Mac OS X Beta Reviewed On ArsTechnica

scout.finch writes: "John Siracusa has just written a review of the new Mac OS X Public Beta over on Ars Technica. His thorough and unflinching reviews of previous developer releases have been the most accurate source of information on Mac OS X thus far, and this installation is no exception."

Comments

Re:Waiting for faster cpus

[Apotsy]

Actually, it works great. One thing Mach is really good at is multi-processor support. (I'm glad there's at least some benefit from using Mach, since its overhead is so bloody high.)

I ran some demos of MacOS X on a dual G4 machine at the Seybold conference in SF about a month ago, and I was able to play a bunch of looped Quicktime movies in the background while juggling about 5 different apps in the foreground. It was very smooth. The CPU meter showed a fairly balanced load between the two processors the whole time. Pretty slick!

Re:Anyone interested in some karma?

[geobaker]

I may not be a karma whore, but I can always use karma in general....

PFM (Posted From a Mac)

Re:So when will Apple ditch OS9's memory controlle

[Cannonball]

It will install with much less than 128 MB, it's just not recommended that you do so. But then again, it's Beta. What did you expect?

Personally, I love it. I love the graphite, I love the protected memory space (uptime measured in weeks on a mac, who'da thunk it?) and I love the dock.

Re:LinuxPPC does support sound...

[namespan]

If LinuxPPC/YDL got sound support and better video support

I'm posting this from a UMAX s900 (PowerMac 9500 clone) running LinuxPPC. I'm listening to some mp3s, too. Obviously, there's some kind of sound support. I didn't change any of it from the default install, either (well, OK, I've recompiled Apache and PHP and MySQL to work together, but I haven't done anything with sound).

Now, video support is sortof a problem. When running Gnome, many of my icons look like they've accidentally been run through an inversion/pixelation/noise filter. And I keep being told my X server does not support DPMS. But by and large, things are OK.

Re:So when will Apple ditch OS9's memory controlle

[AFCArchvile]

I've seen Windows 2000 run perfectly on a Pentium 60 with 32 megs of RAM. It ran kinda like 98 on a 486, but it ran.

My experiences

[TheInternet]

Worst of the Unix and MacOS worlds put together.

I would tend to disagree. In fact, I think it's just the opposite.

The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed.

This baffles me. I'm a "unix person" (have been using Unix for about 6 years -- SunOS, Solaris, Linux), and I'm actually quite amazed with how well the Mac and Unix worlds mesh under Mac OS X.

Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install).

For marketing/positioning reasons, it really doesn't make sense for Apple to include compilers and and X server with Mac OS X. They're not trying to be just another *nix distro.

The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.

No idea what this means. Classic is remarkably solid for me.

New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable.

I'd admit there are some rough edges, but I honestly thinks it's quite a revolution (in a good way). If you're on an iBook, yes you're going to have problems since you're maxed out at 800x600. As far as "not very customizable," nothing could be further from the truth. Most UI elements seem to be made up of PDF files stored throughout the system. Do a search for .pdf.

Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface

This was inevitable, and necessary, IMHO. I'm pretty darn tired of 1984-centric UI.

Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).

Something isn't normal. I'm running on a Blue G3/400. The install and setup went seamless, and in the two weeks I've been using MOSX for my day-to-day work, I have yet to see anything resembling a system crash. Classic dies from time to time, but that's not entirely suprising at this stage.

On the other hand, I've heard of people seeing kernel panics in the beta. Since the differences between my experience and others is so great, I suspect that certain hardware configurations are far more stable at this point than others (rather than just being general kernel problems). Especially since I've heard of people completely ignoring the stated minimum requirements, and then acting suprised when things don't work right.

Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits. :'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.

I think this has a lot to do with the fact that things are still in progress. Note, for example, that there does not appear to be any support for 2D acceleration yet. This will slow things down substantially.

With 128MB of memory I found things quite usable (6-10 Classic/Carbon/Cocoa apps of varying sizes open), but not optimal. I added in another 128MB (256MB total) and the thing absolutely flies now. The OS boots faster, classic launches much faster faster, apps launch quicker, and the disk is rarely touched. I believe Apple is aiming to bring the minimum down to 64MB by the 1.0 release.

Also, you'd be suprised at how much faster the public beta is than DP4. I'm sure there are more optimizations to be done.

- Scott

------
Scott Stevenson

Carbon Finder

[TheInternet]

The Desktop seems (to me) a poor rip of the NeXT Workspace Manager. It is real crappy, have many bugs, and is nowhere as usable as the program he tries to clone. It is interesting to see that it is (almost) the only important Carbon app shipped with the system.

As a side note, the purported reason that the "new Finder" (whatever qualfies as that) is written in Carbon, is that Apple is "eating its own dog food" (Jobs' words). At the 1998 Apple developers conference, Apple said it would develop at least one major Cabon app, and one major Cocoa app to prove that both were plausible, and to make sure they deal with any problems that crop up. The former is the new Finder, the latter is the Mail app included with the system.

Or at least this is how it was in May 1998.

- Scott

------
Scott Stevenson

Unified architecture

[TheInternet]

I mean, really, guys. What would the response be if Microsoft came out with their own version of Linux, complete with Office, but if in order to run it, you had to buy a mysterious 'firmware' card from Microsoft to plug into your machine?? Why does Apple get away with selling some of the worlds most closed hardware in these parts?

Because it's part of the reason things works so well on the platform. The same reason game console popularity has exploded in the past few years. Many people just want stuff to work.

Microsoft's markets and Apple's markets may have some overlap, but they have much different philosophies. Apple is meticulous about architecting the entire computing experience. Example: iMovie. The only reason this came together so quickly and has been such a hit was because they could change the 1) hardware 2) OS 3) application on a whim.

If you like, feel free to continue buying an OS from one company, and all your other hardware from other companies. That's fine. But allow me to have the choice to buy an entire computer, and have that manufacturer be held accountable for the entire experience, not just the OS, or just the CPU or just the hard drive. I don't have time for that BS.

Besides, if you want to run OSX without all the extra stuff, download Darwin and hack it into whatever you want.

- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson

argh

[TotallyUseless]

Are we doomed to see this comment on every story about mac osx from now on? Please everyone who has had this thought... read this now and remember me later...... Apple is a hardware company. They make $ on boxes. thats it. end of story. please... no more 'osx on intel?' comments.... or i will puke. honest. and no, it wont be insanely great puke

Re:Cracked CD

[The Cunctator]

Have you tried using the proper Torx screwdriver to fix it?

Whither Aqua?

[mholve]

Seems strange that the X window manager fans out there haven't made a Graphite theme yet - only the Aqua one... Or even created new ones.

This isn't a gripe, just an observation. I happen to use the Aqua theme myself, and the blue is getting old... :)

A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC

[Bilestoad]

Be careful if you decide to install MacOS X on a Mac with LinuxPPC on it - I did NOT tell it to touch my partitions, but it did, causing the partitions to become inaccessible. I didn't try to find out what was wrong, just put Linux back and put X in the bottom of the drawer.

