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

Smile

[gralem]

Some had to start making the hard changes. Apple is STRENGTHENING itself in the long run. I think most people on /. are warming up to Linux. Most "classic" mac users I know finally find Jaguar usable. For every complaint I've heard about OSX, I can list 10 or more features and reasons why we should ALL be using it. Starting at Apple's not-so-crappy Open Source involvement (gcc3 work gets back to the gcc3 people), to it's stability and use of Unix.

---gralem

Re:Smile

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

"I think most people on /. are warming up to Linux".
You might be onto something! :-)

Re:Smile

[mosch]

Yes, it's cheaper to build your own than to buy a well-integrated, well-tested PC, that has a guaranteed product support life (mac or PC). If you want a relevant comparison, you'd really need to compare the iMac to something from the Dell Optiplex line.

• 1GB Ram
• 40 Gig HD
• DVD-ROM/CD-RW
• 15" flat screen

Dell's price: $2041.00, or about $300 more than the iMac.

If you want to deal with all the incompatibilities that exist between various pieces of hardware and their drivers, then yes, you can build a system on the cheap. If you want to buy something that will Just Work(tm), and will continue to do so for at least 3 or 4 years, Apples are a good deal.

Re:Smile

[MoneyT]

You've obviously had a bad run with the macs you own, my sincerest apologies. However, I would like to point out 2 facts:

1) You're case seems to be in the extreme, just like the horor stories of windows machines that crash every 15 minutes, or on linux users that can even launch netscape wthout creating kernel panics. And of ocurse there's the other end of the spectrum, winodws users who claim never to have had a crash in their life. Linux users whol claim that it was easier to use that windows and mac users who swear up and down that their machines are 100% perfect and never crash. Each of these cases is on the extreme end of computing, and while some of them may be valid (as in your case) they are not the normal user experience.

2) There is something in the mac that keeps you buying. As you said, your first iMac had problems, but implying you have more than one. You speak of beige G3s and B&W G3s, plus you continue to buy the OSes, so there must be something in the mac which you like. And like alot because any PC user buying computers with those problems from Del of Compaq would have stopped long ago. It is for thise reason that people buy macs. Not for just style, but for whatever it is that they see in the mac that makes it worth ignoring a couple lousy hardware setups.

I agree with you in your stance of not wanting to buy OS X.2 quite yet. However, I offer a suggestion. Go to compUSA and buy yourself a copy of X.2. If I recall correctly CompuUSA has a 14 day return policy on software. Take the software home, and try it out. See if it work son your machines. If it doesn't, take it back to CompUSA for your refund, if it does, you could keep it, or take it back and shop for a better deal. Either way, you get to find out whether the system will work properly, and there is little risk involved.

Re:Smile

[gig]

> People buy PC's because of price, Mac's because of style...

I buy Macs because they just work. I used to build my own PC systems, but now I just buy a new Mac ever 2-3 years and get everything I need in one purchase, along with a great service contract (AppleCare), and an OS feature called Software Update that automatically keeps all the included software (Mac OS X, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.) current. Now I spend less overall, too, because I don't have to upgrade piecemeal to make up for what the vendor left out. For example, the oldest of the four Macs here is from January, 1999, and it has FireWire, USB, a 15" flat panel display, and 1.5GB RAM. It runs Mac OS X great (especially 10.2) and can edit DV, be a jukebox, play DVD's, burn CD's and all kinds of other stuff that people are doing TODAY with computers. It also has space for four hard drives and three empty PCI slots. That computer has paid for itself again and again and again and it is still trucking. It does have style as well ... translucent blue display, tower, mouse, and keyboard look beautiful ... that's just candy, though ... an extra.

Re:Smile

[gig]

> It is also useful to know exactly what parts are in the machine so
> that if something does not work it is very easy to select the correct drivers.

