InsideX State Of The OS: 10.1.2 Derek Currie [Mac OS X 10.1.2: Part 1 - Part 2] Just in time for the holidays, Apple gave us a nice 34 MB present: Mac OS X 10.1.2. It continues a trend of gradually thrashing through MOSX bugs and appending missing features. There was a rumor that Steve Jobs was so aggravated with the lack of quality control in Mac OS 10.1.1 that he will delay further updates to ensure that what is delivered actually works. Apparently that was yet another worthless rumor as 10.1.2 is here, and a nice upgrade. Check out the official feature list (as found in Software Update and the official release document: The 10.1.2 update delivers improvements and new functionality, as well as expanded peripheral support for Mac OS X. Enhancements include: - Updated and new USB and FireWire device support, including FireWire-based digital cameras - PC Card storage devices, including media readers - IrDA modem support for FireWire-based PowerBook models - Audio, Display, and Speech improvements - Networking and Printing improvements - AirPort v2.0 - Apache web server v1.3.22 - AppleScript v1.8 When I was writing, an article about 10.1.1 I had been debating with myself what to say. Should I be positive and make all the X zealots happy? Or should I be realistic? Realistic won out. However, the new features in 10.1.2 definitely make the job of being positive a lot easier. That is not to say that MOSX does not have some big fat warts and feature problems worth noting. But, first let's step away from the OS for a moment and get some perspective, we will find some very wonderful things have happened since the day NeXT and Apple joined forces: 1) Classic: Besides, the main OS, we have this wonderful thing running the show underneath called the Mach kernel. Linus Torval can rant about how much better his kernel is than ours all he likes, but the fact is that Mach let's us do stuff his can't. We can run multiple OSes at the same time. As a result, we have this incredible asset in MOSX that is truly miraculous called Classic. No other OS can do this! Itanium PCs can't do it! We have Mac OS 9 running simultaneously with Mac OS X. Yes, the thing is still buggy, drops dead with no warning, and requires Force Quitting far more frequently than I would like. But overall, it works. It's astounding. And btw: Apple doesn't tell you, but 10.1.2 includes another Classic update. After you install the MOSX update and start Classic you will be asked whether the OS can install the Classic update. 2) NeXT Dross Going, Going, Gone: Apple has made some major inroads removing the NeXT junk that Mac users have no use for. Navigation is improving on the MOSX. The Dock is far more functional than anything NeXT had. We have real icons on the desktop. The funky if not outright insane privileges nonsense, imposed by the NeXT implementation of BSD UNIX, is almost gone. MOSX actually has the feel of a Mac OS at last, which is to say that it is a lot more user-friendly. 3) Shareware Out The Ears: Despite the lethargy of the major application developers (and who can blame them considering how bad Carbon was up through version 1.3.1) the shareware and freeware developers have really come through. Bravo little guys! This past week I bought and installed both CopyPaste and StuffIt Deluxe for MOSX on my machine, and they are working great. Now if I could only get Casady and Greene to update SpellCatcher, which is vastly superior to Appleâs built in spell checking. I donât know what I would do without the freeware ASM recreating the Finder application menu for me. Kick butt Frank Vercruesse! Then thereâs TinkerTool, SnapzPro, Space_Dock, MacJanitor, TexEdit Plus, BBEdit, iCab, OmniWeb, Ircle, ICQ, NewsWatcherX, GraphicConverter, on and on! Bless you folks. 4) Real Password Security: I donât know about you, but I found Multiple Users in Mac OS 9 to be one of the buggiest messes Apple ever released, next to of course, early versions of Sherlock. Now we have an OS that not only reliably forces logins, but has free screen savers that require the same. Yeah, I know the problem: You can still hold the option key down on boot and get into Mac OS 9 and we are back to buggy Multiple Users again with its fitful attempt at forced logins, the chaos it often induces in MOS 9, and anyone who gets into 9 can decimate the MOSX partition to their evil heartâs content. But letâs at least acknowledge that MOSX itself does it right. 5) UNIX: We have real UNIX in MOSX. I personally despise CLUIs (character line user interfaces, as I call them), and they are the main reason I ran screaming away from the PC and ran to the Mac when it came out. I will never like CLUIs. They are by definition user-hostile, and no one will ever convince me otherwise. But, some people live in the CLUI world and like it, and they write useful software too. We get to benefit from their work. Darwin and BSD are both OpenSource, improving constantly, and we get the fruits of the CLUI world labor. And yes, sometimes it is nice to outsmart the GUI and use the CLUI to get things done, like delete one of those files with insane root-only user privileges without having to logout then back in again as root. With time we will all learn that UNIX has some kewl and useful tricks, and that it actually has some logic that runs rings around that village idiot of an OS known as DOS. 6) Audio bugs in are GONE. Hurrah! 7) File name smashing is over! You can now have long file names that spill over into a second line. Bless you Apple. 8) You can move the Dock to the side! Oddly, I ended up liking it on the bottom, in hiding mode. There is also an alternative to the Genie effect called Scale that is whipping fast, highly recommended. 