Mac OS X Seminar ---------------- Thursday, June 28, 2001 2-4pm Noble Desktop 594 Broadway, Suite 601 New York, NY Mac OS X is based on a unix kernel (Darwin, a BSD derivative), so it's safe to assume that things are very different in this new Operating System, compared to Macintosh's old OS. Dan Rodney from NobleDesktop gave a 2 hour presentation on the new Mac OS X; here's the gist of it: First of all, everything you read anywhere else about Mac OS X is probably correct and more detailed than my impression, but I thought I should just write a small summary of the seminar. Of the 15-20 people that attended this session, it seemed that most were avid Mac fans or Graphic Design people or otherwise more on the Macintosh-side of the whole "Mac OS X now with Unix inside" issue. Apparently so was the presenter, Dan Rodney. Convincing Mac-fans to enjoy a brand-spanking new, slick, smooth _Mac_ OS doesn't take too much effort, but I was rather impressed myself. The Mac OS X clearly aims for the conventional Mac person, and man, I tell you, it _is_ slick and smooth. Icons are bouncing and sliding and flashing back and forth and all the graphics are cute and neat, I'm sure the designers of Aqua had a field day. Many actions are animated and fluid, and while I'm not sure that all this might not get a little annoying once the "new-appeal" wears off, it sure looks like fun. And later on, you can turn them off, so no problem there. Mac OS X includes a "dock", which seems to replace the "control strip" known from older versions. But eventually you will realize that the dock can do much more. It's a place where you can place application-icons for quick access (similar to WindowMaker's dock[1]) on the one hand - on the other hand, it's the place where minimized icons swoosh[2] into. It comes off as a combination of the Macintosh Control Strip, the Windows Taskbar, WindowMakers dock and GNOME's and KDE's taskbar - several icons can pop up long menu's, you can place it anywhere along the screenborder etc. Again, there are several gadgety animations and goodies that are related to the dock that all say "this is a MAC, dude!". Macintosh's "Finder" is another example of how Apple managed to make a completely new thing look just like the old OS's equivalent. In OS X, the Finder is much more powerful than in older versions, it seemed to me as a combination of Windows' Explorer, KDE's Konqueror and Nautilus. You can browse and explore files, you can add your own shortcuts etc to the toolbar, enabel/disable the toolbar altogether and preview all kinds of files through their iconic view (movies and mp3's can even be played right inside this new Finder[3]). One very interesting tidbit of information that I was unaware of is that OS X's WindowManager itself is somehow PDF/PS based, which means that all rendering scales smoothly and cleanly. Icons and fonts look equally clean across different sizes/resolutions. Furthermore, from any OS X native application, you can create a PDF right away by simply printing it to a file (I don't know if it creates an intermediary PS). These graphics make the entire feel of Aqua very, very slick - but it's not just eye-candy, apparently: some application exhibit a "smart" behaviour according to their size, for example. If the application is very small, it will display the options in a drop-down-menu, while it will instantly change to a select-from-list if it is resized to a certain height/width. I'm not sure, this might be irritating - but maybe it's just a question of getting used to. For demonstration purposes, it sure looks good. OS X's WindowManager furthermore supports some capabilities that may not sound too revolutionary to Unix users, but that apparently have not been there in older versions of the Mac OS - it now remembers the geometry and placement of your applications and exhibits some kind of "smart placement" behaviour when opening new windows. I'm not sure if or in how far you can influence this behaviour, though. Applications that are developed for Mac OS X are referred to as "Cocoa" applications[4], and it seems that Apple tries to include some Interface Standards (for example, the "Preferences" item /should/ always be in the Application menu, and not in the Edit-menu etc). This strikes me as a good thing - in general, I had the impression that many people should take a close look at Mac OS X and learn a thing or two from the Human Interface Strategies implemented here. These standards make it possible for some applications to work together under the name "services". For example, a web-browser can offer the "service" of opening a link from any other application; seems like a mixture of plugins, pipes and file-associations to me. But it indicates that Apple at least tries to follow an old Unix-rule: Do one thing and do it well. Currently there are not too many industry-standard applications available for the new OS X (just yet) - if you want to run an old application that is only available for OS 9.1, you can still do so however. Mac OS X comes with a Mac OS 9 emulator, which is automatically started when you click on an old-er application. In that instance, the old OS is literally booted and becomes available. Of course you need to have installed a version of mac OS 9.1 (older versions will _not_ work). The interesting part about this is that this is in effect a full-fledged Mac-OS-9-emulator (or is it actually closer to a virtual machine?). Since the core of OS X is a BSD derived Unix, it seems to me that it will remain a question of time (and lawsuits, *sigh*) until this part has been reverse-engineered and will be available for other *nices. Not that I'd believe that Apple actually would not sue everybody who tried... So Mac OS X is Unix based - this means that it's a multiuser system. As any other unixlike system, you have the same file-structure and -permissions as anywhere else, with all your desktop-preferences stored in ascii-text-files in your $HOME. This is the part where it actually got really interesting, since a unix-core would indicate that you could probably just recompile most of the common unix-applications on that platform and then you're good to go. However, since Dan is more of a graphics-person (I gather) and not so much a developer, he couldn't answer my question as to wether or not the standard GNU development tools such as make, gcc, gdb etc. are included in a standard OS X distribution, but he assured me that the OS comes with a "Developers CD", which might include such tools. Anyway, so you can set up your OS X to accept incoming connections such as a remote login, ftp or http (apache's included, Dan said), so any unix-geek should be happy with that. There are two editions for OS X, "Server" and "client" (or was it "workstation"?) - it should be interesting to see how OS X compares to other *nices in benchmark tests. Apple successfully hides all the unix-ness from the user - file-permissions and network-configuration can all be done through the GUI, but don't despair, you actually *can* open a normal terminal and you're greeted with a rather familiar looking: [localhost: ~] $ It appears to be /bin/tcsh. Phew - all's well. All these flashy graphics made me want to see a command-prompt already! Anyway, two hours are over. Dan did a great job of presenting the new Mac OS X, answering everybody's question. Thanks to NobleDesktop! My final impression: Mac OS X is a very, very neat thing. Must be fun to toy around with and to develop with and for (especially since Qt 3.0 announced for the end of the summer/fall is supposed to also run on OS X - whohoo!), but it certainly wouldn't be my main machine. But for every *nix-zealot with a non-geek partner/spouse, this seems like a great second computer. Gives him/her the fun of having a slick Mac and funky icons and a familiar (looking) environment, yet you can toy around with the underlying Darwin. It's resource-hungry, though: Dan mentioned that a default install takes about 1 Gig of harddrive space and requires, as a _bare_ minimum 128 MB RAM. Furthermore, OS X will only run on G3's and up. Again, thanks to Dan and NobleDesktop - I very much enjoyed the seminar. -Jan http://www.netmeister.org Footnotes: ---------- [1] the icons even vanish into a puffing cloud when you drag them off the dock again, very similar to WindowMakers "explosion" [2] yes, that _is_ the right word, believe me [3] macintoshy goodie: minimize the finder while it's playing a movie (or the movie-player itself) and it will continue to play in the minimized icon - very neat [4] applications that only work on older Mac OS versions are called "classic", the ones that work on both "Carbon"