But speed bottlenecks remain. The live resize feature remains leisurely, and long menus move slowly. Apple still has to enable hardware acceleration of such refresh functions in its Quartz graphics layer. One programmer told us it's not just a question of turning things on or off, but of performing lots of little optimizations to bring performance up to its full potential. But that's not all.
Application development is a work in progress.
Third party driver support remains spotty. Scanners, for instance, don't work yet, although one manufacturer is strongly hinting to The Mac Night Owl that they'll have something ready for public consumption soon. Although a small number of drivers for Canon, Epson and Hewlett Packard shipped with Mac OS X, not a lot has been added since. The new Epson driver update that comes from Apple is just for the Japanese market, and all HP has provided since then is a set of PPD files for many of its networked laser printers. To its credit, Brother has also released a Mac OS X driver package, and Lexmark says they'll begin to support their inkjet printers later this month.