Operating systems can sometimes take on the aspects of a secular religion. They have their True Believers, their dissidents, their saints and sinners, and their apostates. And most of all, all parishoners know beyond any doubt that theirs is the best, and that all others are the work of Evil Powers. For years, Windows adherents have sneered at anything originating from Apple Computer, MacIntosh diehards have heaped obloquy upon any and all things Microsoft, and Unix zealots have scorned them both.
And so, before we go further, let me outline my own background, so that my prejudices may be exposed for all to see. As an undergrad, I used both VM/CMS and PSU's own Interact system (How's that for nostalgia? JCL, anyone?) on mainframes. Afterward, I began my career in computing as a programmer on VAX VMS systems. At home, I had first a DOS, then a Windows 3.1 PC, and kept it as I moved into doing Unix support and distributing software for Sun OS, DEC Ultrix (which evolved into the short-lived DEC OSF/1), SGI Irix and IBM AIX for the Penn State ILSD program. Following five years in Unixland, I migrated yet again to the upstart Windows NT, working with the Center for Academic Computing's (now the Information Technology Services) Distributed Systems Group, where I had the privilege to be involved in the pioneering deployment and refinement of production Windows domains for PSU's student computing labs.
During all of this heterogeneous OS-hopping, I never had more than a dabbling relationship with MacOS. I did word processing and spreadsheets for ILSD media tracking on a desktop Mac, but the Apple operating system, lacking as it did such amenities as protected memory and pre-emptive multiprocessing, failed to impress. And the frequent lockups and crashes didn't increase my respect for MacOS, either. To my mind, the smiley faces, flashy graphics and "Think Different" posters just couldn't paper over the gaping holes in what seemed to me a seriously antiquated operating system.
Apparently the management of Apple Computer thought so too, for a new day has dawned in those halls. MacOS is being rapidly phased out (though still supported, for the time being) in favor of OS X (it's pronounced "OS Ten"), an operating system for Apple hardware that is at once quite venerable and remarkably innovative. Longtime Mac users will have already heard the news, but Windows double-clickers like myself may be tempted to brush OS X off as just the latest repackaging of MacOS, or to simply ignore it altogether.
This would be a mistake. For OS X, while still far from being a serious threat to Microsoft, is a huge step in the right direction for Apple Computer, and well worth appreciating on its own merits.
What's On The Desktop?
Here's a screenshot of the opening desktop (complete with background bitmap) of my Apple iBook OS X laptop. This is the new OS X GUI, which Apple calls "Aqua." It's not the old Mac OS interface, nor does it take the Microsoft Windows approach, but rather steers a new path somewhere in between:
For a Windows user, things seem a bit reversed. The Taskbar is at the top of the screen, isn't it? No, it isn't. That thing at the top of the screen is the Menu Bar, which isn't the same thing as the Windows Taskbar at all (it contains options for the current foreground program). The OS X analog of the Taskbar is called the Dock, and it looks like this:
Like the Taskbar, the Dock contains icons for software. Unlike the Taskbar, these are iconic shortcuts, not necessarily currently-executing programs. Where the Windows user would select programs from the cascading Start Menu, OS X programs are initiated from the Dock. And yes, you can make it auto-hide, just like the Taskbar.
Programs can also be started from the directories where they live by clicking on Finder icons. The Finder is the equivalent of the Windows Explorer, and a basic Finder window looks like this:
Note that this Finder window is pointed at the system Applications directory. This is the default location for all software to be installed, and each Finder window has an Applications icon that you click to access it and its content. Under Windows, you could get the same effect by creating a Windows Explorer window in icon view mode, and inserting shortcuts to all your software.
If you really prefer the Windows column-list type of file display, the Finder lets you choose this mode as well:
In either view, note the three dewdrop-shaped buttons at the top left of the Finder window. These have exactly the same function as the Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons at the top right of a Windows window. Under OS X, though, their order is different: Red (1) = Close, Yellow (2) = Minimize, and Green (3) = Maximize. If you have trouble keeping them straight at first, don't worry - as soon as you move the cursor to them, they show tiny + - X symbols to remind you.
Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed what looks suspiciously like a Microsoft Internet Explorer icon in several of the preceding screenshots. It is. OS X comes with Internet Explorer as its web browser. In fact, the average Windows user won't have to give up any core Microsoft software under OS X. Microsoft Office is a popular package for OS X, and even the Windows Media Player has an OS X version available for free download from the Microsoft website.
