Coming late to the party

By Adam Gillitt, April 19, 2002

Happy first anniversary, commercial Mac OS X! In the year that has elapsed since the Auspicious Debut, great strides in advancing and completing the OS have occurred. Most major companies have released updated versions of their software, and even more enterprising authors have released apps for Mac OS X only. Yet there are several areas of Mac OS X that are just not ready.

Many peripherals and software that work fine under Mac OS 9 are useless or impaired under Mac OS X. Many third parties share the blame with Apple for this, but especially in the area of device drivers, Apple’s not helping the situation by withholding specifications. Granted, some of these drivers are for esoteric products ... that is, if you consider music and gaming, two areas that Apple is trying to emphasize, to be esoteric.

Take the iSub, which is advertised as being compatible with Mac OS X. Yes, it produces sound when plugged in. But there is no way to control its output, and, being the well designed subwoofer that it is, it cranks out the bass. A lot. Enough to annoy my upstairs neighbor, Stompy. So when I play a game, I have two choices – have plaster fall off my ceiling when Stompy does her thing, or to unplug it entirely.

Compare this with Mac OS 9, where the iSub magically appears in the Sound control panel when you plug it in, allowing you to adjust the output. The settings don’t stick after setting them in OS 9 and then booting into OS X, either. I really would have preferred to spend my money on another solution if I had known the only way to adjust it would be to suppress the bass with my iTunes equalizer.

How about game controllers and webcams? I have a joystick, webcam and gamepad which are all less than two years old, but functionless under Mac OS X. They aren’t specialty products – the gamepad is a Gravis, the joystick is a Logitech and the webcam is a Kensington. Why can’t I play Tony Hawk properly without switching back to Mac OS 9? (You try playing it with the keypad...)

(Late addendum: There has been a shareware app released, called GamePadCompanion but I haven’t been able to get it to install correctly and function yet.)

With the length of time that Mac OS X was in testing and development, and considering the revenue flow surrounding these kinds of products, I would have expected some kind of functionality from them by now. Even many mouse/trackball/tablet drivers have only recently become available (although few of them recognize ADB versions of their hardware connected via Griffin’s iMate). At least Alessandro Levi Montalcini has been able to cobble together a Mac OS X version of the shareware USB Overdrive, although for now it only supports mice, not game controllers.

How about scanners? Epson has been promising Mac OS X compatibility for my scanner for months now. The company just recently released a scan-to-file application, but no in-application scanning support. That’s coming with the "planned release of the Mac OS X compatible versions of the major image editing software packages." Ahem, Photoshop is available already; which application are you waiting for? Many external drive owners are suffering the same problems. My friend Dave’s Que USB CD-RW drive, which is now just a doorstop, causes him to borrow mine whenever he needs to back something up.

Now I will be the first to admit I know little about writing drivers. But many of these products are ubiquitous and their absence from Mac OS X seems like a big, bad oversight. Couldn’t someone have coordinated some sort of effort to generate something that would work? Same with features promised for the (eventually) forthcoming 10.2, like spring-loaded folders, useful contextual menus and labels. None of these are new requests and could have been addressed back in the beta days, instead of 12 to 18 months after commercial release.

I don’t want to pile on Apple’s back too much, because, as a graphic designer, my single biggest gap under Mac OS X is QuarkXPress. Version 5 came out recently, in a Mac OS 9-only version. Details are just as vague about a release date for a functional version for OS X as they were when I reported on them for ZDNN 18 months ago.

Follow me here – if Apple = creative design, print design is a subset of creative design, and print design = Quark, then why isn’t there greater synergy between Quark and Mac OS X? Even giants like Microsoft, Macromedia and Adobe have finally issued just about all their products in Mac OS X form. It makes me want to look at inDesign a lot closer, instead of paying $500 to upgrade my old Quark to one that doesn’t even work with the new OS.

What about media players? A RealPlayer client for X is rumored for this fall, maybe. Don’t get me wrong, QuickTime is the shizznit, but some sites haven’t figured that out and still offer clips only in RealMedia. Cripes, even MS has foisted Windows Media Player on us. Hard to fight for dominance in a field where there are platforms your software doesn’t support.

I have fewer issues with the folks who make plug-ins for design applications – in many cases, they have only recently gotten a hold of the final version of the application they wish to plug into ... we’ll see where they stand in 6 to 12 months.

Wow, that sounds like a lot of concentrated bitching – and there’s more, like having to buy a $500 adapter for my SGI flat panel because Formac would rather sell me its (admittedly nifty) flat panel than make Mac OS X drivers for its existing products. Despite all that, I still use Mac OS X daily, and I can count the number of times I have had to boot into Mac OS 9 (other than for reasons listed above) on one hand. It does almost everything I ask of it, and I have converted my Mac-using friends and family into Mac OS X users. The list above isn’t really all that long, and frankly, that’s not a bad track record.

I still feel like my Mac OS X experience is incomplete, though, because some of the players have yet to show up on the field. I am grateful to all the developers and engineers within and outside Apple for their hard work, dedication and excellent results. Most operating systems that are just over a year old should be this stable and have so many features. I hate picking on Mac OS X for what it is lacking, but for Mac OS X to succeed in the marketplace and attract new users, the phrase, "I would use Mac OS X if only it had ..." needs to be eradicated from everyone’s vocabulary.

What are you still waiting to appear under Mac OS X? Post your comment below; maybe we can get some grass-roots driver-writing happening here.

— Adam Gillitt is a graphic designer who lives in San Francisco, and enjoys the spring-like weather, especially at PacBell Park, while he watches the early success of the Giants this season. You can contact him at his own site at http://adam.gillitt.com or via email at adam@gillitt.com

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