[cla]

Eyecandy is nice but I miss Platinum all the same.
I've been living in exile (=Windows XP) for the past three years and switched back a month ago, and I can't say I'm too impressed with OS X.

Being used to XP, almost everything feels sluggish here.
Resizing windows, switching tabs, waiting for folders to open, trashing items, not to mention getting info on objects which usually takes 3-4 seconds.

System Preferences is a joke. It usually takes SECONDS to switch between panes.

Even TYPING in Safari is sluggish.
(Since this page contains animated gifs, which makes Safari eat 80% of the CPU. That's not cool with me.)

It's a pity faster CPU only allows for developers to get lazy. Optimizing code just isn't that important anymore.

What am I missing? Is it just my system?

-----------------------------------------
iMac G5 20" -- 1,25 GB ram -- Mac OS X 10.3.7
Processor Performance set to Highest
No odd processes in Activity Monitor

[eevyl]

My guess is that you are missing Windows XP, but could just be my impression of your thoughts.

[Sharky K.]

I have to agree that the GUI very slow on OS X, very annoying.
a point though:
Opening folders in Windows also takes time but you hear a sound and adding sounds to GUI is used to make things "feel" faster.

Although the GUI is very slow I don't want to switch to Windows because the UI is so much faster (people do not notice this, you only can notice by timing same day tasks on both platforms).
Flash makes safari very slow btw, I never had problems with gifs.

[JLL]

First off eyecandy is not responsible for a possible slowdown - quartz is.

But according to your post, your Mac sounds slower than normal. Try to repair permissions or install the 10.3.8 Combo update if some of the previous updates didn't update correctly.

Furthermore you should check your iMac's Energy Savings settings as it defaults to Automatic in Processor Performance and that means that you Mac runs at 50% speed most of the time - set it to Highest.

[ManOfSteal]

Don't hate the player, hate the game!

[cla]

Originally posted by ManOfSteal:
Don't hate the player, hate the game!

Hehe =]
Indeed I do, and wouldn't change back to Windows it if so would cost me my mouse arm.

Opening folders in Windows also takes time but you hear a sound and adding sounds to GUI is used to make things "feel" faster.

That is interesting.
Can anyone point me to any research done in this field?

[Agent69]

I don't have the problems the original poster refers to and I am using a single processor PowerMac G4. I suspect that either something is wrong with his computer or his installation of Mac OS X.

And if you think Mac OS X's UI is slow, wait until Longhorn arrives, which will make use of similar technology.

[Sharky K.]

Originally posted by cla:
Can anyone point me to any research done in this field?

Sorry, I read UI and psychology books that also contain these researches, not websites.

[msuper69]

Here I sit typing in Safari on an ancient 500mhz TiBook w/512mb RAM and I don't consider OS X slow. Not as fast as Windows explorer but not what I would call slow.

There is something wrong with your hardware or software.

[jindrich]

hey you guys,
go out and try all OSes. You'll discover OS X is slow. With other os switching tabs, moving or resizing windows, etc takes NO TIME, a fraction of a second.
In OS X you have to wait, is NOT instantaneous. It's very noticable.

Also, on safari, when posting somewhere like here and there are a bunch of animated gifs, typing is VERY slow.

hope tiger adresses this. Switchers will notice this when going to an apple store.
Hey, why is the os slooooooooooow?

[cla]

Originally posted by Sharky K.:
Sorry, I read UI and psychology books that also contain these researches, not websites.

I'm currently writing my master thesis on auditive versus visual perception and effects on working memory and performance. I would be very grateful if you could point me to those papers (or any recommended reading), as I've never seen scientific research confirming that audio feedback increases the percieved efficiency.

[Meadowfield]

I concur. System sounds and drop down menu delays makes me long for the OSIX days (sans regular random system freezes). I, too, hope Tiger addresses this.

[Sharky K.]

Originally posted by cla:
I'm currently writing my master thesis on auditive versus visual perception and effects on working memory and performance. I would be very grateful if you could point me to those papers (or any recommended reading), as I've never seen scientific research confirming that audio feedback increases the percieved efficiency.

