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In this article, I'll be thinking about
current OS 9 users who are going to migrate to OS
X. Mostly for their sake, with an open mind, I'd like
to approach OS X based on how it looks and feels.
I'll start from the surface of Aqua, and will touch
somewhat deeper layers later on. I will provide plenty
of screen shots to illustrate my points, but I'll
strive to avoid the obvious screen shots that have
been posted before.
That's what I will do. Here's what
I won't: I won't discuss what the point-one upgrade
has specifically brought to the table. I won't get
into details on various usability and technical principles,
they have been covered a lot of times, and I won't
be detailing all the different widgets available in
OS X. There are excellent articles written about those.
I won't take a stand in the question of whether one
should use OS X 10.1 full-time or not. This obviously
depends on individual needs, and while I use OS X
full-time at home, I can't yet use it at work, because
some of my main applicatoins there don't work well
in Classic mode. Go figure.
This article assumes some familiarity
with basic OS X hype and buzzwords like Aqua, Genie
effect, Cocoa, or the Dock.
The ideas behind Aqua
Aqua, the new "skin" of OS X was designed
so that it makes you want to lick it, quoth Steve
Jobs. True, Aqua has a great deal of eye candy in
it, and its detractors claim that it wasn't conceived
with a function-oriented mind set. In fact, Aqua is
as much of a statement as it is a mere design.
Aqua is here to tell you that OS X
is a departure from the classic Mac OS. It's completely
new. Its features may be similar, but nothing is
exactly the same. That's right: whatever looks
like a feature from the old Mac OS isn't a matter
of legacy, tradition or simply "not changing whatever
ain't broke". Every piece of similarity to the classic
Mac OS is a result of direct, deliberate decisions.
It isn't like the transition to any
previous versions of the Mac System or the Mac OS.
In any previous version, the developers of the OS
could wonder about any given feature, "shall we change
it, or let's just leave it that way?" Not this time.
OS X originates from NeXTSTEP, where everything was
different. Everything. There was no Trash. Scroll
bars were on the left side. There was no horizontal
menu bar, nothing like an Apple menu, no type/creator
codes, no aliases, no resource forks. OS X designers
and engineers had to add all that back, sometimes
reluctantly.
A new OS X user should bear it in mind
that Aqua isn't different from OS 9 just in order
to be different. Its difference is natural: If the
core is all different, why should the surface try
to look the same?
While a lot in Aqua looks very Mac-like,
other things do not. Mac OS X, including Aqua, is
in active development, and a lot of "Mac-like or not?"
issues are far from settled, both in terms of looks
and functionality. Without going into too much detail,
I'd like to mention the Apple menu and drive icons
on the Desktop as two examples of a functionality
that Apple originally intended to eliminate from Mac
OS X, but found out that the public wouldn't let them
go. It may well happen that other, currently missing
aspects of the old Mac OS will return to Mac OS X
if users let Apple know that they're being missed.
Striking
What will the first-time user notice
about Aqua? I'd say the beauty. Forget all the worries
you might have about functionality, and behold the
glory of a user interface that's truly magnificent.
The translucence, the fluidity, the spatiality, the
dynamics. And it's getting better. This is new in
10.1: Have you ever seen an Apple logo this
beautiful?
In Aqua, the most common widgets are
beautiful, which is probably a first in any OS. Buttons
cast shadows and throb gently, scroll bars and progress
bars undulate, and everything is extremely refined
and carefully crafted.
The looks of the operating system's
user interface transcend functionality. Apple was
the first relevant player to realize that the technical
capabilities of a personal computer now allow the
luxury of an artistic user interface for an entire
operating system. While MetaCreations and some other
software venors surprised users with idiosyncrastic,
uncommon, yet aesthetic and innovative user interfaces
to their applications and Photoshop plug-ins, Apple
has decided to use much greater leverage, and design
an entire operating system with artistic principles
in mind. Interface design for Mac OS X, (using Apple's
free Interface Builder tool) now actually looks and
feels like an art form. User interfaces are, from
now on, supposed to be beautiful.
A lot of people say, though, that all
that beauty is distracting. Throbbing buttons are
annoying, colorful widgets throw your color balance
off, translucent menus violate basic typographical
rules. Of course.
I'd like to see a few changes, too,
as detailed in my article, "Why
Puma isn't the Answer, Part 2. As I said, one
should think of OS X as a work in progress. Think
of OS X 10.1 as a starting point. It will breed OS
X 10.2, 10.5, 11.0, and so on.
If users want to turn off some of the
eye candy, they will surely be able to. Some of it
is already possible. But for now, Apple wants the
whole world to look at its eye candy. You'll see it
in movies. Everywhere.
All in all, Aqua is beautiful. It certainly
has a number of usability issues, and I'd like to
refer everyone interested in them to "The
Macness of 10.1"
Quo vadis, Aqua?
How will developers cope with the challenge
Aqua presents them? For Aqua certainly sets a high
design standard that won't be easy for them to achieve.
What has been required of an application,
up till now, is a clear, intuitive, possibly uncluttered
interface. Beauty has never been a prerequisite. Platinum,
with its totally neutral, plastic gray looks and mild
three-dimensional relief, was pretty easy to design
for.
Look at Adobe Acrobat 4, for OS 9:
its interface is simple, functional, and just right:
all buttons are grayscale, and they are very much
in line with the square edges and mild relief of the
Platinum theme. The active buttons are slightly depressed,
and the icons have a slight 3D feel to them. There
is little antialiasing, which is, again, in line with
the Platinum look.
Here's a Carbonized version of Acrobat
Reader 5. As you see, Adobe tried to apply the same
rules for the Aqua look as they had with Platinum...
And the result is less than spectacular. The striped
Aqua background is supposed to resemble the clear
plastic case of Apple's displays. It, unlike the Platinum
background, won't bear non-antialiased, black and
white icons: it turns them into bad pencil sketches
on cardboard paper. The image below isn't Aqua. It's
Platinum, badly ported to Aqua, and it's discouraging
to see such design coming from a company that almost
exclusively caters to designers.
Carbon, a technology developed by Apple
to allow existing applications to be rewritten for
OS X, looks inferior to Cocoa, the original
development environment for OS X. From the system
font to most widgets, the looks of Carbon are a somewhat
unfortunate mix of Platinum and Aqua, which often
results in monstrosities like this Platinum progress
bar defacing an Aqua panel:
Developers don't seem to get it yet.
A slightly beveled object can no longer be passed
off as three-dimensional item. Solid black lines are
out. Badly kerned or antialiased fonts will look decidedly
ugly in Aqua. Icons and buttons must be striking,
artistically designed, and cast shadows if they want
to look acceptable against the Aqua background. Anything
less than artistic will be ugly. How far are most
third-party attempts from true gems like Apple's own
Mail application?!
Let's hope that they will eventually
catch up and master the art of designing for Aqua.
Some new apps clearly show some promise, including
the diagramming utility called GlyphiX2. Such beautiful,
uncluttered and to-the-point interfaces are what Aqua
should be all about:
Another thing that will strike you
as unusual is the eery silence of Aqua. I'm probably
not the only one who got used to Platinum Sounds.
That sound track certainly contributed to the snappy,
square look and feel of OS 9. While the same soundtrack
wouldn't be right for Aqua, I'm one Mac user who's
looking forward to Aqua Sounds. Obviously, I'm expecting
a more fluid, more space-age theme, and I can also
understand if Apple had little time to work on something
as relatively unimportant as a soundtrack for the
new OS.
