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newly switched from 9 and I HATE OS X, here's why:

Yeah i had that trouble, all my icons were getting smaller and smaller, but i used the task bar in windows so i can go really small.

Trouble is, the maginication is still set at the normal height, if it could adjust itself accordingly to the size of the icons it would be better.

My solution in the mean time was to drag all the icons i didn't use often rather than leave them on the dock. Now i can see everything for the better.
 
Your icons get smaller? How many do you have? And then may I suggest using sub-folders to organize your apps, and keep those on the right side of your dock. Very handy, especially for games!
 
Well, if you have RUNNING apps they keep getting smaller the more items you open, and if your an IT professional like me in a Creative/Ad shop, then youi've got a TON of stuff open at any given moment and the dock gets smaller and smaller...GAMES?? Who has time for games? My PS 2 has collected months worth of dust.

That was one nice interaction element of OS 9...all running apps were in a text drop down menu. Kept it all nicely hidden until you needed it. Now I'm not saying scrap Darwin and create an Aqua-fied version of the 9 desktop, I just think they don't think they did sufficient user testing. Design should follow behavior not the other way around. I could get in to information foraging and perception but got no time. The short is, use iconic for decktop and folder items associated with supportive textual elements and textual for contextual elements (i.e. open apps, menu items, etc.). The Dock is really a blemish on and otherwise well designed and implemented desktop system.
 
X was my saviour!

I bought a used candy iMac one time. - But I really disliked OS 9, so I sold it after 2 weeks... then....

OS X - Jaguar came out... and I switched immediately. Jaguar clinched my switch.

No matter how good the hardware was, I couldn't get into OS 9.

You know... it about UNICODE!
 
The dock is probably the biggest compromise of Mac OS X. No one likes it. Is there an alternative?

With Mac OS 9, you could put things in the Favourites folder and access them through the Apple menu. That was somewhat convenient until you loaded as many things as I have in my dock and it because excruciatingly slow opening the menu.

You could also use the tried-and-true System 6/GEM/AmigaOS/Win3.x/GEOS/BeOS way of digging through folders or putting shortcuts on the desktop.

The Windows 95/NT/98/ME/2000/XP taskbar is useful. You have various areas in the taskbar where you can locate favourite items to quickly start. If things become too small, you can expand the taskbar to nearly half the screen.

The Windows Start button suffers from bloat the way Mac OS' favourite folder did. MS' Intellisense technology hasn't helped much. It hides everything that wasn't recently used and takes a while to open up 'All programs' if you didn't find what you wanted.

Does anyone have a real life way that they keep things at the ready that might be implemented instead?
 
I have been using Panther for about a month now. after getting used to it I really like it a lot.
I love the way OS X allocates the memory for what the program needs, over the way you had to allocate the memory in 9, that alone saves me a lot of time when wanting to run multiple memory hungry programs.
I do miss the Apple menu and finder feature in 9 still, but I will grow out of it, (as soon asI can afford to upgrade all of my old programs and sell my Pismo).
I don't miss the nightmare of the Extensions Manager and some of the conflicts that would arise from it.
 
Originally posted by bousozoku
Does anyone have a real life way that they keep things at the ready that might be implemented instead?
Click to expand...
From the very very short time I used 9, I liked to keep everything in those desktop folders that you could line across the bottom of the desktop.. I wish there was something like that in the dock (not opening folders in finder windows) but actually extending from the dock, like an attached window.
 
Originally posted by Wheezer
(koff, koff) No NeXTstep veterans floating around?
Click to expand...

When the dock was introduced, I heard more complaints about it from NeXTSteppers than anyone else.
 
Originally posted by bousozoku
When the dock was introduced, I heard more complaints about it from NeXTSteppers than anyone else.
Click to expand...

Freaky. Do you mean that they had disliked the NS dock all along, or was it the Apple implementation or something else?
 
Originally posted by Wheezer
Freaky. Do you mean that they had disliked the NS dock all along, or was it the Apple implementation or something else?
Click to expand...

I think it boiled down to their desire not to change. NeXTStep had been visually the same since its inception.

