[Fallout]

I'm running 10.2 on an iMac DV 400 with 512 MB of RAM. It runs slow. Painfully slow at times. Are there any programs or hacks that I can use to totally disable all GUI effects such as transparency, menus fading in and out, windows "scaling" into the Dock or when I close a Finder window, etc, and to increase general performance? Not only do these cause slow performance, I find them annoying. I've already changed the swap file location to another partition, and I use ShadowKiller when I'm running several apps at once. This has helped somewhat.

[WJMoore]

I don't know of anything that will do this and doubt that you will find anything that does. Transparency (alpha channels) are part of the OS (ie. part of Quartz) and are not likely to be able to be turned off now or ever.

I used OS X PB to 10.1 on an iMac DV and never really had any issues with it. Sure it wasn't as quick as the iMac I have now but you wouldn't expect it to be.

Wesley

[Nonsuch]

If you're using a 5400 rpm hard drive, upgrade it to a 7200; the faster disk access helps in some cases.

I'm not sure what you mean about Finder windows; when I close them, they just disappear, with no fading effect or anything like that.

[fisherKing]

check the network and sharing prefernce panes, be sure appletalk is off, etc etc etc.

try closing apps that u are not currently using.

run your monitor in thousands instead of millions of colors.

check out the apps
here

u can kill the bouncing in the dock, and window shadows.

but try the other things 1st!

[kcmac]

nonsuch is correct. We updated ours to a 7200 rpm harddrive as well as upgrading the ram to 1024MB.

[ShotgunEd]

running a theme, believe it or not may help speed up your machine. Many themes have no transparency and thus can seem a bit quicker. ShadowKiller can help a lot as well.

PS as of 10.2 when finder windows close they scale back to where their icon is in the previous window or on the desktop.

[sniffer]

Originally posted by Nonsuch:
If you're using a 5400 rpm hard drive, upgrade it to a 7200; the faster disk access helps in some cases.

It helps a lot actually in my experience back when I upgradet my iMac DV+ with a much faster hardrive. But ram upgrades helps more, althought 512 should be significan unless you have special needs..

[stew]

in my experience, turning off font antialiasing speeds things up notably.

[DBvader]

yeah, OS X is a bit slow on my Dual 867/512 (compared to my previous machine...athlon 2000+/512).

im sure with the coming iterations of jag and especially with panther, apple will speed things up.

the thing that pisses me off the most is how i cant resize in real time, there is a delay. moving windows is fast as a bullet, OSX just doesnt like resizing them.

[sniffer]

Originally posted by DBvader:
yeah, OS X is a bit slow on my Dual 867/512 (compared to my previous machine...athlon 2000+/512).

Do you work for Apple or something? I thought the x86 version was a myte??

[pat++]

Switch to Thousands colors mode instead of Millions. It should help noticeably.

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by ShotgunEd:
PS as of 10.2 when finder windows close they scale back to where their icon is in the previous window or on the desktop.

I tend to use a single window in column mode; that must be why I never noticed the zooming.

[tgrundke]

Speaking of GUI effects, I wish to *God* Apple would give users the option of turning on/off appearance items as *we* see fit.

As an example, when we install new Windows XP boxes, the first thing we do is to change the appearance back to the Windows 2000 settings. Reduces clutter, speeds the interface drastically, and is cleaner in most every respect.

PLEASE, Apple, give us the option to turn the candy off!

[sniffer]

Originally posted by tgrundke:
Speaking of GUI effects, I wish to *God* Apple would give users the option of turning on/off appearance items as *we* see fit.

As an example, when we install new Windows XP boxes, the first thing we do is to change the appearance back to the Windows 2000 settings. Reduces clutter, speeds the interface drastically, and is cleaner in most every respect.

PLEASE, Apple, give us the option to turn the candy off!

Apple is extremely forward thinking with quartz. Sometimes I wishes they could have waited a few years with the "3th generation" (quartz) qui technology. But on the other hand, I belive in a few years we'll look back proudly and thinking this (and os x included ofcourse) have been the biggest thing Apple have ever done since they came out with the original iMac in 98. In a few years MS is expected to follow with their 3 gen GUI technology..

[Fallout]

I should've mentioned that I'm running a theme and have disabled dock item bouncing. I switched the stock HD for a 40GB 7200 RPM Maxtor long ago.

Yeah, Apple really needs to include an option to disable all GUI effects.

