dacs.doc electric

About a month ago Apple shipped a beta release of a totally new operating system for Macintosh computers, OS X (pronounced “ten”). I got a chance to work with OS X on a regular basis, and I’d like to share some of my experience with you. Keep in mind that OS X is a beta operating system, so if you’re going to live on the bleeding edge, be prepared to bleed (crash or lose data).

OS X is a new operating system, built on top of a version of Unix, BSD in this case, for speed and stability. The typical user will never see the “geeky” but very powerful Unix foundation of OS X, they will instead live in a beautiful environment called Aqua.

Aqua is the name for the colorful, futuristic-looking graphical user interface that is the user work area in OS X. Aqua is designed for both the power user and the beginner. It uses new ways of doing things, such as working with files or switching between applications. A lot of thought has gone into how people really use their computer, and once I spent some time with OS X, things really started to make sense.

The best new user feature is the dock. At the bottom of your screen is a toolbar with a series of applications. When you want to run a program, you simply click on the program and it will run, showing an arrow under the program to let you know its running. You can copy a program to the dock by dragging it to the dock, and it will automatically be added to the dock. You can remove a program from the dock by dragging it off. The dock can be configured to grow when you move your mouse over it, so you can keep it very small until you need it. I am really starting to like the dock, but would like the ability to move it to the side of the screen.

With change there is always pain. In this case, the pain is using older applications in “Classic” mode. Classic takes about a minute to launch, but once it’s running you can then run almost any OS 8 or 9 application. If one non-OS X application dies, it crashes all of the old programs. However, it shouldn’t crash the computer or other running applications. I have used Word, Excel and Eudora under OS X without trouble, but Apple says that software that writes directly to the hardware (drivers and other such programs) won’t work. Apple has created two ways for developers to get their programs to work under OS X. They created a quick way for OS 9 programs to be ported, some of them in a few days, to OS X. If developers take this step, we should see a lot OS X-looking applications when OS X ships. This gives them the time to write OS X native applications while still making money on the shipment of the operating system. Making a serious transition like this is difficult for any company, and Apple has planned this very carefully.

Are there any problems with OS X? Sure—there is very little native software written for OS X, but hundreds of applications are expected by next spring. Microsoft is having trouble porting Office 2001 to OS X, so don’t expect to have Word or Excel when OS X officially ships early next year. Yes, OS X has crashed—but only once. It runs a bit slower than I’d expect, but Apple says that they are still optimizing it and it should be a speed demon.

The strangest thing about OS X is the command prompt, or shell. This is the first Macintosh OS to have a command line, like DOS, and it feels weird. The lack of a command line is probably the one thing, as a computer geek, that I miss in OS 9. There are scripts (batch files) that you can write to do amazing things, and now I can have the best of both worlds.

Apple needed to make the move from the antiquated OS 9 operating system. OS X has all of the features a modern operating system needs: protected memory, true pre-emptive multi-tasking, security, and stability. The foundations of OS 9 go back to 1984. It’s about time Apple moved ahead of Microsoft technically in the market they created 16 years ago.

If you’re going to play with OS X please remember that it’s a beta and can crash unexpectedly (not unlike Windows). It costs only $29, and you can get it at www.Apple.com. I installed it on my PowerBook in a second partition, with OS 9.0.4 on the first. You can switch back and forth between the two easily, so you can still get your work done.

I’m looking forward to working with the final release early next year. If you want to get a demo of the operating system of the future, get a copy or ask me for a demo at the next DACS meeting. You can also get more information online at www.Apple.com/macosx.