Linkstew

In a word, "whoa." I've probably said "whoa" enough times in my first 3 hours of using Panther to give gold ole' Keanu a run for his money. If you're for any reason waiting to buy Panther, let me just reassure that it made my PowerBook feel like a whole new computer. There are so many improvements that I couldn't even begin to list them all. Boy, I sure wish I had a Mac to use at work. I'd be so much more productive than with windows.

But just to pick one out of the hat, here's a feature of Expose that I hadn't heard anything about until I discovered it myself: Activate Expose in either "All Windows" or "Application Windows" mode, and then hit "tab," and Expose will cycle through the open applications, displaying each one in "Application Windows" mode. So cool.

The following is completely correct output from my last CS project. If this is correct output, just imagine what incorrect output must have looked like.

nachos% execalot
execalot
pi2d  a3r geuxmeecnetds

arg 0: child a
2p iadr g4u meexnaetrcsge
 d1
: child a
arg 0: child b
pid 5 execed
2 arguments
arg 1: child b
arg 0: chil2dp  iacdr
 g6u meexnetcse
d
aarrgg  01::  cchhiilldd  dc

2 arguments
pid 7 execed
arg 1: child d
arg 0: child e

[2] Donea r(g0 )1
: chnialcdh oes
%

If you're wondering what the hell is going on here, it's five copies of the same program all running simultaneously, so their output is being interleaved. The project was the system that's capable of running multiple programs at the same time, along with a bunch of other low level guts of the "operating system".

Debugging this thing gave me one of the biggest school-induced headaches I've ever had. And in the end, though our system was behaving correctly, it was still running too slowly and so we weren't passing all of the test cases.

Well, at least now I know where Aphex Twin got the names of the songs on Drukqs.

A year ago today I installed Mac OS X 10.0.0 on my PowerBook. In that year, I've come to appreciate it more and more, and it's definitely the most powerful and extensible OS I've ever used. And yet, I'm not blindly in love with it, and I recognize that it still has a long way to go.

The OS X Finder has always been my least favorite part of OS X, and so I'm going to focus exclusively on that for my "OS X Anniversary" post. So without further ado, here are ten problems I still have with the OS X Finder (as of 10.1.3) (though there are many more):

