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One thing that seems to frustrate users more accustomed to standard industry terminology is that a beta release is feature complete and is working on stability. Apple's terminology is a bit backwards since they took out the things that were known to be unstable and thereby also took out the...

Why did Apple make the Public Beta available? More than any Mac OS before it, the user needs time to adjust to Mac OS X. Many machines are going to be made obsolete and many others will need an update in their hardware. Moreover, when you installed Mac OS 6,7,8, or 9 you didn't have to do...

Hierarchical Menus - I think that Apple would hear a lot fewer crys of "Bring back the Apple menu!" if they made the menus items in the "Go" menu Hierarchical and revealed all of the sub-folders in each of these items. It'd also help people in general get a better grasp of what the directory...

If you aren't aware of it, that's the biggest gripe that people have been throwing at MacOS X since the MacWorld when Aqua was shown to the world. The only way to use it in Mac OS X is to go to a classic application and use the Apple menu there. You can buy a 3rd party tool called Classic...

They probably included the beta software update application so they could test its use in the beta operating system. There will probably be updates every now and then before the release (no evidence just based on gut feelings). But keep in mind that this is a beta release and Apple has warned...

I hear that it was pulled from the beta because of its licensing (GNU type rather than BSD type). tcsh isn't my favorite but at least they didn't fall back on csh or sh. Nice relics of history, but well past their prime.

Spring loaded folders - I liked these in OS 9, but I haven't really felt their absence in Mac OS X because I've gotten out of the habit of throwing stuff on the desktop. I haven't tried this, but if dropping stuff on the big Finder buttons worked, that'd be helpful. Shaded current app - I...

I have no idea why Apple made the decision that it did to charge money. But it does say a few things... They don't like grey marketeers because the price is equivalent the world over despite economic differences. They want to be able to legally enforce the license. Some legal agreements...

Apple has never been too open to choice. Killing the clones. Dropping appearance themes. Eliminating technologies rather than open sourcing them. Apple is about control. When people agree with THEIR choices then they are popular. When they don't they are considered tyranical. The whole thing...

Processor cycles aren't like gold that you can save up. Your machine is constantly "spending" them whether you like it or not. That's one of the inherent drawbacks of living with forward-moving time :-) Yes, the "gratuitous" animations do use these precious processor cycles, but their huge...

It's interesting that you see a speed up when logged in as root. Your two explanations don't seem to be very likely. The root user is ultimately a user like anuone else. You won't be blocked from files that are secured from regular uses, but the system still must perform these security checks...

With your right hand click the mouse button on the interface widget (the minimize button for example). Very quickly afterwards, click the "off" button on your monitor. Wait a second or two if you like. Then turn the monitor back on. Once you get the synchronization down pat it will you...

In personal use, I didn't use the label option (which replaced the "Color" option of Mac OS 6) at all. I did work in an office where they used label as a means of saying who "owned" the file in a shared file server. It beat sticking prefixes or suffixes on the names of the files and since you...

In some ways I envy the original poster's position. You have a virgin system configuration. Probably zero personal files and records that you have diligently organized and structured. You basically have a clean slate to start from. If you are buying the machine specifically because of Mac OS...

It really comes down to a choice of using Mac OS X with a focus on the Mac side or the Unix side of things. HFS+ is the choice for Mac users. A lot of meta-information about each file is preserved. File name capitalization is preserved, but the system doesn't see a difference if you want to...

Wow! I haven't tried this yet but it sounds really cool. Is it possible to pipe standard error as well as in and out? I also saw a post about AppleScript being able to go one way (able to interact from the command line with AppleScript) and that the engineers intended to get in to work the...

Chip speed: Mhz ratings are only meaningful within a chip family. Comparing between architectures is like comparing lightbulbs based on watts rather than lumens or lux. ROM protection: Apple was notorious for using custom ROMS to protect its intellectual property back to the days of the Apple...

If you look at the Mac OS X theatre on the Apple site it shows little animations of Mac OS interface items. The genie effect, the stop light glyphs appearing, the pdf compositor, etc. How did they grab these animations? On Mac OS 9 you can do it with SnapzPro, a 3rd party screen grabber from...

1) Apple might be planning a Mac OS X Intel release 2) It might be remnants from a quality test 3) It might have been left over from its OpenStep heritage 4) It might be part of the Darwin base All are possible. Personally, I don't think (1) is very likely.

Right now, Apple's business is focused on selling hardware to the consumer market. If this continues there is zero chance that Mac OS X would be ported to an Intel platform. Everyone talks about the possibility of Apple becoming a software focused company like Microsoft, Red Hat, Be, or NeXT...