BYTE.com > The Be View > 2000 > October
Cube Lust
By Scott Hacker
October 31, 2000
(A BeOS View Of Apple's New OS X
: Page 2 of 4 )
Last week, one of my co-workers took ownership of a shiny new G4 Cube. To me, the fan-less computer is a sort of holy grail. For Apple to have packed one into such a small and fetching box is very attractive to me. An hour later, he had OS X beta installed, and we sat down to explore.
While I hadn't liked the screenshots I'd seen of the Aqua interface, it made a much better impression in person. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's one of the most beautiful user interfaces I've laid eyes on; "downright lickable," as Simon put it.
While sometimes slow by BeOS standards, the PDF-driven Quartz engine produces a gorgeous display quality, and the liberal use of drop-shadows and semi-transparent menus didn't seem as gimmicky in real-world use as I had expected them to. The OS X UI feels good. The command-line shell is there and fully functional, and I didn't find the controversial Dock as annoying as many Mac veterans do.
All of the promised fixes are there. Virtual memory that actually works, pre-emptive multitasking that lets you watch movies, listen to MP3s, and surf the Web at the same time, protected memory that lets you crash your browser without killing the whole OS, etc. In other words, MacOS may actually be catching up to BeOS, technologically speaking.
BYTE.com > The Be View > 2000 > October
|