If you have another hard drive at all, that would be the safest place to try out MacOS X. I might install it again on a rainy day.

Re:A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC

[Bilestoad]

Not acting surprised, warning others. See the difference?

Part of the problem is that the "new world" machines can't use BootX and must use yaboot. The bigger part of the problem is that the dual-G4 machines and the cube are different enough so that the existing kernels can't boot - the symptom is messages about missing interrupts during boot from the distribution CD. The soution is to create a small boot partition and to install yaboot and an updated kernel on that partition, then to boot from it, in the same way that you can boot from floppies created by diskimg in DOS.

Full instructions for this process are on the linuxppc.com home page (that's different to linuxppc.org),

Booting on a New World Mac.

This fixes the first problem, having to use a boot partition. The other half of the fix is to use the ibook kernel rather than the default one - a little yaboot.conf editing is needed, but it can be done.

And that is why MacOS X breaks a LinuxPPC install on that kind of machine.

Re:A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC

[Bilestoad]

The link is too long.. go here first then to the link for the new world machines at the end of the page.

Re:A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC

[Auckerman]

MacOS X installs a boot partition. If you had used Apples partition utility and made MacOS X PB the first partition on the harddrive, just as the instructions say, this would not have happened. Before you act surprised you should read the documentation.

A game with OS X

[f5426]

Applications (.app) are really folders. Drag and drop them in a shell to look inside them.

Cd to the Content/MacOS directory. There is the real application exectuable.

Then, if you have the developer tools (from darwin, for instance), you can look at executable content with 'nm'.

If you have things like:

0000f078 t -[MyClass _myMethod:]

then it is a Cocoa application.

You'll find that most of them are really cocoa applications.

The Desktop seems (to me) a poor rip of the NeXT Workspace Manager. It is real crappy, have many bugs, and is nowhere as usable as the program he tries to clone.

It is interesting to see that it is (almost) the only important Carbon app shipped with the system.

Long life to ObjC.

Cheers,

--fred

Re:A game with OS X

[The Cunctator]

What do you mean by clone? The Desktop uses the NeXT Workspace Manager code, mostlike. Jobs came back to Apple when Apple bought NeXT. OS X is child of NeXT way more than it's the child of Apple code. (Though NeXT is clearly at least philosophically the child of Mac.)

But you probably know that. I gues I'm just harping on the phrase "the program he tries to clone." I'd have used "the program before he tried to make it act enough like the Mac Desktop to be acceptable to Mac owners"

Sadly, ObjC is being pretty aggressively phased out by Apple in favor of Java. The next rev of WebObjects, I believe, won't support ObjC, for example. At a minimum Java will be the default.

Re:A game with OS X

[larkost]

Ok.. I am going to try and set this strait... ObjectiveC is not going away in at all in MacOS X development! But it has been officially declared dead in the next version of WebObjects (officially it will be called WebObjects 5 for Java). The reasoning for this is that Apple wants the iServices division to kick ass in the WebApplications marketpplace, and they need to make sure that the deployment environment will run on all the big hardware. By converging on Java they can make make the Java Runtime Developers do all the work of porting WebObjects Deploment Server to all that wonderful hardware. And just do the work of creating the development enviornment (which is mostly written in ObjC) to the selected few OS's (MacOS, WinNT/2000, Linux, Solarix, etc). This is why WebObjects is moving away from ObjectiveC.

Now there has been a lot of fuss over this move from the ObjectiveC community, because it is mostly made up of WebObjects developers who have a lot of time and legacy code invested in ObjectiveC, and Apple has now told them that they have to find a new way of doing things (my bet is that they will form the backbone of a lot of firm's Cocco development efforts). To these people Apple has stepped back from supporting ObjC where they need it, and this has been percieved by many as an abandonment of ObjC in general. Apple has also been hyping Java2 as a big win (which it is), and this has also fueled their fears. But there is no real sign that apple is abandoning ObjC in MacOS X... none at all (in fact most of the apps that were ported to Java for early DP's were moved back to ObjC for DP4 and beyond...)

Radical ideas are good

[TheInternet]

There is no doubt that taste plays a role in this kind of thing, but that makes it especially strange for Apple to go against the very well-documented tastes of its current users. They had to work hard to change some of these UI details that really did not have to change, and for what gain?

I'm so very sick of hearing this. Enough. 1984 is done. Let's move on.

I know some people feel that the Mac OS 9 is "their" OS (mostly due to nostalgia), but unfortunately, this doesn't translate into broader acceptance of Mac OS X. You should have seen the look of the faces of my family members when I showed them Mac OS X. They instantly wanted it. All the nostalgia-induced love of the same UI is useless if Apple isn't growing marketshare.

I can still remember how some people solidly believed how GUIs (in general) were a bad idea because they were too different. I can remember how people thought that the iMac wouldn't sell because it was too different. Maybe Mac OS X will fail because it's too different, but thank goodness we have people at Apple stretching the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. That's the goal of computing, isn't it?

There really is an awful lot to like about Mac OS X, which is why I suspect the flaws and weird parts seem the more striking: this really could have been almost perfect.

What do you mean "could have been?" It's still in beta. Do you realize how much has changed since DP4? If these issues are important to you, and you'd like to consider using the final version of Mac OS X, go over to the Mac OS X feedback form.

- Scott


------
Scott Stevenson

Re:Radical ideas are good

[King Babar]

I'm so very sick of hearing this. Enough. 1984 is done. Let's move on.

I know some people feel that the Mac OS 9 is "their" OS (mostly due to nostalgia), but unfortunately, this doesn't translate into broader acceptance of Mac OS X. You should have seen the look of the faces of my family members when I showed them Mac OS X. They instantly wanted it. All the nostalgia-induced love of the same UI is useless if Apple isn't growing marketshare.

No, it's not 1984, but nobody repealed Fitt's Law since then. And there is little evidence that most of the UI "enhancements" added into Mac OS X had anything like the thorough interface testing that went into the original Mac. I mean, the "this window is too tall to resize" stuff is just absurd. And you'd be pissed too if you'd been missing the "e" icon for explorer because you were a few pixels off on the click in a region of the screen that *can't* be used for anything else.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with liking a UI for it's looks. That's very important. Mac OS X does look better than Mac OS 9, and some of those good looks (e.g., anti-aliased fonts) have a direct and positive effect on the way people will work with their computer. And some of it is just cool. But, really, some of it is just weird.

As far as increasing market share goes, that is really going to have to depend on factors that go way beyond a cool-looking UI. Given a world where Windows 98 looks good enough to most people, you're not doubling market share by doubling the aesthetics of the user experience, or even the aesthetics of the computer casing itself. (Although the latter is an extremely under-rated factor.) Price plays a huge role, and this is where Apple still has a real problem in some segments, especially people new to the brand.