1. Text/Picture/Etc Clipping Icons no longer distinctive - In the classic Mac OS, text clippings and picture clippings and so on (a feature Windows users have probably never seen) had very nice, distinctive icons. In OS X, clippings of any time get a generic icon, making them not only indistinguishable from each other, but also indistinguishable from a directory full of other "generic" files. I use clippings a lot, so this problem is staring at me from my desktop every day.
2. Alias names aren't italicized - Back in the day, you could tell the difference between an alias and a real file because the alias name was in italics. When Microsoft introduced Windows 95, they introduced shortcuts, which were distinguished from a real file by an ugly little error. When Apple came out with Mac OS 9, they added a little arrow in addition to the italic file name to signify an alias. While the arrow was ugly, presenting the information in more ways than one isn't such a bad thing. But then, in OS X, they got rid of the italics, and now the arrow is the only indicator that a file is an alias. This sucks when you're looking at files in list view, because that arrow it tiny.
3. Command-~ is inconsistent with other applications. - Since 10.1 came out, command-~ has been one of my most used key shortcuts. It cycles through the open windows on an application level, so it's useful for quickly flipping through my open Terminals, or open OmniWeb windows, or what have you. However, the Finder doesn't support Command-~, which irritates me daily. I'm so used to hitting Command-~ at this point that I do it without thinking, and then have to deal with the Finder thinking as it pops up the "Go To Folder" Sheet/Dialogue, and then have to hit cancel, and then have to find my mouse... Ugh.
4. Off-by-one error on the Desktop - This one doesn't actually irritate me so much as it endlessly amuses me. Hide everything and stare at your Desktop. Nice, isn't it? Go ahead and click and drag your mouse around and look at that nice shaded drag box. Now, move your mouse to the absolute left edge of your screen and start a drag box. Now, move your mouse to the absolute right edge of the screen and try to start a drag box. Also, try the bottom while you're at it. Ah, the difference between < and <= makes all the difference!
5. Command-click now toggles the selection - I already wrote about this one at length, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that I hate this, and it drives me crazy when I'm organizing files.
6. It takes two clicks to rename a file. - In the classic Mac OS, you had a few options for renaming a file. You could click on a file and hit return, or you could click on a filename and wait a second, or you could click on a filename and quickly pull the cursor away to open the edit box quicker. It's important to note that in all three of those scenarios, it didn't matter whether or not you already had the file selected. Luckilly (sarcasm), in OS X, the file has to already be selected before clicking on the filename has any effect. Even better, the "pull away" trick doesn't work any more. Your best bet now is probably just to hit return before you start typing. Subtle, but irritating.
7. Disappearing cursor while editing file names - Heh, click on a file. Hit return to switch to edit filename mode. Hit right and watch as your cursor disappears, so you have no idea where it'll be when you stop moving it. It'll show back up after you stop hitting arrows and wait a few seconds, but basically, this makes editing file names even harder, because if you want to insert some text in a file name, you're better off using your mouse, but then you have to deal with the "two clicks to rename" problem. This one is probably qualifies as the "most obviously a big problem and how come it wasn't fixed in 10.1.1, 10.1.2, or 10.1.3?" bug in the Finder.
8. Finder windows don't update. - This one is only debatably the Finder's fault, but: If you're manipulating files in the Terminal and you have a Finder window open to that same directory, the Finder window doesn't get updated to reflect moved/copied/deleted files until you click in that Finder window and wait a few seconds. I suppose this is my fault for using the Terminal so much, but it'd be cool to use an open Finder window as a sort of "graphical ls" to see what's in a directory and what isn't while manipulating files from the Terminal.
9. Replace, Replace, Replace... - Basically, the copy dialogues need a "Replace All" option. Try this: Make a copy of a folder, open the original, select-all, and then option drag (to make copies, so you don't mess up your original) the files onto the copy of your original folder. Hit "Replace." Hit "Replace." Hit "Replace." Scream when you realize that you're trying to copy 1000 files, hit "Stop," (at which point you're left with an incomplete copy), clean out the target folder, and and do the move again. This is actually a big problem if you were doing a move instead of a copy, because if your target folder has an incomplete move, you're going to have to sit there and figure out which files need to be kept (because they were part of the incomplete move), and which ones need to be gotten rid of so you can finish your move without hitting "Replace" 986 more times. Solution: Add a "Replace All" button or something, fer chris'sake.
10. Age old keyboard shortcuts that got changed - "Make Alias" is now Command-L instead of Command-M (because Command-M is now "minimize window"), and "New Folder" is now Command-Shift-N instead of Command-N (because Command-N is now New Window). Both of these still give me fits every day, even after a year with OS X.

And lordy, I didn't even touch file extensions or the Dock... This was just the Finder.

So, what irritates you about the OS X Finder? (Or the Classic Finder, or the Windows Explorer, or KDE's Konquerer, or your file browser of choice?)

This article is rather ridiculously long, but it's a very very good and thorough comparison between OS X and BeOS. I followed the BeOS practically from its beginning, and I've always admired it from a distance. It's a little depressing to see even its supporters bailing out.

This quote from the article sums it up very nicely: "This is all very simple. I'm going to jump up and down and whoop about OS X, and then I'm going to bitch and moan like nobody's business."

Lately when I've walked past the Gateway store on Shattuck, I've been tempted to go in and play with Windows XP. But every time I stopped myself, and decided I'd come back later wearing an Apple t-shirt and ask a lot of difficult questions of the poor sales representatives. ;-)

So after a rocky start, I've had OS X 10.1 running smoothly on my PowerBook for the last day. Though I'm happy as a clam, it's honestly a little anti-climactic considering how worked up I got over this thing a week ago.

Rocky start, you ask? Well, though it took nearly half an hour, the upgrade itself went off without a hitch. I rebooted, logged in, and saw my desktop come up faster than ever before. And in my excitement to play with new toys, I clicked on the menu bar clock, and my desktop disappeared and I was returned to the log in pane. "Uh..." So I logged in again, only this time, the status bar just kept spinning, and after about five minutes I rebooted the computer. The same sequence events was repeated, where I logged in once, it logged me out, and the second log in attempt spun. After this happened four or five times and I was getting a little irritated at the prospect of a reinstall, I got a hunch: "Don't click on the menu bar!"

So I rebooted and logged in again, and when I didn't click on the menu bar, it didn't log me out! So far so good. So I opened my System Preferences and made a new user (I figured this was probably a preference level problem rather than a system level problem, and setting up a new user would have been much better than reinstalling), and did a few other things, and then I clicked on Stickies (which had been launched at login), and I was logged out. So the next time I logged in, I opened the System Preferences and disabled Stickies on login. And after I logged out and back in one more time, I clicked on the menu bar, and... I wasn't logged out! And things have been working fine since then. It was a strange rocky start, but nothing has gone wrong since then.

