The large penetration of the Macintosh operating system in the newspaper environment makes changes to the Mac operating system worth examining. The upgrades to Unix-based OS X have come in fairly rapid succession, with the latest being one of the most dramatic. It’s version 10.2 and is being referred to by its development code name of Jaguar.

Apple demonstrated its new Macintosh Operating System 10.2, known as Jaguar, at Seybold in San Francisco in September.
Photo by Keith DuBay

With more applications being written to run natively in the 10.x environment, those looking to upgrade from the 9.x series of releases have more compelling reasons to do so. As typical, Apple Computer Inc. has improved the visual interface again, which offers quicker and smoother screen redraws and sophisticated shadowing effects that make it clear which window is on top, and which ones are beneath.

Besides the usual visual improvements, the real meat of the upgrade concerns an area that is likely to be of great importance to information systems managers: networking support. The newest features are included in the technology called Rendezvous, which is based on the so-called ZeroConf standards, which attempt to make networking much easier. For instance, attach two or more Jaguar-equipped Macs to a network environment and the Macs automatically configure their TCP/IP addresses and locate each other.

It also has extensive support for the popular and growing 802.11b standard for wireless networking.

For heterogeneous networks such as those common in the newspaper industry, the Jaguar OS will now recognize Microsoft Windows servers directly, with no need to search for them using a machine name or IP address. The servers will show up by name and mounting them simply involves a double-click operation.

The reverse is now also true under Jaguar. Windows users can browse Mac files, using a Windows protocol called server message block. Virtual private networking is also supported: a Jaguar-equipped Mac can create a point-to-point tunneling protocol and connect to a Windows machine that’s been set up as a VPN server.

A number of upgraded applications are bundled with Jaguar. IChat attempts to bridge the chat divide by offering access to the AOL instant messaging network as well as the Apple-based Mac network, but users can’t access both at the same time. It doesn’t offer access to the Yahoo! or MSN chat networks either.

The address book can network with Palm-enabled devices, the internal mail program, Bluetooth cellular phones and the iCal calendar application that is now available for download from Apple’s Web site.

The mail application has been upgraded to Mail 1.2, and now offers an extensive spam-filtering ability that looks for word meanings on top of just selected keywords. The user can have input into the filter over time based on his or her individual preferences, thus increasing the accuracy.

Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar retails for $129 and was found on the Internet for as low as $115 at the time this article was written.