Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar

Ars Technica has a rundown on the latest Apple/Mac conference, MacWorld New York, in MWNY Keynote: Time to line the RDF with asbestos?, which announced a lot of new products, both hardware and software. Most of the hardware changes are incremental updates, with the IMac upgrading to a 17" wide screen, which is very cool. The IPod now has “[u]p to 20 GB of storage, official support for calendar and contacts, and Windows support via MusicMatch.”

The most interesting updates are on the software side, in particular changes made to the operating system in the new version, code-named Jaguar. It has finally gotten “spring-loaded folders” back and introduces multi-threading into many more places in the Finder. It also includes literally dozens of new application, utilities and tools, including all new version of several programs (like iTunes, Mail, Sherlock and the Address Book).

The new rendering layer is confirmed in OS X 10.2, with all display output funneled through QuartzExtreme, which “delivers crisp graphics, anti-aliased fonts, and blends 2D, 3D and QuickTime content together with transparency and drop shadows”. If you have a 3D video card made in the last couple of years, QuartzExtreme takes advantage of hardware-accelerated OpenGL to boost display speed by up to 3-4 times. Even without hardware support, you still enjoy a 50% to 100% speed increase, as seen in the diagram below.

In Apple’s own words:

“Here’s how it works. Quartz uses the integrated OpenGL technology to convert each window into a texture, then sends it to the graphics card to render on screen. The graphics processor focuses on what it does best — graphics — freeing the Power PC chip to do more operations in the same amount of time. Everything is zippier.”

This is the same rendering layer that communicates solely in PDF instructions so any screen or document can be saved as a PDF file. If you’re a programmer, The Register reports in Apple unveils shader language, QE APIs, which gives some scant detail of API support for QuartzExtreme functionality for other programs (though all programs will benefit immediately from improvements to 2D functionality and compositing, few programs take advantage of the 3D support in the interface).

The new 3D functionality in the interface library “features … programmable shaders and a new instruction set for creating OpenGL shaders…” and the “Quartz Compositor features a per-pixel alpha channel, and per-window warp and transform”. The Register notes that this means that “true 3D icons and 3D windows become possible” with full hardware support.

Early reviews of Jaguar are in, and they are extremely positive, noting many other subtle changes to the interface to improve usability and feel. MacWorld’s review, Should You Jump to Jaguar? noticed many small changes, like a “pop-up menu in the General preference pane [that] lists four antialiasing algorithms” for text in the interface so you can choose one that suits your monitor and eyes, and other subtle overall changes like:

“Apple’s interface designers have toned down the pulsating blue default button in dialog boxes, making its effect subtler. All the Aqua buttons have a flatter appearance, and drop shadows are lighter — a small but noticeable improvement.”

As for the vaunted QuartzExtreme, they say that “[t]he result is a system that feels more responsive, especially when it’s busy with other tasks.” It’s also got a faster Classic environment (“roughly 70 percent faster”), far better interoperability with Windows, and an Address Book application that brings in a system-wide database of contact information, which sounds a lot like what the BeOS folk made years ago. This will allow all of your Mac OS X programs, once they’ve been modified to use the shared database, to use only one set of contact information. The iChat and Mail programs already use it, and the “database itself has the potential to eliminate redundant and out-of-date information across your Mac”.

If you’re still running OS 9, should you upgrade?

“If you haven’t yet switched to OS X, there’s never been a better time — OS X 10.2 addresses most of the complaints OS 9 users have about OS X. We recommend that you run it on a Mac with a G4 processor, and you’ll want as much RAM as your system can take, but OS X 10.2 is refined and powerful — and it’s worth the move.”