Rob In The Hood Mac OS
If you were a Mac user eight years ago you may remember Snow Leopard. It was the follow-up release to Mac OS X Leopard, and as Apple explained at the time, the focus was on under-the-hood improvements that would lead to a better, brighter future for the Mac, but be largely invisible to the upgrading user.
Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood is a 2002 stealth-based real-time tactics video game developed by Spellbound Studios. It is similar to games such as Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive and the Commandos series. In the game, the player controls up to five characters in a setting based on the stories of the protagonist, Robin Hood. Robin Hood for Mac belongs to Games. Our built-in antivirus scanned this Mac download and rated it as virus free. OS X was the first operating system to ship as a single install that could boot into either a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel, either of which could run 32-bit and 64-bit applications at full native performance. OS X now exclusively uses a 64-bit kernel, but it continues to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. Mac os x 10.10 under the hood? Fix the lack of dynamic font scaling in OS X. I made the switch from Windows to OS X a couple of years ago and this is by far, my biggest problem.
In the end, Snow Leopard did offer a bunch of user-interface changes (if you knew where to look), but it was definitely more about laying a new foundation. Apple has tried this same technique with other half-step updates in the past few years—Mountain Lion followed Lion and El Capitan followed Yosemite. But today’s release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra is the most Snow Leopardy of any macOS release in the last eight years. (Snow Leopards do not actually live in the high Sierras, for the record.)
High Sierra is truly a follow-on release to Sierra that offers a bunch of under-the-hood changes that will impact the Mac experience for developers today and for users in a while. But in terms of major new features that will transform your everyday Mac experience, there just isn’t much.
In fact, the biggest user change in High Sierra is probably Photos, which gets some major interface changes and file-compatibility features. By default, Apple’s most recent iOS devices begin taking pictures and videos in entirely new file formats when they’re updated to iOS 11—and if you want full compatibility with Photos and iCloud Photo Library, you’ll either need to update your Mac to High Sierra or change a setting on all your iOS 11 devices in order to force the devices to revert to the old file formats.
A new filesystem for some
The single biggest change in High Sierra is implementation of the new Apple File System (APFS). With this release, all Macs with flash-only internal storage will have those drives upgraded to Apple’s new filesystem format. (Users of spinning discs and Fusion Drives will remain on HFS+.)
In the long run APFS has huge potential to make the Mac better. Partition management is much easier in APFS, and disk partitions can share space, so you don’t have to lock your partitions into specific sizes. Snapshot and revision features have the potential to make Time Machine (and other backup software) far more efficient someday. APFS makes duplicating files in the Finder nearly instantaneous… by pointing at the existing copy of the file data on disk until you modify it, at which point the new file is written to disk.
Most important, perhaps, is that APFS is a filesystem written for an era of flash-storage devices, rather than spinning disks. APFS is much smarter (and faster) at flash storage than HFS+ could be.
But changing the filesystem has ramifications for compatibility. If you make a backup utility you may find that APFS is undocumented and choose to tread lightly and with great care.
If you have a flash-only Mac, upgrading to High Sierra means you’ll get APFS. It’s a big leap. I have a hard time believing Apple would make the leap if it weren’t confident about its implementation—and APFS has been powering iOS devices for many months now—but if you rely on disk-cloning utilities or do other funny things with your disk, maybe it’s worth letting others dip their toes in first.
Other changes under the hood
High Sierra features Metal 2, which is the latest version of Apple’s graphics framework. Apple says that this will lead the Mac to be that much more of a graphics powerhouse for games and other purposes, which is great. This feels more relevant for the next generation of Mac hardware, or perhaps for this year’s crop, than for older systems.
Similarly, High Sierra adds support for VR headsets and development tools. The Mac has been behind in this area for quite a while, and it’s good to see that Apple’s finally trying to lay a foundation for VR development on the Mac. Again, though, this will require the latest and greatest hardware—the most recent iMacs, and the forthcoming iMac Pro and Mac Pro.
High Sierra rolls in support for Swift 4, the latest version of Apple’s new programming language and compiler. It’s a good sign that Swift development is progressing, but this is similarly not a feature that most users will notice or care about—though they may reap the results of more apps written in Swift, eventually.
Changes to Safari
High Sierra includes Safari 11, the latest version of Apple’s built-in web browser. As is standard, the latest Safari is also available for the two previous versions of macOS, El Capitan and Sierra. So while this is a feature that rolls out with High Sierra, it also doesn’t require the upgrade to the new version.
