The Big Picture

Aqua is very compelling. It's something that's sure to differentiate Mac OS X in the same way the the iMac stood out in the market when it was introduced. Indeed, Aqua is the 'iMacification' of Mac OS in terms of both aesthetic innovation and marketing strategy.

Of course, Aqua is also compelling in that it may compel some people to gag. Like the iMac, Aqua is likely to polarize consumers and competitors alike. The gem-like buttons and the frilly animations will surely grate on the nuts-and-bolts crowd. It's also not clear how much of this chrome can be disabled. On a 233MHz iMac, will it be unacceptably slow? Conversely, does Quartz leverage AltiVec on a fast G4, rendering the extra CPU usage of even the frilliest of animations inconsequential?

If the history of classic Mac OS has taught us anything, it's that industrious third parties (and even Apple itself) will fill in the gaps and patch up the holes in the UI in accordance with user demand. The Unix-like nature of Mac OS X also ensures that experienced users will, at the very least, be able to kill add-ons like the dock entirely via the command line (and perhaps start something else in its place). In this way, Mac OS X ought to provide more UI flexibility for the power user than classic Mac OS.

What do Quartz and Aqua mean to the industry as a whole? To paraphrase Steve Jobs once again, it's very clear to me that every computer will work this way someday. No, I don't mean that the world's computer screens will be covered with candied window widgets and genie animations a few years from now. I mean that third generation display layers are clearly the future. Pundits frequently predict the rise of the 3D (fourth generation?) interfaces, but I think vectorized 2D has to come first. Apple is the first of the major players to bring this to market...albeit in a a fashion that is not likely to appeal to anyone but Apple's core market. I expect the rest of the industry to follow in a more conventional fashion in a few years.

This is yet another outgrowth of Moore's law. As technology gets more powerful, the industry will always find new ways to harness that power. The GUI itself is the prototypical example. At one time, the thought of using memory and CPU cycles to draw windows, menus, and buttons on a bitmapped screen was considered monumentally wasteful. (I'm sure we all know one or two CLI curmudgeons who still think that way ;-) But the widespread adoption of the GUI was inevitable. In the end, the advantages (ease of use, improved aesthetics, market differentiation) outweighed the obvious disadvantages (speed, size, code complexity). When will third generation display layer technology tip the scales and begin to snowball in the industry? NeXT got the ball rolling, and Apple has followed-up with a much higher profile product. The times, they are a-changing.

Release Schedule

The current official release schedule for Mac OS X is as follows:

• February 2000: Next developer release (presumably named 'DP3', and expected to include the Aqua UI).
  

• Spring 2000: Final beta.

• Summer 2000: Release as a shrink-wrapped product.

• January 2001: Mac OS X pre-loaded on all Macs.

You'll notice that the release date hasn't changed since the last official Apple pronouncement: it's still 'summer 2000.' Readers of my article on Mac OS X DP2 will recall that I predicted that Mac OS X would either ship in an 'unfinished' state (a la Mac OS X Server) or not ship until 2001. It's interesting to note that 2001 is when Apple has decided that Mac OS X will be ready to pre-load on all its hardware. So it looks like Apple will ship whatever it has ready by Summer 2000, and 'finish' the OS in time for a January 2001 product migration.

Epilogue: Unanswered Questions

Here are a few issues that may concern Mac users.

• What happened to 'tabbed' windows? Since Mac OS 8.0, dragging a Finder window to the bottom of the screen has created a small pop-up tab. This feature is not present in Mac OS X DP2 and wasn't mentioned at all at MWSF.
  
• Will the green button do 'shrink-to-fit' in the Finder? The zoom box in classic Mac OS versions since the mid 6.x's has had two behaviors. It can zoom the window to full screen, but it can also make the window change size to exactly contain every icon in the window. Does Aqua's 'green button' do this as well?
  
• What happens when the dock is really filled? I mean filled with tiny 16x16 icons. What happens if you try to add another one in that situation? Does it go to a multi-row format like the Windows taskbar? Or does it coredump and send nasty emails back to Apple? ;-)
  
• Does the dock move? Can I put it on the left or right edges of the screen? Can it be right- or left-aligned instead of centered?
  
• What happened to the Apple menu? There's a big, honking Apple icon in the center of the menubar, and the smiling Mac OS logo where the Apple menu used to be. Which one of those things (if any) is the Apple menu? According to thisaccount of an interview with Mac OS X product manager Ken Bereskin, theApple menu has been replaced by the dock in Mac OS X.
  
• Will the Finder remember my window and icon positions? The classic Mac OS Finder sure does, and anything that doesn't simply isn't the Finder. Well, the NeXT-style browser doesn't remember icon positions, and the multi-window-style Finder interface in Mac OS X DP2 doesn't either. [Update: actually, the multi-window-style Finder interface does remember icon positions.]
  
• Themes anyone? Predictably, Apple has stated that there will be no 'themes' or 'skins' in Mac OS X. But is there an API for such functionality that third parties can write to? How much of Aqua will be exposed to developers?

For more information on Mac OS X, check out the following:

Steve Jobs' MWSF Keynote

This is the entire, interminable, reality distorting experience straight from Apple (in streaming QuickTime format, of course). Skip to the middle if you want to get right to the Mac OS X stuff. More digestible bites are available from ZDTV in RealVideo format: Jobs introduces Mac OS X and Jobs demos the dock

Apple's Mac OS X site

Here you'll find lots of basic information, marketing hype, screenshots, and a theater full of movies (many of which were featured in this article).

Mac OS X DP2

My previous look at the state of Mac OS X.

Other Mac-related content at Ars:

For more Mac and Apple-related content here at Ars, check out the following:

The G4 versus the K7
A technological comparison of the two heavy hitters shows similarities and differences between two post-RISC processors.

RISC versus CISC: the Post-RISC Era
Jon 'Hannibal' Stokes argues that RISC and CISC are both dead, and that a hybridization is already underway.

The G3 350
Ars argues that there's more to computer performance than SPEC benchmarks.