browse through a menu, to drag an item, etc.). This is, however, due to both the multitasking and the multithreading capabilities of Mac OS X: Pre-emptive multitasking is the reason why pulling down a menu in Microsoft Word no longer interrupts that file copying process in the Finder or that web page downloading process in Explorer. Multithreading is the reason why pulling down a menu in Explorer no longer interrupts the web page downloading process in Explorer’s browser windows… Wait a second! It does interrupt it! Well, that’s the catch: While multitasking is a system-wide thing that is entirely managed by the system itself and therefore cannot be circumvented by any application, multithreading is the ability to have several processes running at the same time within the same application — and it’s up to the developers of that particular application to implement it properly. In short, Microsoft Explorer doesn’t support it, and a browser like OmniWeb does. Try loading a web page in OmniWeb and holding down a menu at the same time: the web page continues to load. That’s multithreading for the rest of us.

Do I need to say that I am not surprised that multithreading is not supported in Microsoft’s browser? And that I suspect that it won’t be supported in the “final” Explorer 5.1 for OS X release due to ship with Mac OS X 10.1 either? And that I suspect that it won’t be supported in Office 10 either? This is where hype, official company propaganda and politics in the computing world act as a cover for technical shortcomings — and it saddens me to think that it will probably take years before all OS X applications ship with decent, built-in multithreading capabilities.

If you’re still using OS 9, all this probably sounds like meaningless jargon to you… But I suspect that, when you make the switch to OS X and realize that some applications provide what some others do not, you will become much more aware of such inconsistencies and shortcomings.

Protected Memory

Another obvious benefit of OS X is protected memory. What protected memory means in the real world of actual computing is that, when something crashes and you wonder what the cause may be, well, you simply don’t have to bother anymore. No matter how much you enjoy trouble-shooting your computer and identifying obscure extension conflicts, I am sure you realize that trouble-shooting is essentially a waste of time. If an application crashes under OS X, just fire it up again. If it crashes repeatedly for no apparent reason, drag it to the trash and start using another one. Simply put, repeat offenders no longer deserve to live under OS X.

(Some application crashes are still probably due to problems with the system itself, and protected memory will not put an end to the “blame game” of application developers blaming Apple and Apple blaming application developers for crashes, but the bottom line still is that this is basically, as an end-user, not your problem. It never was, but the new system architecture definitely levels the playing field and should encourage you to do more comparison-shopping than ever before.)

The other significant benefit of protected memory is more subtle, yet definitely just as important: You no longer have to worry about the performance or stability of your system deteriorating as the day advances, and you’ve launched and quit a number of applications, or worked extensively within those applications. Thanks to protected memory, the overall stability and performance of your system no longer deteriorates over time. Your system is just as “fresh” and works just as efficiently at 5 pm than it did at 9 am. Specific applications might suffer from deteriorating performance and stability over time (and some, such as Microsoft Explorer or, indeed, Mac OS X’s own “Classic” environment, definitely do), but this does not and will never affect your system as a whole. The worst that might happen to you is that you might have to quit (or force-quit) and relaunch the offending application.

While it doesn’t entirely solve the problem of data loss due to crashes (if an application crashes and you haven’t saved your work within that application, your work within that application is still irreparably lost), it certainly brings a significant level of much-needed peace of mind.

The Finder Tool Bar

I really like the Finder Tool Bar. I use it all the time, to access frequent destinations, to drag items to the trash, to change view modes. It makes total sense to have direct access to all this functionality at hand within each Finder window, and I rarely even consider hiding the tool bar.

The Finder Tool Bar is not perfect. It shouldn’t be so easily customizable (although there is some debate over this, as some users like to use it as a kind of temporary “shelf” for items that they want to move around), and it needs something that gives access to recent folders as well, and not just favorite folders.

But it’s much, much better than no tool bar at all. And I definitely miss it when I switch back to Mac OS 9.

