TidBITS#650/07-Oct-02
=====================
What happens when you put a few hundred Mac and Unix users
together in the same room? Read on for Adam's report from last
week's O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. Along with his description of
the event, Adam also grades Mac OS X in a variety of categories.
Do you agree? Take this week's poll to register your own grade!
Finally, people who have bought Adam's iPhoto Visual QuickStart
Guide can now download the entire book in PDF format for free.
Topics:
MailBITS/07-Oct-02
O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference Report
Mac OS X Report Card: October 2002
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MailBITS/07-Oct-02
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**iPhoto Visual QuickStart Guide Available in PDF** -- For those
who have purchased my latest book, iPhoto 1.1 for Mac OS X: Visual
QuickStart Guide, you can now download the entire book in PDF
format. As with the first electronic version, which Peachpit and
I made available via Amazon before the book appeared in print,
I bookmarked every page, linked all the entries in the Table of
Contents and Index to their destination pages, and made all the
Web links and email addresses hot. New in this version are many
color screenshots, and at 5 MB it's also half the size of the
previous version. For the current download location and password
to the StuffIt archive (and to receive notification about new
versions), send an email message (no special Subject or body is
necessary) to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. If you order the book
via Amazon or some other online service and don't want to wait for
it to arrive before downloading the PDF version, just cc me on
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I can send you the password directly. One final request - if
you've bought the book and have a moment, I'd appreciate it if
you could write a short review on Amazon - they really do help.
Thanks! [ACE]
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321121651/tidbitselectro00>
O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference Report
-----------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Last week's O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference marked the rise of
the first major new Macintosh conference in years. Luminaries
from the Macintosh and Unix worlds, brought together by Apple's
melding of the Mac OS and Unix in Mac OS X, mingled with a
similarly eclectic mix of several hundred attendees. I found
my three days of attending sessions, chatting with speakers and
attendees, browsing the small room of exhibitors, and giving
several presentations both enjoyable and illuminating, though
the experience was somewhat marred by logistical mistakes.
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/macosx2002/>
<http://www.macdevcenter.com/mac/osx2002/>
**Attendees** -- Though it would be glib to categorize the
attendees as a target audience of "alpha geeks" (to use Tim
O'Reilly's phrase), the reality proved more interesting. A few
of the usual suspects from conferences like MacHack were present,
and a number of speakers also hailed from the traditional base of
Macintosh power users. Similarly, I got the impression that a few
people there were curious about Mac OS X, though they were still
using other variants of Unix. Most of the attendees seemed to fall
between those two extremes. When Tim O'Reilly took an informal
poll of the audience during the second day's keynote, about 75
percent of the attendees raised their hands to his question of how
many in the audience used Unix before Mac OS X. But when he turned
the question around, asking how many used the Mac OS before Mac OS
X, the percentage remained almost identical, and at least from my
vantage point on the stage, it seemed as though roughly the same
people were raising their hands. One member of the audience summed
it up later, saying, "I used Unix at work and the Mac at home."
Four or five people even said they'd been NeXT users - it was
nice to see such a large percentage of the NeXT user population
represented at the conference.
The technical savviness of the attendees was high - much more so
than a Macworld Expo, for instance, and I was particularly struck
by how technical those people who had come to Mac OS X from the
Unix world were. They clearly appreciated Mac OS X, but the
windows you saw open on their Desktops generally belonged to
the Terminal, not to the Finder or other applications. It's not
surprising; I think it's safe to say that people who identify
themselves as being Unix users are likely to be network
administrators, programmers, scientists, and so on - all people
who would be using Unix because of the power and flexibility
it provides them and for whom Mac OS X-native programs provide
additional, not replacement, capabilities.
Oddly enough, these folks were also far more likely to have
decorated their laptops with a variety of stickers, something you
almost never see done by traditional Macintosh users. I suspect
it may stem from the fact that many of the stickers were covering
logos, since they would prefer not to advertise for the PC vendors
whose Intel-powered computers generally run Windows, not Unix,
whereas traditional Macintosh users aren't perturbed about
promoting the Macintosh.
**Keynotes and Sessions** -- Although there was a small collection
of vendors with exhibit tables during two of the days, the
conference launched with a day of lengthy tutorials and then
centered around a schedule that started with a keynote each
day, followed by an extensive slate of sessions.
