DrunkenBlog

MacOS X Panther (Redux)

So I screwed up this evening, and told someone I'd post some 10.4 stuff last night... which, considering I got home at 4:30am and the sheets are calling, just isn't within the realm of possibility at the moment because, well, the pink elephants are telling me its not a good idea.

However something a few people have also asked me about lately is why I dub 10.3 an "edition" release, which is well within the realm my abilities at the moment, mostly because I knew I'd summed it up ages ago which meant I could recycle old words to feed the blog. This is, as you'll recall, blog gold.

If you're not aware, an 'edition' title is generally something that's highly evolutionary. I.E., lets say Acme Co. releases a game which sells well. They'll often come out with ways to keep revenue rolling in as they keep working on the next version to keep the natives happy, usually in the form of 'expansion packs' which might include extra game art, models, or many more levels. These generally don't alter game play itself, but provide extra enjoyment and mileage from the engine.

When Acme Co. finally brings the game over to the mac 3 years later when Apples' consumer hardware can actually run their game (yea, that was low, but hey), they've pretty much ready to release their new version on the PC. But hey, they can still squeeze some more 'free' sales out of the gaming base by packaging the game and all of the expansion levels for a smaller fee, which usually gets an "edition" name. Think gold, silver, or my personal fav: platinum. The good news is that the macs generally get the "edition" version due to economic and marketing reasons.

To be honest the last paragraph doesn't factor into this at all, it just comes to mind and gets up my crawl. The 2nd to last paragraph is really where the meat is: I view 10.3 as an expansion pack, or edition, of 10.2.

The below are the words I was after to recycle, which are from October 23, 2003... right after 10.3 started shipping and hitting peoples' doorsteps.

There's a lot of stuff in this update, but few general across the board wowsers beyond the speed increase. IE, font book is going to help a lot of people out, but a lot of consumers won't care. VPN support is cool, and if you need it you'll be happy. If you live in the terminal, you'll be happier still (primarily due to the speed increase for text).

So your take on the value of this upgrade beyond the speed increase is going to in large part be tied to what you use and what you don't, and whether or not it's been updated in panther. IE, like it or not, a lot of the iApps are an integral part of what apple considers to be the OS development, and if you don't use them, you might feel a little left wanting.

For a lot of people they're going to have a system that feels a bit faster, has some new coloring and a new messed up finder, and they're going to be left wondering where their $129 went. This is an 8.1 to 8.5 upgrade, not a 10.1 to 10.2 upgrade.

That basically summed it up, but then I realized I was trawling through several pages that had been posted to those lists which had nice little bullet points which I could do a find a replace on to turn them into an HTML-formatted list, so why the hell not post them consider 10.3 is on its way out. Plus I did say I was going to throw it up on my blog, so there's one promise I can knock out, even if its almost a year late.

Do remember that it's basically a quick compilation of notes I jotted down while I was playing with 10.3, then hurriedly cut and pasted the ones that would be applicable to the various lists I post to one morning after and I never did get around to removing wordage like "ass clowns".

And, you know, remember it's from October of 2003, and some of you who are on the same listservs prolly remember seeing this and have it archived in your inbox, so feel free to play at home and test my prophet-factor.


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Old message begins here
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>>> I read one report that screen drawing is slow
>>> on non Quartz Extreme machines :-(
>>
>> Um, tell you at midnight? :) I have like a ~10 page
>> report i can put up after i get back from the bar.
>
> Um, you're going to be coherent then? Should we worry
> about the accuracy of post-bar reporting?


So its the next morning, and yep, it was pretty unrealistic. I'm in dire need of a bloody mary at the moment, and then I should call my friends and ask if any of these #'s found in my pocket are worth calling back. It's awful- I'm terribly charming when I'm drunk, but can never remember it, and as such have no clue how to impliment it while sober. *sigh*

The good news is that there are going to be about 100 of these going up like there will be on my site... mine needs a lot of work, it's literally 10 pages of straight text of rants & raves on different areas. I'll slap it all together, clean it up, remove terms like "ass clowns", add in screen shots & such and put it on my site as time allows.

Since some people have already had it shipped, I suppose that means my NDA has been lifted, so here are the cliffnotes, tested on a 667MHz Powerbook (QE enabled, but only 16meg vram, 512 of ram), 400MHz iMac (128megs of ram, no QE), 500MHz ibook (384 ram, no QE), 1.8GHz G5 (2gigs of ram, QE), updated for build 7B85. Clean install on 2 machines, upgrade on the imac, just to do a worse case scenario.

