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The popular image of a test pilot is a wiry man with short-cropped hair dressed in a worn leather jacket. He flies by the seat of his pants and thinks the rules are for some other joker. More often than not, truth prefers substance over hype. Some years ago, I read the official report of Chuck Yeager's first supersonic flight. It is a detailed, number-rich and adjective-free summary of just another in a long series of experiments. Rather than evoking a movie stereotype, it appears to be the work of a very cautious person performing a detailed analysis of an unknown machine.
When it comes to software, the popular misconception of a beta tester is someone whose Mac is loaded down patches, hacks, and numerous half-written programs with typical mind-numbing version numbers like 1.0b4x3fc1x. This popular image is just as wrong as the crazy test pilot, and even less entertaining.
My Mac OS X CD arrived less than forty-eight hours after I pressed the submit order button on the Apple Store Web page. I was even more euphoric than usual when the UPS driver showed up at my door. I often wonder if veteran package delivery drivers know which people have home offices, then stop at those houses when they want to watch a customer jump up and down with glee and act as if they have not seen another human being in weeks.
Still half-blinded from the blast of sunlight at the front door, I ran up the stairs two at a time. I ripped the package away from the CD-ROM before I made it to the top step. I plopped down at my desk, popped open the CD-ROM tray, and gently placed the disk on the spindle. As I slid the tray back into the PowerBook G3, the cold wind of reality blew across my thoughts. I have been waiting for a new Apple OS since the first early promises eight years ago. Eight years of pent-up anticipation was about to be set free. (No, jumping up and down for the UPS driver does not count.) Could anything be worth waiting eight years for? Probably not.
However, after a few days of poking around, Mac OS X comes very close. The first thing that grabbed my attention was the spectacular visual presentation. One small example: the lens on the MP3 player utility looks like real glass. Polished touches lurk everywhere. Icons appear as sharp and detailed as PhotoShop images; the Dock icons stretch and shrink perfectly; and dragging a window is just that - dragging an entire window, not just the outline.
Mac OS X's beauty is not only skin deep: it delivers the goods where the electrons meet the silicon, too. Mac OS X gives the Mac a much more solid "feel." Gone is the ever-present sense that at any moment a crash will force you into a three-minute interruption to restart. Programs still crash. I was able to get QuickTime to hang on a couple of occasions, but all I had to do was kill the process and restart it, a task that only took a few seconds.
The surface is shiny and beautiful, and the core is rock solid. It is as if Apple built Mac OS X like a software version of the Chunnel, with two teams working from different directions that meet in the middle. And it is Mac OS X's midsection that feels the most unfinished. Gone is the Apple Menu, gone is the Application Menu, gone are most Finder windows, and gone is the sense that there is no abstraction layer between the user and the machine's file directory.
At first, this flabby middle troubled me. Then I realized that once the shareware community gets cranked up, and assuming Apple has not locked any doors inside the OS, we should get a flood of utilities that overcome or at least mitigate Mac OS X's most glaring weaknesses. Mac OS 9 does not feel as friendly out of the box as it does after I add a few extras, so I do not expect anything more from Mac OS X. The operating system is, after all, the foundation, not the entire structure. Most certainly a more complete experience will emerge once the utility developers have extended Mac OS X.
For those readers who are thinking of installing Mac OS X, but have not yet taken the plunge, consider this one bit of advice: do not install it on your main work machine. Mac OS X will not boot from a secondary drive, it has to boot from the primary hard drive. Switching back to your original, un-Mac OS X-modified Mac OS 9 is not trivial. It is easy however to boot from Mac OS 9 after installing Mac OS X, but the computer is much more temperamental.
Slowly, I am learning which applications work with the new operating system and which are problematic. Mac OS X really is a beta, in the truest sense of the word. Parts are unfinished. Airport does not work, for example, nor does Mac OS X support many printers. It does not take long after switching to find something that cannot be done, so do not depend on Mac OS X beyond learning and testing.
Unless of course you would prefer to strap on the afterburners and explore the wild blue
yonder.
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"Flying High with Mac OS X"