Appropriately enough for the first conference to focus on Mac OS
X, the keynotes primarily provided history and background. The
first day brought a brief talk from Tim O'Reilly about paradigm
shifts and why he likes Mac OS X. Then David Pogue trotted
everyone through an amusing history of the Macintosh, ending
with some overly safe predictions for the future. Apple's Jordan
Hubbard anchored the second day's keynote, giving a history of
Unix and capping it with a look at how Mac OS X was the Unix
world's best chance at regaining a place on the desktop. Then
Jordan, Tim, O'Reilly editor Derrick Story, and I participated
in a panel discussion about the convergence of the Macintosh and
Unix worlds. For the third day, Wilfredo Sanchez Vega, who had
worked at Apple, gave a talk about the origins of the Darwin
project.
Though it made rhetorical sense to make sure Unix users had a
sense of the Macintosh history, and vice versa, it felt a little
forced. After all, most of the people in the O'Reilly audience
have been in the computer industry long enough to know most of
this history. The presenters were the saving grace - David Pogue
remains one of the Mac world's best performers (he showed a
hilarious unofficial movie of the Newton group setting up and
knocking down thousands of Newton modems like dominos after Apple
cancelled the Newton project), and hearing history from people
like Jordan Hubbard who had lived through it brought it to life
in a way that wouldn't otherwise have worked.
O'Reilly divided the sessions into nine tracks: Mac OS X in the
Large, Programming, Multimedia/The iApps, Unix, User Interface,
Servers and Networking, Hardware, Emerging Topics, and Products &
Services. I found the variety somewhat frustrating, since there
were often several conflicting talks I would have liked to hear.
The variety also made the conference feel a little unfocused at
times.
That said, most of the sessions I attended were excellent,
especially Stuart Cheshire's overview of Rendezvous and Matt
Neuburg's look at automating Mac OS X. Less successful were a
pair of sessions that sounded as though they'd be looking at
techniques and utilities for enhancing the Mac OS X experience.
The first fell prey in part to hardware difficulties connecting
to the projector, and both ended up focusing almost entirely on
Unix command line utilities and related tricks. Nowhere was the
gap that remains between Macintosh and Unix users of Mac OS X
more prevalent - I can't tell you how dull I found it to listen
to someone explaining a four-line shell command while I was
squinting from the back of the room to read tiny monospaced text
in a Terminal window. Unix demos terribly. However, it was clear
from the reactions of people around me that those who were at home
with Mac OS X's Unix foundations found the Unix-oriented tricks
fascinating. O'Reilly could have done a better job describing
these sessions.
More lamentably, with only 45 minutes for each speaker, the
sessions were simply too short. Almost without exception, every
speaker I talked to expressed frustration at having to cover
material extremely quickly, and even then, there often wasn't
enough time left for questions. Some speakers also said that
they'd had to cut down the length of their talks to fit their
allotted time, turning what was otherwise an in-depth talk into
more of an overview. I suspect O'Reilly simply tried to fit too
many talks into a relatively short amount of time. Fewer, longer
talks would have reduced the variety, but would, I think, have
improved the quality and utility of the experience.
**Wireless Community** -- For me, the high point of the conference
was talking with the people present. The mezzanine level of the
hotel held tables, chairs, and the all-important power strips for
recharging batteries, and O'Reilly's network administrators made
sure the entire area had wireless network coverage for Internet
access. Although there was a room of Internet-connected Macs
provided by Apple, it went almost unused, since everyone relied
on the wireless network and mingled in the public area.
Despite the technical skills of the O'Reilly folks like Cliff
Skolnick and Rob Flickenger, the wireless network was plagued with
annoying problems that they eventually traced to what appears to
be a bug with Mac OS X 10.2.1's networking stack. Apparently, if
one machine on a wireless network uses what's called "promiscuous
mode" (as it would if you use Unix utilities like tcpdump or
ngrep, or another network monitoring tool like EtherPEG) and is
also using the firewall built into Jaguar, it could cause other
packets on the network to be dropped. Long-time Macintosh
networking guru Peter Sichel (author of IPNetRouter) confirmed
this, offered a possible workaround, and noted that it's a flaw
in BSD's networking stack that can affect wired networks as well.
