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MacOS X Beta Sneak Preview
Ruddy writes: "ZDNet has screenshots
and a preview of Mac
OSX beta being released Wednesday at the Apple
Expo in Paris, as well as a list of some apps
and utils that will ship
on the beta CD (apparently no download). Some of
the leaking details are a very NeXt-ish file browser, No Airport
support yet, only partial USB and only partial Firewire; Full
Java 2, Full OpenGL, Full SMP; Choice of Aqua or Graphite eye candies;
New Dock choices; installing on G3 & G4s only--requiring the OEM
video cards (no Voodoos or 3DFX) and single monitor systems only; installs
alongside OS9 with no major speed hits for Classic apps. The screenshots look fab and it all sounds pretty heady except for the connectivity shortage, but will
it look and feel? And will it plug and ...play? Highlights from
the rollout will be webcast here
starting Wednesday."
Sheesh!
-- Shamus
This space for rent
The "release it already" dept. What happened to waiting until the software was of sufficient quality to warrant release, aka, v1.0 == bug free?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
I would think that having a virtual desktop would be better and in the long run cheaper since it has less mean time between failures than having 2 monitors would.
Respond to s
It's $99 per year for students. Yes, that's affordable, and yes, I'm whining. But I don't feel like paying $99 per year for what basically amounts to do Apple a favor. =:p
And I still maintain that if apple wants to be successful they'll have to attract new developers to the new platform. A great way to do that would be try to attract BSD developers, even casual ones (like me). And I doubt they can do that if their developement tools aren't free.
Just my two cents.
--
Lagos
According to somewhere in the apple archives, its "OS 10," but OSX has such a better ring to it. Reminicent of a marvel comic, just can't remeber which one.
Mod point free since 2001
Also, and I may be in the minority here, I think Aqua is just plain butt-ugly and hard on the eyes. *shrug*
Re: the hard reset button (which you need on the mac) is on the bottom of the box so you have to lift the thing, put the top on a soft surface (don't want to scratch the lucite) and pop the button. Not cool.
If you're not running it already, you should install MacsBug (easy to find via google.com/mac, for example). In "hard reset" conditions, it drops you into an ugly-ass shell and you can, 99+% of the time, type your way out of it. I don't even know where the reset button on my box is.
You can also send prolix AppleEvent commands from MacsBugApp instead of using your Finder menus, if you're into that dorky sort of thing. I am, sometimes. In fact, my "version" of MacOS is customized enough that I get confused when I have to use the standard setup. Don't let
Virtual desktops exist in the Mac world, too. Search, boy! Search!
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
It will certainly be downloadable. The only question is whether it will be downloadable directly from Apple or from dozens of Hotline and ftp sites. Right now the latter is looking more likely.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
A recent register article mentioned British protest over MacOS and its terminated British-English version. I thought I'd mention it, even though their protests will do little good. Then again, they'd just have to change their spelling component under OS X to get it checking properly again.
Lowmag.net
Only if "several" means "less than one".
I don't know what kind of supercomputer you own, but my Classic.app takes 5 minutes to start, blocking the system (if you don't count some seconds response time on every click as work).
I've got a 300MHz G3 w/ 192MB RAM.
At least I've got many MacOS X-Apps, so I don't have to start it that often (Stuffit Expander is one of those apps, but it seems like this issue is solved!).
A used VGA monitor will cost about $100-$200 around here. A new one will cost about $500 or so. That's a bit of change for me when I can get a whole new computer on pricewatch for about $300-$400 with an AMD chip and linux on it.
Respond to s
Wow, every l33t d00d loves it when some one wants to "play" with Linux and installs a stock Red Hat 6.0 on a box and puts it on their DSL line.
:).
Crack city.
Now Apple is going to give every housewife, PAX family and elementary school a BSD box. Is this a good idea?
Actually, I think is IS a good idea but I think Apple is going to learn some painful lessons in OS security along the way. I'm betting Apple doesn't have the security infrastructure in place (not to mention the support infrastructure) to support a (potentially) full featured Unix based OS.
I mean, look at Sun. Sun has been in the Unix business MUCH longer than Apple and Sun still has problems keeping a head of the Bad Guys. How can Apple ramp up that fast?
OS 9 had two pretty serious DoS holes in it when it first shipped. Yes, these were fixed but how many Mac users knew to patch their systems? Yeah, there's Software Update but I've seen MANY cases where Software Update is never used (and then don't get me started on fooling Software Update).
It's definitly going to be interesting
Run Netscape -- I just dare ya! X Apps? 16MB? Eh? [grin]
To be fair, OS X is more akin to running Linux + X + KDE/GNOME, which really doesn't start to work well with less than 64MB. Another point is that Apple tends to be more realistic about their RAM requirements than, say, Microsoft. When Apple says 64MB, you can probably swing with 32 or 48 plus virtual memory unless any single app (say VIrtualPC) needs a large chunk of memory.
The RAM requirement for Windows 95 was four megabytes (seriously, read the side of the box!); for NT 4, its sixteen. I don't have a copy of Windows 98 or 2000, but I recall (in Win2K's case) that the box requirements aren't really truthful.
--srj/mmv
Does the designation "Beta" mean anything anymore? Or do we need to call it "Alpha" to get people to treat it as a "beta" product? This isn't a "launch" - it's a public "beta preview".
I can't say that OS X supports multiple monitors - I thought it did - but if it does you'll need multiple ATI cards or ATI built-in plus an ATI card as it currently only supports ATI hardware.
Macs have supported multiple monitors for many many years - well and free of charge I might add. I'm sure that OS X will extend this tradition as soon as they get a chance - hopefully this means 1.0 but we'll have to wait and see...
=tkk
PS Half-finished? From Apple? Unlike highly polished M$ 1.0 products? 8)
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Yes, the beta supports SMP. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
In most case the color of the machine doesn't realy matter but the colors in the OS does.
For many graphic professional it's verry important that the windows are neutral grey. Graphite is verry close to that.
When Steve Jobs built the NeXT, the goal was to make the GUI easy for the developers. They were quite successful and many NeXT computer were sold to shops where they needed to build custom software. NeXT's biggest customers were banks and other financial institutions that needed custom trading software. Their single biggest customer was the CIA who needed custom image processing tools. NeXT wasn't successful in the general consumer market and custom apps weren't enough to carry it. All of their customers loved the NeXT computers but they needed Word and Excel and couldn't put two boxes on each desk so the NeXT's had to go. Now Mac is NeXT or NeXT is Mac or something like that, and all of the Microsoft apps will be available.
I predict that we will see some very innovative apps come out for OS-X/Cocoa in the near future. Much in the same way that we saw such innovative apps for the NeXT back in the '90-93 timeframe as Lotus Improv, Diagram, Notebook, SBook, and even the NeXT Mail app (attachments? how quaint...).
Burris
If you're so sure of yourself, why don't you link to screenshots of OSX? Without proof, you're just a troll.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
While I hope that Apple can make OS X work, I can't really see it changing the landscape at all. What the Mac is missing, and I don't think they'll ever get back, is the innovative application development that made it succeed in the first place. Applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel, PageMaker, Director, and Quark are what sold the platform above and beyond the OS. How many killer apps start on the Mac these days, and does anyone think that OS X is going to reverse this trend?
The only thing that needs to happen is for Apple to start bundling OS X with all of its computers (the several million machines it sells every year). Consumers will be using OS X. Your grandmother will be using OS X.
This will have the rather frightening effect of making Apple #1 in unix OS sales.
It's because of the Classic compatibility kludge. Classic runs in its own memory space. The old MacOS doesn't do malloc the way other OSs do, so a huge fixed(?) memory partition is going away to house Classic (at least 64mb).
Since there are so few Carbon or Cocoa apps, most everything out of the gate has to run in the Classic virtual machine.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
I'm writing this on my spiffy new dual processor G4/450, and I can say that there's an enormous aesthetic appeal to the machine that transcends tiresome questions like killer apps.
Certainly the new killer app for the system is digital video, what with both iMovie and Final Cut being made only for the platform. That and my high hopes for MacOS X are the main reasons I bought this system.
Using iMovie, I made a 47 second quickie horror film, complete with sounds, music and cheesy special effects, and it turned out well enough to impress a potential business partner interested in making a real, he-man style moneymaking project with me. Now, Final Cut is much better, and I'm looking forward to using it, but I think that's a good testimony to the merits of the platform and system.
There are two interesting problem areas for X that I haven't noticed anywhere, but are interesting:
* MacOS Classic users are going to miss features such as the Apple menu. Within hours of buying my spiffy new system, I was able to easily customize it to work the way I wanted. The new system is totally different in this regard, and I've heard a lot of grousing about the Dock being unable to replace the old features. I think they have a point, and this is allegedly one of the major reasons this is a beta and not a final release.
* I'm surprised Adobe and others haven't come out with carbon versions of their software yet. It was said to require but minor modifications, and they even showed a Carbonized Photoshop earlier this year. So why is there no Carbonized Photoshop yet if they already know how to do it? This concerns me a bit.
Thoughts?
