| Tuesday, July 9, 2002 |
10:51 - Freeeeoowwww.
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/jaguarmiscellaneous2.html
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Okay, so this may be a good sign: we're seeing more and more appearances of ".Mac" in recent Jaguar builds, and it appears to be intended for serving up things like... subscription-based screen-saver slideshows.
Remember that PPG episode where they followed around this strraaaaAAaaaAAanger, a sinister silhouette with a trench coat and a double-peaked fedora and two glowing yellow eyes... but then the light was turned full on him, and he turned out to be a pleasant little man with a flowerpot and a watering can? That's kinda what this feels like.
Yeah, it's apparently for subscription-based services; .Mac is evidently intended to provide certain avenues by which Apple can suck money out of customers' wallets. But... well, not that I want to seem hypocritical or anything (as they said in Forum this morning, "hypocrisy is better than having no values at all")... but unless there's some major .NET-esque can-of-worms that we have yet to discover, the attitude behind these services appears to be comparatively pure. Apple already provides 5MB of free iDisk space to users, and lets you have more-- if you pay for it. Now it's stuff like screen-savers. Entirely optional, entirely non-intrusive. Can it be that Apple is finding a way to turn the .NET philosophy to good instead of evil?
Naturally, it entails forgoing some revenue, revenue that Microsoft isn't afraid to go for. But hey, isn't that the ongoing story?
But anyway, that's just one little piece of this latest set of Jaguar updates and screenshots. Look at some of the other ones:
When a user is deleted, its files are now saved as a disk image.
Jaguar's developer tools include a new app called Picture Sharing. It appears to be a sort of test app for Rendezvous, allowing you to share images over a network. Picture Sharing Browser is the client application.
In the Mouse preferences, you can now configure your PowerBook to ignore trackpad input when an external mouse is connected.
There are several new cursor icon indicators for copying, selecting, and moving files.
Yeah, look at these screenshots. Even the mouse cursors are works of art, for God's sake.
The newest builds have an interesting new startup sequence. Upon bootup, after the Happy Mac, a message greets "hello" on the screen, with the blue beachball cursor spinning below it. This feature is still in development.
I wanna see this. Too bad there's no screenshot/photo.
As mentioned previously, the Desktop preference pane can be set to change the desktop picture upon login, when waking from sleep, or every time period ranging from every five seconds (for the Mac user who simply must change his desktop picture every five seconds) to every day.
Applications that aren't responding receive a yellow warning sign in the dock. You can then force quit them from a their contextual menus in the dock. Additionally, in the force quit dialog, non-responding apps are highlighted in red for easy identification.
If you get a kernel panic in Jaguar, a message comes up helpfully informing you: "A problem has occured and you need to restart your computer. To do this, hold down the Power key for several seconds." It is then repeated in several languages. Additionally, the kernel panic is automatically logged on your system.
Okay, now this is exactly what I'm talking about. Okay, OS X isn't perfectly "uncrashable"-- no OS is, right? Even the big-iron can kernel-panic, and OS X has been known to do so itself. Until now, such a condition has resulted in lines of ugly console text painting themselves over the suddenly inert GUI.
But now, Apple has GUI-ified the kernel panic.
Now, this isn't as ideal as figuring out a way to eliminate kernel panics altogether; Marcus suggests some kind of redundant-kernel arrangement, where the secondary microkernel would freeze the RAM state and restart the primary kernel. I have to find out why this wouldn't be possible. (It probably would be, but it'd be insanely, insanely hard.)
But it does close the loop. OS X is now completely GUI, from power-on to power-off, even in error conditions. All the UNIX ugliness is now officially wrung out. All they need now is to get it so the mouse will still work in a kernel-panic situation, so you can just click a button to restart instead of having to press the Power button.
This is just another of those details that under any other company's management would just go unaddressed. Steve Jobs is notorious for being someone who is both infuriating and infinitely rewarding to work for; he thinks nothing of looking at a prototype and saying, "This sucks-- do it again." Engineers wither and die under his piercing stare. Software goes through the cycle over and over again. But eventually it's good enough to satisfy him, and that means it's uncompromising in quality, and those engineers who have stuck it out get a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction almost unknown elsewhere in the industry.
Jaguar is full of these little tweaks, these little labor-of-love details, these diamonds strewn on the beach. Booting up a new Jaguar build has to be like reaching a new level in a video game, full of little discoveries and baubles to find.
Whatever charmed life Nick DePlume is leading, he must be having so much fun, seeing the OS evolve like this, with new little gems appearing every few days. I envy him... but not it if means he's having to post this stuff from a hut in the Caymans.
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