Re:Radical ideas are good

[TheInternet]

And there is little evidence that most of the UI "enhancements" added into Mac OS X had anything like the thorough interface testing

There are a lot of really quite smart concepts that have been introduced that have nothing at all to do with eye candy. However, it does take a while to notice them. For example, in the Finder, if you hit Command-1 through Command-6, they each bring up a different portion of the filesystem, such as home directory, apps, documents, etc. This is real progress. Seems so simple and obvious, but it's quite useful.

As for testing in small group, I do think it is important, in moderation. I've seen products that have been UI-tested to death and they come out looking like Frankenstein. When a problem arises, for some reason, corrections focus on that one issue (hack is probably too strong of a word), rather than considering the interface as a whole. I know I sound looney for saying this, but it's been my experience. I think what Apple is doing is testing on a much larger scale, with a much broader type of audience (not just the type of people willing to sit in a room for two hours) by putting out the public beta. This doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.

Given a world where Windows 98 looks good enough to most people

I agree with you, to a point on this. I think people see Aqua, or more importantly, Aqua and WinXX running side-by-side, I think it will click. It's hard to deny how compelling the interface is.

Price plays a huge role, and this is where Apple still has a real problem in some segments, especially people new to the brand.

That's a complex issue. Since they don't have the volume of say a Dell, they don't get all the discounts on the components. Plus there's just the issue of pure revenue. If they lower the prices, will that actually bring in significantly more buyers, or will it just reduce total revenue. I think the $799 iMac is a good test bed.

The Cube is probably too expensive, and poorly positioned, though. I'm not sure who's supposed to by it, except people with extra cash laying around. If there weren't dual G4s available for just slightly more, it wouldn't be such a big issue. But on the other hand, I have no idea how much it costs to develop and produce that thing. There are a lot of new procedures that had to be developed to come up with that casing, so maybe the initial margin isn't soo high after all.

As a side note, people really shouldn't be that suprised at hairline fractures in the cube casing, as nothing like this has really been put out on the market before, especially without a fan. It's largely experimental. What's ridiculous is how Apple appears to be dealing with it.

- Scott

------
Scott Stevenson

Re:Radical ideas are good

[King Babar]

As for testing in small group, I do think it is important, in moderation. I've seen products that have been UI-tested to death and they come out looking like Frankenstein. When a problem arises, for some reason, corrections focus on that one issue (hack is probably too strong of a word), rather than considering the interface as a whole.

What you say is true, which is why it is so important to have a set of global interface guidelines in the first place. It keeps you from hacking away at specific situations that probably shouldn't have ever arisen in the first place. As far as testing in small groups goes, Apple used to do controlled experiments to find out what really did work best. Now, the biggest gripe I've heard with that is that the initial Mac interface was optimized for a novice who wasn't an especially good typist, which is why older versions of the OS could get a bit tedious (and why Anti-Mac can make almost as much sense). The situation did improve, of course, and some OS X features (like sheets) really will reward an expert user. But the "this window is too tall to resize" problem...words fail me. :-(

[Price is] a complex issue. Since they don't have the volume of say a Dell, they don't get all the discounts on the components.

Wow. Now *that* I don't buy. Apple's volumes are still pretty huge, they don't tend to offer bleeding edge anything, and the platform is now so standardized that for some things, I suspect their volumes and discounts are better than Dell's.

Plus there's just the issue of pure revenue. If they lower the prices, will that actually bring in significantly more buyers, or will it just reduce total revenue. I think the $799 iMac is a good test bed.

It could be, except that they "under-RAMed" that box in a serious way. I think there is now one too many levels of iMac, and the cheap box threatens to cannibalize sales on the basic iMac DV.

The Cube is probably too expensive, and poorly positioned, though. I'm not sure who's supposed to by it, except people with extra cash laying around.

The cube is a beautiful thing, and a quintessential Jobs creation. I mean, The Cube is so obviously Jobs' ultimate vision for the NeXT cube that never was. It's an aesthetic statement more than it is a product at this point. The real product based on the Cube is the Cube plus the 15" LCD; the problem is that won't sell very well unless the cost is $2000 or less.

In a perverse way, I'm glad that this is a disappointment so far, since it will return Apple's attention to being a bit more in tune with the market again.

Re:There should be an Ars spoof website

[Apotsy]

Ha, ha, "Arse Technica"! I laughed out loud when I read that. I put it right up there with my own fine spoof names:

• Instead of "O'Reilly and Associates" it's "O'Really and Associates".
• Instead of "Crutchfield" it's "Crotchfield".
• Circuit Shitty (kind lame, but still appropriate)
• And the IBM ;Crap tiva (in the tradition of the Tandy "Trash 80")

Heh.

Dock uses thumbnails!

[TheInternet]

Of course, when the Dock in OS X starts to fill the bottom of the screen, navigating around got a little tricky. For me (today) that point was when I was jumping between 5 apps and 8 windows so I could crib data while installing tomcat

Say what you will, but this is one area where it's hard to criticize the dock. In Windows, you'll get 5-8 different tabs in the task bar that have the exact same IE icon and just a bit of text associated with them.

Mac OS X, however, brilliantly generates a thumbnail of each window you send to the dock, and you get the full title of the window when you mouse over it. If you want to quicker access to various open terminal, consider changing the default window title or the background color of them (perhaps different color for each host or active app), then saving these settings as a separate file. This should greatly speed up navigation.

- Scott


------
Scott Stevenson

Re:Well...

[TheInternet]

Oh, yes. I beleive they tried to kill Cocoa, but the it wouldn't die. I hope that *now* they will push cocoa as much as they can. It is rather easy:

There is some debate as to whether Apple tried to kill off Objective-C, but I don't think killing off Cocoa was ever in the cards.

This looks like a open source MacOS X clone on the horizon... maybe in 3 or 4 years.

It depends on what you're hoping to get out of Mac OS X. The most common reasons seem to be:

1) Love Mac hardware and general Apple system design concepts, want a good OS to go with it
2) Love Unix, want a well-designed GUI to go with it
3) Want anything that is not Windows and can still run most mainstream apps (read: Office)

- Scott

------
Scott Stevenson

LinuxPPC vs. MacOS X Client

[edelbrp]

I tried both Yellow Dog Linux and now receintly MacOS X Client on my iBook. Here's what I thought of MacOS X Client (compared to YDL):

Pros:
- Supports sound (yeah!)
- Supports 32-bit color (yeah!)
- System config is easily at hand in the GUI (NIC settings, screen settings, etc.)
- Very simple. Install and go.

Cons:
- Worst of the Unix and MacOS worlds put together. The Unix side is stripped of most functionality. Unix people will be disappointed. Especially since there is no X server support and no development or daemon support (of the stock install). The Mac side seems even more buggy and much slower.
- New MacOS look and feel is cumbersome, wastes too much screen space (definitely on a laptop, anyway). Not very customizable. Old hat Mac users will have to relearn much of the interface, and Unix users will wish it wasn't so much in the way.
- Very buggy. I couldn't copy files (except using 'cp' in a term) from a server to a local directory w/o weird errors happening. Friends reported system crashes/freezes (under Unix!?).
- Incredibly slow. Playing MP3's and browsing the web takes my 128MB iBook to it's limits. :'( Menus draw incredibly slowly, ditto for switching applications.