Hopefully Apple will fix this one soon.
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2086>
<http://www.etherpeg.org/>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/10249>
**Looking Toward Tomorrow** -- Right after Cliff and Rob finished
demonstrating the network bug they'd isolated, I had to finish up
at the conference and drive down to Harker, a private high school
in San Jose where I'd been invited to speak. The computer science
teacher, Robb Cutler, is a long-time TidBITS reader, and when he
realized I was going to be only a few miles away, he asked me to
come talk to his students about TidBITS and what life in the
computer industry could be like outside of the technology pressure
cooker of Silicon Valley. I managed what I hope was an amusing and
helpful talk, choosing my stories to illustrate some of the points
in my "Lessons from Ten Years of TidBITS," published back in
TidBITS-527_.
<http://www.harker.org/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05899>
Even though (or perhaps because) I hadn't had time to prepare, it
was a great experience. The Beloit College Mindset Lists of what
incoming freshmen knew suddenly gained a lot of relevance as I was
relating the history of TidBITS. After all, my audience was barely
out of diapers when TidBITS was starting in 1990, and some of my
stories revolve around details they likely knew little of, such as
Robert Morris, Jr.'s Internet worm, IBM mainframes, and an
Internet without the Web.
<http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset/>
Nonetheless, I was impressed at how bright and interested these
kids were. They may not have been representative of people their
age everywhere, but it was still clear that there's no lack of
the intelligence and curiosity necessary to enable us to continue
inventing our future. It reinforced my belief that we must not
allow the ugly political, business, and social realities of today
to block the innovations - in all fields - necessary to improve
life everywhere.
PayBITS: Was Adam's report of value in confirming your decision
to stay home or to attend the next O'Reilly Mac OS X conference?
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=ace%40tidbits.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Mac OS X Report Card: October 2002
----------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
At last week's O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, I gave a talk grading
Mac OS X in a number of categories, and although a draft was
discussed on TidBITS Talk, I wanted to share the final version
here. Since I haven't attempted this exercise earlier in Mac OS
X's history, the grades are for Mac OS X overall, not just Jaguar,
and thus include previous versions as appropriate.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=1760>
**Stability** -- Perhaps the most ballyhooed aspect of the switch
to Mac OS X was its vaunted stability in comparison to Mac OS 9.
Overall, Mac OS X has done a good job in this regard, enabling
users to work for weeks at a time without rebooting. Applications
may crash, but Mac OS X generally handles that with aplomb,
allowing the user to continue working without interruption. On
the down side, Mac OS X has proven sensitive to network-related
problems and potentially flaky hardware, with malfunctioning USB
devices in particular causing sporadic and frustrating problems
(if you're seeing Mac OS X crash or freeze regularly, try a
different mouse and keyboard). Although Unix variants haven't
traditionally had to deal with users changing networks rapidly,
fiddling with network settings in unpredictable ways, and plugging
and unplugging a wide variety of devices, Apple needs to work a
bit harder on making Mac OS X more tolerant of unexpected network
and hardware problems.
Grade: B+
**Interface** -- Apple's decision to break from its past with the
look and feel of Mac OS X has caused no end of consternation among
Macintosh users, although I was interested to hear that people
switching to Mac OS X from Unix weren't bothered by the changes
(and during our panel, Tim O'Reilly claimed that as someone who
had used the Mac years ago before switching to Windows, he found
Mac OS X significantly easier to use than Mac OS 9). Nonetheless,
some of Apple's decisions were highly dubious from a user
interface perspective (such as Mac OS X's confused approach to
window layering), and no matter what, when it comes to user
interface, being different purely for the sake of being different
is a mistake because familiarity is an important aspect of any
interface. Plus, Apple hasn't provided as many options as some
would like (such as being able to shut the Dock off entirely).
However, Apple appears to be moving in the right direction, since
Jaguar includes many fixes, such as type-to-select in the Finder
(though Open and Save dialogs remain a festering boil of awkward
and inconsistent interface). And, though some diehards may dispute
this, Mac OS X has introduced some welcome changes, such as column
view, the Finder toolbar's Search field, and (one of my favorites)
the capability to keep icons on the Desktop arranged by date.
Plenty of work remains for Apple in the area of interface design.