Safari 11 features more tracking protections, in order to thwart trackers that try to build a personal profile of you and then follow you around the web. Pages that automatically play video are now prevented from doing that by default; if there’s a site you’d like to autoplay video from, you can add it in Safari’s Settings. And if you’re a fan of Safari Reader, which simplifies webpages to their base text to make them more readable, you can set Reader to turn on automatically on all stories, or on stories for specific websites.
There are a bunch of changes to WebKit, the open-source web platform that powers Safari, as well. A lot of these changes will improve Safari compatibility with complex web apps, but for you to see the benefits, the developers of those web apps will need time to check the new Safari out and support it.
Among the new features in WebKit is support for the multimedia features known as WebRTC, which have been supported by Firefox and Chrome for some time now. These features can let browsers act as full real-time multimedia communicators (think Skype and Google Hangouts) without any plug-ins.
Unfortunately, what I’ve heard from some developers is that the shipping version of WebRTC on macOS High Sierra and iOS 11 is buggy, which means that they can’t yet support Safari in their apps. There are specifically issues with managing and maintaining consistent audio inputs. Also, despite mentioning the Opus audio codec early on, Apple’s support may be missing—one developers I talked to suggested that he can’t find any support for the Opus codec for playback, which would be a dealbreaker.
Other visible improvements
Beyond the changes in Safari and Photos, you’ll find a few other apps with refreshed features in High Sierra. Mail search has been improved, and Mail now uses a compressed format for storing messages, which results in a disk-space savings.
Siri’s been updated with new Apple Music integration called Personal DJ, which lets you issue commands like “play some Alternative next.” Unfortunately, there’s still no sign that Siri on the Mac will ever be able to connect to anything on the Mac beyond the basics introduced last year. There’s no integration with Automator or scripting of any kind. It’s a missed opportunity.
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Spotlight gets a new flight-status feature, so you can type an airline flight code and get a flight tracker right within the Siri window. Notes has been updated for iOS 11 compatibility, so you can see handwritten and scanned items, as well as support for tables.
In many ways, the most important macOS feature these days is compatibility with the latest iOS release. Macs running High Sierra support new iCloud features, such as family iCloud space sharing and the ability to share files saved on iCloud Drive with others.
There are also a few minor updates to the Touch Bar in High Sierra, including an easier way to adjust brightness and volume with a single gesture from Control Strip. But it’s a bit disappointing that there aren’t more changes to the Touch Bar, which has been out for a year now. Third-party utilities still have no access to Control Strip, which would have the potential to make the Touch Bar more useful across apps.
So should you update?
As impressed as I was with all the updates in iOS 11, I’m lukewarm about High Sierra. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s definitely in the spirit of Snow Leopard. The update is something Apple needs to do in order to lay technical groundwork for the future, but technical groundwork is not a motivator for users to update their systems and risk incompatibilities.
Let’s be realistic: In the end, you will need to update to High Sierra, because it will provide you with the latest security updates and features that your apps will demand. But in the short term, until developers better come to grips with the new filesystem and we’ve waited to see if there are bugs or security flaws that could bite this release, I think it’s wise for most users to keep their finger off the upgrade button for High Sierra.
The time will come when you need to ascend to High Sierra. But you may want to wait at the base camp for a few weeks or months until hardier souls tell you it’s okay to make the journey.
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My life changed ten years ago, when Apple rolled out the Mac OS X Public Beta. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time—on September 13, 2000, if my memory serves me correctly, it seemed like this new OS was just the next step (albeit a big one) in the evolution of the Mac’s operating system. Of course, as someone who loved to live on the bleeding edge of technology, clearly this was something I had to have.
I’d love to say I remember exactly when and where I purchased the public beta, but the reality is, I don’t have the slightest recollection, other than I did get it on the release date. I do remember my first thoughts after installing the public beta; they were along the lines of “Whoa! This…is…different!”
The Public Beta
After overcoming the initial shock at seeing all the colors after the nearly-all-gray world of Mac OS 9, I realized that the bright and colorful look of the public beta was actually quite appealing, at least to my eye.
While icons and windows simply existed in OS 9, they seemed to jump off the screen in OS X. Shadows helped distinguish between layers of windows, and the colorful dock at the bottom of the screen contained easy-to-access icons for both running applications and programs I placed there myself. Just on visuals alone, there was no doubt that the Mac OS X Public Beta represented a clean break from the past.
That’s not to say all was perfect…Aqua, as Apple called its new interface, was besieged by an attack of the striped backgrounds. Everywhere you looked, there were stripes—in the menu bar, in menus themselves, in the Dock, in Finder windows’ title bars, in the background of Calculator.
Aqua also consumed a lot of screen real estate, especially when compared to OS 9—Mac OS X’s windows were larger, its Dock took up more space, and Finder windows had huge toolbar areas filled with massive icons. And don’t even get me started on the heavily translucent menus—ugh. Finally, some apps—Address Book, I’m talking about you—were just downright ugly.
Still, overall, I remember thinking that I was using something that felt modern and forward-looking—and that was before I even started to work with the new OS on a daily basis. Once I did, I was amazed for a second time—the new OS really worked…well, OK, it really worked in a number of important ways, and it really failed to work in a number of other ways.
To me, the important ways in which it worked boiled down to one thing: stability. The Mac OS X Public Beta included all the proper buzzword technologies of the day—it had true multitasking support, protected memory, and other goodies under the hood to help keep the machine running, even when an application quit. So instead of rebooting because a program crashed, as I had to do in OS 9, the Mac OS X public beta would simply display a message telling me that a program had crashed, but that I could continue working. What a wonderful change!
Of course, there were less boast-worthy changes with the public beta. For one thing, it was slow—Finder in particular was extremely slow. Simple tasks such as launching applications and opening files could be unbearably slow; in tests I ran at the time, launching programs was anywhere from two to five times faster in OS 9. Another problem was peripherals: most of them simply didn’t work in the public beta.
I recall having a scanner, printer, and external CD drive, none of which worked at all in the public beta. Doing something as simple as printing required rebooting my Mac into OS 9. Still, for as often as I worked and as little as I printed, the added stability was worth the occasional pain and suffering to print.
Rob In The Hood Mac Os Update
The public beta and me
Even with the plethora of changes I’ve covered, the public beta probably wouldn’t have changed my life if it hadn’t been for one additional key fact: Mac OS X Public Beta was written on top of a Unix core, and included a Terminal application to directly access that core.
Even more importantly, in the beginning, using Unix commands in Terminal was nearly a must for everything from getting certain printers to work to changing network settings without rebooting to making Terminal’s window translucent to installing a text-based alternative to the Internet Explorer browser to finding strings of text within text files.
Because most Mac OS users—myself included—had little to no Unix experience, this entire side of the public beta was a completely new experience for us. I found myself so frustrated that I quickly wore out my phone, calling a friend with strong Unix skills. Over time, I figured that taking advantage of the friendship on a hour-to-hour basis was a quick way to lose my friend, so I started keeping a simple text document containing the various tips he’d given me on the ways of Unix.
Over time, the text document gave way to a FileMaker Pro database, and from there, for reasons I still don’t clearly understand today, I decided to put the database on the Web. Lacking any real creative talent or sense for marketing, I simply named the site for what I hoped it would be: macosxhints.com.
The idea was to start a site where the community could be read and contribute tips concerning the brave new world that was Mac OS X. I’d love to say I had a grand plan to create the ultimate Mac OS X hints destination site on the Web, but it was nothing like that—I was just looking to learn more about what it took to create and run a Website.
In the beginning, of course, most of the contributions were mine—I wrote the majority of the hints the first year the site was online. Slowly, though, the momentum picked up, and users began contributing hints. Years passed, and my hobby continued to grow, and take more of my time. I eventually started writing some freelance article for Macworld, all while still fitting in a “real” job to pay the bills.
As the freelance articles turned into a monthly column on OS X hints, someone at Macworld realized it might actually be more cost effective to employ me on a full-time basis. So in 2005, that’s just what happened—Macworld purchased the site, hired me to run it and write full time, and I quit my “real” job.
While I’ve now moved on to my next challenge—working for a two-person Mac software development company—I have great memories of my time at Macworld, and as evidenced by this article, I’m still writing here on occasion.
Looking back now, what amazes me most is that absolutely none of this would have happened without Apple’s decision to head in a new direction with Mac OS X. If that initial public beta had been nothing more than OS 9 with a pretty new face but the same basic underpinnings, I wouldn’t have had the chance to launch a Website, join the premier Apple-related magazine and Website, and wind up working with one of my favorite Mac application developers. So thank you, Mac OS X Public Beta, for spurring a change in my life that I couldn’t have predicted, but am very glad to have experienced.
Rob In The Hood Mac Os Catalina
I’d like to say a public “thank you” to the Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook for allowing use of their Mac OS X Public Beta screenshots in this article.
Rob In The Hood Mac Os 11
[Macworld senior contributor Rob Griffiths is Master of Ceremonies at Many Tricks.]