Moving on from skin-deep beauty, I
should mention OS X sets magnificent type. This is
no longer superficial by any means: to typographers'
delight, even the most simplistic applications written
with the help of Apple's Cocoa environment have access
to unbelievably advanced ligature support. This is
a screen shot of Apple's free TextEdit application
(that replaces the ancient SimpleText), using only
fonts that came free with OS X:
To include the same Font panel, the
Color picker and the ability to set perfect type in
a text field is a matter of checking a few check boxes
when designing a Cocoa application. This is no exaggeration:
any Cocoa application can have the exactsame
typesetting capabilities as seen in the image, for
free. Cocoa also provides pre-built classes that
let developers use Bézier paths (the building
blocks of vector graphics) and image manipulation
procedures with unprecedented ease.
The implications are mind-boggling.
Couple all that with the ability to turn virtually
anything you see on your screen to PDF, and you'll
see that it's only a matter of time when specialized
applications will emerge that let you create publication-quality
text and images, perhaps totally bypassing the industry's
stalwarts. The new OS also supports Unicode fonts
and really easy localization features. All this will
certainly affect the look and feel of many an application
to come to the Mac. But now let's say goodbye to looks,
and concentrate on what we could call the "feel" of
a new operating system, starting with speed.
Speed and interactivity
Is OS X fast or slow? This is a tricky
question. We all know that OS X 10.0 was very slow
(as one poster at a forum so eloquently pointed out,
it ran like "frozen mud in a cardboard box under a
rock with a monkey sitting on it"). 10.1 is much faster.
But as compared to OS 9? Well, it's different...
and mostly slower, yes.
It's slower because it does more. Its
technologies carry a greater overhead. Its windows
are double-buffered, its objects are dynamically bound...
It is more advanced, more secure, and such advancement
comes at a price. Name any new OS, and it will be
slower than its predecessor. So, even though Apple
did a great job at making OS X accessible for G3 and
early G4 users, and 10.1 does run tolerably fast on
those machines, it was clearly designed with future
Macs in mind. Well, duh.
But how is its speed different? How
can be speed any more complicated than fast vs.
slow?
In two operating systems as fundamentally
different as OS 9 and OS X, it can. We all know that
OS X introduces preemptive multitasking. Apple can't
skip an opportunity to tell us that. But what does
it mean? Or, what's more important to us, how is it
different from OS 9?
Here's how. In OS 9, the front application
is king. It has all the power. It stands at your attention,
and promptly does whatever you tell it to. It has
virtually the entire microprocessor at its disposal.
Want to crunch some numbers, or apply a complicated
Photoshop filter? Your entire Mac will be absorbed
in that task. Of course it will all happen very fast.
At the same time, other tasks, relegated to the background
and left at the mercy of the front app, will cry for
attention. There might be a download in progress.
Netscape might need some processor time, merely to
maintain the download, but unless your front application
deigns to step back and gracefully say, "okay, now
it's your turn," that won't happen.
Sometimes the front application gets
so preoccupied with a complicated task that it flatly
refuses to let you switch to another application.
Ever printed a large, complicated document from Quark?
While it processes the pages, you'd better have a
coffee, because your Mac won't be able to do anything
else. You need to sit it out while it's finished.
(That's just plain rude, isn't it?) Worse still, an
app might even become so incredibly busy (perhaps
as a result of an error) that it completely monopolizes
the processor, even disrupting your background downloads.
And if your front application becomes
unresponsive, your entire Mac might fail to respond
to your mouse clicks. Then, your options include waiting
and hoping for the best, trying to force-quit the
misbehaving app, or rebooting your machine.
But most of the time, applications
are willing to cooperate, and let go of the processor
after they had their turn (hence the name: cooperative
multitasking). But the performance of a task usually
degrades when it's performed in the background. While
a download might not get much slower when another
application makes it to the front, FileMaker's scripts,
at least in version 3, take an enormous speed hit
when relegated to the background. Photoshop, the always-courteous
player it is, will always let you switch to another
applicaton, but watch its performance go down the
drain when you do it.
