Review: Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar

I am a bitter old man. I hate change. Mac OS -- not Mac OS X, which is a different OS -- in its various iterations has been my OS of choice for over 15 years, and I have not looked fondly on the day that streak ends. But that day may very well be at hand. I like Mac OS X v10.2 enough that it may soon become my primary OS. From the day Apple acquired NeXT, and Rhapsody was announced, I was excited about the prospect of a "modern operating system" (read: Unix) that would look and act like my beloved Mac OS. But as Mac OS X started to become a reality, it became clear that this was not going to be Mac OS. It was going to be MacNeXT.

Oh, it wasn't entirely un-Mac-like. But it was different enough that I wasn't comfortable in it. I love Mac OS because of its ease of use and applications and interface and all of the little things. I sit in front of this darned computer for most of my waking hours, and if I am not comfortable with it, then it's no good. Life is too short.

Mac OS X v10.0 was a disappointment to me, and many loyalists to Mac OS. Many things in the interface just didn't work at all, or as well as, they did in Mac OS. Many still don't work right, including cmd+arrow keys to open and close arrows in Finder windows (half works: cmd+opt+arrow should open or close all hierarchical folders) and in dialogs with progress bars, such as file copying (doesn't work). The file dialogs, stuck in a column view, are, in my opinion, a glaring design flaw. In many places in the OS, you can't merely hit "return" in an active dialog to select the default button (if there is a default button at all), or "escape" to cancel.

But these problems were just the beginning. In 10.0, performance was bad, even on G4s. This improved significantly in 10.1, but Mac OS v9.2 still seemed faster. The entire Mac OS X UI -- while eminently "lickable," like no OS before it -- was tiring to look at. Anti-aliasing made things harder to read, especially on LCDs, even with the unnaturally large fonts in the Finder; many of the UI elements, including the aqua ones, often distracted the eye.

But in 10.2 (Jaguar), much has changed. The aqua elements are sharper, crisper ... perhaps shinier. Many of the UI elements, such as the Dock, are more subdued. The Finder has more options for changing the appearance of elements such as font size. Gosh, complaining about font size sounds petty, but darnit, it is so much nicer to look at.

The cursors are improved: the busy cursor has gone from an ugly rainbow pinwheel to a cute rainbow pinwheel (and how long before Steve makes it monochrome?). The arrow cursor has a better outline around it. The I-bar cursor still needs work; I lose it on dark backgrounds. In Mac OS, that cursor would change from dark to light when it passed over something dark.

Similarly, I also now lose my selection box in the Finder; in previous versions of Mac OS X, a selection box in a white space would appear grey. Now it is white, and invisible. Oops.

But while in the Finder, one of my old favorites is finally back: multiple Get Info windows. If you select multiple items at once, you still get the single window with all the items, but you can at least now open many Get Info items for individual items, one at a time. And you can get the old behavior of a single floating window ("Inspector") by holding down Option.

I still can't copy the content of a text clipping in the Finder. That's just insane. Open the clipping. Read it. Cmd-c to copy the contents to the Clipboard. This is a no-brainer.

It's all of these little touches that make a significant difference in whether I can comfortably use the OS on a daily basis. And for the first time ever, despite the problems that still exist, I am mostly comfortable.

And man, is Jaguar fast. Everything is just more responsive. Previously, clicking on UI elements would begin a delay that isn't there anymore. It's noticeably quicker. Even Classic seems quicker, despite the fact that Mac OS is no longer included with Mac OS X.

But I still can't do everything in Mac OS X, even with Classic. My UMAX (*spit*) scanner won't work, and likely never will; I use it seldom enough that it's probably a better use of my time and money to boot into Mac OS to use it, for now. I am having trouble getting reliable fax software to work, so I booted into Mac OS to use FaxSTF last weekend (I was going to install the 10.0 installer I have and then the Jaguar update when it comes out, but 10.0 won't install at all on Jaguar, so I am probably out of luck with that, though I am keeping my eye on Cocoa eFax, too).

But most important to my comfort is that all of the apps I know and love from Mac OS -- BBEdit, Interarchy, DragThing, Mozilla, Eudora -- work natively in Mac OS X. The operating system exists to host applications. They are the reason I use the computer. I want the same apps, and, thankfully, I have them. Further, much of Mac OS is still there, like QuickTime, AirPort, Keychains, AppleScript, and Internet Config (although this works somewhat oddly in some cases, and there's not much of a UI for it).

