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When I was in the sixth grade, our teacher began a Monday science class with the Metric
system. By the time we were out of high school he said, the entire country would be using
the Metric system. We learned the basics in a day. It was so simple! Do we have to wait
years to use this? No more conventional fractions! Decimals were a cinch compared to
55/64ths. Then came the bad news, switching between the two systems. We spent the rest of
the week learning how to convert back and forth between English and Metric measurements.
Why? Because transitions take time, and there is a period when both systems are needed to
keep everything working. Converting was terrible. Looking back, I guess the whole country
decided it was not worth the trouble.
Sound familiar? It does to me, as I find myself re-booting between Mac OS X and Mac OS 9.1
several times a day. I am learning how to survive in Limboland. A place that is not quite
here, and yet not quite there, either. As I have written in this space before, most users
should hold off jumping on the Mac OS X train for at least a few more months, maybe even
longer. Limboland is the reason. Unless you have a burning need for a specific Mac OS X
feature, you will not get much benefit from the new OS. Jump on now and you are on the way
to Limboland. Which is just one more hurdle the Mac industry needs to endure on the road
to the Mac OS X Promised Land.
Limboland is not all bad. The more time I spend with Mac OS X, the more I like it. I’ve
gotten completely hooked on the PowerBook waking up before I finish opening the lid. I
love the dynamic network switching. If you move a Mac OS X machine from one network to
another, say from Airport to Ethernet, it is smart enough to detect the change and reset
the preferences accordingly. So much about Mac OS X screams: this is the way it should be!
The Aqua interface is pleasant. Although I think identifying the active window is a little
more difficult than it is with Mac OS 9. With the gray border gone, and the window
semi-transparent, everything sort of blends together. I love the ability to force quit a
crashed application and keep on working. It may take a very look time to boot both Mac OS
X and Classic, but I do not have to reboot as often.
But everything is not as it should be. I keep finding little glitches that do not work.
Each one by itself is a minor annoyance, but when heaped together it emphasizes the 1.0
‘feel’ of OS X. The system font is too big. Too many filenames are truncated. Many of the
Finder dialogs are less informative than in Mac OS 9. For example, the trash no longer
reports the size of the files before emptying the trash. And overwriting a file does not
inform the user as to which file is older. Am I being picky? Sure, but these items and
similar ones tend to stop me in my tracks and think, this is better? Eventually, something
like the inability of the Clipboard to work across Classic and Carbon forces me back to
Mac OS 9.1.
I doubt my concerns are news to Apple. I’m sure a fix is in the works. The mantra since
last month has been wait until summer, that’s when Mac OS X will be ready for everyone.
I’m not so sure. It will be better than it is today, but I think we are going to be in
Limboland a good while longer.
55/64ths of me suspects it will be around at least a year.
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"Surviving in Limboland"
