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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Preview of Mac OS X 10.2 94

Posted by pudge from the jaguars-are-really-just-short-leopards dept.
andrew writes "Some developers have written to the USA Register to share some of the changes and new features in the Mac OS X 10.2 beta released at WWDC (codenamed Jaguar). The story outlines some performance enhancements as well as changes to both Finder and Dock; there are a few screenshots as well." Update: 05/13 22:22 GMT by P : More screen shots! Zo0ok writes "Think Secret has a bunch of screenshots and a description of new features in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)."
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Preview of Mac OS X 10.2 More

Preview of Mac OS X 10.2

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  • some notes I had (Score:5, Informative)

    by jeffehobbs ( 419930 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @11:09AM (#3510156) Homepage

    The Good:

    Hey, those are some nice cursors!

    The install process has an "archive and install" option which presumably backs up your old "System" folder and puts a nice new fresh one in there. That's nice.

    The "optimization" phase of the install has a percentage meter now instead of vague indeterminate values.

    First impression after install: It's f-a-s-t. Very, very fast.

    The dock is missing the stripes, and it looks much better that way.

    The Eject key now pops up a translucent eject key icon like brightness and volume.

    Flurry is a standard "Screen Effect" now. Not a screen saver, mind you; a "Screen Effect".

    The new Address Book is very nice looking, works well. In a thoughtful nod to outside the US, there's lots of different ways to display address info depending on what your country's conventions are.

    The "BlackLight-esque" reverse gamma effect is greyscale, very creepy in a "Tales From The Darkside" way, but cooler than "Blacklight", as all the blue doesn't have it's gamma values reverse to ugly orange.

    It's not as creepy as "ZoomView" which lets you zoom the screen way, way big. It's a neat effect though. I thought it was going to be more vector scaling, but it's a raster scale.

    Speaking of smooth raster scaling, the Finder? Sm-o-o-o-th. The new window scaling open/close animation is awesome -- it makes me feel like I live in the future.

    "Enable Access For Assistive Devices"? What's that?Sounds interesting.

    They have finally admitted that AppleTalk can only be used on one network port at a time, i.e. if you've set it to AirPort, your machine won't show up on the Ethernet AppleTalk network.

    Icon scaling now shows what the pixel count of the scaling value you've set is (32x32, 48x48, 128x128, etc.); very nice, this was one of my complaints from the public beta. The idea that my icons might be 49x49 was keeping me up at night.

    "Snap to Grid" gently glides any dropped icons into grid position.

    Software Update keeps a tidy list of what you've installed.

    There's a forward button in the Finder.

    Finder spring loaded folders' icon pop "open" when you hover a file over them.

    Mail.app (1.2v517) is very, very nice. It's got the rules of Eudora and the junk mail filters of Entourage plus it's neatly integrated with iChat. This is the Mail.app version that I hope will win your heart, like it's won mine.

    iChat looks ok to me, I dunno, I don't use IM that much. Maybe this will change that. It's sure got a nice icon and lots of options.

    Disc Copy now mounts images concurrently.

    Apple System Profiler and Print Center are now pretty lil' Cocoa things.

    The Bad (glaring problems that remain from 10.1.x):

    The built-in spell check dictionary is still fairly inadequate. There's lots of words missing.

    The system boots from a cold start faster than 10.1.4, but still not what I'd call "fast".

    The Ugly (problems specific to 10.2 preview that seem likely be fixed upon actual release):

    There are some odd junk graphics and redraw problems that appear when you wiggle windows around or drag parts of them offscreen. No doubt this is the "EXTREME!!!" part of Quartz Extreme. I kid Quartz Extreme, I really do.

    Energy Saver powers down the monitor but won't power it up so much.

    Some 3rd party apps just refuse to work.

    In short: "Awesome work Apple!" This is going to be a kick ass release.

    ~jeff
    • What third-party applications haven't worked for you?

      That seemed like the only probematical part of the report, so it got me curious.

      D
    • Hey,

      What system are you running on? My guess is that you're using Quartz extreme on a pretty heavy duty computer. I wonder if there will be similar speed updates for
    • Thanks for the details.

