Progress Schmogress!!!

[Peatoire]

I work in a busy repro environment and have been running osx now fully for a couple of years.

The other day I was forced to use quark 4 in os9 as the fonts were playing up, it was then that I noticed the 64Mb Quark file that took over a minute to open on a 2Ghz DP G5 with 2Gb RAM, took just 10 seconds to open in quark 4 on a 866mhz G4.
and the whole os was so snappy and a dream to navigate, it's very easy to forget this when OSX gets stuffed down our throats.

Now I know we all like feature rich OS but from my point of view a snappy os is key to doing my job well and I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the osx system if it still takes me 5 mins to shutdown after having all the Adobe app open for a day.

All this from a system written from the ground up. If I save a 1Gb eps file in Illustrator, it's forever chugging around large chunks of memory from the hard drive and never seems to recover without a restart.

THIS IS NOT REAL PREGRESS APPLE!
I feel they are deserting the professional users while catering to the home market too much.
Rant over

[CAlvarez]

So load OS 9.

[hayne]

All this from a system written from the ground up.
Part of the problem might be that the apps that you are using have not been written "from the ground up" for OS X.

It may also be true that in some application domains it is harder to write a program for OS X that is as responsive as the equivalent app in OS 9. Much more is going on in OS X. The app has much less control over the machine.

[voldenuit]

Like Carlos said, if you feel that OS 9 still better serves your workflow, by all means, go for it !

OS X is a completely new start and while it has some strong arguments in its favor, nothing beats a well thought-out and carefully debugged system.

[Peatoire]

I'd love to but the customers artwork dictate's our os. Adobe brings out these demanding new apps (which are written specifically for osx) enticing the designers with new functionality but the repro end get's the *** end if the stick as we're the ones lugging huse files around under pressure. It just annoys me that speed takes a back seat over functionality. I suppose market forces rule but it's still a pain.

[hayne]

Adobe brings out these demanding new apps (which are written specifically for osx)
What I was referring to above is the fact that most of the Adobe apps are ports of the OS 9 versions. Most of the code is from those older versions.
That's part of the reason why Adobe isn't releasing an Intel-Mac version of Photoshop etc until sometime next year - there is a lot of work to get the programs running under the current software development tools recommended by Apple.

[Peatoire]

Point taken Hayne. I'll certainly be intersted to see how CS3 performs on the intel macs. I wonder if they will ship two versions or make it Universal.

[AHunter3]

OS 9 gets dissed a lot, and it was actually a great OS.

Yeah, no preemptive multitasking, no protected memory (in fact, the memory scheme from hell, to be sure). But aside from having its ancestral feet in a one-app-at-a-time era, it was damn sophisticated, the culmination of a string of Mac OS's that came before.

And yes, (as any user of VirtualPC can attest), preemptive multitasking can generate quite a performance hit for an app that previously got to hog processor cycles when it was in the foreground!

The memory architecture issue is indefensible and totally marked OS 9 as an OS of the past by the last half-decade of the 20th Century, but cooperative multitasking worked a lot better than it is given credit for.

OS X only really overtook OS 9 in overall usability in the latter builds of 10.2, in my opinion, and there are still things it does better than OS X even as of 10.4.

(Well, no huge surprise there, there are probably things that System 4 did better than OS 9. When was the last time you switched startup disks / operating system copies on-the-fly without bothering to reboot? Even genuine progress tends to have that "two steps forward, one step back" aspect to it...)

[Peatoire]

interstesting post Hunter, I suppose with such a mamoth undertaking that was osx it will be baby steps to get back to the polished os9 for certain aspects of the os. I only hope that it will get the chance to get it's full potential realised as an os without the software developers at Adobe etc taking up the slack by creating hugely demanding apps just as it starts to get to the efficiency that os9 had..