g r o t t o 1 1

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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Thursday, January 11, 2007
11:41 - What a difference six years makes

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With people starting to make noises about Leopard involving a completely new look-and-feel to replace Aqua (not to mention a resolution-independent one), it's a bit jarring to realize that Mac OS X is about six years old now—long enough for a lot of us to not remember what it was like in the before-time, in the long-longago. OS X has been smooth and polished to look at for almost that entire time, and it's been eminently usable for at least four of those six years (remember back when you couldn't drag a selection rectangle around a few icons on the desktop without the whole system stuttering to a halt?).

If we're about to embark on a whole new journey into the unknown interface, it might be instructive to look back into the year 2000, when John Siracusa reviewed all the Developer Preview versions of OS X, including the Public Beta, which I still have tucked away somewhere. His review of Developer Preview 3 is indicative of his pessimism: it contains phrases like: The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I believe that Mac OS X DP3 has its heart in the right place. Ouch.

But rightly so. DP3 had goofy things like "Single Window Mode", the fonts and window decorations were still half in the old Platinum world, the Apple logo did nothing but take up space in the middle of the title bar, and the Dock was so bad in both concept and execution that Siracusa deemed it "a total write-off". He's still no fan of the Dock even today, but looking at the state it was in back when OS X was a blue-sky design exercise, it's hard to blame his reaction then.

Nowadays it's easy to take for granted the slickness and unity that binds the OS experience together, especially when the few warts that it does have—clunky Spotlight, awkward disc burning, sometimes-slow device recognition—rear their heads. We ought to bear in mind that when people got their first look at OS X, it was at a stage when the most creative thing you could really do with it was think up names for the spinny rainbow cursor that everyone spent most of their time staring at. iTunes didn't even exist, for Pete's sake. (We did, however, have "Music Player".)

Man. It sure was revolutionary, even with all its problems; but they did have an awfully long way to go—longer than I ever realized at the time. It's only in retrospect that it becomes clear just how much they have accomplished. And while it won't ever be as big an architectural jump as the OS 9—OS X transition was, I hope the next interface generation they embark on isn't quite so riddled with false starts and ill-conceived ideas. Though Siracusa might disagree with me on a few major points, such as the non-spatial Finder and the inelegant file-typing scheme, I think the forces of righteousness do tend to win the day within Apple.

I'm tempted to go install the Public Beta on my old G4...


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© Brian Tiemann