At some point the general population is going realize what the software world already knows — Mac OS X is the real deal. Three items in this week’s news add more weight to this perception.
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Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) is shipping ahead of schedule. And based on the last build I saw, it’s good. Apple has been on time and on target with each of its OS X releases. It’s a lot easier to take a new operating system seriously when the company that produces it shows this type of commitment.
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Oracle has released a developer’s build of its 9i Enterprise Edition software. The requirements for this build are a G4-based PowerPC running Mac OS X 10.2 with Apache active and Tomcat installed. Even though this release only supports core database functions, my guess is that some of the options such as Real Application Clusters will soon follow.
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Rumors are circulating that Microsoft will bring full MSN support to Mac OS X in the near future. If true, why would MS consider such a move if Mac OS X didn’t fit into its business model?
At some point you have to ask, “What does it take to get serious about this operating system?”
You comments are more than welcome, especially those that do not contain the word “Quark.”
Quark
quark quark quark
Quark
:)
Foreign Customers
Apple has to care more about its customers:
(1) QuickTime Pro is not available to customers outside US and a few Western European countries. Why am I not allowed to upgrade to QuickTime Pro just because I live in Poland?
(2) Ship OS X with localization packages or make those packages available on-line for download. At this time, the Polish localization package for OS X costs almost as much as OS X itself!
(2) Fix Unicode support in OS X. It is not working properly.
(3) Fix Preview, PDF documents that display fine in Adobe Acrobat look weird when viewed in Preview. Downlaod some SIGGRAPH papers and see for yourself.
(4) Provide a less expensive upgrade path for existing OS X users.
(5) Improve Sherlock, it is too complex for new users. I've been teaching new Mac OS X users recently and they were quite confused by it.
(6) Add Save as PDF option to the save dialog. It shouldn't be done through the print backdoor.
Jacek
Foreign Customers
Responding to #6, it's not quite as easy as just putting something in the save dialog. The functionality of saving as a PDF from the print dialog is available without the application doing anything besides supporting the ability to print -- in other words the application already has the ability to take it's internal data and format it for a printer. The operating system is simply fooling the application into thinking it's going to print something but instead of taking the printable data from the application and sending it to a printer it writes it to a PDF.
There might be a way to use AppleScript to tell an application to print the current document as a PDF but I'm not sure how Apple Events work when an application brings up the operating system "owned" print dialog.
Oracle9i
I'm really glad to see Oracle9i on the Mac. Now I have an excuse to buy one, a Mac that is.
Foreign Customers
one more goodie: apples superprofessionel 100US$-".mac" isn't supporting special-chars like the german "umlauts" for eMail-folder. just plain english or japanese.
and, although not tested yet, i think that most of sherlocks new functionalities are US-only. closest sushi restaurant near my bureau in hamburg/germany? 25th avenue in new york?
Quark
i don't think that quark is a big problem. because looking around me, there is actually a huge movement going on, towards inDesign. agencies are prefering indesign over quark. quark is shooting themself into the foot by delaying an OS X-version, with the huge upgrade-price of quark5, while indesign gains points e.g. close integration of PDFs and other adobe-products.
quark6 next year, will be too late for quark. DTP is quickly moving towards a 50/50split between quark and indesign.
Foreign Customers
I know about printing to PDF. The PDF option (pointing to the print dialog) should be added (IMHO) to the Save As dialog, because it seems natural. At least that's what many people I taught told me.
Foreign Customers
That's why my Mac is an English-only machine. For my 'local' writings I still use Windows. Apple really has to do more for its foreign customers.
Quark
InDesign is truly a spectacular program. I've used Quark for years, and have never been so happy to be rid of it.
Unlike Quark, setting proper typography is not only possible in InDesign, it's a dream.
Bravo, Adobe!