So, the good:

• Look boss, the speed, the speed! I think OS 9.2.1 on the same hardware is still snappier, but this is now actually usable, unlike 10.0. The most notable improvements are found in the Finder, which was by far the worst part of 10.0.
• Command-D finally does "Don't Save" in Save/Don't Save/Cancel" dialogues. Finally, no more accidentally hitting command-n in stickies, saying "fuck.", hitting command-w to close the window, having the save/don't save dialogue pop up because a new sticky note is automatically unsaved for some reason, hitting command-d, having nothing happen, saying "Fuck!", and then futzing with my trackpad to hit the button. This was my number 2 gripe about 10.0. It should be noted that this isn't universal for some reason, and the save/don't save dialogue for an unsaved mail in Mail.app doesn't support this. But something is better than nothing, and the Mail.app case is the only one I've found where it doesn't work.
• The system finally remembers my default browser, so I can finally just click on a URL and have it open in OmniWeb. In 10.0, I basically avoided clicking on URLs and resorted to copy/paste because I didn't want to wait for IE to open. Of course, now that everything is so fast, that might not be so bad.
• Ah, the return of the sweet double double! That is, I've now got my double ended scroll bars at both ends of the scroll bar in every program but iTunes. To get the double double though, you have to run `defaults write "Apple Global Domain" AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth` in the Terminal, because much like OS 9, you can't enable that feature from the interface.
• Did I mention the speed?

So, if you glance at my impressions after one month with 10.0, I listed a lot of other bad things. And everything but the command-d issue remain in 10.1. Focus is still broken, with windows popping from the foreground from all over the place, totally destroying my window stacking. I still have to use Prefling because there's no other easy way to get directly to a particular System Preferences panel. And there are still no alternating grey lines in the finder list view.

Well, I won't say nothing else has been fixed. I haven't tried using 10.1 as an AppleShare client or server yet. I'll report on that after I try it, but I'd like to believe that it couldn't possibly be worse than 10.0.

So there are a lot of interface issues that are still issues. What of the newly bad?

• The handling of file types and metadata has gone from bad to worse with the option to "hide file extensions." Ugh ugh ugh. To save my fingers, I'll reference this article on metadeta.
• Though it was admittedly a hack, the default showforeground has been disabled, so I can no longer make the triangle of the active application in the Dock blue. I haven't missed it much yet, but it's still a little irritating. Thankfully, the showhidden default still works, and I think that one's much more important.
• The clipboard has now been overloaded in the finder with the ability to copy and paste files -- this causes all kinds of nasty non-intuitive behavior. =(
• Though in theory the ability to resize columns in the finder column view should be a good thing, the interface seems less than intuitive. I can't describe all the irritating details in this tiny space, but suffice it to say that trying to get the columns sized just how I want them has left me pissed off every time, and I never end up with the columns how I wanted them.

Ah well, time to hit Apple's Mac OS X feedback page for the fifth time since the Public Beta was released a year ago...

I just read this article (from MacSlash) comparing Windows XP to Mac OS X 10.1. On the points that the article examined, it was a very fair discussion. And though there were a lot of points on each side which the article did not look at, I'm not going to get into it here and now because the MacSlash comments cover a lot of it.

• Command-D does not "Don't Save". In the Classic Mac OS, whenever an "Unsaved Data! Save/Don't Save?" dialogue box popped up, you could hit return to hit the default "Save" button or Command-D to "Don't Save", but in OS X, Command-D doesn't "Don't Save", so I have to go find the stinking mouse to get out of the dialogue.
• Lack of Documencentricity. One of the biggest annoyances is the attempt at implementing a document centered environment is so half assed and inconsistant that I can never be positive how my windows are going to behave.
• There's no "Send Window To Back". This feature is mainly something I'd like to see because of the stupid misbehaving document centered applications. I'll frequently have my windows arranged just so, with windows of several different applicantions intermingled. Then I'll close one, and some other undesired will come to the front, destroying my window arrangement. To get it out of the way, I have to bring all the other windows I want in front into focus individually instead of just having a "drop this offending window out of my vision" function.
• Actually, there is a "drop this offending window out of my vision" function. It's called "Minimize". The problem is, once I've minimized a window by accidentally (and very rarely intentionally) hitting command-M, it'll destroy my window ordering as described above and there's no way to get the window un-minimized just using my keyboard, despite the very easy to accidentally hit keyboard command to minimize it. Boo!
• There's no easy access to the individual System Preferences. What I'd like to see is the System Preferences entry in the Apple Menu have a sub menu of each applet. Instead, I've had to resort to dropping Prefling in my Dock, which is effective, but wastes space I'd rather hide in the menu.
• OS X does not play at all nice as an AppleShare client to an OS 9 Server. I can't begin to explain how many headaches this caused me, but it's just not pretty. I still have two files in my OS X Trash that I CANNOT delete in either OS 9 or OS X.
• The finder list view doesn't have the alternating grey lines which were oh-so-useful in OS 9 for telling which filesize belong to which file.
• No command-key on the right half of my PowerBook keyboar.... Oh, sorry, that's not OS X's fault. ::sheepish grin:: It still irritates me all the time, though =)

