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MacOS X DP3
Rourke McNamara writes, "Some screenshots and my reactions after using Mac OS X DP3 for a few hours.
" Several interesting things: like seeing tcsh running top on MacOS. It's chock full of BSD goodness, but with that pretty interface on top. It'll definitely be interesting to see where this one heads.
It's not a traditional BSD4.4 because it's been modified to run on top of a Mach microkernel, so there are differences. Their version of Mach is modified from the original source too, I think.
That has nothing to do with OSX, it looks the same under OS8 and OS9. MS did some wierd funk in the IE5 interface on mac... The only widgets for OS8/9 you see there is the window dressing, which is the corrent widget for classic.
no vertical menu - the horizontal menu wastes space, doesn't provide a text title for the current app and can't be moved or hidden---nor easily configured for use with multiple monitors
no top-level print, hide or quit
no built-in faxing and file saving at the print panel - under OPENSTEP I never have to waste time picking printers from the chooser or control strip, or going in to page setup to set the destination to file
no rich set of clients for Services, no Webster.app for definitions, nor Oxfords.app for quotations
no Shelf - having this would address most of the complaints regarding the awkwardness of copying
no icon headers at the top of the Browser columns---these make excellent drag and drop targets.
no desktop as void into which UI elements are dropped to remove them---no manual deletion of aliases in NeXT/OPENstep
no pre-licensed PostScript or Pantone color libraries---the latter was especially nice since all NeXT apps use the same color panel and have access to Pantone swatches, moreover, one only has to pay for them once.
Not sure about system-wide address book or spell-checking....
save status in window close button---the greyed out proxies don't show up in a torn-off window menu
and that's just off the top of my head.
William
One factor that contributes to this acceptance of frequent crashing is that classic MacOS is very resilient, as is HFS: as a Mac tech I've seen many computers that have been hit with constant crashing for months on end, years even, and still managed to drag themselves along with one good finger despite massive disk damage and being forced to run Microsoft OLE extensions and two different old versions of IE and AOL at the same time plus weird menubar extensions and the dreaded Mystery Souped-Up CD-Rom Driver I kept seeing, thanks to some idiot magazine. A Windows box that badly damaged and confused would just be a doorstop, period. A Unix box that misconfigured would be rm -r * material, yet the Macs that crippled still manage to run for like five to fifteen minutes, and this is amazing! Maybe it's better if OSX _doesn't_ put up with abuse that severe, because it seems like if an OS _can_ put up with abuse that severe, then that's what it gets, and people only seem to see it when it's already a pile of slag and should be a doorstop, not dragging itself gamely along.
Hopefully OSX will either cope with luser abuse or make the abuse really hard to do. MacOS basically did the former, with predictable results. It's possible that OSX will do the latter, at which point you'll have clever magazines offering doubleclickable installers that will blithely replace huge big chunks of the kernel for some daft and vague performance benefit, and people will try them because idiots will be idiots. But extensions and control panels will be gone, gone, gone: and it's just possible that treating specifically the core of OSX as open (but not for desperately bright performance tweekers to meddle with) will result in a platform that, in practice, is as stable as a proper Unix mantained by a clued person.
This (he says, in Netscape, from a system that returned to the brandname days of Netscape and Eudora and Fetch with splashscreens galore) is the problem. In MacOS, things are convenient and one basically gets by comfortably if you have a clue, but although it's 'your space' more than a Windows box, you still don't get to control it completely- if The Mothership decides You Will Run IE for instance, and makes new OS pieces check for it and not install unless they install it, then you lose- either you jump through lots of hoops to maintain your own choices, or you cave and do things their way. And though they mostly behave *grumble about Cyberdog*, there is ALWAYS the possibility that someday they'll go somewhere that I just won't follow.
That's why I have LinuxPPC installed. It's my safety valve. I learn about it and grow to accept it for what it is, because it can be mine in a way impossible for corporate closed source OSes. It is dreadfully lacking in some ways, but then I feel that the Netscape and Eudora I use now are dreadfully lacking in some ways compared to Cyberdog, and that got taken away from me. Linux can't ever be taken away from me, so I won't ever forget it's there. It's important.
Will I be able to use other filesystems, such as FFS or ext2, jfs, etc, on OS-X? I guess what I'm asking is this: is any functionality of OS-X tied to features of HFS+ (e.g., does it depend on case insensitivity?).
thanks.
nick
Timezone screenshot for MacOS X DP3
Are we going to see a repeat here? As far as I know, Microsoft got into some hot water for having something like this.