If LinuxPPC/YDL got sound support and better video support (I think both are in the works, or perhaps even done now?). Then it's a no brainer that YDL is faster, more stable, probably more secure, more functional, and cheaper than MacOS X Client. Stick a MacOS-X theme on YDL and you've got something cheaper and better than MacOS X Client.

Really, a sad day for me (being a long term Mac supporter) to see MacOS get this bad. :'( I hope the full release is much more improved than this 'beta'. MacOS X client needs more than just some polishing to make it practical and useful.

--Phil (with a big frowny face)

Re:Well...

[gig]

I've been running Mac OS X Public Beta for the last couple of weeks, too (running it right now, posting from IE 5 for Mac OS X). No need to reboot, no system freezes. Very useable performance on this G3 300 iBook with 192MB RAM and 4MB of video RAM, but not snappy like Mac OS 9. Amazing multitasking, font support, graphics, audio, MIDI. IE, QuickTime, Shockwave, Flash, and POP/LDAP mail are already here. There is so much good tech that it's amazing. App bundles make so much sense.

BUT, the UI is a train wreck. Not the way it looks, which is beautiful, but only skin deep. I'm talking about the way it functions and how useful it is for a variety of tasks. It's unbelievably bad. Give me a Mac GUI, or give me a NeXT GUI, but not this monster. You can't open a folder anymore (gone between DP4 and Public Beta) so you're always stuck in these huge browser windows. Sometimes I just want to open a folder and have it show up where I left it so I can get on with my work. Never mind if I'm using a big display, a little palette window is a little palette window, and list-view Finder windows are drag and drop palettes for me. I always have one or two next to a document window with clipart or script snippets in them. No way to do this in Mac OS X. Amazing stuff. Company after company has copied the Mac Finder since it came out, and Apple ports the source code of the real thing and makes a mess of it. What's bothersome is not that there is stuff missing (it's a beta) but that there is crappy replacement stuff that's far along. If you're going to change it between 9 and 10, you have to have a better reason than "a bunch of us used to work at NeXT". It's got to be demonstrably better ... you're asking all these people to learn a new method for things they've been happily doing for years without complaint, except that they want more stability, which OS X has in droves.

The columns browser is great in the Open and Save dialogs, and it's great when I want to open up a big window and browse around ... previewing files is amazing in columns, but why take a good thing and make it bad by trying to make it do too much? Give me a columns browser, and the ability to open up list and icon view folder windows like on Mac OS 9 and newbies will use the former, and power users will use both.

Seeing only 21 characters of a filename is a bug I can't wait to see gone, either. Suddenly we have 255 character names, but we can only see 21 characters, except through heroic means (opening an Inspector or a Terminal window, or clicking on the name to get ready to change it). Mac OS 9 allowed 32 characters and displayed 32 as well, and that's better UI. On Mac OS 9, you grab a file and it "feels real", but in Mac OS X, you never forget that you're looking at an abstraction in a browser, just like Windows.

Re:So when will Apple ditch OS9's memory controlle

[GrenDel Fuego]

I ran NT 4.0 on a Pentium 75 with 8MB of ram once.. Talk about slow.

I dont' even think it would install on a machine like that. I installed it with 64MB of ram, and then removed some of the chips :)

Re:Security!

[ca1v1n]

Yes, but root can't be accessed from the outside world. Sure, there may be root exploits, but this sounds safer than the current method. As he says in the article, if they have physical access, all bets are off anyway.

So when will Apple ditch OS9's memory controller?

[AFCArchvile]

Seriously, you need 64MB of RAM just to run the OS without hanging. Windows ME still only needs 32MB to run by itself; and you can chop off a few megs from that by using Win98lite.

A lovely new Mac OS (X)

[herwin]

I've been running it for about 10 days now. It's basically BSD (Mach 3.0) with a Mac shell. It runs Mac OS 9 as an application and the major showstopper is that PPP can't be used (yet) with the older stuff. I leave a terminal window up at all times and switch between the two Mac OS shells and BSD on an as-needed basis. It makes the Windows NT 4.0 machine on the other desk look like a toy. (Of course, I've been a UNIX sysadmin.) Recommended.

Re:Security!

[gutter]

Active Internet connections (including servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp 0 0 *.22 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.80 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.427 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.548 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.759 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.762 *.* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 *.sunrpc *.* LISTEN

I turned on sshd (installed by default!) and apache myself. I also cut out all the lines without a LISTEN.

Shows a lotta promise....

[mailseth]

Ive been using it for exactly two weeks now and I have made some discoveries:

OS X shows the most promise of any system out there. Ya, you can have *nix, but can your grandma use it? Or you can have Mac OS 9 (I taught it to my little brother who was seven and he had no problem with it) but it lacks features wanted by us slashdotters (like SMP or protected memory). It's two diffrent worlds almost, and OS X comes the closest to each that I have seen.

The OS X beta is very incomplete. There are many unoptimized areas, just try resizing a window and you'll see what I mean (or QT 4 in os x, or minimizing a window on a 233 G3, or running it on 96 MB of RAM, ect...). Hopefully the final release will run at warp 1 X 10^999999.

At the moment, the beta seems to be too intuative. This doesn't make sense at first, but how intuative was the apple menu? A small picture of an apple with great power and effecincy? Try explaining that to your grandma. The OS X GUI hasn't taken that extra step of complexety that appeals to the pro users, but can remain hidden to novice users. This would be like hiding the dock like I have on my iMac. I get the extra screen space back and the dock works fine, but it just isn't as intuative anymore.

Other options I think would improve OS X that would appeal to pro users would be to have a control strip in the unused upper right in the menu bar. To have an option for the file names permenently under the icons in the dock (no cursor rollover needed). The clickable area in the dock should extend to the base of the screen and not just the icon (easy to hit). Anchor the dock on the left of the base so commenly used apps would always be in the same place on the screen. And yes, I have sent them about 40 suggestions so far, including these

My $2 X 10^ -2

really?

[TotallyUseless]

i have my doubts. heh
/me fully expects to get moderated down

The last holdout

[Adam Wiggins]

Well, this is it. MacOS is going the way of the Dodo, and that means...yes, the last of the "big" OSes (except for that one I won't mention) is a UNIX.

I have high hopes for these "UNIX under the hood" operating systems. I always thought Be had things right, and it looks like OS X is basically duplicating that scheme.

Re:The last holdout

[Dr. Sp0ng]

I have high hopes for these "UNIX under the hood" operating systems. I always thought Be had things right, and it looks like OS X is basically duplicating that scheme.

Repeat after me. BeOS is *not* UNIX based. It is POSIX compliant and bash has been ported. But it is not based on a UNIX kernel.
--

Re:Well...

[jafac]

I've also been using it for almost two weeks. No reboots either.

There are lots of UI quibbles, which we all know that either Apple will fix, or third parties will. I'm not concerned about the loss of spring loaded folders or windowshades (actually, the Cocoa-ified Stickies HAS windowshades!).