9) Volume and Brightness keys actually work! I am so pleased to watch a functional and fun interface pop up on screen when I hit my volume and brightness controls. 10) Carbon is improving! About bloody time. I am hoping version 1.5 continues the trend of adding functionality, not bugs. This is the single best way to convince the big software companies to write for MOSX. 11) Menu Bar icon menus! By default you get menus for Battery (laptops only) and Volume. You can even add on monitor and scripts menus (if you are crafty). StuffIt Deluxe 6.5.1 even adds Magic Menu! 12) Icons stay where you put them, usually! They donât jumble into a mess when youâre not looking. You start to get the idea that the user is in control, not the OS. 13) All the DVD and disk burning capabilities now work. 14) Airport capability has been greatly improved and updated. 15) PCMCIA Hell is over: I took out the measly little 2 GB hard drive on my Wallstreet and put it into a nifty EIDE PCMCIA card driven box by MCE called the DataShuttle. I use it for on-the-road backups of critical work, like my writing. I couldn't use it in MOSX up through 10.1.1! But Apple, continuing to fill in missing MOSX features, has made me a happy camper. I can pop in and remove my drive with no troubles. _______________ But letâs get to the bad stuff. Batten the hatches and lash yourselves to the mast. Here comes the storm: 1) Hype On Toast With Cheese: Apple marketing has told us so much nonsense about Mac OS X as to make me feel queasy if not outright nauseated. Steve Jobs spouted much of it to us, which I found very disheartening. A) Poor Victoria, Bruce and Agnes: Certainly Apple has improved the Speech Recognition features of MOSX. But, Steve Jobs promised last spring to improve the text-to-speech voices in MOSX. It never happened. They suck because Apple never bothered to implement voice modulation, which is standard in Mac OS 9. Oddly I can activate voice modulation inside TexEdit Plus for X. So guess what application I use to read to me! Try setting the Speech Options so that the Speech rate is over 200 and Modulation is set to the max: 100. You will get much better results than what the OS itself sticks you with. But sad to say, the speech quality is still no where near as good as in MOS9. It is stiff and robotic, even with added modulation. So, when I have time, I use TexEdit Plus in Classic to read to me instead, with much better satisfaction. B) What Time Table? Nearly nothing MOSX native was released in the summer of 2001, and much of it was negated in functionality when new versions of Carbon and MOSX 10.1 came out. It turns out that even this fall there were very few MOSX native applications released. So much for Steve Jobâs time table for app releases. It has literally been thrown out the window. I expect his Î6 oâclock, 12 oâclockâ story will be equally worthless to Mac users. I fully expect it will be AFTER MOSX has been out for a full year that we will see a real surge in MOSX native applications appear. Meanwhile, you may sadly note that Mac OS 9 native applications are still coming out and selling at a regular pace, ignoring that MOSX even exists. I believe this is all due to too much enthusiasm at Apple marketing and too little practical programming at Apple development. 2) Complete ATI drivers for older G3 machines don't exist, and perhaps never will: Watching an OpenGL application, like one of Appleâs screen savers, on my G3 Wallstreet 466 MHz is like watching snails mating. Report this as a bug to Apple, and sign the petition to end the madness: 3) Bug Nest: A vast number of bugs in MOSX have been squelched in 10.1.1. But lots and lots still exist! And there are even new bugs. I regularly have the GUI lock up on me, and get kernel panics. Rebooting does NOT fix the damage done. There is this silly myth that the Îchecking diskâ phase of booting repairs disk problems. Wrong-o kids! I donât know what 'checking disk' does, but I can reboot twice after a kernel panic, effectively Îchecking diskâ twice, then boot into single user mode and find masses of disk problems using Îfsck.â Donât fool yourself. MOSX is damage prone, much more so than regular MOSX, and you canât ignore it. Because Disk Utility is entirely useless for fixing its own MOSX partition, you are going to be booting into single user mode and using Îfsckâ, or booting into 9 and using Disk First Aid, on a regular basis. And I strongly suggest you also get a MOSX ready repair utility like DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro or Norton Utilities as they ARE going to find severe problems that fsck and Disk First Aid can't see or repair. I find the MOSX crash and lockup problems quite disturbing considering the so-called Îstabilityâ of OS. Rumor has it that certain RAM chips can be to blame for this problem, which is one reason Apple forced firmware upgrades in newer machines that disabled non-compliant RAM chips. Those of us with older machines have to pray we get happy RAM that solves the problem. I can testify that I replaced all the RAM in my Wallstreet during the writing of this article, and that the result has been rock solid OS stability. It turns out I had an iffy 128 MB chip that caused most of my problems. Conclusion: If you are having odd GUI lockups, and kernel panics that indicate memory problems (read the screen, it will tell you), try replacing your RAM. Hopefully, you bought it from a reputable company that will replace it for you. Also, note that I increased my RAM from 192 MB to 512 MB. Simply increasing available RAM may well have assisted MOSX stability as well. 4) Battery Drain Remains: Can you believe this? Apple has known about the problem since last spring and done practically NOTHING! My Wallstreet PowerBook is dead in 12 hours if I put it to sleep while on battery power. I can hear the fan start up on my PowerBook the moment I unplug the AC power! No wonder its eating up the battery. Unacceptable. There is blunder afoot here! 5) Nothing to replace Internet Config: This means your Internet experience is going to be compromised. The Internet Preferences panel is inadequate. 