A Fistful of Installers
As soon as the Mac OS 8 installer gets underway, you can see evidence that Apple's been aggressively making marketing deals with Internet connectivity providers and enhancing its Internet prowess. Included in the new OS are tools from Netscape, PointCast and Claris, an Apple-branded "Personal Web Sharing" server and a speedy new Java VM of Apple's own design. Interestingly, Microsoft Internet Explorer software is not included on the CD-ROM, but various 3rd party offers are included in the Mac OS 8 package, including one from MS for Internet Explorer. The package also contains a Mac OS 8 CD-ROM, two 1.4MB Disk Tool floppies (one for '040s, and one for PPCs and the Powerbook 190), plus an installation manual, upgrade rebate form, and registration card.
Multimedia is, as you might expect, well supported by Macromedia Shockwave plugins, QuickDraw 3D and QuickTime (augmented in this version by MPEG compatibility and QuickTime VR). The new OS also carries the legacies of Apple's now-faltering commitments to QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc and CyberDog. All of these technologies are included (but some options are not part of the default installation), despite their uncertain futures.
As with other recent Apple OS releases, the software can be installed over a network.
Once installed, the new system rebuilds your desktop and then runs a "Mac OS Setup Assistant" that walks you through the steps to give your computer a name, share a folder, choose a printer, and choose whether you want the "Simple Finder" option turned on or off. Beginners might want to choose to have this option on; we chose the default: off.
We encountered a couple of snags during installation that may give novice users pause. First, the installer was unable to update our non-Apple hard disk driver (and the FWB Toolkit software we resorted to warned us that data loss would ensue if we updated the driver). Confusingly, the "non-Apple drive" error message appears even if you elect to update the driver of an internal Apple drive, if your system was booted from an external non-Apple drive. There are two workarounds for this: first, you can simply choose to disable the hard disk driver update by deselecting it (you'll find it behind the "Options" button on the Custom or Easy Install screen).
Another solution that worked for us was to simple ignore the warning (click "Ignore"). While we can't guarantee this will work for everyone, we tested this on both PowerPC and 68040 Macs of varying vintages with no ill effects. The hard disk driver updater does not attempt to update non-Apple drives, although this is not clear from the on-screen messages. (Note that Mac clones from UMAX, Motorola and other vendors may be subject to severe problems if the driver is updated, or if an IDE drive is partitioned with FWB Toolkit. See the links at UMAX or see the Aug. 28, 1997 entry at www.macfixit.com for more info.)
The second problem we encountered was the error that resulted when the Setup Assistant found our network printer busy. It set up the unit as a generic printer instead. This, too, is easy to fix.
The installer is dumb in a few other ways, too. It installed a CDAudio Player tool, even though our system lacked a CDROM drive. Fortunately, most users will be glad it's there. The installer also placed several printer drivers into our extensions folder, although we did not have the corresponding hardware connected to our system.
Another problem we encountered happened on a PowerBook 5300 -- one of the most trouble-prone computers Apple ever released. The installer unexpectedly quit at the end of the setup process. This did not happen on our other systems and, fortunately, did not adversely affect the PowerBook's ability to re-run the Installer. We were disappointed, however, that a driver for the Dayna CommuniCard ethernet card in one of our PowerBook's PCMCIA slots was not installed, nor did the OS provide any helpful information to enable the card (we eventually enabled the card by installing driver software supplied by Dayna). The new OS provided support for our PCMCIA modem, however.
Next, the System provides the opportunity to run an "Internet Setup Assistant" -- those without a net connection can skip over this and quit the installer here.
The Internet Assistant requires quite a bit of technical information: IP addresses, router IDs, domain names, subnet mask, and so on. Some people will need help in setting this up, even with Apple's helpful wizard (which, we should add, failed to successfully access our office network's DHCP configuration, even though the Mac had been successfully accessing the Internet before the upgrade). The Assistant neglected to notice that our Mac was connected to a network with a DHCP server, or even to turn on TCP/IP. We merely needed to open up the TCP/IP control panel and our office's Windows NT server supplied the necessary DHCP information to enable our Mac to connect to the Internet.
