To NightOwl: When OS9 is the better choice

It is one thing for the online Mac community - more precisely, the Mac-related web sites - to live their own, self-contained life; after all, that kind of virtual existence is what the Internet is all about. But it is quite another thing when the sites evolve into a meta-existence, ranting against each other and thus focusing on themselves and each other, rather than the use and future of Apple produced and -related devices. The purpose of Mac sites is to enrich the individual user by dispensing information of various sorts, relevant to the user experience (a few writers also manage to relate it to extra-IT related sides of existence too, but doing so in a balanced, relevant and profitable way takes a very special kind of talent).

These BloQs have attempted to use other sites as illustrations, inspirations and references only, drawing on the positive content and avoiding any kind of derogation. However (and you probably felt that coming), over time so many articles, comments and messages have been published on the net, deriding anyone that dares question the superiority of OSX or indeed suggest major flaws in the strategic decisions of Apple development, that it can be held back no longer.

The drop that shattered the camel's hump was a series of articles by Gene Steinberg on MacNightOwl, not least a recent one titled The Jaguar Report: Memo to Mac OS 9 Holdouts. Gene Steinberg has been as eagerly proselytizing for switching to OSX as if he was a fully paid MacVangelist - which is not the case - but this is not what raised my ire; he is in his full right to do so. However, the argumentation is so one-sided as to completely ignore any of the arguments that many well versed Apple users will find relevant, and at times this gives an almost patronizing ring to what he writes.

The former characteristic makes his article a useful starting point for a more balanced view on the choice between continuing to use OS9 for the present, or becoming a switch and adopting OSX: his position and argumentation is typical for the already mentioned adulation of everything new and/or everything blessed by Apple.

I spend half of my time in OSX, partly because the UI is so beautiful, and partly because I need to know in order to hold an informed opinion on how Apple development is progressing. This has made it more than clear to me that for a new, casual Mac owner, with new hardware and mostly basic computing/Internet needs, OSX is definitely the place to be, all its shortcomings untold (actually, they will be listed below, but I love that turn-of-phrase). It avoids the confusion of switching between two UI paradigms, the powerful hardware at least negates the slovenness of the coding choices, and it prepares the user for a future dominated by OSX.

However, for a number of user groups the choice is far less clearcut: professionals working independently or in small companies where they have to use a large number of software tools rather than specializing in a few, musicians, long time users, gamers, etc. They will need to look closely at the arguments for OSX and - equally importantly - against OS9. The number of longtime users switching to OSX is far larger than this number of totally new users; furthermore, the choice of staying or jumping is far less relevant to the new users: they bought a package including hardware and OSX, not primarily something that runs OS9. So, the longtermers are the more important ones, and that is where Gene Steinberg comes in.

He lists a number of valid reasons for them not to switch to OSX: they may possess slow hardware and old peripherals with no chance of suitable OSX drivers being released, they may be using specialized software that is unable to run in Classic, and they will definitely have to adjust to a new way of relating to the computer: "almost like having a new computer", is his precise wording.

These reasons are not addressed by Gene Steinberg, instead he stereotypes the whole group of users hesitant to switch as people "to some extent, intimidated by their systems". While I accept that there are some Mac users that are not interested in spending time working with the innards of MacOS, the reason for choosing a Mac for most of them is precisely the ease use - including the ease of learning how to change things. As for the majority of longtime users, they are definitely not "intimidated by their systems"; precisely the logical buildup of the system and the tolerance and ease of use (which are indeed the two basic ingredients of good user interfaces, viz. Jacob Nielsen) has enabled them to feel relaxed about enhancing, upgrading, tweaking their system until it is as much a personal statement as an optimized workspace.

OSX is far more tweakable than Apple has made it out to be - look through the System Utilities section of Versiontracker, and you will se an amazing number and range of programs, extensions, hacks, all of which makes the face of Finder and Aqua at least as morphable as Windows - in spite of its having been available for a far shorter period of time. Undoubtedly, this has to do with the group of seasoned *nix users that have become part of the Mac community and with the flexibility (in some ways) of the *nix system. On top of that, as I will discuss a little later this week, there is an outstanding and exciting range of utilities capable of enhancing the user efficiency in the OS. The problem, though, is that they make for a far less even user experience than in OS9. Interface enhancements nearly always introduce roughness in user handling, but it is more severe in OSX than in OS9, for several reasons: firstly, there is no basic user paradigm underlying OSX, the way there is in OS9; secondly, many of the enhancements in OSX are there to fill holes in the OS user handling instead of enhancing it, and that creates a lot of unevenness; thirdly, the coding is still not very mature compared to that of similar OS9 programs; fourthly, the lack of documentation from Apple makes a lot of "hacking" in the coding necessary (which gives potential instability every time an upgrade comes along); and fifthly, since many OSX enhancements are shareware (and you need at least a dozen to make the OS reasonably functional - who has the dough to pay for so many?), you have to live with annoying pop-up "encouragements", etc, making the use rather annoying.

Gene Steinberg offers two main reasons for switching to OSX: the ability of even untrained new users to perform basic tasks in it, and its extra stability. I don't know whether to take the first reason as a subtle (?) derogation of longtime users, or a paternal attempt at soothe any perceived angst, so I'll leave that on the screen for a moment, and then go on...

As far as the "stability gap is concerned" it is to some extent mythic. While X indisputably is more stable inherently, 9 offers a far more "stable" user experience. Now, my constellation of hardware and OS9 is exceptionally stable; there is little to choose between that and OSX. I have a number of Mac friends with similar experiences - OS9 instability is experienced by far fewer users than it is often made out. The stability of OSX, on the other hand, is often compromised by applications, the code bases of which are far less mature than those of their OS9 counterparts. On top of that, the Carbon API (and some of the other APIs too, for that matter) is still a work-in-progress and therefore buggy and open to future bugginess. This can be seen in not only the Office v. Mac showpiece, but even in Apple's own iApps: on a sidenote, had Lemke or BareBones presented software of that quality, then they would soon have had to close shop. At present, and probably a couple of years into the future, it's a toss-up stability-wise.

Preemptive multitasking is another buzzword often launched like a spear at potential switchers; however, it is less interesting than it affects to be. The argument for preemptive multitasking is that it hinders badly behaving programs from stealing all available cycles; however, the operative expression here is "badly behaving". Preemptive multitasking forces cycle sharing onto the running applications, and that means a slowdown relatively in a situation where one is primarily using one large program (say, XPress). If it is properly programmed, it nevertheless will release the processor at appropriate intervals while still being able to take as many cycles as is necessary, given that it is the main task for the user. Preemptive multitasking in most cases only works well when a number of equally important tasks run concurrently - asymmetric task loads are handled far less efficiently preemptively.

Am I advocating staying with OS9 forever? No. However, to sum it up: the latest version of Classical MacOS is far more capable than the 7.5.5 version that was available when the plans for OSX was first presented. The present UI (not the graphical elements) is far closer to Rhapsody than it was ever thought possible at that time, and that makes the choice between 9 and X far less obvious. The user experience is far better systematized - and thus far more efficient - in OS9 (the OSX UI is not based on, or supported by any UI research that I know of... The stability is less of an issue than mostly argued, as I have pointed out, and the preemptive multitasking is not a boon in all situations. The ease of use, on the other hand, is far more important for the user experience, and for those of us that are able to leave out the stability factor issue, the consistency of OS9 may outweigh the glamor of OSX.

What do you prefer? - to learn how to perform specific tasks, or to understand principles that enable you to perform mostly any task? I wish it was as simple as that, but it isn't - and it's far less simple than Gene Steinberg and other XOSists make it out to be.