Originally posted by wnowak1
I've tested window resizing and moving on various macs and its slow on all of them. The moving is ok, but resizing is horrible.
My mac is a duel 1ghz w 1gb of ram using radeon 9000 graphics. I don't think its the hardware...its the software.
I was actually expecting more from OS X. I hope its a feature in the next upgrade for sure.
I'll just give a little bit of some low level info on this and why I would not hold my breath for faster resizing - it is something that we will just need to grow into with faster machines.
First to address the "platform foo resizes faster" issue. That is only partially true because OSX is doing much more than other systems when resizing. Some use a frame like you mentioned (windows) and others have simpler layout semantics (X11) which potentially allows for more responsive resizing. That means that windows only has to figure out one new rendering of the content while OSX may need litterally hundreds.
Now why is that a good thing that it does all that extra work? Particularly when I only get 5-10 fps when resizing which can look fairly jerky? Well the answer is that it is actually providing useful feedback to the user that I did not appreciate until I went back to the faster platforms.
When I resize a window it is usually to alter the arrangement or relative size of the elements internal to that window. For instance to get rid of the silly horizontal scroll bar that appears on various poorly designed web pages. Live resize allows me to easily find the point at which that transition occurs even if the animation is not super smooth. On windows I have to do a click-drag-wait loop and a binary search to find the right spot. And yes I have found myself cussing the lack of live resize in just those situations.
In the end analysis I am not interested in resizing the windows per se but rather their content. For that purpose the solution OSX uses is ultimately a better use of my time because I can get it right the first time.
Gee this is getting longer than I had intended but I still need to touch on why you won't see a direct resize improvement from Apple. (Of course if rendering get faster so will resizing). The simple reason is that the onus is on the application designer to make resizing responsive and that is the way the system is designed. In responding to resize messages an application can abbreviate its display. For instance lets say there is a dataview which is just slow to draw then the application should use something like a cached image of the content or even just a colored box. Then when the resize is complete finally draw the updated contents. For that matter the application could hijack the whole process and just draw the outline like on windows.
The haxies and such mentioned above work in exactly this way. They dynamically are loaded into each application where they hijack the resizing behavior. But the fact that Apple has given controle of this behavior to applications means that they will be hard pressed to significantly alter the way things work across the whole system while honoring the current programming contract.
As for expecting more form OSX well you are getting more it just wasn't the more you were expecting!
-Eric