Computers Today, November 1-15, 2000; PC User; Images on the Cube

Apple's upcoming operating system is much more than a fresh coat of paint on the Mac user interface. With the ease-of-use of the Mac and the power of Unix blended into a single OS, Mac OS X promises power users a never-before treat.

By Akansha Atroley

Images on the Cube For two years it was hailed as an operating system (OS) that would change the Macintosh experience forever. The wait finally is over, and a look at the recently released public beta of Apple's "features-packed" Mac OS X (pronounced as OS Ten) proves how Apple Computer's "revolutionary development"-slated for release around early next year-combines new applications, ease-of-use and a brand new interface, Aqua.

Creating Ripples

The Aqua interface keeps the user informed of the activity status on his Mac with continuous visual feedback. Aqua (meaning water) brings the Mac to life with colour, depth, translucence and fluid motion. Buttons indicate active or non-active status by glowing and dimming, icons are crisply rendered, and drop shadows give windows greater depth. While the Aqua interface is alive with motion with buttons, the scroll bar and the progress indicator moving, it also provides key visual cues-focusing your attention, suggesting next actions, and making your responses much more intuitive.

The Mac menu bar remains intact along the top of the screen, and at first glance most windows look like traditional Mac windows. But a closer examination reveals a host of artistic touches that makes it better than the best. Aqua's blue progress bar undulates as it moves across the screen. Brightly coloured sliders stand out against window's silver backgrounds. Even scroll bars look like fragile blue-glass objects.

Fire your Imagination

The features in Mac OS X are designed to give users the freedom to personalise their computer, and Dock is one such addition. Termed as the most radical addition to the Mac OS interface, Dock makes desktop clutter a thing of the past. The Dock sits at the bottom of the screen and holds folders, applications, documents, storage devices, minimised windows, QuickTime movies, digital images, links to Web sites, or just about anything else you'd like to keep handy for instant access. The Dock holds as many items as the user wants. As the items increase, the Dock expands until it reaches the edges of the screen-at which point the icons in the Dock begin to shrink proportionately to accommodate additional items.

In earlier versions of Mac OS, Finder referred to the entire desktop. In Mac OS X, the Desktop and Finder are different things. The Desktop is the work area and retains the behaviour the user is familiar with, thereby easing the transition to Mac OS X. The redesigned Finder gives the user three different options for viewing file systems. In addition to Mac OS 9's popular icon and last views, Mac OS X features a new column view designed to make it easier to navigate deep file systems and see what's in them at a glance.

The new Finder's window has a row of buttons at the top, reminiscent of Mac OS 9's Sherlock 2 interface. A click on one of these buttons will take the user to a specific location on his Mac: the Computer button shows available drives and the network connection; Home takes the user to his home folder (this is especially important if the same machine is used by several different people); Apps leads one to the home of all his programs; Docs to where the documents are stored; Favourites to a collection of commonly visited parts of the Mac; and People to the folders of all the people with whom the Macintosh is shared.

Mail is a fully featured E-mail application built from the ground up as an integral part of Mac OS X. With Mail, you can drop attachments directly into his messages. Just drag the sound file, Photoshop image or movie to the body of your message and that's about it. The enclosure is ready for sending. Like the Desktop, Mail gives the user a welcome degree of personalisation in an increasingly generic world. You can have your fingerprints and be outlandishly creative with fonts. If your recipients have the same fonts you do, they'll see them the way you send them.

The Compatibility Criterion

Behind the scene features include speed and stability, powerful graphics and compatibility. Mac OS X offers protected memory, meaning the new OS interface ropes every program off in its own space-where a misbehaving program can't harm any other program. Mac OS X also plays traffic cop: the operating system itself determines how much processing time individual programs get. This means that the program currently in use is much less likely to bog down just because some other program is churning away.

Apple's new OS comes with a new graphics engine, called Quartz, which is based on Adobe's portable document format (PDF). Quartz also includes powerful features, such as the transparency effects used in the Aqua interface design. Mac OS X can run on earlier generation Macs too. In order to retain compatibility with old software, without sacrificing powerful new features, Mac OS X supports four very different program styles, each with its own strengths and shortcomings.

If one is running an old program that hasn't been updated for Mac OS X, that program runs in what's called the Classic environment. These programs can't take advantage of memory protection or pre-emptive multitasking. As a result, if one of these programs crashes, all other programs running in Classic environment may go down as well.

A Mac program that's been updated for Mac OS X will run in the Carbon environment. It lets programmers modify their Mac software enough so that it can take advantage of Mac OS X's new features. Developers writing programs for Mac OS X from scratch could use Carbon, but they might also use Cocoa, a system that Apple claims is easy to use to write software but will not run on OS 9.

It remains to be seen whether Mac OS X would be able to run programs written for Unix OS, including Linux. Most power users and Unix heads would like to get the ease of use of the Mac and the power of Unix in a single operating system. But even without it, even for the new converts to the Mac world, the new OS promises a lot.

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