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Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" Reviews Pour In
hype7 writes "The reviews on Apple's new Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" are starting to come through. The New York Times (free reg required) heaps on the praise: 'Mac OS X 10.2 is the best-looking, least-intrusive and most thoughtfully designed operating system walking the earth today.' MacCentral is positive: 'From what I've seen Jaguar is leaps and bounds ahead of Mac OS X 10.1 in both speed and functionality.' MacWorld has also chimed in: 'for most users, there are a lot of important improvements in this upgrade: performance boosts, improved printing, and interface enhancements will be immediate benefits. And over time, Mac OS X 10.2's new technologies (including Quartz Extreme and Rendezvous) will make the update even more valuable.'"
Just thought it would be interesting to note that Apple is selling "site" licences for home users as what it calls the Mac OS X Family Pack.
Just thought it was neat. Bummed that there was no upgrade price, many users were only going to purchase one box of Mac OS X 10.2 and load it on all thier home machines. Now you can legally upgrade all your home machines, for a much more resonable amount, and Apple gets $199 instead of $129
...What no one is mentioning is that yes the OS is amazing (worth the high price of a Mac IMO) but the Dev tools are simply fantastic. If your a pro you get all these amazing dev tools for free and if your a beginner now you have a reason to start.
The Cocoa framework is, once you understand it, the easiest, most powerful framework there is. You can make amazing, truely object oriented programs with a full GUI in no time t all. Objective C is a great language and the fact you CAN use all your C/C++ code in your programs and integrate things adds to the functionality.
There is an object called NSTask that allows you, the programmer in code, access and use the function of ANY command line tool in your program. Who else offers something like this?
I really suggest to all developers to take a good look at developing for this computer. It's fun, effeciant and powerful. Not to mention free and of course you have all your favorite command line tools, compilers etc. In fact, every program compiled with the free compiler is GCC.
It's simply, great.
Native Java also =)
"Allez Cusine!"
Steve Jobs: Hey, Mike, whassup?
Michael Dell: Drinking, a Bud, hoping like hell that the SEC doesn't decide that I'm next.
Steve Jobs: Anyway, what do you think of MacOS on Dell Hardware?
Michael Dell: It'd be a pain in the ass, Steve. Bill's got my nuts in a pair of vice-grips. I'm trying to break loose, but if I make any moves at all, I start paying Microsoft through the nose. I've made a few deals to ship OS-less PC's with Freedos media in the box, but I'm not sure how that's going to work yet.
Steve Jobs: Well, let me give you an offer like this. Supposing you do manage to start selling PC's without Windows successfully. How about you make us a promise to ship a certain volume of PC's with Mac0SX for x86 along with a copy of Virtual PC or something similiar so your users don't lose out on all thier Windows Apps. It should cost about the same as a Windows XP license, if you don't include the cost of the Windows license they have to buy to get Virtual PC to work.
Michael Dell: I'll do you one better. I understand there are some guys out there who've done a really good job with the Wine project for Linux. Crossover, or something like that. I bet with a small infusion of cash, they could get a version ready for OSX in just a few months.
Steve Jobs: Is it any good?
Michael Dell: It plays Warcraft 3.
Steve Jobs: Hmmm...
Michael Dell: Hmmm...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I've been using Jag for about 2 weeks now... The SMB thing is a pain in the ass...I go back and forth from work and when I forget to unmount shares from one place my computer basically just dies. Relaunching the Finder hardly ever works. iChat is completely worthless. I'm sticking with Adium (tabbed message windows are a must.) The speed is appreciated--especially launching apps, but window resizing has not improved. The Terminal app is faster though, which is nice. I'm still waiting for iCal. Overall I'm very happy, but not everything is perfect. I guess I expect too much.
Didn't get out of the hardware business fast enough? That's an interesting postulation, but I know a few people who still use NeXT workstations for certain tasks, and none who use OpenStep on x86. There has been exactly one successful OS vendor on the x86 platform, but many Unix companies have carved out a good market for themselves selling purpose-built high quality hardware, which apple is doing right now. Putting OS X on that shitty beige Dell with the WinModem, funky sound card, and god-knows-what other cheap knockoff hardware won't give the average user any kind of benefit, if the thing even works at all. This is the problem Linux is running into and having much difficulty with.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
My iBook was actually the cheapest notebook available with all of the features I wanted. iBook: $1,800. Closest x86 alternative (Sony Vaio): $2300. And considering all of the features, the iMacs are very fairly priced.
Bear in mind that there are other things beside CPU speed, especially with laptops. I wanted a 32MB Radeon 7500, when most x86 laptops have 8MB GeForce2 MXs or ATI Rages. I also wanted to be able to plug the thing into any TV without a converter. My iBook does that with a $19 connector; the x86 ones I looked at need a $100 VGA-to-TV converter.
If you're stuck on meaningless numbers (like, oh, I dunno, clock speed) then sure, it looks like a raw deal. But when you look at it from a feature and usability standpoint Apple computers blow away the competition.
Well, it's kinda cool to lurk around .jp sites with full antialiased japanese fonts, even with 10.1.x =)..
I've made a screenshot too.
"Just FYI, Macworld ownd Maccentral and thus anything coming out of Maccentral will be a parrot of what's coming out of Macworld."
Except that I read both reviews, and the MacCentral one is different from the one from MacWorld. The MacCentral review even points out problems with iChat and Word.
Beyond that, know what? If your goal is to run mySQL and PHP as cheaply as possible, you want to be using Linux on a homemade Athlon box. Just like if your primary concern is games, you should use Windows. This isn't about telling every last user in the world to use the same OS.