I don't want to know that stuff anymore ... that's why I use Macs now. I just upgraded three Macs to Mac OS X 10.2 in the past few days, and it was the simplest procedure you can possibly imagine. And (read this carefully) every change was for the better ... it just worked. The "family 5-pack" of full versions of Mac OS X that I used is also only 2/3 the cost of one copy of Windows XP Pro, and there is none of the product activation bullshit to go through. I might keep a fourth Mac I was going to sell, since putting Mac OS X on it is free.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I know my PowerBook G4 has ATI graphics hardware (a RADEON with 16MB I think), and my Power Mac has an NVIDIA GeForce something with at least 32MB. I know this because I read it in the specs when I bought the machines. I was interested at the time only to make sure that each machine would display fast graphics with great quality in full color at the highest native resolution of their displays, and that's what they do. It just works all the time and it's one less thing to be responsible for. I use multiple computers now, with all kinds of other hardware ... the fact that a Power Mac or PowerBook is ONE widget really, really simplified things for me. It was more than six months before I opened the Displays system preference on my Power Mac with Cinema Display. I just never had a single moment where that ever seemed necessary. I plugged the single cable from the display into the only place on the back of the computer where it would fit, and switched on the system and it Just Worked. It wasn't just that it lit up, or that I could see a picture ... the picture was perfect, in full color, at the right resolution. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a PC user's house and see a modern graphics adapter with 21" display running 800x600 with thousands of colors, and the user is scrolling around in little windows all the time. They simply don't know that they can choose to see full color and 2 or 3 times the screen real estate. Their system is using all these "safe" settings that geeks think of as nice starting points for tinkering.

> I have built quite a few PC's that Just Work as soon as I install an OS

Look, you don't understand the "Just Work(TM)" thing. When I got my latest Mac -- a PowerBook G4 -- I took it out of the box, hit the power button (battery already had a 2/3 charge), it asked me what I wanted to name the computer, what I wanted to name my account, what I wanted my password to be, and then I was at my desktop. There's an AirPort (Wi-Fi) menu at the top right of the display, which I used to tell the PowerBook the name and password of my wireless LAN (it would have found the Wi-Fi network automatically and just asked me the password if the base station was set to advertise itself like most do). That's about five minutes, tops, and I'm already on the Internet using IE, Flash, QuickTime, iTunes, Mail, etc. The QuickTime subsystem is already there, with its knowledge of every audio and video and media file format I've ever run into, there is a huge collection of high-quality fonts, Apache is ready to be turned on with a click of a button, Java2 is there, UNIX tools, and on and on.

Here's a good example of Just Works: Mac OS X applications are single icons that can be stored anywhere in the file system that you have permissions to place things. You don't have to "install" them, you can move them, you can rename them, and they still work. You can drag them from your desktop to your notebook and they still work. You can put 3,000 other applications on your system and that first one will still work, because even though there are facilities to share libraries, the app still carries the ones it came with within itself as (at minimum) a backup, if it can't find any newer libraries in the shared spots. Until you have used a Mac day-to-day-to-day, you don't realize how much time and trouble a thing like that can save you. It is also nice to put things where you want them on your own system.

From a non-geek perspective (someone who doesn't know all the excuses that programmers make when things fail), dragging the IE 5 application from a Windows desktop to a Windows notebook that only has IE 4 should be all you have to do to run IE 5 on the notebook. What is it about transporting IE 5 across my own local network that broke it? Yeah, I know that "IE 5 for Windows" is really 1,000 various files all over the place on a Windows machine, but there is no excuse for that. On the Mac, IE 5 is a single icon. Why would I want to manage or even look at more than one icon for "IE 5"? Ugh. That's why there is a "Mac faithful" ... it's not because we admire Steve Jobs or because we're romantics or something (although there's some of that), it's because when you sit down at Windows or a plain-UNIX after using a Mac for a while, things just seem broken on other systems. You don't want to run a bunch of installers and patchers on your notebook before you go on the road just so you can get the same damn apps on there that you were just using on your desktop. The other side of this is that when people go from Windows to Mac, they often spend months or years trying to do things the hard way. You see them in forums complaining that they unplugged this or disabled this or reformatted this or painstakingly typed in certain IP addresses, or rebooted, or whatever, and you have to keep telling them things like "just drag the icon to where you want it" or "just plug it in, you don't need a driver disc" and they're AMAZED. STUNNED.

OS X is a step in teh right direction

[istvandragosani]

I use Linux mainly for my own workstations & server on my home network, byt my wife is a diehard Mac user. After seeing her frustrations with Mac OS 9 constantly locking up and crashing (on a G4 even), I convinced her to upgrade to OS X. It took a little getting used to, but she was impressed by the fact that I can ssh in to her box now and do stuff on it without making her get up from her seat, and overall she likes OS X more than OS 9.

Re:OS X is a step in teh right direction

[Anonymous Coward]

I can ssh in to her box now and do stuff on it without making her get up from her seat

Talk about leaving yourself open to a joke...