D
----
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
but IE on MacOS 9 is a very impressive program. It just keeps on running. Netscape on the same machine crashed within a few minutes of my trying it out.
I'm looking forward to using Omniweb, though. They claim to have full JavaScript support and all kinds of goodies, which I'm certainly anticipating with glee.
D
----
- A basically UNIX-like OS.
- All the normal config files (/etc/passwd, etc/hosts, resolv.conf) are there, but not used by the OS. Instead it uses this NetInfoD thingy, that's kind of like NIS, except undocumented and proprietary to Next and Apple.
- There are few listserves, mostly staffed by avid MacOS9 users lost at sea at the command line. Eager to chat about Apple corp's greatness, but basically clueless about how OSX works. No helpful list like redhat-list with lots of knowledgeable senior folks.
- No LDP.
- A roughly 14 page "Getting Started" manual that walks you through an install procedure that has all the advantages and disadvantages of a 'single-click install'(You get choices like "do you want to be a network server?" not "Which services do you want to install/start?")
- An Unix-like OS that prefers to use MacOS filesystems, but can't back them up from the command line! (It can tar up the data, but misses HFS+-specific data, like file type and creator)
- A Gui backup tool that only backs up and restores files it has in its database, so it's useless for disaster recovery.(And can't back up to remote servers).
- An AppleshareIP implementation that slowly gets slower and slower, and eats itself on about one in ten clean restarts, forcing a full OS reinstall.
- A non-X gui, so no remoting windows, but yet another interface to learn the quirks of.
- Almost No Documentation.
In all fairness, Apple is focusing on the client product, but still OSX Server was a joke. After 6 months of babying it along, we gave up and now we're using linux+netatalk to do the same thing on the same hardware. At zero software cost. Enough Whining. I'm going home now.Tenon announced a future release. Some may remember them for machten.
http://www.tenon.com/
Does this mean that we will get Microsoft Office for X which might work on FreeBSD? a few tweaks?
The difference is, on Mac OS X, it all *works.*
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Is it really that bad? What are they running every single network daemon and quake on bootup? And why do you need to install 1.5 gigs of OS components?
Respond to s
The hardcore user's (as you put it) are just fearing change. Designers tend to be the worst ones of all. Any little change in a tool they use for 8+ hours a day gives them a damn near heart attack. They've been seeing all the reports on the web how this is gone and that is missing and they freak. I've been using OS X for about a year now and I love it. They just need to actually get a chance to drive the thing.
Nice selection of apps, although it has a bastard child of IE, but oh well, nothing's perfect. It looks like it has some compatibility issues with some of the file system apps under Mac OS 9, though...
It still has some work to be done (as expected with a Beta), as a lot of peripheral standards have yet to be implemented, and it can only handle a few different types of video cards. And it won't install on several types of systems, including ones with more then one monitor.
Also, it won't be available for download, but CDs with the OS will be made available for a 'nominal' charge. Me, I'd wait for the full release unless you absolutely have to have it. Check out what it can't run here on ZDNET.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
What makes Apple different from other boxmakers is that it integrates hardware and software for a better computing experience because it makes both parts of the widget. No other boxmaker has that advantage, not Dell, not Compaq, not anyone else. This is WHY there are no Mac clones, It's why Apple could take a gamble on adopting USB and change the industry, It's how they got Firewire going. It's why Macs are the only PCs currently shipping with built-in wireless networking, it's why Apple can design and engineer cool looking computers while WebPCs and iPaqs look pathetic and are sales flops. It's why plug and play WORKS in Macs. Integrated boxes are Apple's FOCUS. If Apple ever ports MacOS to Intel it will still only happen on an Apple box and Apple hardware, otherwise they are just another Dell and the last thing Apple is going to do now is turn beige. Apple is a HARDWARE company because right now that's where money comes from. It doesn't have to be that way but there it is, and not looking like it's going to change much in the near future either. By the way, Macs have the HIGHEST margins in the boxmaking industry (between 27 & 29%) and everything Apple got from Xerox Parc was paid for with cash and stock at a price Xerox was more than happy with.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
winme has no command line
osx does. and it's unix, even.
wisconsin does not exist.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Remember when Rhapsody was almost ready to ship, and large Mac developers said "no way" to ports of their moneymaking apps to Rhapsody. Apple needed another year to make Carbon (reentrant classic mac APIs superset). Blame Microsoft. Blame Adobe. Blame Canada, but don't say Apple didn't get top engineers from NeXT, Inc.
--
--
blinko - "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
Okay, doesn't ANYBODY have some Funny mod points to spare? This is a GEM.
Kinda strange that older applications coexists peacefully with nothing else at 100% CPU-load where it seems to be no user input. But then again what can you expect when this application is made by M$.
>So how much upgrading can you do to your cube? ... I'd take a 1Ghz PIII over the Mac Tissue Dispenser any day.
Well, there's a brilliant comment for ya. Would you take a P3 laptop over a g4 cube? How about a Gateway Astro running a P3? Those things have even less upgradability than a cube does! You aren't making a fair comparison, as you're using two different form factors. Try comparing a g4 tower to an average mid-tower case, and then you might have an argument. And yeah, g4's have less pci slots - but keep in mind the ethernet, modem, usb, firewire, video out, and sound out are all built-in, so none of those need to take up pci slots.
Some corrections from the original article post. As a registered developer I have MacOS X DP4 which was released in June and USB, Airport and my Voodoo3 2000 card(although no 3D acceleration) work just fine. Firewire I have not had a chance to play with although I have heard it is still in progress which is why this is a beta release.
I believe that Carbon apps will continue to use "\r" as EOL, while Cocoa apps will use the standard "\n". It might get a bit confusing, but fortunately nearly all Mac text editors understand all three line ending conventions.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Are you daft? This is the first beta. The previous releases were "developer previews" (more like alphas or pre-alphas even) and were not available to the public.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Remember when Apple bought NeXT because BeOS wasn't ready yet? Remember when Apple killed MacOS 8 (Copland) because it was taking too long? Hell, remember OpenDoc? New stuff from Apple doesn't mean anything until it ships in volume.
Mac OS X is turning into the Daiktana of operating systems.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
My brother has a RiscPC, and it is true that many features of OSX are closer to RISC OS than Windows or even MacOS. This may not be just by chance - Apple joined with Acorn (RISC OS's parent company) to form a company selling into the UK education market. Acorn stopped making machines a couple years ago, and Apple took over the company. So they have had a good chance to see RiscOS.
MSOffice isn't being rewritten for the Cocoa/Yellowbox/Openstep framework any time soon. You'd have to implement Carbon on BSD if you wanted it to work now.
Apple keeps a large profit margin on HDs and RAM so that value added resellers can bundle more stuff for the same price.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
An "anonymous coward" wrote:
..."). Malcolm X, criminal or not, has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple's new OS. As a matter of fact, I have never even heard of the roman numeral ten being accused or convicted of any crime whatsoever. I highly suspect it was chosen for this great honor because it comes after the roman numeral nine, and that they switched to roman numerals for a coolness factor.
;)
> I wished they hadn't honored a criminal
> By naming this after Malcolm X.
The "X" in "OS X" is the roman numeral ten (used by those wacky roman dudes who counted: "I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X,
> If you've never read the Autobiography of
> Malcom X, I suggest you do so. [snip]
If you believe this person to have been a common street thug and a drug dealer, why do you believe anything he wrote?
> If only Apple had named their new OS after a
> modern American hero like George Bush.
"OS Bush"? "OS George"? Oh, please! Anyway, if they named it after a political figure, they wouldn't be able to sell it to members of the other political party in the US. Kinda dumb in a marketing sense.
Me, I'm holding out for "OS Mothra". She's the most heroic kaiju deity of them all. And the Aqua desktop just matches her beautiful blue eyes.
First, it needs to be officially released. Hopefully, Apple will support all the hardware in the supported systems. Then, software vendors need to make OS X native applications that take advantage of certain features.
And then users have to wait for it to become stable. Considering all this, maybe a year is too soon.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
IBM PC clones came about because the BIOS they used was primitive and relatively easy to reverse-engineer in a legal fashion. The popular OS (there was originally a choice between DOS & the UCSD Pascal system) was licensed from MS under a non-exclusive contract. Thus once Phoenix came out with a good clone BIOS the market jumped from almost-alikes to out & out clones running a functionally identical BIOS and the same OS.
IBM sued folks for years trying to kill the clone market, then when it was clear they were unsuccessful they tried to come out with another 'standard' that they had complete control of. By that time however the architecture was entrenched & IBM simply moved themselves into a niche market from which their PC operations never really recovered.
On the other hand Apple put a large chunk of it's code into proprietary ROMs installed on the motherboard. These ROMs contained many of the routines critical to operating the Macs and they were both heavily legally protected and difficult to reverse engineer. There was no particular genius in this - it was simply how Apple built their boxes and it turned out to be fortuitous way of keeping their hold on their market.
Apple did have a licensing program, often incorrectly characterized as clones (in licensing the product is authorized under terms and the license holder is compensated - clones are simply legal knock-offs with nothing going back to the inventor.) The program was intended to supply Macs to markets Apple considered insufficiently profitable for it (Apple at the time had terrible supply management problems and an astonishingly high overhead.)
