by phatcactus:
I do see your point though. it is, indeed, a matter of personal preference, but do you agree that a simpler, less "loud" GUI would be both faster and easier to look at for long periods of time?
Actually considering the amount of time I spend on my systems (14 plus hours on some days) I find that I can't agree.
One year ago my two main systems were running Mac OS 9.2 (with Mac OS X v10.1.x on it, but not used much) and Rhapsody 5.6 (my desktop and laptop systems respectively). Actually Mac OS 9.2 was running with an Aqua theme and Rhapsody was using a Platinum theme (there wasn't any choice) as was Mac OS 8.6 in Blue Box on that system. I was happy with those systems as they were, no need to change as they did all that I wanted from them at the time.
Last August Apple released Mac OS X v.10.2. As a person who must also support other people's systems, I bought and test installed 10.2 five times on the first day on my PowerBook using a spare drive I had (setting the Rhapsody drive off to the side to reinstall it at the end of the day). I was surprised at the performance and wanted to see if it could handle a real world test for a period of time (I was thinking two weeks).
I left the spare drive in and finished installing all my apps and basically said to myself that if at any point during that time it got slow or crashed or needed to be restarted (I wasn't going to turn it off at all during the period) I would pull that drive and put the Rhapsody drive back in.
A friend of mine was in town to interview with a local TV station and he needed to use my PowerBook for a couple days to demo his work on. I told him that he could use it if he didn't turn it off or restart it while using it. It ran everything great (he had quite a few quicktime movies of his work).
After three weeks of testing (yes I check the uptime to make sure that it had not been restarted while in use by my friend or my wife at any point) I pulled the spare drive, put the Rhapsody drive back in, backed up all the information off it and reformatted and installed Mac OS X v.10.2 again on that system.
A short time later I upgraded my desktop to 10.2 and now both spend all there time running 10.2. If at any point I was unhappy I would just go back to using what worked before for me.
So again, I can not agree. If I did, I wouldn't be using Mac OS X now. No one was making me use it, it was my choice. No one is stopping me from going back to what I was doing before, again, it is my choice. The only thing I agree with is that
you feel that
a simpler, less "loud" GUI would be both faster and easier to look at for long periods of time.
Actually as I have been doing more and more work on web sites, I had planned on upgrading to GoLive 6 from GoLive 5 which was painfully slow in 8.6 and 9.x (and almost unusable in
Classic). I was looking at the fact that both of my systems are displaying 1024x768 and thinking that I would need both a faster system and more display space. I started saving up to be able to upgrade my hardware shortly after getting GoLive 6.
About 3 weeks ago I got GoLive 6 from Adobe. I now have no plans for new hardware in the near future. It runs better in Mac OS X then GoLive 5 ever did in Mac OS 8.6/9.x.
Hm. I think by "home user" I meant average email-checking web-reading AIM-chatting people. My bad.
I think by "professional" I mean some one whose livelihood is completely dependent on the functions of their systems and can not afford to use sub-par software just because it looks nice in a screenshot. If "home users" find it nice, good for them. If they don't, that is fine too. I just don't think that people should take the position that because they have a preference it makes others any less
professional.
Besides who would a
simpler GUI really be better for? Sounds like a
home user to me.