The Columns View

The new “Columns” view in Mac OS X’s Finder is, hands down, the most significant feature of the new Finder. With a wide enough screen, it gives unprecedented access to your hard drive’s file structure. Today, people’s multi-gigabyte hard drives easily contain tens of thousands of files — and organizing your files is no longer a luxury. By providing you with an immediate view of the depths of your file structure and single-click access to your destination, the Columns view offers an efficiency that no amount of tinkering with the traditional, more purely “spatial” desktop metaphor of the classic Mac OS will ever match.

As well, the use of file previews within Finder windows in Columns view easily beats the limited “previewing” capabilities provided by Mac OS 9 file icons. There’s simply nothing like applying a single mouse click to an MP3 file or a QuickTime movie and being able to view or play it right away by clicking on the “Play” button of the sound preview (in effect, a mini-QuickTime Player) in the next column.

Sound Preview in OS X's Columns view

The Columns view is just terrific, and it’s going to get even better in OS X 10.1, with options to customize column width, different file name abbreviation schemes, etc.

Undoable Finder Actions

A couple of years ago, I remember reading about the demonstration, during the MacHack convention, of a “hack” (called “Unfinder”) that effectively added an “Undo” command to Mac OS 9’s Finder.

Well, OS X’s Finder has one — and it’s definitely very easy to get accustomed to it. This is one of those many small, yet significant steps forward that Mac OS X has taken and that tend to get buried in all the rhetoric and hype about the product.

Things I Have Grown Accustomed To In OS X

The New “System Preferences” Control Panel

When I first started using OS X, the absence of a “Save” dialog in the “System Preferences” control panel was a bit of a shock. After all, most control panels in OS 9 do require that you confirm that you want to save whatever changes you made to their settings before closing them. (Some don’t, however: The “Sound” and “Monitors” control panels in OS 9 already operate without requiring confirmation.)

I have found, however, that I really don’t miss the “comfort” provided by this extra step. After all, the main purpose of the confirmation dialog is not the “Save” button, but the “Cancel” button, which gives you the ability to exit without recording the changes you’ve just made — in case you’ve forgotten exactly what you changed and just want to leave things they are.

But this is only a problem if reverting settings is difficult. In most panes, however, the settings are just a few check box options or pop-up menu settings. They are really not hard to remember and to reset if necessary. If the control pane requires more complex configuration, a “Default” or “Reset” button is usually provided.

Dock Size Slider Control in System Preferences

There is only one particular time when I miss the ability to easily restore a previous setting: in slider-type controls where there is no default position except for the extremities. In the preferences panel for the Dock, for example, the “Dock Size” is a slider bar, and it has no predefined settings except for the minimum (“Small”) and the maximum (“Large”). A few intermediate settings that the slider would snap to along the way would help.

The Dock

To be honest, I don’t use Mac OS X’s Dock so much. I much prefer the flexibility and customizability provided by DragThing’s docks. I’ve set my Mac OS X Dock to automatically hide and show when I drag my cursor over the bottom of the screen.

When I do use it, however, it does the trick — and I can imagine that, for people who only use a few applications, it doesn’t turn into too much of a mess.

I just wish more of the Dock’s functionality were included in DragThing’s own dock icons, including: visual feedback regarding the status of the application (bouncing when starting up, number of email messages received in email application, flag warning of Instant Message received in AOL, etc.), pop-up menu listing all open windows in each application, etc. — or rather, come to think of it, I actually wish that Apple incorporated all of DragThing’s features into Mac OS X and gave his developer a nice big check…

New Window Title Bar Buttons

I haven’t found the new red/yellow/green buttons (Close/Minimize/Maximize) in window title bars too hard to get used to. They are well positioned and it’s very rare that you click on the wrong button by accident, in my experience.

