Apple`s Mac OS X, which offers the power and stability of a Unix operating system, while keeping the Macintosh`s legendary simplicity and elegant design, is now available in South Africa.
The first thing to notice about Mac OS X is that programs slither up and down from an icon dock at the bottom of the screen, swooping up and down like magic genies from a bottle. But the real magic, according to Apple Europe`s Product Marketing Manager, Homayoun Sarkechik, is that the computer can have many programs open at the same time and experience high performance, stability and full multi-tasking.
Sarkechik was in South Africa to run training programmes for Apple`s 30-odd resellers.
"But Mac OS X is much more than that," explained Sarkechik during his recent visit to South Africa. "It is a completely new, modern operating system, built on an open source foundation. With Unix on the Macintosh, both new and existing users can gain significant performance, stability and security benefits."
In addition to the completely new application environment, Apple has engineered a version of the latest version of Mac OS 9.1 which runs under Mac OS X as a separate task called Classic, preserving users investments in both software and experience.
"Classic runs just about every application that runs under Mac OS 9.1, including FreeHand, Photoshop and Illustrator. Even System Extensions and products like ATM operate as usual," added Sarkechik. "In some cases, they run even faster than under Mac OS 9.1, due to the underlying power of Mac OS X."
The interface on Mac OS X - dubbed Aqua - follows the same dramatic design philosophy that Apple used on the iMac, iBook, the G4 and the G4 Cube. A completely new, yet familiar desktop comes with Aqua, icons and windows are semi-transparent, so it is easy to see what applications and windows are open, even if one is behind another. Window resize, shrink and close buttons change colour as the mouse passes over them, even if their window is partly obscured. The overall appearance is very soft and almost calm.
But Mac OS X`s power really lies under the hood - like Unix, Mac OS X comes with fully threaded memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking and symmetric multiprocessing capabilities. For the layman this means power to spare, memory allocations that work with one application at a time and supercomputer processing power.
"The big name software producers are all working on Mac OS X versions of their mainstream applications, most of which we expect to see released around the middle of the year," said Sarkechik. "In the meantime, users can continue with Mac OS 9.1 versions of their favourite applications while learning about Mac OS X."
Underscoring Sarkechik`s comments, Quark Desktop Division Director, Richard Jones, said: "Apple is committed to providing our developers with a toolkit for Mac OS X that will allow us to tune-up our existing OS 8-based applications to deliver new versions using the advanced features. We will continue to work closely with them so we can simultaneously introduce Quark applications that are native to Mac OS X."
Share
Editorial contacts