Macslash.com reports that according to the Software Update readme, the 30.3 MB MacOSX upgrade brings the following: “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”. Update: Of the version that potentially will become 10.2 or 10.5, leaked screenshots have been released on the web.
MacOSX 10.1.2 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Like who cares about the Mac OS? I tried it out and realized how much
fluff it really is…
me.
and the OSNews editors, it being reported here and-all (it might have something to do with MacOS X being an OS, and this being an OS website).
If you don’t care, just skip the story.
Very nice timing of Apple, releasing it on “MacOSX week”
I care!
And I never got Mac and I don’t think I will. But IMO it’s interesting to know of another OS development.
We care!
Microsoft Office + OpenStep API + BSD Networking + OpenGL Rendering +
JBuilder + Apache/MySQL/PHP/Python/Perl : PPPPP…
But OS *X* I *do* care about. I hated Macs, but I’ve now got an iBook with OSX on it, and it kicks ass… I originally bought it for a sweet laptop to put Linux on, but I’m officially a convert — I just deleted my Linux partition and gave it all back to OSX. =)
I loved your summation as to why you don’t care about Mac OS X. Can you, for the rest of without your vast knowledge of using Mac OS X, explain what you meant by that very descriptive word?
Benjamin Reed: So true! The same goes for me! OSX is great and more and more of my friends are trying it out and staying with it! OSX still have alot to ask for, but it’s getting better every day and thats part of the fun.
I was just complaining to Apple yesterday about how I needed support for my new Lucid FireWire Drive I just purchased a couple of days ago to compliment my new Ti-Book G4 (bought the PowerBook before the combo-drive was released, D’OH!!!) Anyways the new update fixed all my problems and I am now burning away furiously. If anybody needs something to really fit the Ti-Book G4 style, the Lucid FireWire Drive is kick a$$.
check it out here
http://www.mcetech.com (the PowerBook specialists)
Later
hurrr… I was playing wolfenstein on the net while the OS was downloading and installing the 10.1.2 update… My machine did not drop a frame… You gotta love that. Had to reboot 3 times in the last 3 monthes, to activate system upgrades. Unix goodness + mac goodness + opensource goodness + great hardware… How could it be better ? 🙂
Darn, still no major speed improvements for the UI. Being spoiled by BeOS really hurts. I have an OS X/G3 600 sitting next to a BeOS powered dual-450 PII, and guess which one feels faster. However, I can reverse the effect by rebooting both into MacOS 9 and Windows 2k
But it looks like Apple is working heavily on improving OS X and releasing updates – Be unfortunately skipped the latter.
Just in case I don’t visit OSNews in the following days:
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to Eugenia, JBQ and all OSNews readers and their families!
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you too Stew!
OSX IS important.
Like it or not, it has a better chance of penetrating the “normal” user market than any other Unix-like OS. BTW, this is coming from a veteran Unix admin…
It’s funny, seeing people that until recently cringed on the thought of typing ANY command, now discuss shell scripting…
The drawbacks I see in the current architecture are:
1. Filesystem implementation – unfortunately it needs to remain the way it is until developers move to cocoa… after that, we might see UFS+Softupdates or some kind of journaled FS (BeFS could be nice).
2. UI speed, currently a bit on the slow side (well Jobs started it all with NextStep and Display Postscript…)
3. Steep memory requirements
4. The hardware is not as cutting-edge as it could be. Hopefully the G5 will be good enough. They need to get their memory interfaces right and their clock speed high enough.
They’re getting there though. For the first time after many, many years (remember the IIfx?) do I even remotely consider getting a Mac…
D
Ok, OS X appears to be slow on relatively decent hardware due to the overhead of Display Postscript, correct? … Would/could something like this be addressed by a dedicated chip, that was nothing *but* a screaming Postscript rasterizer? Something like what the RIPs they put into printers…
(Yes, I know, I know … costly, probably not practical, etc., etc. … this is entirely a theoretical excercise
> It’s funny, seeing people that until recently cringed on the thought of typing ANY command, now discuss shell scripting…
I doubt many of the former MacOS users are now discussing shell scripting. My guess is they will stick to MacOS 9 for as long as possible and then switch to Windows. If you have to learn a new OS it might as well be that other OS.