NJV
Uh, as I recall:
(a) OpenGL was designed for hardware acceleration,
(b) it's been around longer than D3D
(c) Microsoft still pushes D3D over OpenGL (not surprising, since GL is (somewhat) cross-platform while D3D is Windows-specific) and only grudgingly includes GL support in Windows. (not that I've used Windows recently, so this may have changed)
I haven't used either API extensively, so I can't compare their functionality, but saying that OpenGL only got hardware acceleration after D3D had been around is a blatant falsehood -- had Microsoft put the effort into OpenGL that they had into D3D..well, actually, Windows would be in much more trouble now than it is, due to programs being written to portable specifications. [1] Hmm, maybe that's why they didn't do it?
Daniel
PS - I don't have a SBLive, I don't have a force-feedback joystick, I don't have a GeForce; I just have an AWE32 and an old Number 9 video card, and I'm perfectly happy that way, thank you.
[1] Actually, in an environment that encourages people to use types like DWORD and assume they're 32 bits, this might not be something to worry about..
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
But...
If you look at these screenshots: http://www.xappeal.org/ archive/dp3-2/classicappearance1.jpg and http://www.xappeal.org/ archive/dp3-2/classicappearance2.jpg, you'll see the good ole MacOS appearance manager allowing the user to switch b/w Apple Platinum (normal MacOS) and ClassicX (appears to have Aqua Style menus).
So perhaps there will be some ability to get Classic to look like Aqua.
my blog: good times, man, good times
It's not quite the MacOS 8/9 look and feel is it? And it isn't as pretty as Aqua. More like the bastard child of both of them.
Why not go the whole hog and make Classic use the Aqua L&F? If that can't be done, why mess with the locations of the zoom and collapse buttons?
This is all too WinOS2ish for my liking. Different window widgets for different apps is ugly. Poo.
my blog: good times, man, good times
Think about it. If OS 9 apps are so blatant when running OS X, won't you be more inclined to bug the developer into developing a Carbon or Cocoa (OS X) version of the app so that you'll get all the new features?
Of course.
I was thinking more in terms of usability and general lickability of the UI, but since you bring it up:
Well, Win3.x windows look like Win95 windows when running under Win95 and millions of people still upgraded their apps. WinOS/2 apps looked nothing like OS/2 apps and nobody upgraded to the OS/2 apps.
People are going to upgrade their apps anyway - especially since Apple have gotten into the habit of reminding users of new versions every time you start an app. Damn QT4 drives me insane!
I can't guarantee that the screenshot I linked to was genuine since I didn't make it, but it seemed to be a trustworthy and they were pretty positive about OSX, why bother making an ugly fake?
my blog: good times, man, good times
Carmack's first release was last week, MacOS X Server only. The Darwin-only version is in progress, since there're some Objective-C runtime issues. Heh. Dual monitors, one with Aqua, one with X, simple mouse movement between the two. *wipes drool off chin*
--
The Future: Some assembly required; batteries not included.
Not if the binary-only parts of OSX are compiled with G3 specific optimizations...
Apple can't do that, though, or they lose the G4 installed base. They might optimize the OS for the G3, but there's a difference between optimizing something for a processor and using processor-specific instructions.
John Carmack already has a very basic XFree port working. I think the patches are in the snapshot XFree released today. The original plan was to get it working on bare Darwin, but that hasn't worked out just yet (Carmack says he'll try again with XFree 4.0 final, with its cleaned-up codebase).
Either way, once this is done X apps will be far easier to port over. Given time, it may even be possible to run it rootless. Now that would rock.
Not quite the same userbase. I know several people who still have old 68k-based macs which they try to keep using, mostly because they don't want to go to x86 but they don't want to spend too much money on a modern Mac (or because of other circumstances, like my housemate who doesn't want to upgrade from his old and dying '040-based Performa because after this semester he's going to have to sell everything since he's going on an outreach program where he needs to be very mobile).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Aqua is a UI designers nightmare. Some serious hoop-jumping is necessary to avoid your app looking like the aftermath of a goo factory explosion (take a look at the calculator). Even then it's an interface you'd want to look at for a few hours and say "whoah!" at, then turn it right off and get on with using the machine for real tasks.
Luckily, the Cocoa (OpenStep) interface is nice enough that a simple swap-out replacement can be made, with or without Apples say-so. Unluckily, aqua is probably hard wired into Carbon, the code-portability environment.
When I first saw Rhapsody DR2 (as the developer releases for MacOS X Server were called), I knew I wanted THAT integrated with the MacOS. As I've said before, it's what made me a Unix fan.
I really really hope that it lives up to its promise.
The one downside is that X applications will not readily port, though I'm sure there will be various libraries to make this easier (thus the GNUstep project).
The really interesting upside to this is that, after MacOS X ships, all shipping consumer OSes except Windows (and OS/2, which I don't really count as it's no longer being developed) will be based on Unix.
_Deirdre
Nope, nope and I suppose.
:)
MacOS X is not X-based. While that might seem strange for a new OS coming out, remember this is NeXTStep revamped. At the time NeXT was being developed, X was very very rudimentary and NeXT wanted something more flashy.