But the big question is: why should I use Mac OS X? If I am just trying to recreate Mac OS, why not just stick with Mac OS?

There are two answers. The first is a single word: Unix. I don't need to describe in detail why Unix is a Good Thing to Slashdot readers, but I will say that XDarwin and fink are two of the most important features of Mac OS X, and having a stable operating system is a joy. The stability of Mac OS certainly was pretty good -- ignore the hypocrites who used to praise Mac OS but now decry it -- but it can't match Mac OS X. That I can put my laptop to sleep, and wake immediately, and still have many TCP/IP connections open, is incredible to me.

The second answer is that new features are added to Mac OS X to make it too compelling to ignore.

The i* software suite -- iChat, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync, iProbablyForgotSomething -- are in many cases some of the best products to hit personal computing in many years. iMovie and iDVD are leaders in their niches. iTunes was a bit flat in its earlier versions, but gets more compelling in its feature set every year. iChat is actually a nice chat client: unobtrusive, mostly well-integrated into the system and Address Book, and easy on the eyes (it's also a little buggy; expect a few crashes). iPhoto is a nice beginning, but really needs better features for more flexible exporting of image metadata to be well-used. iCal and iSync aren't yet released, but by all accounts look very promising: how long before I ditch my PDA, or at least Palm Desktop's contacts and calendar apps?

Then there's Rendezvous -- the "zero configuration" networking -- which is only beginning to get significant use, but is sure to be a staple of many applications for years to come. Despite having some problems with printer sharing (making a comeback, finally) via Rendezvous -- I mistakenly had some computers on my network with a 255.0.0.0 subnet mask while others were 255.255.255.0, and this was enough to throw it off -- it requires zero configuration once you're configured properly.

Sherlock is now finally its own separate beast, with Find integrated into the Finder (imagine that!) and no longer is it scraping web pages, but it is enabled with web services goodness.

All of these features and more are only available in Mac OS X. If you want them, you need to switch.

Still, some things simply don't work in Mac OS X v10.2. The upgrade went smoothly, but various third-party apps, and even some Apple programs, had trouble. My chosen replacements for the Dock -- DragThing and LiteSwitch X -- both needed updates (Proteron says LiteSwitchX update should be available any day now). WeatherPop needed updating. WirelessDriver -- a serious boon to PowerBook G4 users who need to work more than 20 feet from a wireless base station -- no longer works, and it's not been updated in many months.

Apple Remote Desktop 1.0.x doesn't work; you'll need to run Software Update to get version 1.1. Unfortunately, even the new version only half-worked for me; the client side seems fine, but the Admin app says it is not installed properly. I wanted to just uninstall the whole thing and start over, but there is no uninstall option, that I could find. So I deleted all the files that the Installer installs, and then tried to reinstall, and the Installer says it is already installed. So now I have nothing, and I can't change it.

I thought for awhile that Apple's ScriptMenu didn't work, too; it was still sitting in /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ where I had left it, but it was not launching. I searched for ScriptMenu on the discs and hard drive for information or a replacement, and on Apple's site, but found nothing. I was later informed the name had been changed from "ScriptMenu" to "Script Menu": the replacement was in the /Applications/AppleScript/ directory. Oops.

fink has a few problems, as one might expect with an OS update that sees a move from gcc2.9 to gcc3.1. Most of the things I tried worked fine without recompiling, including XFree86. But xterm and bash broke because of dependencies relating to the change gcc3.1, and manconf (a wrapper for Mac OS X's man) broke, because the Jaguar man doesn't accept the -C option to specify a configuration file. The workaround is to install fink's man, or at least remove /sw/bin/man in the meantime. The fink team is working to resolve the issues, and updates are forthcoming. An update for xterm is available on the XonX page.

SSHAgentServices, which sets an ssh-agent for the entire login session, stopped working; but the author of SSHPassKey, which I use to provide the ssh password to GUI apps, said he would integrate ssh-agent services into the next version of his application. Some of TinkerTool was obsoleted by 10.2, as Apple has added some of those preferences into their UIs, things like Terminal transparency, and what to do with newly mounted CDs and DVDs, so there's a new version available.

Currently, SharePoints doesn't work. This configures NetInfo to allow you to share arbitrary folders with any users via file sharing. So now I don't have a reasonable file server, unless I want to give everyone admin access to see all the volumes on the machine. But the author says he has discovered the problem, and a new version is forthcoming. This makes me quite happy.

