Macintosh OS X Overview

From a rock-solid, developer-friendly UNIX foundation to grid computing, powerful technologies drive Mac OS X Tiger to its leadership role as the world’s most advanced operating system.

UNIX-based
Beneath the easy-to-use interface and rich graphics of Mac OS X lies Darwin, an open source, UNIX-based foundation built on such technologies as mach and FreeBSD. With Tiger come significant enhancements to this UNIX foundation, including improvements to dual-processor support for increased performance when reading and writing files to disk and when using Mac OS X with NFS file servers. 64-bit Power

With the release of Mac OS X Tiger, Apple delivers the astounding power of 64-bit computing to the Mac. You can now build and run a new generation of 64-bit applications that address up to four billion times as much memory as 32-bit applications, without compromising the performance of your existing 32-bit applications.

Java
Recognizing that Java has become the de-facto standard language for developing cross-platform applications, Apple has made Java a core-component of Mac OS X, which includes the full version Java 2, Standard Edition, version 1.4.2. Since Apple has optimized Java on Mac OS X, Java applications act as first-class citizens on Mac OS X.

Core Image
Mac OS X Tiger introduces a breakthrough image-processing technology known as Core Image that allows developers to harness the power of today’s advanced video cards. Until now, taking full advantage of the graphics processing units in these cards required in-depth knowledge of pixel-level programming. With Core Image, you can express effects and transitions with a just few lines of code. Core Image handles the rest, optimizing the path to the GPU. The result is real-time, interactive responsiveness as you select and apply filters.

Crystal-clear Video
Tiger also features QuickTime 7 with H.264, the industry-standard, ultra-efficient, fully scalable video codec that delivers pristine video quality at remarkably low data rates for everything from 3G for mobile phones to high definition DVD. Since H.264 is built into the QuickTime architecture in Tiger, QuickTime-based applications like iChat AV and Final Cut Pro HD also take full advantage of this advanced video codec.

User Interface in OS X
Mac OS X Tiger eases dealing with an ever more complex, connected world. Features such as Dashboard, Spotlight and VoiceOver will change the way you interact with your Mac — and the rest of the planet. The gorgeous Aqua user interface lets you control advanced timesaving technology without you hardly lifting a finger.

Looks Great, Makes You Look Great
Mac OS X wraps its powerful functionality in a user interface that’s both intuitive and gorgeous. Known as Aqua, the Mac OS X interface presents title bars with the eye-pleasing look of brushed metal, brightly colored buttons that immediately signal their functions and crisp, photo-realistic icons that appear almost graspable. Designed from the ground up to make computing virtually second nature, every visual element gives you important information about the activity status of your Mac.

Find Anything in No Time Flat
Mac OS X Tiger introduces a revolutionary search technology that lets you find anything — files, emails, contacts, images, calendars, you name it — on your system as fast as you can type. It’s called Spotlight and you’ll find nothing like it in any other operating system. No more rifling through folders buried within folders to find something that may not even be there. With Spotlight, Mac OS X Tiger gives you a whole new level of access to everything on your computer.

Get Instant Access
Thanks to Exposé, even if you have dozens of applications open, accessing any one of them requires just the press of a key. Similarly, with Dashboard, Mac OS X Tiger provides instant access to your widgets as well. A semi-transparent layer containing your widgets, Dashboard zooms on top of your Desktop with a click of a function key. Press the key again and it disappears just as quickly.

And the Mac OS X Finder makes navigating the files and folders on your Mac easier than ever, giving you a clearly laid out, customizable window with all of your available disks, folders and files easily accessible with a single click.

Automate with Ease
Why perform the same series of tasks over and over again when you can automate the process? Mac OS X lets you do just that — with Automator, an innovative new application that allows you to easily automate time-consuming, repetitive, manual tasks with just a few mouse clicks. Or with AppleScript, a powerful and easy-to-learn scripting language built into Mac OS X.

Share your Mac
Sharing your Mac with other users is painless and simple. Mac OS X features Fast User Switching, which lets different users of the same Mac, with just one click, switch to their desktop with all their applications and documents exactly as they left them. Your and everyone else’s system preferences also stay perfectly intact when switching from one user to another. (Mac OS X lets you easily set all of your preferences from one convenient System Preferences location.)

