1.1 Convince Me: Why OS X?

     Apple was one of the first to pioneer the graphical approach to personal computing with the first Macintosh, so you’d expect OS X to be simple to use — and indeed it is. For many folks, that’s Job One. If you’re one of those people, you can happily skip this section without need of further evidence because OS X is undoubtedly the easiest OS on the planet to use. (And believe me, I’m not knocking simplicity. Computers are supposed to be getting easier to use, and technonerds like me are supposed to be rendered unnecessary as computers advance.) Here is the mantra of the Mac — and the first of Mark’s Maxims for this volume:

Make it easy.

Still with me? Need more testimony? Or perhaps you’re just curious about the engine under the hood. Then read on — and if you’re a Macintosh owner, feel free to gloat! (If you’re a PC owner, there’s always eBay.)

Pretty to behold

     They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so let me illustrate just how good OS X looks by showing you a screenshot. Figure 1-1 offers you a view of the latest version of the Big X, hard at work. As you can see, everything’s streamlined in appearance, with maximum efficiency in mind. Tasteful 3-D abounds, from the drop-shadowed windows to the liquid-look toolbars. Icons look like miniature works of art. Macintosh owners appreciate outstanding design and recognize the value of a great computer, even if it’s lime green, or the size of a ham sandwich, or looks like a silver picture frame. After all, many Mac owners are professionals in the graphic arts, and Apple provides the hardware they need — like the top-of-the-line display used with the 27" flat-panel Intel iMac or the killer performance of the latest Mac Pro with 12-core processing power.
     Take a look at what’s going on behind the curtain — the Great Oz is actually pretty busy back there.

The allure of Aqua

     The Apple software developers who introduced us to OS X designed the liquid look from the ground up. They call it Aqua, and it’s the standard user interface in Mavericks.
     Whoops, I just realized that I slipped a ten-cent example of technobabble into the preceding paragraph. Let me explain: A user interface (UI) design determines how things look throughout both the OS itself and all applications written to run under it. The design includes the buttons you click, the controls you click or move, and the appearance of the windows and menus. For example, if you’ve already begun to use OS X, you’ve probably stopped right in the middle of a task and exclaimed to yourself, “Why, Self, look at the cool 3-D contour effect on the menu bar!” That shapely contour is a tiny part of the Aqua user interface design.
     Aqua also extends to the placement of controls and how they’re shown to you. For example:

     ✦ OS X uses Aqua sheets (which are like dialogs, but are attached to their parent windows) to prompt you for input, such as confirming when you’re about to close a document without saving it. A dialog, on the other hand, can be moved around like a window, but it requires that you take an action before you can continue. I prefer sheets to dialogs because multiple programs can have multiple sheets open, so you can continue to work in other applications without being rudely forced to answer the query immediately. Like other things OS X, sheets just make more sense, and they’re easier to use!

     ✦ OS X file selection controls, such as the one in Figure 1-2, make it much easier to navigate quickly to a specific file or folder from in an application.

     ✦ The Dock is another Aqua favorite. The Dock launches your favorite applications, indicates what’s running on your Mac, and allows you to switch between those programs — and all in a strip that you can relocate and customize at will. I talk about the Dock in greater detail in Book II, Chapter 2.

     Consider Aqua as the look and feel of OS X and virtually all applications that it runs; you discover how to use these Aqua controls in the pages to come. Of course, Mac owners really don’t have to worry about Aqua itself; the Aqua guidelines are a road map for those software developers writing applications for OS X. Programs written to the common Aqua interface standard will be easier for you to use, and you’ll become a proficient power user of that program much faster because you’re already familiar with Aqua controls.

The quality of Quartz

     The second ingredient in the visual feast that is OS X is Quartz Extreme. Again, I must ask your forgiveness, good reader, because I have to get a tad technical again. Quartz Extreme is a graphics engine: the portion of OS X that draws what you see onscreen (in the Aqua interface, natch). Think of the engine in your car, which is responsible for making your car move. Whether your Mac is running Microsoft Word or simply idling at the Desktop waiting for you to finish your soda, Quartz Extreme is at work displaying icons, drawing shapes, exhibiting the windows you open, and animating things on the Dock.