      How does it run compared to Mac OS 9?
    • Your review is pretty easy to follow and interesting but I am left to wonder how it will compare on my Macintosh. What are you running on?
    • When the ScreenLock is activated, can I finally log in as another user? ala XP or ala Linux virtual screen. This is the only thing missing from the "Perfect" version of MacOS X? still?
    • The one thing that will keep Mail.app from being my default mail program is the absence of threads. Add that, and I'm there, dude.
      • Which part of the mail app doesn't use threads?

        I know I can read my mail while it is checking/indexing my mail.

        It seems to read mail accounts a little slower than Eudora though.
      • Mail.app (1.2v517) is very, very nice. It's got the rules of Eudora and the junk mail filters of Entourage plus it's neatly integrated with iChat. This is the Mail.app version that I hope will win your heart, like it's won mine.
      The Mail.app that will win my heart is the one that will be a MailAndNews.app. Save a newsgroup reply in an imap mailbox with drag'n'drop! if ever there was a place where integration can be useful, this is it.

      Why are Mozilla and mutt/pine/emacs the only (free, OS X) ones to understand it?

    • Re:some notes I had (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drsmithy ( 35869 ) <drsmithy&gmail,com> on Monday May 13, 2002 @05:47PM (#3512724)
      The system boots from a cold start faster than 10.1.4, but still not what I'd call "fast".

      Why do people (it seems particularly prevalent in Mac users) have this obsession with boot times ? I can understand why back in the days of MacOS Classic and regular reboots why it would have been an issue, but why are people rebooting their OS X boxes often enough for it to be of anything more than curiosity value ? Is it just an "old habits die hard" thing causing you to reboot so often ?

      • I have no clue. I've not rebooted my powerbook for several months now, and it runs fine. I've probably screwed up the /etc/rc file so it does prebinding at startup or something odd, long and arduous like that. Come to think of it, I need to defragment my HD.

        But, back on topic, try booting from OS 8.1 from a RAM disk. Superspeedyzoomfast! Or, you could just run the darwin layer at startup and get a very fast startup speed.
      • why are people rebooting their OS X boxes often enough for it to be of anything more than curiosity value ? Is it just an "old habits die hard" thing causing you to reboot so often ?

        I use a laptop. I regularly shut it down, or put it to sleep, but when plugged in (usually only on weekends) it's never shut down.

        You should, however compare the times it takes OS9 to come out of sleep to OSX.
        • I've had my iBook(500) running almost continuously since I bought it last September. The ONLY time I have rebooted was to install the 10.1 update. The damn thing is like a rock. Eight months without even a hint of a problem. I wish I could say that about my XP and SuSE 7.2 boxen.
      • Perhaps some people have frequent power-failures? That happened to me once, but then I figured: Heck, I'll try this thing called outside, that sounds promising.

      • System instability is not the only reason to restart a system. Many people like to conserve power, as well. If the machine has a good sleep mode, this is probably not an issue.

  • At this point I just can't justify a new computer. I have 3 pcs and a laptop as it is, and need to get rid of at least 1. If I don't get laid off and the company I am working for does not go out of business and my pay cut (everyone got one) turns into a pay raise then maybe.

    I played with a Mac G4 with the wide flat screen and opened up the iMovie and it was attached to a camera and it was dreamy! The picture was at least 640x480 and there were no skips or bumps. The screen was awesome, but probably not good enough for gamers, but I don't care I don't do games. It looked like it would be really great for dvd movies too.


  • This sounds great! I use OS X as much as I can on my 500/66 g3 ibook with 256mb ram, though I do boot to 9 to use Logic Audio, Reaktor, and tons of virtual instruments.

    My father runs a desktop publishing company and relies purely on macs. He has three on his desk even (including a cube and an ancient and upgraded power computing clone), and he sure likes to bitch about some of X. Font management is his #1 concern. And Mail.app is his #2.

    He uses X on an 700 mhz G3 iMac, the other 7 macs are using OS 9.

    Apple is doing amazing things these days. Let's hope the dual 1.4 gighertz G4s with fast DDRAM aren't just rumors!

    .
  • I downloaded the developers preview and it had problems with my PC geforce 2 mx (that works fine in 10.1 and 9.2. It will boot up and once it loads the background (or Quartz Extreme) they screen will turn grey. Even when I load the CD1 of the install cds it does the same thing. I had to put my old ATI video card back in. my Pc geforce 2 is a PNY Verto MX400 from compusa, it worked beautifuly with out flashing.. I hope this problem gets fixed. But its amazing!!!