All the colour, the near-photographic quality icons, the animation--it was all unecessary and worst of all--different! :D I'm thinking that someone even complained about it being horizontally-oriented.

If you figure it, NeXTStep was around almost as long as Mac OS and neither one made many advances in all those years. Until Mac OS X, they were both pretty true to their origins.
 
At first I didn't like OS X as much as 9, either, but after over 2 months I love it to death and keep finding new reasons why. I thought the Dock was annoying at first, too, but once you sit down and play with it, you will realize just how powerful and flexible it truly is. Overall, OS X can do anything that OS 9 could do and more, especially with Panther.
 
Man o man

I too have mixed feelings about OSx. For the last year I was, I was in school for networking and had a leave of absence rom Macs after 7 years. Now after a month back in my old job, nothing changed. The artists still need to fix their own computers, but most just deal with the problem and let it occur. Now that I have returned, and my new G5 was given to a weasel at my job, I needed to discredit the guy who gave away my computer.

I found solutions to more than half the problems and gained my fellow support of the artists. Of course all the problems I fixed already weren't important to him beacause he is strictly PC and plays solataire all day.

During this time, I scoped the new OSX, and I will tell you the last time I was shocked was when they upgraded Photoshop 4 to 5 and the "A" wasn't the function for airbrush, I was mortified. I did eventual get used to it. If these OS creators should feel a need to include the same functionality as the previous version, or give you the option of their new interface.

If enough people press on about the importance of a slight functionality change, rather than all new features that screw with your head. For instance the "Step and Repeat" and "Save As" are over ridden by "Show Dock" and "Suitcase". I remember when Quark had a neat way of changing keyboard shortcuts by lowering the menu, highlighting the command and using the new shortcut. WOW.

Hopefully in the next few weeks and possibly longer, I and can everyone vent about the illogical behavior of those trying to create the perfect interface, instead they should let those who use it for real to customize their features and let those who are new to computers deal with the enhanced desktops.
 

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OSX = Love

Originally posted by demian64
You can turn off magnification, you can't set the width of the dock which seems content on expanding till all icons are infinitesimal.
Click to expand...

True, the dock icons shrink when you have a zillion apps open, but isn't that nice that you can get to that point?
Right now, I have 12 apps open: Safari, Mail, Word, Excel, Stickies, Photoshop, Internet Connect, iTunes, Preview, MacJournal, Sherlock, iCal.
I've crashed 0 times, and I've only had to reboot my machine to install new updates.
No more memory allocation, no more lockups. And as annoying as the spinning beach ball is, I see it very rarely.
At work, I connect to the Windows server, share my obscenely large collection of Mp3s across the server, and share 2 Windows shared printers and a Laser printer all just by plugging the ethernet cable in.
The dock is very useful to keep track of apps that you use contantly, plus it has some great available menus. Try hold-click on iTunes, you can pause, play, next track, and rate tracks. Or Mail, Get New Mail, Compose New Message, etc.
Plus, Safari a great browser, not on OS9, nor is iTunes Music Store, universal .PDF support, iCal, iSync, Preview, iPhoto, etc.
OSX is the best OS out there.
 
I wasnt the biggest fan of OS X when I first started using it (10.0) I didnt really like the dock either but now @ work we're still using OS 9 and it really annoys me!!!! the dock is so awsome once you get used to it and the thing that makes it worth it all by its self if multitasking!!! this with the dock I can work in 3 or 4 apps at once (and Im used to doing this at home) do something like add a filter in photoshop, click on MS word print, click on safari click on a website I want to go to in favorites etc etc etc.

now at work, I try and send a job to rip its processing and I automatically click to do something else and the spinning ball comes up and I feel like screaming lol
 
I'm on the complete opposite side of you.

I thought OS9 was the worst, worst ever operating system. 2 of my friends had iMacs (the old CRT ones) and whenever I went on OS9 it crashed and burned, pretty much every time.

It took me about 2 years to work that stigma off until I got myself an iBook and i love it. OSX is superb - the only thing I don't like about it is the lack of a taskbar for one click access to each program - however expose has pretty much solved all of that (im still not fully used to it yet because I work in a Windows/Linux/Mac enviroment and windows and linux work with a taskbar-style widget.)