I think MacOS X will be a success for Apple and will draw lots of converts. But the old userbase will abandon Apple, I see it happening already.
The discontent from veteran MacOS users is not univers hekkel. There are some who complain that windows take twice as long to draw, and of course who wouldn’t. If this happened to Windows, people would make as big a fuss. Fortunately OS X brings more stability, and true multitasking to a platform which didn’t have it for the last ten years. As someone pointed out. It may take longer for a program to start, or to render, but they can actually get other things done while this is happening. To get a simple look at the increase in productivity, just try and print a large document in OS 9, and then try it in OS X. OS X behaves as you’d expect an OS to behave at the beginning of the 21st Century.
On top of that, you have a growing legion of users who are coming into the Macintosh community. I’m back after years away because I finally have a powerful and fun to use Unix platform. Who would have guessed it would be fun to use a Unix platform for anything besides programming!
The slowup in the GUI is unfortunate, but I generally don’t find it to be a detriment to getting my work done. My only *real* complaint is directories with a large number of files, hundreds, in a list or hierarchal view. This is unaccetably slow, and needs to get taken care of. However, now that 10.1.1 is out I find the multitasking during heavy file operations to be *much* better than Windows2000.
I don’t think that a PDF display should be that slow on current hardware. Take NeXT, it had a postscript display on a 33 MHz 68040! Somehow I have the impression as if Quartz was compiled in debug mode, without any optimizations…
still slowish :/
Actually, MacOS X doesn’t have the same imaging model as NeXT Step. NeXT used to generate postscript code for the scene and have a postscript interpreter render the postscript code to the screen. OS X uses the PDF imaging model, but doesn’t actually generate PDF code unless a scene is saved on disk.
As for the chip, its actually pretty feasible. In fact, they already have such chips in almost every computer built in the last 4 years: its called a 3D processor. A modern GPU supports almost everything in the OS-X imaging model plus tons more. For example, using OpenGL, you can render textured text almost as easily as monochromatic text. Go check out E17 at http://www.enlightenment.org to find out how the Enlightenment guys are using OpenGL to accelerate an OS-X type GUI (with transparency and all sorts of nifty effects). Even complicated OS-X windows are a breeze for modern 3D hardware to handle (since they’re built to push millions of polygons, not just the few hundred or so on an average desktop window), so GUI speed could potentially be faster than anything else, even simple software-rendered UIs.
I’ve used them all, starting out with CLI BSD UNIX in the eighties, and Mac OS X has nothing to be ashamed of. Even if you compare it to BeOS, the Mac is way cool. -RB
<blockquote>Ok, OS X appears to be slow on relatively decent hardware due to the overhead of Display Postscript, correct? … Would/could something like this be addressed by a dedicated chip, that was nothing *but* a screaming Postscript rasterizer? Something like what the RIPs they put into printers…</blockquote>I can’t find the URL right now, but when OSX was released arstechnica’s review stated that current GPUs weren’t sufficent for what OSX is doing and, more importantly, that Apple were in talks with hardware guys about this.
Screens shots are gone!
You got here pretty quickly after the article posted, so quickly that you were the first person in line to respond. Do you troll to find affection? Or to feel important? Well, which is it?
did anyone get the screenshots before they went down?
mmm, i wonder why explorer even has a cache
If I can’t extract the images out of it…
what I remember:
an open with … submenu (when you click on a file)
amigastyle diplaybeep() option
white text on black screen option
Try Opera instead. Caches almost everything in an accessable format (ie. native files). You can even cache most streaming Qt videos (impossible under IE5). Most but not all.
I recently found that IE5 (on Win98) somehow hides files in it’s temporary cache directory in such a way that you can’t see them unless you use the find files dialog.
The UI could indeed be accelerated by tapping into the powers of the OpenGL accelerators and making things more multithreaded.
It’s still early code and it’s gonna be better when it moves to cocoa.
This echoes the days when Apple first moved to the PowerPC. Most of the code was running in emulation mode and just a few key calls were native. Slowly things got better and now OS9 is pretty quick on PowerPCs. Took years.
You see, Apple moves slowly in those respects. It’s a compatibility issue. Look at what’s happening to Intel with the Itanium.