Dock of the bay: Public beta testers of Mac OS X find that the Dock, the group of icons at the bottom of the screen, takes up too much screen "real estate."

Another face of UNIX: Apple is not the only company attempting to put a good graphical user interface (GUI) on UNIX. Eazel Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., founded by former Apple engineers including Andy Hertzfeld and Bud Tribble, the company has developed Natilius, seen above, as a GUI for Linux, the open source UNIX variant. Natilius is also open source, but early this month Dell Computer Co. of Houston licensed the GUI to distribute it on the Pentium workstations it sells with Linux pre-installed. Eazel Inc., (650) 940-2000, e-mail: info@eazel.com.

Apple's new operating system has benefits -- and drawbacks

It is like going into the office, which you have worked in five (or six or seven) days a week for 15 years and find that someone has moved all the furniture.

Hell, a lot of the old furniture has been replaced by strange new furniture and not only that, but they moved everything around on the shelves and put all these new-fangled tools onto your desk and it's impossible to figure out how they work.

This is life under Macintosh OS X Public Beta.

Available from Apple Computer since mid-September (at the low, low price of $29.95), the operative word about this new operating system is beta. This is only a test, and in the case of a real emergency, you would be told not to try this at home.

After years of waiting for a "next-generation" operating system, Macintosh users -- and we know that in publishing, there are lots of you out there -- finally have the opportunity to get a glimpse into Macintosh, the Next Generation.

We have covered the underlying aspects of OS X extensively in the past (see The Cole Papers, February 2000), but now, with a couple of months in the public arena (not to mention a couple of weeks on a test machine here at Cole World Headquarters), there are a number of things that are becoming quite clear about this new operating system.

We have gleaned these observations from cruising the Internet (a special tip of the chapeau to Macintouch.com) as well as our own meager attempts at some OS Xing. We're going to divide this report into a couple of chunks: the UNIX aspect of the system, some discourse on the user interface and some tips and tricks for using the system.

Ice cream flavor influence
UNIX, as we have observed in the past, is like a Baskin Robbins ice cream parlor -- there are 31 different flavors and there's always a new flavor of the month. UNIX was devised by the folks at AT&T's Bell Labs in the '60s and basically released out into the public domain for anyone to customize (this was not AT&T's magnanimity -- there was a lawsuit that made that happen). Computer-science students in college loved UNIX because it was free and it was easily customized. Ergo, you have lots of kinds of UNIX -- Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, even Microsoft through SCO, have variations -- and a current hot flavor, Linux.

The underpinnings of OS X are UNIX. There is good news and bad news here.

Those up on their Apple history will remember that Apple had invested a lot of time and effort in the late '80s and early '90s trying to come up with a "modern" operating system that provided two essential features not found in "legacy" desktop operating systems: pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory.

Unfortunately for Apple, those research projects came up a cropper (as to why, that's too much technical and political history to delve into here). Suffice it to say, in the mid-1990s, Apple had a problem -- an aging operating system and nowhere to turn.

A few miles up Interstate 101 from Apple's Cupertino, Calif. offices was a company called NeXT that had built a relatively unpopular desktop computer and a moderately popular operating system called NeXTStep. Apple's top management cut a deal with NeXT's owners to buy the company. Ironically, the founder of NeXT was a fellow named Steve Jobs, who was a founder of Apple. We all laughed -- yet certainly no harder than Jobs.

Vaulting from a position as an advisor to Apple's CEO to CEO himself in a matter of weeks, Jobs installed his NeXT lieutenants in the Apple hierarchy, revitalized the hardware product line (hello iMac) and set about creating a next-generation operating system.

The result is that OS X is based on NeXTStep, which like all modern operating systems is layered, with the basic services provided by a "kernel." NeXTStep was based on the Mach kernel (which came from research done at Carnegie Mellon University from 1983 to 1994) and the Berkeley (as in University of California) Software Distribution Lite of UNIX. Onto this, Apple engineers have layered a graphics model based on Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), a multimedia layer based on the company's QuickTime and a three-dimensional rendering layer based on in-house development.

On top of all those pieces of the operating system are the environments where the applications run: Cocoa, for applications written specifically for OS X; Carbon, for existing Macintosh OS 9 applications that can be tweaked to run under OS X, and Classic, wherein a window is launched (albeit a full-screen window) and the "classic" runs as if the window were its own stand-alone Macintosh.

This gives us two types of OS X applications and a crutch: applications that take full benefit of the modern operating system (Cocoa), applications that take partial benefit of the modern operating system (Carbon) and applications that you are just happy that they run at all under a modern operating system (Classic).

The big thing to remember about not only these environments, but the operating system in general, is that should an application crash (and under these circumstances, Classic is considered to be an application in and of itself), that crash does not affect any other running applications, including the operating system. Which means that you no longer have to reboot when an application goes south.

Further, applications in OS X no longer require that specific amounts of memory be allotted for them to operate. Under System 9 and its predecessors, an application was given a specific amount of random access memory (RAM) and when the application was launched, it took that memory whether it needed it or not. Under OS X, as an application needs memory, it pulls it from the RAM; when it's done, it puts that memory back, which then makes it available for other applications to use.

Cocoa, Carbon and Classic all protect the traditional Macintosh user from the complexities of the command-line interface used in most UNIX implementations. There is the ability, by launching an application called Terminal, to enter into the wide, wonderful world of command-line UNIX, for those who are adventurous souls.

Just to put a spin on all this, Apple has joined the open software movement by releasing the first three layers -- that is, everything except the user interface -- into the public domain, calling it Darwin. This insures that experts from outside Apple will have a shot at debugging -- and further stabilizing -- the operating system.

OS X Public Beta comes with a handful of applications on the distribution CD-ROM: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mail, a text editor, Sherlock (looking like its System 9 counterpart), an MP3 and CD player.

There are a significant -- but limited -- number of other native Cocoa applications.

It appears that many traditional Macintosh application developers are holding back on development for Cocoa or even working up Carbon versions of their products. Perhaps there is work going on in the background, but many application developers are saying things like, "We will have a Carbon version of our application when OS X really ships."

On the UNIX side, though, there seems to be greater enthusiasm. "My preliminary, gut reaction is that developers will flock to this environment," one Macintouch correspondent wrote. "For people like me ... it will be way more fun to develop and port applications for Mac OS X than for Windows."

Further, it is apparently trivial to port NeXTStep applications to Cocoa.

Aqua blues
And atop those three layers of OS X is the last layer -- the one you, as a user, deal with -- Aqua.

Imagine all the design precepts of the iMac rendered in an operating system, and you get Aqua. Lots of pastel colors, bubbles and transparency. And, to satisfy a lot of the underlying UNIX, some really weird (from a Mac user's perspective, anyway) ways of doing things.

The biggest complaint from early OS X Public Beta testers is the Dock.

Stripped across the bottom of the screen (its overall size is adjustable; unfortunately, it scales its icons as the size changes), the Dock is a new, all-icon-based version of the Apple Menu, where frequently used items can be stored. Unfortunately, it also brings with it the "Recent Applications" and "Recent Documents" directories of the Apple Menu, so you get lots of icons stripped across the bottom of the screen. Further woes come from the fact that these icons are not labeled: the name is revealed only when you pass your mouse cursor over them.

Aside from the un-Mac-like functionality of the Dock -- and its lack of general flexibility -- the other major complaint about the Dock, along with other aspects of Aqua, is the amount of screen real estate that it takes.

"For those of us who don't have the shiny new ... Studio Displays, I hope that the OS gets tweaked over time to make it more usable," wrote a beta tester on an Internet board, referring to Apple's new, large flat-panel monitors.

One user suggested that the Dock be "parked" in the "superfluous" Apple logo in the center of the top menubar to save space.

As Chris Pepper of the web site Mosxsw.com has written, "Mac OS X effectively requires a minimum screen resolution of 800-by-600 pixels, while Mac OS 9 was usable at 640-by-480 pixels."

The new operating system does handle multiple monitors, though. "I am pleased to report that my triple monitor setup ... works great on OS X beta," an early adopter wrote.

Apple has provided a method to make the Aqua interface less colorful for those of us who are working in pre-press and publishing, so the colors of the interface don't interfere with our perceptions of the colors of our creations.

And, it should be noted, applications running in the Classic mode retain the Classic look-and-feel (known as Platinum).

A correspondent to Macintouch.com was concerned with another aspect of the user interface -- the fact that applications must reside in a folder called, ahem, Applications. "At least you could ignore the Applications folder in System 7.5 if you wanted to," the user wrote. "Now it seems you have to store OS X programs in the designated folder and can't move them out, [you can] only make copies in other locations."

But the core of OS X remains its most important aspect. User interface specialist Bruce Tognazzini, a consultant with Nielsen Norman Group, who was the founder of the original Apple Human Interface Group, wrote in September's Macworld magazine, "Mac OS X could accelerate the Mac well beyond the reach of its competition once more. It corrects the single biggest interface problem Mac users have faced from day one: lack of reliability."

Tips, tricks, observations
OK, so you want to become an OS X Public Beta tester. Now what?

Probably the best advice we've read about OS X came from a Macintouch reader. "As a classic Mac user -- click first, ask questions later -- this won't work on this OS! Read the Read Mes!!"

This reader found that the operating system wouldn't install because he had additional video cards in the PCI slots of his machine. Upon removal, the OS installed correctly and afterwards the cards could be reinstalled and worked fine. He wasted "hours" before he read the installation notes and found this tidbit.

Other important issues include: