nick@cs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) (05/27/91)
Good evening, here are the votes of the Scottish jury. (*)
I have 7.0 running on my 4Meg SE/30 at home now, after only eight
hours' work. (To be fair, much of that was making two backups of the
40Meg disk and employing various safety measures.)
Problems: minimal except for the MIDI Manager stuff which I'll cover
in a separate posting since I want to broadcast questions to
rec.music.synth as well. I threw away a fair number of INITs mainly
because I'd accumulated a lot of junk and thought it was about time to
clean things up; so, I only have comments about the ones I still use.
One overall observation: RAM usage is about the same, believe it or
not, although the System Heap is a *lot* fuller than it was under
6.0.7 (where I'd turned it up quite a lot). This is one reason I
discarded a lot of INITs - I was trying to get some more free heap
space under 7.0. It doesn't seem to have worked - the heap is still
pretty much full. Turning up the figure on the boot blocks doesn't
make any difference. So, could someone please explain how the System
heap is now organised? DAs seem to get a minimal amount of space,
since they don't run in a DA layer any more. The Finder doesn't have a
separate heap which can be increased in size, which might be a hassle
(I've had out-of-clipboard-space warnings). The few system crashes
I've had (bus errors) seem to be while opening and closing DAs, and I
have a feeling that it's a heap exhaustion problem. I can't use VM, by
the way, because I'm running MIDI software and I don't know whether
all the stuff I've got is 7.0-savvy enough to lock its interrupt-level
stuff down. My code certainly isn't yet.
Performance: fine. It's no slower than 6.0.7, I don't think, but there
are definite times when it's doing things that it wasn't before.
Most of the installation time was spent organising and moving INITs,
CDEVs and so on. I actually took full backups and reformatted the HD,
mainly because I wanted to see if Apple HD setup would let me create
hard partitions. Well, it will, but only one Mac partition at a time.
Oh well, nice try. I also backed up DA's and fonts from the old system
file, and then put these back by hand. (Aside: the 7.0 DA's seem not
to be ordinary Font/DA Mover files, but Font/DA Mover 4.1 can handle
them with option-open as you might expect.)
I can't think of many INITs which fell over, offhand, although I
discarded a lot. Oh yes, I use Scroll2 for custom scrollbars; it still
works for most applications, but not the Finder.
My main concern was whether SUM-II would work, given that the
Compatibility Checker stack had screamed "UNCLEAN!" and painted white
crosses on most of the tools. The soft partitioning stuff seems fine,
despite warnings from the checker. The SUM Shield stuff doesn't.
Volume restoration didn't work on a test example - the application
came back but the SIZE resource was corrupt. Oh well. Volume
optimisation seems OK as well, although I deliberately removed aliases
before trying it. A pleasant surprise: my old copy of FASTBACK, 1986
vintage (I think) works fine. It even backs up and restores aliases,
and also maintains pasted icons (although *not* icons pasted into
aliases, hmm). So, I'm quite pleased about this, although I think I'll
be ordering SilverLining and Retrospect rather than continue to use
this stiffware - I have a feeling I'm on borrowed time.
Comments on the MIDI stuff to follow.
All in all, I'm impressed with 7.0. The general user interface (inits,
control panels, DAs, views, fonts, etc.) is a *lot* more unified and
consistent. Far from being an added bell or whistle, aliases simplify
things a lot since original apps, documents, folders and DAs can be
aliased into the Apple menu, the startup folder, and so on. My Apple
menu now carries my most commonly used folders (this is dead useful),
common HyperCard stacks, and so on, and I have Desktop aliases for
ResEdit and a text editor so I can easily drop things into them.
Congratulations, Apple, it's a very nice piece of work. Firing up 7.0
for the first time was just like seeing my first Macintosh in '84.
Oh, top marks to the writer of the Installer program for the animation
of the disk icons. I thought this was great...
Nick.
(*) This probably won't make sense unless you get the Eurovision Song
Contest inflicted on you every year.
--
Nick Rothwell, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk <Atlantic Ocean>!mcsun!ukc!lfcs!nick
~~~ "The tabla is an organic instrument. We use the hammer for tuning. ~~~
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