Review: My PowerMac and MacOS X 10.2 (a.k.a. Jaguar)

grahams - - 8 mins read

I apparently have corrected the problem I was having with my MacOS X install, so with that nuisance out of the way for a few days I feel that I have finally had a chance to truly evaluate the OS. So, without further ado, my review of MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar).

Before I get started, I wanted to state for the records, that I still think that Pre-OSX versions of Apple’s OS are complete abominations… Perhaps their technical inadequacy was excusable back in 1984, but the fact that it took them so long to rectify the issues are ridiculous. My opinion on that hasn’t changed; OS9 is a complete piece of shit.

Some people question why, after years of slagging Macs, have I been experimenting with the Mac. Well, the answer is pretty simple… I need an alternative to Windows, and there are no other real options. The first computer I owned was a C=64, and the first computer I bought was an Amiga 500. That trusty Amiga lasted me through high-school, but when it finally breathed it’s last breath (or, more accurately, when I spilled my last glass of Coke into it), Commodore had already been dead for awhile, and there weren’t really any other viable platforms. I quasi-reluctantly bought a PC, and became a Windows user… Windows was alright, but I never really enjoyed using it.. I had some Unix experience from using bulletin boards (most notable, Dan’s Domain, which provided a shell account on a Linux box and gave me my first non-fido Usenet access). I played around with Linux on my machine, but it was (heh, still is) simply too immature for the desktop back in 1995. I retreated back to Windows, relatively content in using it but never truly comfortable or happy.

BeOS saved me for quite awhile… From the release of R3 for x86 in 1998 until a year or so ago I was happily using Be as my primary OS. Unfortunately, though, a hardware upgrade on my machine left the OS unbootable and my desire to beat it back into operation had died along with Be, Inc. I retreated back to Windows XP Pro, which is by far the least sucky version of Windows to date. But I missed Unix, I missed the level of comfort I had using Be, I missed feeling comfortable in my OS, and to be totally honest, I missed feeling like I was flipping the bird at Microsoft.

I gave Linux another chance, but I firmly believe that an OS should never get in your way, and I should be able to slip into “novice” mode and never have to compile kernels or insert modules or any such thing and just resort to using my computer, simply. I like being able to be “Mr. Technical Guy”, and I do so often, but I hate having to be that way. This is just impossible on Linux, and it’s a huge turn-off. Add to this my opinion that all of the UI choices on Linux suck, and I found my Linux partition growing dust. When I had the opportunity to pick up a PowerMac on the cheap, I jumped at the opportunity and here we are, two months later, talking about my experience.

So what do I think of Jaguar after two months?

Interface

Jaguar’s UI is slick, but I definately have my complaints. While people rave about the “lickability” of the OS, to me most of the time it is annoying. I feel that I would prefer my UI to be fast as hell as opposed to what I get in Jaguar. While window drawing isn’t terribly slow, it certainly could be faster. I felt the need to upgrade the memory in the machine to 768M from the 256M that came with it, and this definately helped the performance. Jaguar is, and I don’t think this is news, an unrepenting resource hog. I guess I am supposed to kowtow to the party line and say that “Resources are Cheap and we have to use them”, but that’s bullshit. If all this RAM usage was directly tied to usability, I would buy into it, but it’s not.

I have also found that while there is a plethora of freeware/shareware/homebrew applications to satisfy your every need, many of them (and this is an obvious generalization) have completely amateurish or overly fruity UIs. I was always under the impression that Mac users were very UI-aware, so I really have trouble understanding why the UIs of so many apps look like they were thrown together in 15 minutes by a monkey trained in using Interface Builder. This problem is less-prevalent in commercial software, but not completely absent.

I thought I would hate the Dock, but I really kinda like it. Between “you and me”, I even have dock magnification turned on (sssshhh). I think that the combination of “launching platform” and “view of what’s running” works great, and I really like putting folder shortcuts and right-clicking them to browse them, much like in Be’s Tracker (I just wish the Finder followed suit).

I’m less satisfied with the Finder, but not completely disappointed.. I feel that the Finder needs a bit more polish and work before it is truly “done”, but it is definately functional. And for the record, I might even like the Finder’s “column view” as much as my other favorite file-browsing UI, Windows Explorer’s two-pane view. One of my biggest frustrations with the Finder is that it never seems to remember my view settings.. I want to force all windows to the Column View but it seems to pop out of column view randomly). I also wish I could “cut/paste” files from the context menu.

Applications

I have ridiculously low needs for an OS to be usable to me:

  • Good Browser - I find myself using Chimera mostly, which works pretty well. I wish Chimera would close tabs when I middle-click on them, and I wish there was better pop-up blocking control (something exactly like Phoenix would rule, it’s the best I have seen). Safari looks like it has good potential, but until it gets tabbed browsing (which is apparently in Safari CVS) and more fine-grained pop-up controls, I am not really going to be using it much.. I find Safari’s bookmark management to be kind of annoying, as well. I use Chimera nightlies, so occasionally things get a little wonky, and I sometimes turn to Safari when that happens.
  • Good Terminal - The OSX terminal does a pretty good job, the occasional emulation glitch notwithstanding. I wish it would automatically copy text to the clipboard that was selected (as opposed to right-clicking and selecting “copy”). Other than that stuff, it definately does the job.
  • Vim - I can’t survive without Vim, and fortunately both vim and gVim work without complaint.
  • MP3 Player - Audion does the trick, although I wish there was a complete analog to WinAmp2. That has the perfect feature set for me. As I have discussed
    before    , iTunes’ catalogging and management stuff gets in my way, but I use it to listen to my Car Talk subscription from Audible.

That’s pretty much it.. If I am writing software for the OS, a good set of developer tools are also on that list. I haven’t played enough with Jaguar’s Dev Tools much yet, so I haven’t formed an opinion yet.. My rough view is that they don’t suck too much, but they aren’t Visual Studio.

The Hardware

Not much to say here: Apple has it together when it comes to industrial design. I don’t get my shorts in a bunch over technical specs anymore, I gave that up sometime in college. I just want a computer ballsy enough to get done whatever tasks I set in front of it… So I am not going to talk much about the horsepower of my PowerMac G4/733Mhz Tower. Instead, I am going to quickly say that it has the most well-designed case I have ever seen. I giggle like a little kid every time I pop open the case.. I sometimes find myself opening it just for fun.

The suppository
mouse is still a piece of crap and is in the “Island of Misfit Hardware” pile in the closet… I use my Logitech MouseMan Wheel Optical, which works like a champ (as expected). I kinda like the “Pro Keyboard”, and I find myself using it on the PC too (cuz I don’t want to have two different keyboards on my desk).

In Conclusion

Jaguar doesn’t
suck too badly, and probably sucks less that Windows. I find myself using it almost exclusively these days, although there are still a few things I haven’t figured out how to do in OSX (Like extracting/processing stuff from the Tivo). Whether this is a permanent trend has yet to be seen, I may return to the PC at some point if Apple really pooches it, but for now I will probably be using the Mac most of the time (unless I want to play a game, which is a joke on the Mac). Hopefully it will continue to get better, but only time will tell.