Mac OS X 7 Years Later

Continuing my work in the mobile space, I recently had to purchase a Mac. By recently, I mean the day that Apple made their iPhone SDK public. I like the iPhone, it's the device that has raised the bar, the device that has forced all other mobile manufacturers to rethink their own product lines. We should see some real advancements this year from mobile hardware, that it be in terms of screen quality, power and features from competing companies thanks to the iPhone.

If the iPhone and iPod Touch are neat little devices, I have to admit I'm not much of a fan of Mac OS X however. I remember being so excited when I got my copy of OSX 10.0.0. That excitement was promptly crushed when I saw it under perform on my lowly PowerPC G3. After that, I pretty much left the world of Macs behind until the iPhone SDK was publicly made available.

The first I notice is how little has actually changed since 2001. OSX today is pretty much the same OSX that I used in 2001. The performance is much better of course but pretty much the same nonetheless.

I don't like the inherent security policies that are setup after install time. For example, to install an application, you usually have to start an installation wizard to guide you through the process. At one point during the installation, you're usually presented with a privilege escalation dialog. Entering your credentials will allow the installation to proceed. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about uninstalling. First of all, there is no global registry of installed applications, so there is no uninstall wizard. You just go to the applications folder and drag an application to the trash to uninstall it. That's fine, my point is that you don't actually need to escalate to drop your applications into the trash. That's just plain wrong. Furthermore, it's only fine if this is where the application installed all of its files in the first place. Some applications will also install software in more traditional UNIX locations. If you happen to install such a beast, you'll be stuck with those extra utilities or have to rely on using a custom uninstaller before doing a regular uninstall. These custom uninstallers are usually Bourne shell scripts.

Speaking of escalation. Apple may poke fun at Microsoft about UAC in their commercials, but let me tell you they have nothing to brag about. First of all, they have an escalation prompt too, just like UAC. However, a filtered administrator, instead of a single click on 'Continue', must enter his password every time or optionally cache his credentials for a limited amount of time. Both options are terribly insecure. First, because if a malicious piece of software on both these systems makes a dialog box that mimics the appearance of this dialog, you get two very different results. On Vista, you have given out a mouse click (by clicking on 'Continue'), while on OSX you have given out your escalation credentials. Yeah Apple, keep making jokes. Furthermore, caching of credentials? Really? So everything I execute for the next little bit is running escalated? Really? At this point, I think OSX is only secure because it's less of a target than Windows, that's it, nothing else. It really has nothing to brag about. You can say all you want about the underlying UNIX security model found in OSX but if the user interface handles security this way, it's all for nothing.

I officially don't like Objective C. You can talk about the virtues of your favorite programming language all you want or not at all but it doesn't change the real reason some languages are popular and some aren't, in a word taste. Considering mostly all languages these days are Turing complete and object oriented, what a language looks like on screen is pretty much the only differentiator. When people like something, they have a reaction to it and they like it. Same thing when they don't like it. It's the same really for programming languages, when you look at a piece of code on screen, something in you reacts and decides if you like it or not, it really is that simple. When the dust settled, most people decided they didn't like how Objective C felt and used something else. Well, I'm now part of that group too except I can't use something else on the iPhone. I don't completely dislike it, e.g., I like the big class library and I like being able to retrieve the constructor of a class with nothing else but a string that represents the class name, I do, I really do... but that's about it really. The overly verbose method calls, the unified diff challenged syntax, i.e., '+' for static methods and '-' for instance methods is just plain evil when you're reviewing patches.

Using memory pools manually is also really just annoying. What is this? C or Objective C? I'm still not clear on how to correctly use these things across threads on the iPhone. I'm aware that the full OSX supports garbage collection now.

What I really despise however, what turned me off to Mac OS Classic and still does it for me today is the workbook style windows found in applications. If you've never used Mac OS, early versions of Visual Basic and Delphi suffered from this problem on Windows too. You have a single application but instead of being contained into a single master window, you have many little windows floating around everywhere. If you have multiple applications opened at the same time, you can see the windows of other applications within the holes of your current application. Most annoying is that there doesn't seem to be a standardized shortcut for quickly moving focus around between the windows of a single application. This makes use of Xcode really annoying. If I just happened to miss this keyboard shortcut, please, for the love of any deity you worship, please leave me a comment and tell me what it is.

Of course, it's not all bad. One very good feature of this OS is the startup and shutdown times. They both put Windows and Linux to shame.

The UNIX command line is a very nice touch too. I have to admit, as much as I like Vista, I don't think I could use it, or any other version of Windows for that matter, if it weren't for Cygwin.