I did get X working though, and it was stable except for some Classic operations. Many of the reasons you listed for going with X appealed to me, but they will have to wait for another computer. Software synths and samplers with very low latency is another promise of X that I hope will come true.
I don't know what happened to my system 9 partition, but it was murder getting it to work again. (I could boot from a CD, but not my master drive.)
Under missing functionality I did miss QuicKeys (although I think they make an X version, but no easy translation of the 100s of macros I use) and I noticed that many of the key commands for programs and macros are taken over by the system anyway. And why can't you drag and drop onto the Dock? This seems like a major oversight! Perhaps a future release will take care of that.
Some of the gimmicks in X can be turned off, such as the animated morphing tricks, but you are right about everything feeling sluggish. When I got back to System 9 it felt like a huge relief to have windows open and close quickly.
System 9 may be dead but it will still be running my "mission critical" apps for at least another year.
-Randolph Peters
Darcy James Argue wrote:
On Thursday, January 23, 2003, at 05:44 PM, Randolph Peters wrote:My weekend experience with Jaguar (OS 10.2.3) is extremely disappointing, however. I got OS X running on my G4 533 MHz machine and was impressed by some of the software written by Apple just for that system. Overall, I find the system is slower than 9.2.2 and with less functionality. (Functionality will improve over time, I'm sure.)What functionality are you missing, specifically? (A genuine question -- I'm just curious.) Also, it's worth pointing out that OS X also has much in the way of increased functionality, which you may or may not have encountered during your weekend "trial run."
OS X is gimmicky and bloated and will require me to get a much faster computer to use it at the level I currently use.I dunno about "gimmicky," but "bloated" is fair, I suppose, especially relative to older hardware. But by that definition, virtually all new software and all new OS's are "bloated."
Finale with MIDI is still hopeless as is Digital Performer.Yup.Really? I've never had that problem. Even back in OS X 10.0, I never had to physically disconnect my SCSI burner (Yamaha 6X). And as of Toast 5.1, it works perfectly in X, so long as I power on the burner before I start up the system. (An annoyance, sure, but a relatively minor one.)Even my SCSI CD burner had to be disconnected.
The worst part of the experience was trying to switch back to my 9.2.2 system partition. It took me a day and a half just to get it running again. In the end I had to backup,reinitialize my hard drive and restore all of my software.Not that it's much consolation at this point, but that probably wasn't necessary. If you have a post-beige machine, and you hold down the "option" key at startup, you *should* have been able to select your OS 9 partition -- unless you'd done something to it to make it unbootable. You could also have booted from an OS 9 Install CD.
I realize that your results will probably vary and that OS X is the future of Macs, but right now the speed hit, and size of the system itself make OS X a worse option than system 9.For someone with an older system, perhaps. For someone with new hardware, absolutely not. (Your 533 Mz G4 is right on the fence -- personally, I'd opt for OS X, but I can understand why it might be too sluggish for your taste.) For instance, dual-processor machines aren't supported at all under OS 9 -- unless you are running one of a handful of dual-optimized Photoshop filters, in OS 9 the second processor is just sitting there doing absolutely nothing. Perhaps you are happy with OS 9's memory management, "cooperative" "multitasking", susceptibility to crashes, lack of integrated MIDI and audio handling, poor selection of web browsers and email clients, etc etc etc -- but I for one find it excruciating to drop back down to OS 9 just so I can use Finale. (And with the recent release of Audiowerk drivers for OS X -- thanks, Emagic! -- Finale is now the only reason I'm still using OS 9.) Finally, it's worth pointing out that OS X "feels" slower than it really is due to poor GUI responsiveness when resizing windows. But it actually *performs* faster in many, many applications -- for instance, web pages render much more quickly in Safari or Chimera than they do in IE for OS 9. Audio filters are faster in Amadeus II under OS X than they are in OS 9. Etc...
I might be in the minority, but I would rather see bug fixes and feature improvements in Finale rather than an OS X version.Yes, I think it's safe to say you're in the minority. Like it or not, OS 9 is dead -- the new 12" and 17" PowerBooks don't even boot into OS 9. And anyone who owns a dual-processor machine would certainly want to be able to take advantage of that hardware when using Finale.
Will we be forced to switch to OS X to be able to use future versions of Finale? Or will there be 2 versions?Coda will almost certainly release a Carbonized version that runs under both OS 9 and OS X. They have a long history of supporting older operating systems -- they continued to release versions of Finale that ran on 68K hardware long after everyone else was shipping PowerPC-only apps. So cool your jets -- I'd be stunned if Fin2004 didn't support OS 9. Besides, at this point, Coda are *way* overdue to get an OS X version out the door. When the software you're trying to sell doesn't even run on the latest hardware, you have a big problem.
- Darcy
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