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I’ve been consumed with thinking about Mac OS X lately. Why isn’t it faster? Why is it so
difficult to learn what is happening under the hood? How many Carbon applications will
debut at Macworld NY next month? Do I really think Aqua is better? And my answer to all
those questions and more is: who cares?
Lest you think my thought train has gone chugging around the bend, it is not that I don’t
care about the points raised above. They are important, but only in the sense that Mac
users need to know that Apple is working on them, and that they will improve Mac OS X to
address those concerns. At this point, I’m ready to sit back and accept what Apple has
been saying since March: We know it’s not perfect, and we know what needs to be fixed.
Give us time.
Apple, take the time you need. And forget about answering every echo of “when will [insert
pet feature here] get fixed?” I’ll be happy when DVD playback works, and it’ll be fun to
move around the Finder with the same speed as Mac OS 9, but the truth is that neither will
drastically change the way I work with my computer in the next 6 months, so I’m not going
to worry about them. See me in 6 months and we’ll see what remains to be done. Frankly, I
always thought it would take until Macworld in San Francisco (which is conveniently about
6 months away) to get Mac OS X close to where Mac OS 9.1 is this summer.
Besides, all this chatter about the current state of Mac OS X seems to be obscuring
something much more exciting: Cocoa. Much of the focus on Mac OS X thus far, rightly so,
has been directed toward make sure it is equal to Mac OS 9. In a perfect scenario,
upgrading to X would mean we would not have to take a single step backward, while also
gaining the all the benefits of Mac OS X that we’ve dreamed about for so long.
For the next several years, I expect that trend to continue. Mac OS X will become more
refined. Major applications will see a revision or two, and users and programmers alike
will learn they way around the operating system. Pretty boring stuff, when you get right
down to it; about as exciting as a processor speed bump.
That is why I’m excited about Cocoa. It’s not a speed bump: it’s a quiver full of arrows
ready to pierce the status quo and change the world. It should allow much faster
development cycles for applications, which should bring us more innovative applications.
As most major applications close in on their fifth or tenth major release, what I long for
is something completely new and different. I’m not sure where it will come from, or who
will do it, but I strongly suspect it will come from small group of individual developers
writing to the Cocoa framework.
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"Forget Kool-Aid, How About a Cup of Hot Cocoa?"