Next, the user should right-click... Oops. This is still a Mac, and so you can't right-click. Macs have traditionally used a single-button mouse, and still do. However, OS X drivers for many multibutton programmable USB mice (including Microsoft's) are also available for download, so you can still right-click, middle-click, side-click, and duplicate whatever combination tickles you under Windows, if you like.
Losing Control?
Windows users looking for the Control Panel to alter their OS X system's defaults won't find it. But they will find the System Preferences group, which can be accessed by clicking on the blue apple in the Menu Bar and choosing "System Preferences."
As you can see, the icons in this group are similar in function to what
you'll find in Control Panel.
An Apple in the Window
Okay, you say, fine and dandy. But I'm currently using filespace on a file server in my Windows domain. If I start using OS X instead of my XP workstation, I'll have to give that up, won't I?
Not necessarily. As long as your Windows 2000 server(s) have the File Services for MacIntosh service installed and configured, your OS X Mac can connect to Windows shares as easily as a Windows XP workstation. To do so, you must use OS X's Finder interface, choosing the Go/Connect to Server pulldown. This will bring up a series of dialogue boxes, starting with this one:
Note that in this example, I've already entered the IP address of a Windows server and added it to the Favorites lists, for easy recall the next time.
After clicking the Connect button, OS X will look at the selected server, and if it has any Windows MacIntosh-Accessible Volumes, it will display a list of them for you to select. You'll be prompted to enter your Windows userid and password, and when you're connected to the share, it will show up as an icon on your desktop. This actually works quite well: The TIFF screenshots in this article were taken from my networked OS X iBook laptop, written to a Windows 2000 fileserver, converted to jpegs and saved to still another Windows server by an XP laptop running Adobe Photoshop, while the article was written and the images included on still a third XP workstation.
Of course, OS X will also connect to Apple AFP fileservers, as well as Samba and Unix NFS servers. And it supports WebDAV, an http extension that allows file services via web browsers.
All is not entirely rosy for every Windows user who'd like to move to OS X and still connect to a Windows domain, however. For one thing, file shares which are cluster resources (being served up by a Windows cluster) can't be accessed via AppleIP without third-party software on the Windows side. Also, Microsoft DFS (that's Microsoft DFS, folks) shares aren't accessible to OS X clients, either. Nor does authenticated printing through Windows domains work with OS X.
Now, many readers may be shaking their heads at this point and wondering why
I'm harping on the fact that an Apple operating system doesn't fit as well as
it might into a Windows domain. "Who cares?," many will complain, "It's Apple,
not that @##!*&! Microsoft!" Well, like it or not, the raw fact is that we live
in a Windows-dominated world, and Apple would sell a lot more OS X Macs if they
could be easily integrated into the Windows Active Directory domains that
continue to spread throughout the business world. In fact, if OS X machines
(and users) could participate in a Windows 2000 (or .NET) domain as readily
as an XP workstation, Microsoft might well find itself in the uncomfortable
position of selling considerably fewer copies of XP!
OS X's Little Secret
Far down, in the Applications/Utilities folder which for most casual users is OS X's dusty basement, lives a small, unobtrusive little application called Terminal. In fact, this is something that many diehard Mac users of days now gone by would have never believed they'd see on an Apple desktop: a command prompt.
As you can see, this is a Unix command-line interface. Did I forget to mention that OS X is actually the Aqua interface running on top of a Darwin Unix kernel? No, the omission was deliberate, for the average OS X user need never even know or care that he's actually using a Unix machine - and Apple would very likely prefer to keep it that way. Actually, to say that Aqua runs "on top of" Darwin is an oversimplification, for the OS X system architecture is more complex than that. OS X is actually a Darwin base system layered over by a graphics subsystem of Quartz (the window server and 2D rendering library), OpenGL and QuickTime, upon which Aqua is implemented. Also an integral part of the OS are Cocoa (the OS X API) and Java.
But command-line addicts will rejoice to find that the Darwin command prompt
supports the full range of Unix commands, including man pages, several shells,
pico - and even vi!