Strangely enough, a similar problem occured on a different machine when we used the Assistant to help us configure a dialup (modem) connection. Again, we had to manually open the modem control panel and enable TCP/IP before our connection would work. In this regard, Windows 95, with its ability to auto-detect and auto-configure modems and install necessary networking components, is significantly ahead of the Mac. In short, we weren't especially impressed with the Mac OS 8 Internet Assistant. Nevertheless, it is a likely to be improvement for home users over the experience provided by earlier Mac OS releases, where the system provided little or no help at all.
On the desktop are now "Browse the Internet" and "Mail" icons. The browser supplied is Netscape's Navigator, configured with link buttons leading to Apple information pages. Not surprisingly, the Mail program is Emailer Lite, from Apple's Claris spinoff. (Emailer Lite is version 1.1v4 of Claris' product, which has been distributed for free.)
An icon labeled "Mac OS info Center" also resides on the desktop. Double-clicking this icon launches Netscape, but does not require an Internet connection. Apple has provided a number of solutions to common problems as part of the OS in hypertext form.
Memory requirements for this OS are up a bit over previous releases. The default installation, not including CyberDog or QuickDraw GX, required 7.3MB of RAM on our 040-based test unit. Our default installation required 95MB of disk space. Loading up our PPC Mac with all available options boosted the RAM requirements to almost 20 MB. Mac OS 8 does not turn Virtual Memory on by default.
Although Apple says the new OS will not support 030-based Macs, the Unofficial Turbo 601 Site reports that 030 machines fitted with Daystar's Turbo 601 PPC upgrade do in fact work (in PPC mode).
It's worth mentioning that Apple has officially dropped support for PowerTalk with this release. If you were one of the few who used Apple's ill-fated messaging system, you'll have to switch to Internet-based mail or something else this time around.
Visually, the new OS has several nice touches. Buttons and other screen icons have a pleasantly modern shaded look, a la Aaron. Those lucky enough to have more than one monitor will find a few differences in the way the Monitors and Sound control panel handles multiple displays. PowerBooks that support video mirroring can now enable this function by dragging the first display icon on top of the second. On our PowerBook, which has a grayscale display, it was a double delight to see the new OS for the first time in color on this second screen. As has been the case since 1987, windows, icons, and even the menu bar can be dragged from one screen to the other at will.
A Help menu now sits next to the Special menu. The Labels menu is gone, its functions now relegated to the File menu, where they probably should have been all along. (Strangely, however, the Labels menu reappears in its old location when the Find File dialog is open. This is, as it was under System 7.x, to allow found files to have labels assigned.) The View menu has a new option to view items "as buttons," eliminating the need to double-click icons. Another View menu option sets windows so that they may be minimized as tabs along the bottom of the screen. As with other Mac windows, this is on a window-by-window basis. We could find no way to set all windows to behave this way by default.
Some old-timers may be sad to see that gone at last is the old-style Mac Plus icon in the upper right corner. Now, a Mac OS "happy face" symbolizes the Finder. Much as it was in System 7.6, the word Macintosh has been banished. The About box now displays a picture of plant earth with the words "Mac OS computer." As always, there's a hidden screen, too. Press Option while choosing the About box to see it.
There are a number of small but welcome improvements. For example, the Eject Disk command no longer leaves a "ghost" of the disk on the desktop. It now removes the disk, as the "Put Away" command has done in the past.
Pressing Command-Option now creates an alias of any file as you drag it and the new "spring loaded icons" feature is interesting (it opens windows when you drag a file onto them), although it strikes us as too much strain on the mouse-hand muscles to use regularly.
Some Mac users may be surprised that Apple has apparently borrowed a few ideas from Windows 95, as well. Most notably, contextual menus are now available by Control-clicking on almost any item. A menu pops up with appropriate commands, such as Help, Get Info, Open, etc. Surprisingly, though, Print isn't one of the options available to documents.
Menus now stay down without holding the mouse button (Now Utilities and various shareware utilities can add this feature to older Macs). Also, the Desktop Patterns provided by previous releases are now supplemented by the ability to place a full-color picture on the desktop -- another feature long available with shareware products.
If you follow Mac-related stories on the Internet, you mighht have heard about Dax DaSilva's Mac OS 8 font petition, in which DaSilva's group attempted to get Apple to replace Mac OS 8's ugly Truth/Charcoal font with Espy. According to a report on Ric Ford's Macintouch website, DaSilva finally got a response from the company, but Mac OS 8 apparently will ship with a system font detractors say is jaggier and uglier than today's Chicago font.