There's also the long-standing and unresolved problem of AvantGo not working with Mac OS X. It's amazing that this is still broken.

I'm not making any firm commitments, but I am using Mac OS X as my primary OS right now, and it's the least painful it's ever been. That's more of a compliment than it seems. But there's enough that doesn't work, enough that's raw -- especially with third-party software -- that I'd recommend people who don't like pain to wait at least a few weeks, if not a month or so, to allow all of the issues to be worked out, tech notes to be published, and workarounds to be posted.

Comments

Modern OS?

[diamondc]

Unix has been around for 30 yrs+...

Re:What a bunch of whining!

[be-fan]

OS X, 10.1 runs fine, if a bit sluggish on my 9500. To hear people complaining about its performance on G4s makes me laugh. I don't buy it-- I think this is just an excuse from people who are too grumpy to switch from OS 9.
>>>>>>>>
You're just one of those people who'se reflexes are so slow, that you're technically dead. I've heard some people say that WinXP ran just fine on their K6 400Mhz with 128MB of RAM! WinXP doesn't run okay on my 2GHz laptop with 128MB of RAM (swapping). Hell, KDE 3.0 only became truely usable for me when I upgraded from my 1.5GHz Athlon to my current 2 GHz P4.

Re:Smile

[Paladin128]

I'd love to try OSX... but the hardware is too damn expensive. I'm a college student, using a K6-III/400. I'm planning on spending $600 on parts for a new Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67ghz) based system this fall that will kick the pants off all but the highest end Macs in performance.

And don't give me that "G4 is 10 times faster per clock than any supercomputer on the planet" crap. The G4 is a damn fine processor, but an 800mhz G4 (which comes on most new Macs) is about equivalent to a 1.1 ghz Athlon, or a 1.4 GHZ P4. Plus, Macs in the sub $1800 price range come with a GeForce2 MX or GeForece4 MX... I'll be getting a GeForce4 Ti4200. I'll price two similarly configured systems... let's first assume that the iMac's 15" LCD is worth $500:

iMac (from apple's web site):
1GB SDRAM - 2 DIMMs
Keyboard/Mac OS X - U.S. English
40GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX w/32MB DDR graphics
Total: $1,749.00 (not including tax, shipping)

PC:
ASUS A7N266-VM (nForce 220D) $ 80
AMD Athlon-XP 1800+ (retail box) $ 90
2x Crucial 512MB PC2100 $140
nVidia GeForce2MX 32MB $ 50
Western Digital WD400BB 40GB $ 70
Toshiba SD-R1202 CD-RW/DVD-ROM $ 80
Enermax ATX case+300W power $ 60
Name-brand 15" LCD monitor $500
(Sound and ethernet integrated) $ 00
Keyboard and mouse $ 30
Total (before tax, shipping): $1100

So that's $649 difference. I'd personally not get myself the LCD, and spend $150 on a decent 17" CRT. The Athlon system also has a faster processor, and faster RAM.

Yeah, I know you are paying for the finished product, but Dell has some sub-$1000 systems I could live with (after a RAM upgrade). And yeah, no firewire -- big deal.

Please don't think this is an anti-apple flame! It's not. I'm just hoping Apple lowers their prices so more could use their good products.

Tired of being told to switch

[defile]

Look, I'm really happy that people are finding MacOS X useful. It's about time that they had a decent low-level system too, and FreeBSD is a fine choice (lets not talk about Mach). Some Linux users even find their way to MacOS X and never look back. Again, fantastic.

I however, have no interest in switching. The appeal of Linux to me is that it has a real hacker culture, which you can't develop just by sprinkling open source pixie dust and bundling ssh and ping. Solaris has these too, sometimes it comes with source. But I'm not using Solaris, am I? Apple put together the ingredients, but is still missing the, uh, the soul. Yeah. So the cake comes out lousy.

I don't care about the super smooth GUI (I prefer wmaker and vtwm myself), or for that matter the applications that run on it. I'm not a visual artist, or sound engineer. But if I did care about these things, I might be annoyed if it's not open source. Switching to an OSX box for me involves switching to slower, more expensive hardware plus a software tax for a system I don't personally care about. It's safe to say that I will probably never switch.

Sorry.

