::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[celia romaniuk]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, jonah wrote:

> But am I doing the right thing? Is this not just head-in-the-sand
> behaviour? Should I be embracing the new UI and fitting myself to it
> instead of jumping through all these hoops in order to remain "living in
> the past"? Surely I'm rejecting progress?

Nah. Good interfaces need time and development. Sure, the designers can do
their best to make it really good up front, but I think the case with OSX
is that released it before it's even as sophisticated as OS9. I can
understand why this is so (god knows we've all done it - pressing business
need and all that) but I know from experience that it's painful. All you
want to do is get back in there and have another go, and tweak and adjust,
until it's right.

Hopefully future releases of OSX will develop so that its obvious flaws
are f1xxor3d. I hope they bring the third-party features you talk about
into the core. Is this what happened during earlier MacOS development? I
suspect so, but I'm not sure. Mr Mison probably will.

So, while OSX may seem like "the future", I think it's really only the
beginning. There's nothing wrong with plugging in bits and pieces to make
it work for you - as long as most of these are eventually incorporated
into the system itself, so that it becomes usable on its own. (I know that
tweaking the OS with extensions and stuff is something almost everyone
does - but there's a balance between tweaking to customise something and
tweaking so that it's not a complete pain in the arse).

> [0] Out of curiosity, Celia, do you boot into classic or OS X most often?

Funny you should ask. Having said all of the above, I still haven't
installed OSX. This is partly due to not having easy access to the
software, but it's definitely not the full story, as I could get my hands
on it if I was really that bothered. It's more that, from what I
understand of the OS, I'd rather stick with 9 for now. However, I can see
myself installing it sometime over the next six months or so (e.g. if I
get a new machine), because I'd love to start playing with the unixy
goodness too.

-- 
celia
seesmm quite peacuful to me