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To leave Commie, hyper to
http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html
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Wow! Mac joins the 21st century! :-/
Circuits from NYTimes.com
Thursday, March 29, 2001
1. From the Desk of David Pogue: The Mac OS X Top Five
=======================================================
I've been talking quite a bit about Mac OS X, the new
operating system from Apple. My column today in The Times
covers it, and last week I reported on it in this e-mail
newsletter. But I'm not quite finished yet. After all, a
brand-new operating system comes along only once a decade
or so, and this one is likely to influence software design
for a long time to come.
Now that the world has had a week to live with Mac OS X,
hundreds of surprises have come to light. Some are unwel-
come. For example, drivers are available for precious few
printers. A few traditional Mac features have vanished: the
Labels menu, RAM disks, the Encrypt command and dragable
window edges. Worse, only a few programs are available in
Mac OS X versions. The big kahunas, like Photoshop and
Microsoft Word, aren't among them. (You can run the older
versions, but without the stability and good looks of Mac
OS X.)
But complaining about these disappointments feels a little
like griping about the cup holder in a Lexus. Within a year,
every major program will have been adapted for Mac OS X, and
Apple should have patched up the first-release potholes.
Meanwhile, as I've worked with Mac OS X, I've unearthed a
long list of delightful touches that reveal the fun Apple
must have had going boldly where no programmers had gone
before. Here are five of my favorites, which I didn't have
room to mention in today's print column:
1. The animations. Today's computers are much too powerful
to be wasted on mere word processing and email. Apple has
endowed Mac OS X with movement. The OK button in dialog
boxes gently pulsates. Program icons jump up and down
excitedly after being double-clicked. An icon you drag off
the Dock (the new row of frequently used icons on the screen
bottom) disappears with a visual puff of smoke. And when you
minimize a window, it visibly shrinks, apparently squeezing
itself through a transparent funnel as it slithers into the
Dock. You can turn off some of these effects, and the curmud-
geons hate them. But even after a week, I'm still grinning.
2. The multitasking. Because Mac OS X is based on Unix, you
can be ripping a CD or compressing video in the background
-- tasks that usually occupy the Mac's full attention -- as
you check e-mail or the Web. Mac OS X exploits this feature
in its own ways. For example, a movie that's playing or a
file that's downloading doesn't stop when you open a menu.
Meanwhile, a menu you've clicked open stays open forever
(or until you click somewhere else). (In the previous Mac
system software, menus had to close after 15 seconds to
permit background tasks to continue.)
3. Living icons. The Dock is a lot like the Windows taskbar,
at least in concept. But the icons themselves tell a story
far more complete than Windows's little text buttons; for
example, when you look at a document icon in the Dock, you
see the actual image of its first page -- not some generic
page symbol -- which makes it easier to identify. Movies
continue to play even when you've minimized them to the
Dock. The Clock application shows the current time even
when it's a Dock icon, and the Mail icon shows how many
new messages are waiting for you.
4. The sealed System folder. Veteran Mac users know that
they can give a flaky Mac a "clean install" -- a fresh copy
of the operating system -- in about 20 minutes. You can't
do that in Mac OS X, but from the looks of it, you'll never
need to. Nothing can touch the System folder, not even your
applications or their installers. It's embedded in acrylic,
frozen the way Apple intended it to be. It contains no
extensions, control panels or preference files; it may as
well come with a sticker that says "NO USER-SERVICEABLE
PARTS INSIDE." In theory, this means that an OS X Mac will
always run as smoothly as it did the day you first installed
the operating system. Of course, theories require testing.
5. The Fonts. Mac OS X comes with dozens of superb fonts,
which Apple has licensed from big-name type companies. Apple
says you'd pay over $1,000 to buy this collection on your
own. I say it's great to have so many beautiful faces at
your disposal. Now we just need some printer drivers so we
can see them on paper.
Visit David Pogue on the Web at: http://www.davidpogue.com
2. This Week in Circuits: The Casino on the Desktop
===================================================
State of the Art: A New Face (and Heart) for the Mac
The new OS X is almost everything Macintosh fans could wish
for: a gorgeous, easy-to-navigate and virtually crash-proof
operating system that makes previous consumer systems, like
Mac OS 9 and Windows Me, look like hand-cranked antiques.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/technology/29STAT.html?0329ci