I think the BIGGEST weakness of this OS will be Carbon. Carbon itself is a good thing, and was necessary, but it distracts ISV's from what they SHOULD be doing, and that's porting apps to Cocoa, and if they need to address the Solaris and NT market, use the portability stuff inherent in Cocoa (OPENSTEP). Instead, ISV's seem to be confused, running scared, and when we have apps that aren't Carbon OR Cocoa, we have to run the Classic environment, which is a huge waste of time. Classic boot times are slow, the necessity of running classic is a geek concept; normal users won't understand it. It's a memory hog, and many apps don't run at all, while many more run so damn slow it's not even funny. There are still several that run just fine. But the end result is so inconsistant as to be utterly baffling. I think Apple may have taken the only course they could, and how they did it was elegant as possible, but damn, I sure wonder how things would have worked out if Apple had evangelized Cocoa a LOT more strongly pushed the cross-platform features, and ease of programming, and not done the work on Carbon, and not made Classic so easy to fall back on. Personally, if I have any Classic apps I have to run, I'm going to dual-boot to get there, for a LONG while. Make a stronger case for Cocoa, and maybe more ISV's would have taken it seriously, instead of shunning it for either Carbon, or completely ignoring OS X altogether.

Re:Well...

[jafac]

oh yeah, and one REALLY cool little detail about OS X.

If you type in the wrong password in the GUI login, the dialog box responds by shaking back and forth, you can almost hear it say "nope". It is the most brilliant example of computer-human interface I have ever seen.

Re:There should be an Ars spoof website

[AFCArchvile]

Let's call it "Arse Technica." I can see it now...

I don't think so

[twitter]

Judging based on experience is not prejudice, it's reason. We all know that Charlie Brown is going to fall on his but because that little girl is going to pull the ball out.

Despite that, I have not seen too many trolly articles here. The complaints I've seen have been reasonable, just as Ars Technica was a relatively reasonable review. People thinking about this OS should know about those faults. I've also seen some insiteful review of the Ars Technica article as well.

If anything Apple is getting a free ride here. People abuse MS all the time for things that Apple is doing. This is a "buggy" OS that takes up 800MB that hides important concepts from it's users. Some 200MB of that install are trailers for movies! Why should the install not tell you what a root account is? It's a simple but very important concept that's easy to relate. Granted, all of these things are better than what MS offers (920 MB install with very poor security and a checkbox to hide the entire contents of a hard drive, hides other things anyway, and costs much much more). Developments in free software are more interesting than this.

There is a little much coverage of this. Apple stuff has only tangential interest to most people who read this site. It's commodity hardware, and greater success will give us more toys to play with. Their use of BSD is interesting, and we hope that more gets ported back out as free. There seems to be more coverage of this than say Sun.

But really it would be much more impressive if some small company would develop something like this without all of the Apple restrictions. Imagine a small company putting togeter a nice Motorola computer ala IBM, so that duplication would be encouraged and profitable. Imagine also that they used all free ware, so that anyone could develop software for it. Further imagine that they had enough marketing muscle to get the thing noticed and it could be mass produced and cheap. If Apple would form a company to do this, and if they alowed this company to run it's existing codebase, we would indeed be impressed with Apple. As it is, shrug.

Poster does not hate Apple.

Re:Hopefully X should bring up Apple stocks..

[daviddennis]

I checked out the Cube at an Apple dealer, and the ugly beige monitor they were running it on felt almost like an affront to the machine.

Strangely, I felt that almost as strongly when I brought home my shiny new G4/450 Multi-Processor a week or so later, and plugged it into my beige Sony 19".

I wonder how many $3,999 cinema displays they've sold to style-hungry people with more cash and flash than sense? Not to say I might not be one of them if I had a spare $ 3,999 floating around dying for a home ...

D

----

Re:Waiting for faster cpus

[daviddennis]

OS/X works fantastic on my G4/450 multi-processor, and the CPU monitor shows that both processors are working tirelessly on my behalf.

Only problem I have is that none of my video editing applications work well under Classic - hopefully Apple will have carbonized versions of iMovie and Final Cut (both of which I use) before release.

D

----

Re:fix it yourself

[spitzak]

Sorry, that code is not going to be open-source.

Re:dang!

[zorgon]

hmmm, sure? That's pretty cool. Magnum Opera, then. Most folks won't get it. They'll think it's the next version of a vaporware browser ;)

Re:testing environment

[cpt kangarooski]

You're not a Mac person, or you wouldn't have said this.

Let's back up some: The original Macintosh had one small bug that didn't become evident for a while - the name. It was simply 'Macintosh.'

When the newer version came out, the problem persisted. There was no way to tell a Mac with 128kB of RAM from one with 512kB. (they quickly became informally known as the 128K and the 512K, which was also called by it's code name, Fat Mac)

The third Mac, which had 512kB RAM but a new 800kB floppy drive (the original was 400kB... ah, memories) still didn't have a unique name, and ended up being known as the 512KE (E for Expanded, I guess... I have one at my parent's house ;)

Finally the Mac Plus came out, and sanity was restored. Every Mac since had a particular model name... Mac II, IIx, IIcx, SE, SE/30, IIvx (had one of those too... I'm a sucker) Quadra 700, 6100/66, 9500/132, etc.

But it's worth noting that Steve left Apple at around the time of the 512K - 512KE.

Now, a couple years ago the G3's came out. If they had continued with the ~8 year tradition of assigning each model a confusing number, the desktop would have been the 7700 and the minitower the 8700.

But Steve, who had returned, decided that they would simply be named 'Power Macintosh G3/xxx' where xxx was the speed of the CPU.

Okay, obviously a break from the numbering system (which did have a vague amount of logic behind it... I can follow up later on that if you want) but you could say G3 and people knew what you meant.

Unfortunately, the iMac (which also suffers from this problem) had come out and we all knew that the beige look that the first G3's had was not long for this world.

And indeed, the next models to come out of Cupertino in Jan '99 looked different. They had Blue and White cases. Here's a picture. Note, btw, that they ONLY came in Blue and White. By that time IIRC the iMacs came in colors. (more on that in a moment)

Apple, and everyone else, in order to distinguish them, came to call them 'Power Mac G3 (Blue and White)'s. So when he says that that's what he tested it on, that's important. I would have a good guess if he said G3/400, since the ones now known as Beige G3's weren't sold that fast, but the color tells me which MODEL.

The G4's have the same problem; G4 can mean the original G4 Yikes, with a PCI video card, or the slightly newer G4 Sawtooth with an AGP video card, or the Dual-Processor G4. Guess what people call these things in order to distinguish them?

iMacs are the

• iMac Revision A, the original 233MHz Bondi iMac
• iMac Revision B, almost exactly the same
• iMac Revision C, better known as 'Fruity iMacs' because they came in five colors.
• iMac Revision D, a somewhat faster version (ie Fruity/333 instead of Fruity/266)
• iMac Revision E, better known as 'Slot Loading iMacs' because of the new CD/DVD mechanism, or the 'Kihei iMacs' after the codename, or the 'Transparent iMacs' because of the redesigned case. This introduced the Graphite iMac DV/SE, and split the current iMac models up by how powerful they were (a low-end Blueberry, midrange in five colors, high end in Graphite)
• iMac Revision F, currently known as 'Summer 2000 iMacs', which come in different colors, and are currently shipping.

