🚀 go-pugleaf

For the attention of Apple, & Apple's friends:


Likes:

Great performance & feel, soft & witty system sounds, self-compressing
fonts when menus are crowded, floating application switcher at last.
Internet shortcuts.  Smooth new icons.  A really nice, flowing System
upgrade even on my poor little 6200.  Faster AppleScript, a big thank
you.  Faster & smoother Photoshop, MacSOUP, and probably everything
else... excellent.


The likes are much more important than the dislikes, which are mostly
surface.  However, they fail to make 8.5 seriously compete with Windows'
best features.  I suspect it would be a lot better to completely abandon
Windows-like features, but if we have to have them, here's my 2p worth:


Dislikes:

Crappy new Navigation Services.  Where's the functionality of Windows
95, Default Folder &/or Dialog View?  Typical half-hearted Apple bodge
of features done better by third parties - why didn't they just buy DF
and DV like they bought SuperClock and Extensions Manager?  And the same
goes for half-Smart Scrolling!

The floating Windows-style taskbar should snap onto the edge of the
screen like an Adobe palette. Scrolling some of its applications out of
sight is just stupid - the whole point of a taskbar it to offer the
choice between *all* running applications.


The new (third level!) Help system is greatly inferior to Windows Help.
And its hotlinks are less stable and reliable than Windows'.  Twice I
got a lockup in Mac OS Help when it tried to open a Control Panel, once
because I'd deleted the cdev and once when I hadn't.  

Maybe the whole thing should be turned into full-blown HTML and run in
Internet Explorer, a comparatively mature & stable product with a full
feature list.  Why not? - it was good enough for the Info Centre
project, and that was a good piece.  Anyway, Balloon Help & the Apple
Guide system have always been cooler.

A bug: The little triangles keep appearing & disappearing as I go up &
down the Apple Menu...

Finally there's one small performance hit in 8.5 - calculating folder
sizes in List Views and Get Info boxes is slower, though most else is
faster.

IMHO.

-- 
Steve Rogers, The Difference Engine
http://www.thebeast.demon.co.uk
mailto:steverogers@thebeast.demon.co.uk