[iJed]

I have just downloaded the two most interesting utilities for Mac OS X that I have seen so far: FruitMenu and ShadowKiller. Both come from www.unsanity.com and both bring OS 9 like features and performance.

ShadowKiller is the more incredible of the two utilities, it disables the one thing that seems to slow OS X menus to a crawl, the drop shadows. Trying this on my iBook 500 under 10.1.2 has brought tremendous performance increases when moving through menus and dragging and resizing windows. The only problem here is that their are no black lines around windows, but this would be easy for Apple to fix.

FruitMenu is the first worthy replacement to the Apple menu that I have yet tried. It replaces the substandard Apple menu with a fully customizable menu that is genuinely useful to the user and not some poor attempt to stop Mac users protesting about not having one at all.

Now I will just have to tell Apple about these thigs in their OS X feedback.

[ChaChi Boy]

It is nuts how people still want to use the Apple menu when it is a terrible UI. And we make fun of the Start Menu

[v0id7]

Isn' t there already an X optimiztion thread here?

C'mon, lets try to keep the topics away from redundant.

[iJed]

Originally posted by ChaChi Boy:
<STRONG>It is nuts how people still want to use the Apple menu when it is a terrible UI. And we make fun of the Start Menu </STRONG>

It may be terrible UI but it is certainly the fastest way of launching apps and files from large numbers of directories. The experienced computer user does not need as great consistency in common tasks as the novice.

[hmpff]

Ok, so let's make OS X exactly like Mac OS 9!

Tell me one thing? Why did you switch to Mac OS X if you obviously prefer Mac OS 9?

[KellyHogan]

I don't understand why shadows or transparencies should be slow on a G4 'supercomputer'. I can enable shadows, spring loaded folders, transparencies, skins, large icons and other things on Windows with Object Desktop and there is no performance hit. All OSX needs is the kind of tight programming that we saw between 10 and 10.1 and more hardware acceleration.

[juanvaldes]

Originally posted by KellyHogan:
<STRONG>I don't understand why shadows or transparencies should be slow on a G4 'supercomputer'. I can enable shadows, spring loaded folders, transparencies, skins, large icons and other things on Windows with Object Desktop and there is no performance hit. All OSX needs is the kind of tight programming that we saw between 10 and 10.1 and more hardware acceleration.</STRONG>

Indeed X just needs some tighter programming and I am sure apple is working on it for 10.2. But ShadowKiller produced no results for me. I could tell no diffrence, except it was harder to find windows. :-/

[Michael T. Doyle]

If the Apple Menu is such a bad IU, Unsanity would have no market. I find it easier to navigate my hard disk from aliases in my Fruit Menu than from aliases in the Dock. Aliases in the Dock give you menus that pop up on whichever side gives you more room, which is a worse UI than the logical progression from left to right you get with an Apple/Fruit Menu.

[ 01-20-2002: Message edited by: Michael T. Doyle ]

[Scrod]

Originally posted by Michael T. Doyle:
<STRONG>If the Apple Menu is such a bad IU, Unsanity would have no market.</STRONG>

Yeah, you're right. I guess what's why no one buys Windows, either.

[iJed]

Originally posted by hmpff:
<STRONG>Ok, so let's make OS X exactly like Mac OS 9!

Tell me one thing? Why did you switch to Mac OS X if you obviously prefer Mac OS 9?</STRONG>

I switched to OS X because of Cocoa, better stability, the unix command line and many other things. I think it generally has a more consistent user interface than Mac OS 9.x, although on my iBook 500 it is pretty slow.

The only OS 9.x feature that I really care about in X now is the Apple Menu (although springloaded folders would be nice). I do not want to make OS X into 9.x, I just want to have the option to configure things to my liking. I can't see what is wrong with that.

[Kestral]

To me, the Apple Menu is GREAT UI. It's my "utility drawer". I need a calculator in OS 9? No problem, pull up the Apple Menu and there it is!

I need my Notepad Deluxe? No problem, pull up the Apple Menu and there it is!

Temperator/Distance/Currency conversaion? No problem, pull up the Apple Menu and there it is.

Currency conversation? Same thing. WorldClock? Once again, Apple Menu.

And no, putting a folder with these apps in the dock is not the same. Going up to the top right hand corner of the Apple Menu is quick and easy because it's a quick mouse throw away (and it does not have to be accurate. Whereas in the dock, I have to find the folder, right click, wait a few moments for the stuff to pop up, and choose the right one. All steps vs. click Apple Menu select unclick.

ChaChi, I don't know where you got the idea that this is bad UI. If you can substantiate the claim and/or provide a better way of accessing "utility apps", I would be glad to try it out.

[Marook]

Hi All.

First of, I would like to chime in on the move to UNIX: we do this to get a more stable system, that have some modern features we have all screamed for in many years.

Just because the core of the system is changed, does not make the UI of the system the best/worst.

OS X have some nice UI, but it is a pain to step back in the matter of UI, when you upgrade to a more stable/modern core of the system.

So, if Apple don't think clicking their logo in the top/left corner is the right way to access utilities, give it another icon, or let the user choose. The great thing about the Mac has always been the way you could customize the UI to the way you work.

I hate sitting down with a PC, and have to work the way Bill likes... Now, OS X mimics some of that! Not a cool move.