This makes it really frickin' hard to talk about iMacs and actually convey some sense of what you're talking about.

The PowerBooks (which I don't really follow closely) are about as bad - they're presently being officially named after the color of the keyboards or something. And so everyone ignores that and uses the codenames instead.

Backing up, because Steve has boneheadedly decided that we shouldn't have a standard method of being able to tell these things apart (there aren't even name badges on the desktops - just a pictoral Apple logo) we have to describe the appearance, etc.

And as already noted, there never was a purple G3 desktop, though a lot of people did want one actually... Blue and purple have been the most popular colors.

Re:Well...

[ChristTrekker]

The only fault the Apple menu has is that it's not obviously a menu to the novice Mac user. (And once you grasp the idea that the bar across the top of the screen is full of menus, it's not too big a leap to think that everything is a menu, not just the text things.)

If users are used to putting aliases on the desktop, they probably came from the Windoze world where there wasn't anywhere as convenient as the Apple menu for putting aliases. (Don't even mention the Start menu. It's been around for 5 years. The Apple menu's been around for 15.) I hate a cluttered desktop. I use it only for work in progress currently - as soon as I'm done with it it's filed away again. If it was chock full of this, that, and the other thing, like application and document shortcuts I often see Windows users have, I'd go crazy.

And how is System Folder:Apple Menu Items less intuitive than Windows\Start Menu? Man, I haven't done a MacOS install in a while, but isn't "Apple Menu Items" one of the items in the Apple menu? That's just as easy to find as the Windows equivalent.

Re:Well...

[John Siracusa]

[The AppleMenu] is NOT obvious it's a menu, it is NOT obvious how to add things to it and quite frankly a clear majority of users (both Mac and Windows) I know just put alias' on their desktops.

I mostly agree with that. And those users can continue to just ignore it (it's one tiny icon, after all.)

But there's no reason that a UI element that duplicates the functional merits of the Apple menu (as outlined in the article) also needs to duplicate its faults: the obscure icon, the non-obvious customization, etc.

He also left out one of the most relevent piece of ease of use info about Mac OS X. Drag and Drop installation of Applications.

That was covered in many of the earlier articles in the series.

Re:Waiting for faster cpus

[The Cunctator]

It doesn't. To run OS X Beta you have to disable the second processor through Open Firmware. The reason given ran something like "some problems with caching".

Re:MacOS X

[aberkvam]

Not only isn't bash the default on Mac OS X Beta, it's not even installed. After a few days of being frustrated with tcsh, I decided to get bash.

Step 1: Get the development tools. This will let you compile programs for the BSD layer. The basic idea here is to download the Darwin disk image and copy the development tools from Darwin to Mac OS X Beta. MacAddict has the details including a shell script that will move all the right stuff for you.

Step 2: Download the latest bash source code (bash/bash-2.04.tar.gz) from a GNU mirror site.

Step 3: Untar and compile it. The only real trick is the command line options for the configure script. I got it to work with the slightly incorrect:

./configure --without-bash-malloc --host=bsd

Step 4: Install it. Mac OS X Beta doesn't have a /usr/local directory when you install it. I created one by hand but I'm pretty sure that the make install would create the directory structure fine.

Step 5: Configure it. Go into Terminal's prefs and change the default shell from tcsh to bash. Set up bash config files cribbing the settings from tcsh's config files. Move things around. Have fun.

Compiling UNIX-type stuff for Mac OS X isn't that bad. I have done it with ncftp 3, readline, tintin++, and bash so far. Usually it's just a tweak here and there and it works fine. Have fun playing with it.

Apple Menu

[burris]

As someone who used the NeXT exclusively for 8 years and now only has a Mac because Mac is NeXT or NeXT is Mac or something, I like the Apple menu quite a bit and hope it returns to OS-X. I'm not your average user.

Regarding DLL hell, you should check out the Frameworks stuff. Shared Libraries done the Right Way. Framework directories contain dynamically loadable code, and localized UI, and headers, and localized documentation, and anything else. ...and they are versioned. Two different versions of the same Framework will hapilly coexist. It's killer!

Burris

testing environment

[justin_w_hall]

My favorite quote, on the info about the test systems:

"G3/400: A revision 1 Blue and White G3 with a 400MHz G3, 256MB RAM, a 12GB HD, and a matching Blue and White 17" Apple Studio Display CRT."

I'm so relieved that John provided the vital information on what colors the systems were. I know the results would have been astoundingly different if he used the grape one.

---

Re:testing environment

[generic-man]

Apple never made a grape G3 tower. The only G3 towers they made were beige or Blue and White, hence the color specification.

Really, though, the phrase "revision 1 Blue and White G3" sounds a lot clearer than descriptions like "Asus A7V with a Duron 700 @ 1050 with 128MB Kingston PC133 SDRAM and a Voodoo5 5500 running with FSB oc'ed to 150 and a Golden Orb and a ..." that often come up in hardware-oriented newsgroups and chat rooms.

Besides, at least the reviewer managed to color-coordinate his tower and monitor. Give him a little credit.

Re:testing environment

[jafac]

Steve didn't want to have a way to tell these things apart because that way they could more easily screw their customers.

I bought a Rev A G3 Beige, I did not know that there was going to be a Rev B. So I'm stuck not able to do the slave drive thing. Of course they can easily clear out the channel of Rev As after Rev B ships, because the customer has no way of making an official specification of the difference.

Same thing with iMacs. I was shopping for the latest (Rev F) iMac for my wife. I saw an ad at Costco for an iMac for $699, but they didn't specify what kind. I went, and it was a bondi-blue pre-slot-loading iMac. I bought a Rev F (indigo) directly from Apple after that. But I could see how someone who didn't KNOW could have been totally screwed over.

The VCR manufacturers have been doing this for years.

Re:dang!

[zorgon]

... 'nother poster said it was 'opera' -- hmm. Never heard it that way, I've heard it as opus of course (I was trying to be funny). Worth looking up in the unabridged oxford ... off to the library

Re:installing on pre-OS 9?

[King Babar]

Wow, they must have really improved it. I only tried it once, and that was a couple of months ago. It screwed things up so badly I had to scratch-install everything all over again.

Be careful. The netscape problem I mentioned is due to an absolute path problem. OS X Beta (and I think the DP versions, too) puts all of your OS 9 stuff in a folder, which will systematically break anything that hardcodes an absolute path. (I believe the correct way to do it is to put preferences type stuff into a directory in the "blessed" (system) folder; any app can reliably find that folder, so there's no problem. IE 5 does this, so it worked just fine after the upgrade.) If you're a victim of this, you're still going to have to fish around at best to "teach" the applications where these files now are.

