[chasnhisimac]

There are a few misconceptions on the lists about the multitasking. There are also a few things that Apple messed up on when they made OSX.
To start, Apple should separate the network connection managing to another app other than the finder. The spinning wheel is a frequent occurance because the finder manages the connections to fileservers and thus is tied to the activity of the file sharing. I'm not an expert, but it sounds like the finder needs more multithreading... multitasking within the application. No idea why apple wouldn't have spent more time with that.

The speed issues that we're seeing in OSX are definitely an issue of how well the programmer programmed his/her app. Nothing is the same across the board. In some apps the menu bar can lock the responsiveness of the GUI (not necessarily what the apps is doing, just what it displays). Some windows stop what they are doing or just stop displaying what they are doing when you click on them and drag (exp. copy in the finder, drag and it freezes the progress bar even though it continues copying). Take IE vs. OmniWeb. I am very impressed in the speed difference and general responsiveness compared to IE5.1. Who knows if it is because IE is carbon and Omni is cocoa.

Dispite it's flaws... you have to love the ability to telnet in even if the entire GUI becomes unresponsive and start killing stuff till you regain control, or for that matter just force quite the app without worry of an impending crash.

While OSX may not be up the the speed of WinNT, it does share some of the same common problems. Having a quicktime movie stutter while genie-ing a window is just an example of the computer sharing processor time probably more or less evenly between the two processes. This is both good and bad. It is definitely good for servers,etc but it is not good for things like Quake where you want to computer to give all its power to doing ONE thing. This is the reason that game developers still embrace Win98/ME over WinNT because NT's multitasking is too good and too willingly gives other unimportant background apps processor time while playing the game and thus lowering performance. Win98/ME however don't feature as good of multitasking and give Quake all the resources they have. So the misconception is that OSX multitasking is bad.... I don't think that it is bad, you just have to get used to the way it manifests itself. OS9.1 will probably hold the speed advantage for a while because whatever you are running in front gets ~100% computing power instead without sharing for other processes. Personally I'll give up some time to open a window as long as my email checks/downloads/file transfers keep going in the background.

OSX rocks! Lets just demand higher quality software coding!

-chas

[Brass]

Doesn't most UNIX multitasking allow processes to be given a a priority code? As such low priority processes don't get as much CPU time as high priority ones.

Does Mac OS X (or Darwin) support this? If so, is there a priority which allows a processor to completely dominate the CPU? This could be good for some situations... especially if the application asked the user before invoking highest priority... something like, "Take all CPU cycles? (WARNING: This will not allow any other application to continue until this job is finished)".

[foobars]

Originally posted by chasnhisimac:
There are a few misconceptions on the lists about the multitasking. There are also a few things that Apple messed up on when they made OSX.
To start, Apple should separate the network connection managing to another app other than the finder. The spinning wheel is a frequent occurance because the finder manages the connections to fileservers and thus is tied to the activity of the file sharing. I'm not an expert, but it sounds like the finder needs more multithreading... multitasking within the application. No idea why apple wouldn't have spent more time with that.

You're exactly right. The Finder handles too much and needs to be threaded better. Unfortuneatly Apple decided to make the Finder a CARBON app so it can't take advantage of OSXs great multithreading handling. Stupid Apple.

[Scott_H]

Carbon apps can thread as well as Cocoa ones can.

[moki]

Originally posted by foobars:
You're exactly right. The Finder handles too much and needs to be threaded better. Unfortuneatly Apple decided to make the Finder a CARBON app so it can't take advantage of OSXs great multithreading handling. Stupid Apple.

There's something I really am having a hard time understanding. Apple has this awesome object oriented programming framework in Cocoa, and they have a Finder-esque program called "Workspace" from the OpenStep-days done already...

...but then they decide "nah, let's rewrite the whole Finder as a PowerPlant carbon application". Why on earth did they decide to eschew Cocoa and the code they had already in favor of writing the MacOS X Finder in PowerPlant/Carbon?

