[A recounting of my initial Jaguar (or rather, Shagwire) experience,
hopefully useful to someone considering upgrading]
Hi...
The cat is now definitely almost out of the bag! :)
So, I did a full backup using Retrospect, freed up 1.3Gb on my main
OS X drive (1.9Gb if you're doing an install on a drive that doesn't
have OS X on it already), and then ran the installer. It required a
reboot, displaying a grey Apple logo on a grey background. The
progress cursor is a circular set of radial clock marks that fade in
and out in sequence. The spinning beachball cursor is now a
multicoloured 3D beachball (although the colours themselves don't
spin). Then the installer ran, then I got to reboot again after about
30 minutes, then it asked for the second install disk.
Eventually my Mac restarted again and I was presented with the login
dialog. I logged in, the Mac thought about things for a bit, this
being my first login and all.
So, I then tried to close a window in the finder. The Finder
unexpectedly quit. Uh Oh! I thought it might have been a problem with
the preferences, and sure enough I ditched my
/User/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist and then
everything was happy after that (it might have been because I was
using TinkerTool to hide the shame that is my desktop :). However it
has fallen over a couple of times when I use the 'in window' search
option. The Finder's 'Find' command no longer launches Sherlock, it's
back to a dedicated find dialog, ala the days of Mac OS 7.1. The
'Computer' icon of the old iMac has been replaced by an icon of a new
flat-panel iMac. The Desktop pictures have also been revamped. Spring
loaded folders (but not 'click-and-a-half' folder browsing) are back
too. Yay!
Another big win is that you can now get more than one Get Info window
on the screen at once should you wish to compare the information of
two or more files. The Get Info window now has a series of
disclosable panes at the bottom of its window so you can choose what
you want or don't want to see and yet still leave the basic file
information visible (name, mod date/time, etc.)
Sherlock is pretty useless if you're not in the US. Shares were
offline when I tried. YellowPages was for the US, movie times didn't
recognise my postcode (probably because it's not a zip code). Pretty
much there's no reason to use it at all, searching the internet or
photos I can do from my web browser, which is always open anyway.
Connecting my Airport to the internet displays a scrolling status
message in the menu bar 'Dialling' or 'Connecting', which is kind of
nice. You can also choose 'Create Network' to use your machine as an
Airport Software Base Station. There is also the option of displaying
the amount of time your modem connection has been up in the menu bar,
which is also nice.My battery icon seems to spend most of its time
stuck on '(Calculating)', although once it has displayed 0:02
(minutes remaining until full charge).
The Addressbook is great, I imported all the vCards I'd exported from
my Palm Desktop Application and Ericsson Connection Application. It
also provides a function for merging two address entries together,
which is quite handy. It has however unexpectedly quit once so far.
As this is a centralised, extensible address repository, I expect
I'll be using this rather than Palm Desktop eventually as my master
address book.
Apple have addressed the problem of the menubar clock displaying the
date in the wrong format by simply ignoring the short system date
format entirely and displaying it as the long date (Day, Date Month
Year). Ironically the International Preference panel offers a choice
of *Standard* or metric!
BlueTooth eventually paired up with my mobile phone (after I'd had to
reboot). It asked if I wanted to use the paired device with the
addressbook, or as the modem, or both. I then used it to send SMS
messages to a couple of people in my addressbook, to check that it
worked.
Most applications seem to work quite happily, except for some
Preference panels that are dodgy (TinkerTool), but then I haven't
looked to see if they've been updated yet.
iChat asked for either an AIM or a .Mac username and password and
then proceeded to connect. It asked if I wanted to enable Rendezvous
to connect with any other OS X users. Of course I don't actually know
any other .Mac users to chat with, but other than that it looks fine.
Internet Explorer is version 5.2.1 and has been reinstalled (because
it's now back to searching using the evil Microsoft Network rather
than my hacked version that used Google). Sigh.
Speedwise, it's hard to know. The Finder is more responsive because
of its multithreading (and it remembers window setting and locations
properly!). It's certainly not any slower. The difference is probably
more pronounced on machines with newer graphics hardware. Networking
speeds definitely seem to be improved.
The Help Centre is much more visually appealing. Unfortunately they
don't seem to have thought too hard about it as the help manuals
appear in a popup side panel which doesn't have any scroll bars, and
my machine already has more help manuals than fit in the side panel
without having to resize the window. You'd have thought that after
having to add scrollbars to iTunes and other applications someone at
Apple would have worked this out by now. (I did ask the help about
Inkwell, but it didn't know anything about it). Also, if you ask it a
question it doesn't know about, there's no way to abort the search.