Re:Cube..

[maxume]

that was exactly my point. I won't pay the premium. But if I did, I would sure as hell go all out and buy the studio display, and it would look real nice. But I don't care if it looks real nice, so I am running a dell, that is beige and square. Oh well.

MacOS X

[mholve]

I've been using MacOS X Server here in the office, and I gotta say, it's kinda cool. It's a full on Unix setup, but it just kind of feels like a Mac...

Bash is the default shell, and it comes with vi - but not a terribly huge selection of other goodies. Apache is there, as well.

It's proven to be very stable, as the machine has been up for AGES:

bash-2.02$ uptime
5:45PM up 78 days, 4:16, 3 users, load averages: 2.55, 3.54, 3.63

Re:MacOS X

[Bob Uhl]

MacAddict has the details including a shell script...

As an old Mac hand, I cannot say how wonderful it is to see a sentence like that. The thought of a Mac site with shell scripts on it is just about the best thing in recent memory.

As I was saying to some friends this weekend, the Mac vs. PC arguments often cam to stuff that was not inherently bad about the platform, but which WinDOS got wrong. So all those arguments about CLI vs. GUI didn't really hold as much water as we once thought.

I'm running Linux now, but I may have to give OS X a look...

A problem with the author.

[Operandi]

"Also note that 160MB of Beta's ~800MB install is taken up by QuickTime trailers for various questionable movies (Charlie's Angles, The Emperor's New Groove, etc.) Even minus that 160MB, I suspect many curmudgeons will still holler about the "bloated" install size. To them, I have this to say: 1GB of hard disk space costs about $5 at today's prices (20GB IDE drives are less than $100). By contrast, back when Mac OS ("System", please) could fit on one floppy disk, a floppy disk's worth of HD space cost about $10 (I bought a 32MB HD for $450 back when the Mac System fit on an 800K floppy.) Feel better now?"

No, I do not feel better. The issue isn't the financial cost of a bloated piece of software, it's the quality cost of a bloated piece of software. While I'm always generally pleased with the quality of coverage by Ars, this is 1 point I strongly disagree with.

Regards

Hopefully X should bring up Apple stocks..

[cOdEgUru]

As we all know Apple stocks took a beating, a severe one at that, couple of days back when it crashed more than 20 points because of its shortcoming in earnings for the 4th quarter. Analysts are hoping that Mac OS X would help Apple to earn its reputation of a survivor again

In the past also Apple had been through severe beatings, but nothing like this. Wired has an article where they have mentioned that OS X might be the only straw it has. Remains to be seen..

Apple however priced the Cube for a price too high for anyone to afford, which made it inaccessible for both novice users and power users. At 1799 a piece it was too high for anyone with a sane mind to afford it, but for its elegance. And that was too silly a reason to fork out 1800 in cash, and it was reported that feature wise it really didnt make a difference from the G4 macs.

Hope apple would get its act together. It would be worth watching. As for me, I am just gonna go ahead and buy a couple of stocks :)

Re:Hopefully X should bring up Apple stocks..

[The Cunctator]

I think that the base price of the Cube was actually pretty reasonable--it's just that once you tack on one of the cool Apple monitors which you pretty much had to get with the Cube, the price really went wild.

Feature-wise, it was similar to a good amount worse, depending on your perspective and bias, than the G4. Depends how much silence and size and style count as features, as opposed to MHz and expandability.

I hope it's like the iMac, where the first version was cool but overpriced and still had some engineering ugliness, but by a year later was an almost perfect machine.

I'm really interested in seeing what the laptop equivalent of the Cube will be. The Square? The Rectangle? I expect it to be a superlight, superthin full-powered notebook.

Re:installing on pre-OS 9?

[Apotsy]

If by "over" you mean installing both OSes on the same partition, I wouldn't recommend it, even if you have the latest revision of MacOS 9. There will be many instances of conflicting file and path names. This problem is being worked on for the final release, but for now separate partitions are the way to go.

As long as you install MacOS X n a separate partition, it doesn't really matter which OS is on your older partition. You just have to be able to run the "System Disk" utility (different from the old "Startup Disk" control panel; it's included on the MacOS X CD) in order to switch back and forth between the two OSes. I believe MacOS 8 should be able to run it.

One thing worth noting when it comes to older verions of the MacOS, however, is compatibility with MacOS X's "Classic" environment. Whenever it starts up, it needs a boot volume (i.e., a partition with a traditional MacOS "System Folder"). You can use any MacOS 9 installtion with it, but I wouldn't try using a MacOS 8 system with it. That would probably cause all sorts of problems.

Other than that, MacOS 8 and MacOS X should co-exist happily, as long as they reside on separate partitions.

Security!

[QuantumG]

Mark my words. There are going to be Mac cracks by the thousand. "You will be an administrator of this machine" and look at the perms on the directories, and the root password = the first password you entered on install, can we say lame? My god, I wish someone would do a netstat -a and tell us what ports are open.

Re:So when will Apple ditch OS9's memory controlle

[SuiteSisterMary]

It does run, it's not pretty, but it works, and it's probably acceptable for a departmental FTP server or the like.

Re:There should be an Ars spoof website

[Apotsy]

Dude! Don't get me wrong, I loved the TRS-80, too! Calling it the "Trash-80" was just what everbody did, especially those who liked it. A joking sign of affection. (Did I just mention "affection" for a computer? Ugh.)

Yep, I wrote my first BASIC program on a TRS-80, too. Remeber those giant floppy disks that were 10 1/2 inches? Man, those things gave a whole new meaning to the word "floppy". Maybe I'm remembering wrong, and it was only 8 1/2 inches, but whatever it was, they sure were big.

Apple should have...

[jaysones]

released this OS under a different company name. If everyone thought this was some startup company who had taken FreeBSD, put a stunning interface on it, made it very easy to use, while retaining all of the cool BSD stuff, then we'd hail them as Gods. Instead (and I'm not trying to bait), we have people who read the first 5 letters of the article (A-p-p-l-e) and respond with

>"Why does this crap OS get so much coverage?"

This OS is very promising and I wish prejudice wouldn't come into play. If you check this thing out, I think you'd see why it gets so much coverage. Those who most hate Apple should be the most happy. They're actually changing.

Well...

[Auckerman]

I've been using OS X PB as a desktop OS for almost two weeks now (no reboots, no shutdowns since install). I think his UI concerns are little more than personal taste, and not as objective as he would make it out to be.

The one that stands out the most, is that he wants a equalivent replacement for the Apple Menu. Why? The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu, it is NOT obvious how to add things to it and quite frankly a clear majority of users (both Mac and Windows) I know just put alias' on their desktops. The entire GUI is point and click. It took me about 30 minutes to figure out it's quirks.

He also left out one of the most relevent piece of ease of use info about Mac OS X. Drag and Drop installation of Applications. No Applications can install into the system folder. How novel. Uncompress the file (if necissary) and drag it to the Applications folder. This is a BIG deduction in tech support costs since the OS is locked and root is hidden, no Extension conficts, no DLL hell.