Do they really expect developers to take the time to learn Cocoa (which Apple has been hyping for the last few years) if they won't "Eat their own dog food"? Does anyone have any insight into this situation?

[Gametes]

They had to bring some nontrivial app over in Carbon, to demonstrate its viability as a development framework.
Why AppleWorks, iMovie, iTunes, and, oh, basically every Apple app (since they are all Carbon) isn't enough to prove this is beyond me.
As for the Cocoa thing: here too they have plenty of examples: Mail, Project Builder, OmniWeb (nonApple but still), etc to prove that Cocoa is great.

Hopefully the Finder will be Cocoa by years end. Maybe it'll be the centerpiece of OS XI?

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[me]

Apple IS eating their own dog food! Mail.app and many other utility programs in OS X are Cocoa based. However Apple also had to prove that Carbon was up to snuff, so they wrote the finder in carbon to prove it is a robust environment. Too bad really, a Cocoa finder would probably perform much better.

[moki]

Originally posted by me:
Apple IS eating their own dog food! Mail.app and many other utility programs in OS X are Cocoa based. However Apple also had to prove that Carbon was up to snuff, so they wrote the finder in carbon to prove it is a robust environment. Too bad really, a Cocoa finder would probably perform much better.

Well, Mail.app is certainly cocoa, but it was also based on an existing cocoa version of Mail.app from the OpenStep days. I'm a bit confused as to why they didn't do the same thing with the Workspace/Finder?

Are there examples of any *new* apps that Apple has written in Cocoa? Or are they all updates/adaptations of older OpenStep apps (for which the code was already in Cocoa/OpenStep)?

[fmalloy]

A well-designed OS and well-designed apps should make full motion video very smooth regardless of the CPU load. I remember a demo (yes, it was a demo but still believable) of the BeOS showing multiple movies playing at the same time, two browser pages loading, and a 3-D cube was rotated with videos rendered on the faces all in real time!

And all this on a measly PowerPC 603e.

We have huge CPU resources with the G3 and G4 processors today, make no mistake. Jerky quicktime videos shouldn't be acceptable.

I expect Apple to make huge improvements in performance throughout the year as soon as Steve Jobs lets up a little on the developers and gives them some breathing room.

OS X has huge potential, that's for sure.

[fmalloy]

A well-designed OS and well-designed apps should make full motion video very smooth regardless of the CPU load. I remember a demo (yes, it was a demo but still believable) of the BeOS showing multiple movies playing at the same time, two browser pages loading, and a 3-D cube was rotated with videos rendered on the faces all in real time!

And all this on a measly PowerPC 603e.

We have huge CPU resources with the G3 and G4 processors today, make no mistake. Jerky quicktime videos shouldn't be acceptable.

I expect Apple to make huge improvements in performance throughout the year as soon as Steve Jobs lets up a little on the developers and gives them some breathing room.

OS X has huge potential, that's for sure.

[Gee4orce]

I remember being awed by the preview release of BeOS that I ran on my 8500 about five years ago. But I think your memory is a little misleading - those quicktime movies were probably no more than 200x200 pixels, and you were probably running in maximum 65K colours.

Originally posted by Gee4orce:
...those quicktime movies were probably no more than 200x200 pixels, and you were probably running in maximum 65K colours.

that�s one point, the other is, i ran it on my 8500/200Mhz and i was not able to to the same as seen on the demo, the movie playback was not smooth at all, same for the rotating Logo.

[sniffer]

Originally posted by just a guest:
that�s one point, the other is, i ran it on my 8500/200Mhz and i was not able to to the same as seen on the demo, the movie playback was not smooth at all, same for the rotating Logo.