  • how is non-extreme performance? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jfruhlinger ( 470035 ) on Monday May 13, 2002 @03:38PM (#3511708) Homepage
    For anyone out there who has previewed 10.2 on a computer w/out adequate video hardware to support Quartz Extreme: have you noticed any slowdown compared to 10.1.x? I have a 450 MHz DP w/ 384 MB of RAM and an older video card; once I upgraded from 128 MB of RAM, OS X's UI became fast enough for my taste (tho I know others are grumpy about it). I'm drooling over all the 10.2 features but I don't want my experience to get any slower -- but keeping steady is OK!

    jf

    • Re:how is non-extreme performance? (Score:4, Informative)

      by bhamm ( 553532 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2002 @10:23AM (#3516999)
      the speed is just fine.. I've got a PowerBook G4 550 with 512MB Ram and 16MB of video... and 10.2 (dev release) is indeed faster. Everything is faster, and it's not even beta yet. Remember, I (as many others) don't meet the 'suggested' video requirements for QE, but I'm telling you that my PowerBook now runs at speeds equivalent to OS9 without having full support for QE.. I was very pleasantly suprised, I wasn't expecting it to run so well with it being a dev release, and it will no doubt be even better at release... very exciting.. dont worry.. =) bri

    • It's great! (Score:2, Informative)

      by ReblMonkey ( 579089 )
      The speed boost I've received by installing 10.2 can very well be described as amazing. I'm on a G3/450 with the oldskool 16MB Rage 128 running the new 10.2 developer release, and everything is unarguably faster for me. I don't know about this whole "Quartz Extreme" thing, but if must be pretty damn cool if I could get such a speed boost even without it being active (because my graphics card is so outdated).

      This can only get better and better. A few 3rd party apps don't run, but the speed! Oh the speed!

  • imac issue (Score:2, Insightful)

    by liloconf ( 560960 )
    I'm worried about this 10.2 release, everyone says its going to be great but I'm sitting here with my just bought old school imac g3/700 with its 16 meg video and 256 of ram, and am worried. Quartz extreme doesn't look like its going to run on my computer and I'm just wondering what happened to the OS updates that would make things run faster, not slower? My 3 pc's have been with me since win 98 and are all running XP with no slow down at all. I expect new games or graphics apps are the things I need to upgrade for not an OS release one month after I get my computer. When someone drops 2 grand on a computer With all the bells and whistles it should be OS upgradeable for years, or hell at least one.

    • Re:imac issue (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Ster ( 556540 )
      Quoth liloconf
      ...My 3 pc's have been with me since win 98 and are all running XP with no slow down at all...

      Come on now: no slowdown? I find that hard to believe. I admin a lab on my college campus, and we had a line of computers that came with 98SE or NT4. Of course, the university ordered them with NT, and of course we overwrote that with 98 so we could game! Eventually the university decided to standardize on XP Pro.
      We tried the upgrade on the machines we had 98 on: it didn't go well. We had to upgrade the RAM on them to 256 to get reasonable stability without hitting swap every few minutes. Even then, the speed was not pretty.
      So, I kind of doubt that your machines run XP without slowdowns, without upgrades.

      Just my 2 cents,
      -Ster

    • When someone drops 2 grand on a computer With all the bells and whistles it should be OS upgradeable for years, or hell at least one.

      I'm not trying to flame you, but maybe now you understand why it's important to buy a computer with a socketed processor and a PCI/AGP slot?

      • I'm a x86 computer owner, but I don't think the upgrade philosophy works very well any more. There are just way too many improvements in too short time to justify modular computers.

        e.g.
        1, Want a new graphics card? But your motherboard can only do 4x AGP. That's not good enough...

        2, Got old Pentium II processor? Like the sound of Pentium 4? Well sorry it won't fit into socket A... btw. thats about equivalent of upgrading from G3 to G4 processors

        3, RAM, OK upgrading RAM is easy and arguably helps most, but ... you can do that with PC, iMac, iBook or laptop.

        So in the end I think that modular design makes only sense for computers where you are likely to add 2nd sound card, TV card, SCSI card etc... If you have to upgrade motherboard, CPU, graphics, then you might as well get a new comp, and put the old one under the stairs to be mp3 / internet access server, or give it to your sister, girlfriend, housemate... New computer will be quiter (fans not worn out yet) and with guarantee.