I am not sure but I think it was "Engineering Psychology and Human Performance" by Wickens Hollands or "User Interface" by Jeff Raskin... could be an other book, don't remember it exactly, although both still useful for your master thesis.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by JLL:
First off eyecandy is not responsible for a possible slowdown - quartz is.

For the most part, this is actually true. Taking out the eyecandy (such as transparency) would not speed up OSX at all, because it would still have to go through all of the compositing acrobatics that it did before you modified it. That is the price of moving to vector-based graphics, particularly when alpha channels are involved.

This is why moving as much of the graphics system onto the GPU as possible is important. OSX has to do much more calculation to display its GUI than OS9 did. The upside, of course, is that the end result is much more powerful than anything OS9 was ever capable of doing. The downside is that in order to become more powerful, you have to live without making certain limiting assumptions

NeXTStep used a graphics subsystem called Display PostScript, an ancestor of Quartz just as PostScript is an ancestor of PDF. It managed to feel snappier than OSX on 680X0 systems. In some ways, it is even more powerful than Quartz, because it is a programming language all its own. However, it has a key weakness: it assumes that everything is opaque, just as bitmapped graphics subsystems do. This assumption comes from the fact that PostScript was meant to control printers, where the idea of transparency doesn't make much sense.

Quartz does not make this assumption. Aside from the standard RGB (Red/Green/Blue) color channels (which determine how much red, green, or blue is in a color), every color has what's called an alpha channel. This is noted down as another color value, but what it actually does is determine how opaque the color is. All 32-bit color systems actually have this concept, actually -even bitmapped ones- but most systems simply assume this value to be the specific value for fully-opaque colors. Because you already know what the value is, you don't have to bother processing it. This can cut a full 25% or more off of the time it takes to do any calculations done when working with colors, and so most older systems ignore it. In effect, you only have to process 24 of the 32 bits in each color, and that can save a lot of time. The truth, however, is that there are tricks you can perform when you assume everything to be fully opaque that can save even more time than that. The older graphical subsystems of OS9 and Windows use these tricks heavily. DPS wasn't able to use all of them, but it could still benefit from ignoring the alpha channel most of the time, and so it, too, got a significant speed boost from its assumptions.

Quartz no longer makes this assumption; indeed, it cannot make it. Not being able to ignore the alpha channel already puts it at a 33% speed penalty over systems which make those assumptions. Once again, however, the extra tricks come into play, and slow Quartz down even further. For this reason, Quartz can never be as fast as an equally-optimized version of an older graphics subsystem; it simply has more to do, and although these tasks can be made very efficient they cannot be eliminated. In exchange for this, however, Quartz does not suffer from the limitations which these older systems place on themselves. It is a simple trade that all graphical systems must choose to make or not make.

[tooki]

FWIW, transparency certainly does have its place in printing, as in to make semi-transparent objects (for example, a 90% opaque white text box over an image). That's why PostScript 3 has true transparency support.

While I don't have numbers to back it up, I don't think Quartz is to blame for most Mac OS X's slowdowns -- often, when the system is stalled, the GUI is still completely fluid. For example, if Safari stalls with a network operation and is sucking all the CPU it can get, you can still move its windows without the slightest hint of a stutter.

I think it's more that the underlying code is slow. That's a tradeoff of systems that use highly-portable, modular code the way Mac OS X does. Every layer you add adds compatibility, but reduces speed.

For example, let's take an example mentioned above: System Preferences. Someone compared it to switching tabs in Windows. But in System Prefs, they're not really tabs. Each preference pane is basically an application that launches within the System Preferences window. When you click on one, it's not just switching to another pane, but launching an application, letting it gather whatever information it needs, and then displays it. Real tabs (like the tabs within a system prefs pane, like Network) are fast, because their code is already loaded.

So why would Apple make the System Prefs load like apps? Flexibility, of course. It means any developer can (fairly easily, I might add) create a preference pane, which will not break System Prefs, because it's not mucking deep into OS code in order to be displayed there.

Throughout Mac OS X, the ethos of unbreakable-but-slow is used, where Mac OS 9 and Windows prefer code that grabs deep into the OS, which is faster, but much more likely to cause problems.

tooki

[tooki]

P.S. On systems that run Quartz Extreme, window transparency incurs no speed penalty -- it's free. Tiger will expand that free hardware acceleration to drawing inside windows, too.

