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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)."
Not! A lot of the action in Jaguar is going to be behind the scenes. the Reg article only focuses on the Finder/Dock because these guys are classic (OS 9) freaks who are more concerned about form (looks) than function.
Here's a better preview of Jaguar
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/
To summarize here are some of the big changes in Jaguar
Architecture: BSD 4.4, CUPS, PAM, POSIX additions, GCC 3
Networking: Rendezvous (ZeroConf), IPSEC, IPv6, Exchange Support (this is a biggie)
FileSystem: Active Directory, Open Directory, seamless SMB support (client/server)
Media: Full MPEG-4 support, AAC audio, 5.1 support. ISMA 1.0 support.
Universal Access: Boatload of innovation here.
Quartz Extreme: Full OpenGL compositing of movies and pix and text.
Apps: Upgraded Mail (exchange support), semantics based Mail filtering. iChat, Systemwide Database, new AddressBook, Sherlock 3
Inkwell: The best handwriting recognition in the world (from Newton) comes to OS X
User Interface improvements: Integrated find in the Finder. Find by name and find by text in a finder window. This is huge! Quickdraw text over Quartz. Many, many finder tweaks bringing it on par with OS 9 experience and imho way beyond.
And of course, a speed boost through and through.
Also, I am sure Steve is going to demo some more new features at Macworld NY. I am sure there is going to be a lot of surprises at that show.
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
I think it's worth noting, though, that almost no Macs purchased in the last year or two can use Quartz Extreme to its fullest potential because that requires 32mb VRAM.
Apparently performance improvements go way, way beyond Quartz Extreme since reports are saying the system's fast even on G3 iMacs with minimal VRAM.
D
AGP 2x or faster
ATI Radeon or better
nVidia GeForce2 or better
If you have those your 10.2 install will use Quartz extreme. However, 32mb VRAM is recommended for optimal performance. If you don't have 32mb some of the more complicated features might be disabled or scaled back.
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
Don't worry it won't, I've seen it with my own eyes on old hardware and it is indeed faster. The only bad thing I've seen so far is that its due "late summer".
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.