Mac OS X Turns Ten Years Old

Today marks the tenth birthday of Mac OS X, which officially debuted on March 24th, 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 with an internal codename of "Cheetah". As noted by Macworld, the release in retrospect was a milestone in Apple's transformation from a struggling computer company into the major technology behemoth it is today.

On March 24, 2001, the iMac was less than three years old, the iPod was still more than six months away, and Macs ran at astounding speeds of up to 733MHz. But most importantly, Apple on that day released the first official version of Mac OS X, changing the future of its platform forever.

Though nobody knew it at the time, the release, codenamed Cheetah, was the first step in transforming Apple from a company poised on the verge of disaster into the second most valuable company in the world.

While the impact of Mac OS X on Apple's products and the user experience they provide is undeniable, the early days of the operating system were anything but perfect, from a shaky public beta released in late 2000 through the public launch of Cheetah that necessitated rapid fixes and improvements that led to the release of Mac OS X 10.1 "Puma" just six months later. As Ars Technica noted in an extensive review of Mac OS X 10.0.0, the release showed "tremendous promise" despite obviously still being a work in progress.

Mac OS X shows tremendous promise, which is a nice way of saying that the 10.0 release is not quite ready for prime time. This is most certainly an early adopter's OS release. Interface responsiveness and effective stability are the two biggest fundamental problems, but missing features and compatibility issues rank just as high if you actually intend to use OS X as a full Mac OS 9 replacement: the 10.0 release cannot view DVD movies; printer drivers are still scarce; CD burning is not yet supported, even by Apple's own iTunes CD authoring application; and a lot of hardware (like my G3/400's serial port adapter to which my printer is attached) seem destined to be orphaned forever.

Mac OS X has obviously come a long way in the ten years since its initial release, but Apple has also become much more than a computer company: revolutionizing music consumption with the iPod, recreating the smartphone market with the iPhone, and most recently finally catapulting the tablet market into consumers' awareness with the iPad. In the process, Apple's operating system for mobile devices, iOS, has itself matured and yielded a number of new innovations and features.

Consequently, Apple has chosen to position the next step in the evolution of Mac OS X as "Back to the Mac", an effort to bring some of the most popular features of iOS to the Mac platform for the first time while retaining the familiarity, flexibility, and horsepower of Mac OS X. That next step, Mac OS X Lion, is set to debut sometime this summer, and developers and users should be able to learn much more about Apple's efforts at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference presumably set to occur in June or July.

(Quoted from MacRumors)

Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: Apple drops FTP, adds WebDAV file sharing for iOS

The upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion and Lion Server dramatically simplifies file sharing, removing official support for FTP and Sun's NFS file sharing protocols while adding a new WebDAV option making it easy to share files with iOS devices.

Changes in Mac OS X desktop file sharing

The most obvious change for desktop users is the removal of FTP from the available protocols in System Preference's File Sharing. FTP is a very simple, early protocol for making files available over the Internet, but offers little in terms of security.

While FTP is still available and configurable from the command line, it's no longer supported as an easy to turn on option in System Preferences, leaving only the Mac's native AFP and Windows-style SMB as options.

As noted previously, Apple's SMB (aka CIFS) file services are now home grown in Lion, as the company is no longer relying upon the Samba project to deliver its core Windows File Sharing software.

Developers working with the new build say FTP does appear to still be supported from the Finder as a download client. Apple has never supported FTP uploads from the Finder, necessitating a full fledged FTP client for users who need to both download and upload files.

The removal of FTP services appear to be motivated by the non-obvious security implications involved with opening up unencrypted FTP file sharing from a client system. Additionally, there are often better methods for sharing files, particularly for Mac users who depend upon support for file and file system features that FTP does not support well.

Changes in Mac OS X Server file sharing

Apple has billed its Mac OS X Server product as "open source made easy," rolling together a variety of standard Unix services and open source projects and integrating them within an approachable, graphical interface in Server Admin.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple created two interfaces for Server: the ultra simple Server Preferences, which made configuring services as easy as setting options in System Preferences, and the more complex but powerful Server Admin (below).