[passmaster16]

Originally posted by Millennium:


Quartz no longer makes this assumption; indeed, it cannot make it. Not being able to ignore the alpha channel already puts it at a 33% speed penalty over systems which make those assumptions. Once again, however, the extra tricks come into play, and slow Quartz down even further. For this reason, Quartz can never be as fast as an equally-optimized version of an older graphics subsystem; it simply has more to do, and although these tasks can be made very efficient they cannot be eliminated. In exchange for this, however, Quartz does not suffer from the limitations which these older systems place on themselves. It is a simple trade that all graphical systems must choose to make or not make.

With that being said, what will provide the biggest performance increase for Quartz - an increase in GPU speed or the offloading more of graphic operations to the GPU? It's obvious that the capability of Quartz is far more advanced than older systems and with that comes more complexity requiring more resources. I can defintely tell a difference from the responsiveness working in 10.3 vs 9 vs XP. 10.3 just seems to lag a tiny bit even on a dual G5. It's not much, and it's come a long way since 10.1. But I can still see/feel a difference in menu performance and such. I guess my question is will that ever change? Will it ever meet the responsiveness of these older systems or is that a limitation of Quartz that cannot be overcome?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by tooki:
P.S. On systems that run Quartz Extreme, window transparency incurs no speed penalty -- it's free. Tiger will expand that free hardware acceleration to drawing inside windows, too.

Quartz calculates as though everything were theoretically transparent, because theoretically, everything can be transparent. This is why window transparency incurs no additional speed penalty: a transparent window is, as far as Quartz is concerned, no different than an opaque one. It's not a special case, and therefore there is no additional processing required above and beyond what any other window gets.

The downside, of course, is that all windows are handled as though they were transparent, and this is where the slowdown comes into play. It is not that transparent windows have a penalty, it's that all windows have this same penalty, so a transparent window isn't really any slower than an opaque one.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by passmaster16:
With that being said, what will provide the biggest performance increase for Quartz - an increase in GPU speed or the offloading more of graphic operations to the GPU?

At this point, so few of the graphic operations are offloaded to the GPU that offloading more will provide a greater benefit. This is not so much because the GPU is faster as it is because operations on the GPU don't have to contend with the rest of the system for CPU time.

Once most of the graphics functions are offloaded to the GPU, however, then better GPU performance will begin to provide a bigger boost than offloading the remaining functions. However, that point is unlikely to occur until the release after Tiger, and possibly not until the release after that.

Will it ever meet the responsiveness of these older systems or is that a limitation of Quartz that cannot be overcome?[/B]

If the older systems were to implement similar optimizations -which could be done, though no one is putting in the efforts to do so- then Quartz would always lag behind them; that is an inherent limitation of the system. However, these limitations are forcing developers to look at new kinds of optimization, such as offloading graphics operations to the GPU. These techniques were never used with older systems, and they will probably never be done on those systems since everyone seems to be moving in towards vector-based graphics anyway. In theory, the new systems will eventually catch up to the older ones because of this greater optimization. However, if an older system were to be updated in a similar manner, then it would probably retake the lead.

[mAxximo]

AFAIC, Quartz+Aqua is a huge step back from Quickdraw+Platinum in terms of efficiency, crispness and speed. For what I do (motion graphics design) I could easily do without all the useless slow distracting blurry visual crap OS X makes me deal with all the time, which is basically what Quartz is being used for. Multiply that times 10 when dealing with files and folders over a network. Waiting for every icon thumbnail of a Targa image sequence to display in List View anyone? GOD.
As a result I have a less capable and infinitely more annoying interface than before. Thanks Quartz!

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Multiply that times 10 when dealing with files and folders over a network. Waiting for every icon thumbnail of a Targa image sequence to display in List View anyone? GOD.

Try column view, and turn off the icons. Sounds like your server might be a tad slow too.

GOD has no answers either, but the devil's advocate will say go back to what DID work for you, and that is OS 9.

[Thinine]

If you hadn't proven it before mAxximo, that post proves you're an idiot.

There two main reasons why OS X's graphics system is slower, which have been mentioned before but apparently need reiteration.