Unfortunately the licensees didn't remain focused on the small-margin educational market, super-high-end graphics market & burgeoning but very price sensitive foreign markets as originally intended but began to cannibalize Apple's high-profit mid/high-end domestic Mac market. As a result they began to cost Apple both in support, un-recovered R&D, and lost sales and thus were eventually unceremoniously killed.
Apple does have an advantage when it comes to close-coupling their hardware with their software. By making their own boxes they can design the hardware and software to compliment eachother. This is also a drawback as it limits the market to what Apple can develop & supply.
USB adoption came about when Apple needed to drop it's aging Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) and USB was a good match for the old technology (functionially they're very similar so it was easy to write shims for USB to operate in place of ADB.) Firewire/1394 was developed as a next generation SCSI and to correct the many mistakes Apple had made in it's originial SCSI implementation and then codified with (mis)use. The wireless inclusion was a bit of clever thinking on Apple's part and some great product engineering/cost negotiation resulting in a suprisingly inexpensive implementation (which humerously enough is based on a 486)
Wintel PCs have their own advantage in MS setting the WinHEC specifications and many, many companies optimizing their hardware production. This diversity makes for less optimization and greater support issues but it also makes for a much broader market and relatively faster pace of innovation.
Apple would be unwise to compete in the x86 market simply because they'd be horribly far behind when it comes to device support. In the 'sheltered' Mac market it's accepted that not third-party all devices are supported & cost more (conversely Mac users are furious when supported devices don't work flawlessly.) In the Wintel world everyone is expected to have WinX drivers and that's that.
Furthermore Apple commands a high premium for their Macintoshes simply because they're the only game in town. Were they to attempt to get the same margin on x86 boxes they charge on Macs they'd be laughed out of the market. To sell x86 PCs at a competitive price wouldn't recover their OS development costs and would cannibalize their traditional Mac platform sales.
Who would want a $2,000 PC selling for $3,000 runing MacOS X and a limited set of hardware options? I love Macs but this would be hard to swallow. Apple could consider using another chip (perhaps an Alpha) to justify/disguise their markup but it would still be difficult.
Then there would be that whole problem NT had with x86/Alpha/MIPS/PPC binaries and Lunix/BSD have with their own different hardware bases. It was tough enough for Apple when there were the M68020/M68030/M68040 and PPC issues (variations in memory management, floating point, and with PPC an entirely different architecture) leading to products that would run on some combinations of hardware & software but not others. This culminated with the 'Fat Binaries' for M68x/PPC applications.
Unfortunately as we've seen with other mixed-processor OS's (Linux being a good example) the whole process of supporting code on different processors is fraught with difficulty. Can you imagine explaining today to a Mac customer that some apps run on MacOS X PPC & other on MacOS X x86 and that the versions aren't the same?
Finally - Apple didn't 'steal' anything from Xerox. This is an old chestnut that's gone around for years and is patently false. If you do a bit of research you'll discover Apple had already settled on a graphical interface for their next-gen OS well before their visits to Xerox.
Certainly the Lisa folks were influenced by what they saw at Xerox but it was by no means a copy or theft. Indeed the concepts of much of what they eventully shipped were developed *before* their trips to Xerox. Furthermore much of what they released was significantly different from what Xerox had (and yes I've used a Xerox Star extensively.)
Apple is a neat company and they've devloped some great stuff but they're not perfect. They've made some incredibly foolish, incredibly arrogent mistakes. They've also developed some amazing stuff and managed to pull their chestnuts out of the fire more times than any company has a right to.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Yes, folks, it can always get worse. ;-)
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All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
please take it cum grano salis .
I'm in ADC, so I cannot got into detail of exactly *where* it is wrong; but I can say that Apple *is* supporting several key technologies ( and have been for a while) in this release that are misreported by ZDNet.
I would have posted AC, but I wanted to make sure this got read by someone before the world flew off the handle.
Later...
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
Pretty ironic that, just before you pass out, your face will turn a downright iMac shade of blue. That's good. I like that. It's funny to see people who have such a sore bone to pick against companies like Apple are so vocal. Their arguements almost invariably tend toward "Apple is so unimportant..." etc. If they are so unimportant, why do you bloody care? Do you have so little sense of self that you would actually *argue* about something that is *unimportant.* How truly, sad. Apple will probably never live to see its original dream of taking over the world. Good. Because the day the Mac takes over the world is the day it becomes another Microsoft. And that would be a sad day. Don't forget - Apple is the reason that any of us can even consider wearing less than a tie and cordovan Oxfords to work everyday. Companies like Apple are the innovators - whether you like it or not, they change the way we do things.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines - Unknown
The kernel is not what matters, Darwin is just yet another BSD implementation, somehow comparable with NetBSD and FreeBSD. What makes OS X special is exactly what is not libre software, so, no, this won't be availbale on x86. Apple is here to sell hardware, after all.
I would suggest that the main reason for removing from a public beta would be to reduce the amount of piracy. Remember that the public beta is likely to be substantially cheaper than the final product so if you purchased the beta and it had full functionality, you'd be fairly likely to stick with it unless you had some good reason to upgrade (or ethics and a believe in supporting developers and upholding the law etc...).
I guess this is what the computing community gets for allowing pirating to become so socially acceptable. Had to be a backlash sometime now we have a restricted OSX beta and Windows.NET...
Adrian Sutton.
This is nitpicking, but do you mean FreeBSD 2.2? Because, considering that BSD4.0 was released in the very early Eighties, BSD2.2 is pretty old-tech. ;-) FreeBSD 2.2 is not-quite-so-old tech, in that it was developed in an era when PCs existed. ;-D
*Sigh*... how I miss using FreeBSD as my main development OS. Java's what's killing it. No Java 2. We bugged Sun for Java 2, no Java 2. We bugged IBM for Java 2, no Java 2. BSDi claimed they would bring Java 2, but no Java 2, too! I'm depressed. I think I'll go to the zoo tomorrow and throw rocks at the penguins.
More nitpicking... GNU/Linux and FreeBSD don't have very much in common, except that they're Unix-workalikes, free, use XFree86, and have a common application userbase. And I'm not being sarcastic. FreeBSD is a direct descendent of BSD, the Unix system which started as a fork of the original AT&T UNIX about twenty years ago, with GNU goodies on top. GNU/Linux is the combination of a SVR4-ish kernel (with failed aspirations of POSIX compliance) implementented by Mr. Torvalds about ten years ago, and the GNU utilities, applications, and libraries that are the fruits of Mr. Stallman's FSF, which was born about fifteen years ago. Apple's choice of FreeBSD as a basis for OS X has absolutely nothing to do with Linux. Stop rejoicing, GNU/Linux users... this is one war you had nothing to do with winning.
BSD v. SVR4 is the stuff of flamewars. Even though Linux isn't really System V, I hate to see you guys getting along like this. I think it's sad that we live in a day in age where hackers don't care what OS they're using, so long as it isn't Windows. Bah. Flamewars aren't what they used to be. Nowadays it's just NT v. UNIX, and those are too easy to win. No offense, astroturfers.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
According to the folks at OmniGroup's discussion boards MacOS X DP4 worked with the airport card.
Having used DP4 for several months on my Powerbook G3 which has an Airport card, I haven't been able to get it to work at all, so that doesn't ring real true. I'd love to think that it's true though - do you happen to have a URL?
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"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
I think they probably kept the debugging symbols in the OS. DP4 had this, and those lucky enough said it was slow and a RAM hog. still, just a guess on my part.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Why are you so angry at Apple? Have they ever done anything to you?
I'm always startled at the number of people who wan to see Apple wiped off the face of the earth.
Most people just need a good outlet for their frustration, and Apple has some trait or another that makes it an agreeable target.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Once again Apple demoes a supper cool operating system that is to be released "next year". This story is getting pretty old with me...
> software vendors need to make OS X native
... apps all think they have 1GB of RAM instead of being stuck with whatever the user allotted to them under Mac OS 9. Apple says that Classic apps don't benefit from Mac OS X's new features, but Classic.app itself (which simulates -- not emulates -- a Mac OS 9 machine) is a Mac OS X application, with access to Mac OS X's virtual memory, dual processors, etc.
> applications that take advantage of certain features.
There are a lot of native apps shipping with Mac OS X, including iMovie and AppleWorks that ship with most Macs, and are cheap to add ($49 and $99 respectively) if you didn't get them bundled. We've already seen demos of native Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Maya, Quake III, and more, as well. Even without native apps, Mac OS X runs most Classic apps better than Mac OS 9 as well
> And then users have to wait for it to become stable.
I don't think this is really an issue. The final release of Mac OS X follows Mac OS X Server 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, and Mac OS X DP1 through DP4, not to mention OpenStep and NeXTSTEP. The plumbing is good. The BSD and Mach stuff is mature. I would venture to say that the beta version will be more stable than Mac OS 9 for many users. In spite of the fact that it's a Unix, remember that Mac OS X will compete for most of its users with Windows ME, not Solaris or Windows 2000. There are a lot of former NeXTSTEP folks who have been running Mac OS X as their full-time OS since DP2 or DP3 (six months to a year).
a pretty cheap marketing ploy eh?
