He gave a very exciting demo of the new OS X features, including (amongst other things) hierarchical capabilities in the dock, the return of the Apple menu at the left edge of the screen, customizable finder navigation features, and (amazingly cool!) QuickTime movies playing in the dock! Also, it looked very fast in general use (of course, he was probably on the fastest new machine).
In addition, he introduced some very cool new hardware and software. Go to MacCentral's notes live from the keynote for all the details. The most interesting things (to me, anyway) were DVD recording hardware in the new high-end G4's, iDVD, iTunes (for free!), built-in Finder-level CD burning in the new boxes, and (of course) the Titanium PowerBook!
In all, it was a very impressive show. The most relevant OS X items of interest were the price ($129) and the ship date (Saturday, March 24th).
On a related note, anyone interested in buying a slightly used G4/350 AGP? ;-) I'm thinking I really really want one of the new 733mhz machines ... and I wish I had some viable excuse to need a new G4 Titanium PowerBook!
[Editor's note: The following applies to the Public Beta only. The current release version of OS X does not contain SSH; search the site for articles on installing SSH if you'd like to use it. Rumor has it that the first OS X update will again include SSH]
If you access your OS X box remotely, you can do so through an incredibly simple-to-use Telnet server (simply click "Turn on remote Telnet access" on the Sharing System Preference panel). However, this is not the best way to connect to your OS X box - your passwords are transmitted in cleartext (non encrypted), meaning that they could be intercepted by those with malicious intents.
OS X includes a built-in secure remote access package known as SSH (Secure SHell). However, there is no GUI for enabling SSH, which is unfortunate (hopefully this will be changed prior to final release). It is not, however, overly difficult to enable SSH using a terminal session, if you're reasonably comfortable with editing files in the shell.
If you access your machine remotely, and you would like to do so more securely, read the rest of this article for information on how to enable and use SSH.
When you're working in an OS X application such as SweetMail, HTMLEdit, or TextEdit (and others, I'd expect) there's a subtle but useful visual marker to denote unsaved changes.
When you've made changes that are not yet saved, the red document close button will have a small black dot in its center; when you save the document, the dot vanishes.
Quite handy as a quick visual method of checking whether you've saved your latest changes or not.
One of the known bugs with the PB is that when you reboot into OS 9, one or more of your drives may have become invisible. It won't show on the desktop, but Sherlock will find items on it, Disk First Aid will see it, etc. For some reason, the visibility bit on these drives is being turned off (or the invisibility bit is being turned on ;-). OS X ignores the bit, so the drive shows up. OS 9, however, respects the setting and promptly makes the disk(s) invisible.
Alsoft has published a free utility that will restore the visibility of these disks when you boot into OS 9, and has a further description of the problem and its cause. You can read about and download the fix from this page on Alsoft's site.
You'll have to fill out a short form to get the program, but it's free of charge.
While browsing the Mac OS X Forums (currently down for a server swap), I found a reference to a very detailed paper on how you can use BSD (the UNIX system underlying OS X) to stop spam and trojan horse programs from reaching your machine.
The author is Brett Glass, and he's posted the article on his website. It's very interesting reading. Highly recommended if you're remotely curious about this type of stuff; required if you're using the OS X version of sendmail as your mail server!
Under OS9, an often suggested fix for misbehaving applications was to "trash the preferences." While I haven't heard many reports of misbehaving apps under OSX PB, you can still try a similar trick if you are having troubles.
Each user's preferences are stored in the directory /Users/username/Library/Preferences/. Navigate there, and you'll see a bunch of different preference files, all ending in ".plist". If you want to get rid of one, I would recommend taking a "better safe than sorry" approach, since this is beta software. Instead of just deleting the pref file for the application in question, rename it to something like "appname.bad". That way, if for some reason your fix causes more problems than you had previously, you can go backwards.
When you now launch the troublesome application, it will create a new ".plist" file, since it can't find the old one. If everything works as expected, you can now go back and delete the ".bad" file.
As a side note, you can also view the contents of the preference files, since they're stored as plain text.
Browsing a few of the other boards and forums over the last few days, I noticed a few people have figured out how to make their Harmon Kardon Soundsticks function under OS X.
Navigate to /System/Library/Extensions/ and either rename (probably safer!) or remove the file AppleScreamerAudio.kext. You will probably have to be root to have permission to change this file. Here's how I'd do it via a terminal session. Comments are in [brackets], so don't type them!
> su [become root; you'll need to enter root password]
> cd /System/Library/Extensions/ [change to the directory]
> mv AppleScreamerAudio.kext AppleScreamerAudio.bak [rename the file]
> exit [ends root session]
> exit [ends terminal session]
Restart OS X and your Soundsticks should be working! Since you're disabling a portion of the system software, no guarantees on what else might break. However, others have reported success with no side effects.
Rather than launching the System Preferences application and then clicking the desired icons it is possible to double-click the individual panes as items.
These are contained within:
/System/Library/Preferences
These individual panes can also be dropped into the dock giving even quicker access to the pane - for example - sound, monitor, etc.
Most screensavers feature a "fade now" corner which will instantly activate the scrensaver module. The built-in OS X screensaver does not inclue this useful feature. There is, however, a pretty good shortcut way of accomplishing the same thing. Here's how to do it.
In the finder (not in a terminal session), navigate to:
In that directory, simply drag the ScreenSaverEngine.app to the dock. Now, when you want to activate the screen saver, just click on the icon in the dock!
This is especially useful if you've modified your screensaver to use your system password (either via the hack, or using Screen Locker). Now you can walk away and have an instantly protected system.
I'm not sure where I read about this, but I've been using it on my machine for quite a while and just hadn't posted it here yet. Very useful; kudos to whomever figured this one out!
There have been some reports of people with totally dead Macs after running OS X. The causes seem very hard to pin down, but the common condition of the machines is an inability to boot off of a OS 9 CD. The machine is stuck running OS X, despite everything the user tries to fix the problem (including booting into open firmware, resetting parameter RAM, setting the system disk, etc.).
One final thing to try is turn the machine off, open it up, and pull the battery out of the motherboard. Wait a decent amount of time (five minutes or more), reinsert the battery, and restart. This should force your machine to forget about anything it thinks it knows, and go back to the factory configuration. Your CD drive should now boot the machine (when holding down 'C' during boot). I've seen reports of this working for more than one person, but there have been a couple poor souls that have tried this and are still non-functional.
Any other thoughts on potential solutions for those still stuck?