1. It does more. As others have said before, Quartz does much more with its graphics than QuickDraw could ever dream of. Alpha channels, transparency, double buffering, etc.

2. Little hardware acceleration. QuickDraw (and Windows graphics) have been accelerated by the GPU (or equivalent hardware in systems that don't really have a GPU) since time immemorial. Only recently has Quartz had any hardware acceleration at all (Quartz Extreme, which moved window compositing to the GPU in Jaguar). In Tiger, hardware acceleration will be back to the point it was with QuickDraw, with nearly all graphics drawn by the GPU (at least on the cards that support it). This should take care of any 'problems' people have with the responsiveness of OS X's GUI.

As well, anyone who has a G5 should not be complaining about GUI responsiveness. You're either using badly written programs or imagining things.

P.S. Safari's usage of the CPU while drawing animated GIF's is a limitation of Cocoa drawing system. Yet another thing that will be fixed by Tiger.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by cla:
System Preferences is a joke. It usually takes SECONDS to switch between panes.

Dude, how is that different than XP Control Panels ?
There are different apps that start up the moment you click on it.
It takes on my XP work box from 0.5 to 4 seconds as well...

-t

[alphasubzero949]

I'm feeling a sense of Deja Vu. Is this MacFixIt? Oh wait...

[MartiNZ]

Well I don't know about this 'slow' business. I've been without my iBook (G3 800MHz) for about two weeks and having to work fully on a Dell Latitude D600 running XP. And I'm seriously missing the iBook .

I've never really found the GUI in OS X slower than that of XP for a start - in the Finder they do still need to work on showing icon previews, but I don't get the sluggish resizing stuff that everyone always seems to be on about (especially not in Panther).

Opening apps is also pretty fast and what's great is that when they're open, that's it - they're usually not taking up any processor time, and they're not taking up any screen space - other than the dock, which I find much more efficient than Windows's task bar, especially with its 'improvements' in XP.

I also find WMP really bad and had to download iTunes for Windows, which thankfully minimises to the system tray, smartly taking up very little room (if only more Windows things did this).

I find System Preferences much better than XP's control panel method - especially its default 'themes' display, which is a complete mystery to me, and I should think to anyone who has used Windows '98, 2000, etc. It's not so much about speed (which I actually find really good in Sys Prefs), it's about ease-of-use. What one may lose in time with OS X's GUI effects, one gains manyfold in time with actually getting things done!

Also, this damn Dell keyboard is doing my fingers in. They better hurry up fixing my iBook logic board .

[Ji Eun]

Originally posted by jindrich:
Switchers will notice this when going to an apple store.
Hey, why is the os slooooooooooow?

i noticed this immediately when i switched last march to the ibook G4 800 / 640.
took me some weeks to get used to the UI lag.
a perfect illustration of OS X's slow UI is clicking and dragging scrollbars. you can try it right here in this safari windwo. they will NOT stay with your mouse.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Quartz calculates as though everything were theoretically transparent, because theoretically, everything can be transparent. This is why window transparency incurs no additional speed penalty: a transparent window is, as far as Quartz is concerned, no different than an opaque one. It's not a special case, and therefore there is no additional processing required above and beyond what any other window gets.

The downside, of course, is that all windows are handled as though they were transparent, and this is where the slowdown comes into play. It is not that transparent windows have a penalty, it's that all windows have this same penalty, so a transparent window isn't really any slower than an opaque one.

I'm pretty sure 100 percent opacity is a special case. It would be ridiculously inefficient to go through all the calculations to determine the color of a pixel whose color you already know. The reason transparent windows incur no speed penalty with Quartz Extreme is because the calculations are shoved off to the graphic card. They do incur a penalty on my QE-incapable iMac 400.

[IamBob]

P.S. Safari's usage of the CPU while drawing animated GIF's is a limitation of Cocoa drawing system. Yet another thing that will be fixed by Tiger.

Safari's problem with gifs is not "a limitation of Cocoa's drawing system", it's only a problem because the Safari team hasn't addressed it like they should have.

