Preview of Mac OS X 10.2

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)."

BSD 3.4 vrs 4.4?

[Bwanazulia]

It has been asked a few times and maybe some /.ers can finally put it to bed. What can we expect with 10.2 coming inline with BSD 4.4? Features? Unix Tools? Bash? What?

how is non-extreme performance?

[jfruhlinger]

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

Quartz Extreme and PDF

[sg3000]

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.