Enter the Kernel
In OS X, that's different. No application
gets to monopolize the system for itself. No application
or task is allowed the liberty to decide whether it
needs to hang on to the processor for some more time,
or it can "pass it on" to another. Instead, the Darwin
microkernel, the lightweight brain of OS X, schedules
tasks to the processor straight from the core of the
operating system. This kernel makes sure that <em>every
single</em> task running on your OS X box gets
due processing time, including all your applications,
and a lot of background processes you might not even
be aware of.
What does it mean for the user? First,
the benefits. Your ability to switch applications
is always guaranteed. Even though individual apps
still tend to bog down, or even become totally unresponsive
(that's still rude, isn't it?), you can just go and
switch to, or launch another one. Is Internet Explorer
showing you the spinning CD icon, or has it ground
to a near halt with too many windows open (too many
for IE, but not nearly enough for you)? Well, unlike
in OS 9, you're no longer left to its good intentions.
You can alwaysswitch to some other task. Say,
the install of an alternative browser...
Speaking of installs: they are just
like any task. Some that touch the very core of the
operating system, like hardware device drivers or
updates to the OS itself, require a reboot, but most
do not. While installing, you can do whatever you
please: run applications, surf the web, or even launch
another installer.
Also, apps and tasks working in the
background don't take such a significant speed hit
as in OS 9. You'll need to see this to apreciate it:
just because a task runs in the background, it won't
get noticeably slower. Start a printing job, begin
an install, apply a Photoshop filter, and while they
crunch away in the background, feel free to browse
the Web or read your e-mails.
But be careful here. Doing all your
installs at once in OS X, while downloading your next
installer, and burning a CD at the same time (another
task that used to mostly require the full attention
of OS 9) seems like magic, but there's only so
much magic to be performed at the same time on
a given system. I was happy to see that my QuickTime
Player opened in three "bounces", as opposed to the
15 in OS X 10.0, and I was also happy to see that
I could open it while installing Apple's Developer
Tools and another piece of software. However, QuickTime
Player didn't open in three bounces during the two
installs. It opened in 30.
Granted, that was a rather extreme
example. You don't usually tax your system that much.
But tax it you do, and if you do a lot of things at
the same time, everything will start to perform poorly.
Your front application won't be protected from that
symptom either: OS X is being fair, and it says, "no
privileges!". Applications will launch more slowly,
they will have attention lapses, and you might even
end up with an unresponsive Dock. Try doing too much,
and you will think that OS X is really slow. You will
even have problems finally getting all those applications
to quit, relieving your system, and returning it to
decent performance.
Extreme multitasking: even the screen
shot stutters when my poor little iMac attempts to
do a whole day's computing in an instant. Don't try
this at home.
Stability
Applications launch and quit, sometimes
hang or crash; the whole graphics interface might
die on you (it does sometimes, unfortunately), but
the microkernel usually ticks away. It takes a major
fault to make the kernel "panic" (which happens to
be a technical term too: a "kernel panic" occurs when
the microkernel cannot respond to a situation, and
freezes your Mac, but not before spewing out an unsighly
textual description of the error on your screen.)
Kernel panics are rare. I've yet to
have one on OS X 10.1 (I had a few with 10.0). When
an application crashes, it will just simply not
affect the health of any other application or the
system. This is due to another buzzwod: protected
memory. One application cannot touch the memory space
of another, thus the isolation is perfect.
Does that mean that you'll never have
to reboot your Mac because of an error? Well, almost.
As I said, kernel exceptions and other occasions when
the entire system fails are pretty rare indeed, and
Apple's working on improving that even as you read
this. However, there may be events that don't count
as system crashes, yet require a reboot.
For example, sometimes I'm unable to
come out of a screen saver. My system is operational,
I can be serving web pages, and users on our network
can exchange files with my machine... But I cannot
do anything with it. It didn't crash, but it's useless.
No keystrokes work.
