A BeOS power user describes his experiences with MacOS X, what advantages it has, and where it still drops the ball compared to BeOS. Interesting (if rather long).
(Thanks, A.)
He's definitely right-on about BeOS setting the bar higher. After using BeOS for awhile, *everything* else is aggravatingly slow and unresponsive. Open "My Computer" in any version of windows and wait while it quite unnecessarily checks every removable device (a smart programmer would use the media change indicators to avoid rechecking unchanged devices and done the whole thing in the background at the time of change) and prevents you from doing almost anything until it's checked them all ("multithreading? duh, that sounds hard. Can I give you a patronizing help message instead?"). On a Finder window, it's basically the same. KDE, GNOME? Ditto. BeOS on an old 500Mhz system flies, making anything else feel unbelievably sluggish, even on 2Ghz systems.
The real lesson here is the benefit of driving the cost of something down to zero. A true zero doesn't just mean you don't spend much time waiting - more importantly, it means you no longer have to think about the delay.
He's definitely right-on about BeOS setting the bar higher. After using BeOS for awhile, *everything* else is aggravatingly slow and unresponsive. Open "My Computer" in any version of windows and wait while it quite unnecessarily checks every removable device (a smart programmer would use the media change indicators to avoid rechecking unchanged devices and done the whole thing in the background at the time of change) and prevents you from doing almost anything until it's checked them all ("multithreading? duh, that sounds hard. Can I give you a patronizing help message instead?"). On a Finder window, it's basically the same. KDE, GNOME? Ditto. BeOS on an old 500Mhz system flies, making anything else feel unbelievably sluggish, even on 2Ghz systems.
The real lesson here is the benefit of driving the cost of something down to zero. A true zero doesn't just mean you don't spend much time waiting - more importantly, it means you no longer have to think about the delay.
Humans expect direct manipulation to