An X for Mac's revelation

By ADAM GIFFORD

Mac OS X has been eagerly awaited within the Church of Apple.

Many members of the congregation fervently believed this new operating system would show Windows users once and for all what a miserable excuse for a computer Mr Gates has given them.

Well, I have seen Max OS X and sad to report, it is not the future of computing as we would like it.

The first step was to borrow a shiny new iMac - the PowerPC chip in my trusty 6400 would not handle OS X, which needs the newer G3 or G4 chips.

The iMac came loaded with extra memory. OS X needs at least 124Mb so there will be some upgrading going on.

Loading the software proved simple.

Next I went online. As the internal modem was dialling up, I was able to continue opening and working in other programs, which meant multitasking was working.

Apple Works, which I use for word processing and spreadsheets, looks much the same, apart from rounded corners on the windows and slightly different button and tool formats.

But doing a spell check - a fairly important part of my work - caused the application to crash. A big problem.

I downloaded the upgrade to Apple Works 6.1, all 14Mb of it, in a bid to overcome the bug, then realised it was for the American version. It will be some months before all the upgrades to familiar applications will be ready, which could frustrate some users.

I loaded Word to clean up the spelling, did another couple of tasks and the whole system froze. I don't know why - it is not a bug I was able to replicate. But it was definitely not supposed to happen with OS X.

Because OS X is based on a Unix kernel, it is supposed to have cool Unix features such as memory protection, so that even if an application crashes the operating system will keep going.

If you want to see the Unix at the heart of the beast, open an application called terminal in the utilities folder. That will give you a status report of what is running.



The Mac OS has always been known for its superior usability, intuitiveness, user experience.

For Apple to justify changing things, it must argue that it has improved things, or that there had to be some technical trade-off.

I don't think what has been done to the finder, the heart of the user experience, is an improvement.

The most significant change is the new dock along the bottom of the screen.

Open an application and its icon appear in the dock. Icons for commonly used applications can be left in the dock for quick launching.

Drag a folder into the dock, click the mouse and a window comes up listing the folder contents.

It is one way to get round losing the Apple menu - drag the applications folder to the dock.

The dock has some annoying features. I'm sure the developers had big monitors to play with, but on the smaller iMac screen, the dock takes up a lot of real estate.

You cannot manipulate anything behind the dock, even though it overlaps onto the desktop area. That means if you want to resize the window or click on a link at the bottom of a browser window, you cannot get there without hiding the dock.

The option of grabbing the side of a window and dragging it up has disappeared. That was a big improvement in the Mac OS from 8 on, and I would be sad to lose it.

Hiding the dock is one option, but if you are working in a "classic" application, you have to find your way back to OS X to do it.

So grab the white vertical bar in the centre of the dock, which divides applications from documents and folders, and resize it - that is where the magnification button is handy.

For every quibble I might have, someone will point out some fix. Which raises the point that OS X is extremely customisable.

But it is early days. After building up the expectation levels, Apple had to release something to keep the developer community on side. That means OS X is still lacking support for many hardware items, including DVD and certain printers.

Not many applications are ready for show time. And a large number of bugs need to be ironed out.

That makes it an operating system for those who like a technology challenge.

It would not be wise to change production systems immediately. Six months to a year, it will be a far more solid piece of technology.