With the Mac OS 8 came a new appearance for the Mac OS user
interface called platinum. Developers creating apps for Mac OS 8
had a dillemma in terms of making the UI work between both Mac OS
8 and 7, with variations in thickness, operation, and colors. To
help out lazy developers, Apple made Appearance Manager an option
add-on to Mac OS 7 which would halphazardly make it *look* like
Mac OS 8 (to an extent). For a short time, developers made some
programs that would run under Mac OS 7, but required this
Appearance Manager.
The Appearance Manager was never fully optimized for Mac OS 7,
however, and the period where developers were making System 7
compatible software that used the Appearance Manager was very
short, so it was never given much attention. This article
explains why I recommend you avoid the Appearance Manager on your
System 7 machines, as well as software that *requires* it.
GUI TEST:
The best way that I know how to test the performance of GUI
redraws is to benchmark how fast a standard window opens and
closes. Fortunately a certain Rob Terrell has written a small
program that does just that called Let 1k Windows Bloom. It tells
the Mac OS to open and close 1000 stadard dialog boxes as quickly
as possible and reports how long it takes to do so.
256 COLORS
First I ran the test using 256 colors. "Standard" is the default
appearance of Mac OS 7. "Appearance" is the Mac OS 8-style
platinum appearance applied to Mac OS 7 via the Appearance
Manager SDK. The test system was a PowerBook Duo 2300c/100 with
Mac OS 7.6.1 installed. The results are displayed below.
Smaller numbers are better.
STANDARD ---> 67 Seconds
APPEARANCE -----> 92 Seconds
THOUSANDS OF COLORS
Next, I ran the same tests in thousands of colors. The test
system was the same as above. The results are displayed below.
Smaller numbers are better.
STANDARD ---> 105 Seconds
APPEARANCE ----> 128 Seconds
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
Appearance Manager's platinum GUI is not just slower than the
standard UI of Mac OS 7, it also has bugs. The most noticeable is
Window Shade. In short, traditional Window Shade of
double-clicking the titlebar to collapse a window does not work
correctly. Instead of redrawing the window titlebar properly, a
portion of the window will remain. Other users have reported
various artifacts and redrawing issues, even (in rare instances)
system crashes. So in conclusion, I don't use Appearance Manager,
and I think you shouldn't either. System 7 Today only features
software that does not require Appearance Manager (unless
specifically noted), so you can rest assured everything on this
site will work without it.