[ryju]

Originally posted by Fallout:
I'm running 10.2 on an iMac DV 400 with 512 MB of RAM. It runs slow. Painfully slow at times. Are there any programs or hacks that I can use to totally disable all GUI effects such as transparency, menus fading in and out, windows "scaling" into the Dock or when I close a Finder window, etc, and to increase general performance? Not only do these cause slow performance, I find them annoying. I've already changed the swap file location to another partition, and I use ShadowKiller when I'm running several apps at once. This has helped somewhat.

I have the exact same computer as you, but with 1024MB ram. Ive had no problems with it at all. And I run smoothstripes and a buncha stuff all the time. Maybe you should upgrade the ram.

And there's only an 8MB video card in here isn't Quartz non existent? Or at least QE is.

[Morenix]

There's one way to disable finder zoom animations.
But it's Apple secret, i think... it's sad, isn't?

[Fallout]

Originally posted by ryju:
I have the exact same computer as you, but with 1024MB ram. Ive had no problems with it at all. And I run smoothstripes and a buncha stuff all the time. Maybe you should upgrade the ram.

And there's only an 8MB video card in here isn't Quartz non existent? Or at least QE is.

I almost never run out of physical RAM unless I'm running a huge amount of programs at once. We must have different standards for an acceptable speed..see, I can't stand it when I have to wait for menus to draw, windows to minimize, etc.

[stew]

Originally posted by sniffer:
Apple is extremely forward thinking with quartz. Sometimes I wishes they could have waited a few years with the "3th generation" (quartz) qui technology. But on the other hand, I belive in a few years we'll look back proudly and thinking this (and os x included ofcourse) have been the biggest thing Apple have ever done since they came out with the original iMac in 98. In a few years MS is expected to follow with their 3 gen GUI technology..

What is so cool about that "3 gen GUI technology" that is worth the lack of speed? So far, I haven't seen anything useful done with it, and I could darn well live without eye candy.

[sniffer]

Originally posted by stew:
What is so cool about that "3 gen GUI technology" that is worth the lack of speed? So far, I haven't seen anything useful done with it, and I could darn well live without eye candy.

I agree in your view. But on OTOH Quartz is just as revoulutionairy as bringing *nix to the averge user. OS ten is a success for apple, and we might have it for the next 20 years or so. I agree with you in your view, but I also agree with apples desition about bringing out quartz so early with the big picture in mind IMHO. The current gui is the fundation for future versions of mac os, and I am quite pleased with the result so far, except the speed on resent machines.

[stew]

Originally posted by sniffer:
But on OTOH Quartz is just as revoulutionairy as bringing *nix to the averge user.

To be honest, I haven't seen the advantage ov Unix for the average user either. It's not like memory protection or multiuser capabilities were Unix exclusives, and with a decent POSIX layer you're getting all the software too.

OS ten is a success for apple, and we might have it for the next 20 years or so. I agree with you in your view, but I also agree with apples desition about bringing out quartz so early with the big picture in mind IMHO.

If anyone could show me the big picture then. I acknowledge that Quartz is a cool thing from the technology standpoint, but it doesn't make any difference from a user standpoint except for slowness. For the user, it almost seems like solution looking for a problem.

[sniffer]

Originally posted by stew:
To be honest, I haven't seen the advantage ov Unix for the average user either. It's not like memory protection or multiuser capabilities were Unix exclusives, and with a decent POSIX layer you're getting all the software too.

If anyone could show me the big picture then. I acknowledge that Quartz is a cool thing from the technology standpoint, but it doesn't make any difference from a user standpoint except for slowness. For the user, it almost seems like solution looking for a problem.

I am no *nix guru, but with standarisations and open source (Darwin) combined with a userfriendly user interface, os ten is more than a random os with a POSIX layer.

About your second comment, I dubt that I am the right one to fill in your question due to lack of detailed knowledge and terrible english.

[Michel Fortin]

Originally posted by stew:
To be honest, I haven't seen the advantage ov Unix for the average user either. It's not like memory protection or multiuser capabilities were Unix exclusives, and with a decent POSIX layer you're getting all the software too.

If anyone could show me the big picture then. I acknowledge that Quartz is a cool thing from the technology standpoint, but it doesn't make any difference from a user standpoint except for slowness. For the user, it almost seems like solution looking for a problem.

