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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.
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.