A Cool Drink Of Water
The Age
Tuesday February 29, 2000
BEAUTIFUL industrial design - form, colour and finish - have been trademarks of Apple Computer since Steve Jobs burst back into the industry and decreed that the beige box was passe. It gave the company more than just an edge over the opposition in the consumer space, it opened an entirely new market all round the world.
With this talent behind them, the iMac, the G3 and G4 PowerMacs and the iBook set a pace and direction that even now, nearly three years after the iMac's launch, has yet to be met, let alone matched, by the rest of the computer industry. Now Jobs, chief designer Jonathan Ive and the rest of the Apple team have done it again with Aqua, the user interface for Mac OS X.
"We designed beautiful buttons and check boxes, pop-up menus, sliders and windows," Jobs said. "We wanted to go beyond Windows 2000 and beyond our own Macintosh Platinum user interface."
Those who have seen Aqua believe they have done all of that, and more. Some say Apple is making a fashion statement. That may be so, but fashion or, if you like, image, is now integral to our society in the way we live, work, do business and play. And buy computers.
Aqua is beautiful. The radio buttons are smooth and they glow. Icons are sharp images, lifted from the desktop by soft drop shadows. The cruder, cartoon-like icons of the early Mac GUI have long gone. The trash bin, for example, is now an image of a chrome wire basket so clear it could be a photograph.
There is even transparency. In previous operating systems, even OS 9, an inactive window was drawn in a lighter shade of grey. Now, with the transparency feature built into OS X, some of the contents of an underlying document may be seen through the active document should the user so wish.
"So we have more information available and more communication," said Ken Bereskin, Apple's director of marketing for the OS at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino.
But for my money, the best feature of this totally redesigned and much more powerful OS is The Dock. It sits at the bottom of the screen, replacing the old Apple and Progress menus, and is capable of storing hundreds of items, from applications to folders and documents. You may drag a QuickTime movie, for example, and drop it into The Dock where it continues to play in miniature until, with a single click, you bring it flowing back up to full size. Even the manner in which such files move in and out of The Dock is lovely - a smooth "pouring" of the screen image up or down.
Even when The Dock is crammed with items and each icon is only a few millimetres high, needed files may be easily found by sweeping the mouse across the screen area. As the cursor runs, so are the icons magnified to full size, to be identified, clicked on and made active.
"We wanted to make the interface so good that you would want to lick it," Jobs said. You could say that. You might also liken it to running your hands through the pots of rubies, diamonds and sapphires in Aladdin's cave.
"Sure, we are still a small percentage as a platform, compared with Wintel," said Mitch Mandich, Apple's senior vice-president for worldwide sales. "But we are dealing with that better and better, all the time. Mac OS X is seen as the next big push in that effort. These products are incredibly emotional. It takes the whole computing experience to a new level, and that is something that Dell, Compaq and IBM and the rest do not yet understand."
But, as Mandich and others of the Apple top management team concede, not all of the emotion was approving - particularly when it was first mooted a year or so ago that Mac OS 9, the current system, would be the last of the old style. The 10th creation, OS X, would be set on a Unix-kernel base, now known as Darwin.
"It is very Linux-like," Jobs said. "We have made it open source. It is a super modern kernel with protected memory, pre-emptive multi-tasking, modern networking, multi-threading - very state of the art. It is more advanced than anything else out there." And when he said that he knew that Windows 2000 was finally on its way to a birth.
Above Darwin in the architecture of Mac OS X sits Quartz, Apple's name for its 2D, 3D and multimedia graphics packages. Quartz uses Adobe's PDF technology for the 2D part of the equation and is capable of on-the-fly rendering and compositing of the images. PDF also means that Macintosh is now much more cross-platform. A PDF file can be opened on a Wintel machine using Adobe Acrobat Reader, but on the Mac it opens natively.
Three-dimensional images are handled by Open GL, now an industry standard, widely used by games developers. For multimedia there is QuickTime, now built into the operating system.
Three APIs have been laid on top of Quartz for developers to rework their applications and provide what Apple directors call "a gentle migration from where we are today to where we want to go". These are Classic, Carbon and Cocoa.
Classic allows Mac OS 9 applications to run on OS X, but without some of the new features, such as transparency. By "Carbonising" their applications, software developers have been able to move, quite quickly, into the OS X space and take advantage of all its innovations and improvements. Cocoa is seen by Apple as leading to the future. It is object- oriented technology, allows new applications to be written and assembled very quickly.
MacOS X takes personal computing into a new dimension - easy enough for a novice, but full of deeper features needed by the demanding graphic artists, movie post-production and other professionals they have served for a couple of decades and whom they need to keep on their side. gbarker@theage.fairfax.com.au
© 2000 The Age