Red Hat Diaries/0049

This is it

OS X 10.0 was remotely interesting. OS X 10.1 showed promise. With OS X 10.2 Jaguar Apple's time has come.

This is it.

Apple has a new chief programmer in Cupertino - a WOMAN, may the gods forbid, and you can really tell the difference. Things are cleaned up, loose ends are tidied away, and as always the NextStep wizards are there to pull a few new unexpected rabbits out of the hat.

Take the Calculator as an example. Its previous incarnation got criticised for being too simplistic. Even Microsoft's calculator beat it (yes it was that bad). Now lo and behold, what do we have now? A fine new burnished steel interface, the ability to expand to scientific notations, the ability to add tape, and - get this - the ability to have the machine sound off your input, button by button, in addition to voicing the final total.

One zero two four times one zero two four times one zero two four times one zero two four...
Equals one trillion ninety nine billion five hundred eleven million six hundred twenty seven thousand seven hundred seventy six...
Clear entry... Clear.

The voice is clear and distinct too, but it's Victoria, and not Bruce or some other nutter they have on there. I like Vicky - she's sexy but not too sexy, and she knows how to pronouce words well.

Unfortunately Sherlock 3 needs to be connected to the net to work, so scratch one very impressive tool. Mr Holmes could be getting his data anywhere. It could be from Apple, or it could be routed through Apple, or where he goes might be set in his property list - more about that later. Had Sherlock access to all this data - in particular the dictionary and the translations into twenty one languages - that would really have been something. As it is, it sounds like he just takes something client side which works better server side.

But this is quibbling - OS X makes Microsoft look worse than Microsoft ever looked before. Honestly? Next to OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Windows XP looks pathetic, and next to OS X 10.2 the Linux desktops look like scratchy shabby tinker toy boxes. Linux simply doesn't have the programming power on top that Apple has. KDE is great, true - but do(es) the KDE developer(s) have the same superior development environment? (No.) Do they have the same manpower? (Yeah riight.) Do they have the same expertise? (You gotta be kidding.)

This is where the wheat in the Unix desktop industry leaves the chaff so far behind it gets forgotten. Having Unix underneath is undoubtedly a sine qua non today; but all Apple has done - aside from producing hardware and system and software well integrated with that hardware - is add a competing desktop to a common underbody.

The world (of Linux) will never catch them; there's no point in even trying.

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