Grade: B-
**Performance** -- Although Apple claimed the move to Unix would
result in improved performance, Mac OS X's speed has been
disappointing. 10.0 was so slow on a 250 MHz PowerBook G3
that restarts timed out because Mac OS X couldn't even quit
applications fast enough. 10.1 was a huge improvement, and made
Mac OS X usable for many people, but still lagged far behind Mac
OS 9. Although Jaguar was supposed to be significantly faster than
previous versions, in part due to Quartz Extreme off-loading
graphics tasks to supported video cards, it doesn't seem to have
made that much difference, particularly on older hardware. Users
still report that rebooting in Mac OS 9 makes it feel as though
they've gotten a new computer because the Mac is so much more
responsive. On the plus side, a busy application doesn't bog down
the system, and it's usually no trouble to switch out to another
application when you see the rainbow busy cursor (note that Jaguar
cleverly shows that cursor when you mouse over one of the busy
application's windows in the background, so you can easily tell if
the task has completed). Even more welcome in Mac OS X: instant
wakeup for laptops. Apple has lots of room for improvement in the
performance arena, and I strongly encourage them not to pawn the
task off on faster hardware, since many old Macs are both still
officially supported and perfectly useful.
Grade: B
**Compatibility: Mac OS 9** -- Apple knew the Classic
compatibility environment would be key to Mac OS X's success,
since many of us still have applications that have not yet been
updated for Mac OS X. Classic has proved fast and stable, and
initial irritations surrounding pasting information between
Classic and native applications have largely been resolved.
Classic's only warts are applications that need to touch hardware
in some way (credit card authorization software that uses the
modem, for instance), and a few high-profile exceptions to the
rule, such as QuarkXPress. There's relatively little room for
improvement, though it would be nice to see Classic support a
saved state, a feature similar to the way Connectix's Virtual
PC handles PC sessions.
Grade: A-
**Compatibility: Windows** -- The Mac OS has long been able to
read PC-formatted disks, but Mac OS X takes Windows compatibility
to a new level with its built-in support for SMB file sharing.
Though filename extensions are a step backward from an interface
perspective, they do eliminate some problems when sharing files
with Windows users. And though it's not quite fair to give Apple
credit for the work of third party developers, Connectix's Virtual
PC, Netopia's Timbuktu, Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection
Client, and Thursby's just-released DAVE 4.0 all improve Mac OS
X's story with Windows. I can't vouch for these personally, but
there remain complaints about how Mac OS X works in large Windows-
based networks; I anticipate we'll see Apple working on those
problems and making it ever easier for its target audience of
Windows switchers.
<http://www.connectix.com/products/vpc5m.html>
<http://www.netopia.com/en-us/software/products/tb2/mac/>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/rdc/>
<http://www.thursby.com/products/dave.html>
Grade: B+
**Compatibility: Unix** -- Reports indicate that Apple has done a
generally good job with the Unix core of Mac OS X, and the number
of high-profile Unix developers and users who have made the jump
supports this. The Fink package management system has garnered
positive reviews for people looking to install a wide range of
Unix applications in Mac OS X, and the ready availability of both
command line applications and those that use the X Window System
has been positive. As with Windows, though, Mac OS X may not play
as well as it could in large networks - one conference attendee
noted that Mac OS X has no support for NFS file locking and its
automounter has some problems and limitations. Plus, I've heard
from people who aren't happy about Apple's reliance on the Mach
microkernel; their claim is that Mach had some advantages years
ago that have largely been erased in the interim, and the reliance
on Mach requires more work from Apple to integrate changes from
FreeBSD.
<http://fink.sourceforge.net/>
Grade: A-
**Compatibility: Hardware** -- There's no question that hardware
support in Mac OS X has been improving from the early days, when
it was almost impossible even to print. Apple regularly releases
drivers for new devices with updates available via Software
Update, and manufacturers have created drivers for some older
devices. But overall support for perfectly usable and modern
devices remains mediocre at best, with some areas, such as SCSI,
lagging far behind. I included professional audio hardware in this
latter category initially, but Apple Master David Mash of the
Berklee College of Music, who was presenting at the conference,
reportedly disagreed with that assessment, and I haven't managed
to connect him with TidBITS Technical Editor Geoff Duncan, who, as
a professional musician, has repeatedly lamented the near-complete
absence of pro audio for Mac OS X. [Using Mac OS X for pro audio
is like using a flashlight to cook dinner. -Geoff] Finally, flaky
hardware and poorly written kernel extensions can cause
significant stability problems for Mac OS X. Apple needs to
work much harder in this area - pretending that old devices
don't exist is unacceptable.