However, this is where the Unix beast
inside OS X can help. If I have enabled remote login
to my machine, I can run a Telnet or SSH client from
another computer on the same network, and try to pinpoint
the offending application that locks me out of my
system. With basic Unix knowledge, I can simply shut
off the screen saver via the network, and regain physical
control of my Mac. This, needless to say, won't work
if the machine isn't connected to a network, or if
remote login is disabled.
No offense
Any misbehaving application can be forced
quit, and that isn't nearly such a perilous path to
take as in OS 9. In the old Mac OS, force-quitting
an app often means destabilizing the OS. If your Mac
doesn't freeze shortly afterwards (as it almost invariably
does after I force a misbehaving QuickTime player
to quit), it might display some really weird behavior.
For example, forcing Microsoft Outlook to quit usually
results in losing my hierarchical menus in the Apple
menu. Often, an application that was "Force Quit"
remembers that, and refuses to launch until I restart
my Mac. And forcing the Finder to quit usually brings
on disaster.
Not any more. All the above symptoms
are gone in OS X. You can even launch an app, change
your mind, and force it to quit while it launches.
It will happily comply.
You have several options for terminating
an application, but none are without quirks. (See
image.) First, you can use the traditional "three-finger
salute" of Command-Option-Escape. This brings up a
small dialog panel that lists all running apps, letting
you choose if you want to force any of them to quit.
However, this keystroke sometimes fails to work when
the front application is in an unresponsive state.
I hope this is merely a bug that Apple will soon kill,
otherwise the feature seriously suffers. The temporary
solution is to switch to another app that works, and
use the keystroke there. You won't force quit the
wrong app, because you'll be able to select it from
a menu.
The second method, accessing the same
"Force Quit" panel from the Apple menu, has the same
problem: while the Apple menu is now a global menu,
letting you access nothing but systemwide items, it's
still part of the front application's menu bar. If
the front app blocks access to its menu bar (i.e.
becomes unresponsive), you won't have the Apple menu
available. The solution is the same as above.
You can also force quit an application
by CTRL-clicking (or clicking and holding) on its
Dock icon. Every application (except the Finder) has
a "Quit" option there, but when one becomes unresponsive,
"Quit" changes to "Force quit". You can also have
that option on a normally running app, by holding
down Option while clicking on its Dock icon. Ridiculously,
this way of force-quitting might simply fail to work
for no apparent reason. The solution is trying again
and again...
There are other, more geeky methods
for killing tasks, including ones not present in Force
Quit menus. You can use the Process Viewer application
to view stats about running tasks, with the ability
to kill any of them, or you can use the Terminal to
issue Unix shell commands to the same effect. These
work flawlessly, but might be a bit daunting for the
average Mac user. By the way, they let you kill the
Dock, which will automatically relaunch. I unfortunately
had to kill my Dock just a few hors ago. It had just
stopped working. Killing it taught it some manners,
though...
Everyone's out to get TextEdit: 1.
Killing TextEdit from the Force Quit panel; 2. Killing
it from the Dock; 3. Using the Process Viewer application;
and 4. Using the BSD command prompt to issue the "kill"
command. The last option kills without warning, so
beware of the Unix beast!
Overall, the stability of OS X, in
real life, is uncomparable to OS 9. Let's face it,
our beloved Platinum operating system is as stable
as a castle of cards on the St. Andrew's Rift. While
it has no Blue Screen of Death, and few system disintegrations,
one of its most common symptoms is a cursor stopping
dead in the middle of your screen.
OS X is rock solid compared to that.
Let's hope that its stability will approach the 100%
mark as closely as possible, because it isn't close
enough today. I also have the impression that 10.1
has sacrificed some stability with its optimization,
but I may be wrong. The future is very promising,
though.
Conclusion
You'll definitely be in for an intriguing
ride if you start using OS X. The operating system
does have its faults, and it still needs to mature.
But its features, its power, and just as importantly,
its creators' incredible attention to detail, will
win any Mac user over. It's just a matter of time.