Nice Review

[HimalayanRoadblock]

Very nice review. Just wanted to put my favorite quote. it requires zero configuration once you're configured properly. That's classic.

Re:Nice Review

[foobar104]

Yeah. And it also makes it pretty clear that Pudge doesn't understand Rendezvous. And the whole "printer sharing with Rendezvous" thing sounds fishy to me. Methinks he's actually talking about AppleTalk, not Rendezvous.

In the interest of clearing things up for the layman-- web resources on Rendezvous and ZeroConf are pretty obtuse-- here's the briefest possible explanation. I don't guarantee it's 100% right, but I think it's pretty close.

Rendezvous comes in two parts: hostname-to-IP mapping and service advertisement and discovery. With Rendezvous, you can make two machine talk to each other by name without host tables or DNS servers. When I'm on one machine-- felix-- I can address the other machine-- oscar-- by name by using the FQDN "oscar.local." For example, I type "FTP oscar.local." All the Rendezvous-equipped machines on my LAN are listening to a special link-local multicast address for DNS-style queries. When oscar receives my machine's query asking about "oscar.local," it replies with its IP address. This works for any combination of IP addresses, but it works best with self-assigned ones. You know, the 169.254 addresses your computer comes up with when no DHCP server responds. This works perfectly now between two Macs with Jaguar. I've been using it every day for months, on developer program pre-release builds. There were some problems with mDNSResponder running amuck, but that has apparently gone away in built 6C125, which is what I'm running now.

The other part of Rendezvous is service advertisement and discovery. That's not implemented in very many apps yet, but one that has it is iChat. When iChat starts up (if Rendezvous chat is enabled) it sends out a query looking for all machines on the local net that support the service "so-n-so." (I don't remember what the iChat service is called.) All the iChatty machines out there respond, and among themselves they set up a sort of ad hoc peer-to-peer network where one machine can message any other machine directly.

iTunes will have this functionality someday, but it doesn't yet. We've all seen the demo where Steve browsed Phil's library over the network. That was a concept demo, not a real feature demo. That's not finished yet.

So Rendezvous is confusing at first.

Partially this is Apple's fault, but in all fairness, how would you market multicast DNS as an operating system feature? It's fucking cool, so you want people to know about it, but exactly how would you describe it?

The end result? Everybody's excited about Rendezvous, but hardly anybody gets it.

Faxing solution

[MouseR]

Try PageSender available from Smile Software.

It provides printer-like setup and fax capabilities. Exactly what e've all been waiting for. it's a shareware, and makes use of OpenSource code like eFax.

It supports faxing my modem and web-based fax services.

THIS is the faxing solution that should have come bundled in the OS.

Re:Faxing solution

[MouseR]

A few typos in there (dang coffee not kicking in yet).

I'm sure you all guessed it doesn't support faxing MY modem, but supports faxing BY modem.

iMicrosoft?

[Telex4]

I know I'm going to get flamed to pieces for this, but isn't the i* software suite just doing what Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer?

If you install your OS and get iChat, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync and whatever i* software they put in next:

a) are you going to look for/know of alternatives?
b) are you going to use them, especially if they won't integrate as well with the OS and other apps as well as Apple's i* series will?

Surely the point of taking Microsoft to court for bundling IE and therefore slaying the browser market was not just to get at Microsoft, but to prevent OS vendors from dominating and killing off large sectors of the software market?

Re:iMicrosoft?

[BeeShoo]

"I know I'm going to get flamed to pieces for this, but isn't the i* software suite just doing what Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer?"

Nope. There's big difference between included with the OS" and "part of the OS".
Having said that, I don't believe for a second that IE is truly part of the OS. But, you don't get a choice whether or not to install it (the iApps do not have to be installed), and there is no way (at least, none provided by MS) to uninstall IE. The iApps can all be removed simply by using the delete key. No harm to your system. Install your preferred app, get on with your life.
BIG difference.

Re:iMicrosoft?

[Cutriss]

You raise good points, but the fact is that most of the "bonus" software that you don't already have is part of what you're paying for when you buy the OS upgrade, and many people purchasing that upgrade already have solutions for some of those apps.

iChat = AIM
iTunes=MacAmp or XMMS

Outside of those, the rest of the software is functional enough for toying around and playing as a home user. iPhoto isn't taking any business away from Adobe. iMovie and iDVD are low-end versions of high-end software that Apple already dominates the market in.