Re:Well...

[jafac]

Funny thing about Apple Menu and Windows; windows USED to have a neat feature similar to Apple Menu, (not scalable tho), called QuickLaunch, where you could create a nice little toolbar on the Task Bar, and put your own aliases on it.

This was the ONE decent feature of IE 4.0, and bundled with Active Desktop. Of course, when they got the survey study results that said nobody used Active Desktop, they killed that feature in IE 5.0 - so you only retain QuickLaunch if you install IE 4.0, THEN IE 5.0. If you install a new system, and never run IE 4.0, and install IE 5.0 to upgrade IE 3.0, then you don't get QuickLaunch, and you CANNOT get it. Unless there's some goofy registry hack to reenable it. But QuickLaunch was the coolest feature ever. Even if you couldn't scale it, and you were limited to just a few dozen icons at most. You could put folders in there. . . it was the #1 best way to keep my NT desktop from becoming cluttered. Now I spend a good portion of a day every two weeks clearing out clutter on my desktop.

Re:Well...

[King Babar]

I think his UI concerns are little more than personal taste, and not as objective as he would make it out to be.

There is no doubt that taste plays a role in this kind of thing, but that makes it especially strange for Apple to go against the very well-documented tastes of its current users. They had to work hard to change some of these UI details that really did not have to change, and for what gain?

And there are some real problems. It didn't take me 20 minutes to run into the truly bizarre "can't resize this window easily because the dock is in the way and I can't push the window 'up' any higher" problem. This will piss off a lot of iMac users. And there is really no reason not to tolerate more slop in click locations in the dock.

The one that stands out the most, is that he wants a equalivent replacement for the Apple Menu. Why?

Well, he actually does go on for a page or more about this. The Apple Menu plays a very key role in the interface, in that it's always there, and can be much quicker and easier to use than the Finder (or the dock, in OS X) especially for the more experienced user.

The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu, it is NOT obvious how to add things to it and quite frankly a clear majority of users (both Mac and Windows) I know just put alias' on their desktops.

Again, I have to disagree. It takes a Mac novice about two minutes to realize that, like everything else in the menubar, the Apple is a menu. (In fact, clicking on the dorky blue apple in Mac OS X and getting nothing is just a sick joke for many Mac users...) As for putting aliases on the desktop, there's no problem with this up to a point, but, in my mind, if you ever find yourself fiddling with a lot of windows to uncover that third column of icons...then you begin to appreciate the limits to the approach. The apple menu, being essentially text-based, is capable of holding a lot more stuff, especially if you take good advantage of the hierarchical possibilities.

The "solution" to the (non-)problem of the Apple menu and icon triple parking is the dock. But because the dock is (aggressively) more graphical than the apple menu (or even the desktop), you don't really get a full replacement for either thing, and then you begin to wonder what the real use of this is. Ooh--maybe it save screen real estate for minimized windows. But that then points out another, possibly better solution to the problem of where to put all those windows: the virtual window manager solution. Honestly, Mac users are the kind of people who would always park their browser in the lower left corner of the virtual space, their word processor in the lower left, their "true finder" stuff in the upper left, and odds and ends in the upper right. Or do something completely different, but that's okay. The dock, on the other hand, arbitrarily enforces certain constraints on where things should be, and makes a big deal about apps that are running but not currently "out", when they could just as easily be "out there" on the larger desktop. (Yes, I'm completely serious about this, but I'll accept the fact that I'm probably fairly alone in this preference...)

But enough crabbing. There really is an awful lot to like about Mac OS X, which is why I suspect the flaws and weird parts seem the more striking: this really could have been almost perfect. And there's nothing that upsets a geek more than that.

Interesting "uname" and Login Output

[mholve]

From that same box I mentioned earlier, a somewhat interesting "uname" output:

bash-2.02$ uname -a
Rhapsody stream1 5.6 Kernel Release 5.6: Tue Nov 23 15:07:38 PST 1999; root(rcbuilder):Objects/kernel-187.obj~2/RELEASE_P PC Copyright (c) 1988-1995,1997-1999 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Power Macintosh

Also, note the banner upon login:

Connected to w.x.y.z.
Escape character is '^]'.


4.4 BSD (stream1) (ttyp2)

login:

BSD! :)

Don't forget GnuSTEP

[Straker Skunk]

This looks real good for ObjC. You now what ? NeXTstep really did have 10 years of advance. He's only getting mainstream now... :-)

I'd *love* to see ObjC gain a mainstream-ish following. It's everything C++ and Java should have been.

This would also bode well for the GnuSTEP project and GCC's ObjC front end. GnuSTEP is already integrating some of Apple's OSX changes to the OpenSTEP API, and is already the closest thing out there to OSX (that isn't owned by Apple).

Viruses

[QuantumG]

oh yer, the first user you create, they are in the "admin" group, all binaries on the machine are owned by root:admin and are group writable. There's been a lot of people writing unix viruses recently, they've been laughed at for one reason, binaries are not writable by ordinary users. Trust Apple.

Re:Microsoft and Apple

[Noer]

only decent browser from Microsoft?? Try OmniWeb before you spout off again, you might be pleasantly surprised.

dang!

[zorgon]

Ars always seems to be slashdotted when I try to read one of Siracusa's magnum opi (opuses?). C'mon VA, donate them some big servers (and bandwidth!). But based on what I've read soo far... I think my next home PC's gonna be a Mac running OS X! My family gets the gui chrome, I get /usr ... marriage saved! ;)

reinstall not necessary

[Thumpnugget]

Tsk, tsk... You should have run fdisk/pdisk from the Mac side before wiping your disk. You would have saved yourself a lot of trouble.

DP4 did something very similar to me. The installer rewrites the partition table, adding two (very small) partitions to the beginning of the table, and then does some kind of voodoo magic to keep the remaining filesystems from being corrupted. All I had to do was update my bootloader configuration (yaboot.conf, or similar) to look for my kernel 2 partitions down the line. i.e. pointing to /dev/hdb11 instead of /dev/hdb9. Lo and behold, it booted. Updated fstab and there everything was, back to normal.

However, there is absolutely no warning that it would do this. Apple really should have included a warning for those running alternative operating systems. But then, that isn't really a concern of theirs, I guess.

Re:installing on pre-OS 9?

[King Babar]

If by "over" you mean installing both OSes on the same partition, I wouldn't recommend it, even if you have the latest revision of MacOS 9. There will be many instances of conflicting file and path names. This problem is being worked on for the final release, but for now separate partitions are the way to go.

Hmm...I haven't noticed anything really bad yet. I actually thought the overlay was remarkably clever. The only the truly annoying problem was Netscape "losing" profile information when the directory structure changes after the install. But that's not surprising because Netscape on the Mac is...sucky.

On the other hand, the Carbonized Mozilla (with a dorky punned up name) is apparently very close at hand.

Hacks

[Visigothe]

Actually there are already several hacks for the doc and the "magic poof"

you can check it out over on the macnn forums and http://osx.macnn.com