the Good, the Bad and the Beta



Abstract: Mac OS X Beta release has some good points and some things that still need to be done. Here's some impressions and a list of mine that I'll keep going as I explore. I'll assume that people have already read about what was going on with DP4 and move on from there.

Note: This article was written back in 2001, about the just-then released Mac OS X Public Beta at the time that the Aqua was finally available to the public. The information is way way out of date, but left up because it may be of historical interest.


The Good
  • Appletalk: Ah hah! Via the "Go" menu, you can easily connect to an AFP Server and make use of this fine protocol.
  • Dock: Well, of course, there's the nice bouncing start-up icons, the easier to see triangles for active apps, and the dividing bar for apps and documents and active windows, but you can also now add documents directly to the dock for future reference. (Thanks to Eric for pointing that out.)
  • iDisk support is smooth and requires no extra software.
  • Installations: Installations are just another process that runs along side other processes. Surfing the web while installing - what a concept.
  • Keyboards: Dvorak/International finally working in Terminal program
  • Multiple button mice/trackballs 'just work' with contextual menus.
  • Music player: runs like a dream. Reasonable feature set, and never skips MP3s or CDs/AIFFs even under heavy system use.
  • Scroll wheels seems to work fine (without any extra software needed) with all Cocoa apps. (Works at least in: OmniWeb, Terminal, Mail... and doesn't work in, say, IE.) Within one Cocoa app, the scrolling happens to the window (or browser frame) that you hover over, you don't have to have that window brought to the foreground first. All that being said, it doesn't work in finder windows :-( .
  • SSH built-in to system! (saving many install headaches) Specifically, it's OpenSSH 2.1.1, protocol vers 1.5/2.0.
  • Terminal: (of which I'll have more to say later...) Among other things, the paste function in the terminal window works fine (it was a disaster to paste with line breaks in OS X Server).
  • Uptime: No crashes since install on Sept 23rd (ok, no big deal yet...)
  • Volume Indexing: You can index any user's directory, and any pre-OSX drive, but not such things as the root (/) dir, the /System dir and such. It's also nice that dragging a new folder into Sherlock auto-indexes. In sum: less indexing than OS9, but more than on OSX Server (there was none). Still, they indexed the important stuff, which means faster finds in general.
  • Wake-up time does indeed seem to sit at around 1 second. (Actually, my monitor seems to take 1 second, and the OS is happily waiting.)
The Bad
  • Appletalk: Well, you can connect to servers fine, but you can't connect to another Mac using Appletalk just yet. Can't even see the local network, it seems. ... But there's more: There seems to be nothing analogous to "recent servers", either in the "connect to server" menu selection or elsewhere. It seems one could easily add this feature by adding a directory "Recent Servers" under the /Network directory. At any rate, despite being able to drag an alias of a mounted volume onto the document side of the Dock, this will not call up that server when double-clicking it. Seems like the GUI thing to do.
  • Clippings: Their location and window sizing information is lost each time you open a clipping.
  • Dock: Minimize more than about 10 windows and you realize that there needs to be some kind of dock management. Ideas include multiple docks, tabbed docks, one dock for apps one for windows - something supplimental is needed. The dock is great, but needs some orginizational tools.
  • Dvorak keyboard: while you're able to revert to qwerty for control keys, it doesn't do it for command / apple keys, which is a pain in the butt. (Oddly enough, it does correctly map the command keys while in the Finder.)
  • Location Manager: Missing!! This is a big minus for laptop owners.
  • Multiple Monitors: Support is hit or miss, it seems.
  • Tear-off Menus: They were in there in Server, but sorely missed in Beta. Whywhywhy...
  • Window Resizing can no longer be done by grabbing any ol' edge (as with OS X Server). Why not even as an option??


Please feel free to email me at hyperjeff@mac.com with comments, things to add to this list, notes, etc.