[iJed]

Originally posted by Marook:
<STRONG>So, if Apple don't think clicking their logo in the top/left corner is the right way to access utilities, give it another icon, or let the user choose. The great thing about the Mac has always been the way you could customize the UI to the way you work.</STRONG>

I agree completely. The best thing Apple can do is let the user choose. They can set the default to whatever they like but they should allow everything to be changed to the users preferences and not Steve Jobs preferences.

[ChaChi Boy]

Originally posted by iJed:
<STRONG>

It may be terrible UI but it is certainly the fastest way</STRONG>

Ya right. Clicking a 32 by 32 area is not the best way to do things. Put a folder of your most used apps on the Dock and you are much better off.

[K++]

Okay i really dont see why people go to somehing completely new and complain about y its not like the old.

If you wanted the old then stay with it. On the menubar, there is nothing wrong with it, Apple give you the GO menu for exactly what you want from Fruit menu. Just drop an alias in the favorites folder. The fact is the new Apple menu is great UI. Under unix the philosophy is you write a small app that does one and only one thing very well then you combine other apps to do lots of little things saving you the trouble of finding one app that does everything. In the new Apple menu there are only the options that pertain to the computer. About the machine, system preferences, shut down, restart, and logout. That is all that should be in a system wide menu. recent was only added because we gave them enough feedback. Though I appreciate it, there are better places to put it than the apple menu.

If you want all you apps one place use favorites, and use the dock for the most used apps taht you alwasy are using, dont moan and complain about how apple didnt put everything there for you.

Shadows, ahh shadows, the fact is that you iBook is a G3 not a G4, cocoa is a vector based drawing system, so the G4's AltiVec engine helps ALOT. now you wanna turn off shadows to get better performance, fine tis your machine. But not only does it make everything alot uglier it makes things harder. Black lines around windows make unsanity do it, because that is ridiculous apple cant be expected to support hacks of thier ooperating system. Whats next you'll want apple to give you the option of putting the apple menu on the bottom then you can use your fruit menu like a start bar?

You dont like the way X does things dont use it, for most people(G3s and older machines) X isnt for you, just cuz it runs doesnt mean it'll run well. My suggestion is that you use 9 the menus act exactly how you want, and there are no shadows anywhere.

[ChaChi Boy]

Why is this page so damn wide?

[wadesworld]

So, if Apple don't think clicking their logo in the top/left corner is the right way to access utilities, give it another icon, or let the user choose. The great thing about the Mac has always been the way you could customize the UI to the way you work.

Oh yeah, Apple gave so much choice in OS 9. You could put things into the Apple menu. If you didn't like the position or how the Apple menu worked, you could move it to...

oh wait...

well, if you didn't like how it worked you could change it by....

oh wait....

In short, Apple gave you one way to do things in the Apple Menu.

Wade

[iJed]

Originally posted by K++:
<STRONG>
If you want all you apps one place use favorites, and use the dock for the most used apps taht you alwasy are using, dont moan and complain about how apple didnt put everything there for you.</STRONG>

The go menu does not have any sub-menus and is limited to the Finder. Why would I want to use that? As for the Dock, folders in it are moving targets. Terrible UI.

<STRONG>Shadows, ahh shadows, the fact is that you iBook is a G3 not a G4, cocoa is a vector based drawing system, so the G4's AltiVec engine helps ALOT. now you wanna turn off shadows to get better performance, fine tis your machine. But not only does it make everything alot uglier it makes things harder. Black lines around windows make unsanity do it, because that is ridiculous apple cant be expected to support hacks of thier ooperating system. Whats next you'll want apple to give you the option of putting the apple menu on the bottom then you can use your fruit menu like a start bar?</STRONG>[/QUOTE]

I know that my iBook is a G3 but it was made &lt; 6 months ago. It even shipped with OS X. Why would I expect Apple not to support hardware that they still make? And Cocoa is not a drawing system, it is a set of object oriented frameworks written in Objective C. Quartz is the drawing system. I want to be able to turn the visual effects off without any need for a hack. Thats why I want Apple to put black lines round their windows and menus.

<STRONG>You dont like the way X does things dont use it, for most people(G3s and older machines) X isnt for you, just cuz it runs doesnt mean it'll run well. My suggestion is that you use 9 the menus act exactly how you want, and there are no shadows anywhere.</STRONG>[/QUOTE]

For the most part I do like the way OS X does things. It is just that there are some things that I (and many others) believe should be changed or customisable. I don't know how you can say a G3 is obsolete. That is just plain stupid. Apple still make G3 Macs and should support them for at least four years if not longer. I have Windows XP running on a Pentium 200 MMX after all and it is faster than OS X is on my G3. Of course XP lacks the transparency and so on for most things.

[Angrysmiley]

I have a Lombard powerbook, it does perform very well under Linux (Enlighenment with full feature), you dont need 512Mb Ram dual G4 and so on to run a GUI.

It's also bad by Apple to leave out certain acceleration features for older G3s.. like my Powerbook in OSX, i guess there's alot of angry people out there because of that. //

[iJed]

Originally posted by Angrysmiley:
<STRONG>It's also bad by Apple to leave out certain acceleration features for older G3s.. like my Powerbook in OSX, i guess there's alot of angry people out there because of that. // </STRONG>

I have a rev B iMac which has no OpenGL support under X. I find this completely unacceptable since OS X is supposedly supported on the machine and OpenGL is listed as one of its major features!