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[<<] Industrie Toulouse
J. Shell, August 24, 2002 11:19 PM, in OS (de)Evolution
So, Jaguar, Jagwire, Jaguar. It's time for the industrie report to join the countless others.

Interesting items:

  • Command-tab now working like Mac OS 9's. A lot of people requested this one - it's similar to Windows cmd-tab switching too. Previously, Mac OS X tabbed through applications in their order in the dock. Now, a single command-tab will switch with the last used application. While this is mostly a good thing, a feature I used a lot has been lost - in Mac OS 10.0 and 10.1, after hitting 'cmd-tab', 'cmd-SHIFT' would cycle backwards. It made cycling easy as there was less of a chord to hold down. Now, the behaviour in Jaguar is like that in Windows - it's 'cmd-shift-tab' to cycle backwards. sigh.
  • The built in Windows networking is wonderful. Hopefully, I won't have to use this feature much longer, but it's going to be nice during the remainder of one of my projects.
  • Even better - integrated FTP in the finder!. FTP joins WebDAV as volumes that can be mounted through the Connect to server.... Gnome has offered some similar features (at least with WebDAV and Eazel), but this is something that's been long overdue for OS X, especially with the lack of any decent free FTP client for simple transfers. (There are good FTP/transfer tools out there like RBrowser, an old school NeXT Workspace Manager like app that includes SSH and other transfer modes.)
  • bash is finally included in the BSD layer, as is Python 2.2 and Ruby 1.6.7. The latter two came as part of the developer tools CD (which is in the box!). It's nice to finally see Python with Mac OS X officially (even though it's 2.2 and not 2.2.1).
  • Having "Python" 2.2 come along on the free Developer Tools CD is just too cool not to mention again. And ditto for Ruby.
  • The Terminal application allows the window to be split. A very nice feature.

Some bad things:

  • None of my Macs are happy to see me. The little smiling bootup Mac that has been with us for so long is gone. Of course, with Mac OS X's usual uptimes and very good sleeping habits, it's not often that we see him any more. But it is surprisingly jarring to just get the graphite Apple at startup. If there was ever a negative feedback campaign to wage, this might be it.
  • Most of the time, performance on my old home iMac DV SE 400 is improved, even though it can't take advantage of Quartz Extreme. Sadly, there are some things that seem to be worse - namely, getting the folder contents menus in the Dock. The new (and very pretty) 'beach ball' cursor comes up too much. (Urgh, this seems like a memory sleep/wake issue. A few minutes later, and it's running fine)
  • The Help application launches much quicker, (see my post, "Helping Help"), but can take a VERY long time to load a page initially. I think many of the new help pages either need to be indexed, or actually downloaded from Apple's servers (which may just be beleaguered by many many requests today as everyone's installing and looking at Help). Once running, it's alright. Better than before, but still not as fast as it needs to be.
  • Getting out of the 'cmd-shift' habit in favor of 'cmd-shift-tab' is kindof annoying. But, I tend to use LaunchBar as much (or more) for task switching anyways. And LaunchBar is still working fine.
  • Sherlock 3 is a disappointment when compared to Watson. I guess this isn't really a bad thing - the smaller company still has a better product than the big company's imitation. However, I think both Sherlock and Watson (such an interesting pedigree - Sherlock 2 inspired Watson, which inspired Sherlock 3) use the same Movie listing service, which doesn't acknowledge the theatre just a couple of blocks away. For the most part, I think these two tools are cool, but sometimes, services like My Yahoo! are just as useful, or more. shrug

Other nice things in Jaguar:

  • The new "putting the 'find' back in 'Finder'" feature is more than welcome, although I wish you could save queries. Hmmm, maybe there's an AppleScript I can write. Anyways, it's MUCH faster than Sherlock 2 was in previous Mac OS X versions, and supports criteria to find files by extension (finally, I can find ALL of my OmniOutliner documents!). Now, Apple just needs to integrate Be's BFS file system... ";->".
  • The UI tweaks in Aqua are simple, but effective. Buttons and tabs aren't quite so beveled anymore. The effect is strongest on the tabs, and it really looks nice in a way that's hard to explain.
  • The Finder's View Objects settings for Folders has some nice additions, such as the ability to "show item info" (like disk space usage, or how many items are in a folder), resizing of the text, placement of the text underneath the icons or to the right, and more.
  • When Folders and Get Info boxes open and close in the finder, they scale in and out rapidly, providing a nice Quartz take on a classic Mac OS visual cue.
  • The Open With contextual menu for documents in the Finder is a godsend, as is the ability to warn about Classic starting up and being given a chance to stop it (in case a picture wants to open up in Photoshop 6.0 when all you want is Preview). This is a long overdue Mac OS feature that some old contextual menu plugins dealt with nicely in the Classic Mac OS days.
  • Services in the Finder! Now I no longer have to stare at that greyed out Services > Mail > Send File menu option that worked fine in the old NeXTStep/OpenStep/Rhapsody days.
  • Integrated scanning with Image Capture. I haven't fully tried this out, but the thought of it's made me happy. My scanner is fully supported (with colorsync profile!), so I'm happy.
  • Improved Energy Manager, on par (or better) than in the classic Mac OS. Finally, I can tell my iBook again to run full throttle (don't sleep, keep the display on for a long time, etc) when plugged in, and to be a bit more conservative when not.

I'm still undecided about iChat and some of the other larger so-called 'features'. I'm using Mail.app at home, and I have to admit I'm already impressed with its Junkmail feature compared to other ones I've used. Mail also has a new feature where it can highlight replies to a certain message, and hopefully a near-future revision will actually support hierarchical threading.

There are other interesting things tucked away in the Applications/Utilities folder. The Apple System Profiler has been rewritten, possibly in Cocoa (or the lines between Carbon and Cocoa are getting very nicely blurred). There's an ODBC Administrator, and the very intersting Directory Access utility. NeXTStep was very smart in its use of NetInfo, but the rest of the world has since moved on to LDAP, OpenDirectory, ActiveDirectory, and so on. Jaguar looks like it can integrate with many different directory services in network environments where its necessary. Very cool. The Directory Access application lists directories available to this computer. It also lists available methods of discovering network services.

Generally, Jaguar presents a better overall computing experience on top of one that I was already happy with. Mac OS X continues to walk the lines between effective simplicity, common idioms (many of which its predecessor helped to popularize), and being feature rich. There are still some rough spots that I imagine will be smoothed out by 10.2.3. This is an upgrade where the first reaction might be "hmm, this isn't all that much, what's all the fuss?", but it's all the little things. This is really a significant upgrade, and an impressive base platform for Mac OS X's future, just as 10.0 and 10.1 were impressive bases to lead us to this. Bill Bumgarner put it thus: "Digging under the hood is also very interesting -- it is clear that 10.1 laid a foundation that supports a much greater development velocity."