Killing OS X

[JohnnyLundy]

Tried this the other day:

Launch the OS 9 Finder by double-clicking it (it will launch Classic, but that's OK)

Go to the Terminal and find the Process ID for the Desktop (of OS X)

Kill it.

Now you have your OS 9 Finder with pop-up folders, tabbed folders, all the apps (including the OS X ones!) in the App menu which can still be torn off.

Couldn't kill the Dock, though, as much as I wanted to. It somehow resurrects itself even if you kill it from the UNIX shell. Maybe reducing it to minimum, and taking all the contents out of it would work.

Since Desktop.app is just an app, you can cheerfully kill it and the other OS X apps will run just fine.

>>Johnny

[zpincus]

Careful with this though... I've had stability problems with this trick. Big, filesystem-eating ones.

I also was never able to convince carbon apps to launch as OS X native (and not in classic) with this trick, and opening .app bundle-type apps was also impossible for me. If you know how to do these things, that would be helpful.

I have found that I like desktop.app and the dock a lot more now that I have stopped trying to fight them. I don't do things the old way -- I just have a few apps in the dock, and the rest that I routinely use are one click away in a docked folder. I removed the "classicmenu" and the drives on the desktop hack.
And all of a sudden, I realized that my new workflow was much better, and cleaner, and not at all slower than the old.

So, I challenge you to try for a while to work in the new paradigm that Apple has sketched out for us with PB. I think that once you stop trying to make it exactly like the old one, you will be much more able to appreciate the little things you can do with desktop.app and the dock that make OS X a really nice environment.
Of course this is just my opinion, and you are certainly entitled to your own.

Zach

[matt69]

I agree 100% if u try toget use to the new X features they will serve u well. The only bad thing is now I have to slowly migrate all my stuff to os x but that will come soon enough!

[JohnnyLundy]

Well, I've been using X since Developer Preview 1, and I still get completely lost in the filesystem, I don't know what that "goto:" box in the dialog is for, I don't understand why I can't get a simple path when I save a file instead of the dang "favorites" and "recent" stuff, the Dock covers the bottom of all my windows and can't be moved, the "desktop" is really buried 4 or 5 levels deep instead of being at the top, and there is no desktop button, "command-N" opens a new Finder window instead of a new folder, putting a folder in the Dock works but takes 3 or 4 clicks to use it instead of 2 as a pop-up with buttons does (1 if you are dragging to the popup) (Folder in the Dock: 1 to open it, two to launch your app, one to close the folder if you can find it - fortunately X launches so slowly you can probably close it before it gets obscured by the thing you just opened)

Does anyone know how to kill the Dock? It seems to have a Lazarus-like property somewhere.

>>Johnny

[zpincus]

This is what I was talking about when I said you have to give up on how previous OS's worked.
BSD's filesystem is complicated. Stop trying to understand it.
I know that this is hard for mac users, but the best thing
to do is concentrate on your personal corner of the filesystem
and organize that. (Your personal corner = home folder).
Then, the "goto" thing makes sense.
Ditto for the rest of the save dialog. Though I wholeheartedly
agree that it needs work. We also need a heirarchical dock
to solve the "pop-up" problem that you describe so well.

But I think that trying to kill the dock just makes things worse.
For good or bad, we've got these new tools.
They have strenghts and weaknesses, and I think that
even now, the strenghts outweigh the weaknesses. You just
have to give up on the old way. It was wierd for me to stop
using "command-N" to try to make a new folder, but know what?
I make new finder windows at twenty times the rate at which I make new folders,
so this, too makes sense.
Sure, it seems like relearning new key commands and a new UI
is a pain, but at least for me once and only once I gave
into Aqua and stopped fighting it (which it sounds like
many people have not done) I was able to learn the new paradigm in remarkably
little time.

Zach
PS. sorry for the long post. Double sorry if the word wrap is messed up. I'm SSHing to
my X box and using lynx to post, because the connection there is faster, and
my modem here is so slow it hurts. Score one for having remote admin on X.

[zpincus]

Sorry if that came off a little harsh. Do try to
understand BSD's filesystem. But do it at your leisure,
because you shouldn't need to do anything with it. For when
you use your Mac for work, just ignore BSD and concentrate
on the home folder...
Having a little UNIX experience, it makes some sense to me, but I can totally see veteran Mac users getting befuddled and angry.
HAs anyone noticed how much better the fs layout gets from
each release to the next? I'd bet that by 1.0, the fs
is much more comprehensible, and there will be an option
to make it totally invisible to the user, so a user
can think that they have total control...

[Ghoser777]

Originally posted by JohnnyLundy
Does anyone know how to kill the Dock? It seems to have a Lazarus-like property somewhere.

>>Johnny

It's really stupid but it works: just move the Dock app out of the Core Services folder (I think; I can't check because my brother is playing TA right now on my OSX machine). ANywhere will do. Apple has some kind of script running that auto launches the dock... oh, but if it can't find the dock, then it doesn't launch anything. Same fix for all those anoying times Classix loads when you download a file - just move Classic out of the Applications folder, or in a subdirectory of the Applications folder.

HTH,
F-bacher

P.S. Oh it might be a bad idea to move the dock and not have ur harddisk show up on the desktop... if you don;t, it's essentially impossible to do anything on your machine short of logging out, logining as console, and then creating some sort of shortcut into your hardrive. Or you could even put the dock in the login control panel so it will boot on login... but that doesn't help if you accidentally force quit it. Maybe move it to the desktop?

[JohnnyLundy]

Originally posted by zpincus

BSD's filesystem is complicated. Stop trying to understand it.
I know that this is hard for mac users, but the best thing
to do is concentrate on your personal corner of the filesystem
and organize that. (Your personal corner = home folder).
Then, the "goto" thing makes sense.

Hi zpincus,

Yeah, but what exactly is one supposed to type into that box? And where is the OK button for it, to say "OK, goto this?" I'm flummoxed. Surely we are not going to be typing pathstrings into this -

It was wierd for me to stop
using "command-N" to try to make a new folder, but know what?
I make new finder windows at twenty times the rate at which I make new folders,
so this, too makes sense.

In the context of the Mac OS, "New Finder Window" makes no sense to me. Windows don't exist as separate entities in the Finder - they open to display things such as folders or documents. It's not at all clear what is going to appear when one opens a new finder window - what exactly is one opening - a blank window? another view of the same window already open? Having them all labeled "Finder" is also not helpful. I think once we get into having a "window" as a separate entity then we are as confused as Windows users, as this is their paradigm. This is also evident when one has a document open and minimizes the window and also has the original document (file) alias in the Dock. Now you have two identical icons in the dock, both referring to the same document, but one being its "window" and the other the actual document. Do we need this? Is it going to be intuitive to new users? I've been in CS since 1967 and it's not intuitive to me.

>>Johnny