      • I think the whole upgradability thing is a bit of a myth particularly with regard to processor. I have three home built systems under my desk 2 of them I cannot upgrade - they no longer make processors that will fit!!! And the third which I could upgrade I am unlikely too as I cant afford the cost hit. Yes, I upgrade memory. Yes, I can upgrade the Graphics but strangely never had - perhaps I am too mean but the cards in these machine were state of the art when I bought them - I cant just throw them away.
    • I'm using OS 10.1.4 on a G3/400 iMac (2001) and I have to tell you that it rocks! If 10.2 offers better performance than what I'm getting now, I'll be very happy...

      However... to make it do so, I bumped the RAM to 1gig and replaced the 10gig HD with a 120gig Western Digital 7200rpm drive. Maxing out the RAM and replacing the HD with a 7200rpm one made a _WORLD_ of difference in boot time as well as application performance.

      For those that whine that their G3's and older G4's won't be 'fast enough', I offer that if you tweek them a bit, you will see performance that will make you smile. It's the best money I've spent yet.

      --geethree
    • first.. Quartz Extreme isn't fully fully supported on my laptop either, but the dev release of 10.2 runs noticeably faster than 10.1.x, and this isn't even public beta yet. Jaguar will run better on your Mac than 10.1.x does, even without full support of QE.

      secondly, if you expect that your G3 iMac 700 introduced in July of last year is supposed to somehow run the release of Jaguar comparable to other Macs also available last month (G4 tower, TiBook).. I can't really say much to that.

      I'm not knocking your 700 iMac G3, it's a snappy box (probably as fast as my 550 PowerBook G4), and will likely run 10.2 just fine. If 10.2 (and later) was priority for you though, buying a G4 would've given you a longer lifespan, as I'm sure you are aware..

      bri
  • OS X.2 looks REALLY cool, but there is one thing that will probably never change. It's not a technical issue, but business practices at Apple.

    They still sell "North American English" versions of their computers all over the continent. That's not so bad, until the speach recognition doesn't recognise "schedule" and "zed", to name a few.

    It also doesn't know "colour", "realise", or "flavour" to name a few.

    It would be quite easy for Apple to sell "US English" in the USA, and "International English" in Canada.

    So why not?
    • It also doesn't know "colour", "realise", or "flavour" to name a few.

      Here I'm talking about the spell checker, not the speech recognition.
    • Erm, try changing the languages. There's probably an international english dictionary for built in spellcheck floating around somewhere.
      • Actually, I set the language to "British", which is close enough for my tastes, but I'm in Canada, we mix American and British spellings.

        Anyhoo, It doesn't affect the spell checker or speech synthesis. Just the UI.

        Maybe I can find the CA dictionary somewhere, I know ispell and aspell have one.
    • This wouldn't be a problem if Canadians would stop pretending to be Europeans! ;^)

      (I'm not trying to bait you--I have lots of Canadian friends and give them a hard time about that.)

      I agree with you, BTW. Apple shouldn't make their "North American English" so U.S.-centric. The good thing is that they seem far more receptive to consumer comments nowadays than they ever have. I'll bet it would be worth your time to submit this suggestion to them. Apple has made no secret of the fact that they take great pride in the international capabilities of the Mac OS. It could very well be that not many people at Apple realize that Canadians incorporate so many British-isms into their parlance. I live near the border so it's obvious to me, but maybe it's not to a company much further away.

      --Rick
  • I'd sell my soul (or what's left of it after 16 years of parochial education) for a stylus that has something in it that makes the iBook trackpad think it's my finger.

    Who's going to lug a tablet around just to have handwriting recogntion? If we can get by with graffiti on a teenie input space, perhaps we can get by with Inkwell if we had a stylus that can write on the area of a typical apple trackpad.

    is this pie in the sky or within the realm...?

    (yikes - i see now even my 1400's trackpad is about the size of the palm m1xx series lcd...)
  • Has anyone who's seen the preview comment on IPSec?

    Do we get a lickable Cocoa interface, or is it dependent on the command line?
    • if they released it for PC i would buy it.

      They should release an X Box OS X.
      That's Ten, not X. No, the other one. That one's an X.

