At 1:49 pm +0200 7/13/02, Johannes Gebauer wrote: >The point I am trying to make is that the so-called backwards >compatibility in Mac Os X is somewhat a little disappointing to >serious users. I am not a programmer, but it seems to me it should >have been possible to better integrate classic into the OS X finder >and appearance, at least.
I too wish everything "just plain worked as before," and there was a lot of new stuff as well. A few months ago I thought I would be the last person to defend OS X too. However, I think that the backward compatibility of OS X is nothing short of amazing. Everyone talks about how "different" OS X is from previous Mac OS's, but it is astounding how close X is to OS 9.x. Even with the GUI contributions from NeXT, putting the Mac operating system user interface on top of BSD Unix was a major chore. Then there was the complete encapsulation of Carbon so that any fully Carbon compliant program would be essentially indistinguishable from a program written to the "native" (though not to BSD) APIs even though it was essentially an OS 8/9.x program. The earliest copy of a Rhapsody (OS X before it became OS X) developer's CD that I show in my CD database is from November of 1997 (it was probably not the first released). Five years or more ago Apple told developers that major changes were in the works and that they were starting to build the basic APIs of Carbon. Everybody lost a few APIs that they thought were essential in the Carbon transition, but most everyone seems to have figured out how to work around those problems. Then there is the "Classic" layer: It doesn't just allow non-Carbon PPC programs to run, it contains a fully functional 68xx0 emulation as well. I just played a hand of the card game Hearts with a program called Hearts v. 0.92, compiled in November of 1988 by Fractal Software; a 68000 program. That's a program that has survived the transition from one CPU (68xx0) and design philosophy (CISC) to a completely different CPU (PPC) and design philosophy (RISC), and from a long series of related Operating Systems (OS 3.x - 9.x) to a cloistered area under a completely different Operating System (OS X Classic). Pretty impressive longevity for a crude hack of a game. Yes, that wasn't a complex and sophisticated music-editing program, but it was an example of an extreme case. Programs that fail under Classic do so because they have played fast-and-loose with the rules. No Problem: Sometimes that is what you have to do to make things work. But, if you do that and you want to survive the changes, you have to think ahead. Developers who weren't re-evaluating the corners that they had cut five years ago had to know that they were flirting with disaster; developers who didn't start Carbonizing at least three years ago had their heads in the sand. And yes, I know that MIDI is broke under Classic and under the latest versions of QuickTime for OS 9.x. The primary purpose of Finale is not MIDI sequencing, and even under the best OS conditions Finale is not a very good choice if what you want is a sequencer rather than a notation program. For all of its bizarre idiosyncrasies I love what Finale allows me to do. But, if it's development lags behind far enough and new users buy other products, it won't matter what I think. Best wishes, -=-Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
