Did you use OPENSTEP 4.x (or Rhapsody) on Intel? I'm serious here, don't take this as a flame - I want to know. I tried it on an AST P90 with 64MB RAM back in '95 or '96 and I did not notice any problems with the GUI's performance. I also developed a bit with OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows (which implemented the Dispay Postscript engine on top of Win32) and it was nearly as fast as the native win32 windows sharing the same desktop. The only difference was that the DPS windows tended to look more type-set like than the win32 app windows.
This I was not aware of, that Adobe wrote the Display Postscript code. I thought that Next wrote and owned the code, but had to pay royalties to use Postscript, much the same as printer manufacturers do when they provide Postscript capable printers. Lest anyone think you are wrong, since I read your post I've done a couple Google searches and, sure enough, Adobe does/did offer DPS as a product or at least an API. (I'd venture to bet that Next did write their oun DPS engine, but they probably either paid for the DPS API or helped Adobe develop the API.) (When I say developed to the API, I mean like how Sun has a J2EE specification, but BEA, IBM and JBoss actually had to write code to implement that spec.)
I had not heard of Bravo - interestingly, it seems that Adobe had that on the drawing board back in '96 and it is now part of inDesign (or at least was going to be). I wonder how much Adobe involvement there was in Apple's inmplementing it in Quartz or if Apple rolled-there own version of it. I still have to disagree that DPS was slow in the late 80's. Heck, the 1st NeXT Cube I played with in 1990, IMO, blew the doors off any existing Mac or PC in the GUI useability department (ducks tomatoes).
Similar arguements were waged against QuickDraw, the Windows 3.0 API's and even the original Mac "ToolKit" until hardware accelleration came around for them - this arguement goes back to the DOS/Apple II vs. GUI crowd. (Heck it still exists for Unix shell lovers vs. XWindow - many of my coworkers believe a GUI's only purpose in life is to manage multiple terminal windows.) NeXT had a DSP chip or two to help speed things up, I'm wondering if Apple doesn't have a similar idea in the works - if they do, they had better release it soon!
I disagree. I think the fonts in OS X are much easier on the eyes and cleaner than OS 9 or Windows. I guess that's a personal preference thing though.
I don't deny that Quartz is slower than the OS 9 or win32 GUI engines - especially for us non-AGP machine owners who cannot use the OpenGL enahncements. But when I see that, computationally, the OS X app's that I use are doing near the same or better performace than their OS 9 versions, and I don't have to worry about one app taking down the whole system, (which I think there are more people in denial about here than let on) I don't care that window re-sizing is slow. (Obviously, many here do care.)
For reference, the app's I use regularly are: Final Cut Pro, iDVD, iTunes, BBEdit, Toast, Mozilla(Chimera), ProjectBuilder, Safari, and Mail. (As well as doing Java work from the command line - Java is useless on OS 9 so it's not fair to compare) With dnetc ( http://www.distributed.net ) always crunching away in the background.
It all boils down to what you are comfortable with. I'm a software developer who uses Solaris all day at work, if I'm developing C/C++/Objective C I cannot use OS 9 because one errant memory access there would crash the machine. (BTW: To us computer "gear-heads", the lack of protected memory is stone-age. Even WinBlows 95, as crusty as it was, had that for 32bit apps)
Man - that was long winded!
(Maybe I've bored everyone here to death and this topic will just die. )