    • Unfortunately, the MacOS is likely to remain proprietary - the Mac simply wouldn't find a great market out there without the support of vendors.

      There *is* Darwin for Intel - but since you can't actually run the Aqua interface, it's more like "yet-another-freeBSD" for the PC.

      Why not try Linux? They're doing wonderful things with that nowadays.

      Brian.
  • I have a BUSlink firewire hard disk (not the most spectacular of toys), and it does not show up as a bootable drive under 10.1.x. Is there any indication that the bootability of my poor storage device might change with the release of that which we call Jaguar?
    • I find myself in a position to answer my own quiestion:
      The problem is not with my drive, but with my machine, a PowerBook G3, which is not of the New World Architecture which allows for such things as firewire booting.

      The installation log log (which is viewable as installation occurs, a thing I didn't know until just recently, although it may have been there in pre-Jaguar installers) very kindly told me that the OS I installed onto my firewire drive would not boot on Old World Machines. Then it gave me a lollipop and waddled off to finish installing.

      I think I knew this before, but promptly forgot in the hopes that something might have changed.

      It hasn't, but I now know that I can plug my Jaguar-loaded drive into any New World (iMac and newer) machine I come across, and boot into pre-releasey goodness.

      -Zorch.

  • Quartz Extreme and PDF (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sg3000 ( 87992 ) <<sg_public> <at> <mac.com>> on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @10:39AM (#3523266)
    Anybody care to comment on how Quartz Extreme will affect PDF performance, particularly viewing PDFs in Adobe Acrobat? I've noticed that under X, scrolling performance is just plain terrible.

    Here's a comparison with the same 12 page PDF (a report from RHK on Internet bandwidth versus revenue for 2002 -- hey, I'm at work, you know! But the document is two columns, in color, and has plenty of charts)

    800 MHz Dell Latitude (Windows 2000. 256 MB RAM, Acrobat Reader 5.0, scrolling on the internal LCD): 50 seconds

    667 MHz PowerBook G4 (512 MB memory, Mac OS 10.1.4, Acrobat 5.0, scrolling on LCD, but with a second monitor connected): about 8.5 minutes.

    Note that during this time, the Windows computer is scrolling the document fast enough that the text is blurry, and I didn't notice appreciable popup of the images, so it looked reasonably smooth.

    Under Mac OS X, the scrolling was so slow, that I had to switch to the click-lock function on my mouse because my index finger got tired. Generally, the page would stop rendering about half-way through until the previous page completely disappeared off the screen. I don't recall Mac OS 9 being this bad.

    Launching Classic and running Acrobat 4.0 on the same PowerBook, I got these results: scrolling on the internal CD (and this time, playing a MP3 in iTunes): 2.5 minutes.

    Is this just Adobe making a crappy port of Acrobat to Mac OS X? Is it a lack of hardware acceleration? Is it a Carbon problem? At this point, I don't care what's causing the problem, but the performance just stinks and it makes OS X look bad.
  • MacOS X is definatly an OS a lot of people are going to consider switching too in the comming years...

    For me, i love the Unix command line, and i am quite fond of BSD after being frustrated with Linux and its complexities...

    BSD to me is a little more simplier (i like OpenBSD) and i love the small footprint of it. I dont live on Open Source operating systems, i use Windows mostly, because its freak'n easy and i dont have to screw arround to get my internal modem to work, or printing and so forth.

    I would love to get an Amiga, however, they prolly wont be that usable for me until OS5 and thats WAY off :).

    If i was looking to get a new computer in the comming year, i would seriously consider MacOSX as other geeks quite like me will also do. This is mainly due to the Unix Structure that i have come to admir(i love bash) and also Apples infomous user friendlyness.

    It looks like to me this is a seriously powerful OS and one that is going to take the Geek community by storm. Hopfuly with time, average consumers will catch on!
  • Apple said, "here's what we'll do", "We'll release OS ten point two", "The graphics are faster", "cos thats what you asked fer", If they're not then I think I will sue.
  • I've just been told by a source at an Apple sales partner that the old languages covered by WorldScript will now again be featured in OSX. Previously only Japanese and (Chinese?) were included, but now the Eastern European and Middle Eastern languages will also be included. I hope this does not mean we still have to buy localised versions of the applications because they usually were twice as much as normal apps.

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