• The speed increases are pretty much real. IE, I never really bought into the jaguar speed increases to the extent that others seemed to on most machines. Hell, there were mac idiots spouting that it was now as fast as OS9. Sure, on QE-able machines you saw a boost in specific areas, and yes of course it was faster... but I swear half of it was placebo and the ass-clowns proclaiming it was as fast as OS9 were just in their own world. Not so in 10.3, it really is a lot faster and people will be pleasantly surprised, especially if they have the RAM.
• About 2/3 of the speed increases are real, and 1/3 are smoke and mirrors, depending on the type of machine you're on... but they make everything "feel" faster, so I'll take it. IE, when you snap down a menu and let go, in 10.1 & Jaguar there would be about a 5 frame animation of the menu fading out quickly... if you hada slow machine or yours was busy doing other things, you could literally watch it frame by frame sometimes. That animation has been cut to ~1 frame, so everything just gets done faster. Same for sheets- it swoops out now, which can be a little odd (kinda cool tho) but sneakily, it requires ~3 actual frames of animation to do it this way, so it seems a lot snappier.

  The windowserver seems to be a lot faster at not updating things that don't need to be updated, which helps across the board- ie, if you have a progress bar, it's just updating that actual area, not the whole window. As a whole, the window server is using a lot less CPU no matter what you're doing, so I'll take it.

  There are conspicious areas, such as hiding the dock and showing it... not really faster whatsoever. But menu's, etc even on a non-QE machine are much, much snappier. But there are lots of areas like this: ie, background window titles are no longer transluscent, which i'm sure helps switching apps/windows a lot. Application launches seem to be much faster across the board, but most especially with cocoa apps. Under a high load, the machine is much more responsive, so I'm assuming they got some good scheduling enhancements with the new freeBSD. Application switches are a LOT faster.
  

• There are going to be ~10,000 posts of people freaking out because TOP uses so much CPU and is their system broken... read the man page. Lots of BSD update goodness, but they're going to confuse some people... as they don't seem to be stock GNU-current, but they will stop a lot of people from automatically installing their own. IE, du can now give human-readable sizes, but it does some really weird stuff... lots of empty entries... I checked the man page, and checked the commands I use on my linux boxes, but for example, $ du -hs ./* gives the correct entries, but lots of really weird du: garbage entries. Odd.
  
• XCode is cool, but beyond the new tools... people are starting to wonder if apple really has its heart in being the only people/company maintaining, improving, and supporting Obj-C. Not a whole lot new there, besides additions to xcode itself... not a whole lot has changes with cocoa itself, except a lot of optimizing.
  
• Quicktime! Major changes have been done to quicktime, to make it thread safe... unfortunately that doesn't necessarily extend to the apps themselves if they aren't written to take advantage of it. IE, you're not going to have 2 player windows open exporting 2 different movies. Sadness, all modal here. But, in exporting a 3.6gig movie, things didn't crawl as much as they did in jaguar. Pixlet seems pretty worthless outside of a specialized use like ichat. While exporting i was able to play a movie in the finder preview without weirdness, etc. It's defaulted itself to playing your flash movies in safari too, which is going to cause no end of trouble.
  
• 10.3 wants a lot of ram as a whole. It's kinda been a joke that apple software is bloated and eats ram like candy, but this is kind of ridiculous. As an example, i tried it on a 128 machine that had been running 10.2. It is faster on it, as far as menu & windowing performance goes... but it is swapping non stop in light usage (mail & safari), whereas this wasn't the case with 10.2. Just logs of constant chugging. I've been "stress testing" the finder, working with thousands of files, and right now it's using 110megs of real ram. Borky.

  I'm not going to go into a whole big primer on how OSX handles ram, but, well, this version is just a lot more aggressive about caching everything & anything. I've found myself often rebooting after a few days just to keep it from going into swap hell if I have to do something large, or if I've been using photoshop heavily.

  Something is going on with how panther handles SWAP. I'm not quite sure whats going on yet, but it eats disk like Tom Arnold at a buffet. Use this on a space-constrained machine at your peril.
  

• Most major software I've used (carbon) seems to work ok, ie office, photoshop, etc. There are random issues: an example would be jpgview... opens and views everything just fine, but if you try to delete a file, it'll hang... possibly due to finder hooks changing. Mouse drivers are a no no until they're updated, that includes USB overdrive, MS's, etc. Don't even think of using anything APE, including dock detox.
  
• Speaking of the finder: IMHO, it's 3 steps forward and one step back. It _is_ a ton faster, although a lot of it again is smoke & mirrors. IE, in 10.2, if you had 1,000 files selected and hit move to trash, you'd have to sit and wait for quite awhile... and all you were waiting for was for the finder to get done with moving each file individually, updating the screen, etc. Stupid. In 10.3, it moves all the files, then updates the screen. Instant.