Built-In Goodies
Every OS worthy of the name has to have some cute freebies, and OS X is no
exception. Among the user baubles included with it are an email program,
a calculator, a DVD player (not very full-featured at this writing),
iTunes (a utility for organizing and listening to audio files), the
Adobe QuickTime Player, a 3D Chess game, Stickies (an onscreen reminder utility)
and Sherlock. This latter is a utility program with pretty much the same
functionality as the Windows Explorer's right-click/Search. And, since
Macs have always been aimed toward the graphical market (where Windows
has been giving Apple a stiff run for its money in recent years), there's
also Image Capture (for downloading frames from a digital camera), iMovie
(for editing digital video streams), and - downloadable from Apple - iPhoto
(for organizing digital images and creating slide shows with music). You
also get AppleWorks 6, an Apple word processing
/ spreadsheet / drawing / presentation package. I'd still recommend
MS-Office, but AppleWorks can't be beat for the price (free).
What's Wrong With It?
Okay, after all this praise, it's time to put the magnets to the fenders and look at a few of the more annoying things that haven't impressed me about OS X. Here are some that I've encountered:
1: The slideshow screensavers are nice, but on more than one occasion I've had them lock my iBook up completely, not allowing me to log on again. Twice, the OS crashed while putting up a logon box:
The only workaround was to pull the battery out of my iBook laptop to forcibly power-cycle the machine.
2: Stability in general seems to be still a bit of an issue. In addition to the above incidents, I've had OS X crash-dump on me three times, twice on my iBook, the third time on my desktop G4. During the G4 crash, I was trying to install software, and when the iBook bit the dust, I was doing nothing at all.
3: Response time is noticeably more sluggish on both the iBook and the G4, compared to my equivalent IBM machines running Windows XP. I don't know if this is related to the hardware or the software, but since both are Apple products I note it in passing anyway.
4: As many Windows devotees may not be aware, the Unix filesystem structure is quite different from the Microsoft model. Disks don't get drive letters, they're simply grafted on to the local filesystem tree, using mount points. Windows mount points (or "reparse points," to use the proper Windows terminology) are pretty crude compared to their Unix equivalents, and are seldom actually used, so if you choose to go the OS X route, you'd better learn something about mount points as Unix does them.
The problem under OS X is that the Aqua interface isn't very accommodating about
how it allows the user to handle mount points (the default mount point for new
disks is at /Volumes). You'd think that it would be a trivial matter to simply
add a disk for more user space, then mount it at /Users, but it's not. The user
has to go to the Unix command line to do the mount, and if the mount is to be
persistent across reboots, the appropriate configuration files must be edited.
Not something that the average non-professional user is going to find a simple
task. Nor does Aqua have any capacity for assigning a user's home directory to
any local location except /Users/ 5: Windows supports Access Control Lists (ACLs), and has since the earliest
days of NT. (ACLs are file and/or directory permissions, which define what
groups and users have what kind of access to the objects to which the ACLs
are applied.)
Unix, of course, has had ACLs pretty much forever, and thus OS X does, too.
But Aqua, it seems, doesn't want users to know about it. While the Windows
Explorer makes ACL display (it's right there in front of you) and configuration
(select / right-click / Properties / Security) easy, Aqua reveals this
information only in a clumsy way (click on object, go to the Menu Bar and
choose File / Show Info, choose "Privileges" from the scrolling menu).
And this is a one-at-a-time operation - there's no way to show the ACLs on
large numbers of directory objects at once. You can certainly see and set
Unix ACLs en masse from the command line, using the Unix chmod command, but
the GUI has no such feature. The Finder badly needs to be able to handle
ACLs with the same felicity as the Windows Explorer.
6: If you're not networked at the moment (as laptop machines often are not),
you're going to have a tough time doing any casual transferring of small
files between your Windows and OS X machines. You can't just pass a floppy
disk from one to another, because very few Macs have floppy drives (CD R/W
seems to be the Apple external medium of choice, but CD R/W is still a long
way from being universal at this point). Yes, you can buy a floppy drive from
Apple, but it's a somewhat clumsy extra-cost external USB device. Removable
media like Zip drives aren't an easy answer either, since Windows and Mac use
different filesystems, and must have translation software to read each other's
disks. And you can't use the infrared ports of the laptops, since Apple
laptops don't use infrared. So depending upon how large an issue physical
Windows/Mac filesharing is to you, these may or may not be significant
problems, particularly for laptop users. Analyze your requirements
carefully before deciding.