The UNIX advantage is really an advantage for those who use it. Developers, server administrators, and many power users benefits from it. The user benefit is indirect: easier to make applications for developers means more cool applications.

Quartz is just another technology for drawing things. It has the great benefit of having a rendering engine on par (well, almost) with the Adobe Illustrator rendering, but every developer can use it. Again, this means more cool apps based on a superior rendering engine (I take OmniGraffle as an example here). But this more complex rendering engine, combined with antialiasing, means a little slower.

Quartz is used to handle windows too. Windows in OS X are double buffered. That means that you don't see the window being drawn, you only see the result. The old way was to draw directly to video memory, that mean you saw things being drawn (flicker). The new way is to draw to an invisible buffer into main memory and, when the drawing is done, move the image to video memory all at once. That also mean it has to store the buffers somewhere: main memory. So you need a lot of RAM for the buffers.

But if you have a lot of RAM, from where comes the slowness? Well, since Quartz does not show anything on screen before it is all drawn in a buffer, you feel like the computer is "lagging" while it's drawing. So perceived performance of Quartz is slower than real performance. Of course, only perceived performance matters to the most users.

So why use buffered windows? Have you ever seen on Windows what happens when an application stalls and you move other windows over the window of the stalled application? The stalled window does not redraw it's content while you are moving the front window, and you can see a trace of the front window all over the stalled one. Buffered windows work around this problem because it's not the application itself who does the refreshing: Quartz simply use the window buffer to redraw it, even if the application does not respond. Less confusion and better experience for many users.

[stew]

Double buffering doesn't need to be slow at all. The Amiga could use double buffered windows, with CPUs not faster than 66MHz. Don't tell me a G3 ten times as fast is too slow for that. And while buffering the window for the case that application doesn't respond - you could still do the rest of the drawing directly into the window, no need to add extra latency.

But anyway, double buffering isn't the main reason for the slowness IME: Just compare the scrolling speed of IE with Quicktime fonts to Quartz fonts: The overly complicated font rendering engine is making things slow.

What do I need an Illustrator-like engine for? Treating the screen like it was a printer is stupid. 99,9% of what we use on screen is never going to get printed. Display Postscript made sense when Desktop Publishing was the main use for GUI computers, but in the 21st century people use the web most of the time. So please optimize the rendering for screens, not for paper.

The Unix stuff does nothing for me (me = developer with Unix experience) that a POSIX interface wouldn't do. Bash, X11, gcc - I can use all that on NT or BeOS as well. Apache, Gimp, OpenOffice - runs nice on Windows too - no Unix required.

[sniffer]

Quartz and Aqua, the big picture:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1...s-x-gui-8.html

This article is actually in several pages, and starts here, with the basics:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1...s-x-gui-1.html
I recomend everyone interested to read trough the whole article thought.

..it's a very good article written by John Siracusa.



Edit: This article should have been obligated for macnn osx forum surfers btw..

[besson3c]

stew: one of the other advantages of Quartz that hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread is the usage of vectors.

Don't you think it's forward thinking when an application can create a sophisticated animation with an algorithm rather than a frame-by-frame animation?

BSD is a well regarded Unix implementation provides access to users and developers a whole world of existing Unix development and Open Source technology.

- Safari (based on an open source rendering engine)
- Rendezvous (based on zero-conf networking)
- ipv6 (which may become a big thing)
- Sendmail
- rsync/scp/curl/etc.
- SQL, Apache, etc.
- ssh
- etc.

Sure Apple could have ported all of these things to a non-Unix OS, but we'd probably still be waiting for this to happen and rely on Apple to patch these components with security updates, etc.

To me, it is a no-brainer.

[stew]

Originally posted by besson3c:
stew: one of the other advantages of Quartz that hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread is the usage of vectors.

Don't you think it's forward thinking when an application can create a sophisticated animation with an algorithm rather than a frame-by-frame animation?

Oooh...mighty vectors. Tell you what: About every modern systems offers an API for non-bitmapped graphics primitives. You can draw lines, circles, etc using Windows GDI+ just as well. Furthermore, if the vectors are so cool, why is Aqua almost entirely built in bitmaps?

Still, even if this is the best thing since sliced bread: Why does an optional API (face it, hardly anyone's using the 1337 vectors as of now) make it necessary to focrce everry single window through a long expensive rendering pipeline when the result is just the same? iTunes on OS X doesn't look any different from iTunes on OS 9.