  I stress tested it pretty hard... using directories with 23k+ files. Did good, and as a whole is much, much faster in column view. List view is still pathetic. Uber pathetic. I am pretty sure sorting by kind is even slower in this version, but really, as a whole it is an order of magnitude faster & more responsive if you're using column view. But it isn't all peaches & cream, I've seen a lot of problems creep up, such as hanging during larger file moves, or just getting lost. IE, you'll move 400 files to the trash, and it'll do it, but the progress dialog will just stay there spinning. You can continue to use the finder, creating files, deleting them, and it'll just hang out. Threading is still pretty lame, IE, I had a file with 5,000 items i tried to list by kind, and it was taking forever & a day... locks out the whole finder while you're doing it.

  There is going to be some screaming though. Wait till you get a load of how they've implemented labels- you can literally see the designer going "you know, if i showed them ALL right there, they could click on em right away" and hence, you have a 4 pixel space to hit while moving horizontally. It's just stupid. Like asshat stupid. Apple seems to have given up on the concept of muscle memory... if these had been a menu item that swooped out, it wouldn't be an issue. As it is, you are in serious hunt & peck territory, and again with "open with". Open with in the contextual menu is fast as hell, BUT, things like "archive x" and "copy x" include the whole name of what you have selected, and if it's a long name, the contextual menu can get HUGE, meaning you can't just swoop down to move to trash, as it's moved across the screen from where you thought it'd be.

  It does recognize OS9 labels, though, which kinda shocked me some. I found all these files showing up colored from years ago, which made me laugh. :)

  Unfortunately they are obviously pushing column view hardcore, but aren't really improving it much. If i HAVE to look at the stupid toolbar to get the sidebar, at least let me have a way to order column view's output, by size, name, etc. No such luck.

  There a bunch of other bugginess I've seen, some of it major, some of it just cosmetic. It is much more wintel-ish, which is going to piss some people off. The side bar is actually nice, especially with the save/open, but again, buggy as all hell. Lots of "1.0 feel" things... ie, you're not going to be having directories hold their column widths reliably.

  As an example, if you change the icon on a folder more than once, you are prolly gonna have real problems having it show up in the sidebar, you'll just get a generic, but it'll show up fine in the dock. You have to go through a rigamarole to get it to work at that point: move old one from sidebar, rename current folder, create new folder, add icon, move stuff, delete old folder, THEN add it. Weird.

  The one place I've noticed where the finder is slower in 10.3 than 10.2? Previewing a non-pdf file, whether it be a .jpg, .mov, etc. Just much slower, this was pretty instant for me in 10.2, and isn't in 10.3. Of course, in 10.3 it will now preview a .psd file, which is pretty cool. And there is something going on where if you have a movie selected in column view with preview turned on, the computer emits a whine. I haven't been able to track down as to whether this is coming from the speakers or hard drive constantly seeking or something, as when I became aware of it I only had portables handy.
  

• Expose is ok, but feels like a 1.0 thing again. I'm not a good person to judge this, because 9/10 out of ten it just doesn't suit how I work. I use something called virtual desktop, which is an app i've donated time/UI work on. In an effort to give expose a chance, I didn't use it for two weeks and went expose only. The first thing that strikes you is that it is USABLE, especially on QE machines, but even on lower-end machines. It's really impressively fast for what it does, and they let you bind it's functionality to a lot of stuff (including ~5 mouse buttons). VRAM is important though, especially if you have a higher-res display.

  Here's pretty much the main problem- it's meant to solve the issue lots of overlapping windows & apps, and it does so, but it doesn't do it in a really efficient manner... it gets you about half of the way there. I hope it'll be improved, and that i'll find something like VT unnecessary at some point. As an example, lets say you have 10 mail windows up, and you want to switch between them. Normally you'd cycle through them using apple+~, which if you have 5 windows up might take between 1-4 key presses, with your hands never leaving the keyboard. Takes about 1 second. With expose, you hit the button, mouse over to see the title of the window you want, then click it... takes a long longer, and you actually have to sit and think... just slows everything down. IF apple + ~ was remapped while you were exposing documents to allow you to select the window you want and see their titles, I'd be a lot more excited. You also have the problem where it just sort of seems to assume you'll be looking at distinct windows or images. You don't want to see what happens when you have 10 slashdot windows open and 10 html windows open. Some sort of option to always display the title, or even to "crop" the window that is thumbnailed instead of scaling it down to a pretty thumbnail might be in order... it needs some real UI testing to get rid of that v1.0 feature feel. Having to run your mouse over all of those to find the one you want really, really defeats the purpose.

