Product Reviews

Mac OS 8, Apple's latest operating system, has been shipping since the beginning of August. That, however, was the US version. Here in the UK, we traditionally have to wait for three months while a localised version is produced. This time around, the delay was only six weeks, but it was worth the wait.

The OS installer is slightly simpler than Mac OS 7.6, and its harder to dodge any of the recommended steps. This is a very good move, as major upgrades like this should not be installed onto unverified disks using old drivers (see Installing Mac OS 8, Vol 13 No 19, p80).

Apple's whole approach to providing UK users with Internet connectivity has improved. Once the user has installed Mac OS 8, an Internet Assistant automatically offers to walk them through filling in Internet setup details, and even provides the non-wired user with a choice of 14 different UK-based Internet service providers. This is a vast improvement on the single ISP offered in System 7.6. The more flexible but complex dial-up ISP registry approach offered in the US Mac OS 8 has wisely been avoided in the UK version.

Mac OS 7.6 users may note that Open Transport/PPP has been updated to version 1.0.1, but Java remains at version 1.0.2 - however, the performance-enhanced version 1.5 should be available from the Internet by the end of the year. Until then, the bundled Castanet Tuner software will still run more sluggishly than most users would like.

One new feature in Mac OS 8, Contextual Menu Items, is already coming of age. Contextual menus allow users to control-click on an item, and see a pop-up menu of options available for that item. Even better, Apple has made contextual menus extensible, allowing third parties to add plug-ins that perform various functions. One of the first of these, Apple Internet Data Detectors, will display a contextual pop-up menu, showing all selected Internet URLs and email addresses within a text document, complete with a variety of actions to choose from.

The Finder in Mac OS 8 supports a

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form of multitasking; multiple disk related actions, such as copying files, can take place at once. It's also possible to do other things while opening windows with many items, although this can make the Finder feel more sluggish until the disk cache settings are optimised for the Mac.

In addition to this, users running multiprocessor-ready applications on 'MP' Macs should notice some performance improvements.

Mac OS 8 will run perfectly well on 68040-based Macs as well as Power Macs; Quadra owners are still in the game (as long as they have at least 12Mb of real RAM), but Macs upgraded to an 68040 CPU from something older are now sidelined. This requirement is hardly surprising, considering the amount the new OS now does. It may have been technically possible to get Mac OS 8 to run on earlier Macs, but the speed penalties would have been prohibitive.

Quadra-class Macs (including the Centris series and most older Performas) actually run Mac OS 8 at a perfectly respectable speed. Certain features won't be available outside of a PowerPC environment, but the core functionality and most of the extras work acceptably both in the lab and in real life.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of Mac OS 8 is its overall stability. Recent versions of System 7 had been less than rock solid, particularly on Power Macs, so it's good to see that even in its first incarnation Mac OS 8 brings some real equilibrium back to the Mac.

Few add-on utilities and even fewer current applications have been found to have problems with Mac OS 8, and many of those that did during the summer have already been patched or updated.

Those that either break or simply don't work will generally be ones that attempt to tweak low-level parts of the OS such as window appearance, scroll bar behaviour and so on. Of course, there will be a number of more important tools which cut programming corners by choice or necessity, and you may find those shortcuts no longer valid.

This version of the Mac OS is probably the last to run on non-PowerPC-based Macs. Although the minor revision rumoured to appear by the end of the year (in the US at least) will remain 680x0-compatible, the next planned upgrade, codenamed Allegro, is unlikely to work with anything less than a Power Mac.

The ability for users to alter various country-specific settings at will continues to blur the distinctions between the US and UK versions of the Mac OS, but the differences that remain have been handled intelligently. This is Apple's most friendly and feature-rich OS so far; despite its £99 price tag, it's a worthy upgrade.