Will OS X beable to run most X apps? What about Gnome and KDE?
I think the version number is in reference to FreeBSD, not UCB BSD.
Just a quick note to the moderator who marked this as "Insightful": You are a complete, utter, indescribable moron.
Apple bought NeXT, so I think they have something of a right to imitate them.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Apple - who has actually BRAGGED about its simpleton single button mouse since almost day one of the Mac - continues to poo-poo the concept. It chose to slap half-assed contextual menu support into its late OS releases through system extensions, but the mouse remains single button.
OK - now they come out with their Rolls-Royce OS and it looks like they're dropping contextual menus all together (according to what I just read in this article)!
I can't see there being any new Macs in my life. I'm serious - its that important IMHO.
I admit I haven't sampled OSX yet, but how can you possibly ignore what has become a VERY basic component of modern GUIs? How can you work around its absence?
I won't go into your characterisation of Malcom X, save for the fact that much of the same was said of Martin Luther King while he was alive.
Besides it's not true for that mattter. It's not pronounced "OS Ecks", but "OS Ten".
From the linked page:
;)
.sig
SCOOP: Sources discussed the ins and outs of Apple's first publicly available, modern OS.
Mmmm... can't wait to read those sources...
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
I don't think anyone's pointed out yet that "Project Builder", the IDE for Mac OS X Cocoa developers, doesn't seem to be included in the beta.
... but only because I agree with your logic that a $400 entry barrier to playing with the dev tools would be insanely fucking stupid.
:)
Separate CD which gets mailed out to Select/Premier developers.
It strikes me as likely that they'll allow Online (free signup) developers to order and/or download the tools CD
Not that mere insane fucking stupidity in any way disqualifies a course of action from Apple embracing it, it seems. *shrug* We'll know within 24 hours
Requires 1.5G of disk
Requires an original Mac video card with one monitor only (No 3dfx allowed)
MacOS X for me because:
Are you telling me that Linux does not require the same blind love and desbelief to run it. An OS where you have to compile an application to use it, an OS that makes you deal with text files in order to configure it, an OS that forces you to read thru countless README files and such to install basic peripherals.
That my friend, does require blind faith among other things.
Name: Dave Cooley
Location: Bloomington, IN
Occupation: Mac Tech
Ê
As someone eho supports a broad range of PowerPCs for a living, and as someone who has always thought that Mac OS had a huge potential, I am excited to see what this long-anticipated beta brings us. We must, however, remember that it IS just a beta, as Adam has pointed out in his informative and unbiased article. Hopefully we will see lots of smoothing before the final release.
Incidentally, what a fun "talkback" series this article has had! There have been so many interestingand valid points made, as opposed to the usual "your OS sucks, mine rules" postings. I commend Adam and Daniel on posting, too. That sort of thing really makes our news reading experience that much more personal and enjoyable. Thank you both!
Many of the Mac's original "killer apps" (Photoshop, etc.) resulted from the simple fact that suitable Windows API's simply weren't there yet. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, for instance, didn't make their way to the PC until Windows 3.1. Think way back...at the time, Windows just couldn't cut it. Similarly with the version of Illustrator which ran on NextStep...with Display PostScript at the OS level, this version of the app was years ahead of the Mac/Win versions. Today, these apps run virtually identically regardless of platform, and that killer app advantage just isn't there.
I'm hopeful that with OSX API's such as Quartz (system-level PDF support, plus some cool compositing), that perhaps we'll see a new breed of apps that, as with Adobe's killer offerings nearly a decade ago, simply aren't worth the bother to try to reproduce on less capable operating systems. Or with Apache at the back end tightly knit with a good UI, apps, and development tools at the front end, this could be poised to be THE web development platform of choice. Author and serve on a single system.
I'm optimistic, at least with regard to their traditional publishing markets. Let's see what happens.
So what services do you have access to? I'll be more then happy to run the search for you but you can pay for your own copies. Doubtless a finance whiz like you subscribes to Bloomberg / FirstCall / West / etc.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I dont own a powerpc, i will soon but for now all i have is i386. Can anyone drop any info on macosx for i386? The article dosent say anything. Thanks Chris Williams
Of course OS X has a command line. This moron's
whingeing because he doesn't _know_ how to use one.
Don't you realize? The whole reason he's dribbling
on about Aqua is because if he/she/it uses a Mac
w/OS X he/she/it sure as hell won't be using a
command line. Stuck in aqua. Too dumb, presumably.
Windows 2000 Professional
Mac OS X
BeOS
Linux+GNOME/KDE
I'm starting to like this "prosumer" OS stuff. I almost shiver to say it, but Mac OS X is looking super sweet.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
If you want OS X sans GUI then run Darwin, idiot.
P.S. Apple's already said that they will produce
an xterm-ish deal for OS X. It's in the public
knowledge (whoops, everyone _except_ you it would
appear...)
I've seen DP4 run on two monitors using the base ATI AGP card and a Voodoo3 PCI. The Voodoo didn't get hardware acceleration, but it worked fine. I suspect Apple is just saying that multiple monitors aren't "officially supported".
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Whoo-hoo! Now if only the airport support were there -- i wouldn't have to change a thing with my current system. Anyone know how much the Mac OS 9 "emulation" layer will be able to access the G3/G4 hardware? Or does all talking to hardware have to be routed through OS X
--
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
So the Apple Boys have ported IE to their candy-like new BSD system?
...
That's OK! I don't care, but
... THEY ALSO PORTED QUICKTIME!!! (have you seen snapshots?) surely with the infamous *Sorenson* decoding algorithm.
I'm still waiting to see "Star Wars - Episode I" on my linux box.
Nope.
Darwin (The BSD-ish layer of OSX) is open, and supposedly compiling on x86.
OSX, the whole tamale, with DPDF and all the other nifty stuff,
is Apple hardware only. And with Jobs in control, that's not likely to change.
--K
---
Of course not everything works yet. This is still a beta release. Nothing may have changed in the GUI or general structure, but they probably tuned it up some under the hood in order to get it working better. Something about Developer Release vs. Public Beta may have something to do with that.
MacOS X Downside: It'll demand Apple hardware to run, and demand G3+ hardware at that. There's also been talk of X not working with third party CPU plug-ins. Whether it's a matter of optimizing for Apple's specific hardware, or crippling the software on other machines isn't a big deal, unless you planned to cross-compile it. (And judging by the 'first posts,' the Lintel Hegemony is still roaming in force.)
MacOS X Upsides: People complain about how hard it is to configure a Linux system. Well here it is, folks: the people who brought user interface to personal computers are slapping a pretty front end on BSD and are not only planning on *selling* it, but intend to make *money* on it.
(Also consider: a) Apple Computer is in the habit of bundling DVD-ROMs with their systems these days. b) Apple is basing MacOS X on BSD. Therefore, c) Apple will be providing BSD-DVD drivers legally to their users.)
If you want Linux and the various *nix clones to be accepted by the public as a serious force instead of the domain of cloistered geeks, you want to do something to make it visible. KDE and Gnome are okay interfaces, but they're only distributed as far as Linux is. Here's a manufacturer of hardware AND software bundling everything together -- OS, drivers, and front end -- and giving the whole thing visibility.
If you want to pooh-pooh Apple just becuase they 'suck,' then you might be doing the *nix community a disservice. Because most people, if they turn away from Apple for whatever reason, tend to think Microsoft first, not Linux.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
There was a TechNetCast interview with Thomas Bushnell (lead HURD architect), last month--? stream_id=381
http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_play_stream.html
-rozzin.
you MUST be trolling... the UI couldnt be more DIFFERENT from NT!! christ, you must be blind (or aesthetically challengd anyway) the ONLY similarity in UI is that there are some buttons (optional) at the top of every Finder window. One window (as opposed to a new one with every icon double-click) is also optional. Besides, the whole win9x/NT interface is a rip-off of NeXT (well some parts anyway)
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I respond to this, as it's by far the most polite response. Blunt pretty much hits it on the head. Perhaps I have just been soured by the years of "strange" ideas that have been flowing out of Apple. IMacs without floppies or CDR's, forcing the user to purchase add-ons. Mac's that ship with only 16-32megs of ram, only allowing me to run 1 or two apps at once, unless I purchase more, take out the 30 or so odd screws for the case and installing it myself. The endless string of lawsuits flowing from the premature release of data. beta testing a product that will not support firewire or USB fully and no Voodoos or 3DFX cards, and who knows what else. these components can RADICALY change the way the OS works, and with a system as graphically intense as OSX, I have to wonder how valid the "beta" tests will be if enabling these components will completely screw up something else. I am expecting more flame on this, but after all the hype, I was hoping for a little more "finished" beta. I think I need a nap.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
The Mac OS X desktop looks reminiscent of the NeXT browser, and it definitely is NeXT-like in some ways, but the "Finder" in Mac OS X is a port of the "Finder" in Mac OS 9 (it's Carbon, in fact). It still feels like a Mac in many ways.