So, no, they're not at all the same. NeXT was built on Display Postscript, which, because of Adobe's greed, has been yanked from MacOS X. I don't think that's entirely a Bad Thing, but I don't know how much better MacOS X's display system is than the earlier QuickDraw. I hope one can at least do text sideways.
_Deirdre
You guys don't get the point!
The "classic" environment looks different so that you intentionally know that you're running a non-OSX app. Think about it. If OS 9 apps are so blatant when running OS X, won't you be more inclined to bug the developer into developing a Carbon or Cocoa (OS X) version of the app so that you'll get all the new features?
Of course.
The only thing Apple changed was to move all three window widgets to the left, like in Aqua. That makes sense, so that you'll get used to it.
I don't expect Apple to change this in the final release of OS X. Having old "classic" apps look different is good move.
By the way, I think that screenshot of IE 5 running in OS X is faked. It doesn't look right. For one thing, the IE 5 icon is wrong. The real Mac IE 5 icon looks just like the old one only it's 32 bit color and looks polished. It looks realllllly sweet when you use the new Aqua finder and view the icon at 128pix.
However, I have run IE 5 under the classic environment on OS X so it does work. Apparently Microsoft is working on a "carbon" version of IE 5 as well. I haven't got my hands on it yet but that seems to be the version that Steve showed off at Macworld (I was there) since it had the aqua-fied windows.
Ben
Well, this would be a reasonable contention, but I've had mixed success with it in reality. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes I just don't have the coordination to press the buttons as described :-(.
D
----
...will Mac OS X run on non-G3/G4 Power Macs?
I'm not talking about Darwin-plus-goodies, I mean the commercial, shrinkwrapped-by-Apple stuff.
I'm sticking with Mac OS 8.6 right now on my Mac, and the answer to this will determine if I eventually reformat to put Mac OS X on it or some PPC-based Linux.
On the plus side, I do have three choices! Yellow Dog Linux, LinuxPPC, or Debian's PPC port...
Jay (=
Mac OS X is not going to be free, so it does not exactly occupy the same space as LinuxPPC. If current pricing remains the same, it should be at around $99 or so, which is about the same, or a little more than a well stocked/supported Linux distro.
Once MacOS X is released, this may spell the death of linuxppc and the sheepsaver port. Why install linux when you have a free robust BSD to run your GNU tools on?
Hasdi
This is an interview with Steve Jobs, but the formatting is lost so it's hard to tell who's the asker and who's the answerer sometimes.
This one is jsut about Jobs and Apple's new direction in general.
They are both from Fortune/Northernlight, It took me about an hour and a half to find them because I thought I had seen them on forbes.com... ugh.
_________________
rooooar
Is Apple beginning to see that, by holding the software close to its vest back in 84, it practically created the M$ behemoth we all know and loathe?
Steve Jobs has said on several occasions that the Mac OS is Apple's Crown Jewel, and despite the hardware, they're really a software company. While they make more money off the hardware, the OS is Apple. I still think it is crazy to expect any "traditional" company to open source its most valuable asset. Especially when so much of the Mac OS is based on QuickTime, a technology Apple will do anything to protect from Microsoft.
Apple has made great strides in Open Source, far more than most traditional closed-source software companies have, but I think it will be a cold day in hell, or at least 5 or 10 years, before Apple Open Sources the MacOS. And I don't think that's really such a bad thing. Why SHOULDN'T they protect their investment?
_________________
rooooar
MS HAS innovated. They have put out a lot of crappy products, but the HAVE innovated. Take Direct3D for example.
:-|
From what I understood, some of the APIs in the "Direct family" were actually created by companies which Microsoft subsequently acquired. Same with Active Server Pages (ASP). Unfortunately, I don't have a firsthand source..
cpeterso
The really nice thing about this is not whether os x is better than our other unix variants, blah blah blah... but whether existing mac users like it.
If the existing mac user base switches to OS/X.... they will probably discover the wonders of unix sitting underneath it.
Operating systems are converging..
As far as I know, IE does *not* use Aqua natively. MS has produced their own Aqua-ish IE.
Or have I misunderstood you?
emd
As you point out, OS X isn't using the "pure" 4.4BSD-lite code, it's using FreeBSD. Which, incidentally, is derived from 4.4BSD-lite.
/.-like of me, now would it? Of course, admitting a mistake wouldn't be, either... :-)
Anyway, I should have done my fact checking a little more thoroughly, rather than relying on recollection. Of course, that wouldn't be very
As a matter of fact, John Carmack (yes, that John Carmack) has recently posted an early port of X for Mac OS X Server, and says that it should be working on Darwin shortly
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
http://www.macopz.com/rumors/DP3/
http://www.thinksecret.com/
>> LinuxPPC has been fairly critical of OS X and Darwin for some time now
:)
> Have they? Or are you just quoting that one guy?
