Mac OS X Public Beta was released in the heart of Paris on the 13th. The Apple Store was ground to a halt with orders and those of us who had been anticipating the OS for several months were finally going to be redeemed. For those of you who haven't received your CD yet or if you are not brave enough to install the OS, these impressions are for you. Not a comparison, not a review, just some impressions of how I feel about different areas of the OS.

Installation and Setup:

The installation was really a snap. Simply put in the CD, boot from it, and then you are brought into the installer. The installer works just fine and only takes around 10 minutes to run through. The only real installation option you have is what drive you install on and whether you want to reformat the drive first. There is no unsupported installation option for you pre-G3 owners out there, but I have at least one report of it installing on a 7300 (look for an unsupported install page on XA in the near future). As I said, this installation only takes around 10 minutes or so, then you reboot into Mac OS X.

Once you boot into Mac OS X you will be run through a setup manager. This allows you to easily setup your internet and Mail.app preferences. I'd suggest writing down your preferences beforehand if you have a lot of different numbers like I do with @home. Other preferences to setup are the timezone, clock, and date. Most importantly you will be asked to setup a login and password, which you are prompted for every time you boot (though you can turn this off).

In the Beginning:

Upon finishing the setup program you will find yourself on the desktop. The Dock comes fully loaded with with an icon for the Desktop, Mail, Clock, QuickTime Player, Music Player, Internet Explorer, System Preferences, Mac OS X Feedback, the Trash, and more. The Dock seems to be something you love or hate, and while I don't feel undying love for it, it felt very natural from the beginning. The only part of using it that felt unnatural was going to it after minimizing several pages from news websites. I quickly went in IE and checked out a few pages. On OS9 I was one of the remaining Netscape stalwarts, so I can't honestly compare IE in OS9 and OS X. IE worked adequately, I didn't make it run the gauntlet, but it seemed to render things fairly fast and accurately. It did choke on some JavaScript and doesn't seem to have any Java support (it seems there is currently not a JVM for any browser to use under Mac OS X), but it should be adequate for many users. One of the first things I did was to go to download OmniWeb. They've just recently released a new version for the Public Beta that installs more easily. OmniWeb seemed to render things a bit more accurately and handled JavaScript better, allowing me to view some pages that I find critical to see that IE couldn't show. It also has at least some support for Flash, QuickTime, and SSL, which is handy for someone like myself who does a lot of shopping online. One thing I must note is that in either browser text is gorgeous. Of course, this isn't just in browsers, this is system wide, but I honestly found reading pages more pleasurable with the beautiful anti-aliased text.

Applications and Extras:

Other software I tracked down was a Carbonized version of Snak and Transmit ( The Carbon versions of both of these apps are basically unsupported and are provided more as a convenience for us early adopters. Unfortunately, Snak has some stability problems in its Carbon incarnation, leaving me still using Snak in Classic, but I am confident that these issues will be resolved soon. I was happy to find while poking around the Finder all sorts of applications and niceties. You'll find a few movie trailers, a chess game, and other little items of varying necessity. It may not increase usability dramatically, but it just makes this beta OS feel more finished and complete. The last thing I'll mention is that Sherlock is no longer brushed metal and looks much better for it, QuickTime Player and Music Player weren't so lucky, but in the case of the former it does look better and the latter actually looks really nice.

Performance:

Now that you've read about installation and the applications I've used, let me offer some thoughts in terms of performance. The time it takes to startup the OS is similar to my OS9 system. Once you get to the status bar in booting it is pretty quick, but prior to that you do have to wait at the gray screen with the little Mac for a while. Applications start up in about the same amount of time, don't look for drastically slower or faster start up times with apps. The first Cocoa and first Carbon application you load will also both take a few seconds longer, since they load pieces that aren't loaded at boot. Some things like moving windows and redraws can be a little sluggish on this machine (Sawtooth G4/350), but I'm sure that will be cleaned up and that is with several applications and Classic running. One funny thing is that I don't think a lot of Mac users are going to quickly adapt to the improved multitasking. I'm so trained to just wait while one application loads that I don't even realize I can actually be doing other things. Features like that really make up for any sluggishness, in my opinion. I don't have any benchmarks or measurements of the time it takes to do something, but let me just say that I don't feel like my productivity is taking a hit at all. Everything moves acceptably fast and I expect it to only get better with the final version.

Stability:

This is going to be hard for me to write because my OS9 system didn't crash. I had a perfect extension set with a very clean system folder and had great uptime. Basically this means I can't rant about the brilliant stability of OS X and how much better it is than OS9 because my uptime is the same. If you want to know how stable OS X is, though, let me say this: there is no restart menu shown by default. To select it you have to hold option while choosing the Special menu. Some of the early Carbon applications that have been rushed out to the public will quit, but fear not! Memory protection has saved the day, simply restart the application, no fuss, no muss. The only other stability complaint I have is that occasionally Classic gets a little flustered. For instance, I'll have two Classic apps in the Dock. I click on one and get no response, so then I click on the other, and then click on the original one. Luckily, if things get bad you can simply force quit the troublemaker and restart the application. Apple and the software makers will hopefully solve some of these conflicts to make force quitting an application a rarity, but it sure beats a whole restart. This leads me into my next rant, Classic.

Classic:

Classic works perfectly fine, to put it bluntly. I'm not sure I'd use it if I was constantly running a full suite of Macromedia or Adobe applications, but it seems to work well. Performance is about the same as normal OS9, but some applications behave more awkwardly under Classic. AOL Instant Messenger is one of those applications, luckily Fire can be used to access the AIM network. If you don't have a fair amount of RAM Classic can degrade performance, but with 256 megs I'm able to run OS9 and OS X with a few applications each perfectly. Quake 3 supposedly runs fine under Classic, but I tried Unreal Tournament, and while it ran, it was pretty damn choppy, I'd guesstimate I got 10 FPS.

Final Thoughts and the Future:

The future is bright for Mac OS X. The Public Beta has been generally well received and has generated a large number of orders (the number I've heard is at least 20,000 orders so far). Stability and features are near perfect, with increased software and hardware support, some fine tuning, and polish it will be a great OS that users will be proud to call the Mac OS.