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Preview of Mac OS X 10.2
andrew writes "Some developers have written to the USA Register to share some of the changes and new features in the Mac OS X 10.2 beta released at WWDC (codenamed Jaguar). The story outlines some performance enhancements as well as changes to both Finder and Dock; there are a few screenshots as well." Update: 05/13 22:22 GMT by P : More screen shots! Zo0ok writes "Think Secret has a bunch of screenshots and a description of new features in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)."
shoogagoogagunga (shoogagoogagooga)
:(
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Check out the story further down on the apple.slashdot.org main page, in particular this link . Are the Apple people assholes or what?
The middle mind speaks!
As troll, ignorant, redundant.
The Good:
Hey, those are some nice cursors!
The install process has an "archive and install" option which presumably backs up your old "System" folder and puts a nice new fresh one in there. That's nice.
The "optimization" phase of the install has a percentage meter now instead of vague indeterminate values.
First impression after install: It's f-a-s-t. Very, very fast.
The dock is missing the stripes, and it looks much better that way.
The Eject key now pops up a translucent eject key icon like brightness and volume.
Flurry is a standard "Screen Effect" now. Not a screen saver, mind you; a "Screen Effect".
The new Address Book is very nice looking, works well. In a thoughtful nod to outside the US, there's lots of different ways to display address info depending on what your country's conventions are.
The "BlackLight-esque" reverse gamma effect is greyscale, very creepy in a "Tales From The Darkside" way, but cooler than "Blacklight", as all the blue doesn't have it's gamma values reverse to ugly orange.
It's not as creepy as "ZoomView" which lets you zoom the screen way, way big. It's a neat effect though. I thought it was going to be more vector scaling, but it's a raster scale.
Speaking of smooth raster scaling, the Finder? Sm-o-o-o-th. The new window scaling open/close animation is awesome -- it makes me feel like I live in the future.
"Enable Access For Assistive Devices"? What's that?Sounds interesting.
They have finally admitted that AppleTalk can only be used on one network port at a time, i.e. if you've set it to AirPort, your machine won't show up on the Ethernet AppleTalk network.
Icon scaling now shows what the pixel count of the scaling value you've set is (32x32, 48x48, 128x128, etc.); very nice, this was one of my complaints from the public beta. The idea that my icons might be 49x49 was keeping me up at night.
"Snap to Grid" gently glides any dropped icons into grid position.
Software Update keeps a tidy list of what you've installed.
There's a forward button in the Finder.
Finder spring loaded folders' icon pop "open" when you hover a file over them.
Mail.app (1.2v517) is very, very nice. It's got the rules of Eudora and the junk mail filters of Entourage plus it's neatly integrated with iChat. This is the Mail.app version that I hope will win your heart, like it's won mine.
iChat looks ok to me, I dunno, I don't use IM that much. Maybe this will change that. It's sure got a nice icon and lots of options.
Disc Copy now mounts images concurrently.
Apple System Profiler and Print Center are now pretty lil' Cocoa things.
The Bad (glaring problems that remain from 10.1.x):
The built-in spell check dictionary is still fairly inadequate. There's lots of words missing.
The system boots from a cold start faster than 10.1.4, but still not what I'd call "fast".
The Ugly (problems specific to 10.2 preview that seem likely be fixed upon actual release):
There are some odd junk graphics and redraw problems that appear when you wiggle windows around or drag parts of them offscreen. No doubt this is the "EXTREME!!!" part of Quartz Extreme. I kid Quartz Extreme, I really do.
Energy Saver powers down the monitor but won't power it up so much.
Some 3rd party apps just refuse to work.
In short: "Awesome work Apple!" This is going to be a kick ass release.
~jeff
It has been asked a few times and maybe some /.ers can finally put it to bed. What can we expect with 10.2 coming inline with BSD 4.4? Features? Unix Tools? Bash? What?
I played with a Mac G4 with the wide flat screen and opened up the iMovie and it was attached to a camera and it was dreamy! The picture was at least 640x480 and there were no skips or bumps. The screen was awesome, but probably not good enough for gamers, but I don't care I don't do games. It looked like it would be really great for dvd movies too.
Only 'flamers' flame!