So, on the flip side, here's the things I thought I'd hate about OS X but which I actually kind of like or don't mind all that much:

• Amazingly, I'm getting by just fine without Window Shading... It'd be nice to have, but "Send Window To Back" would actually be an infinitely more useful window manipulation tool than Window Shading.
• I don't use the new Apple Menu all that much, but I don't miss the old one, because the Dock has me covered. I just threw my hard drives, my home folder, my applications folder, and a few other notable folders into my Dock, and there's everything I ever used the old Apple Menu for anyway... A few drag and drop related enhancements would be nice, but I figure they're so obvious that they're a shoe-in for future updates.
• I hardly use the Desktop at all anymore. In OS 9, everything landed on my desktop. Now, I have nice neat little buckets waiting for everything in my Home Folder.
• And finally, I can't say that I like the Drawer widget yet, but it's much more usable than I expected it to be.

What's there is very promising, and Apple has been offering updates at a steady pace. I can't wait to see what the future holds for this thing.

I started by backing up the Users directory of the public beta system to another drive. Then I drug everything from the old Public Beta partition to the trash and emptied it. I popped in my OS 9.1 CD, did a quick basic install of OS 9.1 for OS X to use as Classic, and then I put in the OS X CD and installed.

One of my favorite things about the classic Mac OS is how effortlessly it allows me to have multiple versions of the system installed, how easy it is to install, and how easy all of this made to trouble shoot the system. Well, Mac OS X is just as easy to install as it's classic cousin ever was. Pop in the CD, select your language of choice, select your installation destination, select whether you want print drivers and BSD subsystem installed, and off you go! However, I think it's maybe a little too easy, and doesn't protect the User from doing certain stupid things, like installing a second copy of the system, or picking unfortunate user names...

Eventually the machine rebooted, and I was presented with a login prompt. No sign of a registration wizard with spiffy animated water graphics anywhere. That's odd, I thought. Unsure of what to do, I tried one of the old logins from the Public Beta system. Strangely, despite my having deleted all the items on the drive, I was logged in, but instead of the normal Mac OS X experience, I saw a dock full of folders rather than applications, and when I tried to launch System Preference or Terminal, I was met with nothing. Not even an error. Not surprisingly, it also told me that it couldn't find my home directory.

Blaming that snafu on my failure to completely format the partition and pesky hidden files lingering from OS X PB (based on the fact that I could log in as users from that old install), I rebooted off the OS X CD and selected the option to "format partition as Mac OS Extended." After this install, I was presented with the same situation above. Only this time, I had a home directory, but though the subdirectories (Movies, Music, etc) claimed they were folders, I couldn't open them. I rebooted back to OS 9 and poked around the OS X partition -- and to my surprise, I saw not only an OS X install, but also an OS 9.1 install. Why in the hell was there an OS 9.1 install there if I told the drive to be erased when I installed OS X??? Answer? I don't think the install erased the disk, but I have no evidence to prove that.

So I selected "Erase Disk" from the Special menu of OS 9 and reformatted (for real this time) my OS X target partition. I then popped in the OS X CD again and rebooted, only instead of holding down C to boot off CD, I spaced out and hit Option, which presented me with the Open Firmware boot selection screen. And on that screen, there was the Mac OS 9 partition, the Mac OS X CD, and two Mac OS X partitions! There was no install of Mac OS X on the computer at this point, and yet Open Firmware thought there were two copies there!

Unsure of what to do, I forged ahead and just installed OS X again. What could another copy hurt, I wondered. After the install completed and the system rebooted, I was finally presented with the pretty animated water graphics. I filled in some information, but when it asked me what the short version of my name (aka, my login) should be, I was feeling mischevious and typed "root". Boy was that a mistake. I was expecting it to bitch at me right away, but instead, it let it through, and though there was a "Go back" button, I couldn't press it. The registration process finished, and I was dumped into the the non-Mac OS X experience I described above. Folders instead of Applications and nothing working.