You can view folders in three ways: icons and list from Mac OS 9 (view as buttons is gone), and columns from NeXT. The columns feature is enhanced in that when you get to the file level (imagine clicking folder, folder, file as you go left to right) you get the contents of the file in the next pane. If it's a movie of any kind, it will appear with transport controls. If it's an image you see the image, etc. This is through QuickTime, so the movie could be QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, DV, Flash, animated GIF, etc. Images could be PDF, GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, Targa, etc. Audio can be anything from AU to MP3, including 24-bit versions of AIFF used by us pro audio guys (supported already by QT 4 on Mac OS 9). The user can pretty much forget that there are different formats and just play with images, movies, and sounds.
StuffIt Expander on Mac OS 9 has an option where you make archives act like folders, so this will probably end up being used in the column view in Mac OS X, so that you can navigate to an archive and a list of the contents will appear in the next pane, ready to be dragged out or launched, at which point they will be decompressed.
You can also set your preferred icon size for each view, just like Mac OS 9, although you have more choices (16x16, 32x32, and then a sliding scale up to 128x128).
I love the Classic Mac OS user interface, but I think the Mac OS X interface tops it slightly, although in DP4, it was still less responsive than Mac OS 9. Not necessarily slower, just less responsive. Kind of like the way milliseconds can make a difference to a Quake player. Also, the Finder sounds are not there in DP4, and that makes a big difference (non-Mac users wouldn't think it does, but the sounds provide all kinds of useful feedback as you drag and drop that make you feel like you're picking up and putting down real items).
Hmm... I don't know where they got that one-monitor limitation crap from. Mac OS X DP 4 runs fine with 2 monitors (one on a Twin Turbo 128 PCI card).
It may be that AirPort is actually supported, but they say "no AirPort" because the whole AirPort software package with its wizard and software base station may not be up and running yet. I'll be surprised if the slightly technical user can't manually get it working.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Say hello to zMac.
well, now 3dfx supports voodoo3, 4, and 5 on macs but there are/were mac 3d card vendors who use the voodoo 1 and 2 chipsets. I assume they were licensed from 3dfx. So the products aren't directly from 3dfx.
"Half-finished? From Apple? Unlike highly polished M$ 1.0 products?"
Hey, I never said they were andy better...;)
I aggree the finished product will be fuly functional and finished. Mac has a tradition of that. It just struck me as odd that they would release a "beta" product without full support for very important hardware-level systems, when enabling those systems could seriously change the enviorment. Beta's, I thought, were released so testing could be done for compatability, functionality, development and bugs. This seems to be a "feel good" release, designed to let people see what it will look like and make them hungry for the real release, not something for serious testing. Prehaps it should be called an Alpha.....
Dirty Pirate Hooker
It would still be wrong, as Darwin and therefore Mac OS/X are based off of FreBSD 3.4-RELEASE.
-bugg
Given the number of missing features, this release sounds more like an alpha than a beta to me.
Are you mad? MacOS X is a true NOS, Windows 2000 can't even aspire to that yet! The stuff MacOS X can do with PDFs is amazing! OpenGL support is built in! Apple is giving people a CLI, Microsoft is taking it away!
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
[nt] stands for no text, people.
-bugg
For any of you Arc fans out there - don't you reckon it looks very similar to RISC OS 3 did 7 or 8 years ago?
Heh, I remember the first machine I ran linux on, a 16MHz 386 with 2MB of memory, way back in '93. It ran fine, but you couldn't do anything without swapping. I tried compiling a kernel once and finally killed it after a couple days of swapping... When I upgraded to 4 megs (the max on that motherboard), I was in fat city. Kernel compiles took a mere 2 hours and I finally had enough memory to give my friends accounts and let them telnet in remotely. ;-) Now my PC (still a bit outdated by today's standards) has 144 megs and I can always use more, especially when editing huge images in GIMP.
To keep this on topic (heh), my Mac currently has 112 megs. But I'm afraid it probably won't be able to run MacOS X since it's an old 7600 upgraded to a G3. Sounds like from Apple's requirements, it may need to be an original G3 or better for OS X to even boot. Oh well... Anyone confirm or deny my suspicions?
Say hello to zMac.
How exactly was that Flamebait? Incorrect, perhaps, since it isn't really a secret Beta, but not really Flamebait since it is common knowledge that Apple will pretty much sue anybody provides info about them before they're ready (I'm not saying that this is always wrong, but it is what happens).
Moderators: Remember, you can't just pick any of the choices in the drop-down box; those choices all have words on them, and your job is to pick the word which most closely describes the post which you are moderating. "Flamebait" wasn't even close.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Yes, the predeccesors to it ran fine on both Windows and Solaris. So if Apple wanted, they could make a an x86 version.
They don't seem to want to, though. But that may change any day. Steve *is* a man who likes to surprise, you know.
MacOS X is not being developed for x86. Yes that was the plan for Rhapsody, MacOS's immediate predecessor. This was scrapped. Yes Darwin has been released as Open Source by Apple for the x86. Yes this is the base for MacOS X. No these are not the same things. MacOS X includes the Quartz rendering layer and the Aqua interface, the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments, Quicktime, etc. Darwin may be the engine but that's *all* it is. It's unlikely Apple would release MacOS X for x86 since Apple is a hardware company and thus this wouldn't make sense for them financially. Yes you and many others think doing so would be cool but financially it would be suicide for Apple so tough - buy their stock and be happy they make a profit.
MacOS X uses a Mach kernel and is compatible with BSD 2.2. It is based on Nextstep and has inherited many of that OS's features. Technically Apple bought Next; practically Next took over Apple's OS development.
Yes Apple's computers come in funky cases with unusual colors. Hopefully most geeks can see beyond the flashy cases and note that there's some real compute power and some innovative OS stuff going on inside. There are those who are so put off they can't get past the box - that says more about them then it does about the products or their marketing.
This is MacOS X beta If history holds true Apple still has a few cards up it's sleeve it's saving 'till later. Steve Jobs likes very much to "Wow" folks and suprise them with kewl stuff. Nowhere does this beta say it's a full disclosure - it's a preview. Furthermore as a beta this release is expected to not be complete, to be buggy, to have problems - that's the point of releasing it. Lots of folks will want to review this Beta as they would the final release - don't pay too much creedence.
True Apple has gotten very aggressive about enforcing it's NDA's. If you were in their market you would be too. Not only does it weaken their technological edge by having everyone know what they're doing it also affects their sales. Folks hear rumors over & over of a 17" iMac next month and stop buying in advance of it (never happened - unlikely will - lousy form-factor.) Again Steve jobs likes to "Wow" folks - that's his sales technique. Spilling the beans, even a few hours ahead of time means the announcement goes from being a headline for Apple to being buried in a story.
MacOS X is a big deal for Linux & BSD folks. This is the first time a mass market vendor has released a Linux/BSD compatible OS. Sure the interface and many of the details are different but it opens the way for cross-ports. If a developer makes something for one OS they can support the other fairly easily. Thus it means many Linux/BSD applications will get access to the Mac market and many Mac applications being ported to MacOS X will go on to be ported to Linux/BSD etc.
Finally Apple is doing some interesting stuff for BSD and Linux. They've developed a great way of graphically configuring all of the subtly-different configuration files in Unix. They're beginning to help work on a new way of distributing, installing, and maintaining packages. They're spurring development of new drivers (DVD anyone?) With all of the discussion of X-Windows failings Quartz is an interesting example of what can be done with another model - an example that is not just an ambitious plan but a working widely used test case.
Finlly Apple is not perfect. They've blown more opportunites then can be counted, have more lives then a cat, and have legions who love or hate them (or both.) They're famous for developing amazing technologies then failing to capitalize on them, for their 10 (or is it 15?) year quest for the successor to MacOS, for arrogance and indecision. They've more then once set off on a path then abruptly changed course (the licensing program they dumped when it started to bleed them dry, the Newton and the eBook, OpenDoc & Bento, etc.)
But damn they make the market interesting :)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Obviously. The point is not that it should. The point is that if it was produced with the same regard for memory footprint as an embedded system then it would need nothing like 128M. Or even 32M.
You know, if they actually DID port OS X, I would give serious thought to giving it a partition on my hard drive. I'd be very interested in seeing how it would work on my PC.
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
It's going to be big, it's going to be bloated, it's not going to be perfect. It's a BETA. Public, yes. But still a beta. I don't expect it to run on my machines yet. I'll get it, but just as a lark.
If Apple gave everyone everything in the beta, what incentive would people have for buying the full version when it comes out next year? NONE.
Just because they are sue-happy right now doesn't mean they are totally stupid.
-------------------------------------------------
Actually I consider the nomenclature quite appropriate given the following 2 factors.
1. It is a continuation of the Mac OS System software line that includes support for OS 9 applications.
2. it has an entirely different BSD based foundation that takes the Os in a new direction.
Perhaps the next version of the software will be labled not OS Eleven but OS X ver 2.