What third-party applications haven't worked for you?
That seemed like the only probematical part of the report, so it got me curious.
D
This sounds great! I use OS X as much as I can on my 500/66 g3 ibook with 256mb ram, though I do boot to 9 to use Logic Audio, Reaktor, and tons of virtual instruments.
My father runs a desktop publishing company and relies purely on macs. He has three on his desk even (including a cube and an ancient and upgraded power computing clone), and he sure likes to bitch about some of X. Font management is his #1 concern. And Mail.app is his #2.
He uses X on an 700 mhz G3 iMac, the other 7 macs are using OS 9.
Apple is doing amazing things these days. Let's hope the dual 1.4 gighertz G4s with fast DDRAM aren't just rumors!
.
I downloaded the developers preview and it had problems with my PC geforce 2 mx (that works fine in 10.1 and 9.2. It will boot up and once it loads the background (or Quartz Extreme) they screen will turn grey. Even when I load the CD1 of the install cds it does the same thing. I had to put my old ATI video card back in. my Pc geforce 2 is a PNY Verto MX400 from compusa, it worked beautifuly with out flashing.. I hope this problem gets fixed. But its amazing!!!
keanmarine.com
When the ScreenLock is activated, can I finally log in as another user? ala XP or ala Linux virtual screen. This is the only thing missing from the "Perfect" version of MacOS X? still?
Lenny Primak PP-ASEL-IA,Heli
Anyone tried it on one of the earlier titanium powerbooks, the ones with only 16mb video memory? The new 'suggested system requirements' say 32 so I was curious if there is still such an 'enormous speed boost' and if all of the great things are still there to gain even on a 'non-suggested' computer.
To the best of my knowledge, Apple has only presented this release as "Jaguar", "the next major release of Mac OS X". Nowhere have they stated "10.2". And I think it's premature to assume Apple will name it thus, since they might be able to better justify charging for a 10.5 release.
.2 rather than the rather arbitary ".5", but I suspect Apple will go with the latter.
Personally, I hope they go with
Two cock in my pussy! It feel so good!
For anyone out there who has previewed 10.2 on a computer w/out adequate video hardware to support Quartz Extreme: have you noticed any slowdown compared to 10.1.x? I have a 450 MHz DP w/ 384 MB of RAM and an older video card; once I upgraded from 128 MB of RAM, OS X's UI became fast enough for my taste (tho I know others are grumpy about it). I'm drooling over all the 10.2 features but I don't want my experience to get any slower -- but keeping steady is OK!
jf
The one thing that will keep Mail.app from being my default mail program is the absence of threads. Add that, and I'm there, dude.
I'm worried about this 10.2 release, everyone says its going to be great but I'm sitting here with my just bought old school imac g3/700 with its 16 meg video and 256 of ram, and am worried. Quartz extreme doesn't look like its going to run on my computer and I'm just wondering what happened to the OS updates that would make things run faster, not slower? My 3 pc's have been with me since win 98 and are all running XP with no slow down at all. I expect new games or graphics apps are the things I need to upgrade for not an OS release one month after I get my computer. When someone drops 2 grand on a computer With all the bells and whistles it should be OS upgradeable for years, or hell at least one.
OS X.2 looks REALLY cool, but there is one thing that will probably never change. It's not a technical issue, but business practices at Apple.
They still sell "North American English" versions of their computers all over the continent. That's not so bad, until the speach recognition doesn't recognise "schedule" and "zed", to name a few.
It also doesn't know "colour", "realise", or "flavour" to name a few.
It would be quite easy for Apple to sell "US English" in the USA, and "International English" in Canada.
So why not?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
suppose for a moment that someone accidentally happened to find Jag_Dev_Seed_CD_1.dmg somewhere and downloaded it.
furthermore, suppose that they have an ibook only, with no mac cd-r. they do however have a few pc's with cd-r capabilities.
how would one go about burning a disk image to make a bootable cd? is it even safe to copy a disk image to a pc?
just , you know...asking. for a friend. yeah...
I'd sell my soul (or what's left of it after 16 years of parochial education) for a stylus that has something in it that makes the iBook trackpad think it's my finger.