I guess that last one was my fault. But at that point, I was incredibly frustrated, so I gave up and went home. I'll finish the install tomorrow. But what concerns me is how many issues this install had with installing next to/over Public Beta. Apple knew how many people bought Public Beta, so it seems like they should have made a clean upgrade from Public Beta a priority. I didn't even see any mention about upgrading from Public Beta after a quick flip through the OS X manual. And based on that TIL I linked to above, it doesn't look like a second install of the OS X base system for Trouble Shooting would be the easiest thing on earth, either. Apple's top priority for OS X 10.1 -- before DVD, before UI fixes, before optimizations -- had better be a clean and more robust upgrade plan for users of OS X 10.0. Because most users wouldn't have taken as much crap as I did, and even I gave up.

Hot on the tails of the release of Mac OS X, Microsoft has released Windows XP Beta 2... Win Super Site has extensive review of the beta, and a lot of interesting features are mentioned. It's interesting reading, and it leaves me wondering why so many people are dismissing this upcoming version of Windows as just another Microsoft product. Either those people haven't read about the system, they're blinded by hatred, or they're afraid of what they're hearing. It's something to watch, and it's a good thing OS X 10.1 is slated to come out before XP.

As has been widely reported already, Mac OS X was released today, to mixed reactions. On the whole, I'm happy with it, as it gives the unix geek in me a lot of flexibility that the Classic Mac OS just can't offer. However, there are still a lot of interface annoyances that make me shake my head and wonder, and I've had a few strange experiences that have made me blink twice. If you're curious about my experiences, click on the link below. Be warned, though, it's long and wordy.

The Dock has become significantly more useful than it was in the Public Beta. Through editing a config file, it's possible to put the Dock on any edge of the screen, which is very nice, and was the first thing I did when I installed OS X this morning. Through a defaults command it's possible to make the active application arrow display in blue and hidden application icons display faded, but I really don't know why Apple didn't add a way to insert a way to enable these through the interface. The ability to have menus pop out of folders placed in the Dock is very useful, but for some reason, they only allow you to go five levels deep. This strikes me as an unnecessary restriction on a very useful feature. Unfortunately, I can't drag something onto a folder, have it open the menu, and then drag an item into the hierarchy. Also, it's now possible to click at the absolute edge of the screen and hit the icon -- unfortunately, when dragging an item, it still has to be dragged directly on to the icon, which is a horrible decision.

The Finder has been giving me hell, and is probably the thing I like the least about the whole system. The interface really isn't that bad, but the quality of the application isn't up to par. In the first couple of hours I had the finder crash twice (though I didn't have to reboot, of course). It's slow, and stops responding much more frequently than most of the other apps. Also, their method of abbreviation long file names is now even more annoying than it was before. In Public Beta they truncated the end of the file name, but now they're replacing the middle of the filename with ...'s. I would have liked to have seen an "up" option for the toolbar in addition to a back option, because the back option doesn't go up in the directory hierarchy, just back to where you were before. There are no Contextual Menu Modules, which is a big loss, and they left Get Info out the contextual menu which is there.

One of the more subtle, and yet more useful features they added to the finder was the ability to drop a folder onto the toolbar. This little feature singlehandedly made the one window finder much more useful. Just put a folder on your toolbar, go somewhere else, find the files you want to move, and drag them up to the folder on the toolbar and drop away. It could use a little refinement, however. When you want to remove the folder from your toolbar, you drag it off, and unlike the dock and system preferences, when you let go, there's no poof -- it just vanishes. Inconsistant interfaces are never good. The next issue is that you can't toss files up there to move, because when you try to drag them off like you think it should work, they just vanish without a trace. This section of the toolbar effectively acts like the document section of the dock, but it's closer and more central to the file management you're doing. If instead of saving a folder you want to copy things to you want to save files you want to copy somewhere, you'll still have to use the desktop or a second finder window for that.

The Apple Menu has of course returned, but there are a number of things which still could be tweaked. If I click my mouse in the upper left corner of the screen, it should open the menu. Instead, I have to move my mouse about 10 pixels from the corner of the screen to get the menu to open. Second, because they apparently thought that having two icon menus next to each other in the menu bar wasn't aesthetically pleasing, it's now no longer possible to turn the application menu (the first menu after the apple menu) into an Icon. This is a very bad thing, because it means that as I change applications, my file menu moves around on me. Finally, I've got to wonder why they didn't make a sub menu off of the Apple Menu which would jump the user to each of the System Preference panels. That way it'd be possible to jump directly to my Network settings, for example, and then I'd be in my System Preferences and could hit "show all" to get to the next item I wanted to do.

