Review: Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar 745
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.
Smile (Score:5, Interesting)
---gralem
yeah but.... (Score:0, Interesting)
OS X is a step in teh right direction (Score:5, Interesting)
An appealing product. (Score:2, Interesting)
is the new iMail any good? (Score:2, Interesting)
Absent from the review is a discussion of iMail. I have seen that there are quite a few improvements planned, like auto-detecting spam.
Does anyone know: is it really all that good?
It's just that I don't really like Eudora, and I want some alternatives...
Re:is the new iMail any good? (Score:3, Interesting)
The "junk mail" filter is pretty darn good out of the box, and you can "train" it further by hitting the "JUNK" ubtton for messages that are spam.
I siwtched over to it from Eudora, and I'm very happy after a few weeks with it.
What a bunch of whining! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Dude, check out my OSX 10.2 Desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
Since it's a complete OpenGL Environment it takes 2 seconds to launch any OpenGL screensaver to be your wallpaper
I originally was using the Desktop Effects [versiontracker.com] program.
GCC 3.1? (Score:2, Interesting)
If Mac OS X.2 features GCC 3.1, with GCC 3.2 having just been released to 'stabilize the C++ ABI' [slashdot.org] are Apple setting developers up for a bunch of problems by shipping a buggy compiler?
Also is there likly to be any fallout with 3.1 ABI not being compatable with the 3.2 one? I would guess not until apple release next mac os toolkit?
Re:is the new iMail any good? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Junk mail filter is apparently a heuristic filter that will learn as you give it feedback. I have it turned on in "training mode" right now; there is a "Junk" icon to flag junk mail; it turns to "Not Junk" if you want to de-flag some mail. When you put it into automatic mode it creates a "Junk" folder that you can then set to automatically empty after a certain period of time.
Other filters (Mail.app calls them "rules") are more capable; you can AND/OR (match "any" or "all") the rules before applying an action.
Unfortunately, the SpamCop mailbundle for MacOS X Mail.app is broken with the new version of Mail. So is GPGMail, but there is a beta version already available [sente.ch] for download.
The mailboxes "drawer" on the right has changed its look a little bit, which I had to mentally adjust-for. Most irritatingly, I was only able to see my IMAP folders by enabling my .Mac email (it just forwards to my IMAP account anyway). It was a little clunky/inconsistent with things like "On My Mac" appearing/disappearing, but eventually I got the look of it stabilized.
article I'm looking forward to (Score:3, Interesting)
-- james
Are you joking? (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides that point, can you really compare the crap M$ included with it's OS and the quality apps that appear in Max OS X? Compare MovieMaker to iMovie. Compare the crappy picture viewer and it's little green arrows in M$ to iPhoto. WMP to iTunes? No comparison. Don't like it? Get gentoo and compile from A to Z. Otherwise, there are a few million of us that just want to USE our boxen to enjoy our music and pr0n, and don't want to read through a bunch of man pages or crappy O'Rielly books just to get something to work.
NeXTSTEP scrollbars? (Score:2, Interesting)
In OSX you can optionally move both arrows to the same side of the scrollbar, but there is apparently no way to move scrollbars to the left side of a list box, for example. Having scrollbars on the left works a lot better. Try it once and you'll never want to go back.
The Apple guy, who used to be a NeXT guy, seemed to agree with me.
Rendezvous doesn't fix problems with peer-peer SMB (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Rendezvous doesn't fix many of my pressing networking problems. Apple should definitely be bitch-slapped for their claims of networking interoperabiltiy when SMB works if you have a newtwork server, but not if you're using peer to peer networking! I think that far more home users have peer to peer networking rather than have some network server sitting in a closet. Consequently, I can't connect to any of the other machines on my network that use SMB.
My other machines also can't connect to my Mac because the 'Windows Sharing' insists that you add a user name for each Windows user who you want to allow connections from. However, most of my other systems run such things under the user name 'nobody', which you can't add to the 'Accounts' preferences. Even if I come up with other user names, each one has to be manually added one at a time, which is a real pain. Even then, my OS/2 and eComStation [ecomstation.com] boxes refuse to connect with my mac.
The DNS-less stuff doesn't work either. It doesn't find any of my other machines. 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. Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn't support the host table except in console mode. Instead there's NetInfo and a 98 page document that that you need to read to understand the intricacies of NetInfo, but doesn't actually mention how to map hosts to IP addresses! I'm really tired of typing in IP addresses that start with 192.168.0! Please, someone, tell me I'm an idiot and have missed the obious solution, I'd love to see a solution to this. While you're at it, have a look at my MacOSXQuestions [markcrocker.com] page and tell me that I'm all wrong and that there are simple solutions to my Mac OS X problems... please.
Not the same at all (Score:4, Interesting)
With Microsoft systems, I've found it more invloved to use something besides the default apps (browser is the main thing of course but others have gone over that).
Also, with the Apple apps it's easier for users and third parties to extend them - like plugins for iMovie or enhancements for iPhoto. With Microsoft apps generally they are pretty inflexible or you are only going to get enhancements from Microsoft. I think that's one of the key differences, with the Apple OS and included software you get more of a base to build on than something that is supposedly a complete package. It's this flexibility I find missing with Windows and really enjoy in OS X.
I'll bite (Score:3, Interesting)
1) If it takes overclocking my processor and 1.5 gigs of RAM to get a word processor to run "fine" on my computer, I'd rather use notepad ( or MS office, Apple Works, Simple Text etc etc etc). I should not have to superchardge a machine to get something as simple as a wordprocessor working.
