System 10? More like System 6!

One of the surprising things about the OS X System Preferences panel is its similarity to the Control Panel in the early versions of the Mac operating system, up to System 6. Both are single panel devices which use a buttons to change the contents of that panel to display specific sets of controls. For those that don’t remember (or never saw) System 6, the Control Panel was accessed via the Apple Menu. It consisted of a palette with a series of buttons along the left hand side that changed the contents of the rest of the panel. Below is a screen shot of the Control Panel taken from my 1987 vintage Mac Plus; you can see the General, Close View, Keyboard and Map buttons along the side. The panel is displaying the General fields, allowing the user to configure things like the desktop pattern and volume.

System 6 was very different to its successor, System

7, where there

are numerous little panels and applications that apart

from living

together in the Control Panel Folder otherwise ignore

each other.

This is, of course, the same with other, essentially

System 7-based

operating systems, OS 8 and OS 9. Now take a look

at the System

Preferences panel in OS X. There are many more buttons

of course, but

press any one of them and you get the specific panel

required. Though

you don’t have all the buttons visible all the time,

some of them

are, as can be seen below.

So What’s New?

The System Preferences have been updated rather than

radically

changed. Many of the preference panels are unchanged,

such as the

Desktop, Dock, Monitors, Network, and Date & Time.

Others have been

tweaked a little, with extra features. The General

panel now has

better-explained font smoothing controls, so that

you can set

anti-aliases to suit specific monitors. Screen Effects

can show a

slide show of pictures from your .Mac account and

has a very pretty

abstract pattern screensaver module called ‘Flurry’.

There are a few cosmetic changes to look out for

as well, where

panels look a little different but are essentially

the same as in

previous version. The My Account panel offers some

new identity

pictures, and the Keyboard and Mouse panels have new

icons. Instead

of the dark grey images of the earlier USB keyboards

and mice, the

icons are now the same snowy-white of the latest iMacs.

Despite these

makeovers, these panels work just as before, which

in the case of the

Keyboard panel is not perfectly. There is no way to

disable to

default function keys on the iBook and PowerBook keyboards,

where F1

dims the screen, F2 brightens the screen, etc. If

you have any

applications that use function keys (like Photoshop

and Dreamweaver,

as well as plenty of games and flight simulators),

you’ll know how

annoying this is. There is a workaround, incidentally:

reboot in OS

9, and use the Keyboard control panel there to switch

off the

function keys. Amazingly, this behaviour will be carried

over into OS

X.

Some panels have been significantly improved. Energy

Saver is much better, a blessing for iBook and PowerBook

users. Besides the usual sliders for setting the time

for when the display dims and then computer goes to

sleep, the panel comes with a variety of useful presets.

These allow the user to quickly optimise the settings

for performance, DVD playback, presentations or battery

life. The Internet panel (inevitably, perhaps) contains

.Mac registration information and keeps tabs on your

iDisk settings and disk space. This panel also allows

users to sign up to .Mac and buy more iDisk space

if they want to. More traditional web and e-mail settings

are also stored in the Internet panel. The QuickTime

panel is part of the QuickTime 6 package, which will

require a new registration to unlock its ‘pro’ features

even for owners of previous QuickTime Pro owners.

The Classic panel has been significantly enhanced,

in keeping with the overhaul of the Classic Application

Environment, which seems to me to launch faster than

before. The user can observe all the running applications

and see their memory allocations and use, just like

the “About This Macintosh” window of old.

There is only a single new preference panel, the

CD/DVD panel. This allows the user to assign applications

or actions to these media. For example, you could

have Toast launch when you put in a blank CD, but

iTunes for a music CD.

Final Thoughts

Jaguar isn’t really any more configurable that previous

versions of

OS X. Things are tidier, easier to use, and perhaps

a little deeper

in places, but otherwise this aspect of System 10.2

is very familiar.

The fact that System Preferences are, frankly, a bit

dull hides the

fact that here is the place where you can make your

OS X experience

so much better. Switching down the fancy features

of the Dock speeds

slow computers up a bit (turn of magnification, and

don’t use the

Genie effect). Reducing the colour depth of the screen

makes a

difference too (unless you are doing serious graphics

work, thousands

of colours should be plenty). Classic is the place

to make big

savings. Trimming the extensions back by launching

Extensions Manager

makes Classic launch faster at zero cost, since some

extensions, like

the Network and AppleTalk ones, are ignored by Classic

in favour of

OS X’s networking. The same can be said for the DVD

extensions. DVDs

and Firewire devices work so much better in OS X that

you probably

won’t want to use them in Classic, and their extensions

can be

switched off. Practically all Control Panels are obsolete

as well,

since OS X takes care of the user interface, TCP settings,

monitors

and peripherals. You really can’t do much harm in

System Preferences,

so it is well worth exploring. Have fun!

– Dr.

Neale Monks