The System Preferences have a number of annoying deficiencies, which I'll just rattle off. The "General" panel has options for "Appearance" (Graphite or Blue), "Highlight color", and "Scroll bar behavrior." These aren't "General" things, these are all "Look and Feel" things. Rename the damn panel. Also, add in an option for double ended scroll arrows, dagnabbit. In Startup Disk, there's no Restart button, which is a mixed blessing. The options for setting the Date and Time formats are found in the "International" panel instead of the Date & Time panel. I know there's a reason for it, but it's not very clear to a new user where they should go to set the format for their clock. And while they're at it, they should mention that there's apparently no way to change the formatting or the behavior of the menu bar clock. While all of those are mainly interface/consistency points, the biggest loss of functionality probably comes with the Energy Saver control panel, where it's no longer possible to specify different behaviors depending on if the computer is plugged in or running on battery power, etc.

As far as errors and crashes go, the core system has been pretty stable, but I've had some bad experiences with little pieces. The finder has crashed many times. One time when Classic was launching, I decided to change the color depth from millions to thousands in the middle of the operation, which resulted in Classic's display super freaking out in a thankfully unreproducable way. After trying to see if the installed apache had php enabled (/System/Library/PHP exists), the System Preferences started crashing when I launched it. A reboot fixed it. When I tried to install the Developer Tools, it told me "An error occured during the installation. Please try installing again" after it finished. I installed again and it worked. Other than that, nothing has really crashed, and I haven't had to reboot at all than to fix the problem with the System Preferences.

Finally, a few other interface annoyances. The Installer application is very nice, but when it gets to the select disk phase, it only shows me total space on each drive. There's no way to see the more useful figure of free space on each drive at all. There are inconsistencies in the way dragging is handled. In normal finder operations, when I'm dragging a file, there are three possible cursor states. There's the plain cursor, to indicate that the file will be moved, the plus cursor to indicate that the file will be copied, and the arrow cursor to indicate that the drag will make an alias. However, when I drag a file to either the Dock or the Toolbar, it uses a plain arrow. This is inconsistant, leading the user to believe that the file will be moved into the Dock or Toolbar, which is not at all the case. The cursor should really turn into an arrow cursor when performing either of these operations. In all of the Classic Mac OS applications I use, I can hit command-d when a "save/don't save" dialogue pops up to select Don't Save, but apparently this isn't allowed in OS X, because I have yet to encounter a dialogue where this still works.

And finally, the implementation of a document-centric paradigm is still half-assed. If I have two finder windows open, I could have one of them be the very bottom window and the other be the very top, and there could be a lot of windows open in between. The drop shadows used on each window make it very clear which window is on top of which. When I close the top window, the shadows would lead me to believe that the next window down would gain focus -- but no! Instead, a random window I couldn't see suddenly pops forward. Blah, don't let me freely intermix windows at all if they don't behave that way. Also, command-tab still cycles through each Application instead of cycling through each window, making it impossible to get to minimized windows from the keyboard. They should add another mode to that feature to cycle through every open window -- command-option-tab or something, so as to offer a little more flexibility.

I really do like the OS, even if I have a lot to complain about. I just want to see all of the above issues addressed so that it will eventually turn into a highly tuned extension of my intention, allowing me to focus on what I want to do, instead of why the system is annoying me.

Yesterday I installed a new hard drive in my PowerBook, and I got to thinking about just how care free the Mac OS is. I backed up the entire contents of my old drive on to one of my other computers, deleted everything, swapped the drive, formatted the new drive, and then copied everything back and rebooted, and I was left with exactly the operating environment I started with, but had more than three times the storage space.

The Classic Mac OS is very flexible. It doesn't really care about the hardware it's run on. If I'd decided to boot my other mac off of my laptop system folder, it might have complained a little, but it would have still booted and I would have been left with an operating environment very much like my own. Windows, in contrast, wouldn't let you get away with anything like what the Mac OS allows. I've tried it, and the machine wouldn't boot.

The question is, how will Mac OS X handle things like this? I've always loved the Mac for being so lenient when it comes to what it will allow, but I have to wonder how they could ever make a Unix based system be as care free about the hardware it's running on as the Classic Mac OS. I guess we'll find out soon enough, eh?