When I got my digital camera, I purchased a USB SmartMedia reader from SanDisk so that transferring files to my PC would be super easy. As a bonus, the reader was Mac-ready.
When I did move to the Mac, I found that the reader worked fine in Classic – or under Mac OS 9.1. It actually performed better than on the PC; I’d occasionally have corrupted images for no reason, but this went away on the Mac. One of the things I came to live with, though, was that the reader didn’t work with OS X at all. While the computer saw the reader, SanDisk had no X driver for it.
Then I downloaded Mac OS 9.2 to remedy some minor problems I was having. Guess what? Now the reader acts wonky under 9.2. After doing some research I discovered that SanDisk knows that the reader doesn’t work under 9.2 or X, but more importantly they’re totally mum on plans to update the drivers. Their website simply says that the driver is compatible with OS 8.6 and up. I had to dig for this info.
Windows 95 users are in a similar boat – lots of stuff has passed them by, and NT 4.0 users are starting to feel a similar pinch. I acknowledge that companies can’t (and shouldn’t) necessarily support every single version of an OS out there, but both OS 9.2 and X are too big to be considered BeOS. I’m hoping an X driver will come out with the next version of the OS, but at this point, I’m just frustrated that this thing doesn’t work right. -pm
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