You can easily stick 200 animated gifs in a window without using 30% of the CPU. I've done it (stress testing) with gifs similar to the smileys here. It took a single, relatively small class - not complicated at all (especially when standing on the shoulders of giants).

a perfect illustration of OS X's slow UI is clicking and dragging scrollbars. you can try it right here in this safari windwo. they will NOT stay with your mouse.

It looks like the thumb is playing catch-up with the mouse but the page scrolls faster than I can see. Doesn't bother me in the least since I use a scrollwheel, 'find' (cmd+f->keyword->return [cmd+g as needed]) or click in the bar to "scroll to here".

Maybe you're just used to Window's scrolling. I find its implementation to be obnoxious at best and vertigo-inducing at worst.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Quartz calculates as though everything were theoretically transparent, because theoretically, everything can be transparent. ...

Surprisingly, that is not true. If you use the Quartz Debug application to see what's being redrawn in hardware*, with Quartz Extreme turned off, you see that fully-opaque, unlayered regions of windows are moved fully opaque. Contrary to common belief, Mac OS X does use the 2D acceleration in the GPU, despite its not being able to do transparency. Where Quartz knows that no transparency is being used, it doesn't bother to calculate transparency, even on Quartz Extreme systems. (Try it: turn on "flash screen updates" in Quartz Debug, and then drag an opaque window: only the drop shadow, being translucent, gets updated. If you drag a translucent window, the whole window is updated.)

tooki

* This is because Quartz Debug doesn't flash in yellow the regions that are moved entirely in hardware.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by tooki:
Mac OS X does use the 2D acceleration in the GPU, despite its not being able to do transparency.

This has been the case since 10.0.

[tooki]

I know that, which is why I didn't specify a version number, since it applies to all release versions of Mac OS X.

tooki

[tmornini]

Originally posted by cla:
What am I missing? Is it just my system?

You, and everyone else, is missing the fact that every pixel of the OS X interface
is drawn with ColorSync color management.

In OS 9 you could disable ColorSync.

Think of OS X as tomorrow's OS, today!

[tooki]

In Mac OS 9, screen display at the OS level never used ColorSync -- when you chose a ColorSync profile, it basically just applied a gamma table to the graphics card, which is a free* operation. I'm not so sure that Mac OS X is any different.

tooki

*free as in no speed penalty.

[Big Mac]

The OP is a troll. Over the last few months I have had to endure a limited amount of Windows use. Windows is not fast. My iBook 466 feels faster than these admittedly very, very outdated 600MHz PIIIs I have to use. OS X's multitasking and workflow arrangement feels superior, and I feel so much more productive as a result. Firefox even loads faster on my iBook! Oh, and I don't want anyone to try to claim that XP's Control Panels are in any way good. When I first saw that nonsensical, convoluted hyperlink interface I couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or vomit.

I actually will say there is one feature in XP that is clearly superior to OS X: Its Open and Save dialog boxes. They are cluttered and ugly, yes, but they are also much more functional. They have all sorts of view options, while we only have two modes. There are buttons for a variety of file-related tasks - unlabeled and unintuitive buttons, but it's nice having the options. And you get nice contextual menus filled with options. I wish I could rename objects within OS X's Save dialog. It would just be nice to have such power user functions. Yet, despite that one desirable feature, Windows remains a pig.

[sideus]

I give this thread a . Good info here.

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by Thinine:

There two main reasons why OS X's graphics system is slower, which have been mentioned before but apparently need reiteration.

1. It does more. As others have said before, Quartz does much more with its graphics than QuickDraw could ever dream of. Alpha channels, transparency, double buffering, etc.

As I said before, I DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT to do my job. I didn't need it before, I certainly could do without it now. All that crap was just put there so the interface can distract gullible users like yourself from how half-assed and incapable the rest of the system actually is.

2. Little hardware acceleration. QuickDraw (and Windows graphics) have been accelerated by the GPU (or equivalent hardware in systems that don't really have a GPU) since time immemorial. Only recently has Quartz had any hardware acceleration at all (Quartz Extreme, which moved window compositing to the GPU in Jaguar).

If it can't be done well, then don't do it. Apple should have at least given pros the option to use a no-nonsense alternative to Quartz until it was ready for us. But no, instead they thought it was better to give you the jumping Dock icons and the Genie Effect than keeping my workflow and user experience intact. No wonder they can't reach their G5 sales target each quarter...

