MacOS X is just starting to fall into the greedy hands of ADC members. These lucky few have a lot to look forward to, this go around sees OS X with many improvements, far exceeding what many expected.

Installation can take place on UFS and HFS+ volumes. It will still require its own partition or volume, though. Also of interest to many users will be the absence of an unsupported install option. While a workaround is still feasible, this may seem less attractive without an officially santioned way of installing on older machines. DP2 can install officially on all iMac, PowerMac G3, PowerMac G4, and PowerBook G3 computers; iBook support is assumed, but not known for sure.

Overall performance still feels somewhat sluggish on the G3/233, but is said to be a marked improvement over DP1 or even OS X Server. The text files say performance in this area should improve. It is not known yet whether OS X is using hardware acceleration, so things such as scrolling may seem inappropriately slow. Software support from Apple is much improved with QuickTime finally in working order on OS X. NewsWatcher and Fetch are included in Carbonized form, and as StepWise reported MailViewer and Tex-Edit are there coded in Yellow Box, or Cocoa. The control panels are said to feel very Mac-like, making any user feel comftorable configuring the OS.

MacOS Classic, or Blue Box, as many know it, has become extremely usable with a host of improvements. It now runs transparently with good speed. This is on a G3/233 with 96 megs of RAM, which is about the bottom line computer for running OS X. Most users shouldn't even notice a performance drop when running Classic applications. The text files included with DP2 state that Classic apps should run even smoother in future releases.

The images have been removed at request of Apple Legal (12/3/99)