6) Nothing to replace Apple Data Detectors. This further compromises your Internet experience. ADD should have been standard in MOS 9. Nothing is stopping it being standard in MOSX. It's just an addition to contextual menus, and a brilliant one at that. 7) Backing up MOSX is essentially impossible. What is the #1 Rule Of Computing everyone? Say it along with me! "MAKE A BACKUP." If you donât, you will lose data. Itâs that simple, that serious. And yet you canât back up all of MOSX! What does that mean? It means it's an inadequate OS. Flame me all you like, but I am in good company: Read TidBITS #605/ 12-Nov-01 for a great discussion of this lunacy. To quote Adam Engst, editor of TidBITS: ã...the main reason I refuse to install Mac OS X 10.1 on my primary Mac is that I can't back it up acceptably· This time Apple deserves the lion's share of the blame for creating an operating system that can't be backed up and restored reliably many months after the initial release. For this reason alone, Mac OS X cannot be considered acceptable for serious use in many situations.ä The interim work around is to back up all your personal folders as well as these standard folders: Applications, Library and Users. If worst comes to worst you can reformat, reinstall MOSX, then drop these folders into place to restore most of your old functionality. 8) Custom Installation of MOSX is still a joke: At least you get to cross out installment of a bunch of different languages. But, no way can you install something simple like the calculator you accidentally deleted. Instead, you have to go through the entire install all over again, all for one weensy 192K piece of software. Man, is that stupid or what? 9) No way to change the main System Font. TinkerTool letâs you change other fonts, but the main font is Lucinda Grande forever. Humph. 10) Folder Labels are dead. How WinDoze! I have taken to changing the icons for folders myself. Dig up a copy of ÎiMac Folders,â versions 1 and 2 (you will want both) to start doing it yourself. 11) Dot 3 Hell Is Here To Stay: Iâve already said a lot on this issue. It stinks. Files on Mac now have dot 3 or dot 4 names at the end. I suggest you leave the OS set to hide them (under Finder Preferences) and hold your nose. Thank the regressive old OSes for the existence of this stupid convention. The Mac had it right all along by embedding creator codes in file headers. But, sadly we now have to do it the wrong way just to make people on archaic platforms happy. There are petitions to fight this lunacy as mentioned in my earlier articles, but Apple shows no sign of caring. Sad. That leaves the issue up to the developers: Here is my neck, here is the ax, have at me. But, I have to say it: DEVELOPERS! USE CREATION CODES in the files your applications create! Sure, make Apple cheerful by adding that dot 3 crap, but keep creator codes alive and well. When I create a Photoshop JPEG file I want to double-click it and have it open in Photoshop, not Preview! And if I create another JPEG in GraphicConverter I want it to open in GraphicConverter, not Preview again, and not Photoshop! Get the idea? 12) MOSX is still slow. Yes, we know that older machines have hobbled video drivers. But setting that aside, MOSX should really be much speedier than what we have seen so far. There is a myth going around that if only you could give MOSX masses of memory it would come up to speed. As you will recall from above I increased my RAM from 192 MB to 512 MB. Did I notice any speed increase? NO! Here is a quick list of how to get more speed out of MOSX: 1) Get a faster processor. There are some nice processor upgrade deals around and some of them will even allow you to run MOSX on 'non-supported' machines. I especially recommend checking out Sonnet if you have a pre-G3 machine. 2) Have more RAM than the minimal 128 MB, and certainly don't settle for less. I found 192 MB worked just as fine as 512 MB. 3) Have lots of free disk space on your MOSX partition for virtual memory. 4) Get a G4. MOSX is optimized to use Altivec/Velocity Engine to crunch numbers. 5) Get a dual G4. MOSX actually knows how to use two processors, as opposed to the very limited dual processor capabilities of old MOS and even 'dual processor aware' classic applications. ____________ According to Steve Jobs we are half way into the completion of MOSX as a fully functional OS, ready to replace old MOS forever, with lots of apps, and lots of staying power. Yeah, right. But itâs not time to panic yet, instead it is time to start ranting at Apple that their time is running out. If you are having trouble finding Apple's bug reporting page, let me help you: http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/ They may be relatively tiny steps, but 10.1.2 continues Apple's trend of making MOSX meet their mark of user-friendly perfection. We know they will get there. The only question is when? So far, MOSX has been worth the required patience. [Mac OS X 10.1.2: Part 1 - Part 2]