In Tiger, hardware acceleration will be back to the point it was with QuickDraw, with nearly all graphics drawn by the GPU (at least on the cards that support it). This should take care of any 'problems' people have with the responsiveness of OS X's GUI.

Too bad it took them four years to put things *theoretically* at the same level we used to have in the Mac. This should have been ready for the Public Beta release to say the least.

As well, anyone who has a G5 should not be complaining about GUI responsiveness. You're either using badly written programs or imagining things.

Yeah, I'm using the worst written programs ever: the OS X �Finder�, Mail, FontBook, Safari, iTunes, etc., as well as After Effects 6.5, Illustrator and Photoshop. Can you blame Adobe for the responsiveness of their apps when Apple can't get theirs right in the first place?

If you hadn't proven it before mAxximo, that post proves you're an idiot.

I'm critisizing a disappointing, poor commercial product. Your feelings got hurt by it as if I were talking about your mom. Now who's the idiot?

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
Try column view, and turn off the icons. Sounds like your server might be a tad slow too.

Column View is not an option for me. The server is ultra fast, as proven by all the other Unix systems and Windows boxes we have in use at the facility.

GOD has no answers either, but the devil's advocate will say go back to what DID work for you, and that is OS 9.

Not an option either, unfortunately. After Effects 6.5 is X only...

[tooki]

Originally posted by Thinine:
2. In Tiger, hardware acceleration will be back to the point it was with QuickDraw, with nearly all graphics drawn by the GPU (at least on the cards that support it). This should take care of any 'problems' people have with the responsiveness of OS X's GUI.

Actually, Mac OS X already uses more hardware acceleration than Mac OS 9 ever did. Tiger will be doing hardware acceleration that goes FAR beyond Mac OS 9's. Mac OS X 10.1 had essentially the same level of hardware acceleration as Mac OS 9 -- the speed difference is because of transparency, which Mac OS 9 never supported, much less accelerated!

tooki

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Yeah, I'm using the worst written programs ever: the OS X �Finder�, Mail, FontBook, Safari, iTunes, etc., as well as After Effects 6.5, Illustrator and Photoshop. Can you blame Adobe for the responsiveness of their apps when Apple can't get theirs right in the first place?

mAxximo, from your comments since you came here, it's quite clear that either you are lying or there is something wrong with your computer. No G5 has performance as horrible as you describe. Everybody else here who has one can attest to that. So any comments you make about OS X are severely tainted by the fact that YOUR SYSTEM IS OBVIOUSLY BROKEN.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
As I said before, I DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT to do my job. I didn't need it before, I certainly could do without it now.

You are not the only person who uses OSX, nor is your market the only market of people which use OSX. It is unreasonable to expect an OS to be exactly tailored to your desired feature set unless you've made it yourself. Many people do see a need for it.

If it can't be done well, then don't do it. Apple should have at least given pros the option to use a no-nonsense alternative to Quartz until it was ready for us.

Technical impossibility. It would require two graphics APIs, and all programs would have to be written to understand both, including the entire user interface. Furthermore, Apple and other developers would have to constantly QA everything in both systems, as though they were developing for two different platforms. Apple's QA is stretched thin enough as it is; we do not need more problems slipping through.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Thinine:
P.S. Safari's usage of the CPU while drawing animated GIF's is a limitation of Cocoa drawing system. Yet another thing that will be fixed by Tiger.

Not so much a limitation of Cocoa's drawing system as a poorly-implemented use of it. The system it's currently using was not designed for this kind of thing. OmniWeb had similar problems in the early days of OSX; they later fixed it by doing their drawing in a different way, and later still they switched to WebCore so the point became moot.

[cpac]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
As I said before, I DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT to do my job. I didn't need it before, I certainly could do without it now. All that crap was just put there so the interface can distract gullible users like yourself from how half-assed and incapable the rest of the system actually is.

OR... Apple was looking towards the future when it took the large step of going to a completely new operating system. OS 9 and all the iterations of the classic os went back 15+ years. During that time, we saw storage go from kB to GB, speeds go from a few MHz to a couple GHz, etc. It's no wonder that it was pretty speedy at some things, but the lack of fundamental support for new technologies was a problem.

