Siracusa reviews Jaguar

[Craig R. Arko]

The latest installment (http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/02q3/macosx-10.2/macosx-10.2-1.html) of the continuing Ars Technica Mac OS X reviews.

It's long, so plan to allot some time for a full reading.

[dsk]

In my opinion, what Siracusa says about the Menu Extra API is right on the money. It seems really ridiculous of Apple to discourage ANY kind of development, especially as innocuous and potentially useful as Menu Extras.

David

[Jacques]

Siracusa has always had the best Mac OS X observations and reviews. I find his assessments miles ahead of what Mac-only users have come up with..

He has always been a must-read, totally unbiased and thorough - do take the time to read this material!

Jacques

[Phil St. Romain]

I've never really understood his difficulties with the X Finder,as it's always seemed to me that the column view option with configurable toolbar and multiple Finder windows gave it advantages over the OS 9 finder. He also does go on about the metadata issue, and seems to not know that slow window resizing in OS X is not because of the OS, but because many applications use live resizing instead of outline resizing (don't ask me why; not a good idea, imo). Give Eudora or Appleworks in X a try and you'll see the same snappy outline resizing that you find in all OS 9 apps, which would be sludge with live resizing. But all in all, he seemed to acknowledge the improvements being made and was especially impressed with Quartz Extreme.

[Craig R. Arko]

I agree the whacking of the Menu Extras API was a dumb move; I'm grateful Unsanity was able to hack it again at once, but they shouldn't have had to.

John's explantions of QE and Rendezvous for the layman are better than any I've seen elsewhere.

On the UI stuff, I don't obsess on the same things he does (like 9 point Monaco), but some of the Mac old guard would feel better if things worked his way, I'm sure.

I still intend to keep using my paid-for copy of Watson in preference to Sherlock 3 in almost all cases, so I hope Karelia keeps developing the Mac version alongside any Windows port they do.

PS - the new (1.5.5) version of Watson just released is better than ever. Google search is a new tool.