Metacard menu?

[Richard Gaskin]

A patient and good-natured Shari writes:

>> The other way is to ship your standalone to someone with OS X and let them
>> fix it for you (until you get a copy of OS X of your own).
> 
> Not planning to upgrade in the near future.  Too many of my programs
> would break :-)

An over-caffeinated Richard responds:

OS X is a freaky NeXTish hybrid, a very different world than anything you've
known before, with extra bonus points for sucking your machine's clock
cycles away with unreadably translucent layered window and menu rendering.
I've spent many days sorting out issues unique to OS X delivery, with the
added bonus of knowing the Carbon API is still in flux.

If you're shipping for OS X, I can't recommend strongly enough getting a
copy and experiencing its specialness firsthand.

On the flip side, regardless of what Tog wrote at
<http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html> or what John Siracusa
wrote at <http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q4/macosx-10.1/macosx-10.1.html>,
OS X is here, it ain't going away, and the Classic OS we knew and loved will
be phased out of existence the minute Steve & Co. think the market will
allow it.  And to be fair, I haven't installed Jaguar yet, which is said to
boost performance noticeably and tone down the
jellyfish-exploded-on-your-monitor motif to something more useful (and
thankfully less translucent -- see the Ars Technica review of Jaguar for a
comparison).

More to the point, reviewers love seeing OS X versions, and many reviewers
and even end-users won't look twice at a Mac app that isn't X-savvified,
even if they're not running OS X themselves yet (fewer than 30% of Mac users
are).

So while you have good reason to spend most of your time in OS 9 (I plan to
until January), being able to boot into OS X for debugging and UI tweaking
is more useful than I can describe, and may well affect your bottom line in
good ways.

And since you've waited this long to jump on the X bandwagon (smart move,
IMHO), you can draw on the experience of those who've already worked through
these issues here on this list.

One great place to start is with the Apple tech note, "Anatomy of a Bundle":
<http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/SystemOverview/Bundle
s/_Anatomy_of_a_Bundle.html>

Then poke around in MC's bundle, tweak the plist file, etc. to get a feel
for the new world.  The plist file determines the text in that menu item,
along with other Mac-specific metadata -- worth knowing its structure, and
easy since you only need to modify the one MC installs in your bundle for
you.

Also, play with Iconographer for a while and it gets kinda fun.

While it's eay to poke fun at an OS whose design goals emphasize lickability
over usability, aside from the Dock many things start to grow on you after
while.  The text rendering is gorgeous, and I've been a fan of the
NeXT-style file browser since the much-faster third-party Gregg's Browser
premiered many years ago.

You needn't think of OS X as an either-or proposition (at least not until
10.3 in January).  You can continue to get work done rapidly with the tools
you love running in the well-optimized OS 9, rebooting into X for a day or
so along the way as needed.

Have fun.  ;)

(Putting the coffe cup down and retreating for some soothing cocoa.  It's
cold here in Los Angeles - gosh, it must be down around 60 degrees <g>).

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge 2.0: Publish any database on any site
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