I seem to remember back when OS X Server was announced in 1999, the LinuxPPC page had a fairly negative response.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Well, because it comes from a company with presumably more engineering resources than LinuxPPC. What do you think companies are more likely to support natively, OS X or LinuxPPC?
MacNN has an interesting article featuring a talk with Jeff Carr from LinuxPPC, in which he once again slams OS X needlessly ("Mac OS X is very limited regarding hardware support" - well, duh, it's not actually out yet, but I bet it'll support USB and FireWire sooner than LinuxPPC does natively), claiming Apple can't win against a free OS and that they should throw out the Mach kernel. But OS X is built on a free OS, and BSD appears (have to be careful here) to have an easier upgrade path, something Apple is finally interested in - the Software Update feature of OS 9 took way too long to make it into the system, IMHO.
LinuxPPC has been fairly critical of OS X and Darwin for some time now. Why don't they cooperate instead? Then, everybody wins.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Yes, Carbon is what allows Mac OS X to be a viable OS for current Mac users, but it's not what MOSX is all about. If you want to take advantage of the all the services the OS offers, you'll still need to write apps in Cocoa, the OpenStep APIs. Cocoa is the real object-oriented API. Remember how OpenStep developers claimed it took them 1/10th the time to write an OpenStep app as it did to write a Windows app? That's what Mac OS X is about. Carbon is just a temporary solution to get old apps running well on the new system.
c.r.
Earlier today, I wrote how, if Photoshop and Macromedia ported their programs (even older ones) to Linux, then I'd finally have the excuse I was looking for...
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Well! This is it! Photoshop, Dreameaver, Flash, Illustrator... all on BSD! I guess you can even run MS Office (which many of us do, if we admit it!).
Ladies and Gentlemen. I firmly belive that this is going to be something close to the Holy Grail... the perfect OS. I'd heard rumors, now they appear to be confirmed.
Come August, with bugs fixed, and wishlist instated... That was when I was planning on buying a new desktop... Well, guess what I (hope) I'll be getting?
Oh, the MySQL worked fine for me... I did wonder why it was done this way, it was only a handfull of pics... But they looked great!
Yeah, this is it.
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
That's what the 'single window view' is for. Just click on the button in the top right of the window (where the resize button used to be) and only one window will show at a time. Click on another app/window in the taskbar, and the current window will drop to the taskbar as the other pops open.
The root user is currently called "root", but root's home directory is "Users/Administrator" and the documentation refers to the "Administrative" user. Please, Apple, don't change root to Administrator.
Well, most end-users won't know what 'root' means, but Administrator is easy to figure out. Owner would be even better, but doesn't make as much sense in a corporate environment. Besides, those in the know will still call it root amongst themselves anyway. ;)
There are three view modes: by icon, as list, or in columns. In the icon view I couldn't find a way to set the DEFAULT icon size, which drove me nuts. The default icon size is WAY too big. The list view worked very well, but I couldn't find a way to set the defaults for this view either (why does Apple think that modification date is more important than file size?).
Most users don't even look at the file size of their documents unless there's some specific reason. Most of the time people leave their windows in Icon mode, which doesn't show either of those things. I keep my documents in List view, but turn off everything but the filename. And I'm sure you'll be able to at least turn off certain info you don't need, and hopefully be able to rearrange the columns as you want.
____________________
Tension, apprehension
And dissension have begun
JUST a NeXT with real pretty graphics? dont you mean "WOW!?!?!!! this is a Next WITH REAL PRETTY GRAPHICS!?!$!!!!$ and an insanely fast chip! and prospects for future refinements and developments!"
nexts rule. if I could get a 500 MhZ next, I would, and that's why I'm considering a g4 now.
The Ad Critic is running the original "1984" ad that was run during the '84 Superbowl.
I have to admit, it was an incredibly cool commercial. It's worth watching if you haven't seen it.
--
Okay, I gotta bite. NeXTSTEP *is* a branch of
Mach. However, while Mach played with all sorts
of ukernel-type things before Mach3, there was a
ton of BSD stuff in the Mach kernel. They took
4.2 (and updated to 4.3) BSD, and replaced it
piece by piece as they went. But they only
replaced part of it; there's still a lot of BSD
code in there. It wasn't until Mach 3, after the
NeXT branch, that the BSD code was moved out of
the kernel to make the microkernel Mach we all
know and love. So there is most of a 4.3BSD
kernel in there.
Figure 1.
-----------------------------------
Accent UNIX
| |
| BSD
Mach-----------------(4.2BSD)
(Mach 2)--------------(4.3BSD)
| |
+------------+ (...)
| |
Mach 3 NeXT
(BSD moved
to user-
land)
-----------------------------------
When you miniaturize a window, a snapshot of the window is taken and placed in the dock. This is where the magnification feature is really handy. You can actually see which document the icon represents before you expand it.
