OS X v10.2
AKA Jaguar

by Eden Maxwell

Page 4 of 7

Address Book features a superb new interface. Each contact vCard can display and label all the information you want to keep, no matter how many phone numbers and email addresses a particular friend might have. The information is dynamic, also. For example, click an email address to send a message or click on a URL to launch a website.

Address Book. This revamped “little black book” has a brand new interface with a quick way to search through contact information, smart editing, support for vCards (virtual business cards have the .vcf extention), Bluetooth and advanced syncing with Apple’s new iSync (for the Palm OS branch of users). As part of Jaguar’s integrated concept, Address Book becomes the central database for your contacts. Store the phone numbers, addresses, home pages, and even pictures of all your friends and colleagues. Address Book provides system wide access to your contact information, so the power and usefulness of other applications are enhanced. For example, as mentioned earlier, iChat and Mail use the Address Book database for storing and accessing information about people with whom you want to communicate. Mail uses Address Book to automatically look up email addresses, and iChat refers to it so you never have to enter buddy information twice.

An integrated toolbar search lets you search quickly through all your contacts. Type in what you are looking for, and Address Book will find it regardless of which field it’s in. This is handy and effective. Use Address Book to place and receive calls and send SMS messages with a Bluetooth-capable mobile phone. Address Book uses the industry-standard vCard format for storing contact information, so your friends can send you vCards, or even beam them to your PowerBook from their Palm device. Then you can add them to your own list by dropping them in, no typing required; sharing your own card with others is just as easilly. In addition, Address Book can upload information that you can store on your iPod; using iSync to accomplish this is the most convenient way.

Hey, is it just me, but all of sudden I feel like networking.

Address Book lets you use the information on the cards in a new and dynamic way. Click an address to request a map from the web showing the location. Click a URL to launch the website. Click an email address to send a message. If the contact happens to have a Mac.com address, you can also open that person’s iDisk Public folder or send an instant message via iChat. And if you have a Bluetooth-equipped mobile phone, Address Book can automatically synchronize with it, alert you when you’ve got an incoming call, and display the Caller ID information.

Couch potatoes, listen up! Select large type when you click a phone or fax number and the number will be displayed so you can see it across a room.
Address Book can exchange contact information with other programs primarily through vCards. However, it can only import data via the vCard or the less commonly used LDIF format. To address this issue, Mac OS X v10.2 comes with an AppleScript (Import Addresses) that lets you import data from most of the popular contact manager programs, including: Entourage, Outlook Express, Palm Desktop, Eudora, Claris Emailer, and Netscape.

Core Technologies

UNIX. Mac OS X is UNIX based and the  foundation for everything within the operating system. Protected memory and preemptive multitasking make UNIX stable, reliable, and crash resistant. That means OS X can run several programs simultaneously without one interfering with another. Even if a program does crash, you can keep working and the program can be relaunched without the need to restart the computer. This alone is an awesome feature.

There is no longer any advantage to quitting apps that you are not using to conserve memory and improve performance as you did with OS 9. Jaguar has dynamic memory allocation, which means that programs no longer have fixed RAM allotments and virtual memory is turned on all the time. The system allots actual RAM to whatever program is running in the foremost position.

It’s rare for one of my apps to crash. I do find, however, that sometimes trying to delete an email in Entourage freezes up the program. There are also times when hitting the back button when viewing a page in IE 5.2.2 will cause that old SBFH (spinning beach ball from Hell) to do its worst. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars—no, wait, that line’s already been written by the bard. The fault here, I feel, somehow lies with the type of email (always the junk variety) and the web page in question.

Another blessing is that there are no more system extension conflicts. Mac OS X does not rely on “INIT” system extensions (that would often cause nasty conflicts in OS 9), so there’s no longer a need for an application like the Extensions Manager. Good riddance.

Inkwell. Mac OS X Jaguar includes a handwriting recognition system called Inkwell, which recognizes natural handwriting and translates the handwritten characters into regular text. Hey, wait a minute. Remember the late handheld Apple Newton from the mid-‘90s that had a handwriting recognition system? Apple has recycled this handwriting technology and now calls Inkwell. Oh, well.

Continued
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