©2001 Dean
Browell
A plate of flat packs and a side of jazz; 10.1
makes its debut on a wee everymac iMac and the results
are good. Slightly sprinkled with a dash of growing
pains, but finally for the recommending.
Picture it. Southwest Virginia, 2001.
I'm sitting at the faithful wee iMac plugging keys
along with the new Charlie Hunter Quartet album (Songs
From The Analog Playground, a great disc BTW)
with the new Mac OS 10.1 sailing underneath my activities.
How'd I end up with it after my rant of being in the
middle of nowhere? Why my helpful editor — inchiefness
(referred to lovingly in previous rants as Applelust
Tyrannical Overlord) — sent me a flat pack. Yes,
this is cheating. But, I'm happy to say that Apple's
"six-twelve weeks" was a bit of just-in-case scare
tactic, and many mail/fax orders have been fulfilled
already. So lose not hope, just scuttle that form
to them ASAP (I'd do it by fax) and get your copy
of this slick upgrade.
Did I say slick? Am I tipping my hand
before this article is even a quarter on its way?
Well, maybe. It is better, it is an "UP" grade isn't
it? I have some beefs with the state of some things
OS X-esque and I'll get them out. But as for the whole
jump from .0-.1, I shout from the halls of Applelust.com
that the ".1" does matter indeed.
Stable? Yes. Of course everyone is saying
that now, but to be honest I never had any real stability
problems with the earlier iterations, my issue was
speed. No kernel panics for me (crosses fingers).
My problem was the slooooooow as molasses general
operation. Maybe kernel panics couldn't even manifest
as they were too busy laughing. Things just crawled,
especially over internet despite a broadband line,
and Explorer running in Classic ran circles around
its big brother on the OS X end. In fact, the only
things that ran at an OS 9-ish speed in X were the
Freeverse games I was beta testing and Eudora when
I first booted up. Now, everything is at 90% the speed
of OS 9, and some things easily hit that 100% mark
once they are booted up and left on. The wee iMac
has an absurd 640 MB of RAM to burn so I bet that
helps, but there was nothing more frustrating than
putting in that magic 512 RAM chip and watching OS
10.0 hardly change in speed. Yes it booted faster,
but that was like speeding up to the redlight. Now
the whole machine just feels copasetic and chill.
Finder lists pop, apps begin to make audible screams
and the engine underneath is finally purring. Especially
with the jazz humming out the speakers.
The more operational changes are pretty
neat, and I'm sure I'll find them more helpful now
that I'm more willing to use 10.1. The icon triplet
that now resides in the upper bar near the time will
surely help laptop owners (the battery and airport
indicators, specifically) and the audio icon, the
only one that shows himself on mine, will help me.
He looks lonely tho, and hopefully if I can get an
iBook and throw an airport card in this baby to share
the broadband the airport icon will join my lonely
audio buddy. Venturing up to the time to quick-click
and see the date is now a weird action as the drop
down appears for options and the time is barely visible
in a very muted gray.
The control panels, er, System Preferences,
I mean, are really well organized now. It took me
a minute to figure out that I have to change my desktop
picture there now, but that's just falling back on
the old OS 9 instinct. The Super-Mario Bros. style
bounce of the Dock's icons when they are anxious to
alert you is really funny. They seem so needy of attention,
which is the point, but I find myself trying to
click them in mid air like an OS X whack-a-mole game.
Throwing the dock up against the sides
is pretty cool- for awhile (see below). And to be
honest I do prefer the new "Scale" to the "Genie"
effect. And boy is this quicker! My old Genie effect
looked like my Dock was using a Dust Buster rather
than a vacuum (much less a magic lamp). One last trick
I'd like to mention here is the fact that when we
plugged our camera in to download pictures (a feature
we were already happy with in 10.0) not only did it
happen as automatically as we had begun to expect,
but the camera icon in the pop-up box actually changed
to that of our new Kodak (without any net grab for
the pic, or intentionally installed icons). Very cool.
So, three cheers for the new effects and such, which
I am discovering every day through my own exploration
and mentions in articles like those here at Applelust.
The positives not only outweigh the negatives here,
they finally carry the OS to "recommend" status.
Things that still bug me range from
the application specific to the general feel of the
OS. These are not all specifically Apple's fault,
mind you, but I'm not sure who to point the finger
at and I want to get stuff off my chest. I'm a user,
dammit and I have needs...
