Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

28 Aug 2002

 

Jaguar: Early Impressions and Tidbits

We've had Jaguar since very late Friday night. The Big Event. We are currently running it on a 500Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook and a new 700Mhz G3 iBook which was picked up for $150 less than asking price at the Jaguar special event. If you didn't attend, shame on you! It was a blast! We're sure the next major event like this will be planned for earlier in the evening and made even more fun. Apple likely missed some sales because some folks bailed out due to extra long lines. But in any case, they more than made up for it with the active sales.

Impressions - Beyond the Store This Time

We do not suspect that Quartz Extreme is working on our TiBook due to the video memory card and its 16MB of SDRAM. But, OS X is much faster overall and noticeably faster with screen drawing. This speed up is nice. In addition to the general Jaguar optimizations, Jaguar's OpenGL is completely revamped, increasing speed up there as well. (For a reference article on Jaguar OpenGL go here).

Sherlock 3

In a word? Great beginning. The favorite feature thus far is the foreign language translator, while we know this is available on the Web, the whole point of Sherlock 3 is that you can have all this type of activity centrally located while you use the Web browser for real Web work: having fun surfing the Web. The stocks tracking services is also nice because it remembers your stocks, provides nice charts, and integrates news about the companies in the same window. This works a lot like an Ameritrade or Etrade account online app if you have used one before.

More on Sherlock later on. But for now we can say that Sherlock 3 is delightful.

Windows Integration

Boy was it a treat to see all of the dedicated server and peer-to-peer Windows machines appear on the TiBook with no problem and little configuration. Just Command-K to bring up connect to server and your Windows "workgroups" and the shares on those machines will pop right up.

An important notice. If your Windows workgroup is called anything different than "workgroup" (such as "OEMworkgroup") make note that your Jaguar machine will assume "workgroup" is used. So you need to launch Directory Acccess utility in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder and then change your workgroup name. Also, you need to configure your Systems Preferences a bit by turning on Windows networking (a check box click) and by creating new accounts and allowing Windows login options so Windows folks can see your shared folders. (We will go over this more in detail in the future)

Hey, but once that is done, you are set to go! Our Linux server was instantly accessible as well. It is pretty clear that Jaguar now has the multi-platform networking upper hand on Windows, UNIX and Linux. At least from the point of view of a client OS.

We'll be diving into Jaguar a lot over the next few weeks, including application compatibilities and reader feedback, so please write in with your experiences. Thanks!

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