Mac OS X 10.2 Technote Released

Etcetera writes "Apple has released their Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) Technote chock-full of useful information about the API and technical changes in Jaguar. Interested parties will find lots of neat stuff in here... including the idea of storing kernel panic info in NVRAM and writing it to a logfile on reboot."

Comments

Re:some thoughts

[Yarn]

maybe in preparation for higher resolutions (dpi) which will be becoming more mainstream soon.

Horay. Finally automake

[Billly Gates]

After reading all the scary news about HP switching to palidome and seeing IBM already has it. I am strongly considering a mac. As soon as the dying g4 is replaced hopefully with IBM's powerpc I will look into upgrading.

MacOSX is finally turning into a more traditional unix with Xf86 support, now automake as well as some nice speed enhancments. I tested jaguar out at compusa and its a hell of alot faster. Everything loads in a second or two. (or may have seemed fast compared to my pentium700 running w2k.)

Good job apple!

Other gems that are included

[wfolta]

Some other cool UNIX additions:

• The Ruby scripting language is now installed with Mac OS X
• Python 2.1.1 is now installed with Mac OS X
• The tool "automake" is now installed with Mac OS X
• The curses library has been updated to the newer ANSI compliant ncurses library, which supports color and other advanced text attributes as well as offering greatly increased compatibility with applications which rely on having a standards-compliant curses library.

Not bad, eh?

X11 is not really supported

[g4dget]

Sadly, there is no X11 support in Mac OSX--X11 on OSX requires a separate download. It works acceptably well, but it is not well integrated with the OS. Also, when you upgrade to Jaguar, your X11 installation breaks and you need to reinstall it.

Apple really needs to support X11 officially alongside with Cocoa and Carbon. Vendors of OSX software (e.g., Matlab) clearly want to use it. Users need it for tens of thousands of educational and scientific packages that are not going to get rewritten. Supporting X11 would be very little cost or overhead, and it would make the machines a lot more interesting and attractive for scientific and engineering uers.

Re:X11 is not really supported

[andrewski]

Apple WILL NEVER include or support X11. Why not?

1. X11 apps use a plethora of ugly widget sets, all of which look and feel completely different from one another and from Aqua. There's no way Apple would endorse or implement such a flagrant pile of different UI's on their carefully-crafted OS. Can you name a single X11 app that comes even close to conforming to the Apple UI guidelines?

2. The availability of X11 native on OS X would discourage developers from making their applications at all Mac-like in appearance or functionality, leading to less mindshare for Apple's way of doing the GUI.

Apple is still fighting with application developers to get them to Carbonize their apps. Carbon blows, big time. It's a stopgap solution crafted solely to allow ports from OS 9. (If you are developing a brand-new program for Carbon, allow me to BITCH-SLAP you out of the 80's with the clue stick a few times. ) Apple, and anyone with a brain, knows this. Apple's ultimate plan is to ditch Carbon like a hooker bad case of genital warts. Carbon ties Apple to the Motorola PPC platform which is looking more and more like an evolutionary trichordate (good potential, slow development causes it to be overwhelmed by the competition).

Apple surely won't go out of it's way to deny X11 on OS X, but you can bet they won't include it with OS X v10.3 or or OS X v11 or whatever.

As a side-note, does anyone have a theory on how Apple will name their products in the future once the 10.x numbers run out for them (or they get sick of 10.x)? Mac OS XIV anyone?

Re:X11 is not really supported

[am 2k]

Apple could actually make the situation better by taking control of X11 on OSX, improving it, and standardizing things, as well as by allowing KDE and Gnome to provide native-looking OSX themes.

theme != look and feel

Cocoa and Quartz are side shows today--faintly 1980's in their design and without any ground breaking advantage.

Ok, you just admitted that you've never used them.

Most non-Carbon Mac development is happening, and will continue to happen, with C++ wrappers and Java.

Sure. That's why there is a single email per month on the Cocoa developer mailing lists saying something like "Help! I'm a newbie and I want to learn Cocoa using Java", and two or three people reply "use ObjC". I've yet to read an advanced Cocoa/Java-question there (and I've been on Omni's lists for two years now and on cocoa-dev since it began).

KDE, for example, already has options to put the titlebar at the top of the screen

I'm using it on KDE, it feels like somebody removed the menu bar from the single window application and put it on the top of the screen. Not quite like Mac apps, where you can have multiple windows in a single app.

What about things like extension mapping, drag and drop, pasteboards, services, single mouse buttons, dock icon updates, dock menus, NSToolbars, etc...?

Re:Panic logging

[Macka]

Writing into NVRAM should mean that the data survives not just a kernel panic/reboot, but also a powercycle or warm restart. Store it in (volatile) RAM and there are situations where you could loose it!