UI Concerns

[jgalun]

As a former Amiga and Mac user, and current Windows user, I have to say that while I have considered switching back to the Mac, I will not do so while the MacOS X GUI is so flawed. I agree with the concerns expressed by pudge in this review, and with the reservations expressed on asktog.com and by other UI experts about OS X's interface. The one great thing about MacOS classic, the one thing that made it worth its many flaws, was its incredibly correct GUI. Everything was set up right. In MacOS X, a lot of things are wrong.

Two things are most integral to my computing experience: speed and GUI ease. Right now, the PC offers a much better price/performance ratio. Unless MacOS X returns to the Mac legacy of a superior UI, I will not switch back.

Hardware Monopoly

[The Pi-Guy]

But they are.

They have a monopoly on hardware that'll run any Mac OS. "But that's where Apple makes all it's money!" Then they shoulda gone for a business plan that wasn't bullshit. Not my problem.

--j

Re: Oh, I get it now.

[User 956]

I get it now. Slashdot will review MacOSX, but not Windows 2000 or XP; not because it's a better OS, but because it's not a Microsoft OS. Somehow, giving your money to a giant corporation for a commercial, closed product is "better" than giving it to some other giant corporation for a commercial, closed product.

Why doesn't pudge review Yellow Dog Linux, or Mandrake for PPC?

Okay, time to throw out my a**hole, i mean opinion

[DAQ42]

Okay, for you people griping about some of the features of OS X 10.2, here's what I've found from using the OS for over 2 months now (from some early dev releases up to the final release).
- Mac OS 9 schtuff. Ugh, I got sick of troubleshooting Mac OS 9. Always having to use some 3rd party crap optimizer or file system rebuilder. Ugh! Fsck it and forget it. Thank you whoever wrote the HFS+ version of fsck. No more Norton Disk Wreaker for me (and it's true, you don't need it anymore!). All the whiners complaining about having to learn a few new tricks. Please, if you've stopped learning, you must be brain dead. I love learning new stuff and Mac OS X has been a great challenge (but I really wish some things were harder to figure out. Go Apple for making an OS like Unix intuitive).
- You *nix freaks. Yeah, you. I'm not leaving you out of this one. Quit asking for x86 hardware. Please, let us have our RISC processors and vector optimization. I don't want to be stuff trying to figure out BIOS programming again. Open Firmware is really powerful and really neat (just ask SUN!). Please grow a brain and realize that "platform" means the whole widget, not just the OS. Just because you use a *nix doesn't mean your on a different platform if it's still on x86. As for "limited" selection of hardware, fine, you got me there, there is less hardware available for the Mac. But guess what? It's better that way because I don't have to deal with driver conflicts, cheap chips, or major meltdowns because I bought a $49 ethernet card from Generic, Inc. I know that is it says "Mac Compatible" it's been tested, and it will work (99% of the time, yeah, I know all about ATTO and Adaptec and their wonderful disclosure BS). Now then, what else can I yell about.
- Plumbing! Yes, plumbing. The software behind the software. All those nifty services that Mac OS X uses. NetInfo (yay, NeXT!), lookupd (um, it's gotten better, really), lpd, lpr, named, mDNS, CUPS, Quartz (and Quartz Extreme), etc, et. al. Go read the website. I don't feel like listing it all. Man, I even recompiled a few *nix binaries from source and they worked! Now that's pretty nifty if you ask me. As for you bash fans, they added the bash shell too, just to make you happy. Now wasn't that nice?
- And to those who think that they are entitled to a free upgrade from 10.1. Really? Are you a member of the ADC? Did you pay your ADC membership dues? You didn't? Oh, well, I guess you'll have to pay $129 like anyone else not part of the "testing" demographic. Yes, I got my copy of Jaguar early. Yes, I've been using it since BEFORE it was release in March 2001. Now shut it. If you want it, pay for it. Otherwise warez is and break the law. If you get busted, Apple is not going to bail you out for your own stupidity. Gah!
- I could rant more if you'd like but this is really defocusing my brain. I use Macs. I have M$ and all it's malarkey. I also use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris 7,8, and 9, and only when I am forced to Windowz. But Mac OS X has made me like to work on computers again. Mac OS X is...is...
It's one of the best things to come out of the computing industry since the Apple I. If you don't like it, you need to ask better questions and stop complaining. But some people just want to whine. Here, have some cheese. Now shut up. Now I'm going to shut up.

Mod this down to -5 (raving lunatic)
(god, I've been reading /. too much, I even have a sig file now)