For all the uproar over the change from the old Mac's "Chicago" system font to the new system's revised face, we hardly noticed the change. The new font, called Charcoal, is similar or identical to the "Truth" face previously seen, and, at 12 points, is less squat than the 10-point "Espy" face that appeared in products such as Aaron during the "Copland is coming" era. For Chicago fans, the old font is still an option, as is an interface option that eschews the new OS' platinum look for the old black and white austere appearance.
For all the complaints the Chooser has suffered over the years, it is still largely unchanged in this release, although the ability to access a remote Mac by typing in its IP address is a nice touch. Also new on the Apple menu is a "Connect to..." command that opens up a URL with the web browser. Mac OS 8 installs Netscape Navigator 3.0 by default, but also includes Microsoft Internet Explorer on the CD-ROM.
Even better is the Web Sharing control panel that allows a machine running Mac OS 8 to share files or web pages over the Internet by simply dragging files to a "Web Pages" folder and turning on the control panel. And, yes, Personal Web Sharing is also available for free without upgrading to Mac OS 8 -- but it is nice to have it a standard feature.
Unfortunately, when System 8 crashes, it still goes down hard. We found it quite stable and reasonably compatible during our tests (StuffIt Deluxe 4.0, After Dark 4.0, Now Utilities 6.7, and Speed Doubler 2.0 didn't work properly, though), but type 10 errors still froze the machine occasionally when running Netscape and necessitated a complete reboot. And, although the new Finder is multithreaded, the new Mac OS doesn't multitask especially well. Opening up the Print Window dialog brought a file copy to a complete standstill, and formatting a disk locks out all other tasks. We were, however, able to find files, type notes and access web pages during the file copy operation.
In this Internet-centric age of computing, we find it unfortunate that Mac OS 8, even with its included document translation tools from Dataviz, has such difficulty handling standard file types in MIDI, MPEG, HTML and other formats. Attempting to load a MIDI file (filename.mid) created on a PC produced only a "-2003 error -- can't find appropriate translator" message when the file was double-clicked.
QuickTime 2.5, shipped with Mac OS 8, includes the ability to play MPEG files, but you wouldn't necessarily know it by double-clicking a PC-based MPEG movie. Am Easy Open dialog opens up with a long list of applications that may or may not be able to play the MPEG file. If the usewr is wise enough to know that "MoviePlayer with QuickTime Translation" is the right choice, the movie plays, other wise, the file may open as garbage.
Also disheartening is the obviousness that the "not invented here" syndrome still pervades Apple. We found that our non-Apple CD-ROM drive wasn't supported by the new system's CD-ROM driver (Apple's 5.3.2 driver release, however, is still available and supports more third-party drives). The choice of printers provided by the Startup Assistant includes only six printers -- all of them from Apple -- and "none of the above" is not one of the choices. Similarly, the only monitors listed in the ColorSync control panel are from you-know-who. Compare this with the multitude of choices provided by Windows or virtually any other OS.
Speaking of color, we were pleasantly surprised by the improvements to the Color Picker, which can be easily accessed from the Edit Menu's Preferences dialog (just click on a label color). Now, you can see the web-friendly hex equivalent of an RGB color, or select colors in CMYK, HSV, HLS, other several other formats.
Compatibility
Preliminary tests suggest there may be problems with Adaptec Toast version 3.0x, After Dark, Now Utilities 6.7, and many third-party CD-ROM drivers including Spot CD and FWB's CD-ROM Toolkit. An incompatibility with HyperCard is solved by an update to HyperCard 2.3.6 available from Apple. Also, we found certain SCSI-based external removable storage devices that boot without system extension drivers under System 7.6 do not mount under Mac OS 8 without third-party software (we had good results with Software Architects' Multimounter).
Conclusion
The new OS looks like more of an advance (as it should) than any version since 7.0, but the changes are mostly cosmetic. Compatibility seems good, although the performance, particularly on PowerPC-based Macs, was less impressive than we had hoped for from the newly PPC-native and multithreaded Finder. We encourage caution for those considering an upgrade. The prudent strategy is to install it on a separate drive or partition and use the Startup Disk control panel to dual boot until compatibility with your applications and data is ensured.
At this writing, the Canadian retail price of Mac OS 8 is about $130.
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