Whatever..
I don't think there should be any dubt that BeOS is a great OS. Thought, I haven't tried BeOS (4?) for mac, mainly because there isn't any new BeOS 5 mac version out. But I have tried BeOS 5 on my loosy p-100, and I have to say it seemed great. The old PC suddenly woke up to life, and really seemed rock stable, fast and the multitasking seemed great. But unfortunaly there is a huge lack of real apps for it, so it's not wort much.
But still! Be have proved it's possible to make a powerfull OS that doesn't force anyone to buy a new computer. I think BeOS should be runable on anything above 386, and that is really impressive in it self. Be did make a great OS. To bad they didn't succeed with it. Oh well..

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[clebin]

Like everyone else, I can't believe that Apple created a new Finder in Carbon. I just can't find any justification for it. As the centerpiece of the OS, the Finder should use the best API out there, but now it can't even see important features like Services.

I connected to my iDisk last night and got the spinning disk while it was downloading stuff. I couldn't do anything with the Finder and eventually had to relaunch it. Multithreading is not a new concept!!

All they had to do with the Cocoa Finder was fix it to remember folder settings and update the desktop (the new one doesn't do this very well either!) and add the drag & drop toolbar.

If they'd done this, we'd have a better OS and they could've put some work into the DVD and CD-RW support!

Chris

[muchfresh]

My theory on why finder is carbon:

I think that If they had to retrain all their OS 9 system programers to the ways of Cocoa, OSX would have taken a lot longer and wouldn't have been as stable. I don't believe that they needed to 'eat there own dog food' as the reason. Final Cut Pro is probabily a much more technically complex program.

[3.1416]

Carbon apps can thread as well as Cocoa ones can.

That's true, but it is _much_ easier to write a multithreaded app in Cocoa. Of course, it's much easier to write almost any app in Cocoa.

I think that If they had to retrain all their OS 9 system programers to the ways of Cocoa, OSX would have taken a lot longer and wouldn't have been as stable. I don't believe that they needed to 'eat there own dog food' as the reason.

I don't think that's the case. Objective C and Cocoa are vastly easier to learn and use than C++ and Carbon. Even if the entire Finder team were C++ experts and knew nothing about ObjC, I'm sure they would have produced a better product by learning ObjC and doing a Cocoa Finder. I believe the "dog food" theory is correct, but I still don't understand it; I would think that AppleWorks and iMovie would be sufficient demonstrations of Carbon's functionality.

I don't think that's the case. Objective C and Cocoa are vastly easier to learn and use than C++ and Carbon. Even if the entire Finder team were C++ experts and knew nothing about ObjC, I'm sure they would have produced a better product by learning ObjC and doing a Cocoa Finder. I believe the "dog food" theory is correct, but I still don't understand it; I would think that AppleWorks and iMovie would be sufficient demonstrations of Carbon's functionality

This is true, but an knowledge of obj-C doesn't mean that you know and understand frameworks. Learning obj-C is reasonably fast, but that still leaves the brute memorization of frameworks.

Appleworks and iMovie are nothing compared to the complexity of the Finder. The carbon API would still be very immature had Apple not written Finder as carbon. The cocoa vs. carbon flamewars have been hashed over at omnigroup-talk listserv in a very long thread. If you want to see the [very opinionated] discourse between cocoa and carbon programmers check it out.

[dtc]

But mail.app wasn't even written from teh ground up. It is a highly simplified port of the original NeXT Step Mail!!

Originally posted by me:
Apple IS eating their own dog food! Mail.app and many other utility programs in OS X are Cocoa based. However Apple also had to prove that Carbon was up to snuff, so they wrote the finder in carbon to prove it is a robust environment. Too bad really, a Cocoa finder would probably perform much better.

perhaps writing the finder in carbon was the best way for them to really understand how to develop the carbon api. i think it's only been like a month (or some relatively short period of time) that carbon has been frozen at 1.25. the api has been in constant development/flux ever since jobs announced the concept of carbon, which was years ago! i'm betting that the insights gained into what was really required of carbon during the process of creating the finder are critical to the apparent success of actually getting a usable classic environment. if you think about it, carbon is absolutley the future of mac os x for the next 1-3 years, and they needed to make sure they got it right. much much much better to hedge on the side of caution and backward compatability than to force developers towards cocoa.

a bit of topic, but i have been doing some thinking lately about my macintosh obsession. i don't understand it. i am a student, and all i do on my mac is play games, type word documents, and surf the net. basically, THAT IS IT. there is nothing, NO THING that macintosh does so much beter than windows (for my needs anyway) that is justifies my insane mac addiction. i just don't get it. is it some soft of weird underdog syndrome? are the forums the family i never had? any thoughts/comments/12 step program pointers would be appreciated.
good night.

