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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Friday, May 10, 2002
14:01 - Jaguar is Lookin' Good
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/25233.html

(top) link
Andrew Orlowski has a cool run-down on Jaguar, the next Mac OS X release (10.2? Possibly, but still not officially certain), from an everyday-use perspective. It's pretty darn encouraging, especially for what Steve himself described at WWDC as "not even Alpha code".

“It’s got the usual bugs associated with a beta,” was the most downbeat comment we heard.

What should gladden the hearts of the patient X faithful, if our correspondents are not engaging us in a vastly elaborate hoax: is that with Jaguar Apple has the performance issues nailed.

“I get the impression Apple said 'we’re never going to let the user see the spinning cursor again',” said one Jaguar user, speaking – as all others were – on condition of anonymity. “For all practical purposes, it’s been eliminated.”

Ah, but not quite, it seems. The notorious spinning CD-ROM cursor, also known as the beachball of death – and a legacy from the NeXT era - has been laid to rest. The wait cursor has morphed into an animated Aqua blob. If you’re unlucky enough to catch it, that is.

Whether starting applications, switching applications or simply scrolling, the system remains responsive, say users, and one reported several hours use on a G3 system without seeing the wait cursor once.

Sweeet. Yeah, I was hoping they'd get rid of the spinning beach-ball-- I wasn't expecting them to go to this much effort to eliminate system wait behavior so it would never appear, which is extremely happy news; rather, I was hoping (rather more pettily) that they would replace the cursor itself with something a bit more up-to-date and "Aqua" than the old NeXT-era CD-ROM (or whatever it is).

There are spring-loaded folders, you can put icon labels either at the bottom or the right of the icons, and there's a new visual addition that I had written in to request like a year ago (though I doubt I was the only voice that managed to get this feature implemented): "window zooming" effects are back, e.g. when you double-click on a folder, the shape of the window zooms out to where the window appears so you know where it came from. But since this is OS X, it doesn't just zoom the outline-- it zooms the entire opaque window smoothly, à la the "scale" minimize effect.

I wonder whether they intend to put in a "masking-out" effect for the icons of open folders or running applications, like OS 9 had. That's another thing I'd written in about.

Windows and documents in the Dock have a little icon of their associated applications overlaid on top of them, so you'll know what they will open in. Neato!

The code that Orlowski's correspondents got to see has a number of troublesome bugs-- apparently copy-and-pasting of icons is broken, and other pieces of Finder behavior are, er, "in transition", one might say. Orlowski seems to hate the Dock and the horizontal striping on Aqua widgets, but I'm going to need to hear some better bitching before I consider those to be problems.

This thing is looking better and better. I can't wait...

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© Brian Tiemann