     What sets Quartz Extreme apart from the ho-hum graphics engine that Windows uses? It’s all about international programming standards — you know, those things that Microsoft would much rather you forget. To wit:

     ✦ PDF: The Quartz Extreme engine is built around the Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) developed by Adobe. If you’ve spent any time at all on the Internet in the past 20 or so years, you know that PDF files have emerged as the standard for displaying and printing the highest quality electronic documents. Plus, Adobe has released a version of the free Acrobat Reader (www.adobe.com) for just about every computer on this green Earth. As a result, text and graphics displayed in Quartz Extreme are razor sharp, resizable, and easily portable from one computer to another. OS X displays PDF files without even requiring Acrobat, using the built-in Preview application and Quick Look. Figure 1-3 shows a complex PDF document that I opened in OS X.

     ✦ OpenGL: Gamers will get really excited about the fact that Quartz Extreme also uses the OpenGL graphics acceleration standard, which delivers the fastest 3-D graphics on the planet. (Think photo-realistic, high-resolution graphics drawn in the blink of an eye.) This trick is a really cool — OpenGL is even used to produce the Desktop in OS X Mavericks.
     In plain English? Today’s top-of-the-line, 3-D gaming and 3-D graphics acceleration can take care of drawing everything — forget about waiting for windows to close or menus to appear even when you’re creating the world’s biggest honking spreadsheet or building a presentation the size of Baltimore. As the chairman of the board would’ve said, “We’re talkin’ fast, baby, like a rocket ship to the moon!”

     ✦ Core Animation: Mavericks includes functionality that Apple calls Core Animation, which makes it much easier for programmers to animate backgrounds and objects in their programs. Text, 3-D animation, and video now work seamlessly side by side, and eye-catching animations in applications, such as Time Machine, are the norm for Mac owners.

Stable, stable, stable

     “So it’s elegant in design. That’s great, Mark, but what if OS X crashes? Aqua and Quartz Extreme aren’t worth a plug nickel if my cursor doesn’t move and I lose my document!” Believe me, I couldn’t agree more; I make my living from computers, and every time a misbehaving program locks up one of my machines, I throw a tantrum that would make Godzilla back off. Lockups shouldn’t be tolerated in this day and age.
     Luckily, the folks who designed OS X were just as interested in producing a rock-solid OS as they were in designing an attractive look. (Think of Tom Cruise’s face on The Rock’s body.)
     OS X is as hard to crash as the legendary Unix OS — that’s right, the same reliable  workhorse that technowizards around the world use to power the Internet, where stability is all-important. OS X is built on top of a Unix base that’s well hidden, allowing you and me to focus on our programs and click with a mouse without knowing any of those obscure, arcane keyboard commands. You get the benefits of Unix without a pair of suspenders and a pocket protector, or the hassle of growing a beard. (Not to mention many, many years of computer programming experience.)
     Apple has gone yet another step further in safeguarding your data in case of a power failure or misbehaving program: the Auto Save feature automatically saves all the changes you make to your document in the background while you work! You can revert to the document as it was when you last opened it whenever you need to. (I know one technology author who is downright thankful for Auto Save.)
     Apple calls the Unix foundation at the heart of OS X by another nifty title: Darwin. I could tell you that Darwin provides the latest in 64-bit memory support and CPU management, but if you’re a normal human being, your eyes would glaze over. Suffice it to say that Darwin makes the best use of your computer’s memory (RAM) and your computer’s brain (CPU) — Mavericks has been fine-tuned for processors with multiple cores, such as the Core i5, Core i7, and Xeon CPUs from Intel. Rest assured that your web server will stay up even if your misbehaving Virtual Birdcalling simulation decides to run amok. (Emus running amok — how dreadful.) 

     Yes, yet another standard is at work here — uh-oh, Overlord Gates is truly angry now! Those who do have a beard and are curious about such things will want to know that Darwin uses a FreeBSD kernel, so it also inherits all the protocol standards that have made Unix the foundation of today’s Internet. You can find more about FreeBSD at www.freebsd.org. Because much of the foundation code that underlies OS X is developed as an open source project, software engineers outside Apple can contribute ideas and code, just as Unix continues to evolve over time. (And yes, you’ll even discover how to access the powerful Unix command prompt from OS X in Book VIII, Chapter 2!)
     To get an idea of just how well armored OS X is, consider Figure 1-4. One program, which I call Titanic 1.0, has locked up like San Quentin. Under Mac OS 9 and older versions of Windows, your only chance at recovering anything would involve divine intervention. In OS X, however, my Pages application is unaffected because it plays in a protected area of system memory. (I show you how to force a misbehaving application to go away in Chapter 3 of this minibook.)
     By the way, Darwin makes it easy for Unix software developers to quickly and easily port (or modify) all sorts of Unix applications to work under OS X. I think you’ll agree that a wider selection of applications is a good thing.

