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

[Wiwi Jumbo]

I've always thought that cursors should be in a vector format and then be scaled to whatever size the user wants.

But then again... no one ever listens to me... :)

including the idea of storing kernel panic info in

[kangolo]

> including the idea of storing kernel panic info in NVRAM and writing it to a logfile on reboot

AIX has done this for years. Another example of what you can do when you control hardware and software.

Math libraries included, too...

[wfolta]

• A complete BLAS implementation ships with Mac OS X 10.2. The Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS) are high quality leaf routines for performing basic vector and matrix operations.
• The LAPACK library ships with Mac OS X 10.2. LAPACK provides routines for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, least-squares solutions of linear systems of equations, eigenvalue problems, and singular value problems.
• The libm library is now standard compliant. The new math library in jaguar is now IEEE-754 and C99 compliant in double precision. In addition, the new libm is faster than MathLib found in Mac OS 9 and faster than libm in Mac OS 10.1.x.

Thought this was interesting...

[VValdo]

In order to reduce application launch times, the kernel now maintains information about the working set of an application between launches (in "/var/vm/app_profile"). Pre-heat files are meant to be transparent to the user; however, developers who are constantly re-working their applications may find that their pre-heat files are getting large. The files may become clogged with out-of-date profiles on applications who's versions have changed. As a result, developers may find that it is good to clear out the old pre-heat files on test machines once in a while. To do this, become super-user and do a rm -r /private/var/vm/app_profile and then reboot. app_profile is the directory which contains the profile files. The directory is automatically re-created on reboot. (r. 2847332).

Hmm. Wonder if this will slow down my nightly upgrade of Chimera, Mozilla, etc?

W

Re:X11 is not really supported

[g4dget]

X11 apps use a plethora of ugly widget sets, all of which look and feel completely different from one another and from Aqua.

Apple won't stop those widget sets coming to Mac OSX--they'll just get Quartz backends and otherwise behave just like they did under X11. 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.

What this is really about isn't usability, it's about Apple trying to tie developers to their proprietary APIs. But I predict that's a losing battle: Cocoa and Quartz are side shows today--faintly 1980's in their design and without any ground breaking advantage. Most non-Carbon Mac development is happening, and will continue to happen, with C++ wrappers and Java.

Can you name a single X11 app that comes even close to conforming to the Apple UI guidelines?

Gnome, KDE, and many other X11 desktops and toolkits are completely themable and reconfigurable. You can make them look and behave as close to OSX as Apple's lawyers will allow. KDE, for example, already has options to put the titlebar at the top of the screen and choose Macintosh style focus behavior and shortcuts.

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.

Yeah, and the lack of availability of X11 just discourages developers, period.

I have heard the arguments before, and my prediction is: Apple is hurting themselves big time by trying to herd developers to Cocoa-based ports. The should celebrate the fact that they have gotten a lot of interest from scientists and engineers and support their (potential) new customers; they can then worry about how to help those new customers and developers to develop Macintosh-y applications using their chosen tools.

Re:Check out the BSD section

[opk]

Some are just the sort of window dressing we've come to expect like making bash the default shell

I don't see that as particularly being an improvement. They would have been better off updating to a more recent version of zsh. It would make a more efficient /bin/sh because the dynamic modules mean that none of the interactive functionality would be loaded when running basic shell scripts.

The only reason bash is the default shell on Linux is that it is official GNU shell and nothing todo with whether it is technically any good.

Win over Windows users

[OrangeSpyderMan]

In a bid to win over MS Windows users who up until now have been worried about loosing the registry bloat of their OS, Apple has invented an equivalent that gradually fills up with cruft and needs purging once in a while. Hehe :-D

[OT] IPSec and OSX

[Junta]

This is a bit offtopic, but is there any projects making use of the ipsec API in OSX to do VPN connectivity? The 'VPN' used in MacOS is PPTP by default, and I would like to integrate an OSX system into the VPN configuration here for free..