njr 3.0

And back again.

In my experience, Mac OS 9/8 was less stable than a comparably configured Windows 98/2000 box. By a long shot. Of course, Mac OS 9/8 are about 10x more pleasant visually and intuitively than any form of Windows and I could live with the instabilities in the name of not becoming nauseous any time I looked at the screen.

I don't think I claimed overall system stability was better in X. Especially while programming, I did have to restart my Mac multiple times an hour sometimes. There is no protection. In general use, I restarted my Mac under OS 9 every few hours to a day, depending on how lucky I was.

I don't run into any goofy memory problems

Just yesterday my OS X machine decided to fill up memory. I still don't know what the problem was, only that my Mac got slower and slower, I couldn't interact with anything, the music skipped and stopped playing, eventually it ran out of swap space and… boom. Had to hit the reset button.

I can print pages 459 to 578 of the 600 page, graphic riddled, book manuscript I'm editing from OS X.

Printing, along with the Finder, is another area in which Mac OS X is very weak (though it's getting better). For example, I still have to remember to choose “Custom” from the “Presets” menu otherwise my printer doesn't print double-sided. For many versions of OS X, changing to the Custom setting meant that you could no longer specify a page range because the range got saved in the Custom preset! (This was later fixed in a halfway manner by removing the ability of the Print dialog box to show the available page range). The “Save as Default” mechanism that's been around since at least the LaserWriter 5.0 series drivers was dropped from OS X, in favor of this cumbersome mechanism (and the preset is called “Custom Setting” in one place and “Preset” in the other). That's just poor design.

I value ease of use, thoughtful design, consistency and speed while the computer wasn't crashed, over a system that doesn't crash as much, and can do more, but does each individual thing poorly.

In any case, it is quite likely that your firmware revision is different than the one Apple wrote the driver against and, as such, Apple may never have seen the crashes you are experiencing.

Indeed. I recently upgraded the firmware in my MP3 player to see if it helped, and in fact wrote about it here (it didn't).

There's a bunch more in the post, and I generally agree with most of it. No question that my working style has changed because I'm able to run server software—such as Frontier and Radio—in the background on my Mac. But I had a perhaps irrational hope that “the power of Unix with the ease of use of the Macintosh” would deliver on both promises. Right now OS X comes much closer to the former.

9:12 AM | Radio
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TFM for Mac OS X: Now I can RTFM to my heart's content.

11:45 PM | Radio
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Bill Bumgarner responds to my post earlier today about OS X stability. Writing an OS, and drivers, is hard, I don't doubt it, and I don't claim I could do better because I haven't tried. However, what I complain about mainly is that OS X does not have the quality of OS 9. Nothing I see makes me think that the time has been spent to do a really good job—not the kernel, not the drivers or SDKs, not Project Builder, nor command-line tools, and especially not the Finder, the poster child for “unfinished, slow, flaky and buggy” in OS X. That I have to restart the Finder on average 10 times a day is not acceptable.

This is, in part, because time that would be spent in a new 9.x release on fit and finish has to be instead spent implementing basic features that were in System 7, or FreeBSD 3.0, yet haven't been ported to X yet.

The MP3 driver I'm using shipped with Mac OS X, I have a Creative Nomad II. This player is still sold, although not the exact model I use (DAP-0001). The plugin bundle in iTunes says “Copyright Apple Computer, Inc. 2001”, so I assume it means Apple wrote it and should be supporting it—like they're not. In fact the usability of my Nomad has gone down in iTunes 2.x, unlike in 1.x I can no longer drag files onto it after files have started uploading, so I have to either wait for the upload to complete, or create a playlist as a temporary storage area before dragging it to my Nomad. In the flakiness department, I often have to connect and disconnect the player 2–3 times before it registers in iTunes (and pray that it doesn't crash). A robust, stable OS, or applications software (iTunes) does not require that I try something multiple times and work around crashes.

8:45 PM | Radio
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AccordionGuy :: CodeCon (Stagette): Very funny story.

1:21 PM | Radio
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Today, once again, I plug in my MP3 player, and my Mac crashes, like it does about every tenth time I plug in my MP3 player. This bug has been around for over a year, no change. This time it managed to trash my iTunes Music Library file. I hope it didn't cause directory corruption. Because OS X does so many more things at once, its filesystem is actually more prone to corruption than Mac OS 9 ever was. I'm definitely going to get my swap files moved to another disk today.

There used to be no problems with my computer that bothered me day in and day out, as recently as two years ago. Now there are hundreds of outright bugs in the OS. Windows don't activate when they're supposed to, they don't update properly, I get unexplained crashes and lengthy hangs, everything is slow and cumbersome to use. And OS X still crashes once every day or too.

The standards of quality in OS X, currently, are atrocious. On the other hand, Apple is doing very well with fixing the other bugs I've reported this year. So I hold hope for the future as OS X moves past the “immature, new OS” stage.

The public Darwin bugs web site hasn't been updated in two weeks, with no indication of when it will be back again.

12:15 PM | Radio
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