From a geeks technical point of view OS X is the best of all worlds (BSD, Mach, Apple presentation layer). But the folks who make up the majority of the mac's hardcore user base are already starting to feel a bit alienated by the new interface and the loss of some of the components near and dear to the mac users heart (Apple Menu, Application Switcher,etc.) The big question here is, will the people follow? And more importantly, will the application developers follow if there is a backlash against OS X? Now don't get me wrong, I will buy a Powerbook just to run OS X because I think it's so cool, but the designers I work with, some whom have been using Macs thier entire professional lives are not so excited. In fact, they're downright hostile towards the whole thing.... Should be interesting.
"(no Voodoos or 3DFX) and single monitor systems only"
Lokks like another fine half-finnished product from Apple. How long before we see the trademark "multiple monitor support now available for a modest fee,... say $600 or so. Oh, and its incompatible with THAT processor, you need an upgrade..." After all the security and fussing Apple has done to keep every detail of the new OS a secret before it's launch, you would figure they would have done a better job of finishing off the little details. What is the target group for this OS anyway?
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Personally I'm more interested in the ability to turn off all the UI special effects (i.e. fading menus, bouncing icons, genie effect window shading etc). I can deal with annoying colors because they don't affect my interaction with the machine, but all those annoying effects slow down the responsiveness of the UI.
This is not so true. After talking with a apple developer who will remain nameless. There will be one 'public disk' with the 'public' beta in addition there will be a second disk for a new developers release (DP5 or OSXB-DP?). As for distribution 's'he says its all on CD education facilities can sign up with your apple dealer for a free copy everyone else will pay or find alternate channels. This is believe it or not Sh** so don't take my word for it the big news comes in less then 16 hours. Happy Happy Joy Joy
..for the public beta not to.
ZDNet is wrong.
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
Requires 1.5G of disk
Do some people still have hd's smaller than this?
I threw a couple of 1 gig drives away the other week 'cos they were too small!
--------------------------------------------
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
Not necesarily, clients always get a kick out of our 'hall of iMacs'. Many of our copywriters work in this one area that is sort of a hall with open offices along one side.
The desks face the hall and each one has a blueberry iMac on it which complements (to a degree) the decor. It looks quite good and very modern. The secretary's and
boss's graphite iMacs are, admittedly, even more impressive to the suits. We've also got some green ones and red ones, but we kind of hide 'em since they clash.
Funny enough, here in big orange country, not one person has asked for an orange one. No wonder Apple quit making it if even people in Tennessee weren't buying
'em.
Interior design and the computer industry are like oil and water they just don't mix.
Respond to s
I don't mean to nitpick, but aren't voodoo's and 3DFX cards one in the same?
its not imitation, its a direct update from the NeXT codebase....Apple DID buy NeXT, rememberrrrr?
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Sorry, didn't mean Darwin. I meant OSX - everything but Darwin, basically.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Grant us not to be subject to MacOS
Which sucketh even more so than Linux
And give us this day Windows 2000 Professional
Which art the superior OS
We beg your forgiveness
For our neighbors that use Linux
Even though they suck the penis of Satan
Amen
Ever since Steve Jobs rejoined the Apple team, doom was spelled out for the Mac power user base. First came the iMac, which emphasized the "whore" in "affwhoredable" computing. Next, the PowerBook G3 (post Wall Street) and the iBook, which emphasized the "whore" in "pwhoretable" computing. Now an even more stable release of HO-S X. Excuse the anti-mac bigotry, but could Jobs have possibly designed a more smarmy interface for this thing? You'd have to run in 2048x1536 32-bit just to view a webpage or run a GUI performance monitor without having the entire screen taken up by one stinking program(Last I checked, Linux won't let me above 800x600 8-bit on hardware that can go 32-bit, and it was not a big problem). What's worse, this melding of a universally accepted core (BSD) with a notoriously proprietary hardware base is almost guaranteed to cause difficulties down the road. Yes, that's why it's still beta, but does this look like any progress at all? I've seen the last beta of OS X Server (my old high school runs it to serve the network of iMacs; blech), and basically the only thing that's been changed is the GUI. Of course, Steve Jobs in Gay Paris will just denounce this as FUD and hearsay, however proven the reports may be.
To sum it all up in a few sentences, I wouldn't be surprised if OSX is discovered to run about a third slower than it's x86 BSD counterpart. With the GUI running all the time (remember, the mac has absolutely NO form of text-mode), the stupid video driver modules running anti-aliasing operations on all the smarmy window contents will surely be a waste.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
"...some innovative OS stuff going on inside."
Like what? They do some "innovative" UI stuff (scare quotes because I don't think they are all that great, just different)--but what innovative OS stuff have they done or are they doing with OS X?
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
>Hopefully most geeks can see beyond the flashy
> cases and note that there's some real compute power
>and some innovative OS stuff going on inside.
I don't want to sound bitter - I used Macs for many years and was a virulent Mac supporter... but that was when everyone was using DOS and Win95... Is there a real reason to use MacOS today?
I don't know, perhaps I'm being a little harsh -- when I look back at those times, I just see a lot of money being poured down into Apple's floundering... I've owned more Macs than most people, and I actually *bought* Mac software.
I did this for years until I succumbed to using Windows (I couldn't afford to keep up with Apple's changing platforms and "revolutionary" OS technologies)... I started at System 1.1 and dropped out at Mac OS 8. Now, of course, I primarily use GNU/Linux and Helix GNOME.
I think the only reason I can see why some ppl on Slashdot would support Apple is that some of their slightly strange ideas will inevitably spill over onto free software. As far as there still being a dream behind Apple, I'm not sure I understand what it is.
I'd like to see them succeed again, but they're going to have to produce something before I buy into the ten years of hype surrounding what has now become OS X.
--
Spindletop Blackbird, the GNU/Linux Cube.
OSX, the whole tamale, with DPDF and all the other nifty stuff,
is Apple hardware only. And with Jobs in control, that's not likely to change.
At least, not if he doesn't want to be lynched by the shareholders.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Look into it a little further ... the buttons all display glyphs when you mouseover any one of them, even if they are on a background window. The glyphs are plainer than Mac OS 9's or Windows' glyphs. If it takes you longer than three minutes to figure out how to use the window controls you have problems that Apple just can't fix.
To a userbase that knows the Web, the shape and mouseover glyphs make them very obviously buttons, whereas the glyphs on Mac OS 9 are sometimes not understood to be controls by first-time users. Personally, I'd like to see them put close on its own side of the window, like in Mac OS 9, but I have no problem with the look or action of the buttons.
My wife and I were discussing the orange ones last night, and she pointed out that you tend to see mostly orange ones in ads (not official Apple commercials, but resellers, etc.), probably because those are the models that they have left and they want to move them.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Hey,
Got one myself, 500MHz/128M/40G + AirPort and the 15" flat panel (being an overpaid unix/net admin kicks @$$).. The thing is a masterpiece of physical design.. A few notes after about a week of usage:
Now I just have to wait until the next KGP show to drop a 512MB DIMM in.. Apple RAM (as is most vendor RAM) is ridiculously overpriced..
Can't wait for a fully functional OSX release..
Your Working Boy,
(You have no idea how many times I get this...)
but these may not be solid enough to recommend using in this beta version. please check your beta documentation when you get it.
This I can deal with. I'll tell you this, if we can't come up verbose (a must IMHO w/Dp4, damned fsck) and if um, certain networking technology is just *gone* we here are gonna be mighty PO'ed.
it's only a day or so until we'll both have the actual thing in our sweaty little hands. and i bet we'll agree on most things then.
Couple things here:
1) The way Apple ships, the pirates will have it before legit ADC members do...
2) When you say "we" I hope the hell that meant that YOU have it and I will; I'd hate to think you wrote the piece on ZD..blind.
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
Hmm, as I understand Aqua is just a "desktop" using Quartz and DisplayPDF to do lowlevel drawing. I would rather doubt that Aqua is written in PPC assembly or using other Mac specific stuff. It might be rather portable once Quartz is ported.
Those damned NeXTstep hackers - whenever will we be free of their tyranny :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Blow me. I've been on the net since before you were out of diapers.
Oh, and actually, nothing is lamer than an OT reply.
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
It's standard practice in the computer industry to ship your boxes RAM-hungry, so that your overall price seems lower, and the reseller can sell another RAM chip to the buyer and make a little more profit from the sale (in other words, Apple doesn't get a cut of the after-market RAM, the reseller gets the whole profit from it). Very, very few people buy a Mac with 64MB and leave it that way, so people are not going to be left out in the cold wholesale. All of the Mac users that I know have at least 160 or 192 installed (32 or 64 standard plus a 128MB DIMM added on). I have 192 in my iBook and 320 in my PowerMac.
... this stuff doesn't come for free.
Besides, if they do need to add more RAM, it's a matter of choosing your Mac model at an online RAM dealer like transintl.com and then opening a door on your Mac and plugging in the DIMM. iMacs have a special RAM access door, the keyboards on PowerBooks and iBooks are also pop-up doors that expose the RAM slots, Cubes come out of their shell and the whole mobo comes out when you open the door on PowerMacs. Adding more RAM takes only a few minutes on any model. You certainly don't need to pay Circuit City to install a chip or anything like that.
> The problem is not that I don't have 128M... the
> problem is that I don't think any OS should require
> that much.
