By JULES ALLEN
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 2, 2000
Here are some of the new features of the Mac OS X beta:
AQUA USER INTERFACE: A radical departure from the old Mac interface. The familiar Finder has changed, and the Apple menu has disappeared. I like the new look a lot, and it took only a short time to get used to.
DARWIN: Apple's code name for the open source, free software-based core that powers OS X. It's Unix under the hood but, thankfully, you don't have to know about it to get rock-solid stability benefits.
CLASSIC APPLICATION COMPATIBILITY: You'll be able to run most of your Mac software under an emulation layer known as Classic. Popular applications run without problems, but some older Mac programs may not.
SMP: Symmetrical Multiprocessing is the ability to use more than one CPU, or the central processing unit at the heart of a computer, at a time. OS X is the first Mac operating system to offer this feature. Currently there are only two models of the Power Mac G4 that will take advantage of this.
JAVA 2: Java performance on the Mac has been spotty at best. Java allows programmers to write one version of a program and have it run on many different computing architectures. It's best known for applets, those Web browser-based embedded programs that add features to Web pages. The Mac lagged behind the Unix and Windows worlds until OS X.
OPENGL AND QUARTZ 2-D: Graphics wonks will salivate over these additions. OpenGL allows OS X to do very fast, very intense 3-D graphics at blisteringly fast speeds. Quartz is a derivative of Adobe's PDF technology and is used, among other things, to enhance the user interface.