But first, the Dock. Having the dock
on the left or right is pretty neat but honestly it
gives me the creeps. Watching icons magnify as I scroll
down, then jump sideways when excited or altered,
offer options in little flag windows and basically
defy some of the conventional desktop gravity weirds
me out. It's cool, and I dig it, but only about as
much as I used to dig making my plane do rolls in
my old Top Gun NES game; it's not helpful in any productive
way for finishing the game, but it looks like fun
for a few minutes. I'm just not used to dragging a
disk/file across the whole screen to hit the eject/trash.
And The Finder Icon blocks the delete button in my
Eudora when it's on the left, which bugs me. Maybe
I'll find a productive way to use it, but for now
it's only good use is bothering my wife and frustrating
me once I'm done playing with the rollovers.
On to the app-trappings of 10.1... The
new Internet Explorer, in all its 5.1 glory, is fast
and quirky as ever. Yes, it opens and surfs at least
3-4 times faster. But now the pop-up window comes
up about 45% of the time when I hold down the mouse
button (I've found the trick is to move the mouse
slightly down while pressing the button and it appears,
most of the time). This new version seems like a whole
new iteration of I.E. with its own sets of flaws and
benefits, not the evolution of the 5.1 beta we've
been spoon-fed since 10.0 came out. And for the record
I hate that they made the "stop" icon a blue version
of their X-Box logo. Maybe it will "stop" people from
buying it.
Omniweb's latest Browser is still unexpectedly
clumsy with even the most basic Java tasks... sometimes.
I say "sometimes" because I can often flitter
around the net not paying any attention to any shortcomings,
flying through forms and then BAM I hit an OmniWALL
and a page is telling me I haven't filled out an essential
part of a form that is clearly filled out. Javascratched,
I now have to jump onto another browser and make my
way through the forms with no problem. How many iterations
of Omniweb are we into now?
Once online in one browser or the other,
I sped through downloads of the latest patches of
my apps specifically for OS 10.1 and found most worthwhile.
One thing I was quickly reminded of, however, is the
strange variations on how we install things in 10.1.
Thankfully, my iMac seems to have gotten its translucent
head out of its butt and picks the right Stuff-It
Expander, only to be treated to the "time to download
6.5" message, despite the fact that I've already downloaded
it. Twice. At any rate, installing is sometimes as
simple as double clicking an installer, but usually
we're treated (exposed?) to the disk image mounting
process which I honestly don't need to watch. Last
time I saw "dmg" it was an abbreviation for "damage".
Sometimes that further unleashes an installer, and
sometimes we're just supposed to drag and drop a little
bundled icon into our application folder and not ask
questions (this, I like- why we need to see any innards
on our way into just a drag and drop procedure is
beyond me). Seeing the "VISE" icon is a comfort insomuch
as I remember seeing it before. Some installs are
downright alien to us. Try to grab the latest Wacom
tablet driver and you'll find yourself not grabbing
a tablet-specific download, or even a bulky download
that just overcompensates with all the Wacom product
drivers in one batch- no, you have to have your tablet
plugged in for the install, and then must have the
tablet plugged in during startup for it to work at
all once the driver is loaded. More on this in my
Graphire 2 review coming soon, but what happened to
Plug-And-Play? Apple has it pretty down with camera
and printer drivers, can't other companies figure
it out for their own products? Now I know this isn't
a legitimate complaint about 10.1 specifically, but
I feel we're at a point where we can air our beefs
now that the hefty "real" version of 10.1 is out,
and especially about updates that are 10.1 specific.
The Word and Toast betas are comforting to use even
if they aren't at full power or devoid of bugs. You'd
never guess Word was coming out in a matter of weeks
with the way the just-written beta ReadMe tells the
tale. Finally I'd like to keep shouting at Macromedia,
"PLEASE COME OUT WITH DREAMWEAVER AND FIREWORKS FOR
X" ahem. Thank you.
So, let's recap. Things are going well
for the first time in awhile for my iMac's OS lifestyle.
The RAM seems to be appreciated and the new features
are like shiny new toys. Productivity is now only
an issue insomuch as some apps aren't here yet (my
Mac is ready for them finally). Yes, some companies,
Apple included, have some tweaks to make. But some
of my complaints are things that might not change,
for good or ill. I don't know the reasons behind everything,
I just call it like I see it. Everyman and his everymac.
And finally I can say X is ready for everyone.
The .1 truly mattered.
Dean
Browell
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