First, my apologies to anyone whose name I have either forgotten or mispelled (note: Markowitz is Maury's correct last name).

Prior to the red-eye flight home, I spent a good deal of time talking to William Garrison, a Unix administrator from Cornell University. His perspective was very valuable as he had "come to the party" with only a Unix interest. So it was nice to hear about some of the Unix-oriented sessions I wasn't able to get to, notably those about Web Objects.

You can also get such reports from selected sessions at and look for the WWDC seminar summaries.

Also, we chatted about the MacHack conference. I was nearly convinced to attend this year as there will probably be many, many cool OS X hacks.

Apart from that I've had to take a few days to recuperate from the conference and the gruelling 'red-eye" flight home.

*****

Two weeks later.

Before completely wrapping up WWDC 2000, I wanted to take some time to work with DP4 on my work machine and get a feel for it.

The clock.app is one of the cooler little apps in OS X which shows off transparency. I would love to be able to resize it or even make it my desktop. The icon in the dock doesn't update either. Yet.

So now, with OS X, we are firmly in the Unix world... I say this because I installed OS X on my Desktop G3/300 at work and am not able to get it to talk to our exchange server. I am wondering if the localhost thing is screwing it up but since I haven't been in the Unix world for awhile (and never a Unix administrator), I'm a bit of a loss as to what to do next. Edit hosts file? Configure netinfod?

I'm gonna have to sign up with a Mac OS X feedback mailing list or something. Anybody know of a good one for newbie Unix admin/developers?

Now, I don't want to scare anybody. This is still a Developer Preview. I like the way much of the Unix file system is hidden from the casual observer. I expect this to be a lot smoother by the time Public Beta ships later this summer. So, basically, I'll deal with it and save my hoot'n and holler'n until the Public Beta. In the meantime, I've got work to do.

On the other hand, I have been working with OS X for the last two weeks and having a bit of a time with it. I use a lot of odd extensions in my OS 9 environment (Fat Cursor, Relax, Notify, among others) and and I wonder if that is causing some of my problems. At first, I managed to hose OS X so that it just hangs on startup on my Beige Desktop G3/300 with two blank but pretty blue screens.

This turns out to be a multiple monitor glitch. T am using a dual monitor system and my crashes started happening after I switched the monitor arrangement around. The login screen is appearing for a single refresh and then getting wiped out. So I rearrange cables and everything works out fine. I also find I have to turn off a lot of extensions.

So, I've been running Mac OS X all day long. It feels like a new frontier; yes, there are some things missing, others not working. But overall, I enjoy working with OS X and Aqua. It's more than just eye candy... its beautiful.

It's as if we Mac users have been living on the Madagascar Island and can now see the distant African mainland. I want to move to that mainland and not be a genetic off-shoot OS. OS X brings us firmly into that Unix/Linux mainstream.

My hope now is that Apple will post regular patches to the seeding site. This puppy feels like its nearly there. And boy, is it pretty, even in this party finished state. Whenever I go back to OS 9, it feels heavy and somewhat klunky. But, as I said before, I have work to do.

Mac OS X is coming like a freight train. Get ready.

Yes, I think the ride will be a little but bumpy, but in the end, I think it will be well worth the trip.

Getting to Carbon

Immediately after the conference I was wondering how/when we are going to take our products to OS X. At first I thought that the Carbon thing might be too much effort.

After working with OS X for two weeks, I am firmly convinced that we need to get to Carbon as soon as possible. We can make our apps work now with OS 8.6/9.x and then deal with whatever we have to when OS X ships (and customers start asking for an OS X upgrade). For us, the problem is not so much Carbon but the added libraries which will be missing or different in OS X (InputSprocket --> HID manager, IOKit interfaces to h/w, etc.). For us, a user who has a 5 year old (or more) Nubus Mac who still expects support is just not in our target market.

For others, however, the decision to go to Carbon may not be so easy. And this will depend largely upon Apple and how far back they go in supporting older PPC hardware.

Windows Emulation

Finally, I was not able to gain any insight on the future of Win32 emulation on Mac OS X. Naturally Apple wants developers to focus on Carbon and Cocoa, so this is quite understandable from their perspective.

Currently, our plans depend upon Connectix Virtual PC for one of our apps. VPC, however, does not run, even in Classic mode on OS X. Either we'll have to port this app as quickly as possible (easier said than done) or look for other emulators in which to run the app. So from our perspective, we have to wait and see what will happen between now and January 2001.