Grade: C+
**Security** -- Security was essentially never an issue with Mac
OS 9, though that operating system's vaunted security wasn't
exactly intentional. In comparison, Mac OS X is a step back,
though that step was unavoidable, since Mac OS X provides so many
more built-in Internet services and network capabilities. Luckily,
they're all off by default. Apple's early responses to security
vulnerabilities were poor, with fixes appearing slowly and
unaccompanied by communications from the company. That's a thing
of the past, though, and the combination of Software Update with
Apple's Product Security mailing list and Web page has worked well
of late. Apple has even admitted to the lay audience that security
could be an issue by exposing Mac OS X's firewall configuration,
though the Brickhouse utility is still useful for more complex
setups. Maintaining security is an ongoing task, and one question
that remains is how Apple will address security holes in Mac OS X
10.1.5 since there are undoubtedly some who didn't pay for the
upgrade to Jaguar.
<http://www.info.apple.com/usen/security/security_updates.html>
<http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/brickhouse.html>
Grade: B+
**Software Breadth** -- At every Macworld Expo keynote, Steve Jobs
gives some entirely improbable sounding number about how many
applications have been written for Mac OS X. Details aside,
though, Apple has done a good job of making it possible for a
wide variety of software to appear for Mac OS X. Old applications
are supported by Classic, new applications can be written in
Carbon or Cocoa, a good Java virtual machine makes it more likely
that you'll be able to run Java-based programs, and of course,
many Unix applications have been recompiled for Mac OS X. This
adds up to excellent support for network-related tools and
servers, productivity applications, and utilities. Not all is
rosy, though, and games, education titles, and content-intensive
applications still are primarily written only for Windows,
because that's where most of the users are. Unfortunately, I
don't see that changing much, since Apple isn't likely to increase
its market share radically any time soon; the main hope is that
porting from Windows to Mac OS X is enough easier that more
companies will undertake the process.
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/>
Grade: B+
**Documentation & Help** -- Apple used to be known for the best
manuals in the business, but the only paper manual that comes
with Mac OS X is a too-brief Getting Started pamphlet. All
documentation has moved online, and appears in the glacially slow
Help Viewer, which is essentially a slightly customized Web
browser. (One bonus in Jaguar: Help Viewer now has a keyboard
shortcut - Command-[ - for the Back button.) Gone are balloon help
and Apple Guide, though developers can be blamed for their loss -
too few wrote good help for Apple to bother moving them into Mac
OS X. Help Viewer's content is generally mediocre as well - for
technical documentation to be helpful, it must be written with an
eye toward answering user's questions and anticipating their
needs, it must be honest about the existence of problems, and it
must be thorough and complete. The more technical information in
Apple's Knowledge Base is better, and independent documentation
available both in print and on the Web has helped significantly.
Come on, Apple, you can do better.
Grade: C-
**Troubleshooting** -- There's no question Mac OS X is both
completely different from Mac OS 9 and significantly more complex.
Those two facts create a situation where the extensive knowledge
many long-time Mac users had built up is now almost entirely
useless, making troubleshooting Mac OS X much more difficult.
Aggravating the situation are side-effects of the way Mac OS X was
designed; for instance, the fact that it's a multiple user system
results in confusing privileges errors when a file that can't
be deleted by the current user ends up in the Trash. Somewhat
offsetting these problems are the facts that Mac OS X far more
effectively isolates the user from the system (making it hard to
delete the Finder, for instance, or save your thesis in the System
Folder) and that Mac OS X provides much better logging, which can
help track down crashes. Also helpful is Mac OS X's stability -
a crashing application doesn't mean waiting through a restart or
losing work as you troubleshoot it any more. Although there's
definitely room for improvement in this category, the extra
complexity is unavoidable, so Apple will have work hard to keep
it behind the scenes more effectively.