Who's going to lug a tablet around just to have handwriting recogntion? If we can get by with graffiti on a teenie input space, perhaps we can get by with Inkwell if we had a stylus that can write on the area of a typical apple trackpad.
is this pie in the sky or within the realm...?
(yikes - i see now even my 1400's trackpad is about the size of the palm m1xx series lcd...)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I am in Apple's target market. I am a long-time Unix user. I appreciate quality! I lust after their laptops. But I just can't buy one, yet.
This is because I can't use their laptops' keyboards. I need the key to the left of the 'A' to be a Ctrl key. This is not just a want; it is a genuine need based upon ergonomic reasons.
Apple's cost to satisfy my keyboard desires is small: re-design their laptops to use USB keyboards just like the rest of their line. Unfortunately for all unix users, Apple hasn't done this yet. Their laptops still use the ADB keyboards, which are horribly broken-by-design. ADB keyboards are a vestage of the old insanely-bad input devices days, when Apple didn't have an industrial-strength unix core. Apple has been ignoring unix users' requests for a usable keyboard for a very long time, so I don't expect them to change their ways, even though they now have a unix OS.
Apple: Please fix your laptop keyboards! Please re-design your laptop motherboards to use a modern up-to-date USB keyboard, to go along with your robust and mature modern up-to-date unix OS!!
Note: is is now possible to use the keyboard with Debian GNU/Linux, but as of yet, Apple has not made it possible for unix old-timers to use with OSX.
My standard rant follows:
Apple Laptop Keyboards are Unacceptable to Unix Users
Apple designs horrible keyboards. ADB keyboards (which are still used on all of Apple's laptops) are unusable to unix users who need a Ctrl key to the left of the 'A'.
Proper Keyboard Design
- When a key is pressed, the keyboard sends a keyPress
event.
- When a key is released, the keyboard sends a keyRelease
event.
- Each key is assigned a different keycode.
Nothing more, nothing less.ADB Keyboard Mis-design
- When the key to the left of the 'A' (CapsLock) is
pressed, the ADB keyboard sends both a keyPress event
and a keyRelease event.
- When the CapsLock key is then released, the ADB keyboard
sends NO events.
- When the CapsLock key is next pressed, the ADB keyboard
sends NO events.
- When the CapsLock key is then released, the ADB keyboard
sends both a keyPress event and a keyRelease
event.
- The above cycle repeats over and over.
This is WRONG ! Apple's ADB keyboards are broken by design.Unix Users Cannot Use Apple's ADB Keyboards
What this means is that unix users who need the key to the left of the 'A' to be a Ctrl key cannot use Apple ADB keyboards. You can easily reprogram the CapsLock key to be a Ctrl key and get rid of the badness of the CapsLock key, but you can't get the required goodness of the Ctrl key to the left of the 'A'.
Apple Loses Sales to Unix Users
All Apple laptops have the horrible broken-by-design ADB keyboards which are unusable to unix users. I want to buy an Apple laptop, but I cannot and will not until Apple builds input devices usable by unix users.
I thought the code name Jaguar was for the new Quicktime 6, which is having problems (put nicely, without all the swearing) being released. Your saying Mac OS X 10.2 was also named Jaguar?
It's refered to as 10.2 everywhere, including apple's own site.
I'm a long term Unix user (12 years all up) and I've had a power mac g4 for two years. Nothing you say above is true.
I'm using OS 10.1.4 on a G3/400 iMac (2001) and I have to tell you that it rocks! If 10.2 offers better performance than what I'm getting now, I'll be very happy...
However... to make it do so, I bumped the RAM to 1gig and replaced the 10gig HD with a 120gig Western Digital 7200rpm drive. Maxing out the RAM and replacing the HD with a 7200rpm one made a _WORLD_ of difference in boot time as well as application performance.
For those that whine that their G3's and older G4's won't be 'fast enough', I offer that if you tweek them a bit, you will see performance that will make you smile. It's the best money I've spent yet.
--geethree
Where exactly on Apple's site is it referred to as Mac OSX v10.2?
Steve M
remember to post the instructions here.
Has anyone who's seen the preview comment on IPSec?
Do we get a lickable Cocoa interface, or is it dependent on the command line?