Go Beyond the Keyboard
Typing isn’t the only way to input text into your Mac. With Inkwell, Mac OS X lets you write on a graphics tablet and turns your written words in any application into typed text. You can also talk to your Mac. Apple’s Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis technologies enable speech-savvy applications to carry out your voice commands and even speak back to you in plain English. Building upon its speech recognition technology, Mac OS X Tiger delivers VoiceOver, a spoken English interface that allows you to access the Mac through speech, audible cues and keyboard navigation. Apple is continually seeking to enhance its Universal Access features to make the Mac more easily accessible to everyone.

Compatibility with Windows
Mac OS X Tiger provides a variety of features and technologies that enable Macs and PCs running Windows to work seamlessly together. Macs and PCs can easily share files, share the same network and can even share the same peripherals, like printers, scanners and cameras.

Share Files
With a Mac running OS X Tiger, you can easily connect to a Windows-based server or Windows PC that has file sharing enabled. Windows servers automatically appear in the Finder, so you just click the Network icon and browse to the server you’re looking for. Likewise, Mac OS X users can share the files on their computer with Windows users with sharing software that’s built into Mac OS X Tiger. Shared Macintosh home folders appear in the Windows Network Neighborhood just like a Windows server — enabling Windows users to browse folders and share files without having to install any additional software. Through file sharing, Macs and Windows PCs can open, edit, save and copy the same files using a shared folder or directory on the Mac or PC.

Share Printers
Macs and PCs can also share printers. Shared Windows printers automatically appear in the Mac OS X Printer Setup Utility so they can be added to the Macintosh as a local printer queue. You can create a queue for as many shared Windows (and Macintosh) printers as you like, and any application that can print on the Macintosh can print to the shared printer.

Share Discs
Mac OS X automatically burns CDs that support the cross-platform ISO 9660 standard, which can be read by both Macs and PCs. So you have a simple and cost-effective way to share numerous or extremely large documents. If your Mac has a SuperDrive, you can also burn and share files on a recordable DVD disc. A single DVD-R disc can hold up to 4.7GB of information (almost eight times the capacity of a CD), and a Windows PC with a DVD-ROM drive can read the DVD-R discs.

Share Mail
Mac OS X Mail works seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange mail servers, whether you’re in the office or on the road. Mail supports IMAP so while you’re on the road, you can see all of the mail on your machine at the office. You can read new messages, reply, delete a few items and leave other items for when you’re back in the office. Mac OS X Tiger also uses standard GNU Zip compression and expansion for file attachments so Mac, Windows and Linux users can easily open and read them.

Stay Connected with VPN
Many employers now let you work from home and use a DSL or cable modem to connect to the corporate network in order to collaborate with your colleagues over email or share files. But to protect the network from unwanted guests, companies often create a virtual private network (VPN), which requires additional software and configuration. Mac OS X Tiger is VPN-ready right out of the box and even supports VPN on demand, which connects and disconnects securely to the network as needed. Mac OS X

Tiger includes a built-in VPN client that supports the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol over Internet Protocol Security (L2TP/IPSec) and Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), and is compatible with most popular VPN servers, including those from Cisco and Microsoft.

Active Directory Support
If your organization operates a managed network based on Microsoft’s proprietary Active Directory services, no problem. Macintosh computers can be added to an existing Active Directory network without additional software or any changes to the Active Directory server schema. Mac OS X Tiger includes built-in support for Microsoft Kerberos (MSK) authentication and Active Directory authentication policies, such as password changes, expiration and forced password changes, as well as Active Directory replication and failover.

OS9 and OSX Differences
Many major differences exist between OS9 and OSX. Here are the basics:

OSX (Latest 10.4.4)

• Based on BSD Unix
• Multi-Tasking
• Managed Memory
• UDF and Iso9660 support
• No Extensions for program operation
• Seamless integration with Windows systems (in most cases)
• OS9 applications WILL NOT run on OSX with out “Classic” Support. “Classic is an OS9 emulator that is run under OSX and is not compatible with all OS9 applications. OS9 must be installed under “Classic” in order to operate.

OS 9 (Last released 9.2.2)

• OS9 is no longer supported by Apple. The “Classic” environment will no longer be available after 2006.
• No multi-tasking
• No protected memory
• Uses extensions that conflict with each other.
• Requires “AppleTalk” to talk to Windows Networks.

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