In Lion Server, Apple has greatly enhanced Server Preferences and renamed the app simply Server. Rather than being a simplistic set of preference panels, the app has transformed into what appears to be a toned down Server Admin, with an interface reminiscent of iTunes or the Finder.

Apple also appears to have removed much of the duplicated overlap in functionality between Server Preferences and Server Admin, relegating all file system and many other user-facing services (including web, instant messaging, and contact, calendar and wiki services) to the new Server app while leaving only network and backend services (such as DNS, DHCP, Xgrid, and more complex Mail settings) to the more technically inclined Server Admin.

Formerly, configuring file sharing on Mac OS X Server involved turning on individual services (AFP, FTP, SMB or Sun's NFS), then configuring shared folders under the Sharepoint tab of each service. In Lion Server, Server Admin is no longer even used to set up file sharing. Instead, it's simply a matter of defining a folder and checking boxes for AFP or SMB support, just like a desktop Mac.

WebDAV file sharing for mobile devices

While Apple is dropping graphical support for both FTP and NFS (which often used as a file sharing protocol in larger Unix environments), it's adding checkbox simplicity to WebDAV file sharing.

Previous builds of Mac OS X Server could define WebDAV shares as part of the configuration of web services, as WebDAV is an extension to a web server than enables it to allow clients to not just obtain web files, but also add, change or create new files on the server after supplying the appropriate credentials.

In Lion Server, WebDAV has moved out of the back corner of the web services configuration and is now positioned as a prominent file sharing protocol. WebDAV will allow Mac users to define shared folders that iOS devices will be able to access. Apple even defines WebDAV file sharing in the interface as being expressly for iOS clients.

The ability to find and access WebDAV file shares is likely to become a primary feature of iOS 5.0 this summer. Right now, iOS devices are limited to using iTunes File Sharing to copy files between iPhone or iPad apps and a desktop computer, or users can simply email files as attachments. It's currently not possible to upload files via Safari, nor is it possible to download most files over the web to save locally (outside of photos).

Apple also uses the open WebDAV protocol as the basis for its Address Book Server for contact sharing and corporate address books, and its iCal Server for shared calendaring on Mac OS X Server; each use an extension to WebDAV, named CardDAV and CalDAV, respectively. iOS already offers support for these protocols, but hasn't yet adopted full support for push updates.

The company's "out with the old, in with the new" stance on supported file sharing protocols, combined with the much simpler and comprehendible interface of Server and its apparently free bundling with Mac OS X Lion (formerly requiring a $500 license), should dramatically increase the audience interested in Apple's server tools, which include easy to use but powerful and sophisticated calendaring, web, wiki collaboration, and new profile management tools for managing both Macs and iOS devices.

(Quoted from AppleInsider)

Mac OS X 10.6.7 Adds Support for New AMD Graphics Cards

As reported by tonymacx86, Apple's new Mac OS X 10.6.7 update for the 2011 MacBook Pro includes support for a number of AMD graphics cards not currently found in Apple's machines. While the development is certainly of interest to Hackintosh fans looking to build their own systems running Mac OS X, the inclusion of the new cards may provide some hints of graphics cards to be included in future Macs such as potential iMac and Mac Pro updates.

The following graphics cards appear to be natively supported:

ATI Radeon HD 5630 Device ID 0x68D8
ATI Radeon HD 5630 Device ID 0x68D9
ATI Radeon HD 5670 Device ID 0x68D8
ATI Radeon HD 5730 Device ID 0x68D8
ATI Radeon HD 5770 Device ID 0x68B8
ATI Radeon HD 5850 Device ID 0x6899
ATI Radeon HD 5870 Device ID 0x6898

AMD Radeon HD 6850 Device ID 0x6739
AMD Radeon HD 6870 Device ID 0x6738
AMD Radeon HD 6970 Device ID 0x6718

Interestingly, the broad range of cards apparently fully supported under Mac OS X 10.6.7 is leading to speculation that Apple may be looking to support more off-the-shelf GPU options as opposed to the Mac-specific cards that have been used to date.

(Quoted from MacRumors)