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Mac OS X DP3 Report Part 2
More about the OS itself, a little on Apps

I have noticed a number of people responding to my first report in forums across the internet, and I would like to remind everyone that "Developers Preview" means ALPHA in AppleSpeak. Some or ALL of what you see may change. Don't form too strong of an opinion on Mac OS X based on DP3, and more specifically, don't form too strong of an opinion on Mac OS X based on my reports on DP3. I am telling you what I have seen. The conclusions I have drawn based on this are not informed conclusions based on Apple documentation, they are just my best guesses.

That being said, let's start digging into DP3 some more. Firstly while there appears to be no way to change the desktop picture from the finder, it can be done. I suppose this could all be done from the shell, but I found it easier to do under Mac OS 9. The file is in a subdirectory of Finder.app. OS 9 does not want to let you open Finder.app as a folder, though I have seen utilities that can change that. Fortunately Navigation Services sees it as a folder that you can open and save documents in. The file is in Hard Drive/System/Applications/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/ and is called "Desktop Picture". All you have to do is open the picture you want to use in a graphics program (I used Graphic Converter) and choose Save as, name it Desktop Picture, make it a PICT, and then drop it into the aforementioned directory. When it asks tell it to replace, and then start up in DP3 and you have a new desktop picture.

I have seen alot of complaints all over the net about the antialiasing built into DP3. There seems to be no easy way to turn it off (Though I bet that changes), and it is always on for fonts size 12 and up. With 12 and 14 the text is a little hard to read, but the antialiasing looks good at larger sizes and fantastic at huge sizes. Certain programs seem to be able to handle the antialiasing a little better than others. I hope you can choose what style of antialiasing you want the text done in, like in the text tool in Photoshop.

Each user has their own Desktop Folder. When started up under the root account there is by default nothing on the desktop, and nothing in the Desktop Folder. Hence you hear the complaints of starting up to an empty desktop. When you create a user account and start up to it you have three things already on your desktop, you see aliases of the "Developer," "Documentation," "Public" folders. When you start up in the root account there are a number of files that you can only see from the terminal or Navigation Services. When you login as a user, there are even MORE files that can only be seen from the terminal or navigation services. Contrary to what I said in my last report I think Apple will be doing this more and more in the beta to eradicate the UNIX feel of the OS and make it more Mac like. I wouldn't be shocked to see them combine a bunch of the UNIX files into Packages called, say, "System" and "Finder." I would hazard to guess that disks will mount on the desktop in later releases. I think it would be kind of cool if the preference panels were each located in a folder called "Control Panels", and device drivers could go into an "Extensions Folder." Application prefs could go into a "Preferences folder." With just a little reorganizion and a little tweaking I think Apple could make X feel VERY Mac-Like with very little effort, and it seems as though it may be headed this direction. I also hope Apple makes it easier to switch between preference panels. As it is you are always dragging a slider half-way across the screen. It would be nice if there were a pop-up menu to switch between panels, or small icons or tabs across the top of the preference panel.

I invited my UNIX geek friend Tom over yesterday and he played with DP3. Once he found the terminal app, he was TOTALLY at home. The first thing he asked me about was browsers. I told him that I thought there was a way to set up a subnet so that Classic can have it's own IP address, so that you could use any Mac browsers. I have heard of people getting OmniWeb to run, however it was extremely erratic. Rumor has it IE 5 will be Carbonized. He replied, "So you don't have a browser? My god MAN, how do you USE this OS?!? We gotta fix this." Using the terminals FTP client he rapidly downloaded the source code to Lynx, a free console based (No pictures, just text) browser. He immediately started compiling it without alteration to the source code. He ended up with a binary that worked PERFECTLY.

And now, some final few things I noted while playing around: Files decompressed, moved around, duplicated etc. in the terminal do not show up in the finder till you log out and back in again.You cannot move windows under the menu bar like in OS 9. Yak ever be trying to get a windows as big as possible by stashing a little of it under the menu bar? No more. According to "Process Viewer" my idle CPU usage is 0.0%. I'm sure if I had remembered to ask Tom the command to view processes in the terminal I would have gotten a more accurate report as Process Viewer only measures to the first decimal place. There is no icon for CD's, they use the now famous Hard Drive icon. The Finder does not mount Audio CD's. Much more info coming in the next report, keep checking back!

Yet again, everything about DP3 could change by Beta 1. If you have any questions you want me to research, post them in the moonrockreptiles forum and I will try to cover them in my next report. Below enjoy some more screenshots.

 

DP3 Screenshots 2

SCREENSHOTS REMOVED AT THE DEMAND OF APPLE LEGAL

Airport?: A search in Sherlock for "Airport" found a file simply called "Airport." Could this imply that airport or some piece of airport is written into OS X? If I had two airport cards and one more airport compatible computer, perhaps I could find out.

Eject Disk: Currently if you control click on a CD you have to choose "Empty Trash" to eject the disk. It is a known issue, but you currently can not eject a disk by dragging it to the trash can. You can eject a disk from the special menu, also.

Aqualess Finder: As many of you are aware, Mac OS Rumors reported that you could remove the file at System/Library/Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Extras.rsrc and get a platinum interface. Just to discourage people from doing so here is a screen shot of what the DP3 finder looks like without Aqua. I wonder how long it will be before someone has hacked this into a theme file to alter the appearance of Aqua.

Font Panel: This is the Font Panel which is a service that can be accessed from most applications that allow you to enter text. It feels like a hyper-advanced version of Adobe's font panel in Photoshop. I rather like the idea of having "Groups" of fonts, though this feature does not appear to be implemented yet.

Font Sizes: This image shows you fonts drawn in Text Edit at varying sizes. Text Edit is much like an Aquafied Simpletext, however it does not appear to have a file size limit unlike SimpleText's 32k limit. It also has a spell checker and saves files in Rich Text Format.

Mail: The DP3 mail program.

New Desktop Pic: This shot is of the DP3 desktop using a pic from my favorite show!

Process Viewer Process ID: A shot of the process viewer with the Finder's process ID up.

Process Viewer Statistics: A shot of the process viewer with the Finder's Statistics.

Terminal Windows: A shot of a couple of terminal windows, the back one is running Lynx.

Text Edit: A shot of a few of the options available in Text Edit.

Giant Font Rendering: Text looks great when rendered at a large size. This is a T rendered in Text Edit at 800 points.

Jump to DP3 Report #1

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