Now.. OS X is meant to be a foundation that Apple can build on for the next 15+ years. In that time, the hardware will only get faster, etc. If Apple didn't build in forward-looking technologies like Quartz, we'd end up paying for it in the long run.

If it can't be done well, then don't do it.

Too bad it took them four years to put things *theoretically* at the same level we used to have in the Mac. This should have been ready for the Public Beta release to say the least.

I'm critisizing a disappointing, poor commercial product. Your feelings got hurt by it as if I were talking about your mom. Now who's the idiot?

This is where you just need a reality check: Is there an operating system you wouldn't consider a "disappointing, poor commercial product?" OS 9 has its problems (though this seems your most likely candidate). And if the only reason you can't run it anymore is AfterEffects, well then complain to Adobe, or run everything else in Classic and run only aftereffects in X.

If, as I suspect, you're just disappointed because nobody's built your ideal operating system, well then get over it.

Just because Apple didn't release your ideal operating system back when the public beta came out, doesn't mean that what they did release is horrible, or that it should never have been released at all. Constantly being disappointed when things aren't exactly as you hoped they'd be is just childish and naive.

[lookmark]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Yeah, I'm using the worst written programs ever: the OS X �Finder�, Mail, FontBook, Safari, iTunes, etc., as well as After Effects 6.5, Illustrator and Photoshop. Can you blame Adobe for the responsiveness of their apps when Apple can't get theirs right in the first place?

Max, what are the specs for your G5 again? Adobe's products could all use more refining on OS X (save the most modern of them, perhaps, e.g. InDesign) and FontBook just isn't ready for professional use, and the Finder we can all debate 'til we're blue in the face, but... iTunes, Safari, Mail? These are all excellent, IMO -- surely you're not saying Internet Explorer in OS 9 was faster than Safari? Or that iTunes isn't responsive?

OS X has improved dramatically since its initial release, but I do think it does get sticky and unresponsive occasionally -- even on machines loaded with RAM -- and certain window operations could still be faster. I'm hoping that Tiger (for Quartz 2D+ enabled machines, at the very least) will provide the final speed boost.

And, FWIW, whatever speed hit we took, OS X has been, far far far well worth it for the vast technical and UI advancements that came with it. This is, like it or not, the majority opinion -- not just in geek forums, but in the Art Dept. I'm in, and among every designer I know, and talk to. The more frustrating issue is the long wait for major software developers to get up to speed (cough) with a new OS.

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
All that crap was just put there so the interface can distract gullible users like yourself from how half-assed and incapable the rest of the system actually is.

Well it works for me and I certainly am not gullible. Can't imagine how I manage to make a living feeding the family with a half assed incapable operating system.

Why isn't column view an option for you? You need to see thumbnails to identify your files? I like your style of refuting suggested solutions to a problem, without addressing WHY it doesn't work.

I feel sorry for your employer to have someone so disenchanted as you are with your computer. It must affect your work performance incredibly. I have seen similar situations with our employees that had to use the Mac, and they didn't want to use it. They did what they could to impede work flow because of this pervasive ' it doesn't work as good as xyz did ' attitude.

[leperkuhn]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
Well it works for me and I certainly am not gullible. Can't imagine how I manage to make a living feeding the family with a half assed incapable operating system.

Why isn't column view an option for you? You need to see thumbnails to identify your files? I like your style of refuting suggested solutions to a problem, without addressing WHY it doesn't work.

Same here - I use mine for roughly 12 hours a day. dual 1ghz g4, about 2.5 years old now. I have very few complaints. I'd like to see a few changes of course, but most of them have been made already. The speed is great.

I was a sys admin for a windows xp network for about a year, until i recently quit and now I run my own business. Even working on XP all week, fully patched, I found the OS constantly got in my way.

I'd say better performance than the 2.8 P4 i had at as a sys admin (except in office, which chokes so hard it's unbearable)

The only good thing was the start menu - which i found quicksilver is an even better replacement for. Soon to be built in with spotlight (and i also found that the spotlight keyboard shortcut is the same that was used in quicksilver initally, and the same one i'm using right now).

