dacs.doc electric

Imagine one machine that runs Unix, Mac OS, Linux, DOS and Windows. It’s here, and any of the newer Macs with OS X will run these Operating Systems. Out of the box you can run Unix applications and Mac OS 9 applications. With the addition of Virtual PC, you can run Linux, Windows and DOS, to name a few. Combining this with Location Manager (Apple’s utility to manage multiple network environments), a consultant can use one machine to trouble shoot and service his various customers, who may all have different systems.

For the pure technical this may be a great feature, but as an end-user what makes this new OS important and better? To start out, it’s stable. If an application crashes, it won’t crash the system. The UNIX-based core operating system provides an industrial-strength foundation. Then there is protected memory, preemptive multitasking and symmetric multiprocessing (yes, we can finally utilize those dual processors).

There is a lot of hype over the new interface called Aqua. It’s great and your Macintosh does seem to be fluid and "alive;" however, there is a learning curve. Don¹t expect to pop in the disc, install and go. Although you can, and it will, run your OS 9.1 apps, you better get to know OS X. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t like to read the readme files or manuals, just install and dive in. Not with OS X. I tried that method and shelved it. Later, I started over, and started reading. It’s easy to use and once you have the basics and understand the differences between OS 9.1 and OS X, you’ll be set to go.

UNIX, what’s the big deal? To the Mac at heart it may not matter or be a big deal, but Apple’s UNIX-based foundation, called Darwin, makes it easy to port existing UNIX applications to Mac OS X. Actually, the UNIX community is very interested in OS X and the ability to give their applications an Aqua interface that runs on great hardware. UNIX technology has been the core of servers worldwide, but has been too expensive to implement on the standard desktop, until now.
The graphics are great. The OS X graphic technology called Quartz is a powerful new 2D graphics system that delivers on-the-fly rendering, anti-aliasing and compositing for pristine onscreen graphics. Quartz features built-in support for PDF (Portable Document Format), giving you the power to embed and manipulate PDF data, even save to PDF, with any application built for Mac OS X. So you can easily create PDF documents that you can share with anyone.

One of the most impressive improvements I discovered when I started using OS X was network access and communications. Appletalk is gone (you can turn it on if needed) and so is Appletalk over TCP/IP. It’s true TCP/IP and it’s fast. Internet browsing and downloads are faster, but what really surprised me was the improvement within my own LAN. When I first copied files from my server volume to my desktop, I had to double check that the files actually copied since no status bar appeared. With all previous versions of the OS, when you copied files, no matter how small, a status bar appeared. Not always with OS X. You have to copy quite a bit of data before the bar appears.

Thousands of applications are moving to OS X and the majority of the major applications have announced ship dates, and even gave a demo, at the recent Macworld in New York. So now is a great time to see what OS X is all about.

Make sure to come to the August 7th General Meeting and see a demo from Apple and take an up close look at Mac OS X.