Hey - I do that with enlightenment! It seems that Mac OS X has a whole bunch of cool ideas from other GUI's combined into one gigantically cool one.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
Damn - and I just bought an upgrade to my Intel box :) - I can't wait to see this in person. My take on this is it's gonna be like using the BeOS - incredibly stable, flashy, but deep inside there's a UNIX waiting to get out. My question - Where is $HOME, and will I see a .bashrc, a .exrc, etc. lying around there? How will it handle dotfiles, anyway?
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
I already have it...
MacPerl
Red one closes the window, yellow one minimizes it (puts it in the Dock), green one maximizes it (the window grows to the appropriate size to fill its contents).
Also, when you mouse over the buttons, symbols appear in the buttons (X, -, +)
What is each of the completely textless icons at the bottom supposed to mean? Is it like the "mystery meat navigation" that Jakob Nielsen complains about so much at useit.com?
The name of the item appears when you put the mouse over a dock icon. Also, the icon for minimized windows is the actual representation of the window, minimized (does this makes sense). All done on the fly.
nope, it isn't, the way the classic.app is set up, it just lets you kind of see through to the mac os x desktop and there are currently some problems with this, such as when you drag a window, there is a weird frame around it if you move it over one of the windows in classic.app. I'm posting this from msie 5.0b30 running in classic.app, and I can assure you it looks the same :)
This is according to Ars Technica:
It seems as though upon boot-up, the user is presented with a logon window not dissimilar to that in NT, xdm, etc.). As it turns out, if you press Ctrl-Alt-Del, a message pops up saying:
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
The BSD part will not be vanilla BSD 4.4-lite. It will be FreeBSD 3.2.
I think I trust this source more than I trust you:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html
It looks great. I am really looking forward to getting OS X. The one thing I want is my 'clasic' finder. The Unix, the gui, it all looks great. But I will not buy it if I don't have the option of a classic Finder over the NeXT-ish FileViewer.
-- "It is my sacred and holy duty to see those guys suffer."
Do I.Q.s drop sharply whenever people comment on Apple?
Apple is not stupid. It would be stupid for Apple to make icons 128x128. It would be stupid for Apple to make the icons tiff images that use a 512k of RAM for each image. It would be stupid for Apple to write an OS that only their most powerful machine with 256 megs of RAM can barely run.
It is a good thing that Apple is not doing any of those things.
How can people look at an OS and comment it on it without ever looking at anything past the superficial UI.
The icons are RESIZEABLE! Jesus CHRIST! If I read another moron commenting how stupid it is to have huge icons I will have to shoot a windows user.
The UI does not take a 'snapshot' of the window before it is minimized. When anything is minimized it will either show the icon of it or will show the live app in a small winodw.
The entire UI is built on PDF. Everything. From translucency to drop shadows to the genie effect. This UI is not bitmapped based like everything else. This UI is VECTOR BASED! So all of those resource intensive tricks that windows, x-windows, and the macintosh have to do are built into PDF. And are now trivial.
The bitmap UI is now obsolete.
//off subject
UNIX people amaze me. They think running 6 terminal windows on X windows is progress from running one text based terminal.
Probably. It's known already that Apple will be working on expanding hardware support after OSX goes Golden on the G3's and G4's. The narrow hardware support at the start is just to simplify the task of getting it up and running.
Also, remember that OSX is Darwin-plus-goodies (just a lot more goodies than you get with the free version of Darwin). If you can make Darwin run, you'll be able to make OSX run.
For what it's worth, I do have a G3, but I haven't been able to make Darwin run on it. I do hope I'll be able to rectify that before OSX's release.
Dear Foaf,
The screenshot that you showed was actually a doctored screenshot (aka fake). You would notice this if you look closely at the doc and other areas around the edges where the IE imagne has been stamped over the aqua interface.
Enjoy.
--
I'll be one of the first to admit it...I've been ripping on Apple and the Mac for as long as I can remember. I'm a UNIX boy at heart, but I would always rather use BeOS or even Windows before I'd lower myself to using a Mac.
But lately, Apple has been redeeming themselves in my eyes. If I can disregard the whole "Tangerine Computer" thing for a moment, Apple is developing and releasing quality hardware, and finally has the quality operating system to run on it. I'm looking forward to purchasing a G4 when MacOS X is fully released and taking the baby for my own test drive, because everything I've seen on it so far has left me breathless. Its interface looks incredibly slick, and hell, it's got BSD Unix at its core.
Anyway, if Apple can successfully keep its old school flock faithful, and at the same time draw in a UNIX techie like myself, then they deserve some credit.
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
I can't speak for this version (I'm not seeded), but I can say that MacOS X Server (upon which MacOS X is built) is way way way more stable than MacOS 8 or 9. It's also much faster as they STILL haven't managed to make MacOS (as of 8) fully PowerPC happy. Fortunately, MacOS X Server (and Mac OS X no adjective) have really been optimised for the PowerPC.