What is less than rare, however, is that you think you’ve clicked on a button (especially the red “Close” button) when you haven’t. This is probably related to the fact that the buttons are round rather than square and that they have “fuzzy” edges with their drop-shadow effect. However, it seems to me that there’s actually a bug in Mac OS X that prevents it from detecting clicks that are clearly inside the button area. I am actually able to click and hold with the arrow cursor inside the red button area and drag the window around as if I had clicked in the white background of the window’s title bar, as is illustrated below. This clearly needs to be corrected.


Both pictures were taken with the mouse button down, yet only in the right picture can you see the Close button responding properly (turning darker). In the other case, even though the arrow clearly points to the button, it does not register as a click on the button, but simply as a click on the title bar.

Things I Miss Under OS X

WindowShade

While minimizing windows to the Dock has its uses (I often use it to hide web articles that I want to read later on, for example, and their icons in the Dock give me a good preview of the pages), I still miss the ability to double-click on a window title bar to reduce the window to the title bar itself. I really don’t see why Apple can’t provide those of us who like this “WindowShade” ability with the option to activate it in addition to the Minimize button. I don’t need another button. I just want to be able to double-click on the white background of the title bar. I just don’t see why both features can’t coexist. Provide it as an option (disabled by default) in the System Prefs — et voilà.

Spring-Loaded Folders

When dragging a file around in OS X, I find myself, on occasion, wishing that the OS X Finder did have some kind of feature that would automatically open a folder when you drag a file icon to it and keep the button down for a second or so. Here again, it would be reasonably easy, in my option, to provide this as an option for advanced users, and to leave the option unchecked by default, so that unsuspecting users don’t have folders springing open in their faces just because they are a bit slow.

As for pop-up folders (the feature that turned windows into tabs at the bottom of the screen that would pop open like a drawer when clicked upon, revealing the contents of the corresponding window), I don’t miss them as much (and, in my experience, most non-advanced Mac users don’t really feel comfortable using them), but that is probably due in part to the fact that I have taken to using DragThing docks that are automatically minimized into a single button whenever they are relegated to the background (this is an option in DragThing docks). Those docks of mine include several layers containing mostly folder icons that give me quick access (either by control-clicking on the folder icon, with a pop-up menu, or by simply clicking on the icon to open the folder in a new Finder window) to my (many) most commonly used destinations.

Again, this functionality is something I simply wish that Apple would incorporate into Mac OS X —but in the mean time, applications such as DragThing or Drop Drawers do a nice job and are really worth the (very moderate) expense.

System-Wide Spell-Checking / Glossary

One of my favorite applications under the classic Mac OS 9 used to be SpellCatcher. I have always found it pointless to have application-specific spell-checking and glossary features, when the things I write about in Word are also those that I write about in Eudora or in InDesign. It seems to me that no computer user should ever have to type his own mailing address more than once — i.e. in a system-wide glossary feature where it can be given assigned a unique abbreviation, such as “myadd,” which automatically expands into the full, multi-line address whenever it is typed and followed by a space character. Similarly, I don’t see why I should have to individually teach Eudora, Word, InDesign, and every other application in which I might type my name and which offers a spell-checking feature that, yes, “Igot” is my name and not two English words with a missing space char between them and that no, “DragThing” is not a typo for “Drafting”…

When I first read about Rhapsody (one of Mac OS X’s previous incarnations) and its “Services” feature, I had hope that such system-wide features would finally become a reality — but we are not there yet. SpellCatcher still works under OS X, but only in the “Classic” environment, and therefore only in all applications running under Classic — which is severely limiting and becomes even more so with each new Mac OS X-native application that is made available. Like most Mac users, I’m looking forward to the day when I won’t have to use Classic at all anymore — but even now, a good half of my typing is done outside Classic, for which SpellCatcher, in its current incarnation, is useless.