7: Hardware support isn't as extensive as that to which Windows users
are accustomed. Things are improving as OS X picks up steam, but add-on
devices which XP users take for granted may or may not be supported under
OS X. Hopefully we will see this improve with time.
Questions of Identity
Was Apple's decision to base its OS X on an existing Unix kernel, rather
than designing a new OS from the ground up a good idea? That's an
epistomological question, and not an easy one to answer, for it largely
hinges on just how one defines "good." Did Apple - which has yet to be
described by the talking heads on the evening news as "the software giant" -
lack the in-house resources to justify a completely new, start-from-scratch OS?
I don't know, but if so, then making OS X Unix-based was about its only real
alternative to the aging MacOS. But all that to one side, Darwin is certainly
a good Unix, and there's a lot of attractive freeware out there on the web for
both Darwin per se and its OS X incarnation - as well as plenty of Unix
expertise wherever soft drinks and snack foods are sold (having once been
a Unix system administrator, I know the taste of stale pretzels well).
Certainly, Apple's move makes good business sense, as well as a user-friendly
desktop OS.
Still, as devout worshippers at the Church of Gates are ever quick to
point out, not writing your own base operating system means depending
upon someone else's pre-existing technology (or, as condescending
Microsoft PR releases tend to put it, "30-year-old technology"),
and keeps you from correcting any pre-existing shortcomings at the
most fundamental level. Company propaganda - from any company - should
always be taken with a large dose of salt, of course, but there's a
kernel (pun not intended) of validity to this criticism. Apple is working
actively with the Darwin Project, however, so they definitely do have a
hand in Darwin's evolution.
Just what the long-term answer is, only sales figures and the misty
future can tell, and it's too early in the game to see if OS X can
leverage Apple out of its traditional niche markets. My Own Personal Opinion™
is that it's the best desktop Unix ever I've ever seen, but it becomes so by
hiding Unix from the user the way you'd hide the wiring and the plumbing in
your house from guests. Conspicuously lacking in the current version of
OS X (10.1.4, at this writing) is any attention to making Unix functionality
more accessible from the Aqua GUI.
Astute readers with a Unix background will be aware that Darwin Unix runs
on the Intel X86 platform. Does that mean that OS X can be installed on
a PC? No. Apple claims that it has no current plans to do so, but
rumors abound, and the thought of selling an alternative operating
system to all those millions of Windows- or Linux-bound PC users must
surely have rung cash register bells in many an Apple board meeting.
The problem is that Apple has traditionally been a hardware company,
whose profits derive from the sale of its proprietary MacIntosh hardware
bases, rather than the operating system they support. To make OS X
hardware-independent by producing an Intel version would transform
Apple overnight into a software vendor, and such a radical reorientation
would have to be considered very, very carefully. Still, I can't help
remembering another company that once confidently sold an operating
system which would run only on its proprietary hardware line. Its name
was the Digital Equipment Corporation, and though it made a strong
showing for a lot of years, it's now a piece of computing history.
And in conclusionÉ
Well, then, what does this Windows user think? Is OS X "the world's most
advanced operating system" as Apple is fond of saying? Well, not likely.
But it's a very good one, one that Microsoft junkies can't easily dismiss
any more, and well worth considering by anyone who's a fan of either
Windows or the various flavors of Unix.
Now that Apple has an operating system with real technical potential, it
is certainly legitimate to wonder whether the company has the direction
and will to begin exploiting that potential. Certainly OS X is functionally
capable of becoming a real commercial alternative to the Microsoft Monolith.
But whether Apple Computer will take that path or stick to its
carefully-guarded niche is still a big unknown. The next release
of OS X (V10.2, code-named "Jaguar") may begin to reveal a few answers
to these questions when becomes available this summer.
There's plenty about OS X to both irritate and delight fans of Mac OS,
Windows and Unix alike. It works, I like it and use it, I hope to see
it improve and I wish it well. With some added functionality, more
stability and better Windows interoperability, I could see a lot of
XP users jumping ship for OS X. So even if you're a Windows (or Linux)
user who has no immediate plans for moving to OS X, you'd be well
advised to watch this promising newcomer. If Apple Computer plays its
cards right, that guy from Redmond could end up having to share the
jackpot next time.