It will rival Linux for uptime *as long as* you have allocated enough virtual memory. It gets really really cranky when it starts running out of VM (which is implemented as a physical file). All failures I had of MacOS X Server in more than a year of daily use were related to vm issues and most of those because of browser caching.
Sometimes I'd reboot just to resize the VM down (the VM file will grow in size but not shrink). One of the ways around this of course is to implement the vm as its own partition. Unlike Linux, I have seen MacOS X Server eat up *hundreds* of megabytes of disk space as vm for a desktop machine.
Again, my experience is with MacOS X Server, which may vary somewhat from the consumer version.
_Deirdre
Makes me want a Mac. *drool*.
It's a mistake to conclude that once you have something that looks like NEXTSTEP (or some other OS), you will have something that is like NEXTSTEP (or some other OS).
Sure, it's lots of fun to play with The Gimp and make some skins. But there are plenty of things beneath the surface that aren't glamorous but have a huge impact on usability. The imaging models that are integrated into NEXTSTEP and Mac OS X make a huge difference for developers, making it easy to develop applications that can produce high quality printed output as well as excellent screen output. Similarly, having a pasteboard that can handle images, mail messages, line art, and so on -- seamlessly -- makes life easier for users and developers alike.
Most people who think it's easy to imitate NEXTSTEP have never actually used the system for any length of time, and have never taken a look at the `under the hood' complexities the GNUStep project is tackling in their attempt to bring some of the underlying functionality of NEXTSTEP to other OSs.
Finally, just because the concepts embodied in NEXTSTEP (like its imaging model) are several years old doesn't make them outdated, irrelevant, or easily imitated today. On my desk I have two machines: a cool dual processor PC running RedHat 6.1, and a 25Mhz NeXTstation that's about nine years old. I do most of my work sitting at the NeXTstation. I think that speaks volumes.
DB
Actually, Mac OS X uses a Mach kernel with a BSD layer, just like NeXTStep.
Ingredients for OS X:
- Darwin core (Mach + BSD, in an open source package)
- Classic, Carbon, Cocoa APIs (Classic: for MacOS 8/9 compatibility ; Carbon: updated OS 8/9 apps that take advantage of memory protection, preemptive multitasking and Aqua interface; Cocoa: cool object-oriented API)
- Quartz display system (for 2D)
- OpenGL (for 3D)
- Aqua (the GUI)
Hope that clears things up for those less familiar with OS X.
We've been using OS X since we first got it and it's been one "Wow!" after another. More than worth the cost of membership alone since I almost had to pay $800 for NeXTStep v3.3 way back...
BTW, you don't have to jump through any NDA hoops, you just have to sign the standard NDA that every developer signs...
Apple's Mac OS X is based on a solid, secure and dependable implementation of Unix (like Linux no? :-) and they are putting good usable hardware products out the door.
Now, remember, like VA, they make their money on the hardware. The OS income is almost chump change to them except that without an OS they're dead in the water. Apple will continue to make their money from their hardware.
Is Apple beginning to see that, by holding the software close to its vest back in 84, it practically created the M$ behemoth we all know and loathe?
If Apple had loosed the ROM APIs and licensed the ROM to the extremely competitive Intel world this would be very different planet.
Instead the fate the economy rests in the hands of people whose greed has not shown any sign of abating since Gates whined in Byte magazine that people were ripping off his MITS/ Altair 8080 BASIC interpreter and changed an open source world into a hermetic, failure prone process where a business plan now often reads "Get big enough to be noticed by M$ and sell out!"
Lets hope Apple comes to its senses and sets the APIs free (those that aren't already, what with Darwin, [read BSD,] OpenGL, the data management infrestructure etcetera,) to put a severe kink in the strategies of Redmond.
With luck we'll stop the cash hemmorhage that's made M$ a stomping ground for millionnaires, billionnaires and the richest man that has ever lived.
Apple, OS X and Intel/AMD, Linux have a chance to stop the incredible waste that the Microsoft approach has wrought upon the world.
We have lost or lost access to uncountable lines of code because too many consider them proprietary, secret and their own property. Projects die for many reasons and the code disappears forever regardless of whether it was good or useful and could be so again.
The Microsoft approach has led to the perpetual reinvention of the wheel. Unlike Newton who saw far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, we are perpetually rooting around the sty like nearsighted pigs, wallowing in a shallow mire because we are kept there by people who's greed exceeds their sense of history and they believe that they can coopt the information revolution to enrich themselves.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm still mixed on OS X. Now, first things first, I'm seriously glad that someone commercial has released a desktop OS that's built on something stable like BSD. Apple isn't doing this stupid crap like MS, seperating 'workstation' from 'home user.' And I hope this OS succeeds. Apple deserves a good shot at the market, despite my own opinions on the cost of buying into the Apple name (Apple is a hardware company, you buy their hardware and then get to run their OS).
:-)
But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics. A NeXT that can run old MacOS stuff and has an extra-pretty accelerated GUI. Honestly, things like slightly transparent windows/menus, animated buttons, neato entrance effects for status windows.. In the end, it's mostly glitz. It does actually add to the UI, however. Feedback to the user as to what button is highlited, what window a status popup came from, those all mean something.
So how hard *IS* it to do most of that stuff? In March we'll have an XFree that incorporates hardware acceleration standard. GNOME already has libraries in it that do transparency/animated buttons (gdk-pixbuf).. Who's to bet we couldn't do all this, at a minimun cost to CPU?
After all, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery
But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics.
No, it's more integrated than that...a compatability environment for a Windowsesque range of software for end users, a second compatability environment that lets those apps use some of the *nix features, and then the native BSD/NeXT with a thoroughly integrated GUI AND device drivers.
The comparison between my install of Red Hat 5.2 on an old Dell and installing Mac OS X Server (less guified than OS X) is enlightening. It took me the better part of a day to get everything working except networking on the Dell--the networking never worked. Then screwing around as root (which you Shoult Not Do) messed up the system.
For fun, I tried the same thing on the Mac. It was installed and running in 20 minutes flat. This includes having networking and Apache configured and running. There was zero configuration of device drivers, and very little that you wouldn't do setting up a Windows 9x installation.
In short, this was Unix that an end user could conceivably install. Screwing around as root didn't break things. Basically, what will piss off most Linux/BSD enthusiasts is what will be its strength: it doesn't let you screw yourself too badly. Its saving grace is that you can in fact RTFM and get it to do everything your BSD box does. I could do everything through the GUI, too, though sometimes it was more efficient to use the command line.
OK, is this a slam on Linux/BSD/etc? No, because they have a harder job: support a range of hardware that Apple doesn't. Apple's strength and ease of use has always been because they could control both the hardware and the software, and then they made the system usable (theoretically) by grandma. That's going to be too limiting for almost any distro of Linux/FreeBSD.
However, that's going to keep them from taking over NT's market. They can't install on the current hardware, and few companies are willing to replace client and server hardware and software simultaneously, as much as it might deliver on the promises made by NT. An eventual Linux/thin client combo might, though, if it can be easy enough for the secretary to use.
Once upon a time, there were two cute little NeXTStations, point & click. point nfs-mounted large portions of click, and click nfs-mounted some portions of point. Together, they shared a NeXT printer and served a happy community of CSitizens.
point & click ran. point & click ran happily. point & click never ever went down. point & click got forgotten several times during major CS-department wide outages (DNS server lunched or replaced, network equipment died). point & click recorded uptimes of 700 days apiece before they were finally shuttled away as "old, obsolete equipment".
I've never seen anything as stable as these machines. They just plain worked.
So to get back to your question about OS X being more stable than OS 8/9, I'd have to say that, if past history is an indicator, OS X will be a real winner. Here's hoping!
Linux is great for what it is. Linux is a swiss army knife. It is most things to most people. There's nothing it wont do if you're willing to put forth the effort to use what's there. In itself that's a wonderful design philosophy. I've been using Linux for a long time and it amazes me what it can do when people put their minds to it. Gearheads love this sort of OS, and love to demonstrate it's ability to perform any function no matter how arcane or bizarre the procedure to get there is. The people who build Linux are pragmatists. Soured by years of lofty goals, but failed implementations, they work to make a system that solves all the problems, even if they have to compromise usability, simplicity, or advanced design. Efficiency is stressed at the system level. I've never encountered a general purpose computing task that could not be solved by Linux.
:-)
NeXT (and MacOS X I hope) on the other hand is more like a perfectly ergonomic, intuitivley simple yet surprisingly flexible single bladed knife. It doesn't have a corkscrew or scissors, But the handle grip doubles as a file and it is perfectly balanced along every axis. Ninjas use it for throwing, Butchers use it for cutting meat. Carpenters use it to score material and Master chefs use it to prepare dishes, but you wont be able to open a wine bottle, it wont loosen most phillips screws and you'll just make a mess if you try to open a can of peas or bottle of beer with it. It also wont fit in your pocket. However, if there was ever a knife that was a perfect balance of asthetics, utility, and well executed engineering, this is it. Again, a wonderful design philosophy. Programmers, bankers, artists, secretaries, they all have their fond memories of how great NeXT was. The people who built NeXT had only the highest standards in terms of design and executed them to the limits of technology, but no amount of good design can make an OS that is useful for everything, there's some things it just cant do. This is becasue efficiency is adddressed at the UI level. I've never used a system as elegant as NeXT.
It's no coincidence that alot of people who have used both try to make Linux look like NeXT and make NeXT as flexible as Linux.
-Rich
Let's not get sloppy here. The kernel which OS X and NextStep run on is the Mach kernel, written at Carnegie Mellon. It bears little or no resemblance to the BSD kernel.
In a microkernel, what we'd traditionally think of as a "kernel" is reduced to code supporting a set of abstractions for tasks, threads, memory objects, messages, and ports. Things like file systems, networking code, etc... are all implemented in user space using formal message passing to communicate with the "kernel". As a rule of thumb, if it can be implemented in a platform-independent manner, it's not in kernel space.
Mach is actually "OS Neutral". However, rather than having to port all of the system libraries of an OS to use this new, extremely different kernel interface, it's usually easier to write code which implements a the kernel API of another OS. Here's the BSD tie-in: BSD is one of the OS "personalities" available for Mach. Someone has done the work for a Linux personality too (MkLinux). In this sense, OS X is not BSD at all- the kernel code is completely different. On the other hand, it will include a full BSD 4.4lite environment of system programs and utilities, and uses much of the BSD kernel code to implment filesystem, networking, etc... that is "outside" the kernel.
What I don't know is what API the bulk of OS X is based on. Perhaps the different run time environments / programming models used by OS X (Carbon, Cocoa, etc...) are using diffent base kernel APIs. I'm guessing they didn't port all the old MacOS stuff to the BSD personality- it would make more sense to write a MacOS personality for Mach. How about Cocoa- does anyone know if the new / NextSteppish stuff has the BSD kernel API under it?
http://www.xappeal.org/archive/dp3.shtml
Take a look at this, for instance, it's the Text System Overview for OS-X. Read that and then come back and tell me that OS-X/Aqua/Cocoa is nothing special, and with the proper skins GNOME provides the exact same thing to developers.
That is just the beginning. There is EOF, which is the most advanced, high level, database independent access framework available. It's so far beyond ODBC, JDBC, and the frameworks available in commercial appservers like Dynamo and WebLogic that it really isn't even funny.
After 11 years, InterfaceBuilder is still without peer. It doesn't generate code. Nobody else seems to get it.
The fact is, Mac OS-X has the most powerful object-oriented API that has been under development and constant refinement for over 12 years. It has been shipping since 1989. It's been through four major revisions since then.
You may be able to make GNOME look something like Aqua, but it's still going to be a pain in the ass to write applications with a decent UI for it. I use GNOME every day and even the cut and paste support totally sucks. It's been 16 years since the Mac came out, you'd think that every GNOME app would have real cut and paste. I use Navigator, GNOME Terminal, and XChat every day. Only Navigator actually has "cut" in the menu. A quick survey of other GNOME apps that come with my system reveals that only a few have cut and paste support (GEdit comes to mind). Of course, Navigator's clipboard only works within Navigator. The others apps use something that vaguely resembles cut and past but isn't even close (middle clicking causing pasting of the selection does NOT count as real cut and paste). You guys really have no idea what you're missing here....
Burris
Some comments:
tcsh isn't running on MacOS. Remember that Mac OS-X is essentially OpenStep 6.0 (the NeXT operating system). Rhapsody was akin to OpenStep 5.0. It really is a NeXT, with Mac compatibility (Carbon and Classic) and Java.
Most BSD source will port pretty easily. The biggest gotcha I've found is that the HFS+ filesystem isn't case sensitive. Like NTFS, it preserves case but you cannot have two files with the same name differing only in case (i.e. you can't have "README" and "readme" and "ReaDMe" in the same directory). Prepare to hack some makefiles.
When you miniaturize a window, a snapshot of the window is taken and placed in the dock. This is where the magnification feature is really handy. You can actually see which document the icon represents before you expand it.
The "sheets" functionality is way cool. Modal dialogs like save panels are attached to specific document windows and do not affect other documents. They scroll down from the title bar and cover part of the window. However, they are translucent so you can still see some of the document behind it.
Another new thing are "drawers" which are sub-windows that scroll out when you activate a control. For instance, in the Mail application, hitting the "Mailboxes" menu item causes a "drawer" containing your list of mailboxes to slide out from the side of your mail reading window.
The finder has plug-in support for document previewing... I was quite surprised to select WAV and AIFF sound files and find that I could play them from within the finder. Writing your own plugins is not that difficult.
Mac OS-X really is going to be the coolest operating system around. I've been waiting years for it...
Burris
I don't have DP3, I used on someone else's machine. I never signed an NDA. But I'm still not sure what the legal ramifications are of posting information about it, so I took down those links. OS X is truly amazing and I can't wait until the release. Then I'll be able to talk about it all I want without worrying about legal issues.
The server is not MacOS X, but OpenBSD on a PIII 450. Admittedly, Linux would have fared better against the /. effect. However, the server never crashed, it just became very slow and the mysql server started to fail.
The images were stored in the file system, but the pages that show them in a "slide show" were generated via php3. This is becuase I just took the uploaded screenshots and ran the same program against them that I use for my other pictures. I had not idea how crushing the ./ effect could be. Again, I apologize.