The big thing is that, mostly because of the way that the OS works, nothing in any of those programs keeps you from using an alternative solution, and they do nothing to hinder the performance or sabotage operation of other apps. If you don't like iMovie, drag its folder to the Trash.

Also, with the sole exception initial-purchase-consumer-attraction, and Internet Explorer, I can't think of any way that Apple uses its installed base for business reasons. They don't take you to their own ISP for a search engine when your DNS lookup fails. They don't advertise partners and services in iChat's windows. They don't put all sorts of other ads and offers on the screen when you use iTunes. Internet Explorer defaults to Apple's Netscape homepage (ironically enough), and it comes with a default set of saved URLs, but all that's easily changed.

Re:iMicrosoft?

[foobar104]

Apple is also a monopoly in PowerPC machines.

We've talked about this before. Every company is the sole provider of its own products. This does not make it a monopoly. I can only buy Beetles from Volkswagen. That doesn't mean Volkswagen has a monopoly on Beetles. "Monopoly" isn't a word you'd use in that situation.

Similarly, Apple makes Macs. Nobody else makes Macs. That's because a Mac is a product, not a class of products. If Apple were the only company that made personal computers, they'd have a monopoly on the personal computer market. But that's not the case. So no, Apple doesn't have any kind of a monopoly, over anything.

Re:iMicrosoft?

[overunderunderdone]

There is only one difference. Apple is not a monopoly. Everything that Microsoft did is perfectly legal EXCEPT if you are a monopoly. That is a legal distinction you are still free to judge them on the ethics of it.

Perhaps I was wrong and there is one other subtle difference between Apple including free apps with the OS and Microsoft. Appple is not doing it to drive a competitor out of business. Microsoft was threatened by Netscape & by Sun's Java (& the internet in general) with the rumbling of crossplatform compatibility and open standards threatening to make the PC world competitive for other OS's. So they buried Netscape by including a free browser (& making it *part* of the OS) they cut off the cross platform threat of Java by "embracing & extending (& extinguishing) it, so it would no longer be crossplatform.

Apple on the other hand is not threatened by Watson or or Adobe or any of the other developers their iApps compete with. Their motivation is not to create a "good enough" free product to drive a competitor out of business but to create superior products to compete more effectively with that other OS. Inadvertantly it hurts (some) developers they 'compete' with on the mac but that is not their intent - they want as many apps on the mac as possible. And in most cases they are not scaring away developers, for every developer that stays away from the Mac because they dont want to run the risk of competing with a bundled iApp there is probably another developer that come to the mac hoping his little App will be bought by Apple to become that bundled iApp - like SoundJam MP (iTunes) Macromedia FinalCut Pro (iMovie and Apple FinalCut Pro) & all the audio & video developers Apple is buying up right and left.

Re: iMicrosoft?

[Saint Fnordius]

Your questions are valid, but I don't think Apple is doing the same thing that Microsoft did.

a) most of these programs are stand-alone apps that can be removed without fuss. If you own Photoshop, you can delete iPhoto without breaking anything.

b) integration between the iApps is no more than what Apple allows other programs to do. In fact, I think Apple uses these programs as technology showcases/examples to inspire developers.

Apple's philosophy behind including programs is markedly different than Microsoft's. MS adds programs to the OS in an effort to squeeze out competition, but Apple wants to make its hardware more attractive-sell more units. That's why they include these iApps without integrating them into the OS. You really can take them or leave them.

What a bunch of whining!

[BitGeek]

Sheesh. You want Unix but you want it to work just like an operating system designed in 1984? This is silly, these absurd expectations.

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.

I made the transition from OS 9 really easily. The UI? Much better in 10. The cruft? Gone in 10.

Umax doesn't support OS X? Bitch at Umax, not Apple. Some software breaks? Well, those are the breaks-- probably the person who made it will fix it. But Apple hasn't done anything wrong (Except provide some nice features in 10.2 tempting us software makers to make our products 10.2 only.)

To completely gloss over the fact that OS X is a new OS (not a warmed over version of NeXT) with a lot of new fiatures, and complain (and complain and complain) about the fact that its different than 9 is absurd.

If apple had shipped something that looked like OS 9, the OS would have been a complete failure. Instead they shipped something good and made a break with the past-- its about time. 15 years with the same UI is too long... and now they can migrate and update the UI much faster so it doesn't get stale, crufty, and pointless like OS 9 was getting. (Note the changes in 10.2, every button is different, etc.)

