Anyone else a little peeved that we are now forced to run in "Millions" of colors mode in order to see 32-bit icons under OS 9? I know it sort of makes sense, but 8.5 and 8.6 were able to display them in 16-bit (thousands) of colors with some nifty dithering and it was totally fine for most people.

Now we are forced to use Millions and suffer a fairly large performance hit when dragging, scrolling, zooming, etc. The ATI Rage 128 that ships with the G3/G4 seems particularly prone to this slowdown.

In fact, in some casual testing, the Rage128 I have in my Blue 450 G3 is about 50% *SLOWER* than an old ATI XClaim VR (RagePro) installed in the same machine (driving a 2nd monitor) thats also running in millions.

Wierd huh?

Sigh... I guess that's progress!

The icon bit depth problem seems to be a bug. If you select an icon, or give it a label/color, it will switch to thousands. Only unselected, unlabelled icons are 8 bit when the monitor is set to thousands.

An incredibly inconvenient work around is to make a gray (0% saturation) label, and apply it to all files.

Hopefully enough dissatisfaction about this can be shown that Apple will release an update straightaway.

wow, you're right! I didnt even notice that... how strange. Well I'm not going to spend too much time labelling each and every icon on my HD. I will wait for Apple to release a fix, I really hope they do. Millions sucks for most things, especially watching QT movies which are usually optimized to play in thousands of colors.

One of the big features of 8.5 was supposed to be more colorful icons, and now it's largely gone unless you endure a speed hit, assuming you have enough VRAM to support Millions in your preferred resolution.

[This message has been edited by Donald (edited 10-14-1999).]

Hmm... this topic has been quiet for the past few days. Has anyone (developers, etc) heard and news or info about this?? It seems totally strange to me that Apple would ship this OS with such a glaring and obvious bug. There is no mention of it anywhere on their website, nor any explanation in the MacOS 9 Technote.

One interesting thing is that it appears this is an exclusive *Finder* bug, and not an Icon Services bug. I know this because DragThing 2.7 which supports 32-bit icons, still displays them nicely in "Thousands" mode.

I think people should let Apple know that this is a serious bug that they should fix ASAP! I really hate the slowdowns and painful redraws that I now endure when using programs like Netscape, Photoshop, GoLive, etc... but after going out and buying OS 9, I dont want to reinstall 8.6!

Please if anyone has any way to get in touch with Apple about this problem.. it will benefit everyone!

[wlonh]

post away, fellow Mac users:
http://survey.info.apple.com/feedbac...tion=complaint

and use these email addresses too:

leadership@apple.com

sjobs@apple.com

BUT BE RESPECTFUL AND RESPONSIBLE as best you can! please?

Wow, I guess I never thought that people actually used thousands of colors. But then again, for graphics work, millions is the only way to go. Seems like a strange bug to me, but luckily, it has no effect on me... I always run in millions of colors.

In fact, in some casual testing, the Rage128 I have in my Blue 450 G3 is about 50% *SLOWER* than an old ATI XClaim VR (RagePro) installed in the same machine (driving a 2nd monitor) thats also running in millions.

There may be something wrong with your machine. On my G3/400 (Rage 128/16MB), I can detect no speed difference in redraws between Thousands and Millions of colors. I'm running Mac OS 9 with 1152x768 @ 75hz. With graphics work, you pretty much have to run in Millions.

Are you running something crazy like Kaleidoscope?

- Scott

No I dont run Kaleidoscope or anything like that. I run my desktop at 1280 x 1024 so maybe at such high res the Rage128 gets slow, I'm not sure -- I am sure that the difference between Thousands and Millions for me is quite huge...

I think this will affect a LOT of people, esp. those that dont exclusively use their Macs for Photoshop. Any Web designer usually works in Thousands (or even 256) because that is still that standard for the Web.

Virtual PC draws directly into their window, and is noticeably slower in millions than thousands. Any app which must draw directly to the screen should be about 50% slower in millions (16 vs 24 bit).

Thank you for the complaint URL.

[Uncertain]

Check this out...when you take a folder (in millions or thousands) and but it over another folder, the alpha channel doesn't work. The shadow should be translucent. BUT, if you window shade the window to refresh it, it'll work. Another bug to chalk up.

[wlonh]

saw a post on MacFixit homepage Tuesday... they remarked about this 'millions' bit for the first time I have noticed it at that site, and Uncertain posted there too!

Hey that's cool... spread the word and make folks more aware...

and COMPLAIN to APPLE using that link in a previous post and email leadership@apple.com
as well...