Annoying thing about a lot of stuff on OS X is that they block and block a lot. And too often they stay blocked and I have to kill the application.
Doing so many things well and failing at non-blocking I/O is a bit of a shame.
Some day-to-day examples.
- Safari — Certain stages of loading a page block the UI and tabs so you are stuck on that tab waiting. Usually these stages do not take too long but given a slow network and slow servers sometimes they do.
Another gripe is that when a page is done loading, in certain cases, its tab will get focus to indicate it is finished loading. This is not what tabs are for and I have closed GMail more than once because of this ‘feature’.
Dashboard — Usually after sleeping or after a network outage (which tends to happen when you are mobile) all of the Dashboard Widgets will feel they need to rebalance themselves. This proces takes 5-10 seconds on a reasonably crowded Dashboard and makes it useless for looking up stuff on a whim.
Fire — Network outages and other connect/disconnect events to networks will have Fire block the entire GUI. This means you cannot continue typing chat messages until Fire is done and well. This takes the Instant out of my Instant Messaging.
Fire will also happily show me error messages about failed network connections, probably thinking I give a damn. I do not. I can see perfectly well if a network is not connected. Just keep trying to connect (silently) at reasonable intervals.
- Finder — Connecting to SMB shares, or FTP servers or browsing networks will hang Finder indefinitely in some cases. I know this behaviour, I am used to it in Windows though Windows does it somewhat better.
Havin one of the most important pieces of software in the OS hang and crash on a regular basis is not cool.
I did not know that stuff could be too cool for Apple people. It seems that async-I/O is.