That's pretty arbitrary, like saying "nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM". Maybe a better example is that in 1984, almost everybody thought that the GUI was a ridiculous waste of computer power. Mac OS X does a lot of work for the user that other systems aren't doing, like keeping track of a ton of meta-information so that the user doesn't have to wonder what can be dragged onto what, or what app can open what document. It also has to run a simulator that makes Classic Mac OS apps think they're running on Mac OS 9. It has all kinds of built-in services like spell checking, graphic format translation, and icon previews that any app can access, so apps themselves will need less RAM to do the same job. Read the feature list
Apple just updated the Darwin FAQ a couple of days ago. It goes into more detail than you might expect about how they're keeping the userland in sync with the other BSDs, and what their future plans (distribution-wise) are.
Ah, so it does. Thanks for the link.
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
I have been pronouncing it as O S "ex." However, I guess it could also be pronounced as O S "ten." I really prefer the pronounciation of X as in the alphabetic letter over the roman numeral of X. It is cool and rolls easier. Any thoughts? How do you pronounce OS X? What pronounciation does Jobs (or even Woz) give?
I am SO downloading that tomorrow I got myselfa cube with 320 MB of ram and i'm LOVING it... US 2660$ and zero maintenance :)
I have no complaint with using this ATI card, as it tears up unreal tournament.
That and these other apps i use are all i need :) Like the subject says, for me this is sweet goodness
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Not necesarily, clients always get a kick out of our 'hall of iMacs'. Many of our copywriters work in this one area that is sort of a hall with open offices along one side. The desks face the hall and each one has a blueberry iMac on it which complements (to a degree) the decor. It looks quite good and very modern. The secretary's and boss's graphite iMacs are, admittedly, even more impressive to the suits. We've also got some green ones and red ones, but we kind of hide 'em since they clash. Funny enough, here in big orange country, not one person has asked for an orange one. No wonder Apple quit making it if even people in Tennessee weren't buying 'em.
"Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi"
Finally, a REAL UI with a BSD based system.
'too bad that it's proprietary.
Ohwell. HURD will end up beating the pants off of unix, anyway, and it's free:)
-rozzin.
It's interesting when I started running linux they said that 8Mb of ram was good for console stuff and that 16 was adequate for X apps and the like. Now I routinely see apps that take 16+ for just *one* app. That is called bloat.
Respond to s
I've seen that Mac OS X uses "/" as a separator character in paths (rather than ":")--does anyone know about other small unixisms being put in?
What about the EOL character? Does Mac OS X use newline, or does it still use carriage-return?
Does anyone here know?
-rozzin.
No chance unless they port Darwin to PC hardware. And we all know that's not gonna happen.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Anyway, the Hurd is coming along slowly. If you subscribe to one of the mailing lists, you'll see that there are still a handfull of people working on it. A few of the .debs for Debian GNU/Hurd are a couple years old, but
they work okay (mostly). It seems that there's a rather noticeable
difference between the Hurd's sockets and your average BSD sockets, as
pretty well all of the unsupported network apps I tried died immediately
with "socket exception".
In short, if you depend on the network (and I think most people do), the Hurd isn't incredibly useful yet. You can FTP, telnet, and reportedly even get lynx working, but that's abotu it. It's kind of fun to play around with for a few days though (if you have a couple dozen megs of hard-drive space to spare).
One little problem for buyers of new Macs:
the base configuration for the G4 cube, the base G4, all the iMacs except the DV "Special Edition" and the iBooks is 64M. Almost all buyers of Macs to date will be forced to upgrade to run this, if they haven't already. My guess is that if it can't be installed without at least 128M (as the article states), many just won't bother.
The problem is not that I don't have 128M... the problem is that I don't think any OS should require that much.
This is beta software... of COURSE the requirements are going to be obscene. Just like Mozilla, just like Win2000, just like every other beta release since the dawn of time. (mostly... ;)
There is a God! :)
I was seriously afraid for a time they would leave a proper CLI out of it. Of course, there would be a third-party one in next to no time, but I'm really happy Apple are including one themselves. I'm all for snazzy graphical interfaces (you should seem my desktop), but I'm really pleased you have the option of a CLI when you need to do some real work.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
HEY! Blue and Orange might look unprofessional, but you just leave Green out of this!!!
I don't know about compiling, but it certainly *runs* on x86. There are moderately severe hardware restrictions, though [esp. w.r.t. VESA 2.0 compliance]. Here is the screenshot. Grab the Virtual PC disk image here.
Lots of Darwin info is available at:
[ReidNews]
Which makes some sense, given that most end users are not developers. My understanding is that Apple developers will get the developer tools either via CD or by download, depending on the level of support you purchased. ADC Online memberships are free (go to http://developer.apple.com/ and sign up), and that membership should allow you to download the tools when they are ready.
I believe I read that Darwin has already been ported to x86 a couple months or so back, but either way it doesn't matter, Darwin is just another Mach kernel, with a screwy license no less. The "aqua" gui is what they aren't going to port to x86 before hell freezes over. Which may well be a good thing. The use of NeXT technology and design is a good thing, but the UI seems to have some major problems, with some major design decisions appearing to have been made with more emphasis on eye candy than usability.
If you really want a mach kernel with a good UI, take a look at the The HURD and GNUstep - real Free Software projects that could use your help.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Seriously, I'm sick of Steve Jobs desperately trying to throw a curveball into the English language. Someone should castigate him for trying to do that.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
....know _for_sure_ if the public beta will be downloadable after Wednesday?
--------------------------------------------
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
will be the end for Linux.
It was fun while it lasted.
Finally, a REAL UI with a BSD based system.
Rader
"the people who brought user interface to personal computers are " - no longer working at Apple. Don't kid yourself.
For better or for worse, Steve Jobs has always been Apple's final word when it comes to anything visual. This includes advertising, industrial design, the web site UI, and certainly OS UI. This was true in 1984, and it is true today.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Here come the next batch of Mac themes... :)
Apple controls hardware for a good reason: a good chunk of their revenue stream comes from it. Removing the need for anyone to buy Apple hardware by porting OS X to the x86 architecture (and in the process encouraging software designers to abandon the PowerPC) would be a bone-headed maneuver, and probably certain death for Apple Computer.
Also, the x86 realm is fraught with hardware foibles that no one company can resolve completely, let alone control. Whatever revenue would remain would be gobbled up in tech support.
Just in case you don't believe that last tidbit: As I write this, I'm trying to use a PCI/serial port card on my Intel-based Linux box, but something in the BIOS of the machine (I assume) keeps the card from responding properly. I've tried new kernels, new BIOS images, new cards from the manufacturer, and new driver source code, all to no avail. And it's nobody's fault but that of the x86 "standards", which make the Wild West of yore seem as orderly as the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. (If you wish to participate in this wild goose chase, email me with ideas. I'm tearing my hair out, and at this rate, even a new or used Dustbuster would be welcome.)
Suffice to say, I own a Mac at home, and that situation ain't gonna change.
-----
"O Lord, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept those I cannot, and a big pile of money."
".sig,
Dude, either
A) You're lying about going to Paris,
B) You're too stupid to get somebody else to grab you a copy and mail it to you,
C) You like wasting money by flying places just for a crappy beta,
D) You're insane if you love MacOS that much, or
E) You live in a land in the vicinity of Paris, France, and it is convenient to go to get a copy, in which case, you would need to disregard choices A, B, C, and D.
Werd.
So what happened to Apples' industry leading creatively in design? It looks exactly like NeXT...
You're seriously saying that Mac OS X looks reasonably similiar to Next? Huh?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
DP4 did support an Intellimouse, comp-lete with wheel and right-button support. I'd expect that the real "no USB or Firewire support" business is just due to a lack of native drivers for a LOT of things.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
(btw, any chance of an X-compatibility layer or 'wrapper port'?)
Assuming you mean X11 (damn that's confusing -- does "X" mean OSX or X11?), there are several efforts underway. The commercial one is from Tenon, and there are some other floating around. Carmack did one for Darwin, I think.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Or they could install multiple user login on OS9 to get used to the idea...
;)
Like I did..
Though I'm already used to the idea
(btw, any chance of an X-compatibility layer or 'wrapper port'?)
Your Working Boy,
-brennan
If you are a real developer I think you can shell out $500 for a developer membership and get Project Builder and a whole lot more. And if you are a student developer its only $99. :-p
I wonder how many a university would have to special order for Apple to do a run in the college colors.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
This is outright heresy ;)
hello, author of the story here...
according to our rather solid (and that's all i'll say on that) information, the installation instructions say that the beta will not install on systems with multiple monitors. it doesn't say why, or if it'll run on systems that have a second montior added after installation, or whatever.
yes, there was support in dp4, but it's not uncommon for features that the developer isn't solid sure of to be dropped between versions. in a similar way, a new version of open transport was dropped between beta and final versions of mac os 9.0.4.
ddt
The only people who are even working on any of it are the debian people and Stallman himself and I don't see too much work going on in that area. Persoanlly I would like to run something that could be modularized but I don't hold my breath. I would like to see extremely small memory footprint and apps redesigned to work with small memory systems ala QNX but free and with the apps I like for linux. But I doubt that will happen by 2003 anyway.
