iMaculate Conception

Aqua Velvet: The conversion of an OS X skeptic and Wintel heretic

[It started as a column about the sleek OSX interface, but ended with a Wintel/Mac OSX showdown that has shaken the author. Badly.]

Gooey GUI

Not too long ago, I posted a column about how hesitant I was about installing OS X on my PowerBook. Of course, this little voice in the back of my head kept extolling the virtues of a fluid, gorgeous interface and the ability of my PowerBook to actually sleep and awaken quickly. So, I ended up installing OSX. Some of my nightmares came true — I hate Classic. Not because it's slow, and not because of the extra drive space it requires, but because it's ugly compared to this flawless phenomenon called Aqua.

Before I start heaping praise on Aqua, I just want to again say to all the Developers out there — don't take me to the cleaners when you convert my applications to Carbon. I'll get really cranky, and if you haven't seen a 225 pound, bald, late twenty-something art geek get really cranky, it's both pathetic and a little scary.

So I went through this fairly fast (considering what I expected) and painless installation process, and was quickly into OS X. And I loved it. The interface, from the point of view of an artist/designer, is perfect. Flawless. Staggeringly beautiful. After some growing pains — I still can't replace the Hard Drive icon, no matter how closely I follow the directions on IconFactory.com — I was customizing settings, folder icons, the dock and everything else to the geek chic that I prefer. Amazingly enough, my desktop began to resemble my OS9.1 look, but man, it moved and swelled and bounced and went transparency in the coolest of ways.

Unfortunately, in addition to being an educator, I'm an active artist/designer, and I've got to keep the workflow going and hit some major deadlines. I was pleased to see a Location Manager kind of embedded in the Apple menu, a feature I use heavily traveling from my home Airported cable modem to the school's Airported network. But I was able to crash applications like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver and Illustrator on a fairly regular basis. I couldn't even get Director 7 to stay open in Classic, so I had to rely on OS 9.1 as my startup system, and pop into OS X to show off for the Wintel shills on campus.

And they are pretty unanimously jealous of the cool animations, alpha (transparency for you non-graphics types) effects, slick three window Finder directory tree and groovy blinky buttons. For the most par, the new Finder has most impressed the Wintel and UNIX types that have seen X. I get a lot of smirks and snide remarks about the "Genie" effect where minimized applications slide down into the dock. "Isn't that just like Apple," the good old boys/girls say, "to put something like that into an OS." What, put something really cool yet totally useful into an OS? Yeah, that's just like Apple. Like building in native .pdf support in the Preview application — real functionality, that's what Apple is gunning for.

I even downloaded the OSX demo of Bungie's Oni, and whaled away on the hordes of baddies at a noticeably higher frame rate than I was accustomed to in 9.1. Not only was my OS interface sleek, but there's something magical about delivering a vicious backbreaking kick to a game both with the grace and fluidity of a Katerina Witt triple lutz jump. SMACK! On the down side, I found that if my little Pismo freezes up playing Oni - I can't get back into X. Whoops, back to the drawing board, Bungie.

So I fell in love with Aqua, and its slippery feel gave me goosebumps every time I rolled over the dock. (That ended up sounding more erotic than I intended, but you get the point.) The problem was that OS X seemed a bit slow, and even though I had been given a copy of the not so official OS X update, I was a bit apprehensive about installation. So I decided to wait for the update that Apple was assuring folks would appear soon. Now knowing that some fellow geeks are a wee bit superstitious about major upgrades, I will never understand why Apple released the 10.0.1 update on Friday the 13th. I'm superstitious enough to actually believe that you have to name your computer, or it will become angry. All of my computers are named after Biblical plagues, and my PowerBook happens to be named Brimstone. Locust or Frog just sounded too stupid for my PowerBook, but not too stupid for my Wintel cow machines. Besides, Fire accompanies Brimstone, and this is a FireWire PowerBook. That's the kind of logic I'm talking about here, folks.

So I used the Software Update panel to upgrade to 10.0.1 (or X.0.1 if you prefer). And a strange thing happened: Brimstone's performance went through the roof. I've heard of this process called pre-binding, but haven't tried it yet, so I'm just talking about upgrading the OS. Aqua got REAL fast and fluid. Immediately. I was thrilled. I changed my system settings to automatically launch Classic at startup and rebooted. After a really fast boot, I fired up Photoshop 6 to get some work done — and the unthinkable happened. It started REALLY FAST like with one bounce of the icon, and then a quick "boot screen" launch in Classic. I let out a Keanu Reevian "Whoa," picked up my jaw, and got to work.

I needed to resize a rather large Photoshop graphic. It is an artwork that measures 20x13inches at 300 dpi. It has about 35 layers and takes up over 250 megabytes of disk space. I had to resize this monster to use on the web (reduce it to 768 pixels tall) and did not flatten it first. Now for those of you who are not Photoshop junkies, this is the computing equivalent of trying to move a piano by yourself — you can do it, but it's going to take awhile. I turned to the Gateway on the other desk to spilt the work between the two machines. I glanced over at Brimstone, and nothing was happening. I cursed a moment about Classic, and went to resize it again when I noticed the operation was complete.

