A reader, who shall remain anonymous, has provided some reassuring intelligence about Mac OS X. Please not well that this information is unconfirmed, but it sounds rational and plausible.

The reader writes:

"OS X will use HFS+, not the persnickety UFS, so it should not pick up UNIX's fragile links and PATH variables. Applications will come in 'packages,' which will contain everything the app needs to run in one folder, so it should be even easier to install by dragging: you shouldn't have to grab the Preferences and Settings docs from the System Folder, and you won't even have to worry about whether the Mac you're dragging the application onto has the needed extensions.

"I expect that Microsoft is hard at work trying to foil this, given the way they already make application installation and removal needlessly complicated. One more reason to avoid them on principle.

"I can pass along rumors from some of the AppleInsider Forum members that DP3 was far from finished, and OS X Beta will reveal a *lot* of features that DP3 doesn't have. The desktop and the dock are both shadows of their eventual selves. So the minimalist UI of DP3 is not something to lose sleep over - anymore than the pokey, retro-wierd UI of Netscape 6 DP1 is."

Which begs the question of why, what with all the anguished speculation that flooded the Web following the OS X DP 3 developer release/leak, why Apple didn't just issue a simple, declarative statement to ease people's apprehensions.

My correspondent has a theory about that as well:

"Underpromise so you can overdeliver. Steve's already said that that is what Apple is going to do. Besides, he's a showman. You can just imagine him talking about all the anxiety about how OS X really isn't a MacOS, and building up suspense, and then announcing to huge, relieved applause that a lot of the old ways work, and the ones that have changed are for the better."

As I said, it sounds plausible. If the unnamed reader is correct, then the OS X future looks a lot brighter than it did.

For another take on OS X prognostications, MacWelt has posted an article entitled "The Best of Mac-OS X," which says in its opening summary: "The Unix kernel and Quartz layer transform Mac-OS X into an efficient and effective operating system. Both innovations make work more convenient and more stable." The authors Sebastian Hirsch and Walter Mehl note that "Mac-OS X offers frictionless parallel processing [pre-emptive multi-tasking], even when twenty or more programs are simultaneously active on a Mac." They go on to explain in detail how this works.

Moving along to OS X's protected memory feature, Hirsch and Mehl note that: "Every program now automatically receives the quantity of RAM it needs. And there is practically no limit: As long as a program can load all the parts necessary to execute in the physical working memory, nothing stands in the way of its utilization. In plain language: Even when the Mac only has 128 MB of RAM built in, it can nevertheless start three programs one after the other, that each demand 120 MB of RAM." They explain how this works too.

However, programs that are not "carbonized" (rewritten for Mac-OS X), will still share a memory area, which can still cause memory-collision-related crashes, as is currently the case with the classic MacOS. "However," the authors note, "thanks to the Unix kernel the Mac-OS X programs remain untouched, and even a reboot of the older software is entirely possible. "

They also go on to discuss the finer points of the new Quartz PDF-based graphics layer that replaces the old MacOS PostScript-based graphics engine in OS X, and the Finder Dock. Plenty of detail is provided in this article. You can check it out at:
http://www.macwelt.com/action.lasso?-database=comnews.fp3&-layout=detail.lay&-response=detail.lasso&-recid=79&-search

Charles W. Moore

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July 04, 2009