If you install the developer tools, copius developer documentation is
also included.
Image preview now offers zoom in and out, next, previous, and rotate
buttons, and a page number option, along with a thumbnail panel.
Encrypted disk images no longer require you to type your password in
twice to unlock them.
The Classic preferences panel now has a 'warn before launching
Classic' option, so you can avoid launching Classic if you really
don't want to start up a Classic app. Yay!
The Energy saver prefs panel now lets you have different settings
depending on whether you're plugged into a power adapter, or running
off batteries. This should sound familiar to users of Mac OS 8 & 9...
The CD & DVD prefs panel lets you specify what to do when a blank CD
or DVD is inserted (Open the Finder, iTunes, Disk Copy or some other
application or script), or what to do when a music CD, picture CD or
video DVD is inserted (run iTunes, iPhoto, DVD Player, another
application or script).
The General preferences panel allows you to choose from Standard
(best for CRT), Light, Medium (best for flat panel) or Strong.
The Screen Effects panel includes some new screensavers, Flurry and
.Mac, which lets you display photos from a .Mac account as your
screensaver pictures. The Desktop prefs panel now lets you change the
desktop picture at login, or on a regular basis
The Accounts prefs panel now has an option for each user to 'Let user
log in from Windows'. To quote Help:
You can share the files on your computer with Windows computer users
using SMB/CIFS.
Open System Preferences, click Sharing, and turn on Windows File
Sharing in the Services tab.
Then, still in System Preferences, open Accounts preferences and
create a new user account for each Windows user you want to share
with. In the user's settings, be sure to select "Allow user to log
in from Windows."
The Sharing preferences panel also has options for firewalling,
allowing remote apple events. There is also an option for sharing
your internet connection.
Buttons now have a black outline around them to increase their
contrast. They also seem sharper and more crystal clear.
The Internet Connect application now offers a VPN connection window
(via PPTP), prompting for a username, password, and server. I haven't
had an opportunity to try it out with our VPN yet though.
The Image Capture application now has options for automatically
setting the camera date, adding item info to Finder comments, and
embedding coloursync profiles. There is also provision for device
specific options, although at the moment it only seems to display the
make of my camera.
Printing, always the bugbear of OS X. I managed to select one of our
HP printers (shared over AppleTalk by one of our Windows machines),
but OS X was unable to automatically determine what sort of printer
it was. And unfortunately, it still didn't print to our HP Laserjet
2200 (the machine spits out an error page). I notice that the Print
Center [sic] user interface uses a printer icon with a little red
stopsign with an exclamation mark in it as the 'Stop Jobs' button
(how appropriately named :), but unfortunately to me it looks like
it's an alert indicator that there's something wrong with your print
job. Perhaps Apple's Human Interface people need to have another look
at it. Oh, and did I mention that it *STILL CAN'T PRINT PROPERLY*?
Hopefully the new CUPS print architecture means that the
manufacturers will be able to write decent print drivers and not
worry about the architecture changing again in the near future. On
the plus side, printing directly to our Kyocera does seem to work
properly now (previously every page after the first was gibberish),
so perhaps its our Windows print spoolers that are causing the
problem. However you would expect a lot of offices to be using those
and I'd hope that 10.2 would be appropriately compatible with them.
The Finder's 'Connect To Server' option now lists our local Windows
domains and machines. Connecting to machines works (although I'm not
sure what the average user is going to think of a button marked
'Re-authenticate'). Passwords can conveniently be added to the user's
keychain.
Hotsyncing with my Palm via a Keyspan USB adapter seems to work quite
happily, although it does appear to be faster than before!
Terminal now lets you have split pane windows!
Keyboard navigation in Open file dialogs is still broken (as far as I can tell)
For some reason my text highlight colour has changed to a lighter
blue than I used previously.
Apple System Profiler now has a 'logs' tab which lets you view the
end of the console log.
The upgrade to 10.2 was relatively painless, (aside from the Finder
crashing afterwards), although a number of applications seem to have
lost track of their preferences, which isn't good for the majority of
home users. All in all it seems like the next evolutionary step,
moving forwards with new features and at the same time backwards to
the lost functionality of Mac OS 9.
Have fun,
Shay
--
=========================== Shay Telfer ================================
Perth, Western Australia Technomancer It must be bunnies!
Opinions for hire [POQ]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] fnord