OSX is absolutley stunning. The icons blow me away - I sometimes just press command tab to view them in 128x128 glory (compare this with windows mismatch of 16x16 8bit icons and 48x48 icons). The dock seems useless at first, but then you realize how amazing the whole thing is. The trash works perfectly. There is no need to minimize anything as expose handles it...

There is a lot lot more things that make OSX brilliant, but coming from Windows --> OSX I think it's the best OS ever.
 
Remember you can simulate the taskbar by using the dock. Click on the application you want to switch to by clicking its application icon in the dock.

I must admit though - I used to like having not many windows open (eg. using tabs in Safari). Now I want as many as possible so I can use Expose to its full effect!
 
a suggestion to ease the transition

I shared your frustration about the changes in the Apple Menu. Let me suggest a great piece of donation-ware though, called Another Launcher. It's really very customizable, and allows you to recreate all your favorite menus and submenus you enjoyed in OS 9.

Here's a link:
http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=launcher&sprache=english
 

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another thing

Something I forgot to mention about Another Launcher is its text-based launching ability, which I've become addicted to. When I want to launch something that I don't have on the dock, I find it's often the quickest way. You just press control-space (or your own key combo) to bring up a small window that continually updates its list of applications as you type the name of the program you want to launch. Usually, by the time I've typed the first two or three letters of the application name, it's at the top of the list and ready to be launched with a quick tap on the enter key. I love it!
 

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Re: another thing

Originally posted by apple_iBoy
Something I forgot to mention about Another Launcher is its text-based launching ability, which I've become addicted to. When I want to launch something that I don't have on the dock, I find it's often the quickest way. You just press control-space (or your own key combo) to bring up a small window that continually updates its list of applications as you type the name of the program you want to launch. Usually, by the time I've typed the first two or three letters of the application name, it's at the top of the list and ready to be launched with a quick tap on the enter key. I love it!
Click to expand...
Oh I need that!
 
I used both 0S7,8,9,Win95,98,ME,NT,XP and Win2K and I got my PB with 10.2.1 which was my first experience with OS X and I love it. Took me only about 3 days to figure everything out and I had just came out of Windows only environment for last 3 yrs. The only thing I'm really learning now is the Unix portion of OS X now which is just simply awsome.
 
Those crazy kids with their long hair and loud rock and roll music! Why cant they just cut their hair and listen to big band music!

Sorry your having so many problems Grandpa but OS X is the best thing that has ever happened to the mac platform. Change is good, it keeps things from getting stale and lifeless. What I really miss about OS 9 is the multiple system crashes per week,My OS X install on the other hand has only crashed my system twice since January, once for unplugging an external monitor while PB was sleeping and once while using a 500mb file in iMovie on a 400mgz PB.

Hope you find a way to embrace and love OS X for what it is... The Most Advanced Operating System on the planet.

Sonny
 
I'm pretty much in agreement with everyone else here. While there is still room for improvement, OS X is *so* much better than 9 (let alone any flavor of windows), I can't imagine going back.

Occasionaly I have the misfortune of using an older Mac running 9, and I still have a PC running Win2k at home. These are very painful experiences because even though I know how to use these old systems, and was perfectly happy with them when I was using them regularly, now that I'm used to OS X, 9 seems primitive, unstable, ugly and is missing feaures of X I use all the time.

In fact, I even cringe when I have to use a system running Jaguar, as I've become so dependent on expose, I really miss it when it isn't there.

Give OS X a try for a few weeks, and I'll bet you'll change your tune.

Cheers
 
OSX.3 Whee!

I just put Panther on my old iMac and it works great, in fact it's faster than OS9 was, except now I've got iTunes sharing, Rendevouz, etc. Amazing that a machine from 1997/1998 can run an OS from 2003 well. The graphics card is quite up to par, Expose is a little choppy, but it still does the effect. That's pretty good for a 233mhz w/190mb of RAM and a 3Gb drive; now I have to find a new hard disk and some memory.

Simply put, Macs rule and Panther rocks. Sorry the original poster didn't like it, but for all reasons stated keep trying this new OS there are a lot of great things about it, and some really amazing things it can do.
 
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