On the other hand, there are web design and software development apps available for MacOS that make anything on Linux (except maybe KDevelop) look sick. The bundled developer tools alone (Project Builder and Interface Builder) are terrific. You may want to check those out and see if they're a reason to make OS X your primary developer platform.Oh, and if you want a Unix laptop, Apple is clearly the answer, whether you want to use MacOS or Linux.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
As Apple has no copy protection scheme in place, they are worried that they would loose massive amounts of money by just selling an OS to a crowd which has always viewed the OS as a freebie.
It's been said before, but remember that prior to System 7.1, all System updates were free (unless you wanted printed manuals.)
I still remember those glory days in Jr High when I'd walk into the local Apple Computer dealership with a box of Sony disks and walk out with System 7.0.1...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Anyone else notice that there are virtually NO aftermarket upgrades available?
I mean sure you can get a Geforce4 4600 or a Radeon 9000 (if you want to spend a lot), but the only ones that I can find require the proprietary 12V connector for the ADC. My Mac doesn't have this.
The only card that I can find is the Radeon 8500. Nice enough card, but $200?!! WTF?!
This same card is about $70 for the PC. Anyone know of a way to get the PC version to run on a Mac? I assume it would require a ROM flash or something...
Any other suggestions?
BTW, I've played with 10.2 at the Apple Store. It rocks. But I'm going to wait for Fink to be upgraded first.
Fink is great, and I really appreciate everything that the developers are doing. Same with XDarwin. But major support from Apple (including official "hooks" in the OS where necessary -- eg. a seamless window manager) could make OSX a much more attractive unix platform.
I can imagine Apple's viewpoint: "We would rather support Carbon/Cocoa developers than X developers. X on OSX is kludgy anyhow. Use Aqua."
While this is fine for newbies, many companies are only going to support OSX through X applications (Matlab, VMD and others). That's reality. Apple should work damn hard to improve the user experience with these applications. Not as a top priority, mind you. But some real effort nontheless.
What do other people think?
I think that they kind of "snuck" this *major* upgrade on us after the fact. Especially to us "switchers". I'm not very happy that less than a month after I bought a G4 powerbook that I'm told that now to have an up-to-date supported OS I need to shell out full price for a new version. Even on major release updates, most other software vendors have a grace period of when you buy the previous release (a 1-3 months) that you get a low-cost or free upgrade to get the new one. That's good business practice. If you did publicize a new major release coming shortly (which Apple didn't do enough of earlier IMHO), you'd give those who just bought the older release a grace period to get the newer release, otherwise your sales will plummet before the next release with everyone waiting for it rather than buying the shortlived previous release. I'd accept a decent upgrade price as I would expect for other OS's/packages.
Had Apple said earlier that 10.2 was going to be a major release change (that was considered a major release change as opposed to 10.0 to 10.1), or announced it as OS 11 (which doesn't go well with their OSX abbreviation as then it would need to change to OSXI), then I might have held off for another month to get my laptop. I was uninformed and paid the price. That doesn't make me happy.
I was told by Apple support when asking about this that I should have known that something like this would be announced at MacWorld (as I guess the Mac faithful are used to hearing), and that had I known past history of MacWorld announcements, I would have waited. Well, if this practice gets well known, then watch system sales drop even more next year before MacWorld as people wait for announcements then too. I don't think Jobs wants to have to stand up and say that they're last month sales are dropping heavily then will he?
I have been using OS X with Fink also and I find it more fun and in manyn ways superior to Linux. OroboOSX helps, ..... I also have the latest and greatest in Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, etc..... Here we have a pure BSD environment for true *nix users. M$ofties beware! This is not for U.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Yes, and Mac OS 9 and earlier did that in 2D as well...
What Quartz Extreme does is renders everything in OpenGL through your GPU. So all your windows and dialogs etc are Postscript texture mapped onto 3D OpenGL objects.
Sure right now it looks like 2D since they didn't want to make a paradigm shift...but just imagine what you could do with this if you made the 3D actually look 3D. Oh the possibilities...
1. Windows should be completely vectorized. This is faster to load than bitmaps, takes up less RAM, and less hard-drive space.
2. One should have the option to turn off all of the fancy features of Aqua -- i.e., shiny effects, transparency, animation. Why? Firstly, many find these features tacky. Secondly, they serve little or no function. Thirdly, to speed things up. Transferring the rendering of the GUI to the GPU is better than letting the CPU do it (note to X-windows WM developers, hint hint), but it requires many users to needlessly upgrade their GPU when they wouldn't have to otherwise. Thus, one should be able to turn off these resource-hogging features.
3. Minimization/maximization. Windows should minimize to their appicon on the dock, and hold clicking on that appicon should bring up a pop-up menu of the instances of it running. Dragging the appicon of a running application off the dock should quit that application, while dragging an instance of it off the apicons menu should close that instance. After the app's closed, dragging the apicon off the dock again should remove it from the dock, if it was a permanent member. Maximization should maximize to the entire screen.
4. Bring back Apple menu, with all the nifty menus. The old apple menu was great -- had applications, control panel, and many other useful menus. The new one should get those features back. Btw, control panel options should be entirely accessible through menuing: why make us open up a whole new window?
5. Keyboard control. Apple has long had issues with keyboard control -- namely, that you can't do everything you want from the keyboard. I suggest a very simple and traditional fix: F1 opens up File, F2 opens up Edit, F3 opens up View, and so on and so forth; in other words, they F# opens up the #th menu item.
6. Scroll bar buttons. Up/down scroll bar buttons should be available at the top and bottom of a scroll bar column.
7. For other things which Apple should integrate into their WM (as should every WM), see this site.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Apple CUPS does not come with Ghostscript pre-installed; MacOS X apps print using PDF, so Apple uses a Quartz-based PDF RIP in place of Ghostscript.
Just grab ESP Ghostscript from the CUPS site, compile, and install. osxgnu.org might have binary packages as well...
I print, therefore I am.