Multitasking and multithreading for normal human beings

     And now, for your entertainment, a short one-act play. (Yes, really. You’d be amazed at how popular this stage production has become among my readers.)

A Shakespearean Moment of Multitasking and Multithreading

     Our play opens with Julius Caesar shaking his head in disgust at his Mac OS 9 Desktop.

Caesar: Anon, I am only one mortal, yet my Desktop doth abound with portals to applications of all different miens. Tell me, foul beast, why thy spirit seems slow and sluggish, and my Excel spreadsheet doth crawl on its belly!

     [Enter Romeo, a cocky and rather brash young Apple software developer.]

Romeo: Dude, the problem is, like, your operating system. Y’see, older versions of both Mac OS and Windows ended up constantly, like, shifting your computer’s attention from one app to another — Excel has to cooperate with everything else that’s running in the background, like a good little corporate boy. It’s less efficient and very, very ’90s. Install OS X, and you get preemptive multitasking — the app you’re using, like, gets the lion’s share of the processing time, and everything runs smoother when you need it. That’s the way Unix works.

Caesar: Verily, your strange tongue doth annoy me. Guards, behead him — then obtain for me this OS X.

Romeo: I’m outta here — I’ve got a hot surfing date — but don’t forget, like, OS X also uses multithreaded processing, so your Mac can handle different operating system tasks at the same time. It’s kind of like your computer can both walk and chew gum at the same time: fast, fast, fast!

     [Exit Romeo — rather swiftly — stage right.]

Fin

     When the play closes, we can only hope that Romeo is fast as well. (I told you it was a short play.)

The definition of Internet savvy

     Remember the classic iMac advertisements that touted the one-plug approach to the Internet? That entire campaign was centered on one idea: The Internet was supposed to be easy to use. The folks at Microsoft sat up and took notice when the iMac proved so incredibly successful and (starting with Windows Vista) reduced some of the overwhelming folderol that you had to encounter just to connect to the Internet — but OS X still wipes the floor with Windows 8 when it comes to easy and complete Internet connectivity. For example:

     ✦ Easy configuration: OS X sets up your entire Internet connection with a simple assistant. As long as you have the right information handy, which your Internet service provider (ISP) should supply, configuration is a snap.

     ✦ iCloud: Apple’s iCloud service provides you with a chunk of Internet accessible space where you can automatically share documents, photos, and music with your other Apple devices and computers — from anywhere on Earth with an Internet connection! Absolutely, unbelievably, massively cool. I cover iCloud in detail in Book V, Chapter 4.

     ✦ All the Internet behind-the-scenes stuff: The Internet is basically built on a number of protocols (read that as rules for exchanging all sorts of data) — and, as I mention earlier, Unix machines dominate the Internet. Ergo, OS X on your Macintosh also provides you with support for just about every Internet protocol on the planet. Even if you don’t know these protocols by name or write your own software, the applications that you buy can use them.
 
     ✦ A gaggle of great Internet applications: OS X ships with all sorts of Internet magic built in. For example, you’ll get instant Internet and local network communication with Messages and the FaceTime video chat application (both of which I cover in Book V, Chapter 3), Safari (covered in Book V, Chapter 5), and Apple Mail, a standard-issue, battle-ready e-mail program (which I discuss in Book V, Chapter 2). Yup, it’s all free.

Lots of free goodies

     You don’t just get Internet applications when you latch your fingers onto OS X — you can start doing all sorts of neat stuff without investing one extra dollar in more software!
     What you receive along with OS X depends on whether you’re upgrading from an older version of Mac OS or receiving the Big X already installed on a new Macintosh. With that in mind, check out these two “suite” possibilities (pun definitely intended):
     
     ✦ This is the iLife: This suite of easy-to-use integrated programs is included with a new Mac, and it’s practically as well known as the computer itself these days: iPhoto, iTunes, GarageBand, and iMovie. Each of these stellar programs is covered in Book III. If you have a digital camera, an MP3 player, a USB musical keyboard, or a DV camcorder, you’ll be a happy individual. I promise.

     ✦ iWork to the rescue: If you bought a new Macintosh with OS X preinstalled, you may have received a test-drive version of iWork (Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office). Good stuff, indeed. If you don’t want to spend the bucks on Office 2011, and you don’t need the complex gewgaws and baroque architecture of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, I can guarantee you that Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are powerful enough to satisfy your document and presentation yearnings.