2) Open Office is nice (I use it primary on my Athlon machine) but it is slower than other word processors that I've used. It hase some great features (auto word complete is great)and lot's of potential. But it truely is not up to commercial program standards yet, it still feels like a hacker developed program, un polished, not quite finished.
3) It's ironic to see someone call another person a troll and then go on to bash them, bash their OS and call names. Might I suggest you get off the computer, pay attention to your teacher and finish your work, recess is starting soon, you don't want to be left behind.
Re:iMicrosoft? (Score:3, Interesting)
IE hosts the HTML rendering COM component that essentially everything in windows uses. Think of it as a shared library.
How functional would your linux install be if you started removing shared librares. Say you removed libpng ? Sure, the system would boot, many many things would work, but suddenly apps compiled to render pngs wouldn't - at all. Depending on how they were written, they might not even start, because ld would not resolve the symbol at load time. Or, more analagous to the situation with COM, they'd load and start executing, and when they tried a dlopen() (or LoadLibrary or CoCreate or similar on windows) the app would be unable to continue properly.
So, given the huge number of apps that rely on the IE-supplied HTML rendering library (HTML help, the Add/Remove programs control panel iirc, just to name two big ones), blindly yanking all traces of IE seems like a monumentally stupid idea, no ?
Linux will run into the same thing in a few years, if app developers ever get smart and start using moz_embed instead of writing their own crappy broken HTML parsers/renderers. Suddenly browser choice will go away because effectively every app requires the mozilla rendering engine to be included.
Incidentally the way this could be avoided would be to write a shared library HTML renderer specification (something like a COM Interface in windows) that could be implemented by a stub
Re:This upgrade saved me $500 (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
OSX has two sides (Score:1, Interesting)
The OS9 people are in love with, what I have found to be, an inferior and dated Operating System. I worked as a support tech at a school full of iMacs for a year and everything about troubleshooing them was a pain. They didn't play nice on the network, wouldn't fileshare with the windows server (though this is theoretically supported) and when something went wrong with networking, It was gonna be a few hours of switching settings around or finding out which new iMac decided to steal this IP or whatever. They would freeze up in netscape all the time. Heck, printing didn't even work right (they were talking to PostScript print servers. How hard can it be?). They're clinging to the idiosyncrasies of a system that's twenty years old and that they've been using that long. Just like people will always cling to their start menu.
For those of us that are more accustomed to switching GUIs and those of us who have a very wide range of work habits (i.e. more than Word/Excel/IE/Outlook/Kazaa) are going to welcome a cleaner GUI on top of the same unix we know and love.
If you're satisfied with OS9 and it's shortcomings then USE OS9. Nothing's stopping you. For those of us who want a more modern core and a true unix environment, this is the right way to go...
as to the hardware cost (the ONLY reason I have no macosx box), The controlled nature of Mac's hardware is part of why the OS is so stable. PCs are so different. Some hardware does funny things and a lot of time an inherently unstable system can be caused by the hardware. My MB Chipset and GFX card don't play nice. I know this. It hardfreezes. Noone tested the config I picked when I built by system (And subsequently upgraded it). Who knows if it's all stable? Mac knows all their hardware is going to play nice.
I think the premium is a bit much to pay for that. I would gladly accept a mac with lower specs and no support if it meant a significant drop in price and it could be easily upgraded later...but this whole single SDRAM expansion slot means you need lots of built in RAM, making that course impractical. There should be a cheaper way to get performance out of a mac (since for ~$1500 I can build a screaming fast PC complete with RAID and DVD burning. Tack on a few $ for the monitor and I'm looking at a computer five times as fast as their highest level iMac--and I don't even want a DVD burner).
and what's with the SDRAM? why not something faster...some PPC architecture analog to DDR or at that price...rambus
Brian
My 10.1 beefs..Resolved? Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The only reason not to use X (Score:4, Interesting)
Nevertheless, even though OS X is a native 32bit audio OS with a system Midi / audio Manager and system level support for Steinberg and ProTools plugins (which is just -too- damn cool), is does not have a lot of pro audio apps ported to it.
Steinberg and DigiDesign really need to get their a**es together. These guys are camped out on OS 9 Island all by themselfs and it's holding a lot of people back.
Re:Actually it is Rendezvous... (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny thing was the printer could not be deleted from Print Center, and before I got in a full-blown panic, I decided to do a test print. Lo and behold it "just worked".
OSX lost Apple a sale (Score:3, Interesting)
So I trecked the 40 miles to the nearest store that had a display model, and spent half an hour or so playing with it. Went home, convinced. Yep, that's the system for me.
Went back a week later to buy it. Decided to have another look and spent about 3 hours just fiddling with stuff, finding out how to do things, and seeing how quickly I could do the tasks that I have to do hundreds of times every day.
I went home without an iMac. Three days later I bought a new PC, a Dell, and I love it. The PC rocks. WinXP rocks. I'm happy.
I've never used such an awkward OS as OSX. It seemed to me that for every little thing about the interface, someone had sat down and thought "how can we do this to make it as illogical as possible?" and then they'd done it. I don't think I need to go further than this one example: Select a folder in the finder and press enter. Should open the folder, right? Bzz! Renames it!?!
Apple had a guaranteed sale. But they want people to "think different" so they created an operating system that I, personally, would find impossible to use on a daily basis. All that praise? All the awards? Bleugh. I found OSX to be unintuitive, silly and downright annoying.
I'm even getting a bit angry thinking about it as I'm writing this!
Just my 2 cents. I hope this doesn't come across as a rant/flamebait/troll.