[Chet Ript]

I have the same addiction (although I make my living with my Mac). It's 2:00am, I have to be at work in 6 hours and I'm reading forums about the MacOS X finder. Is this healthy? Why do I care? I don't want to quit...but damn I waste a lot of time here. Have a good one y'all.

perhaps writing the finder in carbon was the best way for them to really understand how to develop the carbon api. i think it's only been like a month (or some relatively short period of time) that carbon has been frozen at 1.25. the api has been in constant development/flux ever since jobs announced the concept of carbon, which was years ago! i'm betting that the insights gained into what was really required of carbon during the process of creating the finder are critical to the apparent success of actually getting a usable classic environment. if you think about it, carbon is absolutley the future of mac os x for the next 1-3 years, and they needed to make sure they got it right. much much much better to hedge on the side of caution and backward compatability than to force developers towards cocoa.

a bit of topic, but i have been doing some thinking lately about my macintosh obsession. i don't understand it. i am a student, and all i do on my mac is play games, type word documents, and surf the net. basically, THAT IS IT. there is nothing, NO THING that macintosh does so much beter than windows (for my needs anyway) that is justifies my insane mac addiction. i just don't get it. is it some soft of weird underdog syndrome? are the forums the family i never had? any thoughts/comments/12 step program pointers would be appreciated.
good night.

[foobars]

Originally posted by Scott_H:
Carbon apps can thread as well as Cocoa ones can.

This is theoretically true, but it's way easier to do it in Cocoa, and it takes a lot of extra work to get the same level of performance. Apple should have just gone with Carbon from the beggining.

[mitchell_pgh]

I have heard from many reliable sources that Cocoa isn't completely done. Something like 95% and good enough for most programmers (it still has a few quarks that they are ironing out). They couldn't afford to have the finder propitiate those mistakes, and when they do finalize/clean Cocoa, they don't want there to be any compatibility issues.

PLUS, Steve can stand on stage and make us all clap like trained seals when it is ready...

The Be OS ROCKS and it's very unfortunate that Apple didn't buy them up and make them OSX. We would have had the OS about two years ago and would have done mostly everything OSX can do now (only faster *snicker*)... It's completely multi-tasking, multi-threaded and screams with two processors! It was a very lean OS (unlike the behemoth OSX) I ran Quake on a duel PIII and couldn't get enough... Multi-User underpinnings (Apple could have made a single user/server version without even thinking!) OpenGL... Could port to x86 if they wanted to, AND it was already prepared for the PowerPC! I wonder what the Mac world would be like if they had used the Be OS...

Long live OSX...


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[Gametes]

Well, for starters we would not have Unix, and all the converts from Linux and the server/corporate market that Unix realizes for Apple. We would also be minus Mach, which is a modern and modular kernel, as oppossed to the Who-knows-what that ran - quite well, sure, but still outdated like Mac OS Classic - BeOS.
Secondly, sure BeOS was already PowerPC, but it did not have OpenStep, aka Cocoa, which as we all know is the greatest programing environment ever and a big pushing-the-envelope point for the Mac future.
Lastly, there is the issue of holism. It seems to me that the present OS inherits alot from its father, NeXT, and were it not for this many of the concepts behind X would be completely different. I for one am glad that X's mother, Macintosh, chose NeXT instead of BeOS, as this has resulted in the Dock, and Quartz, and all the things we are actually going to get to know, as in user interaction type things, as oppossed to invisible processes such as multi-threading and multitasking, etc, which are both excel at anyway.

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