"I have been Macified. After not owning a Macintosh for more than 12
years I finally decided that the undeniable coolness and beauty of the
hardware and particularly of OS X meant that it was time to get religion!
The beast, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, is a Power Mac G5 with
dual 2-GHz processors and 1.5G bytes of RAM running OS X Tiger. What a
gorgeous piece of engineering! It is an elegant design even under the
hood: When you need to take off the side to, for example, add extra RAM,
one latch frees the panel. And all the subsystems are plug-ins, making
it incredibly easy to work on. Heaven.
Then when you run up OS X, again, wow. The operating system has a
remarkable polish - just as if someone had thought about the design as a
whole rather than finding and assembling a collection of spare parts and
forcing them to fly in formation."
"Next I decided to load my photographs into iPhoto. My photo collection
is fairly large, weighing in at 14,618 files for a total of 18.7G bytes.
I copied the files to the Mac from my Windows desktop, an XP system that
is misbehaving to the point where it is time to wipe it and start again.
<digression> It is amazing that XP systems can get to a condition where
it is easier to erase and re-install everything than diagnose and fix
what's wrong. </digression>
So now that I had the image files on the Mac I could start loading them
into iPhoto. All seemed to go well with iPhoto doing its indexing and
thumbnailing, then it finished - crash."
"Now, let's review: This was a brand-new machine, the system detected no
problems and iPhoto hadn't been used before, but handling just less than
15,000 images made it blow up. And I thought Mac applications were
generally considered to be better than Windows applications. Evidently
this is not the case.
According to discussions I've had on lists and in Apple forums, there's
no obvious explanation for my problems with iPhoto. According to Gary
Stock, CTO of Exfacto: "From a Mac perspective, the surprising part is
that iPhoto even tried, rather than warning you when you crossed some
threshold or advising you to reduce the dataset."
Exactly! Which makes me think the problem is more fundamental than bad
error-handling in the application, unless you are willing to believe
that Apple's programmers are not very skilled. "
"Despite these snafus I still love the Mac. It is just that my illusions
are shattered."
<http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2005/052305backspin.html>
©2005 Bill Anderson |