Grade: B-
**Flexibility** -- One of the neat aspects of Mac OS 9 was that it
could be customized heavily, both by using options built into the
operating system and with third-party utilities that modified the
way the operating system looked and worked. That flexibility even
provided Apple with features, such as the menubar clock and the
windowshade capability, that originated in independent utilities.
Unfortunately, these utilities could also destabilize the system,
and in the worst situations, would conflict with one another. Mac
OS X has eliminated those hooks into the operating system in favor
of stability, and while the stability is appreciated, it's sad to
lose the flexibility. On the plus side, Mac OS X's multiple user
capabilities make it easy for people sharing a Mac to maintain
their own custom environments, preferences files are more likely
to have a standard format that power users can investigate and
edit, and there are some tweaks that can now be made from the
command line instead of via ResEdit. Apple will have to tread a
fine line here - additional options and opening up the operating
system to modification are worthy goals, but they must be
accomplished without sacrificing stability.
Grade: B+
**Programmability** -- Ever since Apple decided that HyperCard
smells funny, the company has avoided implying that users could
use the Mac to create their own applications. It was a shame,
since giving users programming tools is a bit like giving fire
to early humans. Thankfully, with Mac OS X, Apple seems to be
reversing course, making development tools available for free and
offering numerous different programming targets. Though no one
should be writing Classic applications anymore, developers can
choose among Carbon, Cocoa, Java, and Unix. Plus, the new
AppleScript Studio lets developers write true Cocoa applications
in AppleScript. Third parties bolster this story as well, with
products such as Runtime Revolution, the Java-focused Tekadence
Magik, and the well-known REALbasic. (REAL Software recently
announced their next version will run on Windows as well as the
Mac, which should increase the number of applications developed
using REALbasic, and which in turn could increase the number of
Windows applications made available for the Mac.) The two flies
in the ointment are that Apple still thinks HyperCard smells
funny, and the company seems to have developed an odd aversion
for AppleScript, with AppleScript support in too few of Apple's
own applications. What's especially annoying is that with Cocoa
applications (such as iPhoto), you can reportedly get 95 percent
of the way to having AppleScript support simply by selecting a
checkbox when compiling, and if you add AppleScript support, you
can use it to help automate testing. If nothing else, Apple looks
downright stupid when they don't support their own technologies,
particularly technologies as useful to workflow automation as
AppleScript.
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/studio/>
<http://www.runrev.com/>
<http://www.tekadence.com/>
<http://www.realbasic.com/>
<http://www.realbasic.com/corporate/pressreleases/RbWinAnnounce.html>
Grade: A-
**Internationalization** -- About half of Apple's market lies
outside North America, and although the Mac has a good history
with regard to supporting other languages (largely thanks to
its use of bitmapped fonts for Asian languages), Mac OS X is
reportedly a significant improvement. You can select among
numerous localizations for Mac OS X itself, more input methods
are available than were in Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X offers good
Unicode support for different character sets. On the downside,
many applications aren't holding up their end of the bargain, so,
for instance, a Word document with Greek fonts created on the PC
won't transfer properly to Word X in Mac OS X. Some users have
also complained about complications with accessing files named
with mixed character sets in the Terminal, and others have moaned
about keyboard shortcuts being difficult to use on different
keyboards. But in the end, Apple has done a good job, and merely
needs to keep up the effort to fill in the remaining holes.
Grade: A-
**Overall Grade** -- Rather than attempt a subjective overall
grade, I converted my letter grades to numbers from 1 to 15 (F-
to A+), averaged them, and converted back to a letter grade. The
end result? A solid B, which feels right. Apple has done well
(the grade would definitely have been lower before Jaguar, and
much lower still before Mac OS X 10.1). But as remains obvious
to those of us who have used the Mac for years, Apple still has
plenty of work to do in core areas: performance, interface,
stability, hardware compatibility, and documentation. I look
forward to grading Apple's work again, perhaps in a year.
Grade: B
So do you agree with my assessment? Try assigning your own grades
to each of the categories I've evaluated above, average them as
I've done, and see what you get. Then go register your overall
result on the poll on our home page - it certainly won't be
statistically accurate, but I'll be curious to see how the TidBITS
readership rates Mac OS X. I do ask that you be fair - unjustified
rankings on the extreme ends of the scale are notably unhelpful.
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