Mac OS X certainly is a vastly different
world from the old Mac OS, and perhaps an overwhelming
experience at first. In the beginning, you'll want
to go back to OS 9. Then, you'll wishyou didn't
need to switch back to OS 9 so often. Then, eventually,
you won't have to. That time is yet to come, though.
Stuffit
7 (10-18-02) Dr. Neale Monks. What purpose does file compression have
in this day of 100 GB hard drives? Is version 7 worthy of the upgrade fees?
Fireworks
MX (10-8-02) Dean Browell. Fireworks is more than just a pretty face;
The last app I needed to convert entirely to OS X delivers in upgrades and
features as well...
Dreamweaver
MX (10-8-02) Joel Davies. Not being satisfied with just carbonizing it's
product, Macromedia made sure that Dreamweaver MX was the killer app for web
design.
SliMP3
(9-6-02) Pat St-Arnaud. The SliMP3 is a small, simple and elegant network
devices that connects to any audio component with RCA inputs and lets you
browse, search and play music directly from your computer's MP3 collection.
Voyager
III v.3 (8-16-02) Dr. Neale Monks. Carina's Voyager is the grandfather
of Mac planetarium programs, but does it still have what it takes to keep
up the current generation?
CodeWarrior
8 (8-16-02) Douglas A. Welton. Doug dives into the latest version of this
robust multi-platform programming tool.
STM
Sports Backpack (8-9-02) Pierre Igot. How will this backpack designed
for the "global digerati" stack up when Pierre puts it to the test
with his mobile digital lifestyle?
Scope
Driver (8-2-02) Dr. Neale Monks. An alternative to the 'point and click'
telescope control paradigm: a powerful list-based utility for Autostar and
LX200 telescopes.
Apple
Final Cut Pro 3.0 (7-19-02) Michael Tate Jones. Tate reviews the video-editing
powerhouse Final Cut Pro 3 and sizes up its competition. Does Final Cut Pro
3 hold its ground?
Strata
DVpro RME (7-16-02) Matt Frederick. Matt Frederick. Matt takes a comprehensive
look at Strata DVpro, Strata's pro-level non-linear editor for digital video.
Stargazer's
Delight (6-28-02) Dr. Neale Monks. Looking for a viable shareware alternative
to the big commercial astronomy software packages? Neale may have found one.
TheSky
(6-21-02) Dr. Neale Monks. Neale takes a look at the easiest to use planetarium
program for the Mac.
NI
FM7 (6-21-02) Matt Frederick. Matt takes this software replica of Yamaha's
DX7 synthesizer for a test drive.
The
Digital Universe (6-14-02) Neale Monks. Planetarium program, astronomy
encyclopaedia and space flight simulator all rolled into one - could The Digital
Universe be the ClarisWorks of astronomy software? Neale Monks takes a look.
After
Effects 5.5 (5-31-02) Michael Tate Jones. Tate reviews the OS X native
version of After Effects and likes what he sees.
InDesign
2.0 for Non-Professional Designers (5-24-02) Pierre Igot. In the second
part of our review of Adobe InDesign 2.0 for Mac OS X, Pierre Igot looks at
InDesign from the point-of-view of the non-professional designer - and finds
plenty to like.
Corel
Graphics Suite, Part 2 (5-24-02) Dean Browell. CorelDraw returns in full
force and Corel R.A.V.E makes its debut.
Corel
Graphics Suite, Part 1 (5-17-02) Dean Browell. CorelDraw is back, and
it's brought some powerful friends that makes this Suite worth the look...
OmniGraffle
2.0 (5-10-02) András Puiz. Analog napkins are so 20th century --
this gem from OmniGroup knows (almost) all about diagramming. András
Puiz wishes all Mac developers developed a similar understanding of Aqua,
and of Mac OS X in general.
Watson
(5-03-02) Michael Tate Jones. Tate discovers a 'Swiss Army Knife' for OS X...
it's called Watson.
