It has been over three months since I converted to Mac OS X 10.2
"Jaguar" as my everyday operating system. On the whole, it has been a
positive experience. There are many improvements over 10.1.x, but there
are still a few rough edges that need to be smoothed.
Jaguar is faster. On the same hardware as any incarnation of 10.1.x,
Jaguar will yield a noticeable speed improvement. It boots faster. I
upgraded two Macs to Jaguar. Boot time improved approximately 30% on
one and a whopping 50% on the other. The biggest improvement was on an
older G3 iMac; a PowerBook G4 improved its bootup speed, though not as
significantly.
Jaguar runs faster, especially on a G4 and especially on Quartz
Extreme-capable video adapters. Launch speeds increased noticeably - on
the one Mac that had video supported by Quartz Extreme there was also a
perceptible increase in the speed of screen scrolling and redraw.
One improvement that I consider major is the fact that if you
attempt to overwrite a file with another file of the same name, the
Finder will tell you whether the file you are overwriting is older or
newer. This is an improvement that I called for early on in this
column.
We keep our household finances on Quicken, which resides on my
wife's PowerBook G4. I regularly copy the Quicken data file to my iMac
for a backup. I took great care to be sure I was copying from and to
the correct Mac. Still, my heart began racing a bit anytime I did this
copy. All the Finder asked me was if I wanted to replace a file of the
same name. I never knew if the file I was replacing was older (which is
as it should have been) or newer (meaning I was about to make a grave
mistake).
This problem has now been cured, and I am sure this new capability
(new to OS X; the Classic Mac OS has had this feature for a long
time) will mean a lot fewer "oh-oh's" for everyone.
I have not explored most of the new Jaguar-only iApps in detail.
However, from my initial tinkering I can say I am very excited about
the future of iCal, iSync, and Backup.
The new juiced-up Address Book is nice, too. The promise of all
applications on your Mac being able to draw on this single source of
contact information is powerful. Let's hope developers write programs
to tap this feature.
Although Address Book is nice, it could use a few improvements.
First, let us import from more applications, Entourage in particular.
In my upgrade, I had to export my Entourage contacts to a text file and
then import into Address Book. This was far from smooth, as I had to do
extensive manual remapping of the fields before I could import.
When I upgraded to Jaguar, I decided to dive right in to the
greatest possible extent, and this included leaving Entourage behind in
favor of Apple's Mail application. This area is where I have
encountered the greatest disappointment. While Mail has some features
that elevate it above anything else on the market, it also has some
glaring weaknesses.
I have several different email addresses. One of these is checked
via IP address when I am home and via URL when I am on the road. Mail
(and every other email application I have ever used, for that matter)
needs a tight integration with a full-featured Location Manager so you
can tell it how to check email - and even which accounts to check
depending on where you are. Ditto for SMTP servers. When I am on the
road, I use Juno as my ISP. Juno requires you to use their SMTP server
for sending email. This should integrate with the Location Manager so
that the server is automatically set properly depending on where you
are.
Mail does not allow you to designate different "from" and "reply to"
addresses. Entourage allows this, although it requires manually adding
a header in the setup. If this is possible in Mail, I have not found
it. This is a serious problem for me, as this means I have to use the
Juno address to send email when I am away from home, and I never give
that address out or even check it regularly. Every email I have sent
the last two days has my Juno return address on it. Now I have had to
start checking that account. "Reply to" is a necessity, and I hope
Apple includes this in the next Mail revision.
In the category of "nitpicky," I don't like the way Mail sticks
attachments in the body of the email message. Entourage and other
programs have a second, smaller window immediately beneath the message
body. They put attachments in this area. It just looks cleaner to
me.
Messages are marked as "read" the second you highlight them. I would
like a feature where you can choose whether this happens and even set a
delay so that it is only marked as read if you linger on it for more
than say five seconds. Keeping messages marked as "unread" is one
method I use to keep track of what I have to follow up on. With Mail, I
find myself having to go back and manually mark messages as unread all
too often.
On the positive side, Mail has a spam filter that is the most
amazing I have ever encountered. After an initial training period, it
decides when the time is right to turn on the junk mail filter. A
dialog box pops up and asks you if you want to do this now, wait a
while longer, or not do it at all. I get over 100 emails in a typical
day, approximately 85% of which are junk. After about 30 days of
training, Mail correctly identified about 97% of the junk mail.
I should also point out that it correctly identified about 90% of
the spam correctly right out of the box before any training took place.
During this time, it has incorrectly identified only about 5 bona fide
email messages as junk, a number far less than 1%. That is tremendous
accuracy.
Mail also has what is, as far as I can tell, an unique feature that
allows you to "bounce" an email to the sender so it appears that the
email was sent to a bad address. When a message is bounced to a
spammer, the address is marked "bad" and may be removed from their
database. By using this feature on junk mail you may end up receiving
fewer unwanted messages.
Apple has always been synonymous with innovation, and this is a
prime example of it.
I have noticed one bug that developed after installing Jaguar.
Virtual PC version 5 does not like Jaguar, and the feeling is mutual.
Connectix tells you as much on their website and highly advises
upgrading to Virtual PC 6. However, they have posted a patch that will
help version 5 play a little nicer with Jaguar.
Since I only use Virtual PC to run a single program, I did not want
to buy an upgrade. When I shut down the virtual PC (the Windows PC) and
try to exit the Virtual PC program immediately thereafter, my Mac locks
up. Tight. No mouse, no keyboard, and even the clock stops.
I tried leaving a terminal window open so I could manually relaunch
Aqua, but I could not get back to the terminal due to 100% freeze up.
The only way to recover is to power off the Mac.
If I wait for at least five seconds after the Windows virtual PC has
shut down before I try to exit Virtual PC, the problem does not occur.
This is a bug that is 100% reproducible. It is irritating, to say the
least. Now that I have recognized the issue and know how to avoid it, I
have not had any further problems. At this point, I don't deem this
worth the price of a Virtual PC upgrade, although I could change my
mind in the future.
Like any upgrade, I have experienced some bumps along the way.
However, my move to Jaguar has been a mainly positive experience.
How does my experience compare to yours? Let me know. If response
warrants, I will publish a follow-up "reader feedback" column in a
future article. 
