Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Monday, November 10, 2003
17:28 - The verdict is in http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/003/panther/macosx-10.3-1.html	(top)
John Siracusa, at Ars Technica (pointed out by Steven), has posted an exhaustive review of Panther. We're talking like fifteen densely packed pages, full of in-depth analysis of everything from the history of window management (leading up to his may-as-well-be-used-as-PR piece on Expos�) to an aesthetic guide to the pin-striping on window title bars to a discussion of filesystem metadata. There's enough here to eat up an afternoon, and lt leaves one rather breathless at the end. His verdict? Short answer: Yes, with an "if"; long answer: No, with a "but". In other words, he's about as ecstatic as a really really hard-nosed and demanding tech-head can ever be expected to be. He gushes with praise for Expos� and Safari and Fast User Switching; he's guardedly favorable about the new look of the system and the performance situation; and he's flapping his arms and screeching about a few things that verge on the too-esoteric-to-care-about (namely, the Finder, in which he goes off on a purist's tirade about "file browsers" and "spatial Finders" that leaves my eyes throbbing). He's also disappointed to see that Apple isn't really committed to enriching the metadata in the filesystem, which I take to mean Type and Creator codes-- after all, Siracusa (if I recall correctly) is the guy who sponsored an online petition a while back to get Apple to dump the new cross-platform-friendly per-file extension-hiding and "opener app" typing scheme in favor of the old-style Type/Creator-code structure, which was indeed more elegant, but quite frankly just isn't as useful or portable as the new way is. At the outermost level, there's criticism to be made of the sesqui-annual $129 price tag, and smirking to be done over the confused and half-hearted "big cat" branding, as well as real questions to be raised over UI changes that may indeed be done more for the sake of solidifying jobs in Graphic Arts and Visual Design than for real usability. Siracusa is fair, as seems to be his hallmark-- he points out both the good and the bad sides of these developments. He does love him some Apple, but boy is he a hard-ass about making sure they live up to his dream. I think the guy has a few pet rocks in his brain, but on the whole he draws up a very well-developed analysis of where Panther is and what it's got going for it (and where it stands to improve). Certainly a lot of his nits do bear picking, and I hope Apple reads his piece and takes at least a few parts of it to heart (we really gotta get better long-file-listing handling and a real multithreaded Finder, for example). Considering cases like Dave Hyatt the Safari-meister/blogger and the ever-expanding user feedback structure (now incorporating crash trackback and bug reporting into most applications, not just pages at apple.com), we've got every reason to believe that there are people at Apple who read Ars Technica religiously and know John Siracusa the way Linux geeks know about Eric S. Raymond. And in the marketplace of ideas that is the Apple software design lab, we're sure to reap the benefits. Because while there's something to be said against the system changing aesthetically and functionally as much as it has between Jaguar and Panther, let it never be said that Mac OS X is stagnating for lack of will to tweak it.