Based on what the creator of SpellCatcher has told me, a Mac OS X-native version of SpellCatcher is still a long way off, if only because of the fundamental architectural changes in the way the system operates. Casady & Greene has yet to announce a release date for SpellCatcher for OS X — or indeed, to even confirm that such an application will ever be released. And I am not aware of any other Mac OS X application that can fill SpellCatcher’s shoes at this point in time.

Better Navigation Services

While the “Navigation Services” feature in the classic Mac OS was a welcome addition, it was never really able to match the power and flexibility provided by third-party utilities such as Default Folder or ACTION Files.

Mac OS X takes a new approach, based in part on the strength of the Columns view (which is the default — and only — view mode in Open/Save dialog boxes), but, again, this approach does not meet all the needs of the power user, and I already look forward to the release of dialog box enhancing third-party utilities — if they are at all possible under OS X’s architecture, that is.

On the other hand, it seems to me that it would be fairly easy for Apple itself to provide people with more flexibility. For example, there’s really no reason why there shouldn’t be a “tool bar” of sorts in Open/Save dialogs as well, similar to the Finder Tool Bar.

Conclusion

This article is, by no means, an extensive list of what’s (already) good and (still) bad in Mac OS X as it exists. I tried to avoid the issue of bugs, as it is fairly obvious that no one is expected to get accustomed to them and future OS X releases are expected to fix them. I also avoided the performance issue, as, again, OS X 10.1, due in September, is expected to provide significant improvements in that area.

I still feel, however, that it is fairly reasonable to say that Mac OS X, even as it exists today, with its many remaining flaws, is already a phenomenal success from a technological point of view. Apple has already succeed where all other attempts had failed until now, i.e. in offering a Unix-based system with an advanced, usable, user-friendly graphic interface.

Just on principle, when I started using Mac OS X, I decided that I would refrain from using Terminal altogether — and see how far I’d get. It’s not that I’m not able to program. Indeed, I used to program in assembly code back in the days of the Z80 and 6510 processors. And I do use both AppleScript and other “arcane” tools such as grep in BBEdit on occasion. But, as a tech support person and a “power user” of many powerful Mac applications, I felt that it was almost my “duty” to contribute to the trend initiated by Apple and pressure whoever is tempted to resort to a command-line interface for anything other than the most arcane commands to think twice and determine whether there isn’t a way to make the same functionality available through a graphic interface.

After several months of using OS X on a daily basis for a full range of computing tasks, I’m happy to report that I haven’t had to use Terminal once. The only time I chose to use it was to use the “top -u” command, when I was experiencing such sluggishness that I wanted to determine which process was the culprit. I then realized that I could do pretty much the same with Process Viewer and haven’t gone back since.

Maybe I’m missing some powerful UNIX features that would make my work easier. I don’t know. But I believe that Mac developers have enough sense to realize that whatever useful tools UNIX provides simply must be made available to every user through a graphic interface. And I’m willing to wait, as I said, on principle.

My feeling is also that many of those Mac users who are experiencing serious problems running OS X on their machines are people who have been lured into using Terminal to fiddle around and have created problems that they don’t know how to solve. A good example was the “prebinding” trick that started circulating soon after OS X was released. The only reason to use it was an alleged boost in performance. Well, I too felt (and still feel) that OS X was way too sluggish, but I refrained from using this prebinding command, because I didn’t want to create a situation that I wouldn’t be able to fix. I’ve been following the same rule ever since I installed OS X, and it has served me well. My only significant OS X problems are obviously related to a specific piece of hardware (a Radeon PCI), and I am impatiently waiting on either ATI or Apple to fix those problems — but they do not affect my OS X configuration in any kind of irreversible way. (They are just a pain and force me to use the reset button when I shouldn’t have to.)

In short, in my own experience, Apple is already very close indeed to the goal of making the power of UNIX accessible to the masses without any of the drawbacks. And OS X 10.1 already sounds like yet another significant step toward the full achievement of that goal. X-citing times indeed!

Email Pierre Igot

Pierre's "ApplePeel" page here at Applelust.com