Sam’s Blog

Earlier today, as I posted earlier to the cocoa-dev list of which I am a proud subscriber, I read on MacInTouch that all of the icons on Mac OS X’s Desktop are actually windows — that’s right, real windows, just like you see when you click on the Finder in the dock. The speculation on the MacInTouch thread is that the mere fact that those windows have to be customized constantly; that is, kept hidden, somewhat transparent, etc., and there are so many of them on many peoples’ desktops (like mine for example), leads to a big performance drop in the Finder. That would explain why clearing off your Desktop by putting all or most of the icons into a folder on the Desktop is said to speed up your computer so much. (I verified this by using the Quartz Debug utility. I’d say more, but I have no wish to violate my NDA. For details check out the MacInTouch thread link above.)

I just found another interesting Finder “gem”: I was going through /Library/Preferences looking for something else, when I stumbled across com.apple.com.dockfixup.plist. That name seemed a bit curious, so I opened it up and you won’t believe what it is: All it does is keep track of which of the original items that came in my Mac OS X (i.e., that shipped preinstalled with the OS) are still in the Dock. It also keeps track of what version… well, I guess it started keeping track in: The version it’s got for me is 10.3, but I’ve had Mac OS X going back to 10.0. My guess is this is another performance inefficiency of the Finder: It probably looks at this plist every time Finder loads to see what changes it has to make to the default base Dock settings before it can continue the loading the Dock. I guess in a way it’s a good idea on Apple’s part, but there must be some better way to do this…

By the way, comments are welcome. I’ve had this blog running for months now and still have zero comments…

This article speculates that Leopard could mean the end of the while “windows” user-interface paradigm. We’ll find out for sure when Steve Jobs gives his WWDC keynote on June 11th. If Leopard really does turn out to mean the end of windows, I’m going to have to really put some serious time into thinking about whether it’s worth keeping Tiger support for this program that I’m working on now.

No; they don’t. As an example of this, because I was curious, I just went to Dell’s website and configured a Dell laptop to be a close as possible to my model of MacBook — the midrange one, which costs $1299 U.S. I configured the Dell (an Inspiron E1405 with a 14.1″ screen, because they didn’t have anything smaller) as follows:

And surprise, surprise… it actually ended up costing a little more… $1329 U.S. That’s not counting all of the money not yet spent on anti-spyware software, antivirus subscriptions, etc.

But enough with this procrastination. Back to my paper.