MacOS X Public Beta preview

Bij Ars Technica heeft men een uitgebreid artikel geschreven waarin de Mac OS X Public Beta eens onder de loep genomen wordt. Zoals de naam al zegt is deze beta van Apple's nieuwste besturingssysteem beschikbaar voor iedereen die er $29.95 voor over heeft. De software wordt onder andere getest op een G4 Cube met 1.5GB RAM (wááát? Juist ja, 1.5GB), maar het systeem lijkt toch nog langzaam te reageren, zeker ten opzichte van MacOS 9:

Beta's UI is generally less responsive than Mac OS 9 on the same hardware. The worst offenders were mentioned in the previous section: opaque scrolling of antialiased text and opaque window resizing. But almost everything suffers some sort of speed hit. The slowdown may be below most users' threshold of perception, but speaking as someone who's very proficient with a mouse and keyboard, I regularly found myself out-pacing the screen redraw during what should be routine activities: band-selecting files, moving files, typing in text fields, selecting text, etc. These things are lightning fast in Mac OS 9, mostly because of reduced visual feedback: gray rectangles vs. transparent fields for band-selecting, gray rectangles vs. opaque window resizing, and so on. It's no fun waiting for an OS to "catch up to you." Bottom line: OS X Beta slowed me down. Your mileage may vary.[break]Dit heeft natuurlijk alles te maken met de wel heel erg gelikte interface van MacOS X. Velen hebben ons al verteld hoe mooi dat allemaal is, maar Ars Technica belicht hier ook de andere zijde: het mag er dan wel zo mooi uitzien, maar is het ook functioneel? Vooral over het centreren van de finder (werkt als de taakbalk in Windows) is de reviewer slecht te spreken. Hierdoor verschuiven programma's steeds van plaats. Ook andere elementen zorgden ervoor dat de werkervaring op MacOS X niet optimaal was:[/break]Each time I've sat down to write a Mac OS X review, from the DP2 article right up to this one, I've attempted to create the entire article while working inside Mac OS X. So far I still haven't made it all the way though.

Initially, this was due to problems in the Classic environment that prevented me from running "legacy" versions of apps like Photoshop and IE. But with Beta, Classic is more than solid enough to run an editor, a browser, and Photoshop. There's even a relatively stable Carbon version of IE. But the problems that I experienced trying to work on this article in OS X Beta were not related to the applications I used, but rather to the way the OS facilitated the interaction between the various parts of my task. The Finder in particular was an incredible thorn in my side, with its schizophrenic window behavior and its always-too-large windows and fonts. Shuffling around tons of raw screenshots, compressed image slices, HTML files, and browser windows was much more work (and much less efficient) than performing the same tasks in Mac OS 9.