I don't mean a multithreaded app.
I mean tracking the threads of an email conversation.
i would buy it.
I have a BUSlink firewire hard disk (not the most spectacular of toys), and it does not show up as a bootable drive under 10.1.x. Is there any indication that the bootability of my poor storage device might change with the release of that which we call Jaguar?
The speed boost I've received by installing 10.2 can very well be described as amazing. I'm on a G3/450 with the oldskool 16MB Rage 128 running the new 10.2 developer release, and everything is unarguably faster for me. I don't know about this whole "Quartz Extreme" thing, but if must be pretty damn cool if I could get such a speed boost even without it being active (because my graphics card is so outdated).
This can only get better and better. A few 3rd party apps don't run, but the speed! Oh the speed!
Anybody care to comment on how Quartz Extreme will affect PDF performance, particularly viewing PDFs in Adobe Acrobat? I've noticed that under X, scrolling performance is just plain terrible.
Here's a comparison with the same 12 page PDF (a report from RHK on Internet bandwidth versus revenue for 2002 -- hey, I'm at work, you know! But the document is two columns, in color, and has plenty of charts)
800 MHz Dell Latitude (Windows 2000. 256 MB RAM, Acrobat Reader 5.0, scrolling on the internal LCD): 50 seconds
667 MHz PowerBook G4 (512 MB memory, Mac OS 10.1.4, Acrobat 5.0, scrolling on LCD, but with a second monitor connected): about 8.5 minutes.
Note that during this time, the Windows computer is scrolling the document fast enough that the text is blurry, and I didn't notice appreciable popup of the images, so it looked reasonably smooth.
Under Mac OS X, the scrolling was so slow, that I had to switch to the click-lock function on my mouse because my index finger got tired. Generally, the page would stop rendering about half-way through until the previous page completely disappeared off the screen. I don't recall Mac OS 9 being this bad.
Launching Classic and running Acrobat 4.0 on the same PowerBook, I got these results: scrolling on the internal CD (and this time, playing a MP3 in iTunes): 2.5 minutes.
Is this just Adobe making a crappy port of Acrobat to Mac OS X? Is it a lack of hardware acceleration? Is it a Carbon problem? At this point, I don't care what's causing the problem, but the performance just stinks and it makes OS X look bad.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Not quite a Newton, but Newton inspired. Ratbert wanted to be Dilbert's PDA. Write on his tummy, and his handwriting recognition would see the phrase, and he'd remember it. Dilbert picked him up, started scribbling. Ratbert reads it "Weave me a cone, yew cupid bat".
And actually the later Newton's were much better at it, from what I remember.
MacOS X is definatly an OS a lot of people are going to consider switching too in the comming years...
:).
For me, i love the Unix command line, and i am quite fond of BSD after being frustrated with Linux and its complexities...
BSD to me is a little more simplier (i like OpenBSD) and i love the small footprint of it. I dont live on Open Source operating systems, i use Windows mostly, because its freak'n easy and i dont have to screw arround to get my internal modem to work, or printing and so forth.
I would love to get an Amiga, however, they prolly wont be that usable for me until OS5 and thats WAY off
If i was looking to get a new computer in the comming year, i would seriously consider MacOSX as other geeks quite like me will also do. This is mainly due to the Unix Structure that i have come to admir(i love bash) and also Apples infomous user friendlyness.
It looks like to me this is a seriously powerful OS and one that is going to take the Geek community by storm. Hopfuly with time, average consumers will catch on!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
Apple said, "here's what we'll do", "We'll release OS ten point two", "The graphics are faster", "cos thats what you asked fer", If they're not then I think I will sue.
I've just been told by a source at an Apple sales partner that the old languages covered by WorldScript will now again be featured in OSX. Previously only Japanese and (Chinese?) were included, but now the Eastern European and Middle Eastern languages will also be included. I hope this does not mean we still have to buy localised versions of the applications because they usually were twice as much as normal apps.
I'm suspecting that Apple is promoting the heck on this relese for a very good reason. It probably will not be released as 10.2 instead, sold as 10.5.
Tradiitionally.5 OS upgrades from Apple have never been free. (7.5, 8.5, etc.)