  I have found some nice uses for it, IE, in photohshop i'll often have 20 seperate images i've pulled up that I'm using as layers, etc... being able to hit F10 or a mouse button and have them all of photoshop's windows show up to be selected is pretty nice, especially because i usually have the mouse/trackpad already in my hand and they're images, so it's easy to spot what you want. I've noticed some weirdness with it, IE, exposing all documents/apps and then trying to cycle through them (not a good idea) has at various times left me with a messed up grayed out screen till i hit expose again twice.

  The people who I think are going to love it are those who don't, in general, work faster than their computer, and have problems remembering where things are in their head while they're working. It should be interesting- I'm looking forward to seeing how other developers improve it. It doesn't play very well with VT though, so I'd avoid it.
  

• System profiler is now ugly as sin, but all the stats are selectable to copy & paste. Disk utility is cool, and allows you to enable journaling on all your volumes, but has combined disk image and burning with it... it feels a bit schitzo. Activity monitor is uber-cool, very fast, and very low on resource usage. Surprisingly customizable.
  
• In an effort to clean up system preferences, some things are moved to places that just don't make much sense. You'll see what I mean when you go hunting for them. I don't know why, but maybe it's all the dark and light graduated bars... but "coon" seems like a much more applicable name than panther for some reason.
  
• Safari is much, MUCH MUCH smoother in general, and smaller fonts are much more readable. It seems to be much more threaded, by looking at it's stands (it's got 9 threads open right now) and opening new tabs in the background is a ton smoother.
  
• General UI changes are pretty sparse, and you can pretty much see em all on apple's site or other places around the web. No real surprises. Foreground windows have a dark graduated bar, background windows have the muted pinstripe, including the menu bar. Helps separate things out quite a bit. Toolbars just look dorky, it's nice to show the item selected, but the bar across the bottom (such as in system prefs) separates it from what you're looking at and just makes it look as though they couldn't come up with something prettier in time to ship. Labels, by and large, look pretty dork- except when they are selected and you get a colored circle around the directory icon. Metal is used so much, which I suppose isn't the end of the world, but in many cases just feels inconsistent. You can tell which teams worked on which apps. IE, the calculator now feels like this bloated, fisher price thing, but the DVD player feels much more compact, and i like it even though it's metal... it only has a nice thin metalic bar.

  The finder wastes a huge amount of space, as does the new quicktime player. It's prolly the worst-looking quicktime player they've put out. The new tabs actually work ok, but you're going to see some apps look REALLY funky until they are updated to take panther in mind... and having the "box" a darker color works in general in helping to separate out distinct areas, so you don't have a sea of pinstripes, and is a little more windows-ish.

  The dock seems to do a much better job of caching items, so menu's pop up a lot faster after you've already traversed them. Otherwise, not much new there whatsoever, although CPU usage seems a bit reduced when an app bounces the icon, but god it would have been nice to have an option to tell the dock to never, ever bounce. Hiding/minimizing seems no faster.

  There is ONE change that might make a lot of people's lives easier when it comes to the dock. In the past, when you dragged 100 items to an app to open with it, the dock would have a habit of shifting icons around. It will only do this now if you are dragging an app. If you're dragging .jpg's, etc, it will ONLY shift icons if you are dragging them to the right-hand side. If you're dragging them to an app to open, the icons stay put. Gonna save some people some hassle there.

  I actually like the new alt+tab functionality, although I have suspect it's just to be able to show off the high-res icons, as 99% of the time people never see them in their full glory. Before, the dock would pop up if minimized, and now it stays hidden and you can still change apps... and it's very, very fast for what it does. It's just plain impressive.
  

• Oddly enough, 10.3 is about text... a boatload of the speed increase is simply due to text being alot faster, both in carbon & cocoa apps. This affects everything, from typing to scrolling to tableviews (such as your email client). It was dog slow before this, and while not uber fast, will in most cases not have you ranting. Fonts are much more readable at smaller sizes, such as a 9.0 lucida grande on a flat panel. I especially like how the finder handles it, it stretches the font "down" just a tad, so you have a better look at the icon, and the text is more readable than i would have thought. Seems to be a specific hack. In fact, there is so much new stuff in regards to text that I think new users are going to get wigged out at just how complex any sort of text control panel is.
  
• Window resizing is still pretty poor, but a bit better. Scrolling is MUCH MUCH MUCH better, but still not near where it should be.
  