While maybe being technically cool, it won't do anything if there is no real-life benefit. Smalltalk never took off, so did Display Postscript, the Canon Cat or BeOS. Reality check says web surfing, emailing, mp3 ripping or making 3d movies does not benefit a single bit from Quartz.

If it's forward thinking, just tell me what it is they're thinking of.

BSD is a well regarded Unix implementation provides access to users and developers a whole world of existing Unix development and Open Source technology.

- Safari (based on an open source rendering engine)
- Rendezvous (based on zero-conf networking)
- ipv6 (which may become a big thing)
- Sendmail
- rsync/scp/curl/etc.
- SQL, Apache, etc.
- ssh
- etc.

Most of them compile just as fine on any POSIX system - they do not require a full Unix underneath. The KHTML-engine Safari is using is a very high-level thing that barely touches the Unix aspects - the engine has been ported to AtheOS (a compeltely non-Unix system) by a single programmer over a year before Apple introduced Safari.

[besson3c]

stew:

Applications which leverage animation/Quartz and do things not possible in a 2nd generation display layer:

- any application which uses sheets
- MS Word
- any application with a minimize button (the animation provides good feedback as to where the window is going. A new user would probably become quite confused if some sort of feedback was not in place).

etc.

Drop shadows provide a sense a depth and feedback as to which are the foreground and background windows.

Transparencies the ability for any app to make windows transparent without designating them as background windows. They are very nice in apps like Konfabulator.

Anti-aliasing can provide better looking type (in my opinion)

Are my ideas lame? Maybe, but why not build your display engine on top of something that can handle vectors now, rather than having to rip apart the display engine and regroup later? KDE is using vectors from what I've heard, and Windows plans to use these as well (I know nothing about GDE, but I've yet to see system wide vectors in Windows). It's an evolutionary process. People are very visual oriented. Flashy graphics are all around us.

As far as Quartz being too CPU expensive, it's fine and dandy for all the programmers and wanna-be's in here to go on speculating about how this is the cause of that, etc. but most of is is just speculation to some degree.

There are many factors as to why OS X is less responsive than OS 9. If it were trivial to profile and match with the speed of OS 9, it would be done by now.


As far as your point about those technologies not requiring a full unix underneath, that was not my point. My point was about leveraging existing technology, rather than sinking efforts into porting, providing a new OS for the world to learn and support, etc.

[stew]

Originally posted by besson3c:
Applications which leverage animation/Quartz and do things not possible in a 2nd generation display layer:

- any application which uses sheets
- MS Word
- any application with a minimize button (the animation provides good feedback as to where the window is going. A new user would probably become quite confused if some sort of feedback was not in place).

You might want to try this:
http://www.stardock.com/products/windowfx/
Implementing all that eye candy on Windows.

Drop shadows provide a sense a depth and feedback as to which are the foreground and background windows.

Transparencies the ability for any app to make windows transparent without designating them as background windows. They are very nice in apps like Konfabulator.

See the link above.

Anti-aliasing can provide better looking type (in my opinion)

MacOS 9, XFree86/Linux, Windows and BeOS do antialiasing too, and browser windows scroll much faster there.

Are my ideas lame? Maybe, but why not build your display engine on top of something that can handle vectors now, rather than having to rip apart the display engine and regroup later?

95% of the MacOS X UI is bitmapped graphics, not vectors. All that vector crap comes out of Apple's PR departement, and that's it. There's no need to push everything through expensive rasterizing and compositing engines when the result is just the same because you were starting with bitmaps in the first place. If you want to offer vector graphics as an additional API feature, use that complicated engine only for the applications that use it. The rest can do much better without it.

KDE is using vectors from what I've heard, and Windows plans to use these as well (I know nothing about GDE, but I've yet to see system wide vectors in Windows).

So then you might want to read about GDI+
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...gdi__about.asp

There are many factors as to why OS X is less responsive than OS 9.

Debug code?

What is so special about scrolling in a browser window that it must be that slow? It does not involve any of the new fancy Quartz tricks at all. I could understand it if the new features were slow due to their complexity, but I don't see why things as simple as scrolling must be done in such unefficient ways that they are that slow.

Why bother about "next generation" UI candy no one uses if you can't even get the basics done? You scroll and resize windows much more often than you minimize them. Why waste any efforts on transparent menus? They're slower and worse to read. Drop shadows? I have never seen anyone who had problems telling the frontmost window in OS 9.