Universal GUI (was Re: HIG...)

[Richard Gaskin]

curry wrote:

> Open and Save dialogs are a mess. (At least on 10.1, has it been
> improved?) There are also a hundred little clashing things here and
> there throughout the system.

As annoying as it was to have to pay for the beta releases called "10.0" and
"10.1", v10.2 ("Jaguar") is at last a product-quality release, a significant
improvement over previous versions in nearly every respect.

The UI has been toned down from "clown exploded on your monitor" to
something that approaches being attractive.  The menus have gone from being
unreadably transparent to almost as readable as we had for 15 years prior.
Transparency of inactive windows has also been reduced, so you can almost
discern the layer order of those windows in the new version.

While no version of OS X seems to have sufficient computational horsepower
to calculate the hit region of a grow box reliably, they did speed up nearly
everything else.  The Finder is faster, the Open and Save dialogs are less
teeth-gnashingly slow, and most importantly boot time of the Classic layer
is almost cut in half, a critical feature for an OS that otherwise thumbs
its nose at backward compatibility (ah, how nicely my Win95 apps are still
running under XP).

Tip:  hide Classic apps when you're not using them.  Quartz and Quickdraw
work so very differently that native apps are horribly slow when they have
to draw on top of Classic apps.

All in all, I can't recommend Jaguar enough if you're doing OS X deployment.
It's a drag that we had to pay $360 for it ($120 X 3 releases), but it's
cheaper than buying a new machine (I'm frankenmacing mine anyway until Apple
becomes price-competitive; accellerator prices are good and getting better
with each new Mac release, which should hold me until Apple resumes interest
in marketshare, which shareholders are demanding happen soon).

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
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