ITs time for a moratorium on OS 9 whining. IF you don't like 10, don't switch. But don't complain that you can't have your cake and eat it to. Its absurd.

These are a few of my favorite things...

[frankie]

1. SMB server browsing. It's not quite perfect yet; it should be integrated into Finder --> Network, and it doesn't show me admin shares (C$). But unlike Sharity, I can mount as many SMBs as I want.
2. Subpixel Antialiasing. I'm really surprised more people haven't mentioned this yet. Font smoothing on my Pismo is much nicer than in 10.1.
3. Integrated Finder Search, and Watson too. Much better than Sherlock 3. 'nuff said.
4. Faster, faster Pussycat! In 10.1 I would cringe in horror every time I accidentally opened a folder with 30+ items, because arranging the icons seemed to be an O(n^2) algorithm.

There are still a few kinks though. Many of my favorite Haxies stopped working. Several apps with kernel extensions need to be reinstalled. And a warning: Jaguar Printer Sharing is completely incompatible with OS 9 Printer Sharing, in both directions. I was hoping this would be the update to let my home network finally work, but it's not going to happen.

Re:Are you joking?

[ckd]

It would be fairly easy for Apple to start a database much like freshmeat which would serve as an easy starting point for OSX users to find the software they want.

You mean like the second item in the Apple menu, called "Get Mac OS X Software..." that sends your browser to http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/?

Re:Rendezvous doesn't fix problems with peer-peer

[foobar104]

The DNS-less stuff doesn't work either. It doesn't find any of my other machines.

Rendezvous can only find other machines on the LAN that also support Rendezvous. It won't help you find your OS/2 machine or your eComStation (wtf?) machine.

All I want is a nice simple host table . On Linux or OS/2 I could easily add all of my host table entries in under a minute.

You can do it on your Mac, too. Starting in 10.2, your host table works just like you'd expect. In 10.0 and 10.1, lookupd was configured to ignore /etc/hosts, but in 10.2 it's set up differently by default. You can confirm this by looking at the output of lookupd -configuration.

LookupOrder: Cache FF DNS NI DS
_config_name: Host Configuration

(Among other stuff)

That means that lookupd will try to resolve host names by looking first in its own cache, then in the flat files (/etc/hosts, in this case), then in the DNS system, then in NetInfo. All this is documented in the man page.

All the other items in your list of complaints have similarly simple fixes. Except, of course, for that shit about OS/2 compatibility. What's that about?

My 10.1 beefs..Resolved? Anyone?

[NoData]

Here's a few things that bug the hell out of me in OS X 10.1.x. If somebody knows if they have/have not been addressed, I'd appreciate it.

Long file name display. Aqua shows the first handful of characters of a filename, followed by ellipsis (...) and then THE COMPLETELY UNINFORMATIVE last few characters. It should, of course, show AS MUCH of the leading the part of the filename as possible, then perhaps ellipsis and the extension. Perhaps.

File Dialogs. These stink. First, they're stuck in NeXT style columnar view. That in and of itself is not the worst. The worst is that as you expand the dialog (to see your filenames which are riddled w/ %@&!ing ellipses), the individual columns get wider...up to a point. They get nominally wider, but then further expansion ADDS ANOTHER COLUMN to the view, all columns being re-squished to their minimal width!! GRRR. AND, of course, there's no option to sort the file dialog by anything but name...a feature in Win. since 95.

Incomplete UNIX-length file support. Speaking of long filenames: Darwin allows standard UNIX-length filenames (what is it? 64? 128 chars? Plenty). Just about every OS X app still limits you to Mac's 31. GRRR. Is this just a limit for "carbonized" apps?

Finder won't show .hidden files. THIS is UNIX?

Line termination character woes. This is a long standing problem, but I feel Apple just kinda ignored it. Standard Mac line term. char: CR (ASCII 0x0d). Standard UNIX (and, ergo, Darwin's) line term. char: LF (ASCII 0x0a). Mix programs that by default generate one or the other in one system...try grepping or awking (or your favorite report management) anything useful...hilarity ensues. THIS is UNIX??

Is it possible to get lpd running, in light of all the built-in OS X printing overhead? OK, this last one just thrown in from a position of admitted ignorance.

Otherwise, I love it.