David and Goliath

Needless to say, I'm not used to this kind of performance out of my PowerBook. I undid the resize, picked a slightly different size, and tried it again. Amazingly enough, it ripped through the resize in about a second. I had been working with these files since November, and had never seen Photoshop rip through one that fast. I set up a batch to resize all the graphics (12 total) and resize them into a new folder. It took about 25 seconds to open a file, and a second to resize it. I was used to 25 to 30 seconds to open a file, and say 10 seconds to resize.

Now I should stop and explain that recently, with the ultra low price of RAM, I had pulled the 192MB from Brimstone and replaced it with a pair of 256MB chips. With half a gigabyte of RAM, Brimstone was really cruising for the last couple of weeks. Photoshop is set up to use 450MB of RAM, and I haven't used it much since the upgrade, so I should expect some performance gain.

One thing led to another, and I decided to run Brimstone against my office Cow machine (I'm not going to mention manufacturers, lest I get in trouble). "Locust," the office machine, is running DUAL Xeon processors rated at 550mHz, Windows 2K, 512MB RAM, two 18GB IBM Deskstar Superduper SCSI 10,000 rpm disk drives and a 3D Labs Oxygen VX1 video card. It cost about the same price as a small Korean import or a pair of twins on eBay. Brimstone is a 400mHz G3 PowerBook, with an ATI Rage Mobility card, 512 MB RAM, running OSX and Classic, and a creepy crawling 6GB 5200 rpm IDE disk drive and cost 2400 potatoes plus about 450 bucks for the extra RAM, a Microsoft Explorer trackball (sue me) and a external 250MB Zip with the Firewire adapter. Over a series of ten Photoshop "races" with no real scientific value, the PowerBook won eight times out of ten.

I didn't use a stopwatch, I just started operations with hands on both mice. If anything, the Wintel machine had the advantage, being on the right and having a thumb, rather than pinky hit the button. Using the exact same file, Brimstone beat the Wintel box in Photoshop 6 with the same RAM allotment using Gaussian Blur, various transforms, Eye Candy 4000 HSB Noise with fractals turned on, Watercolor, flattening layers and resizing images. I wasn't keeping time, but most "races" were won by several seconds, with the transforms being the closest finishes. What did the Wintel machine win? Opening and saving massive files — likely due to the drastically faster hard drives. I'll run some more scientific tests next week, but the Wintel machine is now a paperweight from my perspective.

Believer

Now why does someone who writes for Applelust have a Wintel monster machine in his office? Well, I use of lot of 3D models in my artworks, and over the last few years, Wintel was more supported by the software developers that Apple. With Maya jumping on board for OS X, this will likely even out the platform support. Okay, now why do I have another Wintel machine at home? Well, as described above, I like to play games, and support for the Apple as a gaming platform has been abysmal. At the very least, I'm a two mouse button kind of guy, and I really dig the Microsoft Explorer mouse and trackball. Once again, developers are moving toward Apple support for gaming.

So I've been in the active planning stages for a large interactive installation artwork for a show in Fall of 2002. I will need to create some 3D models to be both rendered at a high resolution and animated at a low resolution. I will be using some heavy Photoshop work for some seriously big images, three times the final size of the previous work. And I will want to play some games to keep me sane during this process. I like to put the artwork back in the cranial queue for a while and just frag some friends online now and again. And I want to trade in my PCs. Permanently. I'm done with them: If my cute little Pismo can dust a dual Xeon machine on Friday the 13th with a still under construction OS, I want no part of that Wintel box. I want, no need, a big G4 with all the trimmings (see below for an update!), at a significantly cheaper price, Sure, I'll keep the cheap PC at home as a glorified game console, but the thought of ordering a G4 with a GeForce 3 card is making my vision blur and palms sweaty. Some other announcements last week, such as 3D file support in Director 8.5 and more Apple supported 3D software have hammered the final nails in my personal Wintel coffins.

I'm now a total convert. I'm not looking back. I feel like I had a religious experience, like I've come down from Mount Sinai with the X Commandments. My faith in Apple has been restored, and it's stronger than ever.

Postscript:

Not long after this article was written, I discovered that my installation of X was badly flawed. I went through the pre-binding process, and found that there was NO root user. I was able to pre-bind using my default user - cleverly named "joel" - and things did speed up even more. Then I had a bizarre crash — blank screen, no response from poor Brimstone — and had to start over with a clean install. I still haven't replaced OS X, and I miss Aqua dearly.

However, I did learn that my primary 3D renderer, which shall remain unnamed at this time (no official announcement has been made), pulled Windows support. Apparently, its easier to support only OS X and Unix so the Wintel beast is history, and a G4 is on the way.

Oh, and that G4 I was talking about? I got it (the forst of two I will be getting). See this related piece. More on that later.

joel@applelust.com