From: Jim Witte (jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us)
Date: Mon Feb 23 2004 - 22:51:12 PST
> I wish Apple would do something, because a stable, pretty OS (which
> Panther is not) and thin, light machines not sell computers in a world
IMO (and I have no idea if this would have made ANY economic sense)
Apple should have NeXT (for Jobs, as well as NextStep) AND Be Inc. when
they had the chance.. Now Be is locked up with Palm, never (probably)
to see the light of day as a desktop OS again (and a possible
competitor to MS - I'll never quite forgive DOJ for not noticing this -
that Palm is in effect being as monopolistic as MS - no flames please,
I know it's a stretchy argument but still)
It's sad when I click on a menu in Panther and it *still* takes at
least 0.1 second to pop up. With computers as fast as they are now in
terms of raw Mhz, I expect simple GUI operations to be absolutely
instantaneous. Especially when I do 'sudo fs_usage' and see that the
WindowServer is hitting the cache at *least* 50 times a second!
(Sometimes it hits the disk, which means that my iBook's HD clicks
about once every 30 seconds, no matter what I'm doing). Or the way the
HD clicks every time I wake the machine up. Please - can't they make
an OS that will run completely out of memory for at least a minute?
Yes, yes, I know why all this is. Because this isn't the NOS and
wasn't even built from *scratch* to be a optimized "diskless" OS - it
was based on BSD Unix, which assumes that there will always be a
(preferably big and fast) disk (or RAID) around at all times.. But I
just don't think that'll cut it with todays laptops.. (Well, it
obviously *will*, but I don't like it).
IMO, the iPod is *the* most innovative product to come out of Apple
in the past 5 years. I'm not talking about the style, the concept,
etc. I'm talking about the OS (which Apple didn't even make, although
who knows if/how much they tweaked the Pixo OS - we'll probably never
know). At least they didn't try to build the iPod on a "scaled back"
version of OSX-Cocoa (what a disaster that would have been, unless they
cut out maybe 70% of the Darwin kernal - but I really don't know what
I'm talking about here)
Many times I've thought - if they'd add touch-screen capacity to the
iPod (even with that God-awful small screen), I'd buy it in a
heart-beat. I got closer when people figured out how to run Linux on
it, but with no good input device - except for some strange
scroll-wheel method - see the iPodLinux list for a thread I started on
this, or a USB keyboard (probably chording) - it just isn't worth it.
On the other hand, if they'd put in a TS, there might be a prayer of
porting Rosetta to it (a very weak prayer, from assembly), or some
other HWR algorithm.
But even then, the thing is limited, mainly by the size of the screen
- just like the Palms are.
> Again let me say I think as does $J that most of the real innovation
> to come in personal computing is going to
> be in the software.
Probably true.. If not for Apple, who knows where we'd be. Of
course, one could argue that *someone* would have picked up the Parc
stuff at some point (probably MS) and done something with it. But who
knows if Windows would be any better? Who knows if Apple had picked up
the *right* stuff from Parc. One Newton engineer I talked to said
about that that "Jobs saw the windows, and was blinded to everything
else - the object orientation.." I forget what else he said. Did the
Parc systems use a bytecode system like Smalltalk (or NS)? If they
did, it's strange (not quite the right word), because now (20-odd years
later) bytecode (Java) and OO (Cocoa, Java, C#, etc) are "it" as far as
software hype goes - not that they are necessarily the best, but to
think the concepts have been around for 30-odd years (ever since the
LISP machines of the 60s [garbage collection I think was implemented in
them], and Smalltalk in the 70's [?])..
> You're saying panther is "way" more stable, eye-pleasing and functional
> than Jaguar? I beg to differ.
> 1: Stability has gone down the tubes. I feel like I'm in OS 9, except
I don't know if I'd go *that* far, but I have had a lot of apps quit
unexpectedly (including iChat - though mostly Camino) for no apparent
reason. A lot of other times an app will just refuse to start
(bouceing icon, but nothing else. I need to reinstall the system I
think (always a good thing). The worst thing is, when an app crashes
or you have a KP, at least you have the crash report so you have a
chance at trying to figure out what caused it. If an app just refuses
to start, you have *no* idea why (maybe you could do a fs_usage trace,
or figure out a way to track Cocoa message-passing, but that's only if
it's repeatable, which mine usually aren't).
Panther has a *notorious* bug in the Finder where modifier keys will
stop working unexpectedly (for me, mostly Cmd-O, but sometimes others)
but this doesn't seem to happen in icon view - strange.. I'd think
something as simple as modifier-key processing code wouldn't even be
*affected* by the view mode (maybe they have Cmd-arrow implemented
different, which is the root of the problem), and anyway, shouldn't all
that be layered away down in the bottom of the Finder codebase and not
touched much anymore, exept *very* carefully and tested the hell out of
when it is? Of course, we don't know how much the Finder has or has
not really changed - it's still a Carbon app (strange), so it could
very well be a Carbonized and overly patched version of the OS9 Finder.
Not a clean rewrite (like Path Finder). Of course, even if it *is*
still just a Carbonized version of the OS9 Finder, the key handling
code should *still* be handled at the CoreFoundation level by Carbon
Events (the Finder *does* use Carbon Events, doesn't it? I haven't
bothered to poke..) And in my experience, this modifier-key issue
never comes up in *any* other app (although I think most of the other
apps I use are Cocoa, with the exception of IE and Word, and I'm pretty
sure Word has it's own modifer-key engine)
In praise of Panther, I will say that overall it seems a tad bit
faster than Jaguar, especially on login (but how often do you do that,
if the OS is so stable?), and a bug in the AFP network protocol that
caused a KP was apparently fixed (I think - ask IU's UITS for more -
Jaguar reliably KPs with their CFS system, my Panther iBook over VPN
wireless doesn't)
Jim Witte
jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us
Indiana University CS
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