Respond to s
The real question is, does it support SMP? It would be nice for the second processor in the new G4's to be be more than an expensive heater,.....
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
the Command Line... I really like Macs, and think they are fun to use, but I miss the command line... now, I will finally have it all!!!
So what happened to Apples' industry leading creatively in design? It looks exactly like NeXT... So much so, I don't know if I should feel sympathetic for NeXT's "way ahead of its time" failure, or disgusted about Apple's shameless imitation.
I'm sorry Taco...I thought this was funny as hell ;)
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
i'm using OSX Server right now. it has basically all the cool stuff in OSX client: kernel, BSD, any shell I want, Objective-C, cocoa, etc. i've used just about every GUI consumer OS, except OS/2, including BeOS (i was be developer #136) and I've never been happier than I am now, using OSX Server. coding in WebObjects and Objective-C is absolutely beautiful!
i've played with OSX dp3, and the interface sucks ass. i really hope we can rip out the candy and replace it with a truly useable interface...
According to the folks at OmniGroup's discussion boards MacOS X DP4 worked with the airport card. You just had to tweak some settings. I can't see Apple breaking this in the beta, despite what ZDNET might report. It might very well be that it is just not configured in the initial install.
As much as i believe that OS X is going to kick ass and be one of if not the best OSs out there there is no way it will live up to the hype. Too many people expect too many things out of it. For some the OS has turned into some sort of holy grail of computers and nothing can live up to that. Also too many people hate apple so much that no mater what they come out with they will still complain about it. Even if OS X ended world hunger and lead humanity into a more prosperous age I know people who would still use windows because they are so prejudced against anything that has to do with apple. In fact a few days ago one of my prejudiced friends asked me if apple still made computers (he was filled with cynical gusto when he said it). I told him that their sales were growing at about 35% and added that that was faster than his beloved dell. His joy at dissing apple was short lived. In the end I think OS X wont change the world but it will go a long way into restoring some crdibility to apple and also to defeat the "toy" prejudice that many geeks have against apple.
I don't think anyone's pointed out yet that "Project Builder", the IDE for Mac OS X Cocoa developers, doesn't seem to be included in the beta.
Really? Do you have the beta already?
Project Builder was included in DP4.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Don't forget about Apple's old guard - musicians, filmmakers, media types, basically. As a musician, I am very interested in this new incarnation of the MacOS. I use a PC now, running windows. It sucks, but it's a boatload better than any free unix for music. The free unices are just not viable as real music production systems at this stage of the game. The PC with win9x has a lot of software, but the architecture is such crap that it's always a huge battle to get everything to work. Windows music stuff doesn't work right with nt/2k in a lot of cases.
In addition to being a musician, I'm also a programmer. For programming, I love the unix-style environment. I hate The X-Window System, and all the gui-like stuff on the unices. I like the shells, the pipes, the tools, etc.
Being able to use this type of stuff, along with having a truly top-notch music production environment sounds like a great deal to me. Music is the only area in which my computer's CPU is stressed, so I'll appreciate the PowerPC for that. I'm seriously considering getting one if OS X comes out (still nervous after that whole Rhapsody debacle, and the Copeland debacle).
I know a lot of people who are buying Macs for similar reasons. The studios at my school just bought a bunch of new macs because the work best with all the Pro Tools gear, etc. A lot of people are doing digital video on their Macs. I know some people working on a movie that are working partly with 16mm film, but I think they are having the 16mm film digitized and are flying it into a G4 for editing, effects, post, foley/sound, etc. They wouldn't be able to get all this stuff done without a computer in their budget, and the mac is the best platform for it.
jeb.
It wasn't clear to me if the Classic environment *would* support USB. Can anyone who has used DP4 comment? I'm going to Paris tomorrow just for to grab a copy of OS X. Can't wait!
A message from our sponsor
Heh, you need Norton? Lameass.
Everything he showed, everything he demoed, everything being discussed here is already supported under Windows 2000.
BTW: Have you ever put NextStep and Windows 95 side-by-side?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
>single monitor systems only
Im pretty sure that the last Developer Preview supported multiple monitors. I would expect that the Beta will as well, however, from the sound of it you will need your second video card to be an ATI card and nothing else.
This is the same as in MacOSX DP4 so its not that surprising.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
"Sources who have gotten an early look at Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X Public Beta tell ZDNet News ..."
and were promptly served a supoena by Apple naming "john doe" in a lawsuit.
Apple should seriously just have a ticket number system like a deli counter..."Now suing number 1,341,111".
Sig it.
OK, this is one point of view, but as an embedded SW engineer I find a requirement for 128M of RAM hard to accept for almost anything. It comes about when performance becomes way more important than conserving size - and this is probably because while we can add more RAM, it's harder to add more cycles. Although, if it was impossible to have 128M for some reason we would have all those features and probably even about the same performance, because it would have been necessary to think a little harder about making it small.
For another perspective take a look at www.qnx.com - download their demo floppy. On one bootable disk they get a realtime OS, TCP/IP, drivers for either network or serial port, GUI, a tiny OS and a web browser.
It's interesting to think about just how small a modern OS could be, if it was engineered in a clean way.
As an aside on the RAM issue, I got my G4 cube this morning - has to be seen to be believed. Tiny. Great keyboard, that works fine on the USB PC system too. And it's silent. It came with 64M, and I slotted in a 256M PC133 module I had in another system. Apple offer 256M instead of 64M for $450 extra. The extra 256M SIMM costs $300 from a PC supplier, giving a total of 320M. What Apple's memory strategy seems to be is to rip off people that don't know any better. And you must agree, a lot of computer consumers don't.
And before that, there was Pink/Taligent!
I'll believe it when I can buy it. 'Til then, I'll keep my Windows 2K and Linux boxes. Don't get me wrong, I'd love a stable, nice-looking **nix platform with lots of commercial app support. I'm just not going to hold my breath waiting for Apple again.
(What ever happened to Apple ][ forever? Steve Jobs promised me!)
--- Speaking only for myself,
If by "a few tweaks" you mean recreating the entire Apple 'Carbon' environment and then getting it to work under X instead of Quartz then - sure.
The more honest answer is 'No' - or at least - "Not with MS Office 2001 for the Mac."
MS is not moving their Mac Office apps. to the Unix-side of MacOS X but rather tweaking the to run under the MacOS-derived Carbon environment. Thus aside from dropping some of the more difficult to support calls it's the same as it's always been. Indeed MS Office 2001 for the Mac won't even require MacOS X to run - t'll do fine on any Mac running MacOS 9x as long as the Carbon libraries are present.
The question comes what about after this next release? Will MS refuse to move to the Unix side of the OS, simply move only as far as the Cocoa side (neat Openstep-derived technologies) or go with Java (little chance.) Furthermore will they tie themselves to Apple's Quartz rendering/Aqua UI or write more generalized code that could be retargeted towards X Windows.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I don't think anyone's pointed out yet that "Project Builder", the IDE for Mac OS X Cocoa developers, doesn't seem to be included in the beta.
This is truly a disappointment. In order to survive Apple must supplant its old OS with a better one. In order to do that, they need apps, and in order to get apps they need lots of developers.
Apple's fairly expensive Developer Registration fees (actually they're not much compared to Microsoft's, but they're still not free) has stopped a lot of potential developers from obtaining developers previews through official, legal channels. Isn't this just going to continue the trend?
Maybe it will be included, and Apple just doesn't want to confuse users. But if it isn't, it's going to be hard to convince people to develop for Cocoa. Come on Apple, get on the ball.
--Lagos
I, for one, have a dream... a dream of a time when Macs of all colours can live in peace and harmony, free from the segregated attitudes of people like Julius. I have a dream that green Macs will cluster with blue Macs, and red Macs will swap Zip disks (or whatever those Macs freaks use... Syquest disks or something) with with purple Macs, and beige PCs will telnet to black RS/6000s, and grey Palm pilots will sync with purple E450s. No computer will be shunned, regardless of make. Even your computer, Julius, which refused to share data with Macs of colour, will be accepted and loved as it it were part of the network.
But I also have dreams about fat, greasy, naked clowns with chainsaws, so YMMV.
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
Herbie J.
Which runtime library version will be supported, 1.2, 1.3 or even the upcoming Merlin (1.4)?
Its nice to see Apple will be including a graphite option for the interface. Although the flashiness of the aqua is nice, the graphite just provides a much more "professional" presentation.
The Aqua look is reminiscent of the Blue/White G3s and the iMac look, and is probably where it will be most commonly used. But, if you've noticed...all of Apple's newer high end systems (the G4/G4multiprocessor/Cube/iMac DV/iBook SE) are graphite colored; becuase they know that although people want a good looking system, it must keep a professional image.
Frankly, you won't get that if your system is Blue, Orange, or Green.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Almost. I have a 4gb and a 2gb drive. Damn college bills preventing me from owning the latest and greatest toys.
--------------------------
Requires 128 M of RAM
Requires 1.5G of disk
Requires an original Mac video card with one monitor only (No 3dfx allowed)
...Requires a complete suspension of disbelief and a blind love for Apple.