• OMFG, PDF's are so fucking fast. If you have a lot of PDF's, such as ebooks, then you know the horror of them in past OSX releases. Here was an OS that did nothing but talk up PDF, but when it actually got into bed, it was, shall we say, a bit premature. You'd accidently select a PDF in the finder, or open one in preview, and go make a cup of coffee. Fear no more, opening large ebooks in preview is well, fast & usable. Even 50-meg, chaptered books are just such an order of magnitude faster.
  
• There's a lot of stuff in this update, but few general across the board wowsers beyond the speed increase. IE, font book is going to help a lot of people out, but a lot of consumers won't care. VPN support is cool, and if you need it you'll be happy. If you live in the terminal, you'll be happier still (primarily due to the speed increase for text). So your take on the value of this upgrade beyond the speed increase is going to in large part be tied to what you use and what you don't, and whether or not it's been updated in panther. IE, like it or not, a lot of the iApps are an integral part of what apple considers to be the OS development, and if you don't use them, you might feel a little left wanting.

  For a lot of people they're going to have a system that feels a bit faster, has some new coloring and a new messed up finder, and they're going to be left wondering where their $129 went. This is an 8.1 to 8.5 upgrade, not a 10.1 to 10.2 upgrade.

  IE, Mail is a lot faster. But if you don't use iMail, who cares? Same for iChat, Fontbook, and the list goes on... a lot of people could very well feel they're paying $130 for a speed increase and a new finder. You're going to see a lot of bitching one way or another about it, and in all honesty, both camps have good points.
  

• In one of Apple's biggest ass-hate moves for awhile, they've removed the internet control panel from system preferences completely, and made it all about the .mac. It's horrible, you are going to see so much bitching about this is just isn't even funny, and it's completely justified unless I'm missing something. Get ready for a flame war between people with common sense and the apologists.

  Before, if you wanted to change your default email reader, you'd simply go there, select it, and be done. Guess where that preference has been moved? To MAIL. That's right, to change your default reader, you have to startup mail, enter in bogus account information, go to it's preferences and change it.

  Where did they move the place to change your default web browser? That's right, Safari. This is just ass-hat clowning that is going to hurt their name, sure some people might open up and play with the new mail that wouldn't have before, bug egh it really sucks IMHO and isn't a good sign of what may be to come. They SAY it's because it makes more sense for every app to implement this themselves, which of course no app has done yet, and of course the reasons they gave for why every app should implement this on their own has been completely contradicted by other things they've added into the system preferences.
  

• Don't even think about touching FileVault until there is some real experience and a couple of updates out. This uses sparse encrypted images, meaning that they grow as your need for space grows. Anyone who has been following these things knows they are Trouble. Fixed-size encrypted images are fine, but using sparse images is akin to dropping your kids off with Michael Jackson. One good crash while you're writing and they are corrupted, and there is currently no way to recover one. Just don't do them unless you really know the consequences.

  I really, really can't believe Apple is just throwing this feature in without more stress testing. There is going to be a huge support problem here until this is fine tuned. Just trust me on this, and avoid it for now. It's right up there with the horrific FTP support in the finder in 10.2. Pretend it's not even there.
  

• It's badly, badly in need of an update. I've officially dubbed this release "punter" instead of Panther, because you get the feeling that they got close enough to see the end goal but just couldn't get there for some reason, so just kicked it off and hoped they'd get as far down the field as they could.

  Most people I know are really surprised this has shipped, and didn't go through at least one more round of testing. It's a great build, but there are a LOT of issues and I really think this will be a Q&A nightmare for Apple. IE, printing has some real issues. I couldn't for the life of me get any of my printers to work correctly the first time without selecting, trying to print, then rebooting. Every so often, nothing will make it print except a reboot... even after oh, two days of extremely light usage (email and web for about an hour a day). Firewire is considered to be... problematic.

  Airport has been especially troublesome for myself and some others- it's dead to me. Nothing doing, just can't keep a good signal, and is constantly cutting out. It worked fine for about 2 days with this build, then just started cutting out. Extremely frustrating, and I lost 6 hours trying to trouble shoot, reinstalling 10.2 to make sure it wasn't hardware related, etc... I predict 10.3.1 will be out within a month. I do know there were some major changes for airport in this upgrade to bring it up to spec with the standard, but egh. Booting from 10.2.. airport works fine.

  On the machine I upgraded and didn't do a clean install on, i had a severe moment of Panic. It wouldn't let the main user log in, kept saying they had the wrong password. So, so not good. Logged in as a different user, tried to change that person's password... still not recognized. Ran disk permissions, and suddenly it was... just not a good thing.
  

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    June 12, 2004, at 06:08 AM