[OtisWild]

<em>As I said before, I DON'T NEED ANY OF THAT to do my job. </em>

Just because you don't need it, nobody else should have it?

What are you, an 8-year-old?

Grow up and get a grip bro.....

[osxrules]

I don't really notice any significant slowdown with my g3 ibook. I can echo what others have said about Windows too. My uncle has a something GHz PC (1.5+, can't remember) with a Geforce fx 5200 and the performance is rubbish. I have an emulator that I run on both and I get a higher fps on my 700MHz ibook with Radeon 7500. Note, that he bought it this year for �900 whereas I got my ibook 2 years ago for �800.

Under Windows, the UI and system is just not layed out properly, there's no design. If I install apps, they are put into the system folder's program folder which is hidden by default to supposedly stop you messing with the system. I then have to go in there to put shortcuts from the desktop a lot of the time manually. It's nuts.

I agree that some dialogs in XP feel faster but contrary to the Windows fanboys, they look nowhere near as nice. Whether it be anti-aliasing or transparency, Windows is missing something. I have also experienced people who just sit in front of a mac and won't use it. At least we Mac users use Windows, hate it and move back.

I can't believe the trouble I've had with Windows. I even tried to use a printer, simple in OS X. In Windows, it stuck a job in the print queue and no matter what I did, it would not move. I had to force quit the print spooler and restart the system. I swear I restarted about 15 times in 3 hours trying to print out a leaflet.

Then you try to log in as 2 users at once - OS X is waaaaaay more advanced than Windows at this. The Windows system moved liked a tortoise crapping treacle. I actually had to switch user, log out and log in as the other user before things moved reasonably.

No way does Windows make me more productive, despite having a slightly more responsive UI.

PS For all you G4/G5 users, you should definitely see a speed increase in Tiger because the next gcc automatically optimises for Altivec so everything should get a boost but we'll have to wait and see. Of course, only the apps compiled under Tiger will get the boost but the overall system will be faster as I doubt they managed to maunally optimise every bit of OS X for Altivec in Panther.

[SmileyDude]

Originally posted by Ji Eun:
i noticed this immediately when i switched last march to the ibook G4 800 / 640.
took me some weeks to get used to the UI lag.
a perfect illustration of OS X's slow UI is clicking and dragging scrollbars. you can try it right here in this safari windwo. they will NOT stay with your mouse.

Just tried it... on a mini (1.42ghz w/512MB of RAM) it stayed perfectly in sync with the mouse. I couldn't of asked to it do better. All the while, the window area updated just as fast.

Maybe my dual 1.8G5 would handle it better, but I honestly don't know how.

[abe2]

Originally posted by cla:
Eyecandy is nice but I miss Platinum all the same.
I've been living in exile (=Windows XP) for the past three years and switched back a month ago, and I can't say I'm too impressed with OS X.

Being used to XP, almost everything feels sluggish here.
Resizing windows, switching tabs, waiting for folders to open, trashing items, not to mention getting info on objects which usually takes 3-4 seconds.

System Preferences is a joke. It usually takes SECONDS to switch between panes.

Even TYPING in Safari is sluggish.
(Since this page contains animated gifs, which makes Safari eat 80% of the CPU. That's not cool with me.)

It's a pity faster CPU only allows for developers to get lazy. Optimizing code just isn't that important anymore.

What am I missing? Is it just my system?

Have you even tried running Repair Permissions?

This just looks like a lot of whining without you having even tried to fix it yet.

I can badmouth Winblowz XP just as much as you can buddy.

[Catfish_Man]

Don't feed the troll, guys. Whether his opinions are valid or not, he's clearly here just to whine about them.

More on topic:

Certain aspects of performance are definitely increased a lot in 10.4. Window resizing, loading pages and running javascript in Safari, and some other stuff (see the graphics state of the union presentation, as well as forum threads here and on arstechnica ( http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/j...m_sotu_ref.mov )

Overall I'd agree that some aspects of Quartz are still kinda slow (and Apple agrees as well, as you can see in the presentation). I think the real culprit (as much as there's any one single thing to blame, anyway) is the text system though. Haven't broken out Shark to confirm it, but that's what I've heard and it seems reasonable.