Tuesday

The effect of Mac OS X

My life changed 10 years ago, when Apple released the Mac OS X Public Beta. At the time, it seemed like this new OS was just the next step (albeit a huge one) in the evolution of the Mac.

While icons and windows simply existed in OS 9, they seemed to jump off the screen in OS X. Shadows helped distinguish between layers of windows, and the quaint Dock at the bottom of the screen contained simple-to-access icons both for currently running applications and for programs I placed here myself. On visuals alone, here was no doubt that the Mac OS X Public Beta represented a decisive break from the past.

That’s not to say all was perfect. Aqua, as Apple called its new interface, was besieged by an attack of the striped backgrounds. Aqua also consumed a lot of screen real estate, especially when compared to OS 9. Mac OS X’s windows were larger, its Dock took up more space, and Finder windows had huge toolbar areas filled with massive icons. And don’t even get me ongoing on the heavily translucent menus. Finally, some apps (Address Book, I’m talking about you) were just downright hideous.

Still, overall, I remember thinking that I was using something that felt modern and forward-looking.

To me, the vital ways in which OS X worked boiled down to one thing: stability. The Mac OS X Public Beta included all the proper exhortation technologies of the day—right multitasking support, protected memory, and other goodies under the hood to help keep the machine running, even when an application quit. Instead of rebooting because a program crashed, as I had to do in OS 9, the Mac OS X Public Beta would simply show a message telling me that a program had crashed, but that I could continue working. What a wonderful change.

Of course, here were less welcome changes with the public beta. For one thing, it was slow—the Finder, in particular, was extremely slow. Simple tasks such as launching applications and opening files could be unbearably slow; in tests I ran at the time, program launching was anywhere from two to five era quicker in OS 9. Another problem concerned peripherals: Most of them simply didn’t work in the public beta.

Even with the plethora of excellent changes I’ve listed, but, the public beta probably wouldn’t have changed my life if it hadn’t been for one additional key fact: Mac OS X Public Beta was written on top of a Unix core, and included a Terminal application to frankly access that core.

Even more importantly, in the beginning, using Unix commands in Terminal was nearly a must for a whole range of tasks, such as getting certain printers to work, changing network settings without rebooting, making Terminal’s window translucent, installing a text-based alternative to the Internet Explorer browser, and finding strings of text within text files.

Looking back now, if that public beta had been nothing more than OS 9 with a pretty new face but the same basic underpinnings, I wouldn’t have launched MacOSXHints.com, joined Macworld, andeventually finished up working at Many Tricks, one of my favorite Mac software developers. So thank you, Mac OS X Public Beta, for spurring a change in my life that I couldn’t have predicted but am very grateful to have experienced.

OS X’s 10 Most Innovative Features

Ten years ago, even ahead of schedule adopters of Mac OS X probably couldn’t have conceived of the OS features that we rely on so heavily today. Here are the ten features that we deliberate to be the most significant contributions to the Mac experience.

1. Time Machine: Backup program introduced with OS X 10.5
2. Spotlight: Introduced as the desktop-search successor to Apple’s Sherlock in OS X 10.4.
3. Unix Underpinnings: Thanks to Unix, Mac OS X finally gained the stability that was long lacking in the Mac OS.
4. The Classic Environment and Boot Camp: These technologies made it simple to transition to the Mac.
5. Developer Tools: These tools help developers take advantage of new, compelling features.
6. Expose: This was the first significant attempt to improve window management in view of the fact that Windows 95.
7. Bonjour: This networking technology was introduced as Rendezvous in OS X 10.2 and renamed in OS X 10.4.
8. iChat: Included in OS X 10.2. Gave OS X a notable productivity boost.
9. Native PDF Support: This lets you view PDFs with the Preview application and easily start PDF files with any program that supports the Print command.
10. Smart Folders: Using the power of Spotlight, Smart Folders are essentially saved searches.