Leopard. 1 million files. Little improvement.

I am a reluctant user of OS-X.

Three things turned me off to the new OS.
Apple has yet to rectify the problem(s), some of which I know are not directly their fault and will never be “fixed” because that’s the cost of “progress.” The three things are:

The size and complexity of the OS has exploded.

The eye candy takes too much processor power.

OS-X still doesn’t work right.

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Let me first say that, upgrades and new versions of software should be purchased and utilized when they offer significant improvements to your work. Do not buy them for cute features that would be “cool” to have.
Do not install them if your current system works perfectly.

The golden rule: – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

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Item One:
The first problem with Leopard (and today’s big 2 OSes in general) the size and complexity of the OS. You see, in OS-9 (and before) the OS was visible and user malleable. I backed up my G4 PowerBook one day. This OS-9-based PowerBook had everything I had created since my first Mac, all recently recovered from various floppies and Zip disks. Years, and years, and years, of just, stuff.

Carbon Copy Cloner backed up some 7,000 files.

Then I backed up my brand new iBook, you know, before I go and screw it up. It backed up over 15,000 files and I had not yet installed a single damm thing onto it. No music, no photos, no documents, no e-mails, nothing. And there were already 15,000 files of nothing on the machine.
Absolutely amazing.

Well, Engadget published a photo that shows that Leopard continues this unfortunate trend:

Further, they say:

Removing your root-level system folder from [Time Machine] backup gives a strange, somewhat confusing prompt: do you want to exclude all system files (those being what, precisely?) or just the system folder? Sounds like it’s asking if you want to exclude the system folder + default apps, or just the system folder. Either way, when we put system + default apps in the Time Machine exclusions, the number of files it backed up went from over a million files down to ~200k.“

That’s utterly unbelievable. Nearly a million files for system and included apps. Before you create one single bit of content, there’s a million files that OS-X has to keep track of.
We’re doomed.

TimeMachine doesn’t even create a bootable backup.
wtf?

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Item two.
Directly related to Item one.

While OS-X blows past the 1-million file mark, there are powerful, fast and efficient Linux-based systems are being made that can run from a USB memory stick. No, they don’t have all the eye candy, but that’s the point. We need multiple gigahertz processors just to be able to open the Finder when it comes with a million files of bloat.

Back when OS-X was at version 2, I had a dual processor G4 tower that I had souped up for video work. I was using Final Cut Pro 4 and had just updated to HD. (v4.5 I think). I had a client over and hadn’t launched FCP since I upgraded it. We needed to capture some DVCAM and when I fired up FCP, it asked me for my serial number.

This is not really a problem because I really own the software, not some bootleg. But it was a problem because the client was sitting there, and, I didn’t actually know where I had the original disks at. There’s lots of piles of stuff. It could be in the computer box. It could be with the software manuals. It could be with the CD case of software disks. It might be anywhere, really.

So my mind went into overdrive and the first solution that popped into my head was to reboot into OS-9 and use FCP-3 which I still had installed.

Doing so, I was greeted by a long-lost interface that, even with the interface sounds turned on, was so frakking fast… I mean, when I clicked a menu, it was like it was open before I was able to fully click down. I zipped around like greased lighting (impressing the client) and had the stuff digitized, rough cut and output in no time. I was stunned by how responsive my computer was. It’s hard to convey, but it was like there was an electric sizzle.

The client leaves. I hunt down my disks (in the box with the manuals, the second place I looked). Reboot into X and launch FCP to get this ironed out. Then I open the previous project and begin to finish editing what I had started in FCP3. Tweaking the edits, adding more effects, adding music, etc. I realized that the computer, while not “slow” had taken on the reaction time of someone who doesn’t really care to help. Each menu click had a slight delay. Opening a finder window took just a little bit longer. It was like I was doing 80 miles an hour before, and now I was doing 55. Not slow, but certainly not fast.

Now, we’ve gone from G4, to G5, to Intel, to dual core, to quad core, so, yea… the computers are faster. But you know, I still see the every so slight delay every time I click a menu, every time it has to zoom open a folder, or do that wooshy thing from the dock. Clicking on the Airport menu is always a click and wait adventure. Maybe it’s because there’s so many files that have to be accessed. The computer has to check a dozen things before it can to the “open” animation that used to be just a zooming rectangle. The pauses didn’t go away. And now there’s just more eye candy, more dimensionality to the interface. And all that takes time that the processor could be doing my video work.

It bothers me because it’s still there, and probably getting worse,
despite eight processors and drives that are 100x as fast as before.

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Item three. OS-X still does not work right.

A lot of my video work is managing files.
What projects use what assets, and where are they?

Reviewers are lauding Leopard’s additions to the OS-X finder, specifically spring-loaded folders.
They forget that spring-loaded folders were a Classic OS invention that were not intended to be in OS-X. The first few versions of X didn’t have it. Only because of user demand, did Apple put it back (as they did with the desktop printer, colored labels, and a whole lot of other Classic OS innovations). Those new to X think these additions are just wonderful. Yes, they are. And they were. I’m glad to see that Apple is, however slowly and begrudgingly, putting back the well-developed features they threw away with OS-X. But there are things that Apple still hasn’t fixed.

X has severe problems with two data management tasks that I perform every single day.
Problems that haven’t been resolved in the 8 years since its introduction.

An open finder window will not properly auto-update itself to file size changes.

When you capture video, or recompress files to other codecs, those files will appear in a folder, but never properly display the proper file sizes. I can open an info-window right next to the file and only the info window will display the proper file size. I can click on the file. Open it. Close it. Get info and more. The Finder will never update the window with the proper file sizes. If I look at the folder enclosing the files, that too will not properly update based on both the file size changes, or the last updated changes of the files within.
This is abhorable.
This worked perfectly in OS-9.

A labeled file will discard its label if resaved from within the application.

While I’m editing a project, and I’m in the Finder, I may decide to make that project file red to indicate that it is very important. No one else should touch it. This is the golden child in a folder filled with all kinds of media. So I label it and then I continue to edit in FCP. The next time I save the project, the red label in the Finder vanishes. Aside from the fact that I hate how X does labels (after Apple begrudgingly gave them back to us) compared to the Classic OS, OS-9 never had a problem with files being saved, and resaved. If they were colored/labeled, they stayed that way.
Reliability is GOOD.

OS-9 (Classic) – OS-X.4 Tiger– OS-X.5 Leopard

Notice here how, in OS-9, a labeled item is colored. The ITEM is colored. Not the line it is on.
Selecting it did not change its color or its label. Selecting it made it darker because it was selected but a Red item was still Red. It worked like real life- if you had a real physical folder and colored it red, holding it in your hand did not change the color of the label. It was as concrete and real as you could get. 

In OS-X, Apple completely changed the context by which you indicate the color ofan items label. No longer does the icon of the item take on the color. The icon actually resists any attempt to label it. The line on which an item sits is now what becomes colored. However, selecting the item COMPLETELY CHANGES the display of the label color around the item. What was once surrounded in red is now Yellow (the selection color) and there’s a red “dot” next to it. Does this make any real sense? No. The context by which you understand the label has changed for no fathomable reason.

In Leopard, this interactivity has not improved.

I could go on and on.
I won’t even go into how Apple users have completely given up the “second fork” of their files which enabled them to keep their file type and creator without one of thousands of “dot” suffixes. Notice how both the first two EPS files are properly displayed in OS-9, yet Tiger and Leopard not only display the first file (without the suffix) incorrectly, but they don’t even display it the same way. 

There are even online posts about the loss of hierarchical menus from the dock. You know, where (like OS-9) you could put an alias of your hard drive in the Dock (or Apple Menu) and easily drill down to anything, in any folder, without opening a single window. Yea… that coooool feature…
Gone.
If you want it back, you now have to buy third-party software.
Oh, and it ain’t just me that thinks this sucks. There.. is.. much.. kvetching.. Loved this one:

In Tiger, the story is like this.
You have a folder in the Dock. It looks like a folder.
Click it and it opens in the Finder…
Control-click it and you get a hierarchical menu of its contents… and so on.
Just about all of that is now gone. Gone!
What was wrong with it? Nothing!

An incredible “feature” of Leopard (one you can’t turn off) is the insistance of the OS to show you the first page of every document, instead of the various “file type” icons we have used since Mac OS-1. So now, Instead of easily sorting between PDF, Word doc, Pages, Excel Sheet, Quark, Page and more, you get a long list of white pages that look identical.

If you lost the ability to play Flash under Leopard X.5, it may be that QuickTime Flash playback was turned back on without you choosing it. Apple knows better.

I could go on and on but I’ll leave you with a MacFixIt page of Leopard items that includes:

In a recent article in Computerworld, a LaCie representative takes Time Machine to task for the master boot record problem and the computer name problem: “Apple seems to have failed to test sufficiently, he says, and is only now discovering these things, after the release of Leopard.”

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Like the ever changing design of the iPod,
whatever Apple decides in the new direction is,
is what the users are forced to use. Many follow it blindly.

An interesting ironic twist, eh?

Myself, I use X now only because all the tools I use are now X-only.
I miss the speed, efficiency and reliability consistent interface that was OS-9.
But am always testing the waters elsewhere for the day it just becomes too much of a hassle.

Which is not to say that Vista is any better…

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