Industry Anticipates Mac OS X Roll Out

By all reports, Apple CEO Steve Jobs
still plans to introduce the long-awaited beta release of the Mac OS X (X
as in the Roman numeral for 10) Wednesday at Apple Expo in Paris, holding true to an
announcement he made a few weeks back at Seybold in San Francisco.

According to sources interviewed by Internetnews.com, the move will be a good one.

“Apple is delivering a work in progress to the Mac-user community,” noted
Andrew Stone, CEO of Stone Design, which
has created software for the Mac OS X as well as the OS X server.

“Prior to the beta release, bugs were obviously fixed. Speed was a huge
concern. Now, showing the beta to the larger Mac community presents the
opportunity to get user feedback to make further improvements,” Stone added.
“Ultimately, the product will evolve into the golden master.”

Stone added that the system’s core open-source technology (referred to
as Darwin) will allow users to fix low-level problems themselves.

According to product literature released by Apple, the company began two
design goals for its new user interface, Aqua: create an operating system
that’s appealing to look at, and make it a pleasure to use.

To ensure a gentle transition process from the Mac OS 9.x, Mac OS X
supports three ways of running applications: as-is, optimized and
next-generation. The three environments are called Classic, Carbon and
Cocoa.

According to Apple, “Classic lets you run all your existing Macintosh
applications. Your old apps will run as they do on Mac OS 9, but won’t take
advantage of Mac OS X’s state-of-the-art plumbing and the Aqua interface
components. This year, Apple and its partners will be “Carbonizing”
applications to ready them for Mac OS X, as well as writing new applications
in the Cocoa environment.”

The company also boasts a sharp display and “stunning” graphics. Mac OS X
combines three layers: Quartz (based on the Internet-standard portable
document format), QuickTime and OpenGL.

One of the great features on the product is a protected memory that saves
information from loss or corruption, according to Wil Shipley, president of
The Omni Group. “We released OmniWeb
3.0, which is the only native web browser for Mac OS X Server and Mac OS X,
and the only web browser on any platform that is truly multi-threaded.

“The new system provides is speed and stability because it is based on a
stable Unix system,” Shipley noted. “For the end user, this is a machine
that is cleaner, prettier, faster and doesn’t crash.”

An additional feature includes virtual memory manager to handle protected
memory space. “This way you no longer have to worry about how much memory an
application like Photoshop needs to open the files,” according to Apple.

Voget Selbach Enterprises GmbH (VSE),
a German based corporation with a mission to provide useful, easy-to-use and
affordable software for the Macintosh platform, has high expectations for
the product.

“We expect more stability, better multitasking and more customer support
since some people might now realize this is a beta product and therefore
will probably have some bugs,” noted Johannes Selbach, co-founder of VSE.
“We also expect special Mac OSX versions of all popular applications. We
will release Mac OS X versions of our applications as soon as the final
version is released.”

In a review published in MacWeek, author Stephen Beale noted that
although some changes will be embraced in the new product, there will be
some that will take time to get used to.

He wrote: “Gone are such familiar features as the Chooser, Apple menu and
Control Strip. Instead, you’ll see the Aqua interface with its antialiased
screen elements and photorealistic icons. You’ll see d

ocuments and
applications rising genie-like from the Dock when you need them, and
disappearing in a puff of smoke when you don’t. You’ll see translucent
Sheets that slide out from the title bars of open documents, offering quick
access to commands for saving the file or performing other operations.

“Applications that take full advantage of Mac OS X will have capabilities
far beyond those of current Mac OS software. And the new OS promises to end
the Mac’s second-class status in many areas of computing, such as the
enterprise, professional 3-D graphics, high-end server applications and the
like. But despite its foundation in Apple’s Darwin software, this is not an
evolutionary upgrade. It’s a revolutionary one, and this will make some
users uncomfortable even as they anticipate the goodies.”

Rob Bygrave, a student of client/server programming and Web development,
concurred.

“In my opinion, OS-X is designed to be primarily for the professional
computer user markets, such as office productivity, graphics and video,
database
administration, and, presumably, network administration. I believe this is
Apple’s attempt to answer the critics of the years past who claimed that the
Mac was not a ‘real computer,’ only a PC is considered to be a ‘real
computer.'”

Stay tuned. As the product unveils and ultimately redevelops, there will
be more to say, and write, about this topic.

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