You have heard a lot about it. If you are a true rumor site junkie as we spoke of earlier you have likely heard the reports on Jaguar and this post will hold little interest for you. Some of you may even be running the new build. But the large majority of you are likely running OS 9 and OS X 10.1.* and hoping for a new OS that is stable, easy and fast. Well folks, I think that it is safe to say that Jaguar is likely going to be the OS you, and your G3 or higher Mac, have been waiting for. (See [URL=http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/]Apple’s[/URL] site for full compatibility information.)
There are a few things about the Jaguar release that I can tell you. First of all, the difference in speed for this Developers Release from 10.1.* is quite noticeable. In other words, it is faster, and it is not done yet so there is likely more speed to come. From what I have heard the biggest gains are seen on lower end G3 hardware and on Dual Processor machines. Single Processor G4′s will see a performance gain as well, but it is not so pronounced in this build as of yet. This is due to better code optimization for the G3 systems and the fact that the finder has finally been Multi-Threaded for increased efficiency on Dual Processor machines (meaning that the finder can now use both processors to get stuff done instead of only relying on one as the previous version did.)
For those that liked Mail and for those that did not, Mail is much better now. It is still not the end-all email application, but it is much better than it used to be. One noticeable improvement is a junk mail filter. You can give it information on what mail is junk and what mail is not and it will perform specified actions based on what you decide. This is still not a perfect filter, but the fact that it is there is a welcome improvement. It is also much faster and less quirky when sending and receiving email. If there are any more improvements to it it will simply be icing on the cake.
Speaking of faster, another part of the OS that you don’t think about but likely use all the time has also gotten much faster. Networking. That’s right, the plumbing for networking in OS X has received a major rework and just for your information, the change is good. iDisks mount faster and cause less “spinning disc” waits. Mail retrieves messages faster. Web browsers load pages faster, and it even cleans your hardwood floors in half the time of a normal OS. (Ok, that last part was a joke, it takes the same amount of time, but they get a nice Aqua sheen to them. ;))
Speaking of web browsers, IE 5 is still the only one bundled with the OS, but it has received an improvement due to some of the other important changes in the OS. You may or may not have heard about Omniweb, a browser made by Omnigroup only for OS X and built in Cocoa. Well, that browser was the best looking browser as far as page renders due to the fact that it use all the bells and whistles OS X had to offer for applications. One major thing it used was anti-aliased text. IE being written in carbon did not use this feature and thus looked much less refined. Well, with the new OS even carbon apps can use anti-aliased text and so IE now renders pages only marginally uglier than Omniweb does currently.
Now before this becomes a rah rah session about all the good stuff, let me take moment to cover a few of the glitches I have found. Now to be fair it is still a developers release and by definition should not be expected to be perfect, but I will let you in on some of the problems so that if you do decide to find this build on the web and install it you will not be taken by surprise by some of the problems that currently exist.
Printing appears to have taken a small step backwards as they implement a new printing system. This does not mean the system is worse, only that as it is implemented right now some of the drivers that worked in 10.1.* do not work in Jaguar. This should be expected and did not surprise me at all, however it did make it difficult to get work done when I could not print on my Lexmark X83 anymore. This may not be the case with all printers, but it is something to consider. The likelihood of this problem being resolved before final release is guaranteed.
For me DVD playback became unstable. I have spoken with others that have Jaguar and have had no problems, so I would say that this may be because I upgraded to Jaguar rather than installing fresh. I do bring it up though because many will upgrade rather than wipe and reinstall and if they do they need to know problems that they may encounter.
Speaking of reinstalling, Jaguar is a one way upgrade. If you do decide to install Jaguar, do it on a separate partition or be prepared to format a reload your OS later. During the install of Jaguar it specifically states that you will not be able to upgrade Jaguar to the final release, it will have to be a fresh install. This also goes for going back to 10.1, you want out, wipe and reload.
In conclusion let me simply state that from this writers perspective the new Jaguar build has given us a vision of the future of OS X, and that future to me looks very bright. With speed increases, improved networking, a better Finder, and other under the hood improvements we can expect the final 10.2 release to be the OS we have all been waiting for. And I have not even touched on the many other features of 10.2 like Quartz Extreme (faster and better screen redraw), Inkwell (